Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#821

Post by ThePhysicist »

Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

Most of these points are just a matter of personal preference. I like Apple laptops but they're not great in terms of repairability, extensibility, modularity and openness.

There are some non-Apple laptops with much better displays BTW, even Lenovo ships 500 nit displays and wide-color gamut ones with some their laptops nowadays. Dell and other manufacturers ship OLED display with some of their gaming laptops, which far outperform any Apple laptop display.

Regarding Aluminium vs. hardened plastic / titanium I'd say it's just a style question, I have never had any issues with my Thinkpads and they're way more resistant to scratching than Apple laptops (a poor colleage of mine badly scratched his new Macbook with his steel wrist watch only days after receiving it).

Regarding upgradability I prefer being able to extend RAM and hard disk as well as easily replace the battery, again Apple is a poor choice in regard to that.

Regarding repairability Apple actively keeps me from being able to repair my machine, take e.g. a look at Louis Rossmans' Youtube channel to learn about some of the crazy stuff Apple does to keep independent repair shops out of the game. Again nothing that I want to encourage.

That said the introduction of the M1 chips is pretty great, I plan to buy a Macbook Air as my second laptop for office work, I'll keep developing on a Thinkpad with Linux though.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#822

Post by dusted »

Thorium based nuclear power, instead of trying to minimize consumption of dirty (coal/oil/gas) or expensive-limited-impractical (solar/wind/wave) energy. We should (again) focus more on producing energy that's too cheap to meter. I want my flat-rate power subscription, and I want it yesterday!

We've invented this artificial energy scarcity problem by refusing to use the cleanest and safest solution out there, even traditional 60's era nuclear power kills fewer people per unit of energy produces than any other source of energy.

I put this down to virtue-signalling more than anything else, but even so, nuclear energy is what I'm surprised we're not working on more.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#823

Post by peterburkimsher »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #821
Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

Most of these points are just a matter of personal preference. I like Apple laptops but they're not great in terms of repairability, extensibility, modularity and openness. There are some non-Apple laptops with much better displays BTW, even Lenovo ships 500 nit displays and wide-color gamut ones with some their laptops nowadays. Dell and other manufacturers ship OLED display with some of their gaming laptops, which…

Ironically, I actually think old Apple laptops are better to repair, because of Rossmann.

What other brand has leaked schematics and boardviews? Replacement batteries, iFixit guides, and skilled independent technicians keeping the A1398 and A1466 going as long as possible? I doubt Apple will return to their glory days of making those laptops new, but I feel like the repairability of 2014 Macs is still better than many Dell/Lenovo/HP/Sony alternatives. At the component and logic board level.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#824

Post by johnwalkr »

cluse wrote: post #75
diarrhea wrote: post #52

LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives. There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth. Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people acro…

I wish there was a way to maintain git version control while still being able to send and receive files from attachments from people who struggle with the idea of reading or reviewing something in any way other than by getting an email attachment. I used to work at a bank where we had to collaborate on Word documents stored in SharePoint. It was a nightmare. In SharePoint you are supposed to "check out" documents, ed…

I feel this so much. When my team started up we used latex/mercurial for all documents. It worked great for a year except for one person that used dropbox instead of mercurial. Eventually we reached a critical mass where convincing the whole team to not use word was impossible.

Google docs works pretty well, but I wish it had more friction to download documents in office formats. People are quick to start working on local copies as soon as they miss some minor feature in word and you end up with the same problem you described. I think my perfect tool would not even export to word.

I agree sharepoint is awful and it's even worse now that it's baked into teams and people are using it without even realizing it.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#825

Post by elihu »

Jemaclus wrote: post #443
Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

Related to this, I'm kind of shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes. We've got Windows and MacOS, sure, but the nix ecosystem is so fragmented and not as well supported as the other two that it's hard to justify switching. Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it just works . Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.…

I think the demand is there, just no one has the right combination of financial resources, technical ability to pull it off, the right sense of good design, and a way to make money off of it somehow other than by charging licensing fees (which is probably a non-starter if you want to grow the user base quickly and take advantage of network effects).

The companies I can see who are in the right position to profit from developing and giving away an OS that's at least as user-friendly as MacOS or Windows and as open as Linux are Intel and AMD. But it's hard to imagine either of them making something that's a joy to use.

Something Linux-based could work, but Linux is kind of stuck with a lot of decisions made thirty years ago. The kernel is pretty good, but the basic abstractions of POSIX-like operating systems are perhaps not what you'd design if you were creating them from scratch in 2020.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#827

Post by aliceryhl »

Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

I have been using a Thinkpad T480s for a while, and I think it's a really great laptop, and have no complaints whatsoever about its quality.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#829

Post by elihu »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #590
Jemaclus wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to this, I'm kind of shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes. We've got Windows and MacOS, sure, but the nix ecosystem is so fragmented and not as well supported as the other two that it's hard to justify switching. Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it just works . Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.…

The very most important thing an OS does is run software on hardware. Therefore any new entrant into the OS market must support as much software and hardware as possible. The former is actually kinda doable with compatibility layers and emulation, the latter is basically impossible to catch up on.

If the OS can run in a virtualized environment, you can kind of cheat by letting some other OS like Linux handle the hardware compatibility. It's not as aesthetically satisfying as running on bare metal, but it can work.

If some company wanted to create an Apple-like desktop experience with purpose-built hardware but with an open OS, this could be a good route: implement all the drivers needed to run well on bare metal on the company's own hardware products, but anyone can run it in a hypervisor on any computer.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#830

Post by cik »

Education. At best we're playing at the edges by making knowledge more accessible. But to wit, education is mostly trying to teach content that becomes modern, using 19th century methods.

Given how important the knowledge economy is, I would think that significantly more money (worldwide) would be invested in researching promising delivery models. Admittedly, I have no idea what those are either.

Post reply on HN