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

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

#851

Post by graeme »

graeme wrote: post #248
tomatocracy wrote: post #114

Single subscription payment for news along the lines of the Spotify model. I'd happily pay a single subscription which gave me access to ALL the news websites, and divided payment up based on which articles people click on. Do that without tracking me between the different sites and I'm sold. Pressreader gets close but it only gives you yesterday's print versions (not current online content), it has a few notable gap…

Apple News is trying this and it doesn’t seem to work too well. The trouble is the best publications can run their own offers and charge much more. FT and Bloomberg in particular tend to be corporate expenses. Apple news costs $120 a year. Basic digital FT is over $350. Premium digital even more.

Sorry, I should have said “the trouble with OP’s idea”. You wouldn’t get a full business subscription to news orgs for less than $500-$1000 a year, which consumers won’t pay.

A bundle of consumer news might work, but you still get the adverse selection problem that the clients most interested also tend to be the clients interested in standalone, expensive subs. So it’s hard to get NYT, WaPo, times of london, etc

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

#852

Post by ENGNR »

NationalPark wrote: post #417
NewLogic wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The XPS 15 is basically that laptop and is only hamstrung by dell being slow to move to Ryzen 4000 mobile chips. Mobile intel runs hot and slow.

Of the 5 XPS line laptops I've had, 2 had component failures that required replacement under warranty (drives and ports) and one had a hinge that failed just after the warranty ended. As if that weren't frustrating enough, redeeming the warranty required about five hours total of phone conversation per incident. At every step of the way, they would demand I repeat dozens of irrelevant troubleshooting steps, or they w…

Had the exaaaact same experience

Horrible horrible support. Incredibly frustrating doing all of the steps on phone support to even get someone to come out. They advertise it as better than an Apple store, but after the first year you have to mail it in with a two week repair delay

I now use a MacBook with zero issues, while the XPS never worked properly (they forgot thermal paste after the first repair) and it died entirely after barely 2 years. Huge waste of money

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

#853

Post by xavierlint »

geoffeg wrote: post #611

The coding part of the software development process. We're still writing code in a text editor like we were 40+ years ago. The editors have become more powerful but writing code is still very similar.

Besides all other points by jhayward, what kind of changes do you have in mind? From my perspective at first sight it isn't necessarily negative that we are doing the things in a pretty simlar way as to how we were doing them 40 years ago.

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

#854

Post by thatguy0900 »

theanirudh wrote: post #598
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #285

Social etiquette for online spaces. Especially during a pandemic year, I'm surprised that this hasn't been more of a topic of discussion. Mostly, if people do talk about social etiquette, it's within the context of not explicitly pissing people off, or looking good to your boss. I've never seen anyone talk about actually having good social interactions online. I've had a few friends change jobs during the pandemic, a…

> Zoom "happy hours" pretty much get dominated by two or three voices (usually of the most senior people) and everyone else just listens, because you can't have 2 conversations at a time. This is definitely a problem and my co founder and I wanted to solve it. We tried a bunch of stuff, but one thing that we noticed was that we were playing a lot more casual games with our friends and family since the pandemic. It wa…

Jackbox series of games could be really good for this, only one person needs to own the game everyone else logs in on a phone or browser to play. Mixture of trivia/adlibs/assorted minigames

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

#855

Post by JoeAltmaier »

legerdemain wrote: post #578
InvisibleUp wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a large part of this (in the USA, anyways) is due to how modern cities are structured. It used to be, 100 or 200 years ago, that your workplace, your home, and your usual hang-out place were all within reasonable walking distance of each other. It wasn't a huge deal to go out and meet new people, as you'd naturally bump into them every day. Nowadays we have a large portion of people in bedroom communities, is…

This... still exists? It's called the Elks, the Kiwanis, the Odd Fellows, the Jaycees, the Rotary Club, the Knights of Pythias, the Freemasons, and some organizations based on blood or military service, like the American Legion or the Daughters of the American Revolution. Even here in the Bay Area I live just a couple blocks down from a huge and well-appointed Elks lodge, and just a few miles away in downtown Mountai…

While here in the Midwest, their golf clubs, parks and buildings are being sold off to the public for lack of membership.

Part of the problem is many are invitation-only clubs. That kept them mono-culture and full of the 'right people'. And the current members have at some time quit inviting? Don't know why.

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

#856

Post by thatguy0900 »

milkytron wrote: post #733
meekrohprocess wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's always being worked on - modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous. People are trying. We want to cure cancer, and find effective general-purpose antivirals, and help people maintain healthy bodies, and figure out how to repair hearts, and cure diabetes, and fix autoimmune disorders, and figure out general-purpose gene therapies, and work out what exactly is up with the gut microbiome, and make prosthetic…

> ...help people maintain healthy bodies... As a collective, we try. But are we really trying as hard as we should be? Companies have influenced the public and even health research to be in favor of sugar. I'm pretty sure the rate of diabetes is going up and that doesn't help. Companies contributing to global warming have influenced policies and discredited science they knew would harm their businesses. There are ple…

If anything the obesity epidemic shows that a huge percentage of people really arnt that concerned about living longer to begin with

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

#857

Post by marmaduke »

gfxgirl wrote: post #532
marmaduke wrote: post #270

Placebo effect: how can knowing you’ve taken a treatment improve your condition, without having actually taken the treatment?

There is considerable debate on if the placebo effect is real and for what situations it is. For example apparently it can cure a headache but AFAIK there is no evidence it can cure actual physiological issues (cancer, sickness, ...) It makes some sense it would work on pain since pain at some point is just a signal to your brain and you chose consciously or unconsciously to change your perception of that signal. On…

Given the various issues with painkillers, a better understood placebo effect would be great even if it is pain only.

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

#858

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

imgabe wrote: post #284

The phone system. It seems like it's an unholy mess. I moved from the US to Hong Kong this year. I have a US number that I want to keep, and of course I need a local Hong Kong number. So, the US number is on my Google Fi account that I pay to keep active and I get a prepaid SIM card for Hong Kong. I can switch the SIM cards if I travel back. But why? We have two semi-independent networks, one for voice and one for da…

> Why are we even bothering with the legacy voice network at this point?

Because the government helped to create it, so that it was easy to track and intercept, and there's a lot of infrastructure around those purposes, when they want to use them.

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

#859

Post by fspacef »

Information discovery and what search looks like post Google.

Seems like we got to a search bar that can answer any question we type in but haven't thought beyond it. Like what if we were recommended what questions to ask in the first place?

Thinking out loud here: we generate a ton of data just by browsing and existing on the internet. This data is plugged into recommendation algos to serve ads. What if instead these algorithms were tuned to serve us direct websites or text that could provide our next source for inspiration?

^I'm working on this idea, still pretty early stages but it feels like the time is right to create such technology. Do reach out if you want to collaborate or riff on it.

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

#860

Post by sethammons »

daniellarusso wrote: post #329
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #285

Social etiquette for online spaces. Especially during a pandemic year, I'm surprised that this hasn't been more of a topic of discussion. Mostly, if people do talk about social etiquette, it's within the context of not explicitly pissing people off, or looking good to your boss. I've never seen anyone talk about actually having good social interactions online. I've had a few friends change jobs during the pandemic, a…

I think alot of this are symptoms of bad management or inexperienced management dealing with remote work. I have had to rise to the occasion, and facilitate icebreakers with new hires of other teams (that work with my team). Their managers thought nothing of directing the new hires to slack and email a handful of strangers. The companies or individuals that had successfully implemented remote work prior to the pandem…

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