Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? • Hacker News Board

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

#961

Post by gremlinsinc » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #599

lazyjones wrote: post #369

Space colonization. Where's that moon colony we were promised?

This is a start, but you may have to bypass the moon and go straight to Mars for your colony: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-starship-elon-musk...

I don't get why they built the ISS and NOT a moon colony...

I think a moon colony could be good for mining helium3, maybe creating some sort of manufacturing facilities (or maybe even an asteroid colony) that's a hub for space-mining.

Got to start somewhere, and since it's more expensive to launch from our gravity, might make more sense if majority of space launches/etc was from space structures w/ less gravity.

Though, a space colony would have to maybe figure out gravity, or something if that was magenitized uniforms that made your body feel as thoughit were in earth's gravity so you don't lose muscle/skeleton mass.

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

#962

Post by gremlinsinc » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

WhoCaresLies wrote: post #36

Government (health service) driven meal delivery system, everyone should receive what they need, everyday So we can optimize farming, cultivation and stocks of food, reduce waste by insane amount and make sure everyone has a healthy diet, no matter his income range Or better, globalize and generalize powdered meals (a la Soylent)

Maybe guaranteed pre-fab homes. Couldn't be hard w/ modern technology to even 3d print entire homes or make cob homes from molds or something. If you could make an entire 'dorm' with shared kitchens/bathrooms and a vertical farm it's almost self-sustaining.

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

#963

Post by koheripbal » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

DrRobinson wrote: post #757

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…

I think what OP means is rather than trying to fix deceases one by one, why aren't we focusing more on the root cause (aging)? This seems like a much more efficient way of solving many of these things. There are a bunch of initiatives in this area already, but not nearly enough to be proportional to the potential. > but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade. This I don't get tho…

Because aging isn't "one thing" that breaks. There are a multitude of things that break down, and when you fix one, another one seems to pop up.

It's like growing a factory. expanding the bandwidth on one component, just pushes the bottleneck elsewhere.

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

#964

Post by koheripbal » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

syndacks wrote: post #684

faluzure wrote: post #670

Human Longevity. 150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. Peopl…

End of life care is an incredibly expensive endeavor; why are we so adamant about extending the inevitable? IMO it's a subconscious projection of the fact that we do _not_ live meaningful lives in our day to day, and so we fixate on a fantastical (yet inspiring, universal) compensation of extending it forever. "Left to take care of the elderly" suggests we don't value life in the first place. Why extend it further?

Extending life usually means extending the period of healthy independent function - not extending the life of someone in their incapacitated state.

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

#965

Post by poormystic » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

Love is a phenomenon which bears comparison with electricity. E.g. A home cooked meal has more love in each portion than does a restaurant meal, and does more good than a restaurant meal. E.g. A loving act generates Happiness in the actor, which generates Beauty, which generates Love for the actor. I think that there is an identifiable phenomenon involving love, beauty and happiness and that study of this phenomenon can only benefit the student.

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

#966

Post by 93po » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

gremlinsinc wrote: post #898

corobo wrote: post #22

Eliminating "poor" as an adjective for humans. If we must commercialise it, more people with money = more customers.. Apple, Amazon, etc.. there's billions of potential iPhone and Alexa users out there long term if you set something up to help them now. What, you don't think you'll be around long enough?

I'm wanting to work on this. Think build multiple companies for services people already use/need competitors to existing products but they're owned by the community. People still pay for the service, but they earn shares for their loyalty to a product and get dividends from those shares. Marriage of socialism and capitalism essentially. Marketplaces still exist, but union/co-ops thrive and make businesses more about…

Just wanted to say I like this sentiment but find it hard to imagine revolutionizing entire industries without a minimum of billions of dollars of altruistic funding. And billionaires aren't well known for wanting to weaken capitalism

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

#967

Post by 93po » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

thereIsHope wrote: post #525

Ending the subsidies to the animal agriculture lobby, the industry that is the most destructive to the environment and causes unnecessary horrible suffering to trillions of sentient beings every year. It's the cause of 90% of deforestation worldwide, the main cause of the 6th massive species extinction (due to deforestation), water pollution (75 billion cows, pigs and chickens produce tons of manure that are dumped i…

I know nothing about the topic but is it possible these subsidies exist for national security? I've heard the argument for subsidies before being that if we outsource too much food production, we're suddenly at the mercy of foreign countries to survive. And the only way to ensure continued domestic production when it's not price competitive to foreign countries is to subsidize

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

#968

Post by Shorel » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #938

Shorel wrote: post #930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except: give me touch and a convertible laptop with a good quality pencil. And insane battery life. We have different needs. Your needs are not mine.

Not sure what's up with your tone, but sure, I'd agree with the needs comment. That said, I would would wager that your needs are moreso met as an existing, direct market though - whereas what I'm after is splintered and left only to Apple. To each their own, of course.

Not really, battery life for non-Apple laptops is terrible.

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

#969

Post by zachrose » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

jgwil2 wrote: post #894

zachrose wrote: post #11

Programming languages with built-in inversion of control by way of an effects system, like in Elm.

Could you elaborate on that a little?

Elm is a purely functional language, meaning all you write are the insides of functions that take a value and return a value. There's no imperative way to "do anything" like make an HTTP request, all you can do is return a "command" value from a function and the core libraries will do it.

This means that the core libraries define the signatures of the functions that an Elm application must implement. (All Elm apps "work the same way" in that sense.) It also means that you never have to mock or stub anything in a test. There are also great implications for performance and maintainability.

Elm compiles to JavaScript and is specific to browser applications, but there's no theoretical reason the same idea couldn't be applied to mobile apps or CLI applications or webservers or anything else. (It's just a lot of work.)

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

#970

Post by zzo38computer » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 10:50 PM UTC

max_ wrote: post #725

An alternative to the web. Designed for the user, not for developers, or cooperations. All these initiatives like SOLID, ad blockers, regulation & censorship should not be needed in this new alternative. Power was given to devs and we ended up with web obesity. Power was given to cooperations & we ended up with subversion. Then when people asked regulators to fix it we ended up with popups. The web is currently rotte…

I think that you are correct. There are alternatives though, but they don't like to use it much. Also would be alternative that the web browser could be designed better; interpret them differently and more efficiently for the user to have more control and don't waste too much energy.

For different applications, you can have:

- NNTP

- Gopher

- IRC

- Telnet and SSH

- etc.

(I have a NNTP server set up. If you want to set up discussion forums, this is a good idea, I think. I also have Gopher and QOTD (TCP only, no UDP) services set up too.)

There can also be the better uses of HTTP too (it is capable of some things but that they don't commonly use properly), and the uses of different file formats (you do not have to be limited to only HTML; you can also have plain text format, httpdirlist format, etc).