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?

#981

Post by bshanks » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 10:43 AM UTC

Transpilation platforms. There's a lot of new programming languages being written, but few people want to use a programming language without many libraries. One solution to this is to host the new language on an existing platform/library ecosystem, e.g. JVM, BEAM, Lua, C, but this requires choosing a platform and tying the language to that platform (and accepting the design choices of that platform's major implementations, e.g. in some cases, the platform implementation may have slow startup time, which makes it hard to use your new language for quick scripting from the commandline).

Instead, one could imagine a programming language platform designed to transpile the new language to multiple underlying platforms. Like LLVM IR, this transpilation platform could be a nexus that supports many different frontends and many different backends. Such a transpilation platform would make it easier for new languages to be useful sooner.

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

#982

Post by bshanks » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 10:46 AM UTC

Plaintext project management systems. For individuals, we have todo.txt and orgmode. But what if you have a small group, and you want some or all tasks to be assigned to various members of the group?

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

#983

Post by bshanks » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 10:56 AM UTC

Lightweight standards organizations to track, discuss, publicize, and coalesce support for new formats and protocols recently proposed by individuals or small groups. Think Markdown, trackbacks/pingbacks, RSS/Atom, TOML, SemVer, but in their early days, before many people had heard of them.

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

#984

Post by tome » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

thatguy0900 wrote: post #854

theanirudh wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

https://www.boardgamearena.com/ is also good

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

#985

Post by tome » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:09 PM UTC

grsmvg wrote: post #800

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 used this for someone’s birthday drinks yesterday: https://getmibo.com/ It’s a space were you can walk around freely, have proximity-based audio volume, and your head is your webcam.

https://spatial.chat/ is similar but two dimensional. It was used for the social component of the Haskell Love conference this year and I really enjoyed the way that it promoted social engagement.

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

#986

Post by wussboy » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

nillium wrote: post #516

wussboy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying according to which articles people click on has already failed as a model for determining truth and relevancy. We need to think of “one weird trick” that will have the same “stunning” effect but without the incentive to appeal to humanity’s baser instincts.

FWIW, we are working on this. Almost all of the issues listed in this thread can be traced back to the way aggregators and social networks end up monetizing (or not monetizing) news. We're trying something a little different: https://blog.nillium.com/were-not-an-aggregator/

Can you explain your business model more clearly? Including how you intend to compete with current news outlets, and with the human tendency to not really care about things that should be important to them? The web site was not clear.

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

#987

Post by julienreszka » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

screye wrote: post #252

A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows) I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it. Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a re…

miro.com does a good job at this

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

#988

Post by bshanks » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

bshanks wrote: post #981

Transpilation platforms. There's a lot of new programming languages being written, but few people want to use a programming language without many libraries. One solution to this is to host the new language on an existing platform/library ecosystem, e.g. JVM, BEAM, Lua, C, but this requires choosing a platform and tying the language to that platform (and accepting the design choices of that platform's major implementa…

I should be clearer about how a "transpilation platform" would differ from something like LLVM IR. First, a transpilation platform is focused on interoperability between the source high-level language and the target platform, including high-level language constructs like passing hashtables back and forth. Second, where feasible a transpilation platform attempts to output human-readable high-levl code in the high-level target language.

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

#989

Post by mkl95 » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

canofbars wrote: post #168

mkl95 wrote: post #23

Renewable energy.

What kind of changes do you expect more of? It seems to me like renewable energy is progressing at a very rapid pace so home solar is cheaper and better every year.

Lawmakers and politicians in my country (Spain) have evolved from antagonising renewal energy to having a passive attitude during the last few years. I would like to see a more aggressive approach toward implementing these forms of energy, like in other EU countries.

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

#990

Post by kirso » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 12:57 PM UTC

dkulchenko wrote: post #495

baron816 wrote: post #243

In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…

Agreed. Why is there no Tinder/online dating equivalent for making new friends locally? Instead of dating-specific qualifiers, it'd ask for your interests, hobbies, values, age and other demos, then match you based on overlap. Not Meetup - it's not quite solving the same problem, and so it solves things differently (focusing on shared interests and on discrete meetup events).

I believe lunchclub.ai is solving for it (raised from a16z) - very tech focused though.