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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#211

Post by bbcbasic »

NotUsingLinux wrote: post #152
bbcbasic wrote: post #92

A programming language with the easyness of dealing with state and effects of a mainstream language and with the guarantees you get from a pure functional language

You mean getting the benefits of functional programming without learning functional programming? ;) Once you find a way into it you really see its all "Lego's". You'll get there!

Yes. You can already get some of the benefits as evidenced in the slow adoption of functional concepts into mainstream languages. Lambdas, generics for example.

Being legos is fine but monad transformer stacks and free monads are legos that I can't see most coders putting in the yards to understand. But that's the level you need.to get to to do useful stuff, lest you just do everything in IO but that's imperative style really.

I think a great example of what I mean is Linq and async/await in C#.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#212

Post by tbirdz »

qznc wrote: post #204
tajen wrote: post #174

A paid Linux. To get stunning UX design, upstream bugfixing and excellent marketing. Let me explain myself. I love the levels of ergonomy and polish of Mac OS X. But it's closed-source software. If I use (and pay) Ubuntu, then great patches are sent upstream, which I can use in Debian on my servers and Arduinos. It becomes useful to everyone. With Mac OS X, we're not advancing the world. But when I used Ubuntu for wo…

Apple is not really paid for the OS, but for the hardware. Selling an OS seems nearly impossible today.

I think it's both. People like the hardware, but most of them get it primarily because it runs OS X. But, Apple makes most of it's money off hardware margins.

Apple bundles their OS very tightly to their hardware, so it's not as if there's really a choice between getting the OS or getting the hardware. Even the OS EULA forbids you from running OS X on any non Apple brand hardware.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#213

Post by gtirloni »

jessriedel wrote: post #153
sssilver wrote: post #30

A single IM platform through which everyone can talk to everyone regardless of their IM service, and I mean I wanna be able to send a message to someone's iMessage from my Battle.net account, and then receive someone's Facebook message on my Slack or something. Obviously IDK how this would be possible, but IM is now broken beyond repair by companies that tried to "fix" it. The list of IM apps on my iPhone keeps growi…

Honest question: what's wrong with email? Not in the sense of "you should just email rather than IM and stop complaining". In the sense of "Why doesn't someone build a dead-simple overlay that exploits the email protocol?" I'm thinking a simple tag at the beginning of the subject line that causes it to be auto-archieved in gmail. Is the latency too large?

Yes, the latency is too large.

When I want really instant messages I've to switch to WhatsApp because Hangouts on my phone takes a minute or two to receive messages (tried all configuration tricks in the book). Just an example where latency with messaging apps is already too high.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#214

Post by carussell »

jkroso wrote: post #57
psadauskas wrote: post #39

A stack for building web applications in the browser. HTML and CSS are pretty good for documents, but terrible for in-browser GUI apps that we're all building, its just piles of hacks upon hacks. I want someone, probably Google since they own both a major browser and some of the most popular web applications, to re-invent the entire stack. Steal ideas from GUI-focused languages and toolkits, like QML, Swift, AppKit,…

An OS based on IPFS would give you the best of both worlds. AFAIK browsers are popular because they load apps quickly and without an install step. While native apps let you choose your stack. An OS based on IPFS would load big apps quickly thanks to caching, the install step would go away because there is no difference between remote files and local ones and its still an OS so the app can be written in C or any other…

Zero-install is half of the reason why browsers are popular. The other half is that the Web puts the users in far more control over the content in their viewport than anything else that has been widely deployed except for probably Microsoft Excel.

If your first thought is that desire for control is a niche thing, an instance of power users projecting their biases onto the rest of the world and not a concern for some mythical "everyman", you are wrong. Because those normal folk are exactly why Excel even gets a mention.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#215

Post by gtirloni »

sssilver wrote: post #30

A single IM platform through which everyone can talk to everyone regardless of their IM service, and I mean I wanna be able to send a message to someone's iMessage from my Battle.net account, and then receive someone's Facebook message on my Slack or something. Obviously IDK how this would be possible, but IM is now broken beyond repair by companies that tried to "fix" it. The list of IM apps on my iPhone keeps growi…

All it would take for this is more love from the existing apps from big corporations (Skype, WhatsApp, etc) towards properly supporting mobile, desktop and web clients.

They already have all the users, which is really what makes a messaging platform (I won't use a new app if my family/friends/coworkers aren't there even if it has the best clients everywhere).

Skype seems to be trying with the new web and Linux clients but it's too little too late. There is still time to revert it through. If they opened their API so anyone could embed a client on a website, it would be massive.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#216

Post by tajen »

qznc wrote: post #204
tajen wrote: post #174

A paid Linux. To get stunning UX design, upstream bugfixing and excellent marketing. Let me explain myself. I love the levels of ergonomy and polish of Mac OS X. But it's closed-source software. If I use (and pay) Ubuntu, then great patches are sent upstream, which I can use in Debian on my servers and Arduinos. It becomes useful to everyone. With Mac OS X, we're not advancing the world. But when I used Ubuntu for wo…

Apple is not really paid for the OS, but for the hardware. Selling an OS seems nearly impossible today.

"We can't do it because it's a different business model than Apple's" ;) ?

From 9Gag to HN, Windows 10 is a recurring meme of disrespect for the -cattle- consumer, in a world of Snowden and Facebook where we don't even own our computers. I say there's a demand (with money available) for a trustworthy OS in the PC world, and for a open-source in the Apple world.

Selling today's OSes might be impossible indeed. But a lot of people would switch to Linux even if it had fewer features, just because of Linux' values (which would be properly marketed around values of compatibility, open-source, reusability, privacy, cryptography, distributed services, ownership, offline work, etc). What about marketing the idea that Linux will bring pervasive effects in our democracy, like a global understanding that security systems can only be verified if they're open-source? What about the community value of VW and Tesla being required to open-source their security features, generating better security for them, for competitors and pull requests to upstream projects? We can make customers dream about a lot of values in addition to adhering to a great-UX Linux, and this value is not currently captured by neither Microsoft nor Apple. If only we had the money to kickstart a paid Linux...

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#217

Post by icebraining »

lunaru wrote: post #140

I hypothesize that the list of ideas that will be posted here will make for great examples of what not to build if you're considering commercial value. Developers and the HN crowd make for a very small market and are very hard to monetize. In that vein, I wish someone would build a list of things that regular, everyday folks actually would want and use. The middle manager working at BigCorp; the teenager; the stay-at…

This was linked a while ago: https://nugget.one/

Not affiliated, not even a paid customer, just thought it was well made.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#218

Post by pigpigs »

jagermo wrote: post #200

A smart bank account: I want to set up rules like "take 19 percent of every incoming transaction and save it to virtual account 'taxes'. Use this, account to pay invoices by $financialAgency" Banking hasn't produced any innovation since online banking, it seems

I feel like digital wallets would definitely solve this but there is never enough demand from consumers or merchants to give them sufficient traction. Maybe it's just a really slow shift since the benefits are marginal for most people.

Google Wallet recently added integration to bank accounts though so at least there are some progress in that aspect.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#219

Post by thenomad »

crdb wrote: post #194

A way to use Mechanical Turk from outside the US. I've needed it with every client I ever worked with, and I need it now and know a dozen companies who do. CrowdFlower has a de facto monopoly on the outside of the US supply and charges an enormous premium for it - enough to turn off most of them. I certainly don't want to pay several thousand a month for the right to submit jobs, although I was ok with the 25% premiu…

I could not agree more. It's quite ridiculous that there's no non-US alternative that's affordable.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#220

Post by dijit »

GuiA wrote: post #111
gcb0 wrote: post #90

A decent portable computer. Obscenely large, replaceable battery. small screen (1080p or 720p at 10~13in) that i can actually slide up when open so i don't have to look down and kill my neck/back. decent mechanical keyboard at least 90% size (like the eeepc1000) it can be low on CPU but should have the most connectivity it can. It can weight a little more than a 15" gaming laptop weights today.

Get a thinkpad

Lenovo haven't made a decent thinkpad in multiple years now.
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