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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?

#301

Post by jessriedel »

antaviana wrote: post #262
jessriedel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's different about email?

In email you have sender impersonation. Once blocked, adding a new sender (cell number) is expensive. It is 12 orders of magnitude easier to spam with email than it is to spam with whatsapp.

But that's exactly Razengan's and my point. The email spam problem was solved even though email has very little identity verification. So spam can't obviously explain why instant messaging systems are so walled-garden incompatible, but email functions fine.

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

#302

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

daveguy wrote: post #208
zevv wrote: post #129

A slim, networked, pocked sized computer with a physical keyboard, running android or Linux. These used to exist - albeit disguised as phones - but the marketing department decided we don't need no friggin keyboards, and remove everything but the touchscreen and call it a tablet. The result is a consume-only device, on which it is all but impossible to input large amounts of text. Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 3/4, HTC…

You can plug a usb keyboard into any Android device and it works fairly well for input. I can use an ssh program like ConnectBot as if it were a regular terminal with an attached keyboard.

And deny yourself the satisfying, visceral snap of an integrated physical keyboard sliding out?

Using a USB/bluetooth keyboard is certainly functional, but it's an extra item to carry around, and it's not as elegant.

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

#303

Post by harperlee »

emmabruns wrote: post #116

Maybe not so technical but as a curious person i feel i collect so many articles in instapaper but never take the time to reread them. I do read though, mostly offline. Books, newspapers and articles. My focus is better offline. Combining data mining and my offline focus, it would be great if you could make a tool that categorizes my instapaper articles and converts it to theme numbers (big data, health care, artific…

Or! Sent periodically as a custom magazine when the theme has received enough articles / reach a volume threshold to justify the print and sending.

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

#304

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

cm2187 wrote: post #289
4ad wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty happy with 802.11ac. It's the first time ever I don't bother with wired ethernet on my laptop. I still have to carry with me ethernet cables and dongles (since I use a Macbook without an Ethernet port), but when I find 802.11ac I don't use them. I hope one day it will be ubiquitous so I don't have to carry all that crap.

It depends on people's needs. Transfering a 4GB file over wifi is pretty painful. Transfering a 50GB VM... forget about it.

Do you use a MacBook? They are one of the few notebooks that have 3-stream wifi hardware, which is why I'm consistently getting 800+Mbps in our Ubiquiti equipped office.

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

#305

Post by jessriedel »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #300
jessriedel wrote: post #150

Better reviews of everything. Solve (or ameliorate) the trust and incentivisation problem. It's stunning that something simple and non-optimal like Wirecutter is such an improvement, at least in the area of consumer electronics.

In Germany theres this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest Not great, but it does a decent job. I use Wirecutter a lot, too.

Yea. To a less effective extent, the US has Consumer Reports. But as you might agree, these organizations are quite clumsy and difficult to finance, their recommendations are one-size-fits-all, and they have operated pretty much the same for half a century.

My Mom and I want different things out of a cell phone...

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

#306

Post by amelius »

tmad4000 wrote: post #274
amelius wrote: post #253

1. A worthy Google search competitor. Preferably open, open-source, federated, respecting privacy. 2. A platform where scientists can discuss publications. It should be a "home" for every paper. Of course, also open, run by a nonprofit organization, or perhaps even federated. 3. A good open (xkcd-927-defying) standard for chat that everybody will use. (Why can we have this for email, but not for chat?)

I would be really interested in facilitating 2 What's your vision?

I just posted what I'd like to see built, so I don't necessarily have a vision :)

But a few remarks: I think that getting something like this off the ground is more a social challenge than a technical one. The biggest question is how to get everybody to use such system, and make it into a hub. I imagine it could help if such a system cooperated with existing places which are often visited by scientists, like sci-hub, arxiv. I'm not sure if Google scholar would be a good match (because of their non-openness and privacy issues), but perhaps they'd like to help. Of course there are technical challenges. Like how to run this in a federated space. And UX challenges, such as how to handle moderation. And also basic UX requirements like a good formula editor and diagram editor should be considered. And there will be questions like how to incentivize scientists to comment on their own results, and to help other people (while not necessarily being paid for it).

Lots of requirements and questions :) It is a pity that I don't have time to work on this myself. So good luck if you want to try this :)

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

#307

Post by tajen »

irishcoffee wrote: post #250
tajen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember RedHat as ugly. It would be closer to elementary.io, but paid. Well, the installation process of elementary.io displays unfriendly information too... At the extreme, choosing Mac OS X requires very few decisions, so I don't want to compare Linux distributions either. One distrib should stand out for my usecase, be clearly differentiated from the rest of the market and be the obvious choice for me. (that's…

SO, is your issue with a decent windows manager? I work on RHEL systems daily, and under the hood (sysd arguments not withstanding) its no more or less clunky than any other 'distro' out there. I guess I'm just trying to figure out what exactly you're looking to buy?

Yes it could be summarized as a window manager if it takes over all aspects of managing the computer through a GUI.

I develop with Mac OS and deploy my cloud services on Debian. I don't know much about Linux beyond apt-get upgrade, nginx, Ansible and Java apps. I know when I install Mac OS X that the progress bar is gray with no text on the screen, which means I don't need to dive into the technical details at any point from installation to writing a presentation, displaying it on an external screen through HDMI, tuning a mouse or plugging a printer. Has RHEL improved that much?

On step further is of course being able to install a good clone of Keynote (slideware), iMovie and an image editor for $40-80 each, but that's after the ecosystem starts gathering around the OS.

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

#308

Post by bobajeff »

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.

Also, Apple is older than many PC companies and have been using their own OS since before Windows existed.

To expect a new company to come out with something that is competitive with Mac or Windows is to ignore the tremendous ecosystems that took decades to build around them.

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

#310

Post by Tomte »

cromulent wrote: post #176

A non-cloud off-site backup appliance. This is what I want (I know there are alternatives, but this is what I want): A device that I buy, and can plug at least one hard drive in to. I give it some sort of passphrase. I then place it in a friend's house and connect it to their internet connection. I can then access it remotely from my house. I can easily backup my stuff to it. My backups are encrypted, both over the w…

You could probably do something like that with FreeNAS and ZFS send.

Also, Crashplan has a "backup to friends" feature.

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