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Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

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Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#111

Post by andars »

jpm_sd wrote: post #103
andars wrote: post #35

FPGAs in desktop/laptop computers. That would open all kinds of interesting possibilities. Energy from nuclear fusion. Highly dense electrical energy source. I want to see electric planes, phones that last for months, drones that stay in the air for days, etc. Some kind of magical security system so we could return to native code instead of putting VMs on top of VMs. No idea if this one is feasible or how it might be…

FPGA in your desktop is a solved problem! http://www.alteraboards.com/products/ http://www.nallatech.com/solutions/fpga-cards/

Sweet. Thanks for the reference.

Hopefully these cards will become more widespread.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#112

Post by adbge »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #86

A peer to peer encrypted datastore that everyone can use to store their own metadata. Facebook knows what movies I like and interests I have, Spotify knows what songs I listen to, Amazon knows what books I like to read. All of these pieces of data are currently silo'd and controlled by private corporations many of which can do whatever they like with that data. I want a private encrypted datastore that does this inst…

I won't pretend to exactly understand Urbit, but it seems to be more or less what you're describing:

> In an Urbit world, your data is no longer trapped in a jumble of proprietary servers. Your urbit is a permanent, versioned, typed archive the size of your digital life. Even before you move your data from a Web service to a local Urbit app, your urbit can drive your account with an API or scraper.

http://urbit.org/posts/overview/

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#113

Post by x1798DE »

I would really like a (preferably cross-platform) solution for browsing the internet in a maximally silo-ed way. I think Firefox has been making some progress on this, but here's my ideal workflow:

- I can set up any number of "site groups" that sites go into by default - "www.google.com" and "www.gmail.com" are in the "google" group, and those sites open in their own pseudo-profiles with their own history and own cookies, etc. - For a given site, I can open new tabs in any group (or for sites in multiple groups, set the "current group" for the site. This way I can have a github account for personal stuff, github account for a different context, etc. - For sites not on any "siloed groups, everything operates in a "clear after closing" mode, where once all browser instances are closed, all data, cookies and history is cleared.

Right now I just accomplish this manually by using a locked-down version of Firefox for default browsing and different Chrome profiles for each "site group". It helps that I've forsaken more or less all web-apps, so I don't have to worry about accidentally clicking a link in Google Hangouts that will then open in the Google profile.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#115

Post by viewer5 »

tixocloud wrote: post #110
viewer5 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like that would be wonderful, yeah. Far as I can tell, it's not a real existing thing, right? Just an idea that there was a prototype of?

I was actually building something like that for myself. Would you use it if you had to manually log it?

Yeah. Having to manually log to /some/ extent is actually my expectation; it just has to be simpler than typing out a whole log entry. I don't want to type out

"dec 02 2016 Hung out with Alex and Sammy, talked about Star Wars and whether Darth Maul or Qui-Gon would win in a fistfight, Sammy was backing Darth Maul and won the argument"

I don't have any ideas to improve that in any way, I don't know if it CAN be improved without some element of literal mind-reading, I just know that typing out the above is inadequate, it's too clunky, time-consuming, and conspicuous.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#116

Post by UweSchmidt »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #51

A secure communication technology that is understandable (after reading some mans) and verifiable by an average user, without being infosec expert. For now, there are so many unknowns in the equation, that users have no choice but to rely on vendor's authority, which means centralization. Don't tell me it's theoretically impossible because it's possible in almost every other area.

The One Time Pad is secure and each step can in its operation can be validated by a layperson with pen+paper.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#118

Post by ohstopitu »

I'd love to bring banking to the 21th century. (Ability to create virtual cards, scale bank accounts based on needs/usage, easy access to loans etc.). And all this would have to work internationally (go anywhere in the world...2 people have a smartphone? Great, this system works). Give people the ability to save, invest and help them along that way and give them more power about their money.

Also the ability to get the entire system to work electronically offline.

So we'd need advancements in not just technology (tbh, the tech would be the easy bit), but laws and ideas/conceptions people have with banks/monitory systems in general.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#119

Post by contingencies »

mbrock wrote: post #106

1. A language that synthesizes the advantages of Bash, Node, and ML... Basically an expressive yet simple type system, nice syntax, interactive environment, fast compilation, the ability to run as a script in Unix, first-class support for pipelines, files and sockets, and built in stuff for dealing with HTTP, JSON, regex, etc. 2. An event sourcing database that's not a gargantuan Java EE thing, something like the Red…

Re. #5 see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13070505

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#120

Post by ohstopitu »

EFruit wrote: post #95

>Go wild, dream big. I want a DNS replacement that allows you to "subscribe" to TLDs, each with their own policies and practices. Domains are identified by a tuple of a public key and the domain name, so that if someone wants to share a domain, the browser can let them select the host they want. It should have 3 (or more) distinct modes of operation: Gossip, where popular portions of the zone are continually shared b…

I agree with most of these, but why not JS? (would TS or Swift be more along your lines?)

Want to know why people don't like / dismiss JS considering it's one of the easiest / quickest to pick and go furtherest with.

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