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Ask HN: What annoys you?

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Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#61

Post by tricky »

nollidge wrote: post #46

People who can't keep their car at a constant speed on the highway; cruise control is the best way to do this if you don't want to keep checking your speedometer. To elaborate: If everybody picks a slightly different speed and maintains it , any encounter between two vehicles will never last very long. There's more distance between any two vehicles, so it's safer, and large, impassable clumps of vehicles are less lik…

I want a global movement to make the acceleration pedal actually affect acceleration, not horsepower as it does now.

Imagine a pedal with a dead spot in the middle that represents 0 acceleration. Pushing down on the pedal increases the rate of acceleration. When you get to speed, ease back to the dead spot to maintain. Lift past the dead spot to decel.

Think of it as a hybrid cruise control. I'm convinced it would solve many traffic congestion problems associated with people not maintaining speed on, say, slight inclines.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#62

Post by edanm »

ThomPete wrote: post #42
mslate wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the only problem with Google Wave's implementation was that it didn't integrate with normal email, limiting its network to Google Wave users. This seems very obvious, but I rarely hear people mention this when Google Wave comes up. Did you have something else in mind when you said it had terrible implementation?

Oh man where to start. It's just a noisy mess, poorly designed, with a lot of weird design decisions and exotic patterns that only added to the noise. It starts with a way to complex proposition. Google basically created the entire vision instead of the basic core functionality and then expanded on that, optimizing in the detail rather than for the big shows. Etherpad started the right way. It started very lean with…

I agree that it was a terrible start.

But have you looked at it recently? I've been using Wave to manage most of my project-related communications (with one or two partners), and it's fantastic. Like Etherpad, but a lot more powerful. And fyi, the Etherpad team is now part of the Google Wave team.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#63

Post by pielud »

daleharvey wrote: post #5

Banking - My bank has a website that the 90's would be proud of, it gives me little to no information about my spending habits, transferring money is a nightmare, and using kublax (similiarly mint) had my account banned for security purposes.

Especially doing anything that requires one bank to talk to another. Why does it take 5 days to move money between banks? It's ridiculous.

I once had mistakenly setup a transfer from one bank to another and I wanted to cancel it. So I called up the destination bank and they said there was nothing they could do. I called the source bank and had to pay 30 bucks to put a stop payment order on the account AND they couldn't guarantee it would stop the transfer.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#64

Post by ganley »

zyfo wrote: post #34

Phone calls - makes a lot of noise and interrupts me regardless of what I'm doing. I want some people to be able to reach me right away, while I couldn't care less for others. Creating barriers for interruption based on: a) the person calling b) the time of day c) the activity I'm involved in needs to become more accessible and intuitive.

Something I've always wanted is to be able to set up my home phone so that between (say) 9pm and 9am, when people call they get an automated response that says, "The person you are calling doesn't want to be disturbed at this hour. If your call is urgent, press 1 to ring them; otherwise, press 2 to leave a voicemail without ringing them." Technologically, it's nearly trivial.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#65

Post by username3 »

tsycho wrote: post #29
grep wrote: post #14

Reading posts with a lot of comments in HN. I never know what comments are new without looking to the date (sometimes they are hundreds).

I was thinking of this same problem yesterday. I will try to hack together a Firefox extension for this over the weekend to give the HN comments page Slashdot type filters (min. point thresholds), and date sorting. Will post on HN if it works well.

Chrome can use Greasemonkey userscripts. Can you add collapse-able replies?

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#66

Post by mynameishere »

The fact that 100s of years of art and music are available, but people still gravitate towards whatever is being promoted--typically something recent and inferior. This is partly a function of marketing, partly of herding--both poor selectors of quality.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#67

Post by davidwparker »

daleharvey wrote: post #5

Banking - My bank has a website that the 90's would be proud of, it gives me little to no information about my spending habits, transferring money is a nightmare, and using kublax (similiarly mint) had my account banned for security purposes.

I'd like to add that if you are/were in the U.S. Military at some point, (or even your parents, I'm pretty sure) then you should check out USAA. They have a fantastic website and awesome customer service.

note: I have no affiliation with USAA other than I use them and really like them.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#69

Post by davidw »

One thing that supremely annoys me is Italian drivers who do not stop at crosswalks. My daydream solution is a golf club or baseball bat, but I think that solution probably has unintended consequences.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#70

Post by astine »

davidwparker wrote: post #67
daleharvey wrote: post #5

Banking - My bank has a website that the 90's would be proud of, it gives me little to no information about my spending habits, transferring money is a nightmare, and using kublax (similiarly mint) had my account banned for security purposes.

I'd like to add that if you are/were in the U.S. Military at some point, (or even your parents, I'm pretty sure) then you should check out USAA. They have a fantastic website and awesome customer service. note: I have no affiliation with USAA other than I use them and really like them.

USAA does have a mostly solid website (and a fairly customer service all around IMHO,) but it does have some rendering flaws with Firefox on Linux that are very annoying.
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