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

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

#61

Building a shared runtime for Electron so that each Electron app no longer needs to bundle Node.js and Chromium. It would significantly improve the performance of a framework now used by countless apps. So far as I can tell, this has been on the back burner of the Electron team for many years. I'm surprised it's not a higher priority.

Couldn't that just be made with a browser that would allow to be run in a runtime mode with limited features?

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

#62
post #26

Open source printers

Why do you say that? Most printer companies make their money off of the ink/toner for consumer products. The printers themselves are usually close to break even prices. That doesn't leave much room for open source competitors.

apparently commercial printers leave microdots on printed pages that can be used as fingerprints. Perhaps an open source one would not. just a guess though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

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

#63
post #30

We’ve got a very limited understanding of biology. Ask any kind of researcher and they’ll tell you we need more data, i.e. more experiments. Also, there’s Illumina monopoly in sequencing market, we desperately need competition for genetics to become accessible to general population.

You can buy a nanopore, no need to go with an Illumina. You can clearly do genomics at home with this.

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

#64
AI-assisted "queue" management. We all accumulate a multitude of different lists to work on: tasks lists, email inbox, open tabs, bookmarks, saved articles, books to read, movies to watch, games to play. I've never seen anything that attempts to unify these against their common constraint: time.

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

#65
post #30

We’ve got a very limited understanding of biology. Ask any kind of researcher and they’ll tell you we need more data, i.e. more experiments. Also, there’s Illumina monopoly in sequencing market, we desperately need competition for genetics to become accessible to general population.

I briefly looked at a couple of dirt cheap biology programs near me because I used to love biology and it was something different. Then I looked at the salaries working in the field and kinda just stopped.

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

#66
post #26

Open source printers

Why do you say that? Most printer companies make their money off of the ink/toner for consumer products. The printers themselves are usually close to break even prices. That doesn't leave much room for open source competitors.

Many of these printers don't work well on Free OSes unfortunately. Or require binary blobs (looking at you Canon) that are barely maintained piece of software cobbled together...

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

#68
post #14

Search

Beat me to it. This is now an old entrenched industry overripe for a little...disruption (what a nauseating term, I just don't know what else to call it). This is my focus next year. Placing many small bets that niche/vertical search will make this space much more interesting.

I just hope one vertical is web forums. AFAICT, most useful knowledge that I search for is in the collective archives of reddit, stack overflow, comments here, and the endless sprawl of vbulletin.

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

#70

Elderly care... in fact this pandemic showed precisely the opposite: our elders were neglected, converted into a statistic that dies more then young people. A complete lack of humanity in a lot of developed countries. This is the example we gave to the upcoming generations, we're fucked when it's our turn lol. I've been reflecting a lot on this, and thinking of ways to solve this, but it's not easy - it's bigger than…

Funny enough, I was looking for references related to this topic this morning.

I would add not just elderly care, but appropriate regulation of facilities that provide elderly care. Evidently, the standard business practice is to not just own the nursing home, but the businesses surrounding it, which are used to siphon money away from the facility. As an example, a separate legal entity owns the building and leases it back at a high rate, or the laundry and over charges, or the medical equipment and over charges, etc. It makes the facility look like they're losing money, but in fact the owning conglomerate profits handsomely:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/business/coronavirus-nurs...

https://prospect.org/familycare/the-corporatization-of-nursi...

The net affect is that the facilities themselves are incredibly understaffed and that leads to poor care and massive number of medical errors. As someone who's dealt with both assisted living and nursing home with my own family, it's incredibly frustrating.

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