Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by chaostheory » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #31

libertine wrote: post #13

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…

Yeah, I've noticed in the US that we've lost sight of the old way of ensuring care for your elders and it makes me sad. I understand that "proper" first world countries should take care of them through social programs, but I'm just surprised it only took us a few generations to completely abandon the obligation to take care of grandma, grandpa, mom, and dad when they get too old to work. My buddy is a latino and as s…

> we've lost sight of the old way of ensuring care for your elders

The "old way" is the current way. It hasn't changed, which is why we needed socialist programs like Social Security. Why? We live in a high trust society that is more individualistic. Families in low trust societies tend to adopt a more "clan" like mentality where you even know your distant cousins pretty well, see your cousins on a regular basis, and it's common for three or more generations to live in the same building. Why? Because in a low trust society, you will lean more on people who are related by blood when it's harder to rely on 3rd parties like the government or anyone not related to you. Conversely, we don't have that issue, so our families tend to be more distant.

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

#82

Post by asplake » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

schnevets wrote: post #40

Innovations in publishing. Books are still being written, customers are still making purchases, there's clearly an appetite for longform writing, and yet everyone seems to have given up after Amazon "conquered" the industry with the Kindle.

Perhaps the innovation here will be regulatory

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

#83

Post by asplake » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

the_only_law wrote: post #59

karsinkk wrote: post #57

A Decentralized Government.

I imagine even if something like that was being actively worked on, very powerful people would be working day and night to halt it, probably successfully.

Or deliberately leave the job half done and only one quarter working, as in the UK

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

#84

Post by gisborne » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

Computing tools for non—programmers.

In the early days of computing, we quickly came up with the spreadsheet and the user-friendly relational database (Access, FileMaker).

Then we just sort of stopped. The no-code thing today is a step in that direction, but we could do so much better.

I’m actually ashamed of the software industry that we have done so poorly at this.

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

#85

Post by bobosha » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

gdsdfe wrote: post #14

Search

The only way to beat Google is to come up with a whole new paradigm for information access. Perhaps something like Wolfram alpha for the web.

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

#86

Post by galesky » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

cluse wrote: post #75

diarrhea wrote: post #52

LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives. There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth. Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people acro…

I wish there was a way to maintain git version control while still being able to send and receive files from attachments from people who struggle with the idea of reading or reviewing something in any way other than by getting an email attachment. I used to work at a bank where we had to collaborate on Word documents stored in SharePoint. It was a nightmare. In SharePoint you are supposed to "check out" documents, ed…

I'm actually working on this + pull requests

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

#87

Post by chronolitus » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

Self driving on highways. I know many companies are focusing on tier V, everywhere. but it's starting to look like an AI-hard problem to me, and might not yield a usable solution for a while.

Meanwhile, I believe cars could do motorway driving from entry to exit today, if we focused on that. With LiDAR, some extra safety hardware on roads, coordination with local highway services, a company could make a car that is fully self driving on specific highway stretches.

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

#88

Post by bobbydreamer » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #28

Real news and true unbiased, truth seeking, fact checking journalism.

I was thinking a bit on this few weeks. How real news can be gathered up as now internet is everywhere.

A website made up of Google maps, people would post status or their street or place they visited. Status could be picture or message like "Green", "repair" street lamp not working, awareness" too many street dogs.

Messages could be just few sentences not big as a article. Restricted tags to filter news. This is sort public alerting what's happening in their neighbourhood.

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

#89

Post by sidibe » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

chronolitus wrote: post #87

Self driving on highways. I know many companies are focusing on tier V, everywhere. but it's starting to look like an AI-hard problem to me, and might not yield a usable solution for a while. Meanwhile, I believe cars could do motorway driving from entry to exit today, if we focused on that. With LiDAR, some extra safety hardware on roads, coordination with local highway services, a company could make a car that is f…

Lots of people are working on this (see all the companies working on autonomous trucking), but it's less visible because public testing of this is more dangerous than non-highway driving. We won't see the progress without a much higher level of confidence.

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

#90

Post by chiefalchemist » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

aewens wrote: post #46

chiefalchemist wrote: post #28

Real news and true unbiased, truth seeking, fact checking journalism.

How would we go about proving that a news source claiming to be those things are actually real, truly unbiased, truth seeking, and fact checking?

There are two things that seem to undermine the currect media landscape.

1) Profits are more important that facts and integrity

2) That race to the bottom prevents the media from policing each other. That is, for example, ABC News won't call out CBS News because ABC News fears retaliation (so to speak).