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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?

#91

Post by kcartlidge »

chapium wrote: post #56
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…

What precisely are you proposing? A gui for creating latex documents?

There already is one. Lyx (at https://www.lyx.org/) is a very nice bit of cross-platform software.

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

#92

Post by 0-_-0 »

tucaz wrote: post #38
indy wrote: post #17

Debuggers which can visualise known types of data (e.g. vectors, matrices, bitmaps etc) and display changes made to them over time.

There you go https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hediet.d...

The programmer version of "there's an app for that" has become "there's a VSCode plugin for that".

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

#93

Post by pan69 »

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…

The company I work for recently settled on Office for document management and I agree with you, the collaboration part of Office seems to be in it's infancy.

I was thinking about LaTeX and if it could solve a problem for us in in my search I came across this:

https://www.overleaf.com/

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

#94

Post by Balgair »

Animal Sensation of Earthquakes.

Though a not well studied phenomenon (thankfully), it is well documented and seems to be a reliable, if brief, predictor. Even if it is only a few seconds of warning, that could mean a lot of lives saved by announced warnings or via automatic means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction#Animal_b...

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

#95

Post by swyx »

Balgair wrote: post #94

Animal Sensation of Earthquakes. Though a not well studied phenomenon (thankfully), it is well documented and seems to be a reliable, if brief, predictor. Even if it is only a few seconds of warning, that could mean a lot of lives saved by announced warnings or via automatic means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction#Animal_b...

> only a few seconds of warning

the lead time is important for the value. I don't think a 3 second warning is valuable at all, but a 30 second warning might be. so we have stats on this?

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

#96

Post by modeless »

kethinov wrote: post #15

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.

This already exists: the browser is the shared runtime. What needs to happen is everyone shipping Electron should instead ship a local HTTP server and open the user's default browser to run the UI. You can hide the browser chrome and make real top level windows by making your app a PWA. Anything else that needs to happen outside of the browser sandbox can be handled by the local server.

The only disadvantage is you lose control over the browser version that's running, but you also lose that with a shared runtime (unless every app pins their own runtime version which defeats the purpose of sharing). Besides, most Electron apps also have a web version that has to support all browsers anyway. The advantage is you seriously reduce the disk and memory footprint of your app and shed the responsibility of shipping prompt patches for Chromium security issues.

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

#97

Post by codegeek »

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…

A lot of elderly care (not all but a lot) is tied to healthcare and access/affordability of healthcare. That combined with the fact America is mostly "individualistic" society, it is not a great country if you are old and not well off. If you have serious medical issues, that makes it a lot harder. So I agree that is not just a tech problem but you have to look at all the reasons of why America is not that great for elderly people as a country.

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

#98

Post by tornadofart »

giantg2 wrote: post #26
tornadofart wrote: post #2

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.

Just because of the scam you mention. EVERYONE complains about their bullshit low quality home printer with super expensive ink. Yet nothing is being done about it.

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

#99

Post by tomatocracy »

trevett wrote: post #35

Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.

Agreed. There are a few full text/archiving solutions out there but they all seem to be very manually driven. Automating that properly seems to be hard to make slick enough.

One very easy win though would be to address the fact that history in browsers only allows you to see and sort by the most recent date you visited a page. So you can't really answer the question "what are the pages I visited in March this year?" (for example) with any confidence and you can't be sure you've got all the pages you visited in a particular cluster if you might have gone back to one of them later.

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

#100

Post by eggsmediumrare »

dhruvkar wrote: post #9

Regenerating top soil. We have degraded 1/3 of the top soil in the last 150 years. At the current rate, we won't be able to grow food in 60 years. This is a significant threat to our food production capabilities as a planet, and has severe 2nd, 3rd degree repercussions as well. At the moment, agroforestry and syntropic farming are the only large scale solutions, but they need mass adoption. https://www.scientificamer…

If covid has taught us anything, it's that we should listen to these sorts of warnings.
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