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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?

#161

Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)

I think you are vastly over estimating how much energy appliances need, and how much waste heat that produces. A modern refrigerator for example can consume less than 1kW per day.

The only common appliance that I can think of that produces a lot of unwanted heat would be a dryer. But instead of a gas dryer that sends all the waste heat outside, you could get a condenser dryer with a heat pump which consumes much less energy and hence produces much less heat.

From a residential standpoint it doesn't really make sense.

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

#162
post #6

Uncensorable publishing.

We have a bunch of things like this. Torrents and data on the blockchain can't really be removed. The problem with a lot of uncensorable publishing is the average person does not want to be storing and distributing someone elses illegal content.

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

#163

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.

One answer is that people stopped valuing software and thus paying for software. Furthermore, every service out there now attempts to monopolize their market and intentionally degrades interoperability, further lowering the potential value these tools would provide.

Let's say there's such a tool out there and you want to buy it to roll your own mailing list and want to message your customers on Facebook Messenger. Well, you can't, and any attempt at circumventing the restriction such as screen-scraping will be met with account closures citing ToS or legal threats abusing the CFAA or even the DMCA.

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

#164

Markdown for academic papers. We have this https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown (which is the best template I know and on a personal note I've written my thesis with that too) but the whole ecosystem can be still improved.

How close does AsciiDoctor + asciidoctor-latex get to that? https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-latex

I've only been using Asciidoctor for a few weeks but I'm already an MD convert.

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

#165

Overpopulation. It's the main source of humanity's current woes and will only get worse with time. We seem to be content with addressing the symptoms rather than the problem. The idea of population control is taboo but will help everyone in the long run.

Check https://OurWorldInData.org to see that a lot of our woes do not get worse with time. A lot of things are actually getting better quite fast. That does not mean that everything is good yet but at least it is better than it was in the past. The past sucked. A lot.

Also: peak population growth rate was 50 years ago and it has been decreasing since then: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth-past-futu...

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

#166
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, this is some really high quality piece of software that I did not knew it existed until now. Thank you for sharing it!

I don't really have a good, productive, use case for it right now but I really can't wait to try it out. It looks really user friendly, fast, responsive, has a CLI, and it produces some easy to version in git latex files.

A while ago I wanted to create my CV in latex from scratch and gave up after days of trying to get FontAwesome to work (I wanted brand icons and other nice things), so I switched to a setup where I have a HTML webpage that looks like a paper page, and using chromium headless to "print" it to PDF (only works properly with chrome as other browsers have CSS incompatibilities on PDF generation, never mind the bit fart Firefox is doing on android lol). I guess I could try to replace that setup with this tool, it seems to have a export to PDF/HTML and a CLI interface for exports. Fingers crossed all goes well and hopefully it's customizable enough for the job. This will keep me busy/entertained for a while :).

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

#167

Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)

Most of the people who know that are Architecture and/or Landscape people. Yeah, landscaping. You plant trees which have shade in the summer and lose their leaves in the winter. As such, it cools the house in the summer, and heats up the house in the winter.

Talk to a few architecture / landscaping experts. They got plenty of ideas of how to optimize homes.

EDIT: And then a technologist comes in, wonders who put this big tree in front of their roof. They cut down the tree, install 20% efficient solar panels and overall have to spend more energy cooling down their house in the summer... completely ignoring the thought and effort the architect and landscapers put towards the home.

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

#169
post #17

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

LabVIEW has this, so you might check it out in LabVIEW Community if you're interested in this. Data flows across wires, and so you can probe the data in a running program to inspect it, which uses default displays for the probes. You can create custom probes for the data, which allows custom user interface interactions that takes in data from the probes (custom displays, additional calculations, etc.).

I am in general interested in this as well, and have found debugging in most text-based IDEs to be a step backwards.

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

#170
post #41

Healthy and delicious mass market food. At least in the US currently it's either healthy or delicious, while in Asia and Europe it can be both.

We do, but the problem is cost. It’s one of those “of these three attributes, pick two” between healthy, delicious, and cheap.

Add a 4th item: long shelf life

Healthy, delicious and cheap exists (at home at least). But it is very labour intensive and it will go bad in a couple of days.

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