Debuggers which can visualise known types of data (e.g. vectors, matrices, bitmaps etc) and display changes made to them over time.
I worked on this for quite a while: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd
Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
191–200 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#192You know how we have an overabundance of ways to design, describe, develop, and document rpc-based distributed systems like REST and microservices? Why isn't there anything like that for event-driven, message-based systems? If there's a message bus in your architecture, it's usually just a pipe-shaped widget on a diagram. There's dozens of tools that can describe and API down to the finest detail, like swagger/openapi, uml, C4. We have infrastructure as code (helm charts, etc).
In all of them the events and message buses are kind of an afterthought. Everything seems geared towards request-response systems, and nothing adequately deals with the range of event systems and message flows.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#193Elderly 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…
> our elders ... dies more then young people Um, yes? That's what happens when you get old. It's not lack of humanity, it's just reality. I see no infrastructure, or tech, or social changes that will stop people from getting old and dying.
You removed the "were neglected" part of the line you quoted as if it isn't important. Old people dying because they're old is sadly inevitable. Old people dying because they're neglected is not, and when it happens it's due to an infrastructure, tech or social failure. That can be addressed.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#194Better authentication practices.
I've been writing auth for the web since 2005 and it hasn't gotten easier or more convenient as a programmer or as an end user. The problem is so bad that email/password combos need to be managed by 3rd party services.
Migrating away from Google Authenticator was a massive pain for me this year and as we continue to use more services, this problem will grow.
Some apps on my phone started using biometrics (face id) for authentication and it's extremely convenient.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#195Single subscription payment for news along the lines of the Spotify model. I'd happily pay a single subscription which gave me access to ALL the news websites, and divided payment up based on which articles people click on. Do that without tracking me between the different sites and I'm sold. Pressreader gets close but it only gives you yesterday's print versions (not current online content), it has a few notable gap…
Paying according to which articles people click on has already failed as a model for determining truth and relevancy. We need to think of “one weird trick” that will have the same “stunning” effect but without the incentive to appeal to humanity’s baser instincts.
I didn't think the goal was "truth and relevancy" but... just to apportion payment for the services used (reading articles).
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#196Geothermal Energy.
Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference. Then stick in two pipes, on for sending water down, one for steam to come up. Run a turbine, add a valve to regulate how much water you want to converted into steam to be able to regulate output, enjoy your first mover advantage and price the competition out of the market.
... It's not that I do not understand that it's a lot more complicated than that - but I'm puzzled that noone is doing it on a much bigger scale.
Oil companies are the ones at the forefront of deep drilling technology,
They know that "Oil is bad" and that oil is going to run out. I'd like them to stop drilling for oil completely - but even if they keep pumping oil, why do they not cash in on this additional front and enjoy money and good PR.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few different outlets have tried this over the years, and it's never gone that well, as far as I know. I think that was originally the model for Tinypass, which merged with Piano Media. Not sure if they still offer that model or not, but it's the most recent I can think of. The reality is that for all but the largest news sites, this model won't really work. Say you're in a medium-small city. Even in your best case…
> you'd still only likely get such a small sum per-article (10-20k pageviews, maybe?) that you'd still have to supplement revenue with advertising and other revenue streams Advertising and other revenue streams also only pay out per view on a fairly small number of views though, right? Is the problem not that advertising pays more per view than people are willing to in the first place of their own volition?
I am not an advertising expert, nor do I know much about monetizing static media (in this case I mean newspapers). But regarding Spotify, the business model roughly breaks down to the top 2% of artists get 98% of the profits. So...it's basically impossible for anyone smaller than NYT or WaPo to ever make money from this model.
Likewise, most artists don't make any meaningful money from Spotify.
https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#198Business automation. There seems to be so much that can be easily automated by simple scripts. We just need a better UI and a better way to teach people how to use it.
TBH that can already work quite well with Zapier and the like (in cloud-based businesses). I know businesses where almost every department from operations to HR has one or two Zapier accounts and connecting their dots, no IT or Software Engineering involved. It just needs a bit of oversight from compliance and security.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#199Better software for growth engineering teams (experimentation, analysis, etc). Existing products in this space are limited, expensive, and still pale in comparison to in-house solutions at top tech companies.
I have also observed this. We had a custom thing over Wasabi : https://github.com/intuit/wasabi which was quite difficult to maintain, but compared to the paid solutions out there was still cheaper to do. I wonder why aren’t there more products in this area.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#200Building 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.
And then you need to have everyone install the runtime. And update it.
And we're back in Java-land, but with HTML instead of Swing :-)
It's nice from a developer point of view but I wonder how many application creators/vendors will actually use it. Most want to control as much of the stack as possible.