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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?

#211

Post by marvinkennis »

tomatocracy wrote: post #114

Single 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…

Blendle.com is a notable competitor here. Initially started out with a pay-per-article model, but now moved to a Spotify model as you mention.

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

#212

Post by sokoloff »

pan69 wrote: post #93
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/

Word Online with online commenting and discussion features is a pretty slick workflow for virtual, document-based meetings though.

I considered trying to get us to standardize on LaTeX and git for document management, but delayed that decision in favor of "get started with Word first and get people used to writing at all". Once we went forced-remote and started using the online comment features, I don't see an equivalently accessible means to do that in tex.

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

#213

Post by cma »

fy20 wrote: post #161
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #102

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…

*kWh

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

#214

Post by johnorourke »

Nextgrid wrote: post #163
gisborne wrote: post #84

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. We…

It sounds like you have a specific case of this which caused some problems, what was it?

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

#216

Post by bawejakunal »

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.

Do you have any concrete thoughts that you would want implemented in this domain ?

Amazon/Kindle self publishing is actually a less known but pretty clever innovation they did, especially for printed physical books. The books are printed on-demand after a customer places order on Amazon, instead of advanced publishing. This cuts down a lot on costs and resources for each book, cuts out lot of middlemen for a writer and also provides avenue for writers to go direct to market without giving up huge profits to publishing houses.

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

#217

Post by Waterluvian »

Using ML to detect when I've used words the wrong way.

And I don't mean some obnoxiously advertised chrome plugin but a core part of spell check on my devices.

Also while I'm here: ios autocomplete is infuriating. It's constantly learning complete jibberish typo words and so I have to reset it every few months.

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

#218

Post by ng12 »

morelandjs wrote: post #74
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…

I'd like to see a tech'd out nursing home. Gaming is really a perfect fit for nursing homes, and it will only make more sense as our population ages. Gigabit internet, house Slack, LAN parties, VR gear, zoom calls with family, rigs for new members... create house guilds. Set the tenants up with streaming setups and let them have fun. I don't think the gear would be prohibitively expensive given the cost of nursing ca…

Have you ever been in a nursing home? All those systems would go unused. My grandmother struggles like hell to send simple emails with her tablet and she is easily one of the most "all there" residents in her home.

It would probably be more successful in 40-50 years when millennials start checking in to nursing homes, although who's to say we won't be as out of touch as the current generation of residents are.

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

#219

Post by therealmarv »

dljsjr wrote: post #164
therealmarv wrote: post #109

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.

Oh that's also nice. I mean I also like AsciiDoctor. I think this can get close to the link I mentioned. The biggest difference is that the link I mentioned has an example of a real thesis with this markdown toolchain.

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

#220

Post by thih9 »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #159

Replacing JavaScript

I'd say there's lots of work being done here.

Today's JavaScript is different from JavaScript of 10 years ago. There's also TypeScript and other alternatives that compile to JavaScript.

Are you looking for something different?

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