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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?

#241

Post by Lammy »

anken wrote: post #209
yosamino wrote: post #196

Geothermal 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…

On bigger scale, it seems this can sometimes cause earthquakes... One geothermal power plant is going to close in France https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Geothermal-power...

The Navy had to close one too after the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Weapons_Station_Chin...

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

#243

Post by baron816 »

In-person social organizations.

Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health.

Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have high fees. Church goers regularly give up 10% of their (gross) income to be part of that group. Cult members might even hand over ALL of their possessions to join.

The camaraderie and experiences that go along with being part of a strong, long lived community tends to be the thing people value most in life. Yet finding those communities has become increasingly difficult in the modern era. People move away to different cities, or just don't run into the same set of people everyday. With the rise of remote work, social disconnection is only going to rise. I think there's a lot of room to create new social organizations with pretty minimal technology, and make a pretty profit from doing so. Humans are still human--they want those connections--they mostly just need an introduction.

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

#244

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

Excellent post.

But you forgot the "oven-in-summer" :)

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

#245

Post by hilbertseries »

mertd wrote: post #171
enriquec wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple News is trying. Also better for magazines than current events.

I dislike Apple News because there is no way to follow the article to the publisher site.

Somewhat of a pain, but you can use the share button to open it in a web browser. Then when it forwards you to apple news use the back to old app in the top left corner. Then hit tap here and it takes you to the website.

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

#246

Post by Aachen »

ncmncm wrote: post #153
kylewatson wrote: post #115

A friggin' printer that friggin' works.

Brother printers seem to work. And with after-market toner cartridges. They have a list of models that are fully compatible with Linux. Many have e.g. a scanner that isn't, but can print fine.

Can confirm that printers work significantly more reliably on Linux than on Windows as of about ten years. My SO asks me to print things from Linux because on Windows they need to always re-add the printer or some such nonsense. And that's via USB, don't ask me about my dad's network printer that his Windows fails to "find" half the time even when trying to re-add (and Windows doesn't make it clear what that even means) but my system just sends the job and it just works.

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

#247

Post by guitarbill »

dalai wrote: post #128
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…

Not just LaTeX, groff gets no love even though it can deliver nice output. The syntax is even more arcane, but on the other hand it doesn’t need GBs to install. Asciidoctor is a good modern proposition that can handle more than markdown can, but it’s not without shortcomings. Unfortunately markdown, asciidoc, rst and friends have been focusing too much on publishing to the web. Conversion to PDF is mostly over html (…

> groff gets no love even though it can deliver nice output. The syntax is even more arcane

I think you've answered it yourself. Also damning is that groff doesn't support UTF-8 directly.

Most groff guides only do very basic formatting. Complex math/equation layout can be awful. Image files apparently need to be ps/eps. I just keep running into issues.

There's also no accessible ecosystem for groff. CTAN. Code highlighting (ideally, I want to use pygments - i guess i could write a backend if i was really invested). TikZ is great and something I've invested in a lot. Bibliography management. Also, not an issue for me, but an issue for adoption is Windows support.

As for competing with Word's workflow, at least with some TeX variant I have a chance. Installer frameworks. Editors with previews. So a few GiB to not run into these limitations sounds worth it to me to be productive.

I'm not saying groff couldn't be used for complex stuff, but I wouldn't know where to begin, or want to work around all those limitations.

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

#248

Post by graeme »

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…

Apple News is trying this and it doesn’t seem to work too well. The trouble is the best publications can run their own offers and charge much more. FT and Bloomberg in particular tend to be corporate expenses.

Apple news costs $120 a year. Basic digital FT is over $350. Premium digital even more.

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

#249

Post by hiq »

canofbars wrote: post #162
sneak wrote: 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.

Blockchain is way too hard to interact with even for moderately technical people. And the minute you create an interface that makes it easy, you become the single point of failure.

I used to think BitTorrent was easy for the average computer user by now, but actually not so. You can't really delete a magnet link, but you can relatively easily take down the websites that host them, so it's not really relevant. It doesn't matter if the file still exists and there's a peer willing to distribute it if I cannot find it. In practice a lot of a popular torrent trackers (or magnet link indexers) manage to stay up for several years, but there's no technological guarantee for this.

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

#250

Post by LatteLazy »

It's disappointing that so many things listed here either are not real problems (soil degradation) or are already solved (we're spending a tonne of money on fusion, populations are already falling in many places and will fall globally from 2100).

In light of that: I'm surprised we're not better at spreading awareness of, and prioritising, problems.

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