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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?

#251

Post by montalbano »

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/

I can recommend Overleaf. I used it for my PhD thesis and multiple collaborative scientific papers.

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

#252

Post by screye »

A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows)

I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it.

Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a remote collaboration revolution, with notion, airtable, teams and slack becoming the norm, but this one thing seems to be completely sidelined.

I would have blindly jumped headfirst into making such an app if I did not have serious visa related causes holding me down. I can see it, but it just isn't there yet.

p.s: I have spent days finding a good app. (onenote is my begrudging compromise for now). Send me a good one if you can. There isn't much on apple either, but I care more about the windows ecosystem.

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

#253

Post by kreeben »

therealmarv wrote: post #107
Taikonerd wrote: post #104

Voice interfaces. We have Siri and Alexa, yes, but they're very limited -- they just have a list of pre-programmed tasks they know how to do. I realize that a fully-general voice interface is an "AI-hard" problem, but surely we can improve over what's on the market now?

I think you're underestimating what Google and Amazon are doing behind the scenes (there are a lot of people working on this currently).

G&A are going to be so concerned with "loosing out on data" that to their detriment all of their voice-driven interfaces will be cloud dependent. Hopefully, someone with enough wits will dare to lose out on that data and instead create devices with local voice models that can still learn and become more useful as you use them. I want this model to become embedded into my operating system.

I want an OS that gets smarter by the day but without phoning home. I want my OS to become better than yours, simply because I trained it better that you did yours. I want this OS to be _my OS_. Not your's. Not Apple's. Not Microsoft's.

Did you see the movie "AI" (written by Kubric, directed by Spielberg)? In the movie there's an AI driven teddy bear that is awfully close to being an AGI. I want my OS to be like that.

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

#254

Post by wainstead »

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…

It’s been turning up lately in the energy subreddit, with articles like: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/12/geothermal-energy-ren...

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

#255

Post by layer8 »

throwaway4good wrote: post #8

Desktop UI beyond wimp.

WIMP is fine. The problem at present is that “modern” UIs don’t adhere to WIMP conventions (tooltips, context menus, regular menus, keyboard accelerators/shortcuts and navigation, using native look & feel and controls including windows chrome, unambiguous visual distinction between actionable controls and mere labels/text/images, power-user features like configurable toolbars that were a common feature 20 years ago, ...).

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

#257

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

searine wrote: post #108
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…

This is really not an accurate depiction of the problem. First of all, it may take a 1000 years to naturally create topsoil, but that's not our problem. We have topsoil and can make topsoil much much faster. So how do we preserve, and continue to create topsoil faster than it is depleted. What is top soil? A collection of macro and micronutrients, microorganisms, and organic matter in the first 5-10 inches of soil. E…

> Farmers aren't dumb, they are incentivized to manage their soil as best they can.

Farmers aren't dumb but:

  1. they've made serious mistakes like this in the past, across cultures and civilizations

  2. farmers are not necessarily the people making the decisions in the contemporary vertically integrated "food business" economy of US agriculture in 2020

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

#258

Post by nemetroid »

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.)

Cold pantries (i.e. pantries with a vent to the outside) certainly exist, my (Swedish) apartment has one. I believe they used to be common, but have fallen out of fashion.

Its thermometer currently reads 6° C, so in winter it can more-or-less be used as a second refrigerator.

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

#259

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

spideymans wrote: post #129
Taikonerd wrote: post #104

Voice interfaces. We have Siri and Alexa, yes, but they're very limited -- they just have a list of pre-programmed tasks they know how to do. I realize that a fully-general voice interface is an "AI-hard" problem, but surely we can improve over what's on the market now?

One of the challenges with voice assistants is that voice is a very low bandwidth medium for communicating information. If I ask Siri to tell be about Bill Gates, it would take her a minute to read to me what I could skim in seconds from a Google Search result.

There's nothing inherent to voice assistants that requires that they speak back to you. You can ask them using voice, and get the results on a screen.

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

#260

Post by dylkil »

screye wrote: post #252

A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows) I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it. Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a re…

have you tried https://roamresearch.com/
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