Flexible regex engines. Pattern matching is a much more general problem than string matching, and you don't necessarily always have the entire input available initially. (In fact, especially for performance reasons, you might the pattern itself to tell you what possibilities to consider for the next portion of your sequence.) I've repeatedly found that a regex engine that can work on more general objects (not necessarily string/numeric inputs) and which can be fed the input at the caller's convenience could be quite handy for some applications.
Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#262A 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…
While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/
It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too.
Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#263Replacing JavaScript
God, yes...JavaScript is the great "stick a bandaid on it" story of tech
As someone with many years of JavaScript development experience I approve this message.
The annoying thing is that the community/OSS is so great that nothing that departs too drastically from JavaScript can get traction. Code you're working with is written in JS, docs are written in JS, tutorials written in JS, people you talk to are talking about JS.
TypeScript has really taken off because it's still very similar to JavaScript, something that can't be said of things like Elm or ReScript.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#264Client-side scraping to extract the signal from the noise on commonly used sites.
I've seen older (yet still updated) implementations/portals, but I'm surprised nobody has made federating site scripts easy for client-side use to expose as pseudo localhost site APIs and a portal that resembles Craigslist to bring all of the data together. Again, this has obviously been half done, but it's not packaged for mass appeal ala popcorn time for general web info.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#265Fusion energy and regenerative agriculture. Maybe I’m naive, but I see those 2 being unbelievable transformative for the world, significantly improving quality of life and preventing all those really bad climate change scenarios that seem almost inevitable at this point.
A 10-year plan was presented at the beginning of the month to the federal Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/us-physicists-rally-...
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#266A 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…
While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/ It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too. Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid. [0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes
Even just as a desktop markdown editor, Obsidian definitely delivers. You point to a folder with your files and that's it.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#267Better spellcheck. My Google keyboard still doesn't recognize COVID as a word, and I don't know how to teach it. I have screenshots too of Google docs giving red underlines to simple English words. I expected spellcheck to be far better by 2020. Perhaps incentives haven't been aligned.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#268Cloud tools for musicians. It's a pain setting up a new environment. So many plugins and libraries etc. Also, version control and backup. All manual.
I once thought about contacting Ableton to offer my assistance in taking their DAW to the cloud so that we can have collaboration, version control and publishing in one place, to sort of marry Ableton Live with Soundcloud. I would love a service like that.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#269Elderly 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…
My grandfather went into a Skilled Nursing Facility briefly last year. They had TERRIBLE wifi and we ended up getting a Verizon Hotspot so he could check his email.
He didn't have any desire to play games.
Of note, the therapy department has a lot of low tech games and might actually have a budget for tech assisted therapy.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#270Placebo effect: how can knowing you’ve taken a treatment improve your condition, without having actually taken the treatment?