Tunnels. Even with Boring Company I think they are being underinvested in. Can completely revolutionize cities once the cost drops. More green space. Eliminates air, noise and light pollution. No more unsightly telephone poles and wires. Reclaim prime land for other uses.
Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#272In-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…
Basically a social network app, with calendar events, and without the ability to post (because interaction has to be done IRL)?
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#273Real estate tools that actually help buyers and sellers! The vast majority of tools in the real estate space are there to help estate agents / realtors.
I wish that would happen, too. Cynical answer for why it doesn't: buyers and sellers are in an antagonistic relationship, so it's not easy to optimize value for both simultaneously. Realtors are the middlemen who derisk both sides of the transaction, raking in money in exchange. They have the money, they have the tools.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#274A 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/
No, but this does sound interesting. The graph overview is lovely.
I am hoping for something that treats pen input/ white boards as first party and have text take a back seat.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#275Debuggers which can visualise known types of data (e.g. vectors, matrices, bitmaps etc) and display changes made to them over time.
Check out the glamorous toolkit https://gtoolkit.com/
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#276Earlier 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?
Well, advertising is usually billed to advertisers as a cost-per-thousand (really, cost-per-mil, or CPM) for impressions. For a small local news site, they'd be super happy to get a $10 CPM on a local online ad. So let's just say for fun that we'd get the same rate for the hypothetical 'Spotify for news' service. Say a locally focused article about the latest city council meeting gets 20,000 views. At a $10 CPM that only generates $200 (or $0.01 per person). Does that seem like enough revenue to cover the time it took the reporter to attend the meeting, write up the story, have it proofread/edited, and then posted online and printed and still make a profit? Probably not!
The sad part is that the $.01 per person rate is way, way higher than what Spotify apparently pays out (around $0.006 to $0.0084 from some Googling).
This starts to look better if you just go to something like $0.25 per read, but at that rate you're likely charging much more than it would cost to buy a print copy, or a per-day subscription rate, so i'm not sure the economics would work out there either.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#277User authentication using client-side (aka mutual) TLS certificates. This was promoted with netscape navigator and then never came to be. Be authenticated everywhere, without ever having to log in.
I did this for a bunch of government sites many years ago. It was amazingly simple and completely transparent to the user. No passwords. No auth cookies. No registration. Developers don’t even have to know about it. My understanding is that it’s still supported by every major browser. I’m not really a web programmer though; just stepped in on a lagging contract and it seems like the best solution.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#278Actual, practical human longevity improvement. It seems ridiculous how small of a healthcare tech niche this is given the potential impact.
Why? Human longevity is a source of problems, and I personally wish we'd work harder at making the quality of our lives better instead of extending our time here.
Human longevity goes hand in hand with making our lives better. You don't make people live longer without drastically reducing diseases and healthcare costs whilst also greatly increasing the lifetime earning potential. Human longevity is one of the most important things we can be focusing on.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#279A way for a company I interact with infrequently to identify me over the phone. Pin codes and secret questions are easy to forget when they can literally go years without being used. What was my favorite movie when I setup my ISP account in 2016? This leads to customer service reps that are too forgiving and are easily susceptible to social engineering.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#280Geothermal 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…
My understanding is that it’s geographically limited due to depth issues.