Technology to store greenhouse gases
Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
301–310 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#302Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.
This is a problem that Google tackled themselves, but it had too many problems[0]. Recent attempts use Chrome Dev Tools[1] to cache the results. So this may alleviate problems Google had. Memex had attempted this, but deprecated it: > We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users ... > We spent so much time on building the s…
>> I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]
Here's then a problem I wish people worked more on: structural support for products/features that are used rarely, but when they're needed, they're really needed. Browser history interface falls under this: it's rarely needed, but when you open it, it's usually because you really need to find something again that's not easily found through web search.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#303User 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.
Most big tech companies use this internally. Google "beyondcorp" works this way.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#304Overpopulation. It's the main source of humanity's current woes and will only get worse with time. We seem to be content with addressing the symptoms rather than the problem. The idea of population control is taboo but will help everyone in the long run.
This is a problem that is solving itself. As countries get richer, their people have less children. And this result holds true in every country for which we have data. The prediction is that the world’s population will peak at ten billion then start to decrease.
Well the population is still growing faster than ever, so everybody must be getting poorer.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#305The phone system. It seems like it's an unholy mess. I moved from the US to Hong Kong this year. I have a US number that I want to keep, and of course I need a local Hong Kong number. So, the US number is on my Google Fi account that I pay to keep active and I get a prepaid SIM card for Hong Kong. I can switch the SIM cards if I travel back. But why? We have two semi-independent networks, one for voice and one for da…
Not to mention, data-only calls are often much higher quality in my experience. Whenever I go from FaceTime audio to regular calls, I can’t believe I used to use them all the time
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#306The phone system. It seems like it's an unholy mess. I moved from the US to Hong Kong this year. I have a US number that I want to keep, and of course I need a local Hong Kong number. So, the US number is on my Google Fi account that I pay to keep active and I get a prepaid SIM card for Hong Kong. I can switch the SIM cards if I travel back. But why? We have two semi-independent networks, one for voice and one for da…
In a lot of places, the old PTSN is the only connection. I've been in places where the number of phones in one space made data use impossible, but I could still place a call just fine. In some phones, you can even force data to 1G to use the voice frequencies and avoid using the LTE frequencies.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#307We’ve got a very limited understanding of biology. Ask any kind of researcher and they’ll tell you we need more data, i.e. more experiments. Also, there’s Illumina monopoly in sequencing market, we desperately need competition for genetics to become accessible to general population.
There's a poster out there of all the relevant chemistry of human mitochondria. It's a pretty big poster, about a square meter of paper. Every pore and protein's function is represented. The Kreb's Cycle is in a corner of this thing. All the chain reactions are there, with lines trying to vainly connect it all together. The font on it is ~9 pt., I think. And it's double sided. I can't find a good link on Google, but…
I'm guessing you're talking about the Roche poster. IIRC, it's only useful as art - it's too detailed for a high-level overview, and way underdetailed if you want to work with any of the pathways displayed on it. This only highlights your point: bio is much more complicated than people think it is.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#308We’ve got a very limited understanding of biology. Ask any kind of researcher and they’ll tell you we need more data, i.e. more experiments. Also, there’s Illumina monopoly in sequencing market, we desperately need competition for genetics to become accessible to general population.
There is Illumina competition now with BGI Nanoball sequencing...
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#309Maybe not so much surprised but more disappointed that sustainable public infrastructure isn't more in focus.
Things like road surfaces that don't need to be replaced every couple of years, or better consideration when large infrastructure spending comes around how those bridges, dams, water works, etc, etc will be monitored, maintained and expanded over time.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#310A 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.
Randomize the answers to those things, and stick them in your password manager alongside (or separate from) the log-in information.
Site asks for my mother maiden's name? Let me check "pwgen 18 1"... That'll be "Viquo4cai2gienoo2p".