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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?

#331

Battery-operated household items. I have a cordless dewalt drill that I can use all day on my jobsite, but every single appliance in my kitchen needs a cord. Hand mixer? Immersion blender? Regular blender? Stand mixer? Everything has a cord. Why isn't there a kitchen battery system yet? Similarly: I'd love to have a little reading sconce on my wall next to my bed, but running a circuit through the existing walls with…

I'd guess because the market isn't really there when wire is extremely cheap and the building codes require more outlets than most people need. The wire for your sconce has already been run through the wall, it's at an outlet. Managing cables is not that hard.

Power tools are a bit different because they need to fit into any given tight space about once, and can't rely on wall power being nearby. Your sconce and kitchen appliances don't work on the same assumption.

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

#332
I think for developers (and users) everything is broken, just check https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

That's programming 1.0, and we're need programming 2.0

What I mean about programming 2.0:

- better security

- less bugs and more stability

- less complex code and API

- less APIs

- no halts, reactive live coding everywhere

- less coding, NoCode variants

PS: Who works on programming 2.0 besides me https://animationcpu.com/ ?

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

#333
post #271

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.

New York —https://earthlymission.com/new-york-city-underground-infrast...

London — https://londonist.com/london/transport/london-cutaways

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

#334

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.)

In the 1940s, you could buy a refrigerator with a "butter conditioner" to keep butter at a spreadable 65°F. Basically a compartment in the wall with a thermostat and heater, warmer than the main fridge but colder than the room.

Manufacturers killed the feature to reduce energy waste, instead of adding thicker insulation around the compartment.

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

#335

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.

Same with phone messaging (like whatsapp etc) where it's much faster to receive a text message vs the same message in spoken audio.

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

#336

It IS being worked on, but things move quite slow - and there doesn't seem to have been much progress for decades, but: Cure for hair-loss. Some might say it's just vanity, but if someone could come up with a cure, and sell it affordably, that would be a multi-billion, maybe even trillion dollar industry. Going from quite balding (NW4-NW7 in balding terminology) to a full head of hair makes most guys look a solid 10-…

Just shave it off / short. The person it affects most is yourself, and confidence does not come from hair.

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

#337

Battery-operated household items. I have a cordless dewalt drill that I can use all day on my jobsite, but every single appliance in my kitchen needs a cord. Hand mixer? Immersion blender? Regular blender? Stand mixer? Everything has a cord. Why isn't there a kitchen battery system yet? Similarly: I'd love to have a little reading sconce on my wall next to my bed, but running a circuit through the existing walls with…

What about a mechanical adapter to couple the immersion blender into the deWalt chuck?

I have seen battery powered blenders, though.

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

#338

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…

Meetup is kind of this. There were also a handful of these in the early-2010s wacky startup boom - I remember some acquaintances discussing Grouper, a startup that organized 6-person social outings.

I guess one distinction between those and your examples of country clubs, fraternities, and churches is that the latter are long-lasting institutions: you find a group of people, potentially spend an extended period of time interacting with them without commitment, and then you become a "member," which carries informal commitment. (In the case of cults there's formal/irrevocable commitment, but for the rest, you're free to leave, there's just a social norm that you don't do so casually.)

The flip side is that a lot of people have either first-hand bad experiences at such organizations or know people who have, and committing to an organization that turns out to be mentally draining (even if not abusive per se) is a worry. So maybe if you want to add some sort of structure on top, find a way to manage that risk. Certainly one step is to not accept as customers/members people who make your organization less fun to join, and be very up front about that. But beyond that, there might be ways to demonstrate to newcomers that the existing members are good people, or to support the organization in establishing social norms that discourage bad experiences, or possibly even figuring out what sorts of things toxic people tend to latch onto and designing your society in a way that lacks those.

(One other danger here is that the easy way to provide some of these benefits, like better career opportunities, is to be exclusionary and offer your members favorable treatment from each other and unfairly treating those outside the organization in a correspondingly unfavorable way. Country clubs, fraternities, and churches all have a reputation of helping the rich and powerful remain rich and powerful. It's possible to provide the benefits in a non-zero-sum way, by actually using the connections to make your members better people, but it's harder.)

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

#339

Markdown for academic papers. We have this https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown (which is the best template I know and on a personal note I've written my thesis with that too) but the whole ecosystem can be still improved.

Speaking of academic papers, I'd love to see a focus on readability.

So many papers are just too dense for readers outside of the specific field. This can be because of the complexity of the subject matter, but I often notice unnecessary specific vocabulary and over-complicating concepts.

Because of this, it's impractical for the layman to go read academic papers outside of their field. This leads to reading some news article that attempts to summarize it, and we all know that majority of the time it's just the headline that gets read.

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

#340

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.)

Real estate agent here... so I see a lot of houses and get asked a lot of questions about houses... at the root of your inquiry, I see a couple things going on: 1) Builders at scale aren't willing to make these kinds of investments. They want standard designs that they can throw up as cheaply and quickly as possible. Frankly some of the developments I've seen in my area are just hideous - like if they had just run th…

I wonder if GP's problem could be approached through standardization of heat exchange piping? While people like to move the furniture and white goods around every now and then, usually the kitchen stays a kitchen and the bathroom stays a bathroom, because that's where the piping goes. And we already put all kinds of pipes and wiring in the walls. I imagine another set of piping could be run, meant specifically for moving the heat in and out, with standardized endpoints for appliances to hook into.
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