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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?

#421

Post by Klonoar »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #398
Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

I guess you can't out Apple apple. Apple has the culture and cultural force to sell you a laptop with ports you don't like or a weird keyboard. Part of buying an Apple product is being on a certain cutting design edge and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac. In the PC world, the consumer space is dominat…

> and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac.

Complaints that you commonly see about Apple products are, I find, similar to reading complaints when you're apartment shopping: those who complain have reason to do so, and those with good experiences don't necessarily feel the need to write about them.

For instance: those who experienced botched Catalina upgrades that caused Mail.app issues? I never experienced that, and I've two significantly sized accounts attached. In fact I upgraded my last machine from High Sierra to Catalina with no issues at all. The "beta" parts of macOS that people call out are just never things I've fought against - and I run a fairly custom-ish setup to boot.

On that same note, I could throw a rock and find a KDE user who complains about KMail having issues... but you won't find many KMail users saying "yeah it just works and life is great".

Software is complex. I wouldn't call macOS "beta" and by the same token I'm not going to label other OS/DE combos that either.

(They also fixed the keyboard, so I'm over that complaint. Would I prefer the ThinkPad keyboard? Absolutely. But the new one works fine and fits the design aesthetic of the device.)

tl;dr: The only "agreement" I find myself signing is that the thing looks and feels, and functions, like a premium product. I find myself endlessly frustrated that if I go car shopping for a premium item, I have different options... yet I just don't feel like I have this with computers.

> No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different.

This is exactly why I'm saying that my ideal product wouldn't compete with the PC market. I fully recognize that's a losing battle.

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

#422

Post by xwdv »

cpursley wrote: post #399
InvisibleUp wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a large part of this (in the USA, anyways) is due to how modern cities are structured. It used to be, 100 or 200 years ago, that your workplace, your home, and your usual hang-out place were all within reasonable walking distance of each other. It wasn't a huge deal to go out and meet new people, as you'd naturally bump into them every day. Nowadays we have a large portion of people in bedroom communities, is…

This 110%. It's especially obvious after moving out of the US and it's hard to convey how much better cities built for humans are than cities built for cars than by experiencing it for yourself.

Yea so great, until you are struck by a pandemic and your minimalist home is basically now a prison cell where you can't do much because everything there is to do was outside your tiny home.

Now I know people shitting on suburbs is the fashion, but the fact is if you are the kind of person who has hobbies that don't involve going out and socializing a bedroom community is perfect. You get your own land and a detached home with plenty of space to do mostly whatever you want. Woodwork, swimming in a pool, running around with your dog, playing loud music and movies, hosting dinner parties, whatever. It's so much more comfortable for people who don't have urges to just "hang out".

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

#423

Post by Klonoar »

gfxgirl wrote: post #419
Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

No logo? So the Apple logo is ok? My 2017 14" 1060 Razer seemed exactly like a black Macbook Pro (which I also owned at the same time). Metal case, Razer logo where the Apple logo was. HD-DPI display.

If I could kill the Apple logo, I would. :)

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

#424

Post by ascar »

imgabe wrote: post #284

The 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…

Voice over IP and it's connection to the old system is basically a solved problem. VoIP is very widespread, e.g. in Germany basically all new landline contracts are VoIP.

Also the backhaul of mobile networks is usually VoIP (references to this on Wikipedia date back to 2011 [1]), i.e. even calls starting and ending over the old analog network are converted to VoIP in between.

So what's stopping us is not technology, but exactly these local carriers with their national phone numbers and often also national law around selling these services (e.g. in Japan you need to identify yourself as a resident to buy a phone number). Why do we still need carriers? Because they are operating the local physical infrastructure necessary to connect your phone to the network.

So the problem to solve is to cooperate on an international level to use the physical infrastructure of a country/carrier free of charge while you are paying a different carrier in another country. We just recently (~2 years back?) "solved" this in Europe ("solved" because it only works within time limits generous enough for long term travel but not for permanent relocation). It will eventually happen on a global scale.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110809025050/http://www.eetime...

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

#425

Post by tabtab »

wassenaar10 wrote: post #173
renjimen wrote: post #125

Overpopulation. 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.

I don't know why people still think that overpopulation is a genuine threat. If anything, there's a genuine threat to industrial societies in that their birth rates are almost all sub-replacement. This is true for countries in North America, South America, East Asia, and Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Re: "If anything, there's a genuine threat to industrial societies in that their birth rates are almost all sub-replacement."

That's because budgets etc. assume population growth out of institutional habit. If population stops growing, then the usual assumptions and habits of governing shaped by past patterns are suddenly "wrong". Also known as "poor planning".

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

#426

Post by shuckles »

sirpunch wrote: post #357
TrackerFF wrote: post #319

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-…

And the opposite: permanent hair removal. My partner went through a laser treatment for over an year to get about 60-70% reduction in hair growth. It's immensely painful and time taking process that doesn't work for all akin colors and doesn't guarantee a permanent hair removal. With the current pace of medical research I would have imagined a simple cream that you apply on your skin and whoosh all the hair follicles…

I'm actually not surprised it's hard. Bodies are surprisingly resilient, so disabling their functions without secondary consequences is usually hard.

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

#427

Post by kreeben »

bobosha wrote: post #85
gdsdfe wrote: post #14

Search

The only way to beat Google is to come up with a whole new paradigm for information access. Perhaps something like Wolfram alpha for the web.

Can't we beat Google by being better than them at solving the search problem?

Google launches approximately one new and helpful search feature per year. What if you launched a company or conjured up a community that could give birth to two helpful features per year, wouldn't that company or community catch up and eventually surpass them in functionality?

This company wouldn't have to come up with a new paradigm for information access. Instead, they would have to come up with a way to launch helpful search features that wasn't dependent on PII. To me that doesn't sound as scary as having to come up with a new paradigm for information retrieval. To me it sounds fully doable.

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

#428

Post by cblconfederate »

baron816 wrote: post #243

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…

> with the rise of remote work, social disconnection is only going to rise

No, it's going to drop. Think immigrants who can move from crowded cities back to their country or a place that feels more like home

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

#429

Post by interlocutor2 »

Solvitieg wrote: post #194

Better authentication practices. I've been writing auth for the web since 2005 and it hasn't gotten easier or more convenient as a programmer or as an end user. The problem is so bad that email/password combos need to be managed by 3rd party services. Migrating away from Google Authenticator was a massive pain for me this year and as we continue to use more services, this problem will grow. Some apps on my phone star…

Biometrics are ultimately just a password that you cannot change and share all over the place. They're convenient, sure, but are a step back in security.

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

#430

Post by Aunche »

renjimen wrote: post #125

Overpopulation. 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.

In less developed countries, kids are free labor, so unsurprisingly countries with high population growth are poor. I'm not sure sure what you expect these countries to do.
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