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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?

#431

Post by tested23 »

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.

The razer logo looks like a trampstamp

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

#432

Post by withinboredom »

mindvirus wrote: post #47

Subvocal recognition (wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition) - it seems like it's a mostly solved problem in labs, but hasn't been commercialized. I feel like being able to do voice control silently would be a major paradigm shift in how we interact with computers.

My VR headset has voice recognition. The problem? I talk to myself when gaming and trying to figure something out. So I end up "opening" random programs when I say, "huh, I guess I need to open that next." Detecting that I want something with this technology is the "easy part," detecting that I actually want something right this second and I want actually desire for the device to commit, is the hard part.

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

#434

Post by jdsalaro »

aaron695 wrote: post #157

Text to speech. It's the next billion industry. I wish people would stop wasting time on AI and speech recognition and work on that, it's the next step. ( AI obviously might be needed for 'deep fakes' of good speech output, we need focus on AI that gives us achievable returns, in steps )

What, specifically, are you lacking wrt text to speech?

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

#435

Post by gfxgirl »

seibelj wrote: post #336
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-…

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

This is just plain false. Google attractiveness and bald. Lowering your possible attractiveness by 75% to 50% is not an easy choice. Your confidence has nothing to do with it. Especially in a world where people are chosen via pictures. It works for some men. I might be attracted to DuWayne Johnson but there are plenty of men who look awful bald.

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

#436

Post by Razengan »

• Speech synthesis for games

• Social connection apps (dating/friends/hangouts) that aren’t optimized for fleecing users

• VR tourism

• Some way to digitally record and recreate smells, scents and odors

• A unified paradigm for controlling machines from fridges to elevators. Like tiny touchscreens with a modern and accessible UI you can hook up to with your phones

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

#437

Post by ineptech »

Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone).

It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on, which is why I'm surprised it isn't being worked on by Amazon or similar. The only company I know of working on this is Urbit, which seems at this point unlikely to take off for a variety of reasons.

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

#438

Post by aidenn0 »

mindvirus wrote: post #47

Subvocal recognition (wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition) - it seems like it's a mostly solved problem in labs, but hasn't been commercialized. I feel like being able to do voice control silently would be a major paradigm shift in how we interact with computers.

Consumer throat mics in the field get generally negative reviews. In particular if the transducers shift position even a little, the speaker become unintelligible. That ergonomics problem needs to be solved first.

I think the military throat mics are usually built into flight suits, so they may be less prone to shifting? I know in the lab, they are usually taped into place, which isn't really practical for the real-world.

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

#439

Post by daturkel »

pan69 wrote: post #93
diarrhea wrote: post #52

LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives. There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth. Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people acro…

The company I work for recently settled on Office for document management and I agree with you, the collaboration part of Office seems to be in it's infancy. I was thinking about LaTeX and if it could solve a problem for us in in my search I came across this: https://www.overleaf.com/

Overleaf is very unlikely to be a good drop-in replacement for MS Office for your company because Word and LaTeX are very different tools (with different goals and different audiences in mind). The former is a user-friendly word processor and the latter is a fairly complex plaintext-based document preparation/typesetting tool.

I doubt that most offices would benefit from teaching their employees that instead of just hitting control-B to bold some text, they should now do \textbf{foo}, or that quotes should now be types ``like this''. If you need the huge array of features (which is typically only the case in the context of academic publishing), then it's worth making the investment to learn. But for 99% of corporate documents, Word likely can do what you need with much less pain.

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

#440

Post by optimalsolver »

Python for serious game development. Python for browser scripting so we can have true, full-stack web development in Python. More aggressive expansion of Python into the embedded world. More Python for terminal scripting. Widespread teaching of Python to schoolchildren in order to make programming the new literacy. More aggressive attempt to make Python the lingua franca of the programming world.

Did I leave anything out?

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