Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by jamestimmins » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

rubidium wrote: post #380

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…

Agreed. I’ve set up my life to foster and form in person social interactions (and organizations to the extent that they help) in my neighborhood. It’s affected where I live, what kind of house I have, each weeks schedule, my kids education, and what jobs I’ll consider. But it’s totally the main thing that we have to work on as humans.

Care to share more details? I'm very curious what this looks like in practice.

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

#442

Post by turtlebits » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:12 AM UTC

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.

Razer has serious quality/longevity issues. Would not trust one of their machines to last more than 1 year.

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

#443

Post by Jemaclus » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:12 AM UTC

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…

Related to this, I'm kind of shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes. We've got Windows and MacOS, sure, but the nix ecosystem is so fragmented and not as well supported as the other two that it's hard to justify switching.

Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it just works. Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.

I turned an old Macbook into a Linux box, and it's fine*. It does what I need it to do, but it doesn't feel premium at all. I just wish I had really slick, solid, premium-feeling alternatives.

It seems to me that Microsoft or Facebook or SOMEONE with a bajillion dollars could afford to do this and really make a dent in the space and give us more alternatives. I guess the demand just isn't there. Very sad.

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

#444

Post by TaupeRanger » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:13 AM UTC

InvisibleUp wrote: post #289

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…

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…

You aren't more isolated living in a suburban house than in an inner city apartment. Isolation mostly has to do with your desire/initiative/ability to engage in social activities.

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

#445

Post by crooked-v » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:15 AM UTC

baron816 wrote: post #412

sjg007 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meetup.com doesn’t solve this? I ask cause I work remote and meetups are basically what I used pre-pandemic.

I’ve been the lead organizer of a largish group with a couple hundred very active members. But getting to that point was quite a challenge that was made harder by Meetup. The group still ended up falling apart. The Meetup platform is pretty terrible. It’s designed to get people to join many groups, most of which they never engage with and just get a lot of spam from. I’m sure >99.99% of pre-pandemic “social” Meetup g…

I think one key to a better Meetup would be to solve the no-show problem. From what I understand this is the greatest issue that large-group organizing has on the platform, to the point that I've seen people regularly write sassy rants on event posts to guilt people into accurately updating whether they're showing up or not.

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

#446

Post by conceptualspace » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:15 AM UTC

trevett wrote: post #35

Better 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.

i'm working on this as a browser extension. to get my feet wet i created Yet Another Speed Dial (https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial) which many people find useful, but the end goal is to apply the same kind of richness to all bookmarks and history

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

#447

Post by Jemaclus » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:15 AM UTC

Hearing aid technology. In the last decade, the biggest innovation has been to add Bluetooth to premium hearing aids. It's a total game-changer, but I'm very surprised that there hasn't been more innovation on this front. I'm profoundly deaf, and my hearing aid gives me so many cool features... but I can't help but wonder how much better someone with normal hearing would feel with those features as well. I'm practically a cyborg at the moment, with technology augmenting my crappy hearing. Why wouldn't a normal person want to be a cyborg too, and have tech-augmented super-hearing?!

Like many other things, I guess the demand just isn't there. And even though Bluetooth devices have made having things in your ear all the time way less stigmatized than they were when I was growing up, there's still a bit of embarrassment about having something like a hearing aid in your ear. It's a shame, really.

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

#448

Post by tabtab » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:16 AM UTC

gisborne wrote: post #84

Computing tools for non—programmers. In the early days of computing, we quickly came up with the spreadsheet and the user-friendly relational database (Access, FileMaker). Then we just sort of stopped. The no-code thing today is a step in that direction, but we could do so much better. I’m actually ashamed of the software industry that we have done so poorly at this.

The real problem is maintenance. Maintenance of software is about 2/3 of programming costs. It's counter-intuitive, but has proven true over time. Tools that make it easy to create the original application often make maintenance worse. They only help 1/3 of the total cost pie, pumping up the other 2/3.

Learning how to write maintainable code is actually harder than learning to code. You pretty much have to be burned by maintenance trial and error on your code AND others' code to learn this skill. There are plenty of books that teach "principles" of maintainable designs, but the principles often conflict with each other such that it's a balancing act between competing factors such that a simple list of rules fails.

I can give lots of anecdotes of people getting carried away with specific "principles". The necessary principles are a piano keyboard, but they play only a few favorite notes, making even cats cry. Knowing when and how to use which note is still an art.

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

#449

Post by glandium » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

ineptech wrote: post #437

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,…

There is the Freedombox project.

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

#450

Post by armincerf » Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #279

A 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.

You'd think they would just use the same 2FA methods that are popular for logging in. 'We sent a notification, click accept on it to continue' or 'read the 6 digit authenticator code' would be re-useable for their web login and there are a ton of libraries and info that make it easy to implement.