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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?

#501

Post by m463 »

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 unraid (which I haven't tried)

I'm pretty happy with proxmox - apparently lots of people use the LXC appliances.

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

#502

Post by gfxgirl »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #136
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #102

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…

> like if they had just run the streets the other direction people would have had view lots

Wouldn't that have allowed them to make more $$$$$$$ because places with a view sell for more than places without?

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

#503

Post by imgabe »

ascar wrote: post #424
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,…

Thanks for elaborating. I know there are a ton of details I don't know about for why the phone system is the way it is. It's over 100 years old and I'm sure there's a lot of cruft.

I'd be happy to pay a local carrier for a data connection using their infrastructure. What I'm imagining is an app that lets me get a local phone number anywhere. Calls and texts to that number ring and show up in the app. If I move to a new place, I just get a new SIM card for data and create a new local phone number in the app.

WhatsApp is almost this, except it doesn't manage any of the phone numbers, and I'd really prefer to use something that I can pay for that isn't owned by Facebook. I've taken to giving people in Hong Kong my US number as well since that's what is tied to my WhatsApp account and there is a 90% chance that if anyone here is going to try to contact you, they'll do it through WhatsApp.

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

#504

Post by m463 »

morelandjs wrote: post #74
libertine wrote: post #13

Elderly care... in fact this pandemic showed precisely the opposite: our elders were neglected, converted into a statistic that dies more then young people. A complete lack of humanity in a lot of developed countries. This is the example we gave to the upcoming generations, we're fucked when it's our turn lol. I've been reflecting a lot on this, and thinking of ways to solve this, but it's not easy - it's bigger than…

I'd like to see a tech'd out nursing home. Gaming is really a perfect fit for nursing homes, and it will only make more sense as our population ages. Gigabit internet, house Slack, LAN parties, VR gear, zoom calls with family, rigs for new members... create house guilds. Set the tenants up with streaming setups and let them have fun. I don't think the gear would be prohibitively expensive given the cost of nursing ca…

I visited a nursing home a few years ago and they had televisions on the wall playing crappy broadcast tv and periodically blaring advertisements at high decibel levels. it was awful.

And some folks just didn't move out of bed much because it was so labor intensive.

We need robots and lots of other tech.

That said, there are some cool hospital beds that are like Transformers. For example, you can get hospital beds that not only tilt and let you sit up in bed - but they can basically turn into a chair or help you get out.

(do an image search for "hil rom p1900")

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

#506

Post by daniellarusso »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #363
daniellarusso wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think alot of this are symptoms of bad management or inexperienced management dealing with remote work. I have had to rise to the occasion, and facilitate icebreakers with new hires of other teams (that work with my team). Their managers thought nothing of directing the new hires to slack and email a handful of strangers. The companies or individuals that had successfully implemented remote work prior to the pandem…

> I think alot of this are symptoms of bad management or inexperienced management dealing with remote work I agree, but I’d say >95% of management is completely unprepared to deal with remote work right now, and it doesn’t seem like they’re getting much better.

I agree, the effort is just not there.

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

#507

Post by monocasa »

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…

The closest thing I've found to what you're asking for is the Huawei Matebook Pro that I rock. Everything I like about Macbooks, plus USB-A, plus 3000x2000 screen.

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

#508

Post by jbay808 »

gfxgirl wrote: post #469
jbay808 wrote: post #414

Standardized interchangeable packaging for consumer goods. Ever been to a book store in Japan? Practically every book is the same size. As a result, bookshelves also are designed to be the right size to optimally fit books. This allows people to fit more books in small homes. It makes books easier to transport in book-sized boxes and book-sized bags too. You can get perfectly-fitting reusable cloth covers to protect…

I don't think Japan is any different than the USA here. If you go look at paperback novels in the USA they are 95% all the same width and height, only the thickness changes. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-stack-of-science-fiction-p... Conversely there are plenty of randomly sized books at a Japanese bookstore. I can go walk to some today and take pictures if you don't believe me. It's possible the USA is 50% stand…

From my experience they're a world apart, but your mileage may vary. You can also tell just by doing image searches for "Japanese bookstore". Or looking at how often US bookstores shelve their books sideways. But I agree that there are exceptions in Japan (including specific shelves for oversized books, like coffee table photo albums), and in the US there are some sizes that books sometimes converge to.

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

#509

Post by SN76477 »

Taikonerd wrote: post #104

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?

Voice recognition general is half baked. Voice recognition has been pushed on consumers for 10 years. Siri barely knows what I am saying. The voice recognition on customer service is always broken.

The technology is in its infancy. Yet, being built into more and more devices and services daily.

Not to mention, I don’t want to talk to my television remote. I want to use muscle memory to press a button.

Voice recognition is a mess.

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

#510

Post by glandium »

question000 wrote: post #10

Python in the browser.

I don't remember the timeline, but Mozilla has worked on this in the past with ActiveState. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/PyD... I think this predates Firefox, and was abandoned more than 10 years ago.
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