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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?

#661

Post by rilut »

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…

Razer Blade Stealth 13 & Razer Book 13 fill this gap

I use Stealth 13 and impressed with its metal body and touchpad, also no shiny RGB logo

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

#662

Post by xenihn »

freehunter wrote: post #603
peruvian wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Pre-covid of course) I think about this often, but then I go for a walk (or in other cities, a drive) and see packed bars and restaurants every night with people from all ages having a good time. Makes me feel like the problem is on me - people are obviously able to make friends and hang out without any special apps beyond what is available now.

Pre-covid I went to bars a lot to hang out. Ranging from suburban “family dining” bars to downtown dive bars to hipster breweries, I’ve been a regular at a lot in the last 10-15 years. Most people at my bars come in with friends and really only talk to existing friends or friends of friends. Maybe/rarely the strangers directly next to them if they’re feeling extra social, but not much more than a bit of small talk. F…

Going to bars in other countries and/or frequenting bars that attract tourists is the solution to your problem. You'll have less inhibition when traveling, or at least I do. I would never start a conversation with a stranger in the US, but it just feels...easier when abroad?

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

#663

Post by WWLink »

lmm wrote: post #514
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 found the Surface Book had a wonderful premium feel; I went into the shop with a list of specs in mind, and Microsoft was the last manufacturer I'd imagine going with, but it's a powerful machine and also just a beautiful object. Metal case, relatively subtle/classy logo, absolutely beautiful screen, nothing else was compromised for the sake of touch, clean baseline first-party OS. If you really want a premium feel…

MS' support at their physical stores was fantastic. It's a shame they gave up on that. The phone support sucks if you have a hardware problem.

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

#664

Post by moralestapia »

yosamino wrote: post #196

Geothermal Energy. Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference. Then stick in two pipes, on for sending water down, one for steam to come up. Run a turbine, add a valve to regulate how much water you want to converted into steam to be able to regulate output, enjoy your first mover advantage and price the competition out of the market. ... It's not that I do…

>Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference.

>There's plenty of asteroids rich in gold/titanium just floating around. All you have to do is bring them here.

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

#665

Post by HenryKissinger »

toyg wrote: post #550
gangstertim wrote: post #317

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 would hate your world of batteries-everywhere. I already loathe the fact that I need to constantly recharge my phone, my watch, my mouse, my kindle, my headphones, my camera, my doorbell, my torchlight, my tire inflator, my tv remote... some of these will be used so sparingly that the batteries might leak in the meantime, or they might just die, so now every time you want to use X you have to wait for the batteries…

> Personally, I'm more annoyed by the fact that electrical systems in buildings are still too hard to modify. As you say, you cannot really tweak much once the wall is done. In a day and age where electrical devices continue to multiply, it's sadistic to bang on about extender-cords being "fire hazards" while not providing alternatives. You don't want fire hazards? Give me a way to safely upgrade the energy distribution of my home that is as easy as plugging in an extender cord.

Glad someone else is sharing my views. Burying cables into physical fixtures that cannot be accessed any other way than brute force is, I find, completely archaic. The solution is modular home design. Houses should be built more like gaming PCs in a way. Every wall would be 4-5ft thick, be mostly empty on the inside, and have a special door to allow a human to go inside. This "closet inside a wall" would contain standardized plugs/hooks/supports for electrical cables (along with plumbing and gas lines and internet fiber and any kind of wire or pipe that passes through the home). Load bearing would still be assumed by columns and other hard elements, but hidden inside these 5ft thick walls.

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

#666

Post by akramquraishi »

jhayward wrote: post #621
yosamino wrote: post #196

Geothermal Energy. Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference. Then stick in two pipes, on for sending water down, one for steam to come up. Run a turbine, add a valve to regulate how much water you want to converted into steam to be able to regulate output, enjoy your first mover advantage and price the competition out of the market. ... It's not that I do…

There's a very useful and up-to-date writeup of the four main types of geothermal projects, and the latest (AGS) that features 1) no injection wells or other fluid contact down-hole, 2) re-using existing oilfield wells when possible, 3) no need for "hot rock" steam flashing, and 4) no parasitic energy use for pumping (thermosiphon). Well worth the read. The author, Dave Roberts, is a reliable read in the energy world…

Using Graphene to radiate heat from deep holes to the surface is also one other area being worked on.

Graphene has exceptionally high thermal conductivity, 12000x of copper:

https://futurism.com/thanks-to-graphene-we-may-harness-the-l...

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

#667

Post by golergka »

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,…

Why would a non-technical person choose this over SAAS that already provides the same service?

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

#668

Post by ali92hm »

mNovak wrote: post #645

Packaged 'apps' to run in the cloud. Rather than everyone selling a SaaS which they're just hosting on AWS anyway, they should just have a one-click install of an instance to my personal AWS. There's really no reason it should be any harder than installing an app to my phone or computer. I've seen one or two "launch on AWS" buttons about, and they have a marketplace, but clearly these aren't widely adopted or useable…

When I worked on Microsoft Azure, my team created many Azure Resource Manager templates that we offered on Azure Marketplace. There was no charge for the software, only the underlying resources that you consumed. While privacy and owning your data was a benefit, this had many more downsides and 99% of our customers were asking us to offer those solution as a managed PaaS offering. First, because the app was single tenanted the cost for most users did not justify the benefits that they were getting from it. Maintenance, trouble shooting, scaling, updating, and support are just few areas to call out where our customers had trouble and wanted us to run everything for them and just give them access.

Of course the customer experience lacked mostly due to the lack of a better platform for offering such "one click to deploy" apps. But still the customer needs to manage the uptime of the system and have on-call engineers who not only are intimately familiar with our software but can quickly identify and fix the issue.

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

#669

Post by cocoa19 »

cblconfederate wrote: post #428
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

Immigrants won't give up their high salary in the developed world.

Employers won't pay a first world salary while living in a low cost country.

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

#670

Post by faluzure »

Human Longevity.

150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. People are forced to save for a future where they have enough to survive for a few years and then pay to have someone take care of them, instead of doing what they actually want to do.

Why are we not all collectively trying to solve this problem? Dying of age related diseases is as natural as dying from malaria or childbirth, yet we try to solve those issues and pretend age related diseases are inevitable. COVID largely shut the world down because the largest risk factor for complications is how old someone is. The gains in productivity alone should make human longevity the number one priority for every government.

I also think it would solve climate change because if you expected to live much longer, the obvious problems are no longer just future generations problems.

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