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

It's not simple to address something like this. Either you have to replace the follicles (e.g. transplant surgery), or mess around with people's androgens (right now, we can only do that pharmacologically). Drugs that affect people's hormones have a tendency of having longer-lasting effects than those that affect neurotransmitters, which makes treating a cosmetic condition with them somewhat iffy from a "first do no harm" perspective.

Minoxidil (topical) and Finasteride (oral) are the two most reliable pharmaceuticals for pattern hair loss.

- We don't actually understand how minoxidil works, but it probably stimulates blood flow to hair follicles that are going dormant, buying a little more time. It's fairly safe side effects wise, but only addresses some forms of balding (top of head, smaller areas).

- Finasteride affects the production of DHT in men, which can halt or even reverse male pattern hair loss - but a very small subset of patients experience loss of sexual function as a side effect, which can be permanent. This makes it iffy to recommend to everyone without reservation.

The worst thing about both of these medications is that they have to be taken regularly, or else the hair loss will resume.

Until we more fine-tuned ways of tinkering with people's hormones or editing their genes, I don't think that we'll have a truly consequence-free cure for hair loss. Medical technology is just not there yet.

...That said, you're absolutely right that there's a lot of money in selling people cures for hair loss. In fact, if you just take the two drugs I mentioned above, explain them to men on the internet in clear language, and charge a small premium (3x the price of generic) to sell it to them... Boom! You got yerself a startup that just raised a $47M Round B! https://www.keeps.com/

People are trying. We want to cure cancer, and find effective general-purpose antivirals, and help people maintain healthy bodies, and figure out how to repair hearts, and cure diabetes, and fix autoimmune disorders, and figure out general-purpose gene therapies, and work out what exactly is up with the gut microbiome, and make prosthetic ears/eyes/etc, and then there's the brain...

There's only so much that you can do with the technology we have right now. Advances in other fields will eventually help, but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.

Anyways, wouldn't significantly longer-lived people exacerbate climate change? You'd have many more people on the planet, and individuals would accumulate much more total wealth to spend on wasteful consumer goods thanks to the power of compound interest.

I don't understand why the Web Browser ecosystem is stuck with Extensions, and why Web Browsers, the most used programs on the planet, are still unautomated for 99% of humans.

This just doesn't make sense in any economical or rational view.

Web Filtering and Ad Blocking are things that are stuck UX wise, because currently there are basically two different concepts. Either you have some scammy anti-virus firewall premium service that does things you don't understand, or you have an Ungoogled Chromium with uBlock Origin and uMatrix where you can block per domain basis (which most people don't even understand in terms of terminology).

Why is the Web not allowlisted?

Say you browse a website, and you disable everything by default. Then you want to allow a payment provider because you want to buy something, and you click on "Allow PayPal".

Wouldn't a collective list of services and SDKs and their required assets in the form of a named "web service" list make more sense than the adblocking approach?

I think that this can be improved a _lot_ in its UX.

Coming back to Automation of the Semantics of the Web:

I think once a Web Browser gets smart enough to understand the semantics of a website, and the implications of user interactions ( e.g. "make a payment" or "subscribe to channel") - it can be recorded, trained, and automated.

And I think this is the reason why I started to build a Browser from scratch, even when it is an almost impossible task to do. I believe that Web Automation is a necessary step to get to a superintelligence level.

And such a Browser would push our collective efficiency far beyond what we can imagine right now.