I’m surprised there’s not more construction tech. I mean housing is multi trillion dollar industry with enormous unlimited demand. I get that it’s hard due To regulation and barriers to entry but still
Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
921–930 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#922Smartphone Keyboard I cannot type a single sentence without making a typo and I have been using a smartphone for 12 years. I miss Blackberry's keyboard. At the moment I even cannot use my natural keyboard layout with a fast and responsive keyboard. I type 3 times slower on my phone than on a computer keyboard.
I very much agree. And the annoying thing for me is that I spend much of my (work) life sitting in front of a full-size keyboard, yet when I want to respond to a personal email on my phone it's actually quicker to type it on the PC keyboard, mail it to myself, and then copy-paste it into my personal email on my phone. It's horrific.
What I've longed for is a bluetooth dongle (or something) that I can just plug into the PC or piggyback on the keyboard's USB connector, and which will let me use the keyboard I already have to type on my phone.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#923Human 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. Peopl…
Probably controversial here but as far as I can see correct: This seems like a shortcut to hell on earth. Who do you think will have the means to pay for this first? It won't be the saints, it will be the greediest ones. So we (or rather out descendants) would probably be stuck with a ruling class of demigods. Why? 1. They were already pretty well off (since they are the ones who can pay for this treatment in the fir…
Most things go to the wealthy first, but usually it's worse quality and very rapidly becomes democratized and improved. Consider how great life was 100 years ago for the wealthy compared to the average person today. I would definitely prefer air travel and computers to being wealthy but stuck in the past. Almost every technology has gotten much better when it becomes mainstream.
If treatments become available, the pressure to make it available to everyone will be immense. Consider how much of a government budget goes to health care and how much productivity and resources are wasted on those who have exited the workforce due to age. It will be economic and political suicide not to ensure everyone gets access to anti-aging treatments.
As for a ruling class, the problem exists with or without anti-aging treatments. We're already moving to a world where more wealth is concentrated with fewer people. The solution to this is to demand taxation on wealth and enforce it globally.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#924Battery tech. Smartphones almost all components has come a long way from processor, RAM and storage. Battery tech has not improved much.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#925In-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…
The UK appointed a Minister of Loneliness in 2018.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/minister-lonelines...
The reality is the changing social dynamics of a population spending increasing amount of time on the internet and less inclined to do things in-person, amplified by people choosing to have 'busier' lives, is the direction we are currently heading in.
We need top down (govt) and bottom up (community) efforts to start real change that can gain momentum (network effects for the founder inclined).
Working on experiments to chip away at this from the bottom up .
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#926In-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…
Whole social clubs may have been on the decline for decades, there’s been a pretty big growth in group fitness. CrossFit has been huge for over a decade and BJJ had really begun to explode, prior to Covid. I hit my two-year mark in jiu jitsu, right before the pandemic. While I still maintain contact with a few members, I really miss the camaraderie. I have no interest in returning to my office for work, but the moment it’s safe for me and my family, I’ll be restarting BJJ. And possibly reforming dormant bands I’ve played in.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#927Subvocal 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.
I work on voice control with a custom speech engine and models (Talon). I know nothing about subvocal mic hardware or even how the audio sounds, but if anyone has a viable answer to this, especially with a good hardware option, please reach out to me.
Basically, if someone can point me to a solid subvocal speech recognition tech demo and a reliable subvocal mic (note the sibling comment that indicates generic subvocal mics are frustrating and fall out of alignment easily): I think I could train production subvocal speech models, tune support for the audio style in my app, and ship to the public in a matter of weeks.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#928No mentioning of global warming, the most pressing of all issues? It might not effect your level of comfort or net worth in the next two or three years, but it does have the potential to wipe out humanity, if not life itself, in the next few hundred years. Unless you're actually going hungry right now or are sick or homeless, I don't know why you'd be worrying about anything else.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#929No mentioning of global warming, the most pressing of all issues? It might not effect your level of comfort or net worth in the next two or three years, but it does have the potential to wipe out humanity, if not life itself, in the next few hundred years. Unless you're actually going hungry right now or are sick or homeless, I don't know why you'd be worrying about anything else.
Does it really though? I mean the medieval warming period was ballpark the same temperature as we have now.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#930Premium-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…
Except: give me touch and a convertible laptop with a good quality pencil. And insane battery life.
We have different needs. Your needs are not mine.