How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Toosie Roll Tootsie Pop?
(The world may never know.)
Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
131–140 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some public schools are just fine. Some private schools are awful given who my kid is. I just want to know which one is which.
Where I come from is Almaden Valley of San Jose and Palo Alto, so YMMV depending on where you are. Barely-adequate public schooling doesn't work for my family. Many moons ago, the high school I attended was rich af and an overachiever mecca because of high property taxes and extreme property values. There are also excellent private schools, including some of the more specialized ones for higher gifted and genius kids…
It's that word of mouth that I want to know! I agree that something Yelp-like isn't going to be useful. I just don't see a way of doing this successfully unless the government mandated surveys, or some other compulsory mechanism.
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
AlphaCode --> AlphaDocumentation
As in text completions and corrections for software docs? Have been tinkering with this exact concept: https://i.imgur.com/txhgLiy.mp4
C++ programmer here. I have a class that does something, so a header and a source file. I add some words as a primer on why the class exists, and the magic neural net adds comments in the header as to what the member variables are, and what the methods do.
I'd be really curious to see if the output is comprehensible and informative. There's a huge training corpus for this do I'd assume this would work.
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#134Problem of unjust societies. My kid will be a multimillionaire in his twenties without a single day of work while his equally capable peers will enface a life of limited opportunity because the best they can do is to work their ass off to pay rent. It is structural and it needs to change. A truly liberal idea could be to reset the "score" when the game is over. Try to be the best you can and earn as much as you can -…
The biggest obstacle IMO is that inheritance taxes are unpopular. We already tax very large inheritances (above $5M), but I don't think there is an appetite for stepping that top bracket up to 100%.
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. We already have a wealth tax for the overwhelming majority of Americans and they don’t seem opposed to it. It’s called property tax. They all know what it’s used for. The issue with a wealth tax is purely a marketing one. Rich people have truly done a great job distorting the wording around a wealth tax.
When people say 'wealth tax' they usually are thinking add up all your assets and pay some percentage of that each year. There are quite a lot of practical problems with that.
Yet most Americans have almost all of their wealth inside of their home and they pay a tax on it every year. Hmmm, interesting. It's almost like we made a system for this and made it easy for people to pay this tax... It's almost like there's ways to tax things easily and effectively... Hmm!!! Even for assets which can change dramatically in price every year like houses do! How does it work?!
The practical problems are all very solvable. Again - this is just propaganda the rich sell into the minds of the masses to avoid taxation further. Don't buy into it. And stop spreading it.
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#136I know this might be asking too much, but: fix political corruption
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#137Lack of reliable service from plumbers, HVAC, appliance repair people. There are many people available but the quality and consistency of service is highly variable and chances of getting ripped off are high if you don't do your due diligence. I wish there was more standardization in these services where I don't have to worry about getting ripped off and can expect a decent quality of service without spending too muc…
Having worked on this the realization came that the problem isn't one that can be solved with software. There are a million solutions that in theory should work, if that were the case. The problem is a large percentage of people who work in the trades are flaky. This is not something that the SV crowd can understand. They don't want to be more efficient. They know their jobs can't ever be outsourced. They want to wor…
penalize the flakes, give steady performers a boost?
after some point, no flakes on the platform.
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#138I know this might be asking too much, but: fix political corruption
the only way to fix that is to improve education everywhere. that includes moral education.
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#139P2P E2E chat. Much like signal (support for IOS, Android, and desktop), just no central servers.
https://status.im does this for text and group text just not voice. p2p leaves a pretty wide attack surface from everyone's ISP.
Re: Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
The better solution is eliminating the need to fold, probably.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not. I'm guessing if I said, "I would like a device to cook me dinner," your response would be "The better solution is eliminating the need to cook anything," and I'd be eating out of some NASA-approved squeeze tube or eating TV dinners for the rest of my life. As I am a normal human, no, the answer is a device that actually organizes and folds laundry when I dump it into a pile out…
there is no need to fold clothes. a lot of clothes can be left hanging if you have enough space, or an efficient way to do that. i hang up clothes to dry on regular coat hangers, and ideally i'd just move them into a hanging closet. no need to take them down and fold. hanging clothes are also easier to search through to pick what you want to wear.