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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#171

Post by mertd »

enriquec wrote: post #117
tomatocracy wrote: post #114

Single subscription payment for news along the lines of the Spotify model. I'd happily pay a single subscription which gave me access to ALL the news websites, and divided payment up based on which articles people click on. Do that without tracking me between the different sites and I'm sold. Pressreader gets close but it only gives you yesterday's print versions (not current online content), it has a few notable gap…

Apple News is trying. Also better for magazines than current events.

I dislike Apple News because there is no way to follow the article to the publisher site.

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

#172

Post by unlaxedneurotic »

newman555 wrote: post #137

Fusion energy and regenerative agriculture. Maybe I’m naive, but I see those 2 being unbelievable transformative for the world, significantly improving quality of life and preventing all those really bad climate change scenarios that seem almost inevitable at this point.

ITER has been making some headway in the fusion reactor space. https://www.iter.org/

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

#173

Post by wassenaar10 »

renjimen wrote: post #125

Overpopulation. It's the main source of humanity's current woes and will only get worse with time. We seem to be content with addressing the symptoms rather than the problem. The idea of population control is taboo but will help everyone in the long run.

I don't know why people still think that overpopulation is a genuine threat. If anything, there's a genuine threat to industrial societies in that their birth rates are almost all sub-replacement. This is true for countries in North America, South America, East Asia, and Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

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

#174

Post by oblio »

tomatocracy wrote: post #114

Single subscription payment for news along the lines of the Spotify model. I'd happily pay a single subscription which gave me access to ALL the news websites, and divided payment up based on which articles people click on. Do that without tracking me between the different sites and I'm sold. Pressreader gets close but it only gives you yesterday's print versions (not current online content), it has a few notable gap…

For news? I want an OS and browser integrate single payment system. I don't want to have to give my credit card details to everyone. I want a digital wallet that's an open standard and that's integrated with every form of online payment.

Where I can cut off subscriptions easily and with no hassle, maybe one time payments, etc.

For news, shopping, any kind of subscription (Netflix, AWS, etc.).

I want banking-as-a-service. I already trust my bank with my money, I want them to be the middle man between me and the online payment jungle.

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

#175

Post by oblio »

searine wrote: post #108
dhruvkar wrote: post #9

Regenerating top soil. We have degraded 1/3 of the top soil in the last 150 years. At the current rate, we won't be able to grow food in 60 years. This is a significant threat to our food production capabilities as a planet, and has severe 2nd, 3rd degree repercussions as well. At the moment, agroforestry and syntropic farming are the only large scale solutions, but they need mass adoption. https://www.scientificamer…

This is really not an accurate depiction of the problem. First of all, it may take a 1000 years to naturally create topsoil, but that's not our problem. We have topsoil and can make topsoil much much faster. So how do we preserve, and continue to create topsoil faster than it is depleted. What is top soil? A collection of macro and micronutrients, microorganisms, and organic matter in the first 5-10 inches of soil. E…

Isn't the real problem these days fertilizer drainage going into rivers and oceans, etc.?

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

#177

Post by jhayward »

giantg2 wrote: post #16
java-man wrote: post #4

Educating the general population.

I'll agree with this, but want to clarify that the education I would reference isn't necessarily formal higher education, but educational reforms at primary and secondary levels to include more useful life skills like logic, finance, and understanding of civic duties including the legal system.

And yet, the official platform of the Texas GOP used to (and still may for all I know) have a plank opposing any schools teaching "critical thinking skills". Because, that's just liberal indoctrination leading children away from authoritarian structures of "whatever I say is true is true".

All that to say - it's not a bug, it's a feature to many Americans.

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

#178

Post by mceachen »

throwaway4good wrote: post #51
throwaway4good wrote: post #8

Desktop UI beyond wimp.

Maybe it is not for lack of trying but it is surprising to me that the desktop UI of today (say MacOS Big Sur) is the same "windows, icons, menus and a mouse pointer", beyond some improvements in animation and graphics, as it was 20 years ago (say Windows 2000).

s/20 years ago/36 years ago/

s/Windows 2000/the first Macintoshes/

ftfy

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

#180

Post by crsr »

trevett wrote: post #35

Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.

This is a problem that Google tackled themselves, but it had too many problems[0]. Recent attempts use Chrome Dev Tools[1] to cache the results. So this may alleviate problems Google had. Memex had attempted this, but deprecated it:

> We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users

...

> We spent so much time on building the search and with it also 30-50% more time on every new feature because of interdependencies with the amount of data produced. End2End encrypted sync, backup, search performance, search filters, all were directly or indirectly necessary to work much better than we can afford. We're just 2.5 devs.

Another developer attempted this, too. But didn't have many users:

> I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]

One user does point out the reason why this may not have took off:

> about once every two months, I am looking for something that I swear I came across on the Internet at some point. However, the rest of the time, I'm able to re-find it just by doing another search, whether on search-engine-of-choice, or a search box on particular-website (e.g. socnet, stackoverflow, reddit, github, hacker news...).[3]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745931

[1] https://github.com/c9fe/22120

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13427464

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744785

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