Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Products I Wish Existed

blog.eladgil.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 434 posts

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#391

Post by modo_mario »

bhl wrote: post #291

#2. With Discord, I would love to have it move in the other direction, from being a game-centric network to more of interest-centric network. Parts of this already exist — there’s a way to search through open invite communities — but it’s not as explicit as I’d like: most of times to find a niche discord group, you first have to visit its respective subreddit and find the invite link beneath all the clutter. Sometime…

I've wondered about this as well. Discord should realize it's main appeal is not hosting gaming communities. It's providing a good and very customisable textchat environment (way less limiting than let's say slack) with easy voip and that all across platforms (browser, desktop, mobile, etc) I'm curious how large of a share of the servers is in no direct way gaming related.

As far as the rest goes I've wondered about as well. I'm part of a Discord that has no subreddit, yt or twitch channel is not a gaming community coming from some game or the like. It has a focus in that it's Eurocentric tho there's plenty of people on it from the US and the rest of the world but the only way it has survived for bout 2 years now is by being welcoming and a very broad catch all community with channels for cooking, politics, tech, memes, etc (https://euro-lounge.eu) I've encountered other ones that survived but they tend to be part of some big crosslinking groups and seem void of community feel with a shitload of people 99% of which don't say anything. Meanwhile more interest-centric communities just die if they don't have an area like a subreddit to pull people from. I've encountered numerous disappointing graveyards like that.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#393

Post by ehnto »

asdff wrote: post #242
Lucadg wrote: post #115

> What would be a network which allowed for more thoughtful discourse We used to have this and it was called forum (phpbb and such). They have been oblitared and we moved to Facebook apparently leaving our brains behind. In reality we are victims of armies of psychologists optimizing for engagement. I have the feeling forums will come back though.

We didn't leave our brains behind, this is just the internet without heavy handed moderators keeping subforums organized, discussions on topic, and putting the brakes on flame wars. Of course things crash and burn in an environment of total anarchy like what is seen on social media websites, image boards have taught us that decades ago.

Also, it's the internet now that everyone is on it. Heavy moderation of a niche group is pretty easy. Try moderating 100 Million + active accounts.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#394

Post by jacobush »

wffurr wrote: post #163
jagged-chisel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> focus on forming good relationships with their neighbors in meatspace Remember that garbage you mentioned. We don't want to deal with other people's garbage in meatspace any more than we do online.

Many people self-censor to a much greater degree in person interactions vs what they post publicly online.

No man's an island. What some post online is nothing but free-wheeling, disconnected from feedback.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#395

Post by reportgunner »

monch1962 wrote: post #339
wpietri wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! But the trouble for me with Excel is that it has an incredibly low ceiling. There are so many people out there doing what is essentially app development but with terrible tools. Tools that give them the wrong habits and mental models for working at scale. I would love to see the spreadsheet reinvented to be a) collaboration-oriented, and b) a good on-ramp to ever-growing programming skills. So that when Bob i…

If you haven't used it, Google Sheets is worth looking at closely. It's good for collaboration (within the boundaries of a "normal" spreadsheet interface), and has a lot of options for integrating with external systems

For me, Google Sheets don't have the signature features of Excel, it's like Excel lite.

No VBA, no keyboard shortcuts, (no cross-workbook references).

Imho two people working inside the same worksheet at the same time was never an Excel's missing feature.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#396

Post by arethuza »

jariel wrote: post #312
NikolaNovak wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cynical comment that has some roots in truth, but really needs some metrics defined to be useful :-) By time spent? Not on anything but the tiniest projects which are likely to be loss-leaders anyway. By value added? For consulting company, sure, that's one way to look at it; for the customer, probably not :P For the purposes of my post, pre-sales/sales/RFP/whatever were assumed to be done prior to start of impleme…

I'm not being cynical. The lifeblood of major consulting is the sales life cycle, which includes branding, relationship building. Lobbying costs. Responding to RFPs. Advertising. Trade shows. Expensive offices (to give the appearance of credibility). White papers. Paying off Gartner etc. so they put you in the 'good quadrant'. Partners at some firms spend nights a week having people in the industry over for dinner, n…

Having been on the buying side of large enterprise projects (up to $50 million) I was surprised at the number of vendors who simply look at a very small outline of the project and decide not to get involved.

Later on, back on the selling side, I now appreciate that "qualifying out" opportunities is definitely a critical activity otherwise you well spend huge amounts of money chasing stuff that you probably won't win or, worse, win and make a loss on.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#397

Post by Retric »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #343
Jedd wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear also has a lot of fearmongering and red tape around it. Plants are reaching their EOL and in many cases new ones are not being built due to the cost of getting through all the red tape (getting approval from the feds down to local government, dealing with inevitable NIMBY lawsuits, etc). Renewables are the future, but we aren't fully in the future yet. This is a common trope. I can't work out where you live…

But there are places with much larger portions of their power supplied from nuclear plants, e.g. France, with >70% nuclear power.

That’s incorrect.

France generation is over 70% nuclear power, but in 2018 exported 86.3 TWh mostly nuclear and imported 26TWh mostly non nuclear. So they actually use less than 70% nuclear power. This is important because of how hard it is to match nuclear generation with demand resulting in a 77% capacity factor vs ~90% in the US nuclear industry even with all those exports.

In other words they built enough nuclear to cover well over 80% of demand, but only use ~60% internally.

They are also looking to significantly reduce nuclear production. Closing up to 17 reactors by 2025. https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#398

Post by Lucadg »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #382
Lucadg wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is probably the closest thing to a forum. I guess having a separate domain in a website owned by people rather than one run by a big company allows for a more intimate environment.

I don't really find reddit comparable to forums, mainly because reddit is also built around recent comments. It has very rudimentary search functionality, and the way submissions and comments are scored discourages long conversations. Unless you're on a really small subreddit, stuff falls off the first page quickly, and your comment will be far less visible if posted half a day later. This is completely different tha…

Exactly. Forums optimize for quality content and this makes it hard to monetize them because when you found the good stuff you are not going to click on ads.

Also, mobile which is not ideal for long conversations helped their demise.

Still, I hope they come back big time. I miss them.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#399

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

reportgunner wrote: post #395
monch1962 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't used it, Google Sheets is worth looking at closely. It's good for collaboration (within the boundaries of a "normal" spreadsheet interface), and has a lot of options for integrating with external systems

For me, Google Sheets don't have the signature features of Excel, it's like Excel lite . No VBA, no keyboard shortcuts, (no cross-workbook references). Imho two people working inside the same worksheet at the same time was never an Excel's missing feature.

> No VBA

FWIW Google Sheets does have the ability to write macros in JavaScript. They even have an npm tool [0] that will let you edit offline via your preferred IDE and then push to your sheet.

[0] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/clasp

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#400

Post by majortennis »

asdff wrote: post #233
arkanciscan wrote: post #120

I fail to see how TikTok is a "good reminder for the generational turnover of social products". Has an entire generation passed since Vine or Snapchat? If anything it's proof that securing an early lead in a new form of media (short form video in the aforementioned cases) doesn't guarantee success even for a generation. My takeaway is that young people are increasingly mercurial and disloyal. Chasing their attention…

Snapchat is still extremely popular among people my age (20s). Vine only died because it was killed off, the community was thriving. If anything, tiktok shows that it was a mistake to kill off vine; functionally it's the same sort of content.

i'm in my 20s snapchat is dead
Post reply on HN