Ask HN: What annoys you? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#41

Post by mrduncan » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:55 PM UTC

daleharvey wrote: post #20

mrduncan wrote: post #17

Email - Not a lot has changed in the past 20 years, I think we can do better. Yes, Gmail was pretty innovative but I still think there are plenty of things to improve.

Fully agreed, I think wave was an awesome concept, but a terrible implementation. Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I have yet to try lampson)

Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I have yet to try lampson)

Is there an available solution for the reverse of SendGrid? Basically a service which would receive your emails and then post to a url on your application.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#42

Post by ThomPete » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:55 PM UTC

mslate wrote: post #35

daleharvey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed, I think wave was an awesome concept, but a terrible implementation. Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I have yet to try lampson)

IMHO the only problem with Google Wave's implementation was that it didn't integrate with normal email, limiting its network to Google Wave users. This seems very obvious, but I rarely hear people mention this when Google Wave comes up. Did you have something else in mind when you said it had terrible implementation?

Oh man where to start.

It's just a noisy mess, poorly designed, with a lot of weird design decisions and exotic patterns that only added to the noise.

It starts with a way to complex proposition. Google basically created the entire vision instead of the basic core functionality and then expanded on that, optimizing in the detail rather than for the big shows.

Etherpad started the right way. It started very lean with a basic principle that then evolved with time, slowly. And now it got bought.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#43

Post by zyfo » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:56 PM UTC

Dealing with random candy attraction aka dopamine email effect.

The reason I and other people keep refreshing email, fb and hn all day long is because you never know when something good is coming up. Maybe one email that will change your life. A wall post from a potential partner. A insightful reply to your comment.

Limiting one's usage to predefined periods (eg mail only at lunch) is a start, but far from enough if we are to keep increasing our connectivity with the world.

I'm skeptical that there will be a good enough technological solution for this, which makes it all the more scary (scale/reach problems).

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#44

Post by cjg » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:56 PM UTC

Overcrowding on the train.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#45

Post by daleharvey » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:57 PM UTC

mslate wrote: post #35

daleharvey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed, I think wave was an awesome concept, but a terrible implementation. Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I have yet to try lampson)

IMHO the only problem with Google Wave's implementation was that it didn't integrate with normal email, limiting its network to Google Wave users. This seems very obvious, but I rarely hear people mention this when Google Wave comes up. Did you have something else in mind when you said it had terrible implementation?

The main thing was the integration with email, I was amazed it didnt have it from the start and convinced that it would be coming very soon.

But the UI also irked me, it was far far to bloated with features I didnt care about (replay), when the thing that I care about was it being as fast and responsive as gmail, which it wasnt close to.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#46

Post by nollidge » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:58 PM UTC

People who can't keep their car at a constant speed on the highway; cruise control is the best way to do this if you don't want to keep checking your speedometer.

To elaborate: If everybody picks a slightly different speed and maintains it, any encounter between two vehicles will never last very long. There's more distance between any two vehicles, so it's safer, and large, impassable clumps of vehicles are less likely to form.

EDIT: bad markup

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#47

Post by tansey » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:58 PM UTC

daleharvey wrote: post #7

Things to do - I find it really hard to find things to go out and do in my spare time, events listings never seem to have something that interests me, same with tourist guides although they can be better. Asking friends is always an order of magnitude better.

What about sites like Meetup? I had this same problem after moving and found a lot of regular hobbies locally.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#48

Post by dingle_thunk » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:58 PM UTC

tjr wrote: post #21

Informal music notation. Existing systems are fine enough for formal classical notation, but if you want to make a quick rough sketch (e.g., lead sheets in The Real Book ) it's pretty cumbersome, and the amount of time & effort it takes doesn't seem commensurate with the sort of document desired. I've been pondering this off and on for years; I think it might require a pretty fundamental switch in how the data is ent…

Oh man... This one bugs me too, but I see a lot of potential for things like the iPad here...

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#49

Post by ptn » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:59 PM UTC

Productivity pr0n - it´s the number 1 productivity killer

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#50

Post by daleharvey » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 2:00 PM UTC

zyfo wrote: post #43

Dealing with random candy attraction aka dopamine email effect. The reason I and other people keep refreshing email, fb and hn all day long is because you never know when something good is coming up. Maybe one email that will change your life. A wall post from a potential partner. A insightful reply to your comment. Limiting one's usage to predefined periods (eg mail only at lunch) is a start, but far from enough if…

This is something I have thought about as well, I think its 2 problems, notifications and filtering, I have gmail notifier but it would be nicer to see it come natively to more apps (facebook / twitter / email / comments)

and filtering which is much harder and specific to each application