Traffic lights are totally fixable, there's just a huge amount of legacy hard and software systems. Ten years, better tracking systems, and some fuzzy logic. Problem solved.
Reminded me of this one: http://xkcd.com/277/
Experiment HN: Idea day
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Experiment HN: Idea day
#52Re: Experiment HN: Idea day
#53Unknown or expired link. This should be fixed.
There's "Resurrect Pages" for Firefox, which has buttons for Google cache (for recently dead pages) and archive.org (for longer-dead pages). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2570
Re: Experiment HN: Idea day
#54Idea for this site: up/down voting decrements ones karma points. It is not related with the concept of the karma, but we do not have live-span values here.
Re: Experiment HN: Idea day
#55Unknown or expired link. This should be fixed.
There's "Resurrect Pages" for Firefox, which has buttons for Google cache (for recently dead pages) and archive.org (for longer-dead pages). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2570
I think he means the situation where if you are browsing HN, then take a trip to Mars and after you continue clicking, the links no longer work.
Re: Experiment HN: Idea day
#56this sounds like a potential startup, unless anyone knows of a site like this
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Re: Experiment HN: Idea day
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'll drive you miserable and grouchy if you think of them as petty annoyances. Thinking of them as opportunities for improvement is more healthy.
People here don't know who you are, Mongoose. Why don't you put a link to "Rules for my unborn son" in your profile? Amazing site. http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/
What? I'm not affiliated with 1001 rules for my unborn son.
Re: Experiment HN: Idea day
#58I think I spend all damn day whinging (mostly in my head) about problems that nobody else will fix for me. Anything and everything from the lack of software I want to the poor design of my headphones to the stupidity of traffic lights. 90% of everything is rubbish and nothing is perfect. Problems problems problems, they're endemic, and OK. I think that if you cultivate this habit without also driving yourself to fix…
I have the opposite problem. I am happy and optimistic. I think long and hard about problems to solve - with a notepad in hand - and can't think of (m)any. So, it will help if you share the problems you have thought of.
I'm not happy and optimistic and I see problems everywhere. What do you want - things that annoy me on a national scale? On an industry-wide scale? Personally? Things that could be solved with small amounts of software? Large software? Website?
Problem 1: There's too much software. I can't learn it all. Why do I still have no better way to take a quick poll around the office than sending everyone an email and having everyone reply (too much email), or creating a custom website (too much effort)? Related: I think Microsoft Infopath might help but I don't know and all I can find about it quickly is marketing waffle - why isn't it easier for me to find out if a given program will help me and how to use it? Related: often when whinging online someone replies with a program that might help, yet when I try to search in advance I just get spam shareware download sites offering the top 20,000 shareware programs that might help and no way to find good ones. This is related to the problem of the sheer amount of software in the iPhone Appstore. Which are the games I might want to play?
Problem 2: I have cool ideas that I don't have enough interest to learn all the things I would need to know to put them together. The asterisk phone system has awful call logging. The MIT simile project is nice. It would be good to have an ajaxy javascript timeline call log with clickable links to replay the call recordings using e.g. the embeddable yahoo flash media player, searchable (preferably with speech recognition). All doable, maybe not even a lot of work for a full time html/css/javascript coder with asterisk knowledge.
A script that runs as a cron job and saves router and switch configs to a DVCS system with a front end like github crossed with django-admin. Sounds simple enough, great for an open source project. http://www.tadasoft.com/ have made a program that costs $10,000 for 500 devices per year just to do this. Problems: faffing with SSH, telnet and secure password storage and custom firewalls with weird interfaces and learning enough about everything to make it workable.
Summary: Finding good software is hard, creating good software is hard, plugging existing software together is hard. I don't know if there's a solution in a better form of online tutorials/examples, a more forgiving/higher level scripting setup, more standard kind of interfaces, other. What I would typically expect is a smug reply saying "math is hard" or "suck it up". Wow, helpful.
Problem 3: I need to work on a project with someone from another company. Why is there nothing in the space between Microsoft Project backed by Sharepoint libraries (huge and complex) and Basecamp (tiny and not locally installable)?
Also related to problem 1: If there is software out there, what is it? Also related to someone elses reply here: Use workflow software. Great! I'd love some that isn't as enterprisey as Microsoft CRM. A small program that half a dozen people can install, that spots each other by Bonjour and ... keeps track of internal projects so I don't have to by hand.
Musing: Visio is unpleasant to draw diagrams with but the results are good. Being able to sketch on paper and have the sketch turned into a visio diagram would be cool - rough circles turned into neat ones, rough lines into neat connections, this symbol into a server, that one into a building.
I don't want "tries to explore the network and draw a diagram for me", or "draw on the web and export in visio format", but I do want "get the same or similar results with less hassle".
We have very powerful graphics cards and decent AJAX-y web sites. Why are my network diagrams like on-screen-paper? (I use this analagously to 'writing Java in Python'). Why aren't they more 3D, more interactive, more searchable more animated, more ... multiplayer, more like the Windows pipes screensaver?
When someone calls me and tells me they have a problem with a program I don't use, why can't I go to a website, find the program and see clickable screenshots of all the key areas so I can guide them to the settings they need?
Remote controlling a computer is slow a lot of the time. For support work I could get use out of a program that just screenscrapes text and shows it to me in the relative positions. i.e. turning a screenshot into a lighter weight balsamiq style sketch outline + text.
Whine whine whine ... you get the picture!
Re: Experiment HN: Idea day
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the opposite problem. I am happy and optimistic. I think long and hard about problems to solve - with a notepad in hand - and can't think of (m)any. So, it will help if you share the problems you have thought of.
I'm not happy and optimistic and I see problems everywhere. What do you want - things that annoy me on a national scale? On an industry-wide scale? Personally? Things that could be solved with small amounts of software? Large software? Website? Problem 1: There's too much software. I can't learn it all. Why do I still have no better way to take a quick poll around the office than sending everyone an email and having…
Wait! In case you don't get the picture...
www.autotrader.co.uk is a rubbish site to search for cars if you know what you're looking for. I have a car in mind and can only narrow it down to about 400 at a time. I can't exclude based on keywords, can only search on one keyword which doesn't work at all well when it's a number, can't add notes to them, and if I come back tomorrow I have to trawl through them all again, I can't exclude any. Their recent redesign is uglier, slower and less pleasant to use.
It's ripe for a startup to nip in and take their market.
More generally, there's got to be a better way of pulling what I want out of their database than the two alternatives of a complex and scary search command line (that is, scary for most users), a massive 'advanced search' form or a limiting basic search form. Some nice search/filter/exclude interface.
Also, /etc is the place for linux config files, except for some apps where that isn't good enough so you get stuff like /etc/httpd/conf which is the config file location with in the httpd config file location within the config file location. Or /etc/sysconfig which is the place where system configuration goes within the place where system configuration goes. Stop being so stupid and redundant. Nobody (read: me) wants to deal with that. Put everything in /etc and maybe /etc/httpd if you need to group by program which you shouldn't because filenames are almost certain to be good enough and you can filter using ls anyway didn't you get the message about simplicity and composability of commands?
And what about a program I can run and it takes the running program which has the focus and draws on some overlays over the buttons and menus, such that when I click on them it takes me to some useful help on the web? So I can go to Tools -> Options and run this program, then click on "enable the frobnicator" and it whisks me off to a website where people can talk about what the frobnicator does and where it's useful and what problems it causes. All to often at the moment if there is any help with a program like that it just says "enables or disables the frobnicator".