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

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

#941

Post by young_unixer »

nrr wrote: post #674
young_unixer wrote: post #534

A desktop OS that doesn't suck.

Out of curiosity, what does "doesn't suck" mean to you?

- No spying on what I do with my computer.

- General purpose. Applications don't have to pay a fee to the OS maker be treated as applications.

- Simple, but aesthetically pleasing interface. Not trying to push weird paradigms (e.g. laptop/tablet hybrids UIs). Polished look.

- Applications are installed through regular files. Stores are acceptable, but only as frontends to this same file interface, not as replacements. It should always be possible to store the installer or bundle as a regular file.

- Consistent vision. Programs don't feel like they were developed by completely different groups of people with completely different purposes.

- No surprise updates. User has full control over the computer.

- Preferably open source.

Apple have been the closest to this OS nirvana (if you forget the open source part), but they decided to screw their users with spying and forced signing of applications instead.

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

#942

Post by chkaloon »

baron816 wrote: post #243

In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…

Decline of churches is one aspect. Society is becoming more secular, and there is nothing replacing those weekly religious services. There are no replacement "myths" that groups can cohere around.

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

#943

Post by pbadg3r »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #373

Ok I'm guessing this is super naive, but holy cow someone sell me a home robot. Ideally something with a good enough arm to load small things into the dishwasher, or at least unload onto a surface, open the front door, get the mail, put shoes where they need to be, pick up socks, dust/mop/broom, mow the lawn, fold towels, fold clean clothes from a basket, replace toilet paper, clean toilets, scoop out kitty poops, an…

Load small things into the dishwasher: Do you want an internet-connected device that can pick up a butcher knife and move it at waist level, that has a human watching its camera to back it up when it fails? This objection applies to a bunch of your feature requests, since knives don't weigh that much :/

Open the front door: You can do this with a $5k investment in some IoT + automated door opener

Get the mail: Curious what subtasks you imagine here (e.g. outdoor vs indoor, pick up packages, climb stairs, etc)

Put shoes where they need to be, pick up socks: This could totally work today if you don't need to open doors and you don't mind organization on piles in the floor, but I think the use case isn't compelling enough on it's own to create sufficient demand.

Dust/mop/broom: lots of people have robots for floors, but higher surfaces are hard to make work. Despite this, some teams have worked on bathroom-cleaning robots with this capability.

Mow the lawn: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers

Fold towels: Not that hard, but small market

Fold clean clothes from a basket: Super hard if you never want to destroy the clothes, and hard even if you can destroy some clothes.

Clean toilets, replace toilet paper: People are trying! Not going to be in homes for 5+ years though.

Scoop out kitty poops: products like this exist, but you still have to manually unload them to a trash can.

Make the bed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzNZrFhBeoY haha

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

#944

Post by ioseph »

Ekaros wrote: post #385
ioseph wrote: post #296

Sustainable timber. Given it's popularity as a building material (at least in Australia) I'm surprised there isn't more research into genetically modifying trees to grow quickly / have desirable characteristics for construction / need less land and water. I wonder if lab grown timber is a possibility. (I could also imagine a GM'd fast growing tree becoming a ecological disaster though...)

Quick and desirable for construction is a hard one. A slower growth is better as the food is then denser which means it's stronger. Maybe solution is some type of composite of fast growing fiber material combined with some type of binder...

I guess in many ways we're doing that already with pine board ply and bamboo benchtops.

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

#945

Post by rhizome »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #764
rhizome wrote: post #411

Pagination is always obviously somewhere at the bottom of a site's priorities but... that's how people engage with more of your site . Random examples of the state of the art, which is remarkably similar to the state of the art, oh, 15 years ago: https://freefrontend.com/assets/img/css-pagination/paginatio... https://uicookies.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Pagination-... https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4a/af/58/4aaf5…

yeah why is pagination on HN so bad I've hit more 4 times to see your comment.

Moreso: does ">>" mean "go to the end" or "skip 10 pages ahead?"

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

#946

Post by seesawtron »

baron816 wrote: post #243

In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…

Wait, aren't all social media platforms with their rooms and groups not promoting the idea of finding like minded strong communities? Sure its all digital and sometimes it leads to events happening in real. The "moderators" in these groups take their positions a bit too seriously sometimes.

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

#947

Post by mixmastamyk »

Jemaclus wrote: post #443
Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

Related to this, I'm kind of shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes. We've got Windows and MacOS, sure, but the nix ecosystem is so fragmented and not as well supported as the other two that it's hard to justify switching. Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it just works . Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.…

Dell XPS or Precision with Ubuntu Mate, am very happy with it.

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

#948

Post by LdSGSgvupDV »

baron816 wrote: post #243

In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…

If you don't mind the virtualized social organizations, MMORPG or VRChat or Streaming are good places to get connection.

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

#949

Post by woutr_be »

skinkestek wrote: post #850
woutr_be wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zoom "happy hours" pretty much get dominated by two or three voices (usually of the most senior people) and everyone else just listens, because you can't have 2 conversations at a time. They tried to do “zoom happy hours” where I work, and this was exactly what happened. The two people who were usually the loudest in the office, just ended up talking to each other. They would quite often stop and say “it feels like…

If I catch myself talking too much I sometimes make a joke or something and make a point out of muting myself until someone asks me something directly. Still I think there's room for more: I'm not that interesting, it just seems that many people want someone to say something.

I feel that, especially with video calls, it’s good to have some sort of moderator. If someone is talking too much, they can jump in and just say “xxx, what do you think?”, quite often that’s really all you need.

In video calls it’s much harder to pick up signs that someone wants to say something.

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

#950

Post by jbboehr »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #901
tunesmith wrote: post #344

Well, it's tongue-in-cheek, but more than once I've thought abut the ability to move somewhere without moving there. Like, if I live in Oregon, there's nothing stopping me from going on vacation to another state for months out of the year. So why can't I "move" there without having to physically go there? I think about this in context of the red/blue voting divide. If a couple million people in safe blue states "move…

I actually wanted to start a social network / organizing app. Around this. People essentially 'volunteer' to move where we need them to. But they actually would move for a few years. Maybe even stay there, permanently. As long as they live there, they can vote there. Emphasis at first would be red states close to turning blue, or with large electoral college votes. Then maybe states needed for local change, could ask…

And this is why no one likes Californians moving to their state.
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