Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? • Hacker News Board

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

#971

Post by sbierwagen » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

yosamino wrote: post #196

Geothermal Energy. Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference. Then stick in two pipes, on for sending water down, one for steam to come up. Run a turbine, add a valve to regulate how much water you want to converted into steam to be able to regulate output, enjoy your first mover advantage and price the competition out of the market. ... It's not that I do…

Rock isn't very thermally conductive. Geothermal plants work great where the crust is thin, but for the rest of the planet you have to do a lot of drilling to get not much heat. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geother...

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

#972

Post by jldugger » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 12:35 AM UTC

screye wrote: post #252

A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows) I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it. Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a re…

Honestly, because most "mind maps" convey a loosely connected set of ideas that provide information only to the author. This is not a collaborative tool.

Whiteboarding, there's a dozen existing apps, but none are like IPO worthy IMO. If you think there's something missing, I'm not sure you need a visa to pursue it (unless I suppose if you are already living somewhere on a work visa and need to continue that work).

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

#973

Post by selfhoster11 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:52 AM UTC

max_ wrote: post #725

An alternative to the web. Designed for the user, not for developers, or cooperations. All these initiatives like SOLID, ad blockers, regulation & censorship should not be needed in this new alternative. Power was given to devs and we ended up with web obesity. Power was given to cooperations & we ended up with subversion. Then when people asked regulators to fix it we ended up with popups. The web is currently rotte…

Gemini protocol aims to address some of these problems by doing away with the web entirely. It's like a modernised Gopher with improvements that benefit from 21st century hindsight.

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

#974

Post by selfhoster11 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:58 AM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #970

max_ wrote: post #725

An alternative to the web. Designed for the user, not for developers, or cooperations. All these initiatives like SOLID, ad blockers, regulation & censorship should not be needed in this new alternative. Power was given to devs and we ended up with web obesity. Power was given to cooperations & we ended up with subversion. Then when people asked regulators to fix it we ended up with popups. The web is currently rotte…

I think that you are correct. There are alternatives though, but they don't like to use it much. Also would be alternative that the web browser could be designed better; interpret them differently and more efficiently for the user to have more control and don't waste too much energy. For different applications, you can have: - NNTP - Gopher - IRC - Telnet and SSH - etc. (I have a NNTP server set up. If you want to se…

I already replied to the parent, but Gemini is a modern protocol that significantly improves conceptually upon Gopher. It's lighter than HTTP/HTML and with just enough features to serve the small web and not much more. It's worth checking out if you haven't already.

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

#975

Post by hansdieter1337 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

UX design. Just looking at modern web tools like AWS, I don’t understand why they can’t make it a bit more intuitive.

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

#976

Post by detritus » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #242

detritus wrote: post #134

Fusion Energy.

Too much is being spent on that, not too little.

'Too much' might be swallowed up by ITER, but given its potential to benefit the entiriety of our species and planet, I earnestly believe we should be dedicating a % of the entire world economy to pushing the development of fusion energy, in whatever form it ends up taking.

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

#977

Post by cjameskeller » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

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…

Texture was like this, but was acquired by Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(app)

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

#978

Post by bshanks » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

Information overload. There is now lots of information available online but there are only a few systems for prioritizing/sorting it. For example, if you are a software developer and you want to continually learn about new software development tools and technologies, you can talk to colleagues, you can read the front page of Hacker News or r/programming, you can follow people on Twitter and on their blogs; I would think there would be a lot more ways to do this (for example, things like Hacker News or r/programming with a much wider variety of ways of sorting the stories; more transparent and customizable social media 'feeds'; a wide variety of collaborative filtering websites like StumbleUpon tried to be; etc).

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

#979

Post by bshanks » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 10:00 AM UTC

Governance systems. A lot of resources are allocated by institutions, and institutions have a lot of power over our lives. There is a decent amount of research comparing and analysing existing governance systems (e.g. comparative constitutional law) however there is surprisingly little effort put into coming up with new ones. In more detail, there is surprisingly little thinking, research, and experimentation on alternatives to the current procedures by which institutions make decisions (things like Robert's Rules of Order; voting systems; procedures for determining what gets on the ballot of e.g. corporate shareholder meetings; procedures for selection of judges, conduct of trials, resolving disputes in the interpretation of rules; etc).

There are many new and small institutions being formed all the time (e.g. HOAs; new companies; local non-profits; technology standards committees; etc) but few of them experiment with new and "experimental" procedures, and few experimental procedures are proposed (which could be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; maybe no one wants to try out a novel procedure unless it has been at least analysed a lot, but maybe no one wants to spend time inventing and analysing novel procedures if there is little chance they will be used).

In addition, there is little work on novel procedures for self-governance of large asynchronous online communities (such as forums).

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

#980

Post by bshanks » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

Wikis as discussion forums. Not wikis for encyclopedias, not for collecting notes on some topic, not for notes within an organization on how various technical infrastructure works, but rather wikis for discussing topics, coming up with ideas, and debating together.