15 ms·
Ask HN: What annoys you?
A lot of recent threads have been talking about sharing ideas, I would rather share our problems. Hopefully some people can be lead towards solutions that already exist, and it might be useful for those looking to startup something new.
List the problem you have, and why you find it a problem, possibly saying why other things you have used havent solved it.
Make 1 comment per problem, and try to upvote / comment on problems to expand on them.
- Eliezer 16y agoDeath annoys me. People who can afford $300/year for a cheap cryonics membership and life insurance, and who don't sign up, annoy me. A lot of them are probably being held off by the trivial inconvenience of signing a few papers without a paid salesman to hold their hand. It therefore annoys me that cryonics is poorly marketed and that there are no paid salespeople - that no one gets a commission when you sign up for cryonics.
- ww520 16y agoDoes cryonics work? When one with a cryonics membership dies, is his life insurance benefit still paid out? Assuming he can be revived via the cryonics process. Cryonics and life insurance seem incompatible.
- dzlobin 16y agoGreat question, I'd hate to be revived and then stuck with a 2 million dollar bill for previously paid out life insurance. My guess is that insurance companies haven't bothered to write that fine print yet, but who knows.
- ben1040 16y agoWhen one with a cryonics membership dies, is his life insurance benefit still paid out? Yes, as many people pay for their suspension by taking out a life insurance policy that names the cryonics organization as a beneficiary.
- grandalf 16y agoLinks to good/cheap cryo? I will sign up today.
- Eliezer 16y agoCryonics Institute: http://www.cryonics.org/ http://www.cryonics.org/ Membership is $120/year. You'll also need at least $50K of life insurance with them as beneficiary. I pay around $170/year for $250K, and went through Rudi Hoffman who does cryo-compatible life insurance.
- grandalf 16y agoExcellent. BTW do you know if any cryo companies are using the sort of suspended animation technology described in Mark Roth's TED talk? It would seem to have potential benefits.
- jtbigwoo 16y agoI have no faith that a cryonics company is going to last for more than a few years. If the money doesn't run out (which it will because someone will get greedy), all it takes is one incompetent employee to open the wrong door or push the wrong button for my investment to be entirely wasted. (or it could be an earthquake, or a 100-year flood, or rising sea levels...)
- fredBuddemeyer 16y agotrue but your investment could help the industry evolve and help others in the future. these grateful folk wake up to a world with time travel and return the favor ;)
- adamta 16y ago"I have no faith that a cryonics company is going to last for more than a few years." Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have been around since the '70s and don't appear to be in any danger.
- davi 16y agoI do electron microscopy on nervous tissue. I know what it takes to get good brain preservation at the fine scale, at the level of synaptic connectivity. I know how small problems in fixation and embedding can completely trash the anatomy at this fine scale. I am skeptical that current cryonics methods can preserve the brain at anything better than 'massive stroke' quality.
- Eliezer 16y agoFixation? Cryonics involves cryoprotectant and vitrification at liquid nitrogen temperatures, not plastination, and the last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope. Also, think in terms of the brain being carefully examined on the molecular level by nanotech for tiny hints in the process of being restored to its exact old state, not in terms of trying to warm people up using present-day technology and hoping they pop back to life. The whole point of cryonics is to wait until technology advances to the point of being able to restore you so long as the necessary information is physically there in any form.
- davi 16y agolast I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope Do you have a reference to some images I could look at?
- Eliezer 16y agoFired off your question to Aschwin de Wolf and got back: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html (Figure 4 and 5 for the more recent technology, earlier photos are older technology) http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.html http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm... (photos as of 1995 tech) Aschwin also notes this paper is important: http://www.ijcep.com/707005A.html http://www.ijcep.com/707005A.html
- davi 16y agoThanks for inquiring and relaying the response you got. Here is an example of the scale I'm interested in: http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/atlas/1_6_2.stm http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/atlas/1_6_2.stm Things that look like the newtechnology.html's figs 4 & 5 can look very bad at higher mags. I know this from painful experience. I don't see any high mag pictures at newtechnology.html or in Lemler et al. 2004, which that page cites. These mags are quite accessible once one has gone to the trouble of preparing sections for transmission electron microscopy. Sheleg et al. 2008 was interesting and surprising to me. It is published in a journal not included in the ISI Science Citation Index, so I can't tell at a glance how their paper might have been received by other workers. I might try replicating their results myself at some point down the road, it would be a pretty simple experiment for me to do (at least, the EM part, not the histology work). I understand the hope that even anatomically degraded tissue could retain sufficient information for cryonics to be useful. I just don't plan to bet my own money on this hope, at least not at this time.
- chanux 16y agoAcne. Annoying me for 7 years.
- seiwyn 16y agoPeople writing "loose", when they really mean "lose".
- kingofspain 16y agoI can let any spelling mistake or grammatical murder slide except this one. I won't comment on it as that's a bit petulant, but I will seethe inside and often, almost without thinking, I'll disregard whatever else they wrote. Silly I know!
- Pengwin 16y ago"your" and "You're" is my pet hate
- fragmede 16y agoAlso: "payed" vs. "paid"; in grammar, "well" vs "good".
- m-photonic 16y agoAnother one is "phased" in place of "fazed."
- heycarsten 16y agoSame goes for "alot" instead of "a lot".
- ciupicri 16y agoLet's not forget about "it's" and "its".
- pjscott 16y agoApostrophe mistake's are pretty jarring; seeing one is like tripping over a rock, for me.
- mcknz 16y agoa whole nother.
- daleharvey 16y agoIdentity - I am sick of having to create accounts on every website in the world, OpenID is an awesome solution but it needs to be implemented ubiquitously, I do not want everything tied to my twitter or facebook account.
- loewenskind 16y agoSystems like Password1 solve this for me, with the added benefit that if someone manages to hack one of these sites and capture my password for it they'll have a bunch of random characters that wont work for anything else I have. Personally I don't like OpenID for this reason among others.
- bemmu 16y agoI recently switched to 1Password. Now I realize that I'm basically unable to use any sites that require login with my phone, since I don't know my own passwords.
- himmel 16y ago1Password has an application for the iPhone
- there 16y agoand an "export to html" option that exports all of your passwords into a single encrypted javascript/html file that you can put on a server. it acts as a self-contained web application that lets you browse and search through your passwords on-demand. i've been using such an exported file for months after i migrated away from mac os and frequently access the file from my android phone and other browsers.
- daleharvey 16y agoPayments - I am tired of entering 20 things every time I want to pay for something, paypal has been problematic with cancelling accounts and generally being untrustworthy.
- jacquesm 16y agoToo much choice.
- zephyrfalcon 16y agoThis is actually a valid point. Freedom of choice seems to be a given nowadays. Obtaining freedom FROM choice is a lot of work.
- daleharvey 16y agoBanking - My bank has a website that the 90's would be proud of, it gives me little to no information about my spending habits, transferring money is a nightmare, and using kublax (similiarly mint) had my account banned for security purposes.
- joubert 16y agoOnline banking in South Africa is excellent - I was shocked when I moved to the US how archaic it is. Transfers are a breeze, fast, and everyone does it. Integration with cell phone infrastructure is also great.
- superuser2 16y agoI suspect transfers are archaic (inconvenient, expensive, and take several days or weeks to process) in the US because otherwise the credit card and payment processing industries would cease to exist.
- loewenskind 16y agoIt's really sad how many useless jobs exist in the US because someone thinks that these people would simply starve to death if they weren't able to e.g. hold a stop/slow sign at road construction sites.
- grinich 16y agoA specific bank in particular?
- joubert 16y agoMy experience is with Investec and Standard Bank. But I've heard good things about ABSA, Nedbank, and FNB as well. Competition is pretty strong, so fairly comparable across the board.
- pielud 16y agoEspecially doing anything that requires one bank to talk to another. Why does it take 5 days to move money between banks? It's ridiculous. I once had mistakenly setup a transfer from one bank to another and I wanted to cancel it. So I called up the destination bank and they said there was nothing they could do. I called the source bank and had to pay 30 bucks to put a stop payment order on the account AND they couldn't guarantee it would stop the transfer.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoArranging travel schedules, tying together train, plane and car hire.
- daleharvey 16y agoThings 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.
- ganley 16y agoI've long thought there is a serious opportunity in connecting organizations who provide fun things to do with people looking for fun things to do. I had an (unpursued) idea a while back to create a single-serving site called, "What should I do this weekend?" Another idea was a subscription-based service that organizes adult "field trips" every weekend.
- p01nd3xt3r 16y agoI am working on this problem right now.
- tansey 16y agoWhat about sites like Meetup? I had this same problem after moving and found a lot of regular hobbies locally.
- tel 16y agoI've had a lot of success with the CouchSurfers community. It's a travel oriented site, but they also promote meetups for the people living in a city so as to form a tighter, most trusting community. When you throw travel-wise tourists, friendly city ambassadors, and generally open-minded go-out-and-tackle-the-world style people together in a room and have them share stories or plan events it gets crazy and amazing really, really quickly.
- nickpinkston 16y agoLikewise - If you have time and love meeting interesting people, Couchsurfing is awesome. I've met some very interesting people, and it's quite safe.
- binarymax 16y agoPaperwork!
- slater 16y ago- Having multiple gadgets, one can connect to a network, the other can't, even though they both have WiFi - Bureaucrats that could be replaced by web apps
- arethuza 16y agoPaper receipts.
- tmsh 16y agoYou ain't kidding. http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=bpa http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&...
- mrduncan 16y agoAirlines - They are nearly all just a pain in the ass to deal with. When was the last time you heard someone tell you how they had a great experience with an airline?
- mseebach 16y agoI know where you're coming from, but when the combination of online check-in and dedicated bag-drops is in place (unfortunately, sometimes, especially when flying on budget airlines, it's not), flying is pretty painless. And painless, affordable transfer from A to B is my definition of a great airline experience.
- lenary 16y agoyou don't hear about it because you don't know rich enough people, or because you're tuned out from it - like weathermen constantly being wrong. they aren't, you just remember it more when they are than when they aren't. I had a great experience with two airlines recently, bmi and airberlin, but it was probably because i was prepared to pay a little more than my usual easyjet price. Yeah, i think that it's probably more to do with the correlation of how much you pay to how much you will enjoy airlines though
- rdouble 16y agoI've had great experiences on Virgin America. It's cheap, the planes are nice, there is wifi, the terminals are better, the stewards and stewardesses are pleasant and good looking, etc.
- spudlyo 16y agoMe too. I had no idea flying could be so enjoyable. I've made the Seattle -> SF trip a 4-5 times this year on Virgin and I've been over the moon at how easy and comfortable it's been.
- mortenjorck 16y agoHonestly, they can't come to Chicago soon enough. Too bad they seem to be having a dog of a time getting space in the airport.
- mdg 16y agoSheep herd mentality. It also annoys me when my CD skips
- maushu 16y agoGet a mp3 player.
- Mc_Big_G 16y agoPeople in the left lane driving with a speed <= or 1mph faster than the people in the right lane.
- logicalmind 16y agoThis is annoying but what is more annoying is when you're on a multiple lane highway and 2 or more people decide to drive at exactly the same speed right next to each other. It would be nice if there was a rule (a law would be nice, but I don't see how you'd enforce it) that you could not drive within two car lengths of the car next to you at speeds over 40mph. The added bonus here would be that people would not be sitting in other people's blindspots all the time and should reduce accidents.
- antidaily 16y agoMore infuriating is when the driver is so oblivious that he/she doesn't notice the 8-10 cars behind him/her trying to pass.
- ww520 16y agoAh the left lane squatters who squat but won't shit. More infuriating are people who change into the left lane and slow down.
- grep 16y agoReading posts with a lot of comments in HN. I never know what comments are new without looking to the date (sometimes they are hundreds).
- BJakopovic 16y agoI generally try and batch read HN (via rss) daily, and sometimes I feel that I am missing out on new comments (made after I finished reading and closed the tab; most commonly the new/recent posts)...would be nice to avoid bookmarking and searching for the new comments
- bluemetal 16y agoI've got a chrome extension called "hckr news". It shows you which comments on a HN thread that are new since the last time you visited that page. So far I'm liking it
- tsycho 16y agoI was thinking of this same problem yesterday. I will try to hack together a Firefox extension for this over the weekend to give the HN comments page Slashdot type filters (min. point thresholds), and date sorting. Will post on HN if it works well.
- username3 16y agoChrome can use Greasemonkey userscripts. Can you add collapse-able replies?
- bambax 16y agoI built an extension for Chrome that lets you hide articles + collapse comments (HN HideIt); it's here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dibillbafbngeiloehmhhibhjhipeoig https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dibillbafbngeilo...
- tsycho 16y agoGood suggestion....will try to add that as well.
- rperkins 16y agoNaggers
- noverloop 16y agoPoliticians
- mrduncan 16y agoEmail - 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.
- daleharvey 16y agoFully 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)
- mslate 16y agoIMHO 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?
- ThomPete 16y agoOh 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.
- edanm 16y agoI agree that it was a terrible start. But have you looked at it recently? I've been using Wave to manage most of my project-related communications (with one or two partners), and it's fantastic. Like Etherpad, but a lot more powerful. And fyi, the Etherpad team is now part of the Google Wave team.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tjr 16y agoInformal 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 entered. So far the best I've come up with is, uh, pen and paper...
- s-phi-nl 16y agoSorry for the accidental downvote. I meant to upvote because I have been thinking about (more formal) music notation on and off for years, too, trying to come up with a better format than Lilypond.
- dingle_thunk 16y agoOh man... This one bugs me too, but I see a lot of potential for things like the iPad here...
- zefhous 16y agoYes, agreed. I am actually working on an iPad app for this purpose.
- ovi256 16y agoHave you thought about piano rolls ? Either paper-based ones that you draw yourself, or use software like Reason that has a piano roll for note input or display, nor sheet music. Actually, most non-classic music software has piano rolls.
- wazoox 16y agoWhat do you want to jot down? only chords, chords + melody?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- harscoat 16y agoExpense reports - eg. receipts collection, sorting them, scanning them (even if some solutions exist) but then accountants always want it in a different format/system that I use. (no standard especially outstide the US)
- bemmu 16y agoAgreed, I believe even small businesses could save hours each month if all the relevant receipts related to a month's bank transactions somehow magically got gathered in the same place.
- nostromo 16y agoThis is so true. My company uses Concur and I'm sorry to say it's actually worse than doing it the old fashioned way. You wouldn't expect that from their homepage, but the actual app is godawful. I know the receipts are an IRS thing, but why can't the rest be easier?
- xsc 16y agoLack of time - Seems as if I can't spend enough time with people I care about.
- ExtremePopcorn 16y agoPsychological pricing - don't tell me that your product is $9.95; say $10.
- zephyrfalcon 16y agoI wonder if businesses actually sell more if their products are priced like $9.95 or $9.99 instead of $10, or that it's just based on the expectation that such prices are more attractive to the customer. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing] doesn't mention whether any research was done to verify this, much less any results.
- dminor 16y agoIt's probably more about phonetic symbolism: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119111051.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119111051.ht...
- detst 16y agoYes. I bought some food from a place recently that had all of their prices listed on the board as whole numbers. It took me a couple seconds to register as a price because it's so unusual. I loved it though.
- bitwize 16y agoI heard tell this practice arose because of some newspaperman who struck up deals with local businesses to salami-slice pennies off their prices so that people would have more pennies with which to buy his one-cent newspaper. If true, I don't think he realized the Sorcerer's-Apprentice-like consequences of his actions, as I'm now AWASH IN USELESS PENNIES.
- Timmy_C 16y agoI know that most prices at Nordstrom end in .95 whereas Nordstrom Rack prices typically end in .97. They have a very liberal return policy so it's a simple way to encode where the product was bought so customers can't pass off outlet store items as if they were bought from Nordstrom proper. That's one beneficial use to psychological pricey but I too would rather pay nice round numbers. It makes it easier to calculate sales tax too.
- harscoat 16y agoRoaming cell fees - when traveling abroad (there are some ways around but very cumbersome)
- Timothee 16y agoAnd the ways around this are not necessarily working well sometimes. Recent experience: getting a prepaid SIM card for my iPhone in France. Turns out that it would randomly and without my knowledge connect to WiFi hotspots and completely drain my credits.
- jakevoytko 16y agoProblem: Designing clean architectures to solve an unfamiliar class of systems programming problems This goes beyond design patterns - I mean designing systems with a dozen or more components that interact in complex ways. My first few cuts have lots of rough edges, and as I redesign the system, cleaner solutions appear. I work on lots of almost-real-time robotics systems, and good solutions for normal apps have subtle-yet-fatal problems when you need a small average latency at 100% CPU load
- imagii 16y agoFanboys and bad journalism.
- olalonde 16y agoSomething tells me you just read http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/apple-religion/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/apple-religion/.
- uptown 16y agoDrivers that run red lights.
- zyfo 16y agoPhone calls - makes a lot of noise and interrupts me regardless of what I'm doing. I want some people to be able to reach me right away, while I couldn't care less for others. Creating barriers for interruption based on: a) the person calling b) the time of day c) the activity I'm involved in needs to become more accessible and intuitive.
- ganley 16y agoSomething I've always wanted is to be able to set up my home phone so that between (say) 9pm and 9am, when people call they get an automated response that says, "The person you are calling doesn't want to be disturbed at this hour. If your call is urgent, press 1 to ring them; otherwise, press 2 to leave a voicemail without ringing them." Technologically, it's nearly trivial.
- misterbwong 16y agoI believe google voice does this
- Timothee 16y agoI don't know if Google Voice can do that out-of-the-box, (though it technologically could) but services like Twilio/OpenVBX or Tropo can definitely do that. I would think that one problem right now is that not many people are really thinking like that yet. So amongst the people who do think about that kind of setups, each solution tends to be pretty specific to their own use. That's why you have on one hand Google Voice which presents some options around what I would call "programatic telephony" but not fully customizable, and on the other, OpenVBX's kind of solutions which are highly customizable but not trivial to setup for "regular" people. But yeah, it's now trivial to do and I'm sure it'll come with time.
- olalonde 16y agoApple fanboys.
- mortenjorck 16y agoApple haters.
- lovskogen 16y agoBoth.
- todayiamme 16y agoModern Psychiatry - Parts of it are updated for the modern world. The rest is still pretty much medieval guesses sans experimentation. Accurate unbiased information for someone in distress is hard to obtain, which compounds the problem.
- gizmomagico 16y agoWhat about it is disappointing? We're all human, so we all work pretty much the same way. Everyone has their problems, and typically those problems are similar to someone else's. This means that the means to treating most of your problems apply to everyone.
- todayiamme 16y agoYes and no. It is true that we have a similar brain structure and represent all but a mere point in the endless space of mind design possibilities, but there is a lot of variation within that point. Just think about the variables in operation over here. Billions of neurons with multiple connections in a chemical soup, firing in a patter and changing while sharing information. It isn't surprising that we don't understand this, but you'll be amazed at the psuedo-science out there did you know that there was something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder (see: http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Oppositional-defiant-disorder.html http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Oppositional-defiant-diso...)? I cannot name one scientific, unbiased experiment for the root causes behind expression and functioning in gender variant, or intersexed children. There is some amazing work being done at the national institute of mental health in the underlying neurological basis of mental health disorders like depression and PTSD, but it isn't enough. (see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...) The disappointing thing is not the lack of knowledge but the psuedo-science out there and the self proclaimed experts willing to ruin lives without a flinch. We've come a far way, but we have even farther to go.
- gizmomagico 16y agoWell, my point was that many - if not most - problems people have are "standard" problems that people just have because they're people and they all work in the same way. For example, being lonely causes depression, bad parents cause a huge variety of problems, and so on. Human nature, our insecurities, our egos, our selfishness & greed, and so on - they're the same for everyone. If you've got a problem, you can be pretty sure you're not the first one to have it, and that the way to treat you is no different from the way all the others with the same problem were treated. So, I wouldn't think of it in terms of neurons, but in terms of humans.
- CatalystFactory 16y agoOnline Payment Transaction Costs - every time a new player enters the field like Amazon Payments/Google Checkout entering into Paypal's domain they all converge on the same relative pricing scheme.
- zyfo 16y agoDealing 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).
- daleharvey 16y agoThis 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
- listic 16y agoI advise to only check email/IM/what have you once a day at most. In the evening, when you have done the meaningful work. Don't use notifications. Only launch email, IM client when you need them. See Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule if you haven't: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- cjg 16y agoOvercrowding on the train.
- nollidge 16y agoPeople 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
- tricky 16y agoI want a global movement to make the acceleration pedal actually affect acceleration, not horsepower as it does now. Imagine a pedal with a dead spot in the middle that represents 0 acceleration. Pushing down on the pedal increases the rate of acceleration. When you get to speed, ease back to the dead spot to maintain. Lift past the dead spot to decel. Think of it as a hybrid cruise control. I'm convinced it would solve many traffic congestion problems associated with people not maintaining speed on, say, slight inclines.
- sanderjd 16y agoHow do you solve this problem for those of us in Colorado (or other non-flatlands) where nearly every drive involves mountains and hills. Would the idea be that in the dead zone, the car is smart enough to increase or decrease horsepower to adapt to these conditions and retain 0 acceleration or...? I think you would run into the same problem that cruise control runs into in the mountains - we don't have variable ratio transmissions, so at some point going up a hill it has to shift down a rev in order to stay the same speed. Doesn't work very well.
- tricky 16y agoYes, the whole idea is the car is smart enough to maintain a speed. You're right about having problems in the mountains. If someone doesn't want their car to downshift, they'd just slow down by lifting and returning to the zero point. I think it would be a little better than cruise control in the mountains, but not much.
- 16y ago
- ptn 16y agoProductivity pr0n - it´s the number 1 productivity killer
- ganley 16y agoPennies.
- mortenjorck 16y agoActually, I'd rather just see cents go away for everything in the US and deal with integers for everyday purchases and floating point when necessary.
- judofyr 16y agoIsn't that called "dollars"?
- jsz0 16y agoI'd love to see a text editor that let you select text blocks by drawing a box. (ie, you could draw the box selection style and select the last 5 characters of each line)
- logicalmind 16y agoYou can do this in visual studio if you hold down the alt key and do your selection.
- gmurphy 16y agoTextpad does this.
- albemuth 16y agoTextmate and Vim as well
- edanm 16y agoAre you talking about "column selection mode"? It exists in several editors, SlickEdit for example, and lets you select "boxes" (or columns) of characters. My favorite editor nowadays is Sublime Text, which takes this concept much, much further. It allows having several cursors active at once, each one behaving like a real cursor, so you can do things like ctrl+right to move all the cursors to the next word, no matter the length of each specific word. Kinda like real-time macros, only much better.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Naga 16y agoEmacs can do this!
- pjscott 16y agoSpecifically, you set the mark at one corner (C-Space) and move the mark to the other corner. Then you can do rectangle editing with commands like kill (C-x r k), yank (C-x r y) or something to insert a string (C-x r t). These are hugely useful when moving blocks of Python code around, for fiddling with the indentation.
- mirkules 16y ago1. Technologically possible things that have been castrated/restricted by business people (or that need to be hacked, i.e. can't be done by your mother, in order to get them to work properly). Examples: phone tethering, ring tones, lack of power outlets in economy class on airplanes, VOIP over 3G, media licensing (aka dvd zoning), inability to stream Netflix from different countries, inability to watch streams on ESPN3.com/Univision from non-approved ISPs (wtf?), general lack of TV/radio streams on the internet (major annoyance during the world cup) 2. Things that are obscenely expensive but don't cost much to produce/service. Examples: mobile broadband ($30-60 that you can't share, see above), mobile text messaging ($0.25 per 160 bytes!?), dealership car service, iPhone cases, Monster cables, etrade transactions, international roaming (data: $20 PER MB, voice $2.29/min), laptop batteries, retail books, music, DVDs, basic software (such as FTP/ssh clients, PDF readers, etc). 3. Getting ripped off, knowing I can't do anything about it. Examples: exchanging foreign currency, used video games
- judofyr 16y agoActually, it's 160 7-bit bytes, so that's $0.25 per 140 bytes.
- mrduncan 16y agoSome interesting conversions to put it into perspective: (25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 0.18 U.S. cents / byte (25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 1,872 U.S. dollars / megabyte
- trafficlight 16y agoBut you have to admit, it's an impressive marketing accomplishment. Millions of people paying for something at a 1000%, or more, markup.
- openfly 16y agoThe ridiculous "zomg I am a founder", "omfg entrepeneur", and "omfug I will change the paradiggams boxes!" flag waving that occurs. Makes me want to stab my own eye balls.
- mynameishere 16y agoThe fact that 100s of years of art and music are available, but people still gravitate towards whatever is being promoted--typically something recent and inferior. This is partly a function of marketing, partly of herding--both poor selectors of quality.
- zephyrfalcon 16y agoThings that were made in a different day and age will generally take more effort to understand or get into, though. It's easier to pick up what's already all around. I'm not saying it's better, but that's how it goes.
- brettnak 16y agoThe biggest problem that I have with most pop music right now, is that so much of it is incredibly simplistic. I have no problem with simple music, but it never feels deliberate. It feels formulaic. I hear no artistry in most of it. That being said, there are a fair number of groups that I actually do enjoy. Does anyone else here listen to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q50xzhDO9lI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q50xzhDO9lI
- JoelMcCracken 16y agoI don't care much if other people like bad things, but it irritates me when societal structures don't exist to allow me to enjoy the good things properly. For example, the other day I was listening to my opera channel on pandora, and because pandora has horrible displays for opera music, I could not figure out what aria I was hearing, and spent close to two hours trying to figure out what it was. ID3 is totally unsuitable for anything besides pop music.
- terra_t 16y agoPersonally, I'm offended by the popularity of "Classic Rock" and the fact that marketing channels have broken down to the point where there's no connection between great music being made today and many listeners. I grew up listening to "Classic Rock" in the 1980s, and it took years for me to realize that this had deprived me of the authentic music of my youth... It was the music of somebody else's youth, which makes it all the more dangerous and seductive. It appeals to geezers who were listening to it when it was new, and it still appeals to new generations of young people. Classic rock dominates the airwaves in my locale; other than NPR, I find everything else unlistenable [there was ~one~ good urban music station a long time ago, but it's owned by Clear Channel and quit playing anything good rather abruptly after 9/11] The situation has many dimensions (for instance, any credible 'new' rock has to make a rapprochement with punk) but the thing I hate the most is hearing the same doobie brothers song on the radio driving into work and driving home. I'll listen to NPR or a Shonen Knife or Red Red Groovy disc, but I feel bad for all the boomers who can't escape the gravity of 1968.
- vegai 16y agoBureaucracy and The positive effects of democracy made negative by the conservative older generations.
- davidw 16y agoOne thing that supremely annoys me is Italian drivers who do not stop at crosswalks. My daydream solution is a golf club or baseball bat, but I think that solution probably has unintended consequences.
- tansey 16y agoFinding people to work on short, proof-of-concept projects with. I have a list of more than 25 items that I would love to work on, but have little motivation without someone willing to help out. I don't necessarily want to form a startup on these ideas, just get the ball rolling and see where it leads. I would like a site that enables me to find others and create prototype apps in a matter of days, almost like a flash mob. It should bring together graphic artists, designers, developers, and specialists as seamlessly as possible. I think this would work especially well for mobile apps, where project size is often small enough that a 3-4 person team could finish a reasonable version 1 in a weekend. Example: I want to build a mobile app to answer the question "Does this fit me?" The app would enable users to scan a bar code, upload if it fits or not, get predictions about if it fits or not, and receive recommendations on other items that may fit. I have no idea how the design should look. I have no idea how to write iPhone apps and limited Android experience. I don't have a lot of experience building web applications. I can't do graphics for the life of me. However, I have a TON of experience in AI and data mining, and what I imagine to most people would seem like the "hard part"-- predicting if something fits, recommending similar items, etc.-- is actually the fun part to me. So I need a designer and an iPhone/Android guy with a free weekend. If we planned on selling the app, then the site could optionally include some auto-generated legal code for agreeing to revenue/equity split. That would make it more of a flash-startup idea, though.
- p01nd3xt3r 16y agoAlso... have you seen this https://squadedit.com/ https://squadedit.com/?
- p01nd3xt3r 16y agoI am the exact opposite of you. I can put up entire projects myself (design, code etc...) but when it comes to heavy lifting I try and out source it because even though I can do it, it would take as much time as putting up a whole mobile web app. I am currently working on 3 apps (2 will go live in the next few weeks). If you are interested in working on some stuff together send me an email.
- tansey 16y ago
- larsalan 16y agoReloading whole pages when an iFrame would be much better.
- Pengwin 16y agoIve always had the belief that iFrames are bad news. They are rarely needed in the days of simple AJAX and DOM manipulation. Come to think of it, I haven't used one in about 5 years...
- larsalan 16y agoReloading whole pages when an iFrame would be much better.
- username3 16y agoRepeated, unorganized debates online in comments, forums
- JoelMcCracken 16y ago*nix. Too bad its the best thing out there.
- MikeCapone 16y agoThe fact that most people seem to think that it's okay to get sick from the diseases of aging, get frail, suffer, and die, and that we shouldn't try to do something to fix that problem (really fix it, not just prolong suffering a bit). I think it's probably partly rationalization because they think it's inevitable (but it is not inevitable, and I'd like that to become a more mainstream view so we can hurry up and work on this problem), and partly ageism, which makes a lot of people think that old people have less value so their pain and loss isn't as bad.
- brettnak 16y agoI might be the only one who thinks this around here, but I think the concept of mortality is kind of beautiful. However, ask me about that when I'm facing my own and the answer might be different.
- MikeCapone 16y agoI think it's a really powerful concept, and like religion and superstition, I think it's fine in fiction (books and movies would be boring without that imagery). But in the real-world, it's just plain bad and we need to do something about it. Nobody is in favor of malaria or smallpox, but most people turn a blind eye to the diseases of aging even though they kill a lot more people. The real question is: If dying of old age didn't exist (if everybody stayed physically as fit as 25 years olds indefinitely, until they get hit by a truck or whatever), would we miss frailty and decrepitude? Would we invent death by slow diseases that make our bodies and minds fall apart? I kinda doubt it.
- TheSOB88 16y agoYou guys seem to think death isn't inevitable? Huh?
- MikeCapone 16y agoNot death, just the diseases of aging (which aren't so different from other diseases in their effects, when it comes down to it). The general idea is that our bodies accumulate damage as a side product of metabolism (stuff that evolution hasn't equipped us to deal with - various long-lived molecules that we can't break down); over a certain threshold, that damage turns into pathologies. So your skin is less elastic, your arteries aren't as flexible, your immune system doesn't work as well, your brain accumulate beta amyloids that lead to alzheimer's, etc. If we could periodically repair that damage before the pathologies happen, we could potentially keep young bodies indefinitely and cure many diseases without having to understand how metabolism works, thus reducing human suffering tremendously (about 150k deaths each day). For more on this, check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/B001O9CHRA/ http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough... Or these presentations: http://citywire.kuluvalley.com/player.html?pguid=E586AD51-418F-C8CE-442B-828A9164D788&vtguid=70B21F9A-4BCA-C090-62F2-F77C0B007FE2 http://citywire.kuluvalley.com/player.html?pguid=E586AD51-41... http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8554766938711591377&hl=en# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8554766938711591377&... Or the work of this foundation (I'm in no way affiliated with them - I'm just a fan and individual donor): http://www.sens.org http://www.sens.org
- zephyrfalcon 16y agoAdvertisements! They're obnoxious, obviously biased, and interfere with whatever it was you were doing (watching a show, visiting a website, reading a newspaper, whatever). It's just wrong. And we all know this, yet we just accept it like it's some fact of life. In addition, it doesn't just affect customers, but all newspapers/magazines/sites that rely on "advertisement income" to make a buck. One thing that puzzles me greatly is, how pageviews and sales are apparently their #1 concern, yet at the same time they're talking, in all seriousness, about "being objective" and "journalistic integrity". It just doesn't go together. Since the internet is already beating the hell out of pretty much all old business models, maybe it will get rid of this one as well, or at least transform it into something more palatable. But so far, the industry's response has been to make advertisements (on websites at least) even MORE obnoxious and intrusive.
- what 16y agoWould you be willing to pay to remove the ads from a website? Pay for each show you watch without ads? Pay more for an ad free newspaper? If not, you shouldn't be complaining about ads (even though they are pretty obnoxious). The ads support the content that you consume. Or do you have a better way to compensate the people that create this content?
- zephyrfalcon 16y agoI knew somebody would bring this up. :-) What many people don't realize is that in the current situation, instead of paying (more) for the show/newspaper/etc, we pay for advertisements instead. When a business spends $$$ to promote their product, that money didn't fall out of the air; it's part of the price of the product they sell (much like some part of it is production cost, etc). So whenever somebody buys product X, they're also paying (a tiny fraction) for that product's advertisement. So no, I would not be willing to pay to remove the ads from a website, since I am already paying to put them on there in the first place. Personally, I would much rather that the price of all products would be a bit lower (i.e. minus any advertisement costs), and pay more for content that I actually want to see/watch/read, without obnoxious advertisements and commercials. Admittedly, the current situation isn't anything like this, so if it were to happen, maybe I would actually regret it, or maybe it would have unforeseen drawbacks. (As it is, many people seem to be unwilling to pay for content...) It does seem like a fairer system though, that doesn't force consumers to read/watch things they don't want to.
- SandB0x 16y agoFood. I miss the healthy, affordable, sociable dining halls from university. There are people who cook better than I do, and who should be able to make great food at a reasonable price by buying fresh ingredients in bulk. My options for eating are * Cook it myself [1]. Cheap but takes time and effort to make good food. * Restaurant. Good food but expensive and takes time. I don't always want table service and small portions. * Fast food. Quick and cheap, but unhealthy. * Supermarket ready meals. See above. So yeah, I would love an urban cafeteria serving a handful of healthy, cheap, fresh meal options. I'm sure it can be done. Edit, re Tel: [1] I love to cook, but not when I'm in a rush, and I'm not always near home.
- tel 16y agoIt's not quite the replacement for a dining hall, but learning to cook is not only cheap but really enriching in other ways as well. 1. It's easier to be healthier (and in time this transforms to "impossible to not be healthier". 2. It's an impressive skill for attracting relationships both friendly and romantic. 3. Once you're confident, cooking for a party of friends and second degree strangers is a GREAT way to meet new people. I forget who it is, but there's a HNer around who's had great successes throwing open-to-all, multi-course Hacker Dinners and taught himself the skills more or less on the fly. At the end of the day, everybody eats; almost everybody can enjoy interesting, tasty food; and those who can skillfully, confidently serve that up become a social hub.
- sliverstorm 16y agoIt is indeed a great skill, but time is limited and it feels so incredibly futile to spend 30 minutes preparing nice food for the millionth time, when in 10 minutes it will only be a memory in my stomach.
- tel 16y agoEat slower? (edit: removed a superfluous link, so instead I'll just be anecdotal. Cooking and eating are great social activities when done right. In my mind it's incredibly relaxing to cut vegetables and manage a meal. Conversations can spring into new inspiration or just better bonding with friends. I understand that not all meals can put striving for that kind of bliss as a major goal, but I'm not trying to defend all meals.)
- adrianwaj 16y agoIran. The Twitter Fail Whale. No excuse for either.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pjscott 16y agoThe Fail Whale is cute enough that I actually don't mind when Twitter goes down. If I used Twitter more, I might feel differently.
- adrianwaj 16y agoI also don't like when people downvote when they merely disagree.
- pjscott 16y agoI would guess that you were downvoted because of extreme brevity (e.g. "Iran") or because your comment trivialized the tough business of making and running something like Twitter. If that's the case, then the downvoting doesn't just mean "I disagree"; it means "I disagree, and don't think this guy is worth arguing with." It's a reply to tone as well as content. Mind you, that's just speculation. I didn't vote on your comment. But most of the time when someone complains about a comment being downvoted "just because you disagree", there's another reason he's overlooking.
- adrianwaj 16y agoWell, fwiw, I get the fail whale more often than not when signing in. How much funding have they received again? Iran - well, I am not the only one annoyed. Pretty much the entire middle east dreads the thought of it with a nuclear arsenal, let alone the damage it can do around the world with its proxies.
- jasonkester 16y agoThings that assume/require that I have exactly one physical address. That includes banks, insurance companies, government agencies, utilities, and pretty much every business that I need to deal with to do anything. 90% of the pain I encounter during my life on the road stems from the fact that I don't own or rent property in the US, and therefore don't have a fixed address. There are tons of people in my situation (especially among the less well off), yet every time I have to deal with any official paperwork from any organization they make it seem like it's some novel situation they've never encountered before.
- fragmede 16y agoOr even just physical addresses in general. I wish there was an official registry a-la-dns, people would mail things to me, and the post office would route it to me based on what that registry said. Yes, you'd have to update it, but it beats having to update my address in a half-dozen places every time I move. There are actually a few places that deal with this - http://earthclassmail.com/ http://earthclassmail.com/ being one of them.
- Maciek416 16y agoThere's a similar service, myus.com , which accomplishes this for non-US residents.
- decadentcactus 16y agoThanks for the link, I was after something exactly like that and was at the point where I was just going to do it myself.
- lutorm 16y agoLol, try doing that on a US nonimmigrant visa...
- dabent 16y agoAdvertising - especially online. I believe one of pg's areas he thought YC would fund was an ad startup and there's a good reason for that. Online ads are still in their infancy. Ads are often clumsily placed on content sites using keyword matching that can misfire or even backfire (ads for airline tickets in a story about a crash). To make matters worse, all content seems to covered with a slimy film - the sorts of ads that normally appear on late night TV seem to show up on the best of sites. Believe it or not, there are people who enjoy well executed television or print ads, either for their entertainment value or for their effectiveness. I haven't heard the same for online ads, with possibly the recent exception of the "Old Spice Man Who Your Man Could Smell Like." There's a lot of room here for improvement not only of the ads, but for the online experience overall. While Google and others are milking the contextual cow, some bright minds are going to come up with something revolutionary that will change how publishers monetize their sites. Ads will fit better, be more engaging and monetize sites and drive results for their buyers. Perhaps then those ads for diet pills, get-rich-quick schemes and their ilk will be banished to the gutters of the internet where they belong.
- rdouble 16y agoSlow people in New York annoy me. It's like everyone is on vacation, even the people who live here.
- lovskogen 16y agoProbably just enjoying life.
- Eliezer 16y agoNon-teaching of explicit rationality annoys me. The most fundamental, elementary, and basic concepts of rationality are not systematically explained anywhere that I know of. It is impossible to engage the average PhD in a dialogue with agreed-upon rules of reasoning because they do not know why you can't prove things about the real world by arguing about the definitions of a word, or why it's a bad idea to pick a conclusion first and then come up with arguments for it, or the Bayesian definition of evidence that forms the foundation of all belief updates in epistemic rationality, or why violating the expected utility theorem by failing to assign consistent utilities always means leaving some value on the table. I am writing a book to solve this problem.
- tome 16y agoI would be interested in reading your book, as well as a summary if you have one somewhere.
- barry-cotter 16y agoHe's still writing it. The huge numbers of blog posts it is a synthesis of are available at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
- orangecat 16y agoAnd for a less conventional overview, see Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
- petercooper 16y agoor why it's a bad idea to pick a conclusion first and then come up with arguments for it Unless one had to start one's thesis with null hypotheses (increasingly less common, but still a notable approach.)
- barmstrong 16y ago
- tomh- 16y agoPaypal.
- rxever 16y agoit annoys me that staring at a computer screen kills my eyes.
- gizmomagico 16y agoDoes it, really?
- eel 16y agoThe lack of people (or my inability to find them) who want to do the same thing as me. This goes for almost anything from playing board games to finding help for a side project.
- fezzl 16y agoCollege. It interferes with my startup more than it helps it (and I'm still a sophomore going to junior year).
- astartup1 16y agoI have major problem with current way of handling reputation and value of text. I think karma & points system on HN is sloppy approximation of actual quality of a text. Also it is not absolute. In real life whenever someone talks we get large number of inputs to process about a person. For example when we speak with someone we don't judge them merely what they are saying but who they are. In pure analytical conversation it is good but where opinions matter it is bad. If someone on Hacker News says something is bad or you should do it that way, I have no way how it relates to me and what is the credential of that person. I don't want to get advice from bad programmer about some framework. This creates lots of noise in online communication. I wish there was a better way.
- 9ec4c12949a4f3 16y agoThe absolute disgusting nature of standardization of data sets in the world, and this insane notion that we should maintain legacy data as the status-quo of doing things. Just look at the airline industry. IATA, ICAO, ISO, all competing and separate, all with insane and bat-shit psychotic rules and conventions (eg, IATA lets multiple airlines have the same "two letter designator" [by the way, it's sometimes three, but you never know for sure] if they operate on different parts of the globe and 'rarely if ever will confuse an operator'). When the hell did computers need human-understandable designation short-hand codes for things? What the hell was wrong with 1 - American Airlines, 2 - Air Canada, 3 - Delta, 4 - SAS, 5 - That small one that flys between A and B once a year you've never heard of. Why the HELL do we have a system that has "AA" and "AA*" ? This is basically the worst thing you can do for normalization of global data. Travel GDSs are even worse, they don't actually follow along with these standards because they cannot, so while you take your "AA" flight number 123456 (oh, by the way, we recycle flight numbers instead of archive forever historical tickets) from airport zzz to xxx (by the way, depending on the standard they came from, your airport might not even exist), which are actually city codes for airports, so when you're flying to a city with multiple airports you have two cities in the GDS just to deal with this. We can't even agree on how to measure distance, it's like we're stuck in the stone ages. What the hell is wrong with measuring in kelvin degrees? Why do we have MORE THAN FIVE separate standards for systems of measurme for what most people think is one (the metric system)? Fact: We do not live in 1950 or any time before then, computers don't give a flying rats ass if the letters make sense to you as a short-hand abbreviation, you should just number them. That's what databases are for, to relate data. Major airports alone have several names people call them anyway, some airlines go by a few names (for example, SAS airlines is actually "Scandinavian Airlines"). Fact: We do not need to encode data about the data into the primary key of our data. For example, we do not need to generate employee numbers like "Q100-5-TR-9" where Q is the building they work in, 100 is their pay grade, TR is their last name's first two letters, 9 is that number we introduced for separating all duplicates of Q100-5-TR. This is just stupid, stop this insanity NOW. People working on global standards, you should be ashamed. Do you have ANY idea how much time is wasted because we do not have UUIDs for so many things, even something as simple as an airport? There's only 50,000~ of them, and we have duplicates? Did we run out of beads on the abacus??
- 16y ago
- agentultra 16y ago1. Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it. This is just a tragedy. 2. Job interviews that require quizzes and an "intensive" multi-stage interview process. As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code and offered to give you other code examples from my private repositories on request. I give you links to my previous work and letters of recommendation. Yet you insult me by being paranoid that I can't actually program and expect me to believe that this half-assed exam rife with trick questions and obscure trivia is actually going to tell you something about me? This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process and made it more expensive, paranoid, and stupid than most other processes in a business. There has to be a better way to verify a candidates' potential. At least for programming jobs. Maybe something like Ohloh's repo log-analysis tool that can create a dashboard view of a candidates' source-code contributions to the world? Obviously only works for candidates that can provide URLs to publicly accessible repositories. Probably ways to get around that. Anyway, that has been really annoying me lately. :)
- rdouble 16y agoThis mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process... It's not a myth.
- makmanalp 16y ago> It's not a myth. I refute your argument merely by stating the exact opposite.
- agentultra 16y agoI'll admit it's pure speculation on my part. I have a hard time believing that ninety-some-odd percent of applicants believe they can blatantly lie their way into a position they are clearly not qualified for. How embarrassing is it to be caught in such a lie? Not every needs to be keenly self-aware to at least have an intuition about the limits and potential of their own capabilities... Maybe I'm just not cynical enough... update: and even if it were true, it's still a pain for qualified applicants to get through these draconian hiring practices.
- heycarsten 16y agoCyclists that disobey the rules of the road, but complain when motorists don't follow the rules of the road really bother me. (I am a cyclist.)
- himmel 16y agoI agree everyone needs to obey the rules of the road... But the situation is such that when a cyclist disobeys rules, it never causes the automobile driver to die. Whereas when a giant SUV disobeys the rules, it can kill a cyclist. Disclaimer: I live in Florida. State with the highest cyclist death rates.
- mcknz 16y agoExcept when a disobedient cyclist causes the auto to swerve and hit another car head-on.
- ojbyrne 16y agoageism. It's so common today that people who would never exclude women or minorities or the handicapped or whoever have no problem excluding people over forty.
- cryptoz 16y agoWhen a male turns 18 in the USA, he is allowed to sign up for the Army, get a gun, go kill human beings in the Middle East and perhaps die for his country. BUT if that man dares drink a single beer with his dad before being shipped off to war, he will be treated like a criminal. His dad may be taken to court and punished for letting a minor have alcohol. The 18 year old could face severe punishments, including not being allowed in the army. WHY THE FUCK are 18-20 year olds not allowed to drink a beer in the USA, but they're allowed to kill and maim thousands of people? Ageism goes both ways my friend. We may let our young kill others, but we sure as fuck won't let them drink a beer.
- 3pt14159 16y agoHeh, in Ontario it is legal for parents to have beer and wine at home (or any other private dwelling) when the child is only 14. By 18 we take a trip to Quebec to have our first drunken stupor at a bar (but that happened long before then at house parties) and sooner or later voila, you are 19 and drinking. The funniest was when I went to the states and ordered a beer nonchalantly at a pub when I was 20. When I was ordering my second beer the waitress asked if she had checked my ID yet. "No you haven't, but don't worry I'm 20." "Uhhh, the legal limit is 21" "Oh yeahhh, America..." "Ah don't worry, I'll bring you a second one anyways." Small town USA waitresses are awesome.
- adamta 16y ago"BUT if that man dares drink a single beer with his dad before being shipped off to war, he will be treated like a criminal. His dad may be taken to court and punished for letting a minor have alcohol. The 18 year old could face severe punishments, including not being allowed in the army." That is not true in most states: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_A... (still a bad law, I agree)
- 0x47 16y agoLiving expenses. Currently it takes nearly 30% of my income just to afford the physical shelter. Then pretty much the rest for basic necessities. Not to mention the time it takes to maintain all of this stuff. Pay bills, car maintenance, home maintenance, clothing, grocery shopping. I feel like just living takes up so much of my time.
- jyothi 16y agolies & laziness. I see people around cribbing why they are not rich or can't or not being treated at par or not getting due credits. Dig in a little and you see they don't even want to work hard.
- dabent 16y agoI knew a person who was rather honest about their laziness. One day at lunch he just said "Yeah, I'm ready to be a millionaire." I said "Well, you better get busy!" With all sincerity he said, "Oh, no! I didn't want to work for it!"
- jyothi 16y agoSo ? Its not about one off instance where laziness might be welcome. I am talking about people who add no value to their existence, to the well being of anyone. ps: I don't understand why my previous comment has to be downmodded. It is to the point of what the post asked for, nothing against the terms. This has been happening too much, I see it everywhere on HN. People downmodded for they don't agree.
- ww520 16y agoSoftware patents. Need to spend time and energy to get around them. The increasingly extended copyright term. Come on, create something new instead of milking the old stuffs forever.
- heycarsten 16y agoDeception online. Tricking people into providing their personal information and reselling that information to third parties.
- jyothi 16y agoCustomer Support. If only they knew what they know forget what the customer needs. People trained to very politely deliver long quotes without really meaning an ounce of what that sentence is. And of course not knowing much to really resolve the issue unless it is listed. A good trouble-shooting software would be less annoying and more truthful.
- nollidge 16y agoAnything animated on a text-centric webpage. And it's not just ads: animated twitter feeds, scrolling lists of related posts, little twinkling Super-Best Awesome Blog Award .gifs, etc. Cut it out. I am trying to READ your WRITING, and you are actively distracting me from doing so!
- alexro 16y agoDisconnection between articles of the same topic. There are plenty of material about particular subject, each of them describes it from a slightly different angle, it would be great to have them all come together in a single place, but without all the junk associated with every one of them (like ads) - true syndication
- gruseom 16y agoMosquito bites.
- joshfraser 16y agolaundry. i think it's absurd that we can put a man on the moon and send a message around the world instantly (from a touch screen computer in my pocket no less!) and i'm still stuck moving laundry from one machine to another machine 2 feet away.
- himmel 16y agoThere exist combination washer/dryers (all in one, no moving laundry!)
- jtbigwoo 16y agoThey're not very good, though. It's hard to make something that is both water-tight and has great air circulation.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago> It's hard to make something that is both water-tight and has great air circulation. I don't see how that's true - washer driers circulate fluids with the aim to get maximum interaction between the fluid and the clothing. In one instance that fluid is washing water and in the other it is hot air. They seem very similar things to me.
- klous 16y agoWhen the clothes dryer is in cool-down mode and approx. 1 min from completion, why can't it send me an SMS message?
- listic 16y agoI am not sure if I can sympathize you because I only have one washing machine. Is the second machine for drying I wonder if I should even want one, if it causes such annoyance. :-/
- joshfraser 16y agogoing to the grocery store. why doesn't food just show up at my house automatically by now?
- postfuturist 16y agoAll you have to do is sign up. There are a number of services that deliver groceries, at least there are in Portland, OR. Some even specialize in local/sustainable produce.
- char 16y agoBAD PARKERS annoy me so much. a) People who can't center their vehicle within the lines. b) People who park SUVs in compact car spots. c) People who parallel park in the middle of two driveway openings (as opposed to an edge, which would open another parking space!) I have seriously considered creating stickers with various versions of "YOU PARK LIKE AN ASSHOLE" printed on them, so I can distribute them at will.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ramy_d 16y agoit annoys me when people come up to me to tell i shouldn't be using c++ for project X. Like I don't know exactly what I'm doing or exactly what C++ is for. I mainly do game development, but if you've made a game you know how time consuming it is to actually get something usable/playable/fun at the end. Between projects I like to take brakes and work on other smaller applications. some of those applications are in c++ so I have some testing grounds to come back to so I don't loose my edge - and too often I get some grade-A BOZO telling me I'm using the "wrong" language and the falling into his diarrhea diatribe about his favorite language X and how it's SOOOOOO COOL and SSSOOOO HIP and SSSOOO EXPRESSIVE as if those are things I care about. it's such a handicap being a c++ coder in an environment like that, it's like I'm not eligible to hang out with the hip kids/zealots because they have some religious animosity against something they never use. what a joke of a culture that becomes.
- ticktock 16y agoaccessing these comment pages is VERY SLOW http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1560796 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1560796
- cmarv 16y agoFluorescent office lighting
- pjscott 16y agoOn that note, offices that have the air conditioning turned down to extremely low temperatures. Even in the summer, when the cooling bills must be horrendous. I suspect that the thermostats in many places are controlled by fat men in heavy suits.
- sagres 16y agoLack of transparency e.g., government, markets, business etc.
- lovskogen 16y agoNewspapers delivering "news". One have to search hard and deep to get some truth in the morning. People reading "news" making the "journalists" write more "news" also annoys me.
- lovskogen 16y agoColleges getting sponsored by Microsoft, Sun and corporations using those technologies. Churns out developers not having a choice of languages, and ends up working for the corporations sponsoring the college. A circle destroying innovation.
- CoryMathews 16y agoLarge Corporations/Associations ect. Every time I have a problem with a large corporation it never gets resolved until it is convenient for them, and follows their screwed up procedure. They deter innovation and could care less about their customers. Take a look at the cable, internet, automobiles, music industries. Anything new happen lately? Nope.
- orangecat 16y agoPhone screens are too small to do useful work on, and laptops are too inconvenient to carry around.
- plinkplonk 16y agoI am annoyed at how much the hacker/startup scene sucks here in India. All the cool people and projects are in the USA and the people who don't emigrate end up working on the outsourced Java/RoR enterprise program from hell simply because there aren't any technically interesting jobs. Beng teh greta outsourcing destination for crap legacy code creates an ecosystem of substandard "programmers" who all get certified in J2Ee (or whatever the latest crap is) and then move on to become "managers" asap. I've found my niche in Machine Learning, and have escaped this fate somewhat, but damn, it is a small and lonely niche. It would be great to go out and have a beer with engineers working on technically challenging projects, like you can in San Fransisco. (I'd love to hang out with the Data Drinking group for e.g.). The amount of talent wasted on legacy enterpriseware maintenance is unimaginable. I've lived in the USA and I love the place, but I don't want to choose between doing good work and living "at home". Meanwhile, HN keeps me sane. I don't have great engineers to talk to and learn from in the Real World, but online is a different matter.
- lazy_nerd 16y agoI tried to start something similar to the Data Drinking group in valley here in Bangalore with a bunch of Google, Yahoo ML/Distributed Computing guys but it didn't work out because of weird reasons. Maybe, its worth another shot. Ping me on my email address if you are interested in helping organize something like this.
- pradocchia 16y agoI am relieved to read that so few of you are annoyed by other people. The same question on reddit would be a bitch fest about fat people, stupid people, religious people, slow drivers, etc, at the intersection of tribalism, ego and impatience.
- Goosey 16y agoAnd you show this by talking about being annoyed by the people on reddit? Are you not seeing your own tribalism or am I just not getting your sarcasm? :)
- doyouknow 16y ago* Having applied for three internships at major research labs, which obviously lack the courtesy of letting you know that they are not interested. (This pisses me of so much that I hardly find time to do productive work anymore.) * Living in a comparatively rich country that is so full of asshole civil cervants playing shenanigans that it makes you wonder why the hell you should continue providing for these jerks. I for one cannot believe the insane amount of taxes I have payed in my country just to get lied, cheated and straightout harrassed by people who should actually sit down and listen before telling you off. * No funding for PhD research and travel expenses for attending conferences. Even though there is a shitload of money set aside exclusively for women in CS, I cannot get this kind of funding because of my gender. My research group is underfinanced and a recent grant proposal has been denied because of minor improvement suggestions. Of course I can re-submit, but I figure that I will be finished before any decision can be made. Man, I've had it with my country, I cannot wait to turn my back and go somewhere else...
- lovskogen 16y agoWhere do you live?
- kqueue 16y agoHN has really changed. This question is an example. This is not readdit.
- thebigshane 16y agoI don't consider the parent a troll comment, but I could be wrong. KQueue, Finding out what annoys a group of people is an excellent way to collaborate and list all things that "need fixing". Some of these things, as you may have seen in this list, are things that other collaborators can fix (or work on fixing). I think polls like this should be a quarterly occurrence here. You may be right that the question is common on Reddit, but probably for a completely different reason: people like to vent, and the OP wanted karma. [although reddit does have: http://www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis/ http://www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis/ ]
- bingaman 16y agoTexting while walking down crowded streets or driving. You are doing both badly.
- lutorm 16y agoI try not to get annoyed, especially about things outside my control. It just makes you unhappy without changing anything. (I'm moderately successful.)
- knweiss 16y agoTraffic noise. Build quieter cars, give more thought to urban design. Make low noise a design property.