6 ms·

One Hundred Ideas for Computing

171 points by saadalem 7y ago

user00012-ab 7y ago
All the email ideas can be accomplished with lotus notes.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Notes was in many ways much better than Outlook. It's a shame it got sold off to the crapheap and abandoned.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    It was a great technical idea (email as a replicating distributed database), but I heard the user experience was not great. Friction kills both mechanical devices and software products. Work on removing friction if you want your gearbox, or your software, to last.
    - andrekorol 7y ago
      "email as a replicating distributed database" sounds a lot like something that could now be approached with new blockchain technology.
      - nine_k 7y ago
        Why, yes. Blockchains don't necessarily require a proof of work; git is essentially a blockchain.
- FatDrunknStupid 7y ago
  I think I'm one of the few people who actually developed a Lotus Notes application. It was well received at the time doing standard (template) letters!
geuis 7y ago
I’m somewhat struggling through getting a service working on Kubernetes. So much configuration to go through. I’m trying to build a product, not be a systems engineer. It occurred to me that Kubernetes might really benefit from some kind of nodal editor. Think iOS Interface Builder but nodal. It would let us visually see the network configurations, make connecting different bits easier, etc. The editor would also show a visual representation of our current clusters, nodes, pods etc along with health and usage etc. Man if that existed right now I’d pay some cash to use it.
- haolez 7y ago
  Helm might help you installing complicated services like PostgreSQL. But keep in mind that Kubernetes is complex and Helm adds magic on top of that.
  - geuis 7y ago
    I’ll take a look. Thanks for the tip. Spent the last couple days going through one blog after another and pages of k8s docs where the directions seem to fall to “copy this command that downloads a script from github and then follow the next step”. I just want to improve my service’s reliability by adding auto scaling (Linode is my host) and k8s seems the way to go. Wasn’t expecting it to be so complicated though.
    - haolez 7y ago
      If you are not using managed Kubernetes, then Nomad is probably a saner choice. https://www.nomadproject.io/ https://www.nomadproject.io/
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  I'm smiling at your comment, and please don't interpret this as me making fun of you; I'm laughing along with you at the absurdity. > I’m somewhat struggling through getting a service working on Kubernetes. So much configuration to go through. I’m trying to build a product, not be a systems engineer. I'm a systems engineer through-and-through. I've resisted k8s for a long time, but recently inherited a project that was already very k8s-native (for example, it's an Elixir-based app that auto-joins other OTP nodes based on k8s discovery) and figured it was time to dive in. From my understanding, the whole point of this is to abstract away a lot of the pieces that were fundamental to "sysadmin" skills. I'm running this on a DigitalOcean Managed K8s cluster, so I haven't had to do any configuration on the nodes at all, but there's a ton of things that feel dramatically more complicated, even though they're nominally more "abstract" than they would be on bare metal. What's missing, though, are the systems power tools that help you debug what's happening! I have no doubt that this is an exceptionally powerful platform, but... when I start getting errors about a process not being able to make a TCP connection to a publicly-accessible IPv4 address, I can't just connect and look at the iptables configuration on the node to see if there's any kind of rule that might be blocking it. In a lot of ways it feels like we're throwing out the baby with the bath water.
SeekingMeaning 7y ago
I’m on mobile and when my finger touches the screen, the page zooms out, and when I let go, it zooms back in—but off center. Anyone else experiencing this? Edit: It seems this can be fixed by manually zooming out to 85%, but I still don’t know why this is an issue in the first place
- geuis 7y ago
  Yup, same. Had to enable reader view to pursue the article.
  - maxfan8 7y ago
    This totally worked for me. Site is broken on mobile. I’m using iOS on iPhone.
- Jaxan 7y ago
  It’s the second website where I see this strange behaviour. Very annoying indeed.
kodablah 7y ago
I've reached over 100 ideas too at https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas. Anyone can steal them for any reason (ideas alone have little value to me). Granted some of them may be more targeted towards certain technologies and less vague than OP's.
zzo38computer 7y ago
For the first one, about email, I have a few comments: - For newsletters and forum/blog posts), I think NNTP can help. - For invoices, a multipart message might help. This might also be used for having some format for delivery info, and for purchases. - For replies to customer service tickets, you could use a part of the message ID. For "Elements Represent Themselves", note that different users may use a different desktop environment and some none at all (I do not use a desktop environment on my computer). X selections could be used. For example, if the user clicks on a filename in another program, it could take the FILE_MANAGEMENT selection; if a file manager is running, it will notice that it has lost ownership of that selection and can use that to trigger a menu or something. In many cases, even the PRIMARY selection is good enough; the user selects the text and then enters some global key command which causes it to execute another program to do something with the selected text, whether it is converting a unit of measurement, ping a IP address, etc. You could also have a similar idea for HTML documents; this is another use of the <widget> element I have described before that I think would be a good idea. For example, you could use <widget> to mark some text as representing a measurement. Since <widget> normally acts like <span>, the text is visible and you can still use document JavaScripts to provide this functionality too (just like any other <span>), although if the user has their own implementation, then it might provide more units to convert to (even if document scripts are disabled). And if neither <widget> nor scripts are implemented, it still works as static text! Standard format for defining keybindings seems like it could work, although some programs may need their own extensions to the format due to various things, but even then, many common commands will be able to be copied without a problem, so it may still be helpful anyways. I agree about 66 "Wizards and Forms Request Data". Furthermore, it should be possible to write the file locally and send it using a command-line interface, or even automatically convert data entered together with an uploaded file, for this purpose. (A scriptable interface makes this possible to do.) For "Right Click Outsource", that may be good for a desktop environment; for people such as myself who use command-line interface, in some cases it can work. You could have one command which outsources audio, one which outsources directories, etc. (You could also have a FUSE to represent these things and then use a single interface with all of them, including a GUI if you want to.) Mounting email attachments seems a good idea. A program could be made which allows mounting a mbox file in this way. For 90 "Views of Data", SQLite has a virtual table mechanism, and also supports in-memory databases. These features could be used to do some of this stuff (and SQLite includes an extension to access JSON data in this way, actually; the command-line interface also supports importing CSV, too). But sometimes I want to be able to access remote data in this way and (and even make a join query between multiple remote data sources, such as movie times and weather, or any other combination that you might want). However, there are some deficiencies in the virtual table mechanism, such as the inability to have indexes on expressions (including nondeterministic expressions, which in the case of virtual tables, is sometimes useful), partial indexes, consuming LIMIT/OFFSET clauses, etc. (If it supports these things, the client could then understand such a thing as "ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1" and have it automatically convert into the request to access a random record.)
sidcool 7y ago
A solution for hover over animations on touch devices.
- Shorn 7y ago
  I was just adding some on-hover functionality to my side-project's website recently (to zoom screenshots, https://kopi.cloud https://kopi.cloud) and was thinking I was going to need some "solution" for touch devices. But then I tried it out on iphone/surface-pro and most browsers seem to work fine - you just have to touch the image instead of hover to get the animation to fire. Is there an issue with this I need to look into?
- real-hacker 7y ago
  One solution is to use another touch screen (not showing pixels, just a touch pad) on the back of the phone. The front touch screen is for touch interactions, the back pad is for hovering/other interactions. It can be quite intuitive, and it is easy to use with one hand.
mattrp 7y ago
I think it’s awesome that you’ve created this list. I have thought about documenting my own ideas for years and never have because I’ve Never felt comfortable with it. It’s not that I think they are that great or that I’m afraid someone will steal them —- Id actually love it if someone did steal one or two. In any case kudos for putting your mind out there for all to see.
mci 7y ago
36. Documentation Linked Code sounds like literate programming [1], which interleaves the source code with prose explanations. This idealized description is due to Peter J. Denning [2]: > A literate program contains not only the needed statements in a programming language, but also a precise problem statement, a summary of the background needed to understand the solution, an evaluation of alternatives, assessments of trade-offs between the running time and space, or between running time and programming time, and suggestions on how to modify the program. Program code segments are inserted in the text at points logical to the intellectual development of the algorithm. A literate program pays careful attention to lucidity of presentation and presents all arguments needed to understand why the program will actually run as intended. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming [2] https://www.cs.upc.edu/~eipec/pdf/p583-van_wyk.pdf https://www.cs.upc.edu/~eipec/pdf/p583-van_wyk.pdf
- user00012-ab 7y ago
  Emacs org-mode does this very well.

171 points by saadalem 7y ago

user00012-ab 7y ago

All the email ideas can be accomplished with lotus notes.

thrower123 7y ago
Notes was in many ways much better than Outlook. It's a shame it got sold off to the crapheap and abandoned.
- nine_k 7y ago
  It was a great technical idea (email as a replicating distributed database), but I heard the user experience was not great. Friction kills both mechanical devices and software products. Work on removing friction if you want your gearbox, or your software, to last.
  - andrekorol 7y ago
    "email as a replicating distributed database" sounds a lot like something that could now be approached with new blockchain technology.
    - nine_k 7y ago
      Why, yes. Blockchains don't necessarily require a proof of work; git is essentially a blockchain.
FatDrunknStupid 7y ago
I think I'm one of the few people who actually developed a Lotus Notes application. It was well received at the time doing standard (template) letters!

geuis 7y ago

I’m somewhat struggling through getting a service working on Kubernetes. So much configuration to go through. I’m trying to build a product, not be a systems engineer. It occurred to me that Kubernetes might really benefit from some kind of nodal editor. Think iOS Interface Builder but nodal. It would let us visually see the network configurations, make connecting different bits easier, etc. The editor would also show a visual representation of our current clusters, nodes, pods etc along with health and usage etc. Man if that existed right now I’d pay some cash to use it.

haolez 7y ago
Helm might help you installing complicated services like PostgreSQL. But keep in mind that Kubernetes is complex and Helm adds magic on top of that.
- geuis 7y ago
  I’ll take a look. Thanks for the tip. Spent the last couple days going through one blog after another and pages of k8s docs where the directions seem to fall to “copy this command that downloads a script from github and then follow the next step”. I just want to improve my service’s reliability by adding auto scaling (Linode is my host) and k8s seems the way to go. Wasn’t expecting it to be so complicated though.
  - haolez 7y ago
    If you are not using managed Kubernetes, then Nomad is probably a saner choice. https://www.nomadproject.io/ https://www.nomadproject.io/
tonyarkles 7y ago
I'm smiling at your comment, and please don't interpret this as me making fun of you; I'm laughing along with you at the absurdity. > I’m somewhat struggling through getting a service working on Kubernetes. So much configuration to go through. I’m trying to build a product, not be a systems engineer. I'm a systems engineer through-and-through. I've resisted k8s for a long time, but recently inherited a project that was already very k8s-native (for example, it's an Elixir-based app that auto-joins other OTP nodes based on k8s discovery) and figured it was time to dive in. From my understanding, the whole point of this is to abstract away a lot of the pieces that were fundamental to "sysadmin" skills. I'm running this on a DigitalOcean Managed K8s cluster, so I haven't had to do any configuration on the nodes at all, but there's a ton of things that feel dramatically more complicated, even though they're nominally more "abstract" than they would be on bare metal. What's missing, though, are the systems power tools that help you debug what's happening! I have no doubt that this is an exceptionally powerful platform, but... when I start getting errors about a process not being able to make a TCP connection to a publicly-accessible IPv4 address, I can't just connect and look at the iptables configuration on the node to see if there's any kind of rule that might be blocking it. In a lot of ways it feels like we're throwing out the baby with the bath water.

SeekingMeaning 7y ago

I’m on mobile and when my finger touches the screen, the page zooms out, and when I let go, it zooms back in—but off center. Anyone else experiencing this? Edit: It seems this can be fixed by manually zooming out to 85%, but I still don’t know why this is an issue in the first place

geuis 7y ago
Yup, same. Had to enable reader view to pursue the article.
- maxfan8 7y ago
  This totally worked for me. Site is broken on mobile. I’m using iOS on iPhone.
Jaxan 7y ago
It’s the second website where I see this strange behaviour. Very annoying indeed.

kodablah 7y ago

I've reached over 100 ideas too at https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas. Anyone can steal them for any reason (ideas alone have little value to me). Granted some of them may be more targeted towards certain technologies and less vague than OP's.

zzo38computer 7y ago

For the first one, about email, I have a few comments: - For newsletters and forum/blog posts), I think NNTP can help. - For invoices, a multipart message might help. This might also be used for having some format for delivery info, and for purchases. - For replies to customer service tickets, you could use a part of the message ID. For "Elements Represent Themselves", note that different users may use a different desktop environment and some none at all (I do not use a desktop environment on my computer). X selections could be used. For example, if the user clicks on a filename in another program, it could take the FILE_MANAGEMENT selection; if a file manager is running, it will notice that it has lost ownership of that selection and can use that to trigger a menu or something. In many cases, even the PRIMARY selection is good enough; the user selects the text and then enters some global key command which causes it to execute another program to do something with the selected text, whether it is converting a unit of measurement, ping a IP address, etc. You could also have a similar idea for HTML documents; this is another use of the <widget> element I have described before that I think would be a good idea. For example, you could use <widget> to mark some text as representing a measurement. Since <widget> normally acts like <span>, the text is visible and you can still use document JavaScripts to provide this functionality too (just like any other <span>), although if the user has their own implementation, then it might provide more units to convert to (even if document scripts are disabled). And if neither <widget> nor scripts are implemented, it still works as static text! Standard format for defining keybindings seems like it could work, although some programs may need their own extensions to the format due to various things, but even then, many common commands will be able to be copied without a problem, so it may still be helpful anyways. I agree about 66 "Wizards and Forms Request Data". Furthermore, it should be possible to write the file locally and send it using a command-line interface, or even automatically convert data entered together with an uploaded file, for this purpose. (A scriptable interface makes this possible to do.) For "Right Click Outsource", that may be good for a desktop environment; for people such as myself who use command-line interface, in some cases it can work. You could have one command which outsources audio, one which outsources directories, etc. (You could also have a FUSE to represent these things and then use a single interface with all of them, including a GUI if you want to.) Mounting email attachments seems a good idea. A program could be made which allows mounting a mbox file in this way. For 90 "Views of Data", SQLite has a virtual table mechanism, and also supports in-memory databases. These features could be used to do some of this stuff (and SQLite includes an extension to access JSON data in this way, actually; the command-line interface also supports importing CSV, too). But sometimes I want to be able to access remote data in this way and (and even make a join query between multiple remote data sources, such as movie times and weather, or any other combination that you might want). However, there are some deficiencies in the virtual table mechanism, such as the inability to have indexes on expressions (including nondeterministic expressions, which in the case of virtual tables, is sometimes useful), partial indexes, consuming LIMIT/OFFSET clauses, etc. (If it supports these things, the client could then understand such a thing as "ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1" and have it automatically convert into the request to access a random record.)

sidcool 7y ago

A solution for hover over animations on touch devices.

Shorn 7y ago
I was just adding some on-hover functionality to my side-project's website recently (to zoom screenshots, https://kopi.cloud https://kopi.cloud) and was thinking I was going to need some "solution" for touch devices. But then I tried it out on iphone/surface-pro and most browsers seem to work fine - you just have to touch the image instead of hover to get the animation to fire. Is there an issue with this I need to look into?
real-hacker 7y ago
One solution is to use another touch screen (not showing pixels, just a touch pad) on the back of the phone. The front touch screen is for touch interactions, the back pad is for hovering/other interactions. It can be quite intuitive, and it is easy to use with one hand.

mattrp 7y ago

I think it’s awesome that you’ve created this list. I have thought about documenting my own ideas for years and never have because I’ve Never felt comfortable with it. It’s not that I think they are that great or that I’m afraid someone will steal them —- Id actually love it if someone did steal one or two. In any case kudos for putting your mind out there for all to see.

mci 7y ago

36. Documentation Linked Code sounds like literate programming [1], which interleaves the source code with prose explanations. This idealized description is due to Peter J. Denning [2]: > A literate program contains not only the needed statements in a programming language, but also a precise problem statement, a summary of the background needed to understand the solution, an evaluation of alternatives, assessments of trade-offs between the running time and space, or between running time and programming time, and suggestions on how to modify the program. Program code segments are inserted in the text at points logical to the intellectual development of the algorithm. A literate program pays careful attention to lucidity of presentation and presents all arguments needed to understand why the program will actually run as intended. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming [2] https://www.cs.upc.edu/~eipec/pdf/p583-van_wyk.pdf https://www.cs.upc.edu/~eipec/pdf/p583-van_wyk.pdf

user00012-ab 7y ago
Emacs org-mode does this very well.