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

• throwaway4good 6y ago
  Desktop UI beyond wimp.
  • throwaway4good 6y ago
    Maybe it is not for lack of trying but it is surprising to me that the desktop UI of today (say MacOS Big Sur) is the same "windows, icons, menus and a mouse pointer", beyond some improvements in animation and graphics, as it was 20 years ago (say Windows 2000).
    • canofbars 6y ago
      I think its more that the core concepts of a desktop UI were correct 20 years ago and other than minor refinements, there is no reason to change it up just for the sake of change. If you look at apples other products (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch) they all have radically different UIs which suit their form factor best. We see this in basically all established industries. The bicycle of 30 years ago looked pretty similar to one you would buy today. Its just every part has been made slightly stiffer, lighter, more durable, more vibration absorbing, etc but the core shape is still the same because we already came to the correct design.
    • mceachen 6y ago
      s/20 years ago/36 years ago/ s/Windows 2000/the first Macintoshes/ ftfy
  • layer8 6y ago
    WIMP is fine. The problem at present is that “modern” UIs don’t adhere to WIMP conventions (tooltips, context menus, regular menus, keyboard accelerators/shortcuts and navigation, using native look & feel and controls including windows chrome, unambiguous visual distinction between actionable controls and mere labels/text/images, power-user features like configurable toolbars that were a common feature 20 years ago, ...).
• tornadofart 6y ago
  Open source printers
  • giantg2 6y ago
    Why do you say that? Most printer companies make their money off of the ink/toner for consumer products. The printers themselves are usually close to break even prices. That doesn't leave much room for open source competitors.
    • uberman 6y ago
      apparently commercial printers leave microdots on printed pages that can be used as fingerprints. Perhaps an open source one would not. just a guess though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
      • giantg2 6y ago
        I think the microdots have become mandatory. Any commerical open source printer would likely be required to do this too. I guess I just don't see that as giving people a compelling reason to produce one (meaning I'm not surprised by a lack of people working on it).
    • ta988 6y ago
      Many of these printers don't work well on Free OSes unfortunately. Or require binary blobs (looking at you Canon) that are barely maintained piece of software cobbled together...
      • giantg2 6y ago
        I had an HP and Lexmark working with Ubuntu and didn't have any problems that I can remember. I still imagine the market demand is quite low, especially if there are some existing printers that already work. I guess I could see it if it was DIY. But then the question would be why it hasn't been done already.
• uberman 6y ago
  Bringing research findings from university studies forward into products/services.
  • f6v 6y ago
    I’d add that researchers should eventually try to commercialize their research. I understand that it’s not possible for all the fields, but I think too many life sciences PhD end up in e-commerce and finance.
• java-man 6y ago
  Educating the general population.
  • giantg2 6y ago
    I'll agree with this, but want to clarify that the education I would reference isn't necessarily formal higher education, but educational reforms at primary and secondary levels to include more useful life skills like logic, finance, and understanding of civic duties including the legal system.
    • jhayward 6y ago
      And yet, the official platform of the Texas GOP used to (and still may for all I know) have a plank opposing any schools teaching "critical thinking skills". Because, that's just liberal indoctrination leading children away from authoritarian structures of "whatever I say is true is true". All that to say - it's not a bug, it's a feature to many Americans.
      • giantg2 6y ago
        Depending on how it's taught, that could be a concern. I've experienced some bad marks when doing critical thinking exercises in grade school simply because my view didn't match with the teacher. They wouldn't even let me defend my positions, just mark it wrong. This was a common problem for me as I would think out side the box (as told) but they didn't like my answers because it doesn't fit with their view. This still happens at work today. I had a logic course in college called philosophy of argument. It was graded differently. You were graded on your knowledge of fallacies and structures of arguments. You did have to construct some basic arguments, but you could have people in the same class with opposing positions and both could still recieve full marks if their arguments didn't contain fallacies, factual issues, or structural issues. This way provides the building blocks for arguments and recognizing fallacies without indoctrination.
  • t0astbread 6y ago
    Agreed and I'm especially concerned with how little people are taught about IT even though it's an important part of our daily lives. Specifically I think everyone should be thought about: - cryptography basics - how the web works (cookies, JavaScript etc.) - how email works (MTA/MDA/MUA responsibilities, OpenPGP, S/MIME, maybe also SPF/DKIM/DMARC) - TCP/IP basics - how computers and operating systems generally work and execute programs Though I'm not suggesting we should replace other subjects with IT.
• ketanmaheshwari 6y ago
  An immediate push to simplify complex concepts / ideas given that we know from history how much the efforts pay back in terms of broader adaptation / understanding by the masses. Examples: quantum mechanics, string theory, certain advanced algorithms, AI etc.
  • MathematicalArt 6y ago
    Hi! I am Xavier, Mathematical Artist and am leading an initiative to do just that with a form of thinking called “Omnidisciplinary Thinking” or Thinking OMNI. The intent is to encourage people and organizations/groups to identify the root structure of concepts (“Engage with the Root”) and to use any shared structures to help them reason quickly and accurately across, within, and between domains, disciplines, and industries. The applications of this are intended at the personal, interpersonal, and social levels. At the personal level, the mindset can be used to make sense of complexity and for self-understanding. At the interpersonal level, such a mindset is useful for finding common ground/understanding between philosophies such that we can have difficult conversations with those who seem most different from us. And at the social level, we have many applications such as more efficient and rich education, and for companies and job seekers we get better talent recognition and integration into organizations (e.g. removing the keyword bingo everyone must play on resumes). Please feel free to check out the site: mathis.art and subscribe to our newsletter. Also feel free to reach out. We have a passionate team working on content to help people understand this way of thinking, its utility, and its ability to help one to express! Think OMNI
• sneak 6y ago
  Uncensorable publishing.
  • giantg2 6y ago
    This is interesting. What mechanisms do you see enabling this?
    • ghoward 6y ago
      Not the GP, but I see it happening with a global, but decentralized ID system. I wrote about a possible design at https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-internet-and-other-ideas/#decentralized-identities https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-internet-... .
      • giantg2 6y ago
        Interesting. How would that system work for non-trusted people? I see that it would work for family and friends, but how to publish for the general public? This reminds me that there is/was a company working on blockchain tech for tracking legislation changes.
        • ghoward 6y ago
          The point to having the system is that if someone who is a publisher is being censored, they can move their content to another platform and their entire audience knows they moved because their "location" is in the blockchain. That's why being able to store data alongside an identity is important.
          • giantg2 6y ago
            Yeah, I got the concept for platform level censorship. If you have adversaries actively trying to shut you down, they can just follow you to the next platform. Government level censorship could still be possible.
• sneak 6y ago
  Browsers.
  • aninteger 6y ago
    Well, people are working actively on Chrome and Firefox, and people are building new browsers on top of webkit often enough. If you mean an alternative browser not based on the 3 major rendering engines, well that one is not really surprising given that you need a large team to concentrate on it.
• dhruvkar 6y ago
  Regenerating top soil. We have degraded 1/3 of the top soil in the last 150 years. At the current rate, we won't be able to grow food in 60 years. This is a significant threat to our food production capabilities as a planet, and has severe 2nd, 3rd degree repercussions as well. At the moment, agroforestry and syntropic farming are the only large scale solutions, but they need mass adoption. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
  • eggsmediumrare 6y ago
    If covid has taught us anything, it's that we should listen to these sorts of warnings.
  • searine 6y ago
    This is really not an accurate depiction of the problem. First of all, it may take a 1000 years to naturally create topsoil, but that's not our problem. We have topsoil and can make topsoil much much faster. So how do we preserve, and continue to create topsoil faster than it is depleted. What is top soil? A collection of macro and micronutrients, microorganisms, and organic matter in the first 5-10 inches of soil. Essentially, its compost. Traditional farming depletes topsoil because it takes more than it gives. By traditional, I mean subsistence up until early industrial. After we figured out that plants need food, and supplemented it accordingly, the draining of nutritive value of the topsoil largely ended 100 years ago. However, industry brought about destructive methods such as deforestation and deep tillage which increase erosion. Even if you are adding in enough inputs to balance out what your crops are taking, erosion may simply sweep away your 5-10 inches of good soil. However, in the last 40 years, tiling and no-til methods have vastly improved this. No-til and more efficient combines have also much improved soil organic matter (which take decades to build, but not 1000s of years). In general. Yes, the erosion of soil is the erosion of civilization, but don't believe the media hype. Farmers aren't dumb, they are incentivized to manage their soil as best they can.
    • oblio 6y ago
      Isn't the real problem these days fertilizer drainage going into rivers and oceans, etc.?
• question000 6y ago
  Python in the browser.
  • zie 6y ago
    see: https://brython.info/index.html https://brython.info/index.html
  • meredydd 6y ago
    There has actually been quite a lot of work in this area. A colleague of mine wrote up a comparison of several solutions last year: https://anvil.works/blog/python-in-the-browser-talk https://anvil.works/blog/python-in-the-browser-talk We build our all-Python full stack dev environment (https://anvil.works https://anvil.works) on Skulpt - but there's a lot of room in that solution space! If you haven't checked out Mozilla's Pyodide project, for example, it's truly impressive - they compiled all of CPython and popular data science libraries to wasm for a full notebook experience in your browser: https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide
  • glandium 6y ago
    I don't remember the timeline, but Mozilla has worked on this in the past with ActiveState. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/PyDOM https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/PyD... I think this predates Firefox, and was abandoned more than 10 years ago.
• zachrose 6y ago
  Programming languages with built-in inversion of control by way of an effects system, like in Elm.
  • jgwil2 6y ago
    Could you elaborate on that a little?
    • zachrose 6y ago
      Elm is a purely functional language, meaning all you write are the insides of functions that take a value and return a value. There's no imperative way to "do anything" like make an HTTP request, all you can do is return a "command" value from a function and the core libraries will do it. This means that the core libraries define the signatures of the functions that an Elm application must implement. (All Elm apps "work the same way" in that sense.) It also means that you never have to mock or stub anything in a test. There are also great implications for performance and maintainability. Elm compiles to JavaScript and is specific to browser applications, but there's no theoretical reason the same idea couldn't be applied to mobile apps or CLI applications or webservers or anything else. (It's just a lot of work.)
      • jgwil2 6y ago
        So it sounds like there's Elm the framework and Elm the language then. The language is the language and the framework gives inversion of control. So this is a bit unique in that usually frameworks are built in a language that has other uses, but how is it qualitatively different from programming in any other framework?
        • zachrose 6y ago
          A little bit of both! Elm the language is different from JavaScript, Java, Ruby, etc because there is no facility for statements or imperative APIs. It’s restricted in that sense. Frameworks in those languages still have some inversion of control, but there’s nothing stopping you from making a network request in your Celsius/Fahrenheit conversion function. (And over enough time that’s usually what happens, and you have fewer constraints with which to reason about what the code does.) I can’t speak for languages that are similarly restricted, like Haskell, but my impression is that Elm is different because you don’t have to learn extra rule-bending mechanics to do I/O. The Elm approach is unique, as far as I know. And while it doesn’t make for a truly all-purpose programming language, it’s a great model for developing libraries and applications on the web. I’m just a bit “surprised” there isn’t a similar thing focused on web servers or IOT or whatever else.
• iambateman 6y ago
  Global warming businesses: carbon capture, emission reduction, etc.
  • giantg2 6y ago
    Can you elaborate? My perspective is that these businesses have a lot of research and growth in the past decade.
    • iambateman 6y ago
      It’s likely my own ignorance, I just don’t see many of those businesses in the spotlight.
      • giantg2 6y ago
        True, they aren't really in the spot light. I do hear a good bit about them through the stock market news as opposed to mainstream news. Also in science/tech focused publications for the break through news.
      • agumonkey 6y ago
        Maybe not ignorance, just slow ramp up, there's a lot of activity compared to 20 years ago.. but it's nascent in a way.
  • canofbars 6y ago
    We already have the solutions and know they work. Solar and wind are incredibly well developed and successful. We just need to remove the politics and corruption holding them back.
  • thereIsHope 6y ago
    The easiest is to change the content of our plates, without waiting hoping that maybe if we are lucky enough someone will come up with a solution for all the destruction that we cause in the first place when we buy products from the most destructive industry in regards of GHG emmissions, deforestation, fresh water pollution, ocean dead zones and much more : the animal agriculture industry. Watch "Endgame 2050" on YouTube or "Cowspiracy" on Netflix if you want to learn more
• libertine 6y ago
  Elderly care... in fact this pandemic showed precisely the opposite: our elders were neglected, converted into a statistic that dies more then young people. A complete lack of humanity in a lot of developed countries. This is the example we gave to the upcoming generations, we're fucked when it's our turn lol. I've been reflecting a lot on this, and thinking of ways to solve this, but it's not easy - it's bigger than infrastructure or tech... it's a social problem.
  • chiefalchemist 6y ago
    Truth be old, as a rule the marginalized didn't fare well with Covid. Minorities, specifically Afro Americans, continue to remain on the wrong side of the healthcare tracks. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/pandemic-black-death-toll-racism/617460/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/pandemic-...
  • xeromal 6y ago
    Yeah, I've noticed in the US that we've lost sight of the old way of ensuring care for your elders and it makes me sad. I understand that "proper" first world countries should take care of them through social programs, but I'm just surprised it only took us a few generations to completely abandon the obligation to take care of grandma, grandpa, mom, and dad when they get too old to work. My buddy is a latino and as soon as the elders got too old, they just moved in to the family house and their needs were met. * I do understand that some level of care is unable to be met by normal families but I'm talking about the situations where its really just room, board, food, and love.
    • libertine 6y ago
      I truly believe that one of the ways to measure the evolution of a society is how it takes care of the vulnerable groups: children, elders, and people with disabilities. Of course there are other social problems, and inequalities, like racism, unemployment, sexism... but the difference is that these groups still have strength and a voice. The vulnerable groups are exposed and left at the waves of the society. While people were complaining because they had to stay some weeks inside, you have countries where the elder are still in isolation after 9 months, only to finally get the virus to creep in slowly and start to wipe a lot of them. It's borderline criminal. It's sad, and it makes me worried for when it will be my turn. If we're this detached from the problems of old age, we won't have a good end.
• gdsdfe 6y ago
  Search
  • simplecto 6y ago
    Beat me to it. This is now an old entrenched industry overripe for a little...disruption (what a nauseating term, I just don't know what else to call it). This is my focus next year. Placing many small bets that niche/vertical search will make this space much more interesting.
    • abakker 6y ago
      I just hope one vertical is web forums. AFAICT, most useful knowledge that I search for is in the collective archives of reddit, stack overflow, comments here, and the endless sprawl of vbulletin.
  • karsinkk 6y ago
    My thought exactly. But Google has built such a big moat that it'd be hard for any new player to take out any considerable market share from them.
  • bobosha 6y ago
    The only way to beat Google is to come up with a whole new paradigm for information access. Perhaps something like Wolfram alpha for the web.
    • kreeben 6y ago
      Can't we beat Google by being better than them at solving the search problem? Google launches approximately one new and helpful search feature per year. What if you launched a company or conjured up a community that could give birth to two helpful features per year, wouldn't that company or community catch up and eventually surpass them in functionality? This company wouldn't have to come up with a new paradigm for information access. Instead, they would have to come up with a way to launch helpful search features that wasn't dependent on PII. To me that doesn't sound as scary as having to come up with a new paradigm for information retrieval. To me it sounds fully doable.
• kethinov 6y ago
  Building a shared runtime for Electron so that each Electron app no longer needs to bundle Node.js and Chromium. It would significantly improve the performance of a framework now used by countless apps. So far as I can tell, this has been on the back burner of the Electron team for many years. I'm surprised it's not a higher priority.
  • thelastbender12 6y ago
    The webview project fills some of this need, correct? I didn't start using one yet but there were multiple GUI projects leveraging it to create cross-platform application binaries. Link - https://github.com/webview/webview https://github.com/webview/webview
    • krapp 6y ago
      Unless something has changed, using that means no Webassembly support on Windows[0]. [0]https://github.com/webview/webview/issues/76 https://github.com/webview/webview/issues/76
      • pritambaral 6y ago
        For now, hopefully: https://github.com/webview/webview/issues/85 https://github.com/webview/webview/issues/85
  • karsinkk 6y ago
    Earlier discussion on this Topic : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19083169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19083169
  • ta988 6y ago
    Couldn't that just be made with a browser that would allow to be run in a runtime mode with limited features?
  • modeless 6y ago
    This already exists: the browser is the shared runtime. What needs to happen is everyone shipping Electron should instead ship a local HTTP server and open the user's default browser to run the UI. You can hide the browser chrome and make real top level windows by making your app a PWA. Anything else that needs to happen outside of the browser sandbox can be handled by the local server. The only disadvantage is you lose control over the browser version that's running, but you also lose that with a shared runtime (unless every app pins their own runtime version which defeats the purpose of sharing). Besides, most Electron apps also have a web version that has to support all browsers anyway. The advantage is you seriously reduce the disk and memory footprint of your app and shed the responsibility of shipping prompt patches for Chromium security issues.
• indy 6y ago
  Debuggers which can visualise known types of data (e.g. vectors, matrices, bitmaps etc) and display changes made to them over time.
  • tucaz 6y ago
    There you go https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hediet.debug-visualizer https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hediet.d...
    • 0-_-0 6y ago
      The programmer version of "there's an app for that" has become "there's a VSCode plugin for that".
  • bmitc 6y ago
    LabVIEW has this, so you might check it out in LabVIEW Community if you're interested in this. Data flows across wires, and so you can probe the data in a running program to inspect it, which uses default displays for the probes. You can create custom probes for the data, which allows custom user interface interactions that takes in data from the probes (custom displays, additional calculations, etc.). I am in general interested in this as well, and have found debugging in most text-based IDEs to be a step backwards.
  • westoncb 6y ago
    I worked on this for quite a while: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd
  • joubert 6y ago
    Check out the glamorous toolkit https://gtoolkit.com/ https://gtoolkit.com/
• gpetukhov 6y ago
  Healthy and delicious mass market food. At least in the US currently it's either healthy or delicious, while in Asia and Europe it can be both.
  • aewens 6y ago
    We do, but the problem is cost. It’s one of those “of these three attributes, pick two” between healthy, delicious, and cheap.
    • raverbashing 6y ago
      Add a 4th item: long shelf life Healthy, delicious and cheap exists (at home at least). But it is very labour intensive and it will go bad in a couple of days.
      • withinboredom 6y ago
        I think that's the difference between EU and US. After living in both, in the EU, we shop nearly every day, while in the US it's ~ every weekish or longer.
• terse_malvolio 6y ago
  Mathematics Just think of all the good it's brought and how underfunded it is
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • mcshicks 6y ago
    Can you elaborate a bit? My son is a mathematician, a post doc right now. While I would not say math is over funded, my understanding is that most of the money they spend (above and beyond salaries) is just travel related so they can talk together. That is they don't have expensive equipment like electron microscopes, server farms, etc. On the other hand I think you can make a strong case that math education outreach to under represented groups in math, like some minorities and women in some countries maybe does not get the attention it deserves.
    • Balgair 6y ago
      One thing that does cost a bit is the computers. Computational flops are microscopes for a mathematician these days.
    • hiq 6y ago
      More funding can mean more people working in the field with the same amount spent on everyone rather than more money spent on the same number of people.
• corobo 6y ago
  Eliminating "poor" as an adjective for humans. If we must commercialise it, more people with money = more customers.. Apple, Amazon, etc.. there's billions of potential iPhone and Alexa users out there long term if you set something up to help them now. What, you don't think you'll be around long enough?
  • giantg2 6y ago
    This is an extremely complex topic that would likely require political and societal reforms. I'm curious why you are suprised there aren't more more people working on this?
    • corobo 6y ago
      We're on a site for a VC right? Big risks for massive rewards. The biggest risk is compassion. The reward a dedicated however many people you help as customers later. If an AppleHelps scheme set me on a path out of poverty I would never even think the word Android. Companies are the only entities with the clout and long term justification to get those reforms started on. e: version 1 of this comment was very snarky, sorry. I took your comment as quite dismissive and responded emotionally.
      • giantg2 6y ago
        I see what you are saying. I guess I just don't know what those companies could do to pull those people out of poverty, especially at the macroeconomic level. It would likely be easier for them (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc) to join forces and lobby the government to provide people in poverty with smartphones, or at least provide grants similar to rural internet grants today. What do you envision for an "AppleHelps" program?
        • jph 6y ago
          Specific measurable actionable relevant timely (SMART) steps that Apple/iOS and Google/Android could do to help poorer people: 1. Improve device sharing. One example: a family can have one phone with individual accounts for each member. 2. Permit better repairs. One example: the company can state that it's legal for a user to replace an old phone battery. 3. Accelerate free knowledge. One example: preinstall Wikipedia and similar free libre open source software (FLOSS).
• mkl95 6y ago
  Renewable energy.
  • canofbars 6y ago
    What kind of changes do you expect more of? It seems to me like renewable energy is progressing at a very rapid pace so home solar is cheaper and better every year.
    • mkl95 6y ago
      Lawmakers and politicians in my country (Spain) have evolved from antagonising renewal energy to having a passive attitude during the last few years. I would like to see a more aggressive approach toward implementing these forms of energy, like in other EU countries.
• antibland 6y ago
  Large-scale seawater desalination.
  • tomatocracy 6y ago
    The big problem here is how to make it more energy efficient (let alone more energy efficient than our existing freshwater purification/distribution systems). We know how to build them, they're just very expensive to run.
• chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Real news and true unbiased, truth seeking, fact checking journalism.
  • aewens 6y ago
    How would we go about proving that a news source claiming to be those things are actually real, truly unbiased, truth seeking, and fact checking?
    • chiefalchemist 6y ago
      There are two things that seem to undermine the currect media landscape. 1) Profits are more important that facts and integrity 2) That race to the bottom prevents the media from policing each other. That is, for example, ABC News won't call out CBS News because ABC News fears retaliation (so to speak).
  • bobbydreamer 6y ago
    I was thinking a bit on this few weeks. How real news can be gathered up as now internet is everywhere. A website made up of Google maps, people would post status or their street or place they visited. Status could be picture or message like "Green", "repair" street lamp not working, awareness" too many street dogs. Messages could be just few sentences not big as a article. Restricted tags to filter news. This is sort public alerting what's happening in their neighbourhood.
  • chad_strategic 6y ago
    Wow! Let's not get to crazy here... fear and hate drive audiences which drives profits. Also we we need to start with a critical thinking public. But I'm with you, I'm going to keep hoping.
    • chiefalchemist 6y ago
      Absolutely. The two go hand in hand. And yes, individuals need to be more responsible. However, that lack of critical thinking doesn't excuse the media from too often selling editorial as journalism. It doesn't excuse them from serving up click friendly fluff while real news gets sidestepped.
• f6v 6y ago
  We’ve got a very limited understanding of biology. Ask any kind of researcher and they’ll tell you we need more data, i.e. more experiments. Also, there’s Illumina monopoly in sequencing market, we desperately need competition for genetics to become accessible to general population.
  • ta988 6y ago
    You can buy a nanopore, no need to go with an Illumina. You can clearly do genomics at home with this.
    • f6v 6y ago
      Nanopore is a different kind of instrument and absolute majority of cutting-edge protocols rely on Illumina chemistry. Just no way of escaping it if you're doing science.
  • the_only_law 6y ago
    I briefly looked at a couple of dirt cheap biology programs near me because I used to love biology and it was something different. Then I looked at the salaries working in the field and kinda just stopped.
    • Balgair 6y ago
      It's a supply and demand issue, just like in nursing. There are a lot of bio undergrads out there in the US, and as such the wages are depressed. That said, with higher degrees comes higher wages. And with 'outsider' skill sets comes higher wages. Things like programming, EE, and management-skills will get you a better job in bio. Honestly, most bio people don't have anything past Calculus 1, so if you even have Linear Algebra, you're much ahead of the group, let alone Diff. Eqs. or some real Stats classes. Granted, these salaries not near SWE jobs, but you're not working on dog-walking-apps, you're working on heart conditions and health issues. The effort, inherently, is compensation to those doing it.
  • Balgair 6y ago
    There's a poster out there of all the relevant chemistry of human mitochondria. It's a pretty big poster, about a square meter of paper. Every pore and protein's function is represented. The Kreb's Cycle is in a corner of this thing. All the chain reactions are there, with lines trying to vainly connect it all together. The font on it is ~9 pt., I think. And it's double sided. I can't find a good link on Google, but other biologists will know what I'm talking about. That poster is the result of ~70 years of hardcore work and blood and sweat of ~10k+ people on the human mitochondria. That poster alone is worth billions of dollar of research and will likely save billions of lives. And it's just the normal functions of the human mitochondria. One of many organelles in a 'typical' human cell. I'm not aware of any attempts to produce such a thing for something as complicated as the ER or the nucleus. Our understanding of bio is very much limited. But I want to stress that Bio is complicated much more beyond what anyone thinks it is. There is a good quote to help grok the ocean we are looking into: Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. This is biology. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
• GlenTheMachine 6y ago
  Robotic motor learning. It's being worked on, but not nearly to the same extent as machine perception. And yet it's probably the biggest technology gap preventing us from deploying human-equivalent robots in unstructured environments.
  • lasagnaphil 6y ago
    From seeing the robotics field from a distance - the issue doesn't simply stop at high-level intelligent algorithms; there is also the problem with actual hardware. The human body is an incredibly efficient biomechanical system that can perform a wide array of delicate movements, and current robotic systems are still too far away from reasonably mimicking human muscles, joints, and sensory nervous systems. Robots might still has difficulty in performing everyday tasks done by humans, even if the algorithms are intelligent enough.
• mdorazio 6y ago
  Actual, practical human longevity improvement. It seems ridiculous how small of a healthcare tech niche this is given the potential impact.
  • willis936 6y ago
    I searched the internet for “telomere therapy” earlier today. I was curious if there had been any interesting advancements in the past year. Almost all hits were holistic healing sites.
    • istorical 6y ago
      There was a study in the last month showing telomere lengthening in humans via hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Still waiting for more reproductions of the study but quite promising. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/can-breathing-pure-oxygen-under-pressure-reverse-ageing-1.4422779 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/can-breathing-pure-o...
    • ncmncm 6y ago
      There was a big splash about this just a couple of weeks ago: hyperbaric oxygen treatment triggering telomere restoration. Don't know if anybody has shown any actual benefit from having the telomeres boosted. Some of what had seemed like a good idea (antioxidants!) have turned out to interfere in essential signaling pathways, and be therefore harmful in excess.
  • bmitc 6y ago
    Why? Human longevity is a source of problems, and I personally wish we'd work harder at making the quality of our lives better instead of extending our time here.
    • tashoecraft 6y ago
      Human longevity goes hand in hand with making our lives better. You don't make people live longer without drastically reducing diseases and healthcare costs whilst also greatly increasing the lifetime earning potential. Human longevity is one of the most important things we can be focusing on.
• trevett 6y ago
  Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.
  • mikulabc 6y ago
    I had to go as far as create a chrome extension that helps with managing 10000 bookmarks, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager-per-doma/ehpdoeepbmijafimdjcippbkpffhfmif https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager-p... feel free to try it out, maybe it helps
  • tomatocracy 6y ago
    Agreed. There are a few full text/archiving solutions out there but they all seem to be very manually driven. Automating that properly seems to be hard to make slick enough. One very easy win though would be to address the fact that history in browsers only allows you to see and sort by the most recent date you visited a page. So you can't really answer the question "what are the pages I visited in March this year?" (for example) with any confidence and you can't be sure you've got all the pages you visited in a particular cluster if you might have gone back to one of them later.
  • crsr 6y ago
    This is a problem that Google tackled themselves, but it had too many problems[0]. Recent attempts use Chrome Dev Tools[1] to cache the results. So this may alleviate problems Google had. Memex had attempted this, but deprecated it: > We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users ... > We spent so much time on building the search and with it also 30-50% more time on every new feature because of interdependencies with the amount of data produced. End2End encrypted sync, backup, search performance, search filters, all were directly or indirectly necessary to work much better than we can afford. We're just 2.5 devs. Another developer attempted this, too. But didn't have many users: > I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2] One user does point out the reason why this may not have took off: > about once every two months, I am looking for something that I swear I came across on the Internet at some point. However, the rest of the time, I'm able to re-find it just by doing another search, whether on search-engine-of-choice, or a search box on particular-website (e.g. socnet, stackoverflow, reddit, github, hacker news...).[3] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745931 [1] https://github.com/c9fe/22120 https://github.com/c9fe/22120 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13427464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13427464 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744785
• WhoCaresLies 6y ago
  Government (health service) driven meal delivery system, everyone should receive what they need, everyday So we can optimize farming, cultivation and stocks of food, reduce waste by insane amount and make sure everyone has a healthy diet, no matter his income range Or better, globalize and generalize powdered meals (a la Soylent)
  • gremlinsinc 6y ago
    Maybe guaranteed pre-fab homes. Couldn't be hard w/ modern technology to even 3d print entire homes or make cob homes from molds or something. If you could make an entire 'dorm' with shared kitchens/bathrooms and a vertical farm it's almost self-sustaining.
• schnevets 6y ago
  Innovations in publishing. Books are still being written, customers are still making purchases, there's clearly an appetite for longform writing, and yet everyone seems to have given up after Amazon "conquered" the industry with the Kindle.
  • asplake 6y ago
    Perhaps the innovation here will be regulatory
  • bawejakunal 6y ago
    Do you have any concrete thoughts that you would want implemented in this domain ? Amazon/Kindle self publishing is actually a less known but pretty clever innovation they did, especially for printed physical books. The books are printed on-demand after a customer places order on Amazon, instead of advanced publishing. This cuts down a lot on costs and resources for each book, cuts out lot of middlemen for a writer and also provides avenue for writers to go direct to market without giving up huge profits to publishing houses.
    • wallacoloo 6y ago
      Print On Demand has been around for decades. Before Amazon, it was companies like Lulu. I haven’t used Amazon’s POD, but I’m pretty sure the concept itself isn’t their innovation.
• oxymoran 6y ago
  UAP. There is clearly a phenomenon occurring that is completely unexplainable and well beyond our current understanding. We have countless credible witnesses and multi-witness events in our armed forces alone. I don’t purport to know what the phenomenon is or why it is happening, but it seems important on a variety of levels. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population doesn’t seem to care.
• mindvirus 6y ago
  Subvocal recognition (wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition) - it seems like it's a mostly solved problem in labs, but hasn't been commercialized. I feel like being able to do voice control silently would be a major paradigm shift in how we interact with computers.
  • withinboredom 6y ago
    My VR headset has voice recognition. The problem? I talk to myself when gaming and trying to figure something out. So I end up "opening" random programs when I say, "huh, I guess I need to open that next." Detecting that I want something with this technology is the "easy part," detecting that I actually want something right this second and I want actually desire for the device to commit, is the hard part.
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    Consumer throat mics in the field get generally negative reviews. In particular if the transducers shift position even a little, the speaker become unintelligible. That ergonomics problem needs to be solved first. I think the military throat mics are usually built into flight suits, so they may be less prone to shifting? I know in the lab, they are usually taped into place, which isn't really practical for the real-world.
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    Yes, this a step towards technological telepathy. Something that hasn't been tried as far as I know is to design a new human language from the ground up with only phonemes that are easily distinguishable when spoken silently. That is, first we figure the kind of signals that are well separated by ML interpreting EMG output on the throat when subvocalizing a range of sounds, and then we build a conlang using only the precursors to these signals. Possibly this conlang could then be parsed and translated and the recipient of the message could hear their native tongue instead. It could start as a computational language at first, only used to send commands and control to software, but then it could be expanded with more nuances and human-centered constructs.
  • lunixbochs 6y ago
    I work on voice control with a custom speech engine and models (Talon). I know nothing about subvocal mic hardware or even how the audio sounds, but if anyone has a viable answer to this, especially with a good hardware option, please reach out to me. Basically, if someone can point me to a solid subvocal speech recognition tech demo and a reliable subvocal mic (note the sibling comment that indicates generic subvocal mics are frustrating and fall out of alignment easily): I think I could train production subvocal speech models, tune support for the audio style in my app, and ship to the public in a matter of weeks.
• diarrhea 6y ago
  LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives. There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth. Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people across various different organizations. Everything in MS Word. I don't even hate MS Word, it's useful and its dominant position isn't entirely undeserved. But holy cow was working together a gigantic pain in the behind. I really started to loathe it (Excel is far worse and did its part too). This was all with technical people. They could potentially grasp WYSIWYM approaches like LaTeX. Slap git and CI/CD on top and you're where software developers have been 10 years ago. But my industry is still light years away. Part of it is how Word "just works". But it takes 5 seconds of using it until it doesn't. If LaTeX was more modern and also approachable (very ugly syntax/language. Could learn from Markdown here), technical folk could ditch Word and really upgrade their workflows. I'm sick of Word templates from 2004.
  • chapium 6y ago
    What precisely are you proposing? A gui for creating latex documents?
    • kcartlidge 6y ago
      There already is one. Lyx (at https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/) is a very nice bit of cross-platform software.
      • sdwolfz 6y ago
        Wow, this is some really high quality piece of software that I did not knew it existed until now. Thank you for sharing it! I don't really have a good, productive, use case for it right now but I really can't wait to try it out. It looks really user friendly, fast, responsive, has a CLI, and it produces some easy to version in git latex files. A while ago I wanted to create my CV in latex from scratch and gave up after days of trying to get FontAwesome to work (I wanted brand icons and other nice things), so I switched to a setup where I have a HTML webpage that looks like a paper page, and using chromium headless to "print" it to PDF (only works properly with chrome as other browsers have CSS incompatibilities on PDF generation, never mind the bit fart Firefox is doing on android lol). I guess I could try to replace that setup with this tool, it seems to have a export to PDF/HTML and a CLI interface for exports. Fingers crossed all goes well and hopefully it's customizable enough for the job. This will keep me busy/entertained for a while :).
• karsinkk 6y ago
  A Decentralized Government.
  • mikulabc 6y ago
    Let's do it step by step, first let's get rid of all the dictators, there are still a few roaming around
  • the_only_law 6y ago
    I imagine even if something like that was being actively worked on, very powerful people would be working day and night to halt it, probably successfully.
    • asplake 6y ago
      Or deliberately leave the job half done and only one quarter working, as in the UK
  • Trasmatta 6y ago
    The US's separation of state and federal powers is already kind of that. In addition to lots of countries with similar systems. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you though.
• xnx 6y ago
  AI-assisted "queue" management. We all accumulate a multitude of different lists to work on: tasks lists, email inbox, open tabs, bookmarks, saved articles, books to read, movies to watch, games to play. I've never seen anything that attempts to unify these against their common constraint: time.
• ta988 6y ago
  Alternative ways than tracking, ads and information gathering/selling as a revenue source for companies handling users data.
  • bigpeopleareold 6y ago
    I agree with this completely. I probably think though that the industry needs to be disrupted, ie. prove that you can monetize at scale without relying on user data. I think this is something very hard to change because the industry and its large customers are actually quite conservative. It is understandable because newspapers are not exactly a fast growing sector. I wish that newspapers at least, etc. would instead consider working out their subscription models a bit more. I like to read stuff from multiple papers but can't justify multiple subscriptions for the occasional thing I want to read from them. The Internet opened new ways for people to access news and information but it just feels like the business model of newspapers hearkens back to pre-Internet times where you would buy the paper either at a newsstand or through home delivery.
• indigochill 6y ago
  You know "Explorable Explanations" (https://explorabl.es/ https://explorabl.es/)? I'm surprised more work isn't going into tools to optimize ease of creation of that kind of thing. Imagine any grade school teacher could create something like this for their kids (or even let kids make them for themselves - something like Scratch). I think that (easy development of interactive explanations) would be an educational revolution.
  • wes-k 6y ago
    I'm working on this and I completely agree! I'm a LOOONG way away, my first goal is to create a drawing app similar to http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddendum/ http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend.... From there, I want to create a WYSIWYG where you can drag in these drawings and add controls. Controls -> data -> drawings.
• diabeticApe 6y ago
  Nanotech and mass adoption of graphene based products. I understand the cost hurdle but so was solar which has been seeing major improvements lately to help reduce cost and improve efficiency. I'm still surprised by how little has been done to make nanotech and/or graphene based products more viable and affordable.
• gisborne 6y ago
  Computing tools for non—programmers. In the early days of computing, we quickly came up with the spreadsheet and the user-friendly relational database (Access, FileMaker). Then we just sort of stopped. The no-code thing today is a step in that direction, but we could do so much better. I’m actually ashamed of the software industry that we have done so poorly at this.
  • Tobias42 6y ago
    I recently thought about this, too. Is there any cloud-based, simple relational database, aimed at non-programmers?
    • jugg1es 6y ago
      Microsoft Access is a database aimed at non-programmers. I'm not really sure why you would care if it's cloud-based or not if you aren't a programmer though. You could have Access save your database file to One Drive or something. Access also integrates with SQL Server and you can probably get a free tier one on Azure.
      • chaostheory 6y ago
        Microsoft is aiming to replace it with their easy to use Power App platform. Plenty of people and companies are working on this problem
    • kylewatson 6y ago
      QuickBase and Knack are along those lines. A long time ago I used QuickBase. It was like a Google sheets before google sheets and you could couple multiple sheets together, relating them. It has probably come a long way since then, but ironically, I can't get past the marketing ui of the website to see how it really works. Fucking marketing people love to hide the product behind bullshit.
    • joubert 6y ago
      Interesting. What do you envision non-programmers would do with it?
• chronolitus 6y ago
  Self driving on highways. I know many companies are focusing on tier V, everywhere. but it's starting to look like an AI-hard problem to me, and might not yield a usable solution for a while. Meanwhile, I believe cars could do motorway driving from entry to exit today, if we focused on that. With LiDAR, some extra safety hardware on roads, coordination with local highway services, a company could make a car that is fully self driving on specific highway stretches.
  • sidibe 6y ago
    Lots of people are working on this (see all the companies working on autonomous trucking), but it's less visible because public testing of this is more dangerous than non-highway driving. We won't see the progress without a much higher level of confidence.
  • MDWolinski 6y ago
    I think the key to fully autonomous vehicles is a three part solution: Smart cars, smart roads, and car to car communication. The current view is to build all the intelligence into the cars, but as we've seen from Tesla, this effort is hard and there are an unlimited number of variables the vehicle needs to adapt to. However, if the cars were able to communicate and get information from the road itself (speed limit, turns, traffic control etc) then the car doesn't need to be able to figure this out. Yes, it'd take awhile to retrofit roads. Car to Car communication could be used to let vehicles know how the traffic is flowing without needing to use radar/lidar to determine when traffic is slowing ahead. These are very basic thoughts on the subjects.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Or build something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHyxakXed34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHyxakXed34
• Balgair 6y ago
  Animal Sensation of Earthquakes. Though a not well studied phenomenon (thankfully), it is well documented and seems to be a reliable, if brief, predictor. Even if it is only a few seconds of warning, that could mean a lot of lives saved by announced warnings or via automatic means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction#Animal_behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction#Animal_b...
  • swyx 6y ago
    > only a few seconds of warning the lead time is important for the value. I don't think a 3 second warning is valuable at all, but a 30 second warning might be. so we have stats on this?
    • marcuskaz 6y ago
      > I don't think a 3 second warning is valuable at all 3 seconds is plenty of time for a sensor to trigger an actuator to close valve, say a natural gas valve that could leak and cause fires.
      • Lammy 6y ago
        Also enough time to shut down a nuclear reactor! https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-reactor-trip-and-how-does-it-protect-the-plant/ https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-rea... > A reactor trip causes all the control rods to insert into the reactor core, and shut down the plant in a very short time (about three seconds).
        • Balgair 6y ago
          It would be kinda fun to have a camera-ML-algo combo just looking at a bunch of cats in a room, hooked up to a nuclear fail-safe switch, waiting for them all to just freak out abruptly. Kinda like a reverse Schrodinger's Cat experiment: the cats live if the random event triggers.
        • swyx 6y ago
• DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)
  • xchaotic 6y ago
    when you think it through, it's simply better to keep heat/electricity usage to a minimum, and just keep stuff better insulated overall. And I would say this area of problems is still being worked on, but you know physics gets in the way, and iterating in housing is a lot slower than software...
  • Nextgrid 6y ago
    Regarding refrigeration appliances, this is a solved problem. Most commercial refrigerators and ACs have a separate condensing unit placed outdoors (which also houses the compressor so its own heat doesn't affect the indoor location which is a problem when cooling). The problem is that most homes aren't build with this in mind and don't provide a place to run the refrigerant lines (nor comes with the lines built-in) especially for the fridge.
    • meowster 6y ago
      When I build my next house, I am doing this for the refrigerator, not for the heat, but for the noise.
    • imgabe 6y ago
      It also adds a lot of complexity if you want to change anything. Want to remodel your kitchen and move the fridge to the other side? Now you have to reroute refrigerant lines. Want to add a second fridge in the garage? Is your outdoor compressor large enough to handle it? You have to run new lines to it, maybe replace the compressor, or add a second one. Way more expensive and complex than just buying a refrigerator at Home Depot and plugging it in.
  • canofbars 6y ago
• Taikonerd 6y ago
  Voice interfaces. We have Siri and Alexa, yes, but they're very limited -- they just have a list of pre-programmed tasks they know how to do. I realize that a fully-general voice interface is an "AI-hard" problem, but surely we can improve over what's on the market now?
  • therealmarv 6y ago
    I think you're underestimating what Google and Amazon are doing behind the scenes (there are a lot of people working on this currently).
    • kreeben 6y ago
      G&A are going to be so concerned with "loosing out on data" that to their detriment all of their voice-driven interfaces will be cloud dependent. Hopefully, someone with enough wits will dare to lose out on that data and instead create devices with local voice models that can still learn and become more useful as you use them. I want this model to become embedded into my operating system. I want an OS that gets smarter by the day but without phoning home. I want my OS to become better than yours, simply because I trained it better that you did yours. I want this OS to be _my OS_. Not your's. Not Apple's. Not Microsoft's. Did you see the movie "AI" (written by Kubric, directed by Spielberg)? In the movie there's an AI driven teddy bear that is awfully close to being an AGI. I want my OS to be like that.
  • istorical 6y ago
    I think ironically your criticism of voice interfaces actually betrays perhaps their biggest weakness over visual interfaces - it's not immediately obvious what their capabilities are, what they will respond to or understand, or what your options in a situation are. Super users and developers of these systems are likely able to harness them for much more powerful usecases than the average person, but how do you make those options and usecases visible to the end user? It would seem like the answer is either 1) a robocall / callcenter bot style solution (press 1 to ____, press 2 to ____, press 3 to ____) where you must listen to lists of things but can more expressively verbally respond rather than press 1, or as you said solve the Hard AI problem of the bots contextually understanding your current situation and suggesting options based on it.
• Elof 6y ago
  Micro-grids
• therealmarv 6y ago
  Markdown for academic papers. We have this https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown (which is the best template I know and on a personal note I've written my thesis with that too) but the whole ecosystem can be still improved.
  • dljsjr 6y ago
    How close does AsciiDoctor + asciidoctor-latex get to that? https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-latex https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-latex I've only been using Asciidoctor for a few weeks but I'm already an MD convert.
    • therealmarv 6y ago
      Oh that's also nice. I mean I also like AsciiDoctor. I think this can get close to the link I mentioned. The biggest difference is that the link I mentioned has an example of a real thesis with this markdown toolchain.
  • jononor 6y ago
    I wrote my thesis with Markdown, combined with pandoc. Worked out allright. I think Overleaf supports Markdown now as well, which might be a more practical approach for those not familiar with git/make/shell.
  • torbital 6y ago
    Speaking of academic papers, I'd love to see a focus on readability. So many papers are just too dense for readers outside of the specific field. This can be because of the complexity of the subject matter, but I often notice unnecessary specific vocabulary and over-complicating concepts. Because of this, it's impractical for the layman to go read academic papers outside of their field. This leads to reading some news article that attempts to summarize it, and we all know that majority of the time it's just the headline that gets read.
    • alexchamberlain 6y ago
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• tomatocracy 6y ago
  Single subscription payment for news along the lines of the Spotify model. I'd happily pay a single subscription which gave me access to ALL the news websites, and divided payment up based on which articles people click on. Do that without tracking me between the different sites and I'm sold. Pressreader gets close but it only gives you yesterday's print versions (not current online content), it has a few notable gaps which matter to me (the FT, The Times (of London), Bloomberg news among others) and it doesn't really collate different sources for the same story very well. Though I have to say it's great for magazines.
  • enriquec 6y ago
    Apple News is trying. Also better for magazines than current events.
    • mertd 6y ago
      I dislike Apple News because there is no way to follow the article to the publisher site.
      • hilbertseries 6y ago
        Somewhat of a pain, but you can use the share button to open it in a web browser. Then when it forwards you to apple news use the back to old app in the top left corner. Then hit tap here and it takes you to the website.
    • packetlost 6y ago
      It's too bad that number of sources they actually support is not very good. I got a free trial with my new phone and have no intent on renewing when it's up because it's borderline useless.
  • wussboy 6y ago
    Paying according to which articles people click on has already failed as a model for determining truth and relevancy. We need to think of “one weird trick” that will have the same “stunning” effect but without the incentive to appeal to humanity’s baser instincts.
• kylewatson 6y ago
  A friggin' printer that friggin' works.
  • ncmncm 6y ago
    Brother printers seem to work. And with after-market toner cartridges. They have a list of models that are fully compatible with Linux. Many have e.g. a scanner that isn't, but can print fine.
    • Aachen 6y ago
      Can confirm that printers work significantly more reliably on Linux than on Windows as of about ten years. My SO asks me to print things from Linux because on Windows they need to always re-add the printer or some such nonsense. And that's via USB, don't ask me about my dad's network printer that his Windows fails to "find" half the time even when trying to re-add (and Windows doesn't make it clear what that even means) but my system just sends the job and it just works.
• renjimen 6y ago
  Overpopulation. It's the main source of humanity's current woes and will only get worse with time. We seem to be content with addressing the symptoms rather than the problem. The idea of population control is taboo but will help everyone in the long run.
  • canofbars 6y ago
    Surprisingly capitalism seems to be helping here. A lot of people feel they are unable to afford to own a house and have kids at the same time.
    • nawgz 6y ago
      Haha, "helping" and "growing wealth inequality to such disturbing extremes that the richest have more than ever before and more than most could conceive whilst the poor are faced with crushing existential dread and complete lack of power" might not be analogous to me, but yes.
      • canofbars 6y ago
        I'm not saying its helping the individuals, but if you look purely at the problem of overpopulation, its helping.
        • Lammy 6y ago
          Maybe 4°C+ climate change is how we'll maintain humanity under 500-million in perpetual balance with nature? https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/scientist-warming-could-cut-population-to-1-billion https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/scientist-warm... > “In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something — namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,” said Dr. Schellnhuber
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• detritus 6y ago
  Fusion Energy.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    Too much is being spent on that, not too little.
    • detritus 6y ago
      'Too much' might be swallowed up by ITER, but given its potential to benefit the entiriety of our species and planet, I earnestly believe we should be dedicating a % of the entire world economy to pushing the development of fusion energy, in whatever form it ends up taking.
      • pfdietz 6y ago
        I disagree entirely. I think it has very little potential. Fuel being cheap does not imply it has potential.
• gjvnq 6y ago
  Business automation. There seems to be so much that can be easily automated by simple scripts. We just need a better UI and a better way to teach people how to use it.
  • texasbigdata 6y ago
    Isn’t that Microsoft’s entire “hey use active directory, and write this no code flow app” premise?
  • vincentchau 6y ago
    Interesting idea. I thought that everything in business is automated already. Can you give some examples?
  • ivan_gammel 6y ago
    TBH that can already work quite well with Zapier and the like (in cloud-based businesses). I know businesses where almost every department from operations to HR has one or two Zapier accounts and connecting their dots, no IT or Software Engineering involved. It just needs a bit of oversight from compliance and security.
  • CodeGlitch 6y ago
    This so much. Also I'm a big fan of chat-bots. How about a chat-bot that answers typical HR questions for an organisation? "How much leave do I have remaining this year?" -> 16 days. "Book the dates 10/5/2021 to 11/5/2021 as leave" -> Confirmed. Request sent to your line-manager. etc... I've seen so many bespoke web pages for these sorts of tasks. Including emailing someone in HR to do it for you. I'm sure a system exists, but too lazy to google for it :)
    • torbital 6y ago
      I feel the opposite about chat-bots. It just adds to the clutter of the website (along with cookie notification, asking for email signup, etc). If I need help, I'll go specifically to the "contact us" page.
    • 6y ago
• newman555 6y ago
  Fusion energy and regenerative agriculture. Maybe I’m naive, but I see those 2 being unbelievable transformative for the world, significantly improving quality of life and preventing all those really bad climate change scenarios that seem almost inevitable at this point.
  • unlaxedneurotic 6y ago
    ITER has been making some headway in the fusion reactor space. https://www.iter.org/ https://www.iter.org/
  • joubert 6y ago
    A 10-year plan was presented at the beginning of the month to the federal Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/us-physicists-rally-around-ambitious-plan-build-fusion-power-plant https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/us-physicists-rally-...
  • JabavuAdams 6y ago
    Tokamak Energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWYnbYsp3i8&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWYnbYsp3i8&t=2s https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk
    • newman555 6y ago
      I’ve heard and read about all these initiatives that you and few others mentioned in your replies. However, (as per original question) I’m surprised we’re not investing much more resources into these. Again, super naive me - we put a lot of money and resources into finding the vaccine for covid and it quickly paid out, I think if we did the same for fusion energy we would also see big leaps in smaller period of time. Or is fusion energy really not just a matter of how much cash we throw at the problem? I don’t buy that.
• mrloba 6y ago
  Cloud tools for musicians. It's a pain setting up a new environment. So many plugins and libraries etc. Also, version control and backup. All manual.
  • texasbigdata 6y ago
    Universal Audio at least on the non-VST side and (is it) slater have interesting models.
  • ajakate 6y ago
    I started using https://www.bandlab.com/ https://www.bandlab.com/ soon after lockdown started. It's a collaborative DAW that allows you to record, save, and mix music in the cloud, and even lets you share access and collaborate in real time with others. It was great for sharing ideas with my band when we couldn't really meet up and play in person. It has a few performance/audio syncing issues being in the browser, but for what we use it for it's an amazing tool.
  • kreeben 6y ago
    I once thought about contacting Ableton to offer my assistance in taking their DAW to the cloud so that we can have collaboration, version control and publishing in one place, to sort of marry Ableton Live with Soundcloud. I would love a service like that.
  • tunesmith 6y ago
    eMagic had a great collaborative DAW plugin in 2001 or so, the year or so before they were bought by Apple. You'd be in a shared chatroom with others, where you'd all see the same DAW view, and could play all the tracks. You'd record a new track locally, and then upload it. It was a cool compromise - in most use cases, you didn't necessarily need to record live, you just wanted to work on the shared project at the same time. I haven't seen that nice of a UX since.
• tanseydavid 6y ago
  Reversible computing
  • unlaxedneurotic 6y ago
    Genuinely curious, in what fields would reversible computing be helpful?
    • 37ef_ced3 6y ago
      Debugging
• aaron695 6y ago
  Text to speech. It's the next billion industry. I wish people would stop wasting time on AI and speech recognition and work on that, it's the next step. ( AI obviously might be needed for 'deep fakes' of good speech output, we need focus on AI that gives us achievable returns, in steps )
  • jdsalaro 6y ago
    What, specifically, are you lacking wrt text to speech?
    • gfxgirl 6y ago
      I'll consider text to speech done when I can give it a novel and have it sound like the best voice actor audiobook performance.
• CyanLite2 6y ago
  Replacing JavaScript
  • preordained 6y ago
    God, yes...JavaScript is the great "stick a bandaid on it" story of tech
    • atom_arranger 6y ago
      As someone with many years of JavaScript development experience I approve this message. The annoying thing is that the community/OSS is so great that nothing that departs too drastically from JavaScript can get traction. Code you're working with is written in JS, docs are written in JS, tutorials written in JS, people you talk to are talking about JS. TypeScript has really taken off because it's still very similar to JavaScript, something that can't be said of things like Elm or ReScript.
  • thih9 6y ago
    I'd say there's lots of work being done here. Today's JavaScript is different from JavaScript of 10 years ago. There's also TypeScript and other alternatives that compile to JavaScript. Are you looking for something different?
  • hiq 6y ago
    What about WASM?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• iEchoic 6y ago
  Better software for growth engineering teams (experimentation, analysis, etc). Existing products in this space are limited, expensive, and still pale in comparison to in-house solutions at top tech companies.
  • realrocker 6y ago
    I have also observed this. We had a custom thing over Wasabi : https://github.com/intuit/wasabi https://github.com/intuit/wasabi which was quite difficult to maintain, but compared to the paid solutions out there was still cheaper to do. I wonder why aren’t there more products in this area.
    • iEchoic 6y ago
      Yup, we just ended up building ours from scratch. Glad we did, in retrospect.
      • realrocker 6y ago
        How far did you go ? Something comparable to wasabi ?
        • iEchoic 6y ago
          It looks pretty comparable to wasabi from what I can tell, yeah. We made some different design decisions than wasabi from what I can tell, but the core of it is similar.
• cratermoon 6y ago
  You know how we have an overabundance of ways to design, describe, develop, and document rpc-based distributed systems like REST and microservices? Why isn't there anything like that for event-driven, message-based systems? If there's a message bus in your architecture, it's usually just a pipe-shaped widget on a diagram. There's dozens of tools that can describe and API down to the finest detail, like swagger/openapi, uml, C4. We have infrastructure as code (helm charts, etc). In all of them the events and message buses are kind of an afterthought. Everything seems geared towards request-response systems, and nothing adequately deals with the range of event systems and message flows.
  • jdkoeck 6y ago
    Hi, you’ll be pleased to learn about the AsyncApi initiative! https://www.asyncapi.com/ https://www.asyncapi.com/ Haven’t looked into it too closely but it looks promising
    • cratermoon 6y ago
      Thank you!
• Solvitieg 6y ago
  Better authentication practices. I've been writing auth for the web since 2005 and it hasn't gotten easier or more convenient as a programmer or as an end user. The problem is so bad that email/password combos need to be managed by 3rd party services. Migrating away from Google Authenticator was a massive pain for me this year and as we continue to use more services, this problem will grow. Some apps on my phone started using biometrics (face id) for authentication and it's extremely convenient.
  • Trasmatta 6y ago
    2020 introduced a new major challenge with face id, given mask usage
  • interlocutor2 6y ago
    Biometrics are ultimately just a password that you cannot change and share all over the place. They're convenient, sure, but are a step back in security.
• yosamino 6y ago
  Geothermal Energy. Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference. Then stick in two pipes, on for sending water down, one for steam to come up. Run a turbine, add a valve to regulate how much water you want to converted into steam to be able to regulate output, enjoy your first mover advantage and price the competition out of the market. ... It's not that I do not understand that it's a lot more complicated than that - but I'm puzzled that noone is doing it on a much bigger scale. Oil companies are the ones at the forefront of deep drilling technology, They know that "Oil is bad" and that oil is going to run out. I'd like them to stop drilling for oil completely - but even if they keep pumping oil, why do they not cash in on this additional front and enjoy money and good PR.
  • jiofih 6y ago
    You’re underestimating the cost and difficulty of scaling that to any meaningful energy output.
  • anken 6y ago
    On bigger scale, it seems this can sometimes cause earthquakes... One geothermal power plant is going to close in France https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Geothermal-power-plant-closed-in-Strasbourg-after-causing-earthquakes https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Geothermal-power...
    • yosamino 6y ago
      That is correct, but not for the "two pipe approach" I outlined in my post. There is a form of geothermal energy generation that is being used here, that injects water into the ground and taps into the heated water. This is somewhat similar to the way fracking is performed to extract oil and gas from the ground, but it's not the only method. But to your point - to me it is surprising that these issues aren't being "worked on more".
      • worik 6y ago
        Where's here?
• carapace 6y ago
  Human tissue regeneration. Imagine being able to regrow limbs and organs! For a long time Becker's book was about the only thing out there: "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life" by Robert O. Becker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_(book) Now there's pretty serious progress being made at Levin's lab: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" talk by Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
  • ipnon 6y ago
    I discovered only about 10 million people in the world are amputees, having recently become interested in biomechatronics. Most of them live in developing countries. I suspect this is the reason for the relative lack of research. There isn't big money in solving the problem although its solution would be immeasurably valuable to those it aids.
    • JabavuAdams 6y ago
      I'd pay quite a bit for knees that were as good as in my '20s.
      • ipnon 6y ago
        Would you amputate your legs for the treatment?
        • JabavuAdams 6y ago
          I mean if there was longstanding evidence of the treatment working well enough and with low enough side-effects. I don't think we're anywhere close though. Think of phantom limb pain. That's a brain thing, and it's not clear whether being able to regrow extremities would also entail knowing enough about the brain / nervous system to fully solve phantom limb pain.
        • 6y ago
• Waterluvian 6y ago
  Using ML to detect when I've used words the wrong way. And I don't mean some obnoxiously advertised chrome plugin but a core part of spell check on my devices. Also while I'm here: ios autocomplete is infuriating. It's constantly learning complete jibberish typo words and so I have to reset it every few months.
  • mlacks 6y ago
    Agreed on iOS autocomplete. I recently shut it off - unaware i could simply reset it. I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but the feather on the camel's back was a word I commonly use autocorrecting to 'ducking'. Infuriating. I remember listing to a podcast with Ken Kocienda - former iOS engineer who wrote the original iPhone keyboard with the dictionary; it was intentional.
  • gfxgirl 6y ago
    Google Docs and Mail both have this. I mostly hate it with a fiery passion as it tries to coerce all my writing into some standard bland style. I like it when it truly catches a real mistake but grammar is more flexible than it believes it is.
• dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  Effectiveness and chemical makeup of home remedies/ancient medicine. I know there is no money in researching non patentable chemicals, but I'm surprised that governments are not sponsoring the research Collection of environmental/lifestyle information of cancer patients. I know it would lead to a ton of stupid headlines, and correlation does not equal causation, but I think if you have cancer they should ask where you live what you eat what products you use and whatnot. Atleast for the cancers that do not have well known causes. Superficially, why is there no standard video streaming api. Do content/platform owners really want to be in the app business? They are all bad it.
  • jclulow 6y ago
    In rightsholderworld, the application is a mere irritation that must be paid for in order to retain absolute control over distribution for as long as possible. They probably don't want to pay for it -- why can't the customer just be happy with whatever we were already giving them! -- but they want to cede control to a third party platform even less.
  • JabavuAdams 6y ago
    Researchers and pharma companies do mine traditional medicine for potential meds. See e.g. phytoalexins. Maybe it could be more widespread, but a lot of traditional remedies just don't hold up to rigorous controls/testing.
• graaben 6y ago
  Innovation in the mental health care space. Right now most of the top funded startups are working on either 1) Simplifying access for wealth people to the already available supply of therapists; or 2) Removing the human component entirely by creating with apps which have very little evidence to back them up. I see mental health care as one of the most important problems of out time, at the root of so many of the issues we see in society today. Yet government has been very slow to act, which in turn means insurance companies don't modernize their reimbursement policies, which then stifles innovation.
  • hn_asker 6y ago
    I agree. How can mental health issues like depression be affecting so many people, yet all we are settling for as a solution are pills that don't even work that well, haven't been studied in the long-term, create a long-term dependency, and have unholy side effects??
    • graaben 6y ago
      I was shocked when I found out that the current most effective therapy modality, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, is only successful in 50% of patients. I'm very hopeful for the future of psychedelic therapy, as it seems to be very effective after just a single dose and non-toxic.
  • slothtrop 6y ago
    One frequent complaint I see is the difficulty accessing therapists either owing to cost or availability. Also just feeling lost as to how to attack the problem. I see it as an information issue. According to research, online-administered CBT can be effective, and so are workbooks. Since CBT is so simple in principle, no reason this information shouldn't be easily accessible. I've even found free CBT workbooks online: https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/therapists_guide_to_brief_cbtmanual.pdf https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/therapists_guide_to_brie.... This doesn't have to "replace" therapy, but it can be the first line of defense, along with what we know helps a great deal: regular exercise (boosts serotonin and reduces stress), adequate vitamin D3 intake (mood enhancer and helps anchor circadian rhythm), proper whole foods diet, enough socializing, etc. I think the (possible) epidemic of mental health issues is exacerbated by a combination of isolation, stress (and negative newscycle bombardment), sedentary lifestyle.
• sm001 6y ago
  dolphin communication research
• tonymet 6y ago
  User authentication using client-side (aka mutual) TLS certificates. This was promoted with netscape navigator and then never came to be. Be authenticated everywhere, without ever having to log in.
  • jl2718 6y ago
    I did this for a bunch of government sites many years ago. It was amazingly simple and completely transparent to the user. No passwords. No auth cookies. No registration. Developers don’t even have to know about it. My understanding is that it’s still supported by every major browser. I’m not really a web programmer though; just stepped in on a lagging contract and it seems like the best solution.
    • tonymet 6y ago
      Most big tech companies use this internally. Google "beyondcorp" works this way.
  • 10000truths 6y ago
    Perhaps that's a good thing, because I'm almost certain that would be abused as a user fingerprint.
    • tonymet 6y ago
      So is your password presently (via auth session cookies). The same whitelisting used for cookies today would work to allow fingerprinting of your personal certificate.
  • krupan 6y ago
    So much this! WebAuthn is sort of doing this, but I think it is way too complicated. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. All we have to do is be better than passwords, and that’s a really low bar.
• baron816 6y ago
  In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have high fees. Church goers regularly give up 10% of their (gross) income to be part of that group. Cult members might even hand over ALL of their possessions to join. The camaraderie and experiences that go along with being part of a strong, long lived community tends to be the thing people value most in life. Yet finding those communities has become increasingly difficult in the modern era. People move away to different cities, or just don't run into the same set of people everyday. With the rise of remote work, social disconnection is only going to rise. I think there's a lot of room to create new social organizations with pretty minimal technology, and make a pretty profit from doing so. Humans are still human--they want those connections--they mostly just need an introduction.
  • tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    Basically a social network app, with calendar events, and without the ability to post (because interaction has to be done IRL)?
  • seneca 6y ago
    This is essentially what the book Bowling Alone is about. It's worth reading, along with the writer's other research.
    • offtop5 6y ago
      I can also suggest Lost Connections. Last year I did everything I could, to go to tons of concerts, meet up groups, and alumni events. I had a very successful year in terms of meeting new friends, finding high income partners , and generally loving my life. I've long been disillusioned with social media, and I completely blame it for destroying a generation of mental health. You need to make friends, and you need to go back to the old fashioned way of having light-hearted discussions. Versus nasty arguments on social media. I had to stop using Reddit for the most part, since no matter what I said people would attack it in some way shape or form. Even something as mundane as I find Java to be difficult, turned into a personal attack on my abilities as a programmer. Tons of people are obviously angry for whatever reason, and you feeding into their anger isn't going to help anyone. I went to tons of meetups, and even though and all of these cases I was a complete stranger I was never insulted or made to feel unwelcomed. There's community out there you just need to seek it out.
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  It's disappointing that so many things listed here either are not real problems (soil degradation) or are already solved (we're spending a tonne of money on fusion, populations are already falling in many places and will fall globally from 2100). In light of that: I'm surprised we're not better at spreading awareness of, and prioritising, problems.
• screye 6y ago
  A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows) I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it. Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a remote collaboration revolution, with notion, airtable, teams and slack becoming the norm, but this one thing seems to be completely sidelined. I would have blindly jumped headfirst into making such an app if I did not have serious visa related causes holding me down. I can see it, but it just isn't there yet. p.s: I have spent days finding a good app. (onenote is my begrudging compromise for now). Send me a good one if you can. There isn't much on apple either, but I care more about the windows ecosystem.
  • dylkil 6y ago
    have you tried https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/
    • screye 6y ago
      No, but this does sound interesting. The graph overview is lovely. I am hoping for something that treats pen input/ white boards as first party and have text take a back seat.
  • nickjj 6y ago
    While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too. Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid. [0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes https://github.com/nickjj/notes
    • abnercoimbre 6y ago
      Even just as a desktop markdown editor, Obsidian definitely delivers. You point to a folder with your files and that's it.
• realty_geek 6y ago
  Real estate tools that actually help buyers and sellers! The vast majority of tools in the real estate space are there to help estate agents / realtors.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I wish that would happen, too. Cynical answer for why it doesn't: buyers and sellers are in an antagonistic relationship, so it's not easy to optimize value for both simultaneously. Realtors are the middlemen who derisk both sides of the transaction, raking in money in exchange. They have the money, they have the tools.
• mehrdadn 6y ago
  Flexible regex engines. Pattern matching is a much more general problem than string matching, and you don't necessarily always have the entire input available initially. (In fact, especially for performance reasons, you might the pattern itself to tell you what possibilities to consider for the next portion of your sequence.) I've repeatedly found that a regex engine that can work on more general objects (not necessarily string/numeric inputs) and which can be fed the input at the caller's convenience could be quite handy for some applications.
  • gfxgirl 6y ago
    I just wish there were better UIs for much of this stuff. Most code editors have a regex search and replace figuring out the regex requires too much regex expertise. I can't think of a good example off the top of my head but for example, being able to search for things that match multiple rules. It would be much easier for many users to be able to say "starts with x", "ends with y", "has abc in the middle" as 3 separate statements than to have to derive the regex that does it. Similarly being able to search easily for balanced parens, brackets, quotes. And being able to search programming language aware as in "only in strings", "only in comments", etc... All of those seem like they'd be useful features but I know of no editor that do any more than just a single regex with no context
    • gcmeplz 6y ago
      > It would be much easier for many users to be able to say "starts with x", "ends with y", "has abc in the middle" as 3 separate statements than to have to derive the regex that does it. This seems like a less error-prone and more testable way of writing regular expressions in code too! Writing out the individual portions of a regular expression might be a ton more verbose, but it's because regular expressions hide a ton of complexity with "write-only" shorthand.
  • aarroyoc 6y ago
    Some of the things you say can already be achieved with Prolog DCGs, which are more or less like pattern matching over lists (usually lists of chars, but not needed).
• aphroz 6y ago
  Smartphone Keyboard I cannot type a single sentence without making a typo and I have been using a smartphone for 12 years. I miss Blackberry's keyboard. At the moment I even cannot use my natural keyboard layout with a fast and responsive keyboard. I type 3 times slower on my phone than on a computer keyboard.
  • jbay808 6y ago
    Last time I visited Tokyo I bought a sleek little folding Bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket but unfolds to nearly full size and types very comfortably. By just unfolding it, it pairs with my Android phone and the on-screen keyboard disappears. Folding it up triggers the phone keyboard to reappear. I take it with me whenever I expect to write anything about as long as this comment. Being generally a luddite when it comes to devices, I'm honestly shocked at how seamless the pairing process is. I don't know why they don't sell these in North America.
    • flubert 6y ago
      Care to compare / contrast your keyboard to the folding keyboards on Amazon? https://www.amazon.com/Keyboard-Bluetooth-Geyes-Wireless-Smartphones/dp/B0876DSTWD/ https://www.amazon.com/Keyboard-Bluetooth-Geyes-Wireless-Sma... https://www.amazon.com/Geyes-Ultra-thin-Kickstand-Universal-Smartphone/dp/B06XXJVT8K/ https://www.amazon.com/Geyes-Ultra-thin-Kickstand-Universal-...
  • flubert 6y ago
    Has anyone tried to improve upon the Dasher eye-tracking thing for text composition? Seems like there could be more ideas here that haven't really been explored. http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html
  • maximedb 6y ago
    Would a smarter auto-correct help?
  • slothtrop 6y ago
    I'm finding the touch keyboard too impractical for my purposes so I'm going back to BB, probably the Key2 LE. There are other keyboard phones on the market now that run Android but they also don't have the productivity toolset that I'm accustomed to and prefer.
• kodablah 6y ago
  Client-side scraping to extract the signal from the noise on commonly used sites. I've seen older (yet still updated) implementations/portals, but I'm surprised nobody has made federating site scripts easy for client-side use to expose as pseudo localhost site APIs and a portal that resembles Craigslist to bring all of the data together. Again, this has obviously been half done, but it's not packaged for mass appeal ala popcorn time for general web info.
• tedsanders 6y ago
  Better spellcheck. My Google keyboard still doesn't recognize COVID as a word, and I don't know how to teach it. I have screenshots too of Google docs giving red underlines to simple English words. I expected spellcheck to be far better by 2020. Perhaps incentives haven't been aligned.
  • gfxgirl 6y ago
    Did you turn off the keyboard's online features? I just typed "covif" into Google Keyboard on iOS and it corrected it to "covid"
• marmaduke 6y ago
  Placebo effect: how can knowing you’ve taken a treatment improve your condition, without having actually taken the treatment?
  • gfxgirl 6y ago
    There is considerable debate on if the placebo effect is real and for what situations it is. For example apparently it can cure a headache but AFAIK there is no evidence it can cure actual physiological issues (cancer, sickness, ...) It makes some sense it would work on pain since pain at some point is just a signal to your brain and you chose consciously or unconsciously to change your perception of that signal. On the other hand there is nothing placebo will do to stop that cancer from growing or those viruses from multiplying.
    • marmaduke 6y ago
      Given the various issues with painkillers, a better understood placebo effect would be great even if it is pain only.
• breck 6y ago
  Tunnels. Even with Boring Company I think they are being underinvested in. Can completely revolutionize cities once the cost drops. More green space. Eliminates air, noise and light pollution. No more unsightly telephone poles and wires. Reclaim prime land for other uses.
  • joubert 6y ago
    New York —https://earthlymission.com/new-york-city-underground-infrastructure/ https://earthlymission.com/new-york-city-underground-infrast... London — https://londonist.com/london/transport/london-cutaways https://londonist.com/london/transport/london-cutaways
• slg 6y ago
  A way for a company I interact with infrequently to identify me over the phone. Pin codes and secret questions are easy to forget when they can literally go years without being used. What was my favorite movie when I setup my ISP account in 2016? This leads to customer service reps that are too forgiving and are easily susceptible to social engineering.
  • mfontani 6y ago
    Randomize the answers to those things, and stick them in your password manager alongside (or separate from) the log-in information. Site asks for my mother maiden's name? Let me check "pwgen 18 1"... That'll be "Viquo4cai2gienoo2p".
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      That may be vulnerable to social engineering if the person on the other side accepts "I'm using a randomly generated string of letters" as an answer :). So if your password manager accepts user-provided passwords, I'd just string two or three random words together and use that as the maiden name.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • xavierlint 6y ago
      Never understood those kind of "security" questions. Is the site really going to hand out access to my account if that question gets answered correctly? Also, some sites don't allow you to not set up one, so it's like forcing users to open up a new vector to be hacked.
  • drzaiusapelord 6y ago
    Charles Schwab does this with voice recognition. It certainly works, but I'm guessing its cheaper to use these legacy systems.
  • armincerf 6y ago
• imgabe 6y ago
  The phone system. It seems like it's an unholy mess. I moved from the US to Hong Kong this year. I have a US number that I want to keep, and of course I need a local Hong Kong number. So, the US number is on my Google Fi account that I pay to keep active and I get a prepaid SIM card for Hong Kong. I can switch the SIM cards if I travel back. But why? We have two semi-independent networks, one for voice and one for data. The voice one is arcane, region-locked (local numbers cannot easily or cheaply make international calls), and subject to all sorts of restrictions and regulations. The data network can send and receive data to anyone, anywhere in the the world, for practically free. Why are we even bothering with the legacy voice network at this point? Why can't I get one number that works anywhere in the world? Google Fi kind of does. It's great if you live in the US and travel a lot, but I've heard that if you're living outside the US and use it outside the US too much, they'll shut down your account. Even porting the number to Google Voice isn't a solution. It only works in a few select countries and of course Google might decide to just shut it down at any time, so who knows. Internet speeds are more than fast enough now even on mobile in most of the world that you should be able to handle voice calls with a data-only plan. If someone figured out the backend to connect it to the legacy telephone system, to just have one phone number that is independent of a carrier that you can access from anywhere with an Internet connection, they'd make a killing.
  • uncomputation 6y ago
    Not to mention, data-only calls are often much higher quality in my experience. Whenever I go from FaceTime audio to regular calls, I can’t believe I used to use them all the time
    • mod 6y ago
      This is not my experience at all. I've not used FaceTime, but messenger calls are terrible.
  • withinboredom 6y ago
    In a lot of places, the old PTSN is the only connection. I've been in places where the number of phones in one space made data use impossible, but I could still place a call just fine. In some phones, you can even force data to 1G to use the voice frequencies and avoid using the LTE frequencies.
• Bukhmanizer 6y ago
  Social etiquette for online spaces. Especially during a pandemic year, I'm surprised that this hasn't been more of a topic of discussion. Mostly, if people do talk about social etiquette, it's within the context of not explicitly pissing people off, or looking good to your boss. I've never seen anyone talk about actually having good social interactions online. I've had a few friends change jobs during the pandemic, and the thing they immediately tell me is that none of them have made any friends at work since starting virtually. They all just work on their own tickets, and whatever collaboration there is, is pretty transactional. Zoom "happy hours" pretty much get dominated by two or three voices (usually of the most senior people) and everyone else just listens, because you can't have 2 conversations at a time. I've heard a bunch of the most cringeworthy techniques that managements have tried, to enhance socialization among employees. In person, some things are pretty obvious. If someone is new, usually a good team will invite you into the conversation somehow. It would be weird if you got to your office and sat down and for days no one asked you anything about yourself. But it's perfectly fine to log into slack and have no DMs for weeks or even months.
  • raihansaputra 6y ago
    I started a new job since March, this is similar to what I’ve experienced. Fortunately my team has some ways to work around the limitations (team lunch and what not) so it’s definitely not terrible, but I’m missing the spontaneous smoke/coffee breaks from in-office type of work.
  • daniellarusso 6y ago
    I think alot of this are symptoms of bad management or inexperienced management dealing with remote work. I have had to rise to the occasion, and facilitate icebreakers with new hires of other teams (that work with my team). Their managers thought nothing of directing the new hires to slack and email a handful of strangers. The companies or individuals that had successfully implemented remote work prior to the pandemic, I think are dealing with it better. The best tip I read was from the Zapier remote work ‘guide’, to use the Slack giphy add-on, because it is easier to convey emotions via an animated gif versus text. Of course, it was a major setback when we had to ban it for inappropriate use.
• ioseph 6y ago
  Sustainable timber. Given it's popularity as a building material (at least in Australia) I'm surprised there isn't more research into genetically modifying trees to grow quickly / have desirable characteristics for construction / need less land and water. I wonder if lab grown timber is a possibility. (I could also imagine a GM'd fast growing tree becoming a ecological disaster though...)
  • Ekaros 6y ago
    Quick and desirable for construction is a hard one. A slower growth is better as the food is then denser which means it's stronger. Maybe solution is some type of composite of fast growing fiber material combined with some type of binder...
    • ioseph 6y ago
      I guess in many ways we're doing that already with pine board ply and bamboo benchtops.
• throwaway7281 6y ago
  Internet as a public good.
• uncomputation 6y ago
  Voice assistant technology. It seems like Alexa and Siri keep getting more features and integrations (one far more than the other) but the actual language processing is rather basic. A different way of phrasing something throws off the assistant entirely, or your basically using a hard-coded menu just with your voice.
  • kreeben 6y ago
    It seems to me we that need an app on our devices that we trust that is divorced from the device's OS (and it's vendor's cloud) that will help us in transitioning from hard-coded voice interfaces driven by dictionaries of known commands and interfaces that simply fail to understand you to something that is truly useful to us and that gets better and more useful over time. Until we have a voice assistant or voice driven OS, can we please have some of us working on a voice-driven work-flow? My eye sight is getting worse by the day and my finger joints are getting sore. I need a voice driven work-flow, soon.
    • uncomputation 6y ago
      Very true. I feel open-source would be a great fit for a voice assistant
• rafal-pieprzyca 6y ago
  Technology to store greenhouse gases
  • thereIsHope 6y ago
    The most effective CO2 sequester technology already exists : trees. Once we end with the number 1 cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss, the very destructive animal agriculture industry, we'll be able to reforest / rewild UP TO 80% of the land that we currently use for crops because that's the part used to grow crops to feed the 75 billion cows, pigs, chickens that we unnecessarily breed, feed and kill every single year. 80% of agricultural land is wasted on that as it only produces 18% of our calories which will be easily substituted by plant-based foods. Also water waste : 55% of fresh water And much more In a plant based world, vast amounts of land will be able to rewilded, restoring the original habitats that were cut down (deforestated) to make space for all those cows that we don't need. If you want to see data about this check out the white paper from Climate Healers
• kevin_nisbet 6y ago
  Maybe not so much surprised but more disappointed that sustainable public infrastructure isn't more in focus. Things like road surfaces that don't need to be replaced every couple of years, or better consideration when large infrastructure spending comes around how those bridges, dams, water works, etc, etc will be monitored, maintained and expanded over time.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    To extend that point: I wish there was some focus developing low-maintenance technologies - i.e. things that live long and don't require active maintenace or attention, because they passively or actively clean and fix themselves. It would be nice not just for infrastructure, but also for every household. Despite the proliferation of machines that reduce the household workload, we're still wasting large amounts of time keeping our houses clean and in working condition.
  • uncomputation 6y ago
    This is my cue to mention Solar Roadways, which I’ve been a fan of since 2013-14. They would solve or beautify so many existing problems
    • etrabroline 6y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4&list=PLPnz7ojKD2ypn5GgSkUwyAcIQ0gSMKszi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4&list=PLPnz7ojKD2... Thunderf00t has some really entertaining videos about that.
  • jdsalaro 6y ago
    > Things like road surfaces that don't need to be replaced every couple of years, I remembered this article where they discuss self-healing materials for use in road construction: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/4/15544156/potholes-self-healing-materials-infrastructure-transportation https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/4/15544156/potholes-self-hea...
  • alexchamberlain 6y ago
• gangstertim 6y ago
  Battery-operated household items. I have a cordless dewalt drill that I can use all day on my jobsite, but every single appliance in my kitchen needs a cord. Hand mixer? Immersion blender? Regular blender? Stand mixer? Everything has a cord. Why isn't there a kitchen battery system yet? Similarly: I'd love to have a little reading sconce on my wall next to my bed, but running a circuit through the existing walls without tearing them up is impossible. Why isn't there any attractive battery-powered home lighting? Sure, maybe overhead lights for lighting a room need more draw, but there's no reason to plug in a desk lamp, wall sconce, or coffee table light every day. Especially for renters who aren't about to hire an electrician—why no battery-powered lights designed for the home? Periodic recharging is annoying, but it's better than literally not being able to have a light where I want it. There's a market here and it's not new technology. It's just repackaging existing technology with a splash of industrial design. Hell, the battery requirements for my drill are much greater than the battery requirements for my immersion blender. It shouldn't even be expensive!
  • zbowling 6y ago
    Battery powered devices like this do better with brushless motors to save battery. Corded devices which can use a brushed motor since they can sacrifice some electrical efficiency. Good brushless isn't cheap. Fixed appliances this aren't really going to go from kitchen to kitchen like your drill either. Probably pulling it out from the counter and using it and then putting it away. Why deal with batteries?
  • lock-free 6y ago
    I'd guess because the market isn't really there when wire is extremely cheap and the building codes require more outlets than most people need. The wire for your sconce has already been run through the wall, it's at an outlet. Managing cables is not that hard. Power tools are a bit different because they need to fit into any given tight space about once, and can't rely on wall power being nearby. Your sconce and kitchen appliances don't work on the same assumption.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > and the building codes require more outlets than most people need Does it, though? Never in my life I've seen a house anywhere in the countries I've been to, that would have a sufficient number of outlets. Myself I think corded devices are fine, but houses come with way too few outlets.
• TrackerFF 6y ago
  It IS being worked on, but things move quite slow - and there doesn't seem to have been much progress for decades, but: Cure for hair-loss. Some might say it's just vanity, but if someone could come up with a cure, and sell it affordably, that would be a multi-billion, maybe even trillion dollar industry. Going from quite balding (NW4-NW7 in balding terminology) to a full head of hair makes most guys look a solid 10-20 years younger. The hair-loss industry has been in a permanent state of "in 5 years..." for 30 years now. And yes, I know there are more pressing issues in the world of medicine, but it's a real problem for tens of millions of people.
  • klaudius 6y ago
    Balding is not vanity. It is a marker for serious health problems. Balding men are several times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, for example.
    • na85 6y ago
      Are you suggesting that a cure for male pattern baldness would address heart disease?
      • klaudius 6y ago
        Yes. You can look up scientific papers linking balding with health issues. We know premenopausal women have much lower incidence of heart problems than men. Some ethnicities of men like east asians also have better heart health and incidentally have better hair than caucasian men.
        • jazoom 6y ago
          Correlation does not mean causation. I'd actually be very surprised if fixing the hair addressed any correlated heart disease. The hair would be a downstream symptom, almost certainly. I'm a doctor, if that makes a difference.
          • 6y ago
• thethought 6y ago
  vRoomba for at home vid conferencing. With multiple independant cam, mic, light sensors etc. On-board AI for optimal presentation. Individual preference control via app.. and so on.
• ellis0n 6y ago
  I think for developers (and users) everything is broken, just check https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 That's programming 1.0, and we're need programming 2.0 What I mean about programming 2.0: - better security - less bugs and more stability - less complex code and API - less APIs - no halts, reactive live coding everywhere - less coding, NoCode variants PS: Who works on programming 2.0 besides me https://animationcpu.com/ https://animationcpu.com/ ?
  • ipnon 6y ago
    We need higher-level, context dependent programming languages. Homotopy type theory promises to be revolutionary, and Jet Brains is working on integrating the theory with their IDE, so you can write any program with well defined inputs I and outputs O and the computer will find all equivalent programs for you. Programmers would no longer need to get lost in the implementation details.
    • ellis0n 6y ago
      Thanks Jet Brains for C-Lion !
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • Maximus9000 6y ago
    Why "Less APIs"?
    • ellis0n 6y ago
      Because https://imgur.com/gallery/cxwSlUX https://imgur.com/gallery/cxwSlUX
      • Maximus9000 6y ago
        hmm, I'm still confused. Are you saying there are just too many APIs and my app's little API is insignificant in a world overflowing with APIs? What if several customers want access to my API? Is there an alternative that I should be using (like GraphQL)?
• tabtab 6y ago
  GUI's, such as a GUI Markup Standard. Mobile UI conventions stole the show, but IN PRACTICE gui's still rule the office and productivity world. Yet, our current web standards are GUI and CRUD un-friendly. To be desktop-like in a browser requires giant JavaScript libraries which are clunky and buggy. GUI's may no longer be sexy, but they still run the backlots of the world and that's not likely to change within the next decade or more. Mobile UI's are a sub-set of rich GUI's, which logically means they don't have the same full ability. I could list several UI patterns GUI's do with fewer human eye and finger movements. So, let's create a state-friendly GUI markup standard so we can have rich GUI's in browsers without requiring bloated buggy JS/CSS libraries. And somewhat related, our current web standards have too many "positioning problems" such that they can't replace PDF's. PDF's are needed because end users (non-IT office workers) want WYSIWYG documents; they can't afford to go to CSS school.
  • NewLogic 6y ago
    What makes you certain any theoretical GUI markup standard would improve on the industry standard of Electron and Chromium wrapped web components? Just need to look at the utility and performance of vscode to see what is currently possible.
    • hombre_fatal 6y ago
      People who set out to invent "better GUI tools" always eventually realize it's no the specifics of the programming language used to build them that's hard. It's high level things like state management. iOS doesn't even have a stable answer to React, yet. The problem isn't JS/CSS.
      • tabtab 6y ago
        Why is state management a problem? Could you give a sample scenario? Have all screens be tied to an application session instead of managing page per page. A given screen stays put the entire session (although may be hidden or removed as needed). Its state would be hierarchically addressable & examinable, such as requesting "scopeA:screenB.panelC.widgetD.value". (Scoping clause optional.) I have some further suggestions for state and scope management that would take up too much space here. The Oracle Forms client seemed to somehow pull it off. (It used a proprietary markup, not XML.) There are deficiencies with the Oracle Forms model, but it proved a browser-like GUI client approach can work. Companies loved Oracle Forms before Java ruined it. They weren't pretty, but cheap and practical to create and maintain. The Oracle Forms devs were 3x more productive than our MVC team and it took about 1/5 the code to do the same thing. Productivity died in CRUDville; we de-evolved. (Same for desktop VB & Delphi like tools, although they required per-PC reinstalls for app upgrades, unlike Oracle Forms.)
• tunesmith 6y ago
  Well, it's tongue-in-cheek, but more than once I've thought abut the ability to move somewhere without moving there. Like, if I live in Oregon, there's nothing stopping me from going on vacation to another state for months out of the year. So why can't I "move" there without having to physically go there? I think about this in context of the red/blue voting divide. If a couple million people in safe blue states "move" to red states, then the Senate would be more representative of the population. Or even to counties across the same state to break up gerrymandering. I'm sure it's illegal in a bevy of different ways, though.
  • gremlinsinc 6y ago
    I actually wanted to start a social network / organizing app. Around this. People essentially 'volunteer' to move where we need them to. But they actually would move for a few years. Maybe even stay there, permanently. As long as they live there, they can vote there. Emphasis at first would be red states close to turning blue, or with large electoral college votes. Then maybe states needed for local change, could ask people to move to 'support' the changes needed. Like legalizing cannabis in Utah (we'd need a lot more blue for that to ever happen even via ballot initiative, it's a miracle we got medicinal).
    • jbboehr 6y ago
      And this is why no one likes Californians moving to their state.
• JabavuAdams 6y ago
  Life support. AFAIK we can't keep someone alive in a sealed container for five years, even if we supply as much power as desired.
• lazyjones 6y ago
  Space colonization. Where's that moon colony we were promised?
  • krapp 6y ago
    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Americans stopped caring about the moon after they planted their flag on it to dunk on the Soviets. When China, Africa, India or whomever else lands on it in the future I hope they knock it down.
  • 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
    This is a start, but you may have to bypass the moon and go straight to Mars for your colony: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-starship-elon-musk-explains-rocket-to-the-moon https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-starship-elon-musk...
    • gremlinsinc 6y ago
      I don't get why they built the ISS and NOT a moon colony... I think a moon colony could be good for mining helium3, maybe creating some sort of manufacturing facilities (or maybe even an asteroid colony) that's a hub for space-mining. Got to start somewhere, and since it's more expensive to launch from our gravity, might make more sense if majority of space launches/etc was from space structures w/ less gravity. Though, a space colony would have to maybe figure out gravity, or something if that was magenitized uniforms that made your body feel as thoughit were in earth's gravity so you don't lose muscle/skeleton mass.
• drzaiusapelord 6y ago
  Ok I'm guessing this is super naive, but holy cow someone sell me a home robot. Ideally something with a good enough arm to load small things into the dishwasher, or at least unload onto a surface, open the front door, get the mail, put shoes where they need to be, pick up socks, dust/mop/broom, mow the lawn, fold towels, fold clean clothes from a basket, replace toilet paper, clean toilets, scoop out kitty poops, and maybe make the bed. God what a timesaver that would be. I'd pay small car prices for something like that.
  • kreeben 6y ago
    I have a robot under way that can pass the butter, sadly. But jokes aside, what a terrible life for an AI to live.
  • jibbers 6y ago
    This thinking makes me think of buttons to push buttons. Gotta go up a level and imagine toilets that don't need to be cleaned. That or become this automaton yourself. Making my bed each morning happens almost automatically before my brain is fully booted, after a while of forcing myself to make it.
  • withinboredom 6y ago
    You should watch the movie Robot & Frank: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1990314/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1990314/
  • pbadg3r 6y ago
    Load small things into the dishwasher: Do you want an internet-connected device that can pick up a butcher knife and move it at waist level, that has a human watching its camera to back it up when it fails? This objection applies to a bunch of your feature requests, since knives don't weigh that much :/ Open the front door: You can do this with a $5k investment in some IoT + automated door opener Get the mail: Curious what subtasks you imagine here (e.g. outdoor vs indoor, pick up packages, climb stairs, etc) Put shoes where they need to be, pick up socks: This could totally work today if you don't need to open doors and you don't mind organization on piles in the floor, but I think the use case isn't compelling enough on it's own to create sufficient demand. Dust/mop/broom: lots of people have robots for floors, but higher surfaces are hard to make work. Despite this, some teams have worked on bathroom-cleaning robots with this capability. Mow the lawn: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers Fold towels: Not that hard, but small market Fold clean clothes from a basket: Super hard if you never want to destroy the clothes, and hard even if you can destroy some clothes. Clean toilets, replace toilet paper: People are trying! Not going to be in homes for 5+ years though. Scoop out kitty poops: products like this exist, but you still have to manually unload them to a trash can. Make the bed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzNZrFhBeoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzNZrFhBeoY haha
• Klonoar 6y ago
  Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but if some lunatic out there wants to blow the money, build and sell a laptop at whatever price point you want that: - Supports CoreBoot - Isn't a rebranded Clevo shell and has close enough fit and finish to a recent MacBook. Read: No. Plastic. Case. - If there is ever the phrase "panel lottery" uttered about your machine, you've messed up. - No logos, or throw them on the underside like Purism. - The screen has to be relatively close to the MacBook in brightness + viewing angles. Give me an option for a glossy screen. - Trackpad must be glass. You won't get close to the MBP trackpad on the first or second pass, but try. - Go for some crazier vertical integration ala the M1. I don't care if it blocks upgrading certain parts, since I consider the industry to move fast enough that I won't _want_ the machine anymore in 4-5 years. - There is no need for touch of any kind, nor the ability to flip the screen or anything. Just make a damn laptop. - Edit: high quality boutique feeling support. I don't need an Apple Store equivalent, but at least invest in this. I get why Apple can do all of the above. I would pay literally twice what I pay Apple for a competing product. Currently, every laptop that I try feels like stepping back a few years. The upcoming Purism Librem 14, in terms of images, feels like it could _feel_ close - but I'm not impressed with their other products so I'll believe it when I see it. I remain shocked that System76 hasn't bothered with this. End my rant about this industry, I guess.
  • acd 6y ago
    If Lenovo would ship Coreboot Linux laptops that would fit the bill as premium and good laptop with open boot loader.
    • Klonoar 6y ago
      This comes close, but I don't find the build to be as nice as a MacBook, and trackpad is the same issue. I do often look at a ThinkPad and wonder, though.
• acd 6y ago
  An sustainable economic system that promotes sustainable consumption and recycling. That products are design for repairability and sustainability in such a system. Third an economic system that is not built upon debt slavery but promotes individual freedom in the age of robotics. That would be the three main things that needs fixing. Plus most countries needs four-seven weeks of vacation per year. This would promote healthier work life balance. Four day work week another one for work life balance.
• imranhou 6y ago
  Elementary Schooling - At a young age teaching skills such as Critical Thinking, Self awareness, Inculcating curiosity to understand others perspective, understanding logical fallacies, Ethical behavior are not prioritized. In a way these are more important than learning the normal sciences which can be taught at a later age. I find focus on that lacking outside of fleeting local attempts.
• germinalphrase 6y ago
  I teach at the high school level. I fervently believe that the lack of any kind of modernization of assessment tools for k12 educators is a profound impediment to the advancement of education (and instead we flail around with fads and bullshit). There are millions of assessment items created and administered by instructors everyday in the United States, but the results are unreliable so we spend billions on standardize testing which is “trustworthy” while also (often) having negative externalities. We accept this dual system because the two modes of assessment have different goals, but it is wildly inefficient. If it were possible to create an assessment platform that supported the rapid generation of unique and trustable assessments[1], we could have 1) more frequent/less costly assessments of student progress, 2) better instructor accountability, and 3) greater opportunities for non-traditional educational pacing. [1] more ‘contextual autocomplete’ than ‘discrete item creation’ as a primary mechanism for assessment creation. Yes, someone has to create the original bank of assessment materials - but, for the love of god, how many times has an assessment been developed on “To Kill a Mockingbird”, the Pythagorean Theorem, etc? Make the tool slick enough for content creation that it is at least on par with current offerings, do automated assessment analysis a la College Board, et. al. in the background on all submitted content, and then allow the instructor to create an assessment based on the class & lesson context as easily as accepting/rejecting a list of questions as a final “cultural fit” culling. Ideally, this final step would be completed as quickly as the instructor can read and reject assessment items such that they could - conceivably- be able to create and administer an assessment during a lesson in a manner that is reactive to the immediate progress of the students. Reduce the assessment feedback loop time this much and the ground would move under the profession. Edit: for those asking via email, the core tech here to be developed (at least initially) is automating the assessment analysis: how do you know the assessment items are correctly assessing what you want them to? Once you have that there would be downstream effects on instructional design, pathways to graduation, talent identification, etc. - but that’s the special sauce. The labor of assessment analysis is what provides the creators of standardized tests the ability to maintain a monopoly on trustworthy assessments. They will not themselves develop the tech to do this analysis in an automated and distributed fashion as it would undermine their core business. In this way, they seem to be trapped in a classic innovators dilemma.
• acd 6y ago
  That all parents must attend parenting classes. We have drivings licenses to drive a car. Yet there’s no such skill requirements for parents on how to raise children. Cost of dealing with miss raised children is very high.
  • sonotmyname 6y ago
    If you start mandatory parenting classes, you have to start mandating the ‘correct’ way to raise children. There are HUGE cultural, religious, financial, and educational barriers to implementing a one-size-fits-all parenting regime. Good luck with that!
    • froh 6y ago
      Why not a menu of different approaches to chose from? I don't get the jump from parenting classes to "the correct approach".
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Could be N correct approaches, but I guarantee you that for any set of criteria you devise, some group will come out of the woodwork and shout that it's Wrong. And you need testable criteria set by some central authority to determine whether someone learned the information from training course correctly - otherwise the whole course will turn into one big waste of time as it scales to large amount of training facilities.
        • froh 6y ago
          Like schooling. And some do homeschool. And some of those shouldn't. Anyhow schooling is considered a Good Thing (tm) and nobody claims we should give up on it, because some shout that it's _wrong_.
  • kreeben 6y ago
    But sometimes "miss raising" a kid is the right thing to do. This is especially true in a society that has gone awry. Shouldn't I as a parent and who knows my kids and their needs better than anyone be free to raise them as I see fit?
• larrydag 6y ago
  A truly free and open internet mesh network. We are so dependent on big telecom conglomerates as an ISP that run the last mile for the internet backbone. Wireless technology is simple and ubiquitous. I surprised we haven't come up with an ingenious way to connect all of our mobile and wifi hotspots together yet.
  • gremlinsinc 6y ago
    I had an idea, while thinking of a novel idea about how a people could challenge a fascist regime if one rose to power in the USA, You could disrupt communications, then create your own network using small drones with mesh nets that are the size of a dragon fly or something. They would need to be easy to build, fly, program, and use, and have good range for the mesh net. Then you could send out thousands which could park on trees, and be just far enough from each other to deliver good signals but be as cost-effective as possible. If one node goes out, another one flies in and takes it's place.
    • larrydag 6y ago
      I think it could be even simpler. Mobile phones are everywhere. You just need a mass of them to connect by some mesh app. For instance Firechat can be setup quickly. Perhaps integrate that with your drone idea.
• graderjs 6y ago
  Remote isolated browsing. It's supposed to be next big thing. I created an feature complete, clientless OSS version but interest in this has mostly been from random individuals not enterprise
• rhizome 6y ago
  Pagination is always obviously somewhere at the bottom of a site's priorities but...that's how people engage with more of your site. Random examples of the state of the art, which is remarkably similar to the state of the art, oh, 15 years ago: https://freefrontend.com/assets/img/css-pagination/paginations-options-and-designs.png https://freefrontend.com/assets/img/css-pagination/paginatio... https://uicookies.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Pagination-By-Rosa.jpg https://uicookies.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Pagination-... https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4a/af/58/4aaf58f56e598e6c485e10ae4f3c74b7.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4a/af/58/4aaf58f56e598e6c485e...
  • denimnerd42 6y ago
    yeah why is pagination on HN so bad I've hit more 4 times to see your comment.
    • rhizome 6y ago
      Moreso: does ">>" mean "go to the end" or "skip 10 pages ahead?"
• jbay808 6y ago
  Standardized interchangeable packaging for consumer goods. Ever been to a book store in Japan? Practically every book is the same size. As a result, bookshelves also are designed to be the right size to optimally fit books. This allows people to fit more books in small homes. It makes books easier to transport in book-sized boxes and book-sized bags too. You can get perfectly-fitting reusable cloth covers to protect your library books. American bookstores are a war between publishers to stick out from the shelves as much as possible. There's not much that a bookshelf designer can do except guess and have adjustable, oversized shelving. That also describes the state of today's packaging. With more shopping happening online, the need for items to stand out on a shelf is lower, and the need for them to fit nicely in boxes is much higher. Nobody would force you to design your products to fit the closest available standard package size, but companies would tend to do so more often because of the efficiency gains. Logistics companies like Amazon or Fedex could offer incentives.
  • gfxgirl 6y ago
    I don't think Japan is any different than the USA here. If you go look at paperback novels in the USA they are 95% all the same width and height, only the thickness changes. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-stack-of-science-fiction-paperback-books-28029500.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-stack-of-science-fiction-p... Conversely there are plenty of randomly sized books at a Japanese bookstore. I can go walk to some today and take pictures if you don't believe me. It's possible the USA is 50% standard sizes and Japan is 70% but it's definitely not close to all of them. Even in the USA many hardbacks are a standard size. At most they are off by an inch so that you can get by with certain sized shelves and have on extra shelf for really odd sizes.
    • jbay808 6y ago
      From my experience they're a world apart, but your mileage may vary. You can also tell just by doing image searches for "Japanese bookstore". Or looking at how often US bookstores shelve their books sideways. But I agree that there are exceptions in Japan (including specific shelves for oversized books, like coffee table photo albums), and in the US there are some sizes that books sometimes converge to.
• MichaelMoser123 6y ago
  expert systems; ML is great, but at the end of the day you need some logic in order to make sense. Maybe some combined system could try to take on the knowledge acquisition problem?
• Razengan 6y ago
  • Speech synthesis for games • Social connection apps (dating/friends/hangouts) that aren’t optimized for fleecing users • VR tourism • Some way to digitally record and recreate smells, scents and odors • A unified paradigm for controlling machines from fridges to elevators. Like tiny touchscreens with a modern and accessible UI you can hook up to with your phones
• ineptech 6y ago
  Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone). It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on, which is why I'm surprised it isn't being worked on by Amazon or similar. The only company I know of working on this is Urbit, which seems at this point unlikely to take off for a variety of reasons.
  • glandium 6y ago
    There is the Freedombox project.
    • swsieber 6y ago
      And sandstorm.io ... sort of. A similar problem space.
  • m463 6y ago
    There is unraid (which I haven't tried) I'm pretty happy with proxmox - apparently lots of people use the LXC appliances.
    • geoah 6y ago
      I’m honestly amazed at how bad the ux of unraid is. It does a ton of things I’ll give them that. But coming from synology’s dsm (xpenology) the experience has not been good. The lack of a web file manager is mind boggling.
  • decasteve 6y ago
    I wondered if this would move along more quickly if hosting from home were easier. Give everyone their own IP addresses and people tinkering their way to personal servers becomes more likely.
    • 6y ago
• optimalsolver 6y ago
  Python for serious game development. Python for browser scripting so we can have true, full-stack web development in Python. More aggressive expansion of Python into the embedded world. More Python for terminal scripting. Widespread teaching of Python to schoolchildren in order to make programming the new literacy. More aggressive attempt to make Python the lingua franca of the programming world. Did I leave anything out?
  • FloatArtifact 6y ago
    Cross platform accessibility APIs for integrating with OS and programs with high level scripting language bindings such as Python.
  • TulliusCicero 6y ago
    > Python for serious game development. While it's not python, Godot's 'native' language is GDScript, which is quite python-like. I don't really see the point of the rest of your comment though. Python is fine, but other languages have their advantages as well.
• Jemaclus 6y ago
  Hearing aid technology. In the last decade, the biggest innovation has been to add Bluetooth to premium hearing aids. It's a total game-changer, but I'm very surprised that there hasn't been more innovation on this front. I'm profoundly deaf, and my hearing aid gives me so many cool features... but I can't help but wonder how much better someone with normal hearing would feel with those features as well. I'm practically a cyborg at the moment, with technology augmenting my crappy hearing. Why wouldn't a normal person want to be a cyborg too, and have tech-augmented super-hearing?! Like many other things, I guess the demand just isn't there. And even though Bluetooth devices have made having things in your ear all the time way less stigmatized than they were when I was growing up, there's still a bit of embarrassment about having something like a hearing aid in your ear. It's a shame, really.
  • kevlened 6y ago
    If Musk’s claims are true, neuralink could make you hear music by bypassing your ears [0]. That could plausibly cure many types of deafness. [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-chip-music-stream-a9627686.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
• owletto 6y ago
  1) Full day elementary education. 2) Universal charging adaptors for electronic devices. 3) Charging for disposal of oversize trash like appliances and furniture. Reduce the bad habit of buying cheap junk only to toss them in a couple of years. This is how it works in Tokyo and consumers think full-life cycle cost of a product, not just the upfront cost. 4) Grocery trucks that make their daily rounds in urban neighborhoods so all people need to do is walk up and purchase fresh food. Reduces the need for grocery delivery which requires a lot of packaging. Basically same as food truck idea, but for fresh groceries.
• pronlover723 6y ago
  Sex toys that are more than just a piece of latex with a vibrator. There are tiny vibration units like the one in your phone, why aren't there sex toys with 200 of them and various patterns going through them? Why are there no sex toys that use expanding or contracting materials like electroactive polymers. The sex toy market is apparently 26 billion and growing.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• yodsanklai 6y ago
  Better cycling infrastructures, and some ways to prevent bicycle theft and vandalism. Cycling is a great mean of transportation, it's ecological, healthy, quiet, convenient. Lack of safety and theft are hindrance to more adoption.
  • slothtrop 6y ago
    Would like to see an innovation to improve this in the winter. It's too dangerous in snowy/icy conditions.
• FloatArtifact 6y ago
  Cross platform accessibility APIs for integrating with OS and programs with high level scripting language bindings such as Python. Most of the stuff is written in c# sharp or c++. that is platform specific. Honestly until platforms integrate accessibility into their frameworks that do not take Dev time to implement, accessibility access will continue to suffer.
• burlesona 6y ago
  Building new cities - actual cities, not suburbs - in the western world. This seems especially relevant in the US West Coast, where there’s both tremendous demand for development and population growth and vast amounts of undeveloped land, yet simultaneously, a housing shortage and general affordability crisis.
• academi 6y ago
  Sending information back in time. Think about how quickly science could progress by sending back results from experiments performed in different timelines.
• vbezhenar 6y ago
  Content categorisation service. For example news. There are thousands of topics. They are hierarchical. Every news article touches some of those topics to various degree. I would love to subscribe to some topics with some kind of tolerance. Like I want to know about most important world political news. I want to know about important IT news and my country political news. I want to know almost everything about Java, cryptography and my city news. I want to get every content from or about my favourite bloggers. And that should be extended to all kind of new content. News, articles, videos, tweets and so on.
• m463 6y ago
  Why don't cars (or even pickup trucks) have modular storage? Why isn't there a way to load up your groceries in the store, put them in your car in a modular way, and help you unload them into your house somehow? It could go even further to mini palettes that can be loaded and unloaded automatically. And even electrical cool or cold boxes to keep stuff at the right temperature as you drive home.
  • dharmab 6y ago
    I think storage bins/totes and coolers work fine for most people. Throw a folding dolly in there if you want to move them faster. Bed organizers are already a popular addon for pickup trucks, including rolling drawers.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • trestenhortz 6y ago
    I dreamed once if the car that has a little shopping cart that dicks with the back of the car.
    • dharmab 6y ago
      Honda experimented with some ideas. The CR-V once came with an integrated folding picnic table and the Honda City had a space for a 50cc Motocompo folding scooter.
• walleeee 6y ago
  Sustainable agriculture. Ag is the material basis of human society. We have to stop destroying soil. We have to stop poisoning ecosystems. We have to minimize artificial fertilizer inputs. We have to stop emitting and start sequestering atmospheric carbon to mitigate climate instability. If we don't do this we will likely see widespread crop failures and food shortages within 50 years. Land use practices must be reformed to protect soil health. Agriculture must become carbon negative. It may be possible to tweak crops to increase CO2 incorporation rates and store more carbon in soil, for instance.[0] I want to leave future humans a planet with fertile soils, a stable climate, and vibrant life. I do not want our grandchildren to live in concrete domes and eat out of yeast vats. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17174 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17174
  • agf 6y ago
    Any thoughts on the automated vertical farms that are starting to see good results?
    • walleeee 6y ago
      I think they may make sense in some locations. I don't see them scaling to replace traditional ag, barring some unforeseen advance yielding extremely cheap and plentiful clean energy. Besides significant power requirements, large construction projects come with large emissions footprints, as do synthetic fertilizers (it may be possible to repurpose existing buildings, and compost could help provide for some portion of nutrient needs; this would require a sea change in social and lifestyle conventions which is currently happening far too slowly). There are also real possibilities of supply chain and infrastructure unreliability due to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, geopolitical tensions, etc. What's most appropriate is likely highly context-dependent. I think a multi-pronged approach is best, and vertical farms could certainly play a role. Personally I see halting deforestation and fossil fuel use/extraction as the most urgent priority. I'm also a bit biased toward crop breeding/engineering for increased carbon uptake and soil sequestration (the lab I work in is pursuing this); it could help restore soil health while improving yield as well as resilience to environmental stressors. I don't know much about the details of vertical farming, though. If you have anything to share, I'd love to check it out.
• exabrial 6y ago
  Stronger Permanent Magnets, Flow Batteries, Fuel cells. Phones that don't copy all of Apple's dumb decisions.
  • pySSK 6y ago
    What are some of these dumb decisions? Not arguing. Genuinely curious.
• jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  1. Regeneration of teeth. Maybe with stem cell biotech? I don’t know what is relevant but it’s a damn pity we have to have root canals and screw nuts and bolts for fallen teeth. 2. Nanobots that get into your bloodstream and dissolve plaque and repairs old cells/regenerates tissues.
• thereIsHope 6y ago
  Ending the subsidies to the animal agriculture lobby, the industry that is the most destructive to the environment and causes unnecessary horrible suffering to trillions of sentient beings every year. It's the cause of 90% of deforestation worldwide, the main cause of the 6th massive species extinction (due to deforestation), water pollution (75 billion cows, pigs and chickens produce tons of manure that are dumped in our rivers and leaked into underground water), a leading cause of green house gas emissions (from 14% to 60% depending on the study), one of the main causes of air pollution (manure is also sprayed to the air and we breathe it), main cause of ocean dead zones and pesticide pollution (because breeding and growing animals requires waaay more crops than using crops directly to feed people) etc etc etc Yet tax payers money, billions of dollars in the USA alone every year, is being gifted to this extremely unsustainable and harmful industry, to compensate for their loss of sales (as consumers educate themselves, find out the truth behind this cruel toxic industry and move towards more ethical and sustainable choices), which is basically corporate welfare and doesn't happen with other industries. If a car manufacturer's sales decline, do you want your tax money to go to fund their company as corporate welfare or do you want your taxes used for hospitals, schools, roads etc? Why are we wasting billions of needed dollars to maintain the lifestyle of the owners of CAFOs (concentrated aninal feed operations, that is, big industrial animal farms -subsidies don't go to small farmers for the most part-) Look up Agriculture Fairness Alliance if you want to see the data and learn more about the very critical and urgent task of ending these absurd destructive subsidies and instead help farmers transition to sustainable and healthy business models that will allow us to avoid the worst consequences of climate change if we do switch fast enough So yeah I am shocked that this very urgent matter is not being discussed and challenged yet at a mainstream level
  • 93po 6y ago
    I know nothing about the topic but is it possible these subsidies exist for national security? I've heard the argument for subsidies before being that if we outsource too much food production, we're suddenly at the mercy of foreign countries to survive. And the only way to ensure continued domestic production when it's not price competitive to foreign countries is to subsidize
• jacknews 6y ago
  Post-capitalism, post-market economies. I think at this point it's clear that market economies are good at getting people out of bed, and for innovating, finding new markets, optimizing for efficiency, etc, and generating 'wealth'. But they are perhaps not good at creating the right kind of wealth, spreading it fairly, fostering healthy societies, respecting the environment, optimizing for resilience, sustainability, etc. It isn't really fixed by what we do now; tacking on taxes by government - which is always seen as 'lazy bureaucrats stealing from wealth creators', etc. We should be researching, and testing alternatives, built into the very fabric of how economies are structured, along with ideas like Georgeist land taxes, universal basic equity/dividend etc.
• young_unixer 6y ago
  A desktop OS that doesn't suck.
  • nrr 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, what does "doesn't suck" mean to you?
    • young_unixer 6y ago
      - No spying on what I do with my computer. - General purpose. Applications don't have to pay a fee to the OS maker be treated as applications. - Simple, but aesthetically pleasing interface. Not trying to push weird paradigms (e.g. laptop/tablet hybrids UIs). Polished look. - Applications are installed through regular files. Stores are acceptable, but only as frontends to this same file interface, not as replacements. It should always be possible to store the installer or bundle as a regular file. - Consistent vision. Programs don't feel like they were developed by completely different groups of people with completely different purposes. - No surprise updates. User has full control over the computer. - Preferably open source. Apple have been the closest to this OS nirvana (if you forget the open source part), but they decided to screw their users with spying and forced signing of applications instead.
      • 93po 6y ago
        Linux Mint seems to check all these for me.
      • selfhoster11 6y ago
        Watch the space around the Haiku OS. It's a modern, open source BeOS clone that looks like it could develop into a decent system.
• williesleg 6y ago
  Something new like Steve jobs and bill gates used to do. All boring whining and bullshit these days as everybody's an expert at everything but nobody does anything.
• gullywhumper 6y ago
  Car-free or significantly car-limited communities. Cars that are safer for pedestrians (not just for occupants in cars). Better traffic safety enforcement. Automobiles kill ~6k pedestrians and almost 140k are sent to the ER in the US - many of which will have life-altering injuries. https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...
  • asperous 6y ago
    There is https://culdesac.com/ https://culdesac.com/ But I think the market has basically spoken on automobiles, people are more then willing to take the safety risk for convenience and many are willing to live far far outside the city for one extra bedroom.
    • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      >But I think the market has basically spoken on automobiles I don't know about the US but within the UK you have to pay a premium to live somewhere where you aren't car dependent.
      • denimnerd42 6y ago
        Same in the US but only because areas that are like that are so small and are only location based, not intentional.
        • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
          It does show there is demand though.
        • presentation 6y ago
          So do what smart cities do and make the livable space larger with efficient public transit.
  • kiliantics 6y ago
• eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Static code optimization, particularly for the web. There’s a really great thing happening where more and more frontend work is embracing static site generation, while using tools more commonly used for client rendered content (eg react), but the frameworks then ship tons of JS duplicating the mostly static content of these sites, roughly doubling page size and at least doubling render times. Easy to use, type safe, automatically validated/decoded/encoded/documented interface boundaries. There’s awesome tooling for this and nothing I’m aware of checks all those boxes, at least on platforms I develop on. I’m considering experimenting with solutions for the former, and actively developing a solution for the latter for TypeScript/Node.
• Trias11 6y ago
  Unbiased, independent, unsponsored "CONS Reports". Before buying something I want to know all CONS about specific thing, service, product, car, real estate, etc... Everyone pitching PROS. I want to know CONS BEFORE I commit.
• DecoPerson 6y ago
  Protocells. Self-replicating cells that can be programmed to perform specific tasks. The first protocells will be bacteria with heavily modified DNA. Eventually, we’ll be able to build fully-artificial self-replicating protocells (more “artificial cell” than “small robot”). Being fully-artificial will help us integrate new tech that nature hasn’t quite discovered/made-full-use-of yet — like different battery techs, RF communication, transistors, etc. Here’s a good paper exploring the topic: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/5/2/1019/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/5/2/1019/htm Imagine a blob that could wash along the floor, clearing 100% of detritus and intelligently depositing it — or perhaps even recycling it. Imagine being able to repair a worn hip joint by injecting then commanding these protocells — no surgery required. Imagine them self-assembling into structures to transport, deposit and combine material like an advanced 3D printer, building objects to incredible detail, or massive structures quickly, or both: massive structures with incredible detail. Imagine programming them to kill all COVID-19 virions!
  • godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
    Imagine programming them to make paperclips :P
  • ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    The word you are looking for is "minimal artificial life/cell". They are being worked on, a lot. A bigger problem is increasing funding for life sciences and making commercialisation cheaper.
• spaetzleesser 6y ago
  I would like more research on trash sorting and recycling. It looks like this would be a perfect test bed for advanced computer vision and robotics.
• ryanSrich 6y ago
  The typical ones - cancer and longevity. Why billionaires aren’t dumping 99% of their net worth into extending their lives is beyond me.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• yor1001 6y ago
  Google Wave. Basically integrated information transmitting and collaboration in an easy to digest manner. Google failed miserable with their invite requirement.
  • nrr 6y ago
    Google's marketing around Wave was extremely disappointing to me. The invitation system was only a small part of their problem. I know I was incredibly excited about it because I immediately understood it to be a way to kill email and the things that surround it. To think that Microsoft's Bedlam DL3 incident could have been a bitter memory. Oh well. I guess we're stuck with email as it continues to exist today. Reply all. "Remove me from this thread please." Send mail.
• rubicks 6y ago
  Open source firmware.
• ykevinator 6y ago
  Term limits
• inetknght 6y ago
  Farming automation, particularly in vertical farming. Space exploration, particularly in LEO manufacturing.
• flemhans 6y ago
  Age reversal / life extension. Most people seem contempt with the fact they'll die pretty soon. Otherwise every scientist would be working on curing this inevitable "disease".
• t0astbread 6y ago
  Frameworks and languages to build small to mid-sized web applications that aren't no-code or low-code or tied into an online service. Basically, PHP alternatives. Here's a "wishlist" of features I'd like in such a framework: - Absolutely no boilerplate code: It should feel more like a powerful templating language than a general purpose programming language. - A static type system that's checked before your application can go live - Vertical integration, especially towards the database: You could go really crazy with this. LINQ-style query-ability is just the beginning. Imagine if you had a typed access control framework that lets you specify which users/roles can access a database column. Or built-in ways to handle migration and automatic schema checks to prevent mismatch issues. - Useful primitives, especially around authentication and authorization: For something simple I should only have to write my business logic. - FFI (for example to C or JVM libraries) - Automatic and safe dependency updates
• geoffeg 6y ago
  The coding part of the software development process. We're still writing code in a text editor like we were 40+ years ago. The editors have become more powerful but writing code is still very similar.
  • jhayward 6y ago
    40* years ago I was using an IBM 029 keypunch, and sequencing my cards using an offline sequencer in case I dropped the deck. Today I use an editor that knows, semantically, the context of everything I type. It suggests nouns, and checks compatibility. It automatically shows me documentation for APIs. It knows several hundred common pitfalls to watch out for and suggests corrections for them. It even auto-formats my code so I don't have to dink around doing that. We've come a long long way in 40 years. * Ok, it was actually 1979. We got Vaxes and VT100 terminals with VMS EDIT 4 years later. The state of the art in editing was QED, a souped up version of unix 'ed', and vi hadn't really escaped Berkeley yet. Somewhere in MA and CA, some people were munging TECO to become Emacs.
  • xavierlint 6y ago
    Besides all other points by jhayward, what kind of changes do you have in mind? From my perspective at first sight it isn't necessarily negative that we are doing the things in a pretty simlar way as to how we were doing them 40 years ago.
    • geoffeg 6y ago
      A few things I've been considering for the last few years. These are just brainstorming thoughts, so I definitely haven't thought these ideas through. * Why do editors allow us to write invalid code? Most editors know the syntax of the language, many embed (or connect to) the language runtime. If the editor knows a file is going to be invalid, why allow it to be saved (allow the user to force the save, of course). * Why are editors still showing us entire files instead of functions? I usually edit code by looking at functions and how they relate to other functions. Why not show a function at a time and allow you to bring up multiple functions at a time to edit, regardless of which file it's in? Light Table (http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/) started down the path of what I was thinking, especially with the continual/inline code evaluation. Once again, these are primarily just thoughts I've been considering. I haven't found a good outlet for discussing my ideas, everyone I discuss them with seems to respond that "that's the way things are" or "that sounds complicated". I've been considering writing a little editor proof of concept to explore some of these thoughts.
• mbgerring 6y ago
  There is a staggering amount of work that needs to take place within a decade to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels, and compared to the size of the workload, very little of that work is currently in progress.
• energ8 6y ago
  Residential Flywheel Energy Storage by Velkess: http://velkess.com/letter.html http://velkess.com/letter.html Maybe sad more than surprised
  • ccarter84 6y ago
    Yea, I've also been thinking about this one a bit lately. Really thought it had a shot, but the runway ran out.
• thisistheend123 6y ago
  Hard problems: - Poverty - Inequality - Racial Discrimination - Affordable Health and Education - Old Age Care The list goes on. We are 200 years into industrial revolution and have made significant scientific and economic progress. Time we start looking for solutions to the really Hard problems.
  • onecommentman 6y ago
    That’s a list of topics, but not problems. Need problem statements and definition of terms before they get to be called “hard problems”.
  • hn_asker 6y ago
    I agree. The question to ask is "how do you boil those problems down to computational problems?". Those problems you've listed are broad but solutions to subproblems would go a long way. I'm surprised this hasn't been explored deeply yet.
• bra-ket 6y ago
  1) the 'I' in 'AI': Cognitive architectures, knowledge representations and data structures, memory models, neurolinguistics, causal inference. It seems like the AI field got stuck optimizing a particular (and very primitive) decades old ANN model, which is a dead end in my view. 2) Alternative nuclear reactors & fuels, it seems like the field is stuck in iterative improvements on decades old LWR/PWR designs.
• mNovak 6y ago
  Packaged 'apps' to run in the cloud. Rather than everyone selling a SaaS which they're just hosting on AWS anyway, they should just have a one-click install of an instance to my personal AWS. There's really no reason it should be any harder than installing an app to my phone or computer. I've seen one or two "launch on AWS" buttons about, and they have a marketplace, but clearly these aren't widely adopted or useable. I think this would open up some interesting opportunities for non-technical individuals and small businesses. Plus then you know you own your data.
  • blackoil 6y ago
    Digital Ocean Marketplace https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/ https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/ is something similar.
  • ali92hm 6y ago
    When I worked on Microsoft Azure, my team created many Azure Resource Manager templates that we offered on Azure Marketplace. There was no charge for the software, only the underlying resources that you consumed. While privacy and owning your data was a benefit, this had many more downsides and 99% of our customers were asking us to offer those solution as a managed PaaS offering. First, because the app was single tenanted the cost for most users did not justify the benefits that they were getting from it. Maintenance, trouble shooting, scaling, updating, and support are just few areas to call out where our customers had trouble and wanted us to run everything for them and just give them access. Of course the customer experience lacked mostly due to the lack of a better platform for offering such "one click to deploy" apps. But still the customer needs to manage the uptime of the system and have on-call engineers who not only are intimately familiar with our software but can quickly identify and fix the issue.
• therockspush 6y ago
  Maybe it's already out there, or isn't worth it. Local news. Twitter is too noisy, nextdoor has too many busybodies.
• dkdk8283 6y ago
  Privacy and forgiveness. Cancel culture needs to be cancelled.
• yigithan 6y ago
  Technology to efficiently visualize any part of the body at atomic level in real time. And, technology to efficiently cut the bonds between atoms in any visualized part of the body. What would something like this require? What is missing? I would expect this to be the next step after MRI/electron microscopy and gamma knife. If this existed, we wouldn’t need vaccines for Covid, we would just shoot the bonds of those ... . Also the same cure for cancer cells.
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    What I've been wanting for years/decades is consumer level devices to see inside the body without opening. We've been doing it for many decades in expensive facilities or doctors offices, it should be democratized by now. Echography/ultrasound (huge market for pregnant women btw), sports injuries, sprain ankle, muscle ache, stomach pain, I want to see what it looks like inside. Soft tissues, bones, tendons... I want to take hundreds of images of the normal state and compare when something is weird. Interpretation of images is hard but we can learn it. And it will be much more data that we can feed to ML models to help us make sense of it. To this day I'm still puzzled that I can't buy a €100 device and look inside myself.
• rudismds 6y ago
  Steel Bite Pro Reviews Well, dental expenses are no longer as problematic, because researchers and manufacturers have produced a self-sufficient supplement, crafted out of natural ingredients, to help those wanting to maintain excellent oral hygiene in a natural, affordable and effortless way. Steel Bite Pro is supposed to be taken at night before sleeping for optimal results.As per the official website, Steel Bite Pro is plant-based, and oozing with healthy vitamins and minerals, which enable it to improve and maintain one’s oral and dental cleanliness effectively. http://supplementsnetwork.org/steel-bite-pro-reviews/ http://supplementsnetwork.org/steel-bite-pro-reviews/ https://twitter.com/SteelBitePro3/status/1343575812616855553 https://twitter.com/SteelBitePro3/status/1343575812616855553 https://tocal.instructure.com/eportfolios/9590/ https://tocal.instructure.com/eportfolios/9590/ https://www.pexels.com/@steel-bite-pro-14866667 https://www.pexels.com/@steel-bite-pro-14866667 https://gocrowdera.com/US/other/steel-bite-pro/ https://gocrowdera.com/US/other/steel-bite-pro/ https://www.bonfire.com/steel-bite-pro/ https://www.bonfire.com/steel-bite-pro/ https://publons.com/researcher/4132847/steel-bite-pro-get-50-off-today/ https://publons.com/researcher/4132847/steel-bite-pro-get-50... https://teletype.in/@steelbitepro/zXzJRVoPp https://teletype.in/@steelbitepro/zXzJRVoPp https://share.naturalnews.com/p/3641359 https://share.naturalnews.com/p/3641359
• dmix 6y ago
  Sorry to not contribute but this turned into a goldmine of business ideas.
• spoonjim 6y ago
  The micropayment problem. Sometimes I click a link and it's to the Cleveland Plain Dealer or something like that, asking me to pay $2.99 a month for access to their 120-year-old archive. I mean seriously guys I just want to pay a buck for this article and never talk to you guys again. Movies work like this, I can pay $15/month for Netflix OR I can just rent a movie on Amazon for $3.99. Why not for Web content?
• ciconia 6y ago
  Electric cars, but without the bullshit: no giant screens, no autopilot, just a reliable, lightweight box on wheels that can do 500km on a charge. Or: really efficient petrol/diesel cars that weigh 600kg and consume 2l/100km (that's about 120MPG).
  • daliusd 6y ago
    VW Up (Electric or petrol) or ID3 is kind of you are looking for or moving towards that. I own up petrol version - 6l/100km, but I believe petrol engines hit their limits. I remember vw built super efficient petrol car but I doubt that it will be ever in production.
  • denimnerd42 6y ago
    Giant screens aren't expensive compared to the cost of those batteries for 500km range. Look at the new Korean EVs. They are basic but they still cost a lot.
  • freetonik 6y ago
    KIA Niro EV is close. Very conservative, physical buttons for pretty much everything (thank god), modest screen, seems very reliable. Not lightweight though.
• faluzure 6y ago
  Human Longevity. 150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. People are forced to save for a future where they have enough to survive for a few years and then pay to have someone take care of them, instead of doing what they actually want to do. Why are we not all collectively trying to solve this problem? Dying of age related diseases is as natural as dying from malaria or childbirth, yet we try to solve those issues and pretend age related diseases are inevitable. COVID largely shut the world down because the largest risk factor for complications is how old someone is. The gains in productivity alone should make human longevity the number one priority for every government. I also think it would solve climate change because if you expected to live much longer, the obvious problems are no longer just future generations problems.
  • syndacks 6y ago
    End of life care is an incredibly expensive endeavor; why are we so adamant about extending the inevitable? IMO it's a subconscious projection of the fact that we do _not_ live meaningful lives in our day to day, and so we fixate on a fantastical (yet inspiring, universal) compensation of extending it forever. "Left to take care of the elderly" suggests we don't value life in the first place. Why extend it further?
    • DrRobinson 6y ago
      The idea isn't that people will live in that fragile and unhealthy state even longer, the idea is to also extend how long we're healthy. Imagine being as healthy as a 30 year old when you're 70 for example. This is often also called healthspan and we probably don't want to extend lifespan too much without also extending the healthspan.
      • jgwil2 6y ago
        Yes but aging and death are inevitable regardless. Delaying them on an individual basis does nothing to solve that problem.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Centigonal 6y ago
  Endometriosis and adenomyosis. Endometriosis is a condition that affects 10-15% of adult women, that can be extremely painful, that we barely understand, and that we can't effectively treat most of the time. It also confounds a lot of the conventional understanding of the source of pain, which means we might get some interesting insights from studying it further.
  • chime 6y ago
    There is no easy diagnosis for Endometriosis either. It’s symptom-based “maybe it’s endo but until we open you up and scope you, there’s no way to tell.” And no idea what causes it, how to treat it, and what all does it affect. Does it cause infertility? Who knows. Maybe. Does it need to be removed? Maybe. Depends. Is there medication? Not exactly. Can you do anything to reduce the effects? Be healthier. It is one of the most frustrating things to go through and it absolutely messes with the quality of life. It’s basically the “default:” or “Other” for all undiagnosable issues.
• tekcyb-org 6y ago
  Therapy in VR. (Social anxiety, situational, etc)
• geocrasher 6y ago
  Phones with actual keyboards.
• jldugger 6y ago
  Structured interviews. There's a massive literature supporting the idea that structured interviews outperform any other kind in predicting outcomes, and instead we get ten remote whiteboard screening apps, and adhoc interview panels of people with, frankly, conflicting values and evaluation criteria.
  • trestenhortz 6y ago
    I’m interestsd. Can you link any of the literature you have in mind?
    • jldugger 6y ago
      Well, the lit survey people tend to cite on interviewing is Schmidt and Hunter 98: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Schmidt-and-Hunter-1998-Validity-and-Utility-Psychological-Bulletin.pdf http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Schmidt-and-H...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• cookiengineer 6y ago
  Web Filtering, Web Automation and especially the UX behind it. I don't understand why the Web Browser ecosystem is stuck with Extensions, and why Web Browsers, the most used programs on the planet, are still unautomated for 99% of humans. This just doesn't make sense in any economical or rational view. Web Filtering and Ad Blocking are things that are stuck UX wise, because currently there are basically two different concepts. Either you have some scammy anti-virus firewall premium service that does things you don't understand, or you have an Ungoogled Chromium with uBlock Origin and uMatrix where you can block per domain basis (which most people don't even understand in terms of terminology). Why is the Web not allowlisted? Say you browse a website, and you disable everything by default. Then you want to allow a payment provider because you want to buy something, and you click on "Allow PayPal". Wouldn't a collective list of services and SDKs and their required assets in the form of a named "web service" list make more sense than the adblocking approach? I think that this can be improved a _lot_ in its UX. Coming back to Automation of the Semantics of the Web: I think once a Web Browser gets smart enough to understand the semantics of a website, and the implications of user interactions ( e.g. "make a payment" or "subscribe to channel") - it can be recorded, trained, and automated. And I think this is the reason why I started to build a Browser from scratch, even when it is an almost impossible task to do. I believe that Web Automation is a necessary step to get to a superintelligence level. And such a Browser would push our collective efficiency far beyond what we can imagine right now.
  • dartharva 6y ago
    > Wouldn't a collective list of services and SDKs and their required assets in the form of a named "web service" list make more sense than the adblocking approach? Standardizing things at such scale would limit the implementation of new web technologies as sites have to wait for the overloaded browsers to catch up with their new technologies each time they invent something new. All in all, it would overcomplicate things and slow down development. Plus, web browsers are an intimate part of our online lives and act as the main gateway for almost all our activity on the internet. As such it is better to have barebones web browsers like we are used to having in my opinion and extend them as users see fit (similar to adhering to the Unix philosophy), instead of having rigidly-built software that take away control what technologies to implement from the user.
• baby 6y ago
  Phone with better batteries (so that don’t focus on trying to be as slim as possible)
• max_ 6y ago
  An alternative to the web. Designed for the user, not for developers, or cooperations. All these initiatives like SOLID, ad blockers, regulation & censorship should not be needed in this new alternative. Power was given to devs and we ended up with web obesity. Power was given to cooperations & we ended up with subversion. Then when people asked regulators to fix it we ended up with popups. The web is currently rotten beyond repair. We need an alternative
  • zzo38computer 6y ago
    I think that you are correct. There are alternatives though, but they don't like to use it much. Also would be alternative that the web browser could be designed better; interpret them differently and more efficiently for the user to have more control and don't waste too much energy. For different applications, you can have: - NNTP - Gopher - IRC - Telnet and SSH - etc. (I have a NNTP server set up. If you want to set up discussion forums, this is a good idea, I think. I also have Gopher and QOTD (TCP only, no UDP) services set up too.) There can also be the better uses of HTTP too (it is capable of some things but that they don't commonly use properly), and the uses of different file formats (you do not have to be limited to only HTML; you can also have plain text format, httpdirlist format, etc).
    • selfhoster11 6y ago
      I already replied to the parent, but Gemini is a modern protocol that significantly improves conceptually upon Gopher. It's lighter than HTTP/HTML and with just enough features to serve the small web and not much more. It's worth checking out if you haven't already.
      • zzo38computer 6y ago
        Yes, I believe you, although my list is not meant to be exhaustive.
  • selfhoster11 6y ago
    Gemini protocol aims to address some of these problems by doing away with the web entirely. It's like a modernised Gopher with improvements that benefit from 21st century hindsight.
• baby 6y ago
  How will I manage to live when I will grow old? I often feel like society is not made for old people.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dartharva 6y ago
  Sexbots. It may sound amusing, but there really are many sexually frustrated individuals who could potentially see massive improvement in their social and physiological life and lead to a net gain for the society. Also it might lead to a reduction in the overvaluation of sex in romantic relationships and thus happier couples. Add this to its potential of sexual education (by having realistic simulation devices) and it might just compensate for the damage pornography has done.
  • slothtrop 6y ago
    I think VR is heading this way. Ultimately it is probably more efficient, both in cost and experience, to improve VR with supplementary hardware than have sex-dolls that can walk on two legs for no reason.
    • dartharva 6y ago
      Sure, yes. That would be more realistic to expect than actual humanoid robots. I meant something similar, probably should have worded it better.
• hvasilev 6y ago
  Robotics. In my opinion the cyber-physical is clearly the next frontier. I think people stay away from the field since it is quite interdisciplinary and requires a lot of additional knowledge and effort.
• hn_asker 6y ago
  social justice issues. I'm waiting for a computational model of government so we can question and improve these models without violence. It seems that (in America at least) politics is so tightly woven into a person's identity that to question their political beliefs offends them personally. Thus we languish without being able to critically think of better forms of government/politics. Also mental health issues (which is closely related to human rights issues). After watching Medicating Normal, I've lost hope in the psychiatric/pharmaceutical system. Why are there no better solutions to depression? It seems to be affecting a large number of people.
• bigpeopleareold 6y ago
  Adoption of applications that are mostly text-based (e.g. chat) that don't require increasingly more hardware requirements to be usable.
• annon_dater_000 6y ago
  With the rise of video based meetings, I'm surprised more products around video first dating haven't appeared. It seems to solve several issues with apps like Tinder / Bumble etc. I guess a negative is that it's more nerve-wracking to video-date complete strangers, and to ensure it doesn't go the way of chatroulette. Over quarantine I started something in this space [1], but I thought some of the larger dating companies would have introduced products around this concept too. [1] https://copperdating.com/en/ https://copperdating.com/en/
  • mikulabc 6y ago
    Can you make a version for my audience too? https://speedfriending.at/ https://speedfriending.at/ at each of our events we get 100 people, it's something people care a lot about, we are the 2nd biggest meetup group in vienna https://www.meetup.com/speed-friending-events https://www.meetup.com/speed-friending-events
• vermaden 6y ago
  FreeBSD.
• habosa 6y ago
  Data Insurance. Almost every company out there is collecting tons of data, but 90% of companies don't have an IT department capable of keeping it safe and compliant with the latest regulations. Companies thought data was an asset but as the hacks and regulations pile up I think they will begin to view it as a liability. So what are their options: 1) Try and beef up your tech operation. Maybe spend $xxM with AWS and hope their customer engineers can set you up right. This is a distraction from selling cars or whatever it is that you actually do, but the shareholders like that you're modernizing I guess. 2) Buy insurance. The same thing that people do to prepare for any other potential disaster that they can't prevent. If Russia decides to hack you there's nothing you can do, but at least the insurer will cover the bill. The key is that this should NOT come from a traditional insurance company. Those companies do not have the ability to assess the risks properly nor do they have the expertise to recommend simple preventative measures or help a customer recover from an incident. Instead there needs to be some sort of combination Cybersecurity consultancy and data insurance company. They come in, audit you, fix the low hanging fruit, and insure the rest. Maybe they even sell you some cloud services too for data warehousing, etc. All the cloud companies are trying to sell Kubernetes to every traditional company out there. Forget it, just sell them insurance.
  • etothepii 6y ago
    These products exist but in the US insurance is a highly regulated relationship driven transaction. The insurance market is ripe for disruption but having worked in the reinsurance market for 4 years I don't see any realistic prospect of it happening.
  • jhayward 6y ago
    As a foundation for the above, also add universal data provenance. I want to know, in exact detail and provable chain of evidence, how a specific fact or conclusion about me arrived in company A's database.
• dusted 6y ago
  Thorium based nuclear power, instead of trying to minimize consumption of dirty (coal/oil/gas) or expensive-limited-impractical (solar/wind/wave) energy. We should (again) focus more on producing energy that's too cheap to meter. I want my flat-rate power subscription, and I want it yesterday! We've invented this artificial energy scarcity problem by refusing to use the cleanest and safest solution out there, even traditional 60's era nuclear power kills fewer people per unit of energy produces than any other source of energy. I put this down to virtue-signalling more than anything else, but even so, nuclear energy is what I'm surprised we're not working on more.
• azaras 6y ago
  Blogs and RSS.
• cik 6y ago
  Education. At best we're playing at the edges by making knowledge more accessible. But to wit, education is mostly trying to teach content that becomes modern, using 19th century methods. Given how important the knowledge economy is, I would think that significantly more money (worldwide) would be invested in researching promising delivery models. Admittedly, I have no idea what those are either.
• dunefox 6y ago
  First-class logic/constraint programming like in Flix (https://flix.dev/ https://flix.dev/). This would make complex logic easier and powerful.
• fspacef 6y ago
  Information discovery and what search looks like post Google. Seems like we got to a search bar that can answer any question we type in but haven't thought beyond it. Like what if we were recommended what questions to ask in the first place? Thinking out loud here: we generate a ton of data just by browsing and existing on the internet. This data is plugged into recommendation algos to serve ads. What if instead these algorithms were tuned to serve us direct websites or text that could provide our next source for inspiration? ^I'm working on this idea, still pretty early stages but it feels like the time is right to create such technology. Do reach out if you want to collaborate or riff on it.
  • pdimitar 6y ago
    > Like what if we were recommended what questions to ask in the first place? That's what Google is doing in the last several years and it's very annoying. They don't try to look for niche sources and articles and just gently correct your query to pertain to something more popular or trendy. We don't need more of that. > What if instead these algorithms were tuned to serve us direct websites or text that could provide our next source for inspiration? Sure, I like that. But how do we ensure it would also not be used for ads and tracking again? I feel companies are just too easily tempted and can't be trusted. > Seems like we got to a search bar that can answer any question we type in but haven't thought beyond it. IMO a lot of us here thought about it but (a) it's not easy, it's likely a rather gigantic undertaking and (b) nobody funds such research and (c) we can't do it as a hobby while maintaining a $dayjob so in the end we are the mercy of the corps.
• dandare 6y ago
  Baby crib connected to a senior. You have countless of lonly seniors and countless of babies that need constant attention during their sleep. The solution is an automated arm mountable to any crib, two refurbished tablet and a decent software to connect the two. The senior could: watch the baby, check that it breaths, take its temperature, talk/sing to the baby, use the hand to give it a dummy, cover the baby with a blanket, reposition the baby slightly or alert the on place caregiver.
• quotz 6y ago
  Human genetic engineering. Its like the cure to everything, and everybody is too scared to actually work on it. Especially big grants committees
• krupan 6y ago
  Open Source SystemVerilog
• smurf_t 6y ago
  Agriculture. With global warming changing traditional farming, the knowledge and expertise of local farmers is not relevant.
• tabtab 6y ago
  Dynamic Relational: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic-database-schema#46202802 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic-database-s... Unlike the NoSql movement, it embraces SQL and many RDBMS conventions to reduce the learning curve. It only removes or changes RDBMS features that get in the way of dynamism, but keeps the baby in the bathwater. And it allows incremental tightening of constraints/types to go from prototype to production. I'd love such a tool for prototyping. This "isn't being worked on" topic is large and popular; I suggest follow-up HN entries break suggestions into categories for further discussion. HN is about innovation and the future. I miss the C2 wiki for documenting opinions on various suggestions, and allow slower pondering. Nothing has replaced it for that function.
  • bshanks 6y ago
    You might like recfiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recfiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recfiles
    • tabtab 6y ago
      Maybe parts of it can be borrowed to implement Dynamic Relational (DR), but it looks too different from RDBMS such that there's a big learning curve. A goal of DR is to only deviate from RDBMS conventions JUST enough to get sufficient dynamism. It doesn't try to be a new database paradigm.
• midhhhthrow 6y ago
  I’m surprised there’s not more construction tech. I mean housing is multi trillion dollar industry with enormous unlimited demand. I get that it’s hard due To regulation and barriers to entry but still
• akmittal 6y ago
  Battery tech. Smartphones almost all components has come a long way from processor, RAM and storage. Battery tech has not improved much.
• guenthert 6y ago
  No mentioning of global warming, the most pressing of all issues? It might not effect your level of comfort or net worth in the next two or three years, but it does have the potential to wipe out humanity, if not life itself, in the next few hundred years. Unless you're actually going hungry right now or are sick or homeless, I don't know why you'd be worrying about anything else.
  • react_burger38 6y ago
    Does it really though? I mean the medieval warming period was ballpark the same temperature as we have now.
    • guenthert 6y ago
      The temperatures today might be, the difference is however that the Crusaders didn't burn fossil fuels at even remotely the same level as recent generations. CO2 concentration assures that the comfortable temperatures today aren't those enjoyed by future generations.
• Jemm 6y ago
  Camera based AI for traffic control. With today's cheap computing hardware and sensors this really could be on every street light. Credit card numbers that when given to a scammer trigger an investigation into the scammers finance network. Each person can be given a unique scamCatcher number.
• poormystic 6y ago
  Love is a phenomenon which bears comparison with electricity. E.g. A home cooked meal has more love in each portion than does a restaurant meal, and does more good than a restaurant meal. E.g. A loving act generates Happiness in the actor, which generates Beauty, which generates Love for the actor. I think that there is an identifiable phenomenon involving love, beauty and happiness and that study of this phenomenon can only benefit the student.
• hansdieter1337 6y ago
  UX design. Just looking at modern web tools like AWS, I don’t understand why they can’t make it a bit more intuitive.
• bshanks 6y ago
  Information overload. There is now lots of information available online but there are only a few systems for prioritizing/sorting it. For example, if you are a software developer and you want to continually learn about new software development tools and technologies, you can talk to colleagues, you can read the front page of Hacker News or r/programming, you can follow people on Twitter and on their blogs; I would think there would be a lot more ways to do this (for example, things like Hacker News or r/programming with a much wider variety of ways of sorting the stories; more transparent and customizable social media 'feeds'; a wide variety of collaborative filtering websites like StumbleUpon tried to be; etc).
• bshanks 6y ago
  Governance systems. A lot of resources are allocated by institutions, and institutions have a lot of power over our lives. There is a decent amount of research comparing and analysing existing governance systems (e.g. comparative constitutional law) however there is surprisingly little effort put into coming up with new ones. In more detail, there is surprisingly little thinking, research, and experimentation on alternatives to the current procedures by which institutions make decisions (things like Robert's Rules of Order; voting systems; procedures for determining what gets on the ballot of e.g. corporate shareholder meetings; procedures for selection of judges, conduct of trials, resolving disputes in the interpretation of rules; etc). There are many new and small institutions being formed all the time (e.g. HOAs; new companies; local non-profits; technology standards committees; etc) but few of them experiment with new and "experimental" procedures, and few experimental procedures are proposed (which could be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; maybe no one wants to try out a novel procedure unless it has been at least analysed a lot, but maybe no one wants to spend time inventing and analysing novel procedures if there is little chance they will be used). In addition, there is little work on novel procedures for self-governance of large asynchronous online communities (such as forums).
• bshanks 6y ago
  Wikis as discussion forums. Not wikis for encyclopedias, not for collecting notes on some topic, not for notes within an organization on how various technical infrastructure works, but rather wikis for discussing topics, coming up with ideas, and debating together.
• bshanks 6y ago
  Transpilation platforms. There's a lot of new programming languages being written, but few people want to use a programming language without many libraries. One solution to this is to host the new language on an existing platform/library ecosystem, e.g. JVM, BEAM, Lua, C, but this requires choosing a platform and tying the language to that platform (and accepting the design choices of that platform's major implementations, e.g. in some cases, the platform implementation may have slow startup time, which makes it hard to use your new language for quick scripting from the commandline). Instead, one could imagine a programming language platform designed to transpile the new language to multiple underlying platforms. Like LLVM IR, this transpilation platform could be a nexus that supports many different frontends and many different backends. Such a transpilation platform would make it easier for new languages to be useful sooner.
  • bshanks 6y ago
    I should be clearer about how a "transpilation platform" would differ from something like LLVM IR. First, a transpilation platform is focused on interoperability between the source high-level language and the target platform, including high-level language constructs like passing hashtables back and forth. Second, where feasible a transpilation platform attempts to output human-readable high-levl code in the high-level target language.
• bshanks 6y ago
  Plaintext project management systems. For individuals, we have todo.txt and orgmode. But what if you have a small group, and you want some or all tasks to be assigned to various members of the group?
• bshanks 6y ago
  Lightweight standards organizations to track, discuss, publicize, and coalesce support for new formats and protocols recently proposed by individuals or small groups. Think Markdown, trackbacks/pingbacks, RSS/Atom, TOML, SemVer, but in their early days, before many people had heard of them.
• nloa 6y ago
  Apple‘s Reminders app. Unfortunately, the app is not mature at all. The text (date) recognition, like "4pm shopping", should in its current state just be removed. I honestly don't know though if it's intentional, to create a place for companies like Todoist in the App Store. If the text recognition and user interface in Apple's Reminder app would be better, I wouldn't use Todoist anymore.
• tonymet 6y ago
  Noise pollution