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The Biggest Tech Problems So Obvious We Aren’t Fixing Them

68 points by steven 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago
I've noted the printer problem in the past (I tend to call it crapitalism, the equilibrium point between price tolerance and crap tolerance, and a lot of people are way more crap tolerant than I am.) But I think for folks here who are wondering what sort of startup to create its a good way of thinking about the question.
- demian 11y ago
  That's something the big markets (USA/Europe) can improve by being less crap tolerance.
- mikeash 11y ago
  The problem with crap tolerance is that crappiness doesn't become apparent until after you make the purchase, whereas price is obvious beforehand. People heavily discount the future in favor of the present, so people will naturally favor something that's cheaper but worse even if their overall experience will suffer for it.
- shawkinaw 11y ago
  Funny, I came to the comments to dispute the printer point. I have a <$100 wireless duplex laser printer (Brother HL-2270DW) which works really well. It's not color, but does everything I need it to do. Maybe $100 doesn't qualify as cheap.
  - wil421 11y ago
    In my experience Laser jets have always been much better than ink jets. My ink jet printer requires $120+ dollars for color and black cartridges. Black cartridges are usually much cheaper. Some advice I received years ago was to forgo a color printer altogether and use Kinko's/UPS Store to do color. The cost savings are very good if you dont require a lot of color printing.
    - ssmoot 11y ago
      I bought a Konica Minolta 1600W Color Laser Printer on Amazon a few years ago after being frustrated at the infrequently used ink-jet cartridges going bad yet again because I didn't print enough. I think it was $120. Still on the original colors (replaced the black). Toner gives me a lot more prints, never goes bad because of disuse, and looks better. I love it. Now I just wish I could find a no-drivers AirPrint compatible Color Laser with the same reliability and price point that was as small or smaller (so it still fit in my IKEA printer stand with rolling door). Haven't turned up such a device yet so I'll stick with this USB printer for awhile yet I guess. It was discontinued years ago, but toner refills are still readily available, for about the same price as a new set of Inkjet cartridges (except again, more capacity, and if you only use it once every 6 months it won't complain and make you buy a new set). Anyways, IMO Color Laser is definitely the way to go for the home user. The printers are pretty reasonably priced these days, and the TCO is drastically lower than any Inkjet printer I've ever owned.
      - ansible 11y ago
        The easiest thing I know of to do with dried out ink cartridges is to use steam to open the nozzles.
  - taco_emoji 11y ago
    In general I've found cheapo monochrome desktop laser printers to be completely satisfactory. My hypothesis is that inkjet is just an error-prone technology.
    - mark-r 11y ago
      I had an old HP inkjet printer that was flawless for many years, until the belt that moves the head wore out and shredded itself. I believe I got my money out of that one. But in the drive to make the printers ever cheaper, quality has gone out the window. Plus the price of ink cartridges vs. their capacity has become totally out of whack. When that printer died, I didn't even consider another inkjet.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    I also have a monochrome laser printer at home. It replaced a monochrome laser printer that lasted about 10 years, including a jury-rig home repair of the solenoids. I think that on some instinctual level, I have always known that the home consumer market for color inkjet printers is absolutely saturated with crap. It all just seemed like a massive conspiracy to sell ink at prices higher than an equivalent quantity of heroin. I know a photo-artist who uses a higher-end inkjet to make archival-quality prints, and he buys 6 colors of UV-stable pigment inks, by the bottle, for less than most people pay for one dinky, chipped, proprietary replacement cartridge for their printer. Those consumer-level printers are engineered to be the absolute minimum-cost solution to get people to empty their ink cartridges. So I'm not entirely certain that the two breeds of printer are comparable. Mono lasers are almost certainly considered by the industry to be small-office/home-office (SOHO) goods, wherein a perceived deficiency in quality or operating costs might hurt future large-office purchases.
    - bluedino 11y ago
      >> I also have a monochrome laser printer at home. It replaced a monochrome laser printer that lasted about 10 years Same here. Rescued an HP Laserjet 2100 from the trash, it lasted 10 years and would have kept going with more toner but I got a Brother something-or-another for $69 at OfficeMax.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Ahhh! I too have a Brother HL-2270DW sitting at my feet currently! Its probably the best $100 I've ever spent on tech gear. Miser on the toner, and a solid piece of hardware even after thousands of pages have been run through it.
    - orkoden 11y ago
      Brother HL-2030 the best 80 € I ever spent on a printer. It's been printing perfectly for years and is on its second toner cartridge now. I sometimes wish it had automatic duplex. But I print less and less.
  - withdavidli 11y ago
    Also had a Brother Laser printer. $100 as well and came with a 4gb flashdrive (which would've cost~$30 at the time). Thing lasted 9 years without changing the toner. Sad that I couldn't find the same model anymore.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    The whole line of Brother printers is surprisingly good for the price. Also, the Ricoh printers do a good job, but send a lot of e-mail about how they are doing.
- varelse 11y ago
  I have PC desktops from 2009 that are still functional. In contrast, I have gone through three printers since then and in fact I no longer own one. See also mobile phones/tablets with annoying 18-24 month lifespans before they develop pathological HW issues and/or just die, usually a few months before their contract is up.
  - vardump 11y ago
    I have a PC from 2007 that is not only functional, but reasonable even now. 2.4 GHz Core2Quad Q6600, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 8800 GTS. 120 GB SSD replaced original hard disk. Still snappy to use. It's disappointing how little things have improved in 8 years.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      same, got a beefy one in 2008 with the core 2 quad q9400, only upgraded the videocard midlife as the 8800 gts overheated and died. I am about to replace it but it had incredible value for money. while waiting for the next intel cpu iteration I got a cheap samsung 850 and it feels like new!
  - icebraining 11y ago
    A phone sold in the EU that fails before 24 months have passed will be returned and replaced for no cost, so either they're making specially durable editions for the European market, or the failure rate <24m can't be that high.
- jandrese 11y ago
  I was going to comment that his problem with crap printers is that he apparently keeps buying crap printers. I bought a Laserjet cp1525nw+ Color Laser printer for $200 a few years ago and have never looked back. It's a network postscript laser printer so you never have driver hell and forced obsolesce. It prints beautifully. The paper tray is plenty big for home use. It even came with a spare black cartridge! I intend for it to be the last printer I ever buy. There is no reason to buy some messy finicky quickly obsolete expensive-refill ink jet piece of crap ever again. Ok, so that's not 100% true. You can't print on CDs or T-Shirts with a laser printer, so there is still a use for ink jets as specialty craft printers. For day to day printing however they are completely obsolete.
- jstelly 11y ago
  While I think the printer problem is real I think it is less of a long term opportunity because paper is becoming less valuable. When everyone has a phone or tablet with them all the time they'd much rather have photos there than print them on paper. Even older people with photo album collections they enjoy seem to be shifting towards mobile devices for photos in my experience. So having a printer is still useful but the requirements are shifting away from the crappy inkjet product anyway. I recognize that I am biased against paper personally, but in this case I feel like it makes me notice people who cling to it and photos are a case where people seem to be clinging to paper less and less over time.
Mz 11y ago
I didn't read the detailed list of what the author thinks we need to fix, but I enjoyed the beginning of the piece. I especially liked this paragraph: So how do you see into such a blind spot? How can we periscope around the corner of our assumptions and peer into the future? If we want to create a list of the blind-spot problems that await better solutions from tomorrow’s innovators — which is what I want to do with this piece — where do we begin? I wonder a lot about how new things start successfully. The piece that intrigues me is: If you know you are doing something genuinely different and valuable, how do you cross the chasm from everyone telling you it will never work to actually having some meaningful number of users? How do you get other people to see what you see and that you are not just another dime-a-dozen loser with some half-baked idea? That intrigues me and I don't know the answer to it.
acqq 11y ago
"To wit: our digital world doesn’t have a good system for identifying us, or helping others confirm that we are who we say we are. Because no one has solved this problem, we all live in dune-drifts of lousy passwords." No. It's that we don't want to have the equivalent to "certificate authorities" mess for our identities too. We don't want the "obvious" "solutions" because we are aware of the bad effects of them.
- amelius 11y ago
  Probably, authentication will be solved by Apple's fingerprint-reading phone, or the iwatch. They have to use that mechanism anyway for the iWallet (or whatever it is called).
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Solving the problem for the elite that can afford to spend ungodly amounts of money (by global standards) on a smartwatch is not really solving it.
- jt2190 11y ago
  Not to mention that there are a lot of good reasons that someone should remain anonymous when they're online.
  - perfTerm 11y ago
    A solution for identity doesn't necessarily imply a lack of anonymity on the entire internet. It sure would be nice to not have to update so many payment details after a card number gets stoken though. Last time my card was stolen I had to update a tremendous number of services. Usually I just wait until I get some sort of notice or my account stops working somewhere but it's a pain in the butt.
    - acqq 11y ago
      The reason the new number is issued depends on the update procedure being non-trivial and hopefully less broad than the last time. Otherwise, they'd just let you continue using the same one. That's the most convenient solution.
fweespeech 11y ago
As interesting as the idea of the piece is....none of the mentioned problems are actually problems for me. My printer has worked for years without an issue. I don't use too many tabs. I'm perfectly fine with my collaborative editing tool [git]. Credit card fraud authentication is a massive problem....but no solution can actually be completely secured so its a cost/benefit. Sure, the author cares...but ultimately, authenticating the new vs. old credit card number and choosing which vendors to provide it to is a choice the author has to make as he is the only one who can do it securely. :/
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  meh I don't see it so big of a problem. first is a problem for banks, not ordinary people, they bear the cost of fraud secondly there already are solution in the space that split authentication from payment tokens (i.e. paypal and more recently the super annoying verified by visa / mastercad securecode) and are safe enough and good enough
le_meta 11y ago
"The biggest problems that Google can't fix with money"
dmschulman 11y ago
I'm at a happy medium with the Tab Overload situation, though I would welcome a fantastic app that helped me save content in an intelligent way for consuming later. Currently I browse in Chrome, keep a window with things I prefer to read later, then go back to that tabbed window when I have the time, or more conveniently, access those tabs from Chrome on my Android phone when I'm out and about and have some time to kill.
- robertcarter 11y ago
  Give the chrome extension OneTab a try
  - angersock 11y ago
    I don't understand people with a bajillion tabs open. If you're referencing a bunch of man pages, sure, but generally it just seems like people load up with the intention of reading later, and never do. Just read the damn page, close it, and move on.
    - dntrkv 11y ago
      Agreed. I used to be one of those people with 10 windows open with 20 tabs each thinking that it's an efficient way to work. Nowadays I never keep tabs around, if I really will need to reference it later I drop it into the bookmarks bar, otherwise I close it and find it again when I need it some other time. If it's an article, I use Instapaper. That, combined with Inbox Zero, has really helped declutter my brain of unnecessary digital hoarding.
    - dmschulman 11y ago
      Well bookmarks never quite worked for me, they're more clutter than they're worth and tend to get lost in the pile. I've organized my web browsing into a few different Chrome windows based on tasks, one window for personal browsing (articles, a forum post I'm monitoring, a tutorial I'm following, etc), web development projects (self explanatory), job hunting (can't apply to every listing at once but I also don't want to misplace these), DIY electronics projects I'm working on (schematics, build manuals, references), and items to read later/long form stories I can't finish in one sitting. If I end up putting some of these topic areas on the backburner I'll close out an entire window and uses Session Buddy to save those links. I'll have to check out OneTab as suggested, looks somewhat similar. It's not perfect but it works. I use one desktop as my personal and work computer so I need to organize myself around those divergent areas or else I really get lost. When I want a mental break from work I'll go browse HN and open the stories that interest me in new tabs but I'm aware that I don't have the time to read all these items (hence the need to keep an active tab on a background window). Mental break #2 comes along and I already have a few articles ready to digest.
sosuke 11y ago
"Everything Beyond the Developer’s Over-Contemplated Navel" I think the push to learn everyone to code might fix that. That is the open source way right? You have a problem, you can fork it, fix it, create it. It works great for determined people. Otherwise my response is to learn how to fix it yourself. I learned to code, I taught myself, made the investment, and by gosh I am going to fix and contemplate my navel. My paid jobs however have taken me all over the place, in all sorts of fields, but each shared the same thing, there was money to be made. Find a way to make money and serve the under-served and you will shortly have developers developing there of their own accord or as employees.
ris 11y ago
This is a highly stupid article, written by... some dude(?) who then goes and berates the developers who he wants to fix these gripes of his for "navel gazing". For what it's worth, I don't really see any of the points as blind spots. I think there have been many attempts to solve all of them.
- mason240 11y ago
  Exactly. The author is free to solve these issues anytime. Until then, he is nothing but an "idea guy."
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    well he didn't even provide real solutions, so he's not even that
beat 11y ago
I think of "fish don't know they live in water" problems... problems so deeply endemic to a specific field that the practitioners of that field don't realize it. It's as ordinary as breathing to them. I'm devoted to solving one of those myself, in the configuration management space. When I get it off the ground, lots of happy fish (well, engineers) will know about the water.
- CPLX 11y ago
  I think it's amusing that as of this writing nearly all the other comments on this post are somewhat snarky and dismissive of the problems the author mentioned. Personally I thought several of them were quite compelling, especially the authentication one. Perhaps HN is an aquarium full of fishes, so to speak.
  - jdbernard 11y ago
    Yes, a lot of them are compelling. The problem, from my point of view, is that these aren't blind spots, especially authentication. Lots of people and companies have tried, lots of people and companies are still trying. I was hoping to gain insight into problems I didn't already know about when I clicked the link. This article is not really adding value. It's just complaining. That's not a particularly useful thing to hear.
    - CPLX 11y ago
      He's not saying that they are literally invisible, his actual quote is "those problems that we don’t bother changing because we’ve stopped seeing them as solvable" Which I think is a reasonably reality based point of view.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  I've never understood the popular idea that fish can't recognize water because it's all around them. Here are some equivalent ideas: - No human culture has a concept of air. - Humans can't tell whether wind is blowing or not. - Abolitionism couldn't happen, since slavery was present everywhere, and therefore the concept of not having slavery didn't exist.
callesgg 11y ago
Blind Spot 1: Authentication, Yes it is an actual problem. Blind Spot 2: Tab overload, It is called bookmarks... Blind Spot 3: Collaborative editing, Google Docs. Blind Spot 4: A printer that isn’t junk, You get what you pay for. Blind Spot 5: Everything Beyond the Developer’s Over-Contemplated Navel, vote with your wallet.
andy_ppp 11y ago
Opt-in, web based, democratic world government is my penny in the well... Unfortunately instead of tax they'll just sell everything they know about you advertisers!
agentultra 11y ago
My current favourite "blind spots" are municipal services and identification in the notary sense. Municipal services are still driven by lumbering bureaucracies that worship paper forms and take weeks to make a decision on anything. This makes the process of interacting with them tedious, error prone, and daunting. Worse still is that it can take weeks for program approvals and to issue permits for repairs and renovations. The identification issue is that almost all of the above and for legal documents often the only "proof" of identity is a signature. We have much stronger guarantees available that are verifiable and terribly difficult to impersonate. When I bought my house there was a stack of papers to sign that relied on good faith that I wasn't forging the signature and representing myself faithfully... but they could never know that for sure. They were also happy with having me email them sensitive documents without any encryption or verification at all. Andy Rooney would be rolling in his grave [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6U4IF39kqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6U4IF39kqM
smithbits 11y ago
Networking. Every time I see a non-technical friend have to know anything about the DNS to set up a website it makes me cringe. And while we're at it, why isn't my new laptop online by default? I realize that there are tremendous problems of configuration and security, but I should be able to unbox my laptop and not care about how many G's there are what the wifi passkey is or what the letters CDMA stand for. It should be as invisible to the end user as memory management.
zapdrive 11y ago
Number 1 has already been solved: Bitcoin.
tdees40 11y ago
Remote controls. Why are they terrible? Why is no one fixing them? Why is it literally impossible to walk into a friend's house and decipher the tangle of remotes for TV, cable box, XBox, sound system, etc, etc. I'm staying with friends for a few days and literally couldn't watch TV.
- aschampion 11y ago
  I interned at a digital subscription television receiver manufacturer eons ago. One day I was given several boxes full of random remotes, a microcontroller with an IR receiver, and an oscilloscope. I spent the next month deciphering coding schemes for dozen of remotes, which were usually undocumented or documentation-contradicting. The amazing part was how little standardization even individual vendors had, with few encodings having any real advantage over others. The purpose of all of this was so the receiver could IR blast commands to the rest of the customers' devices. AFAIK the only place this was used was for triggering VCR recording, which was amusing given we were working on early DVRs. The whole time I was thinking how short-sighted this was given we'd certainly be using some standard protocol in a few years since the home media center was going digital. In the early 2000s all the incidental annoyances in digital electronics still seemed like temporary problems that would be swept away by constant disruption as they had been in the 90s, as opposed to the entrenched problems we were stuck with in other technologies.
- jewel 11y ago
  I believe HDMI CEC is a potential solution to this. It is a way to send keystrokes (remote-strokes?) back up the HDMI cable from the TV to the set-top box. This means that there's no need to have a separate remote. Now, all that needs to happen is the number of buttons per remote need to be reduced as the menus improve, and as some features are automated. It works well with the Nexus Player, for example.
- shas3 11y ago
  Even Apple didn't bother to put in any thought into their remote control design. They ship the Apple TV with an IR remote (in the era of Bluetooth LE!) which is too painful to operate. Luckily, the Remote App works pretty well.
louithethrid 11y ago
Memory and Batterys? Or Batterys and Memory
skizm 11y ago
Random question: is there any way to disable that menu from popping up when you highlight text on Medium? I could write a little chrome extension to strip it out but would rather just turn it off for good.
snoonan 11y ago
For the past few days, I've been thinking about easy to use encryption and signing for everyone.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jhim 11y ago
i didn't believe hacking is real until i was introduced to a hacker named frank. I promised him I'm going to testify to his job well done and i'm fulfilling that obligation by telling you frank_zues@outlook.com is the big thing if you need to hire a real hacker. Once again thanks Frank, i'm letting the world know about you.

68 points by steven 11y ago

I've noted the printer problem in the past (I tend to call it crapitalism, the equilibrium point between price tolerance and crap tolerance, and a lot of people are way more crap tolerant than I am.) But I think for folks here who are wondering what sort of startup to create its a good way of thinking about the question.

demian 11y ago
That's something the big markets (USA/Europe) can improve by being less crap tolerance.
mikeash 11y ago
The problem with crap tolerance is that crappiness doesn't become apparent until after you make the purchase, whereas price is obvious beforehand. People heavily discount the future in favor of the present, so people will naturally favor something that's cheaper but worse even if their overall experience will suffer for it.
shawkinaw 11y ago
Funny, I came to the comments to dispute the printer point. I have a <$100 wireless duplex laser printer (Brother HL-2270DW) which works really well. It's not color, but does everything I need it to do. Maybe $100 doesn't qualify as cheap.
- wil421 11y ago
  In my experience Laser jets have always been much better than ink jets. My ink jet printer requires $120+ dollars for color and black cartridges. Black cartridges are usually much cheaper. Some advice I received years ago was to forgo a color printer altogether and use Kinko's/UPS Store to do color. The cost savings are very good if you dont require a lot of color printing.
  - ssmoot 11y ago
    I bought a Konica Minolta 1600W Color Laser Printer on Amazon a few years ago after being frustrated at the infrequently used ink-jet cartridges going bad yet again because I didn't print enough. I think it was $120. Still on the original colors (replaced the black). Toner gives me a lot more prints, never goes bad because of disuse, and looks better. I love it. Now I just wish I could find a no-drivers AirPrint compatible Color Laser with the same reliability and price point that was as small or smaller (so it still fit in my IKEA printer stand with rolling door). Haven't turned up such a device yet so I'll stick with this USB printer for awhile yet I guess. It was discontinued years ago, but toner refills are still readily available, for about the same price as a new set of Inkjet cartridges (except again, more capacity, and if you only use it once every 6 months it won't complain and make you buy a new set). Anyways, IMO Color Laser is definitely the way to go for the home user. The printers are pretty reasonably priced these days, and the TCO is drastically lower than any Inkjet printer I've ever owned.
    - ansible 11y ago
      The easiest thing I know of to do with dried out ink cartridges is to use steam to open the nozzles.
- taco_emoji 11y ago
  In general I've found cheapo monochrome desktop laser printers to be completely satisfactory. My hypothesis is that inkjet is just an error-prone technology.
  - mark-r 11y ago
    I had an old HP inkjet printer that was flawless for many years, until the belt that moves the head wore out and shredded itself. I believe I got my money out of that one. But in the drive to make the printers ever cheaper, quality has gone out the window. Plus the price of ink cartridges vs. their capacity has become totally out of whack. When that printer died, I didn't even consider another inkjet.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  I also have a monochrome laser printer at home. It replaced a monochrome laser printer that lasted about 10 years, including a jury-rig home repair of the solenoids. I think that on some instinctual level, I have always known that the home consumer market for color inkjet printers is absolutely saturated with crap. It all just seemed like a massive conspiracy to sell ink at prices higher than an equivalent quantity of heroin. I know a photo-artist who uses a higher-end inkjet to make archival-quality prints, and he buys 6 colors of UV-stable pigment inks, by the bottle, for less than most people pay for one dinky, chipped, proprietary replacement cartridge for their printer. Those consumer-level printers are engineered to be the absolute minimum-cost solution to get people to empty their ink cartridges. So I'm not entirely certain that the two breeds of printer are comparable. Mono lasers are almost certainly considered by the industry to be small-office/home-office (SOHO) goods, wherein a perceived deficiency in quality or operating costs might hurt future large-office purchases.
  - bluedino 11y ago
    >> I also have a monochrome laser printer at home. It replaced a monochrome laser printer that lasted about 10 years Same here. Rescued an HP Laserjet 2100 from the trash, it lasted 10 years and would have kept going with more toner but I got a Brother something-or-another for $69 at OfficeMax.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Ahhh! I too have a Brother HL-2270DW sitting at my feet currently! Its probably the best $100 I've ever spent on tech gear. Miser on the toner, and a solid piece of hardware even after thousands of pages have been run through it.
  - orkoden 11y ago
    Brother HL-2030 the best 80 € I ever spent on a printer. It's been printing perfectly for years and is on its second toner cartridge now. I sometimes wish it had automatic duplex. But I print less and less.
- withdavidli 11y ago
  Also had a Brother Laser printer. $100 as well and came with a 4gb flashdrive (which would've cost~$30 at the time). Thing lasted 9 years without changing the toner. Sad that I couldn't find the same model anymore.
- protomyth 11y ago
  The whole line of Brother printers is surprisingly good for the price. Also, the Ricoh printers do a good job, but send a lot of e-mail about how they are doing.
varelse 11y ago
I have PC desktops from 2009 that are still functional. In contrast, I have gone through three printers since then and in fact I no longer own one. See also mobile phones/tablets with annoying 18-24 month lifespans before they develop pathological HW issues and/or just die, usually a few months before their contract is up.
- vardump 11y ago
  I have a PC from 2007 that is not only functional, but reasonable even now. 2.4 GHz Core2Quad Q6600, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 8800 GTS. 120 GB SSD replaced original hard disk. Still snappy to use. It's disappointing how little things have improved in 8 years.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    same, got a beefy one in 2008 with the core 2 quad q9400, only upgraded the videocard midlife as the 8800 gts overheated and died. I am about to replace it but it had incredible value for money. while waiting for the next intel cpu iteration I got a cheap samsung 850 and it feels like new!
- icebraining 11y ago
  A phone sold in the EU that fails before 24 months have passed will be returned and replaced for no cost, so either they're making specially durable editions for the European market, or the failure rate <24m can't be that high.
jandrese 11y ago
I was going to comment that his problem with crap printers is that he apparently keeps buying crap printers. I bought a Laserjet cp1525nw+ Color Laser printer for $200 a few years ago and have never looked back. It's a network postscript laser printer so you never have driver hell and forced obsolesce. It prints beautifully. The paper tray is plenty big for home use. It even came with a spare black cartridge! I intend for it to be the last printer I ever buy. There is no reason to buy some messy finicky quickly obsolete expensive-refill ink jet piece of crap ever again. Ok, so that's not 100% true. You can't print on CDs or T-Shirts with a laser printer, so there is still a use for ink jets as specialty craft printers. For day to day printing however they are completely obsolete.
jstelly 11y ago
While I think the printer problem is real I think it is less of a long term opportunity because paper is becoming less valuable. When everyone has a phone or tablet with them all the time they'd much rather have photos there than print them on paper. Even older people with photo album collections they enjoy seem to be shifting towards mobile devices for photos in my experience. So having a printer is still useful but the requirements are shifting away from the crappy inkjet product anyway. I recognize that I am biased against paper personally, but in this case I feel like it makes me notice people who cling to it and photos are a case where people seem to be clinging to paper less and less over time.

Mz 11y ago

I didn't read the detailed list of what the author thinks we need to fix, but I enjoyed the beginning of the piece. I especially liked this paragraph: So how do you see into such a blind spot? How can we periscope around the corner of our assumptions and peer into the future? If we want to create a list of the blind-spot problems that await better solutions from tomorrow’s innovators — which is what I want to do with this piece — where do we begin? I wonder a lot about how new things start successfully. The piece that intrigues me is: If you know you are doing something genuinely different and valuable, how do you cross the chasm from everyone telling you it will never work to actually having some meaningful number of users? How do you get other people to see what you see and that you are not just another dime-a-dozen loser with some half-baked idea? That intrigues me and I don't know the answer to it.

acqq 11y ago

"To wit: our digital world doesn’t have a good system for identifying us, or helping others confirm that we are who we say we are. Because no one has solved this problem, we all live in dune-drifts of lousy passwords." No. It's that we don't want to have the equivalent to "certificate authorities" mess for our identities too. We don't want the "obvious" "solutions" because we are aware of the bad effects of them.

amelius 11y ago
Probably, authentication will be solved by Apple's fingerprint-reading phone, or the iwatch. They have to use that mechanism anyway for the iWallet (or whatever it is called).
- icebraining 11y ago
  Solving the problem for the elite that can afford to spend ungodly amounts of money (by global standards) on a smartwatch is not really solving it.
jt2190 11y ago
Not to mention that there are a lot of good reasons that someone should remain anonymous when they're online.
- perfTerm 11y ago
  A solution for identity doesn't necessarily imply a lack of anonymity on the entire internet. It sure would be nice to not have to update so many payment details after a card number gets stoken though. Last time my card was stolen I had to update a tremendous number of services. Usually I just wait until I get some sort of notice or my account stops working somewhere but it's a pain in the butt.
  - acqq 11y ago
    The reason the new number is issued depends on the update procedure being non-trivial and hopefully less broad than the last time. Otherwise, they'd just let you continue using the same one. That's the most convenient solution.

fweespeech 11y ago

As interesting as the idea of the piece is....none of the mentioned problems are actually problems for me. My printer has worked for years without an issue. I don't use too many tabs. I'm perfectly fine with my collaborative editing tool [git]. Credit card fraud authentication is a massive problem....but no solution can actually be completely secured so its a cost/benefit. Sure, the author cares...but ultimately, authenticating the new vs. old credit card number and choosing which vendors to provide it to is a choice the author has to make as he is the only one who can do it securely. :/

LoSboccacc 11y ago
meh I don't see it so big of a problem. first is a problem for banks, not ordinary people, they bear the cost of fraud secondly there already are solution in the space that split authentication from payment tokens (i.e. paypal and more recently the super annoying verified by visa / mastercad securecode) and are safe enough and good enough

le_meta 11y ago

"The biggest problems that Google can't fix with money"

dmschulman 11y ago

I'm at a happy medium with the Tab Overload situation, though I would welcome a fantastic app that helped me save content in an intelligent way for consuming later. Currently I browse in Chrome, keep a window with things I prefer to read later, then go back to that tabbed window when I have the time, or more conveniently, access those tabs from Chrome on my Android phone when I'm out and about and have some time to kill.

robertcarter 11y ago
Give the chrome extension OneTab a try
- angersock 11y ago
  I don't understand people with a bajillion tabs open. If you're referencing a bunch of man pages, sure, but generally it just seems like people load up with the intention of reading later, and never do. Just read the damn page, close it, and move on.
  - dntrkv 11y ago
    Agreed. I used to be one of those people with 10 windows open with 20 tabs each thinking that it's an efficient way to work. Nowadays I never keep tabs around, if I really will need to reference it later I drop it into the bookmarks bar, otherwise I close it and find it again when I need it some other time. If it's an article, I use Instapaper. That, combined with Inbox Zero, has really helped declutter my brain of unnecessary digital hoarding.
  - dmschulman 11y ago
    Well bookmarks never quite worked for me, they're more clutter than they're worth and tend to get lost in the pile. I've organized my web browsing into a few different Chrome windows based on tasks, one window for personal browsing (articles, a forum post I'm monitoring, a tutorial I'm following, etc), web development projects (self explanatory), job hunting (can't apply to every listing at once but I also don't want to misplace these), DIY electronics projects I'm working on (schematics, build manuals, references), and items to read later/long form stories I can't finish in one sitting. If I end up putting some of these topic areas on the backburner I'll close out an entire window and uses Session Buddy to save those links. I'll have to check out OneTab as suggested, looks somewhat similar. It's not perfect but it works. I use one desktop as my personal and work computer so I need to organize myself around those divergent areas or else I really get lost. When I want a mental break from work I'll go browse HN and open the stories that interest me in new tabs but I'm aware that I don't have the time to read all these items (hence the need to keep an active tab on a background window). Mental break #2 comes along and I already have a few articles ready to digest.

sosuke 11y ago

"Everything Beyond the Developer’s Over-Contemplated Navel" I think the push to learn everyone to code might fix that. That is the open source way right? You have a problem, you can fork it, fix it, create it. It works great for determined people. Otherwise my response is to learn how to fix it yourself. I learned to code, I taught myself, made the investment, and by gosh I am going to fix and contemplate my navel. My paid jobs however have taken me all over the place, in all sorts of fields, but each shared the same thing, there was money to be made. Find a way to make money and serve the under-served and you will shortly have developers developing there of their own accord or as employees.

ris 11y ago

This is a highly stupid article, written by... some dude(?) who then goes and berates the developers who he wants to fix these gripes of his for "navel gazing". For what it's worth, I don't really see any of the points as blind spots. I think there have been many attempts to solve all of them.

mason240 11y ago
Exactly. The author is free to solve these issues anytime. Until then, he is nothing but an "idea guy."
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  well he didn't even provide real solutions, so he's not even that

beat 11y ago

I think of "fish don't know they live in water" problems... problems so deeply endemic to a specific field that the practitioners of that field don't realize it. It's as ordinary as breathing to them. I'm devoted to solving one of those myself, in the configuration management space. When I get it off the ground, lots of happy fish (well, engineers) will know about the water.

CPLX 11y ago
I think it's amusing that as of this writing nearly all the other comments on this post are somewhat snarky and dismissive of the problems the author mentioned. Personally I thought several of them were quite compelling, especially the authentication one. Perhaps HN is an aquarium full of fishes, so to speak.
- jdbernard 11y ago
  Yes, a lot of them are compelling. The problem, from my point of view, is that these aren't blind spots, especially authentication. Lots of people and companies have tried, lots of people and companies are still trying. I was hoping to gain insight into problems I didn't already know about when I clicked the link. This article is not really adding value. It's just complaining. That's not a particularly useful thing to hear.
  - CPLX 11y ago
    He's not saying that they are literally invisible, his actual quote is "those problems that we don’t bother changing because we’ve stopped seeing them as solvable" Which I think is a reasonably reality based point of view.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
I've never understood the popular idea that fish can't recognize water because it's all around them. Here are some equivalent ideas: - No human culture has a concept of air. - Humans can't tell whether wind is blowing or not. - Abolitionism couldn't happen, since slavery was present everywhere, and therefore the concept of not having slavery didn't exist.

callesgg 11y ago

Blind Spot 1: Authentication, Yes it is an actual problem. Blind Spot 2: Tab overload, It is called bookmarks... Blind Spot 3: Collaborative editing, Google Docs. Blind Spot 4: A printer that isn’t junk, You get what you pay for. Blind Spot 5: Everything Beyond the Developer’s Over-Contemplated Navel, vote with your wallet.

andy_ppp 11y ago

Opt-in, web based, democratic world government is my penny in the well... Unfortunately instead of tax they'll just sell everything they know about you advertisers!

agentultra 11y ago

My current favourite "blind spots" are municipal services and identification in the notary sense. Municipal services are still driven by lumbering bureaucracies that worship paper forms and take weeks to make a decision on anything. This makes the process of interacting with them tedious, error prone, and daunting. Worse still is that it can take weeks for program approvals and to issue permits for repairs and renovations. The identification issue is that almost all of the above and for legal documents often the only "proof" of identity is a signature. We have much stronger guarantees available that are verifiable and terribly difficult to impersonate. When I bought my house there was a stack of papers to sign that relied on good faith that I wasn't forging the signature and representing myself faithfully... but they could never know that for sure. They were also happy with having me email them sensitive documents without any encryption or verification at all. Andy Rooney would be rolling in his grave [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6U4IF39kqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6U4IF39kqM

smithbits 11y ago

Networking. Every time I see a non-technical friend have to know anything about the DNS to set up a website it makes me cringe. And while we're at it, why isn't my new laptop online by default? I realize that there are tremendous problems of configuration and security, but I should be able to unbox my laptop and not care about how many G's there are what the wifi passkey is or what the letters CDMA stand for. It should be as invisible to the end user as memory management.

zapdrive 11y ago

Number 1 has already been solved: Bitcoin.

tdees40 11y ago

Remote controls. Why are they terrible? Why is no one fixing them? Why is it literally impossible to walk into a friend's house and decipher the tangle of remotes for TV, cable box, XBox, sound system, etc, etc. I'm staying with friends for a few days and literally couldn't watch TV.

aschampion 11y ago
I interned at a digital subscription television receiver manufacturer eons ago. One day I was given several boxes full of random remotes, a microcontroller with an IR receiver, and an oscilloscope. I spent the next month deciphering coding schemes for dozen of remotes, which were usually undocumented or documentation-contradicting. The amazing part was how little standardization even individual vendors had, with few encodings having any real advantage over others. The purpose of all of this was so the receiver could IR blast commands to the rest of the customers' devices. AFAIK the only place this was used was for triggering VCR recording, which was amusing given we were working on early DVRs. The whole time I was thinking how short-sighted this was given we'd certainly be using some standard protocol in a few years since the home media center was going digital. In the early 2000s all the incidental annoyances in digital electronics still seemed like temporary problems that would be swept away by constant disruption as they had been in the 90s, as opposed to the entrenched problems we were stuck with in other technologies.
jewel 11y ago
I believe HDMI CEC is a potential solution to this. It is a way to send keystrokes (remote-strokes?) back up the HDMI cable from the TV to the set-top box. This means that there's no need to have a separate remote. Now, all that needs to happen is the number of buttons per remote need to be reduced as the menus improve, and as some features are automated. It works well with the Nexus Player, for example.
shas3 11y ago
Even Apple didn't bother to put in any thought into their remote control design. They ship the Apple TV with an IR remote (in the era of Bluetooth LE!) which is too painful to operate. Luckily, the Remote App works pretty well.

louithethrid 11y ago

Memory and Batterys? Or Batterys and Memory

skizm 11y ago

Random question: is there any way to disable that menu from popping up when you highlight text on Medium? I could write a little chrome extension to strip it out but would rather just turn it off for good.

snoonan 11y ago

For the past few days, I've been thinking about easy to use encryption and signing for everyone.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jhim 11y ago

i didn't believe hacking is real until i was introduced to a hacker named frank. I promised him I'm going to testify to his job well done and i'm fulfilling that obligation by telling you frank_zues@outlook.com is the big thing if you need to hire a real hacker. Once again thanks Frank, i'm letting the world know about you.