Ask HN: What annoys you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What annoys you?

81 pointsdaleharvey345 comments

A lot of recent threads have been talking about sharing ideas, I would rather share our problems. Hopefully some people can be lead towards solutions that already exist, and it might be useful for those looking to startup something new.

List the problem you have, and why you find it a problem, possibly saying why other things you have used havent solved it.

Make 1 comment per problem, and try to upvote / comment on problems to expand on them.

View on HN

1. Technologically possible things that have been castrated/restricted by business people (or that need to be hacked, i.e. can't be done by your mother, in order to get them to work properly). Examples: phone tethering, ring tones, lack of power outlets in economy class on airplanes, VOIP over 3G, media licensing (aka dvd zoning), inability to stream Netflix from different countries, inability to watch streams on ESPN3.com/Univision from non-approved ISPs (wtf?), general lack of TV/radio streams on the internet (major annoyance during the world cup)

2. Things that are obscenely expensive but don't cost much to produce/service. Examples: mobile broadband ($30-60 that you can't share, see above), mobile text messaging ($0.25 per 160 bytes!?), dealership car service, iPhone cases, Monster cables, etrade transactions, international roaming (data: $20 PER MB, voice $2.29/min), laptop batteries, retail books, music, DVDs, basic software (such as FTP/ssh clients, PDF readers, etc).

3. Getting ripped off, knowing I can't do anything about it. Examples: exchanging foreign currency, used video games

Actually, it's 160 7-bit bytes, so that's $0.25 per 140 bytes.

Some interesting conversions to put it into perspective:

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 0.18 U.S. cents / byte

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 1,872 U.S. dollars / megabyte

But you have to admit, it's an impressive marketing accomplishment. Millions of people paying for something at a 1000%, or more, markup.

Food. I miss the healthy, affordable, sociable dining halls from university. There are people who cook better than I do, and who should be able to make great food at a reasonable price by buying fresh ingredients in bulk.

My options for eating are

* Cook it myself [1]. Cheap but takes time and effort to make good food.

* Restaurant. Good food but expensive and takes time. I don't always want table service and small portions.

* Fast food. Quick and cheap, but unhealthy.

* Supermarket ready meals. See above.

So yeah, I would love an urban cafeteria serving a handful of healthy, cheap, fresh meal options. I'm sure it can be done.

Edit, re Tel: [1] I love to cook, but not when I'm in a rush, and I'm not always near home.

It's not quite the replacement for a dining hall, but learning to cook is not only cheap but really enriching in other ways as well.

  1. It's easier to be healthier (and in time this transforms
     to "impossible to not be healthier".
  2. It's an impressive skill for attracting relationships 
     both friendly and romantic.
  3. Once you're confident, cooking for a party of friends and
     second degree strangers is a GREAT way to meet new people.

I forget who it is, but there's a HNer around who's had great successes throwing open-to-all, multi-course Hacker Dinners and taught himself the skills more or less on the fly. At the end of the day, everybody eats; almost everybody can enjoy interesting, tasty food; and those who can skillfully, confidently serve that up become a social hub.

It is indeed a great skill, but time is limited and it feels so incredibly futile to spend 30 minutes preparing nice food for the millionth time, when in 10 minutes it will only be a memory in my stomach.

Eat slower?

(edit: removed a superfluous link, so instead I'll just be anecdotal. Cooking and eating are great social activities when done right. In my mind it's incredibly relaxing to cut vegetables and manage a meal. Conversations can spring into new inspiration or just better bonding with friends. I understand that not all meals can put striving for that kind of bliss as a major goal, but I'm not trying to defend all meals.)

Make more food. Leftovers!

Every time I make pasta, I boil the entire box and make too much sauce so I can eat later.

Have you ever been to IKEA? I wish that they would do stand-alone cafeterias like that have in the store, but place them around the city; I would eat there all the time.

It's really good (and healthy [steamed vegetables, fish, etc.]) and really cheap; it's awesome.

Ikea restaurants are loss-leaders to get people into the store. I too will quite happily pop into an ikea just for food too but the idea is that you have come to shop.

But as a loss-leader it doesn't make sense to have independent stores in town.

I recall a cafe in Brussels I saw on some PBS travel show, where all the seating was long wooden benches. This is much more sociable than what I see in most US eateries.

I find that one of the Whole Foods in Houston is a good option, so long as I don't want to pig out. (The one off Wesleyan - 4004 Bellaire.) They have a couple of long tables, but not enough volume of people interested in talking. The food is top-notch, though and they have a great selection of raw foods. Kirby - the food isn't as good though okay and the customers are obnoxious. (Some of the help is pretty unconcerned too.) Westheimer & Wilcrest - I liked the store and what food there was was good, but selection was gimpy when I worked near there. The other Whole Foods in town are not worthy of the name as far as the hot-bar selections and attention to detail go.

Sometimes I've eaten at the Kirby Whole Foods and looked down the row of 2-seat tables by the window. 4 people in a row eating by themselves and reading.

(There's some weirdos at the cheese bar at the Wesleyan/Bellaire Whole foods who know a bit and give a damn about cheese -- enough to give out delightful recommendations.)

I've sat in that cafe in Brussels!

I would love an urban cafeteria serving a handful of healthy, cheap, fresh meal options.

There are hundreds of delis like this in midtown Manhattan, they just don't have much seating.

I have the opposite complaint. My school's dining hall meal plan works out to $8+/meal and it's infuriating. I now spend almost half as much by shopping at Trader Joe's and cooking.

What do you count as good food? I find that it doesn't take me that much longer to make something good and healthy (maybe not gourmet delicious) than it would to wait in line at a cafeteria.

Good food: Salad, main course and dessert for around £4. Lots of vegetables and other (healthy) perishable ingredients. The thing with perishable food at home is you either have to constantly buy in small quantities, which is time consuming, or buy more, plan your meals up-front, and hope you can use it up before it rots. This is also assuming it makes sense to travel home for dinner most evenings and cook, which is not true a lot of the time. Three good courses is what I'll do for a dinner party, not when I've come in late and tired.

Also, in a food hall you don't have to do the washing up.

Still, it sucks that your setup is so expensive and the queues are so long. The worst I've seen is a university where they've outsourced everything to a bunch of chains. The food is overpriced, processed and bland - it's just like eating in a mall.

I've always wanted somewhere that would serve a decent salad reliably for £5. I've yet to find that place. If they existed, they'd have me as a customer at least 3 times a week.

Former poet laureate of the US, Charles Simic says, the secret to happiness begins with learning how to cook.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/magazine/03wwln-q4-t.html

Well, I'm sure there's some economics laureate out there who says that the secret to efficiency begins with comparative advantage.

It sounds like you live in the wrong city then. I can think of several places within 15 minutes of my house that fit your exact description.

What university are you referring to? Personally, I find university dining options to be overpriced, with low food quality. Sure, they often try to be healthy, but I've never felt a draw to them. The only good aspect I can see to them is the social aspect, which (as another poster mentioned) is solvable by simply learning to cook and using it to create a social hub.

I was a grad student at an Ivy League school and I found the "all you can eat" food options to be impossible; everything was so stuffed with fat that I couldn't eat much of it...

Maybe that was the idea.

Another option: cook for two days and put half of it in your fridge or freezer.

I agree with this... only I want to add one more star

* open late.

where do I get food at 2am? silicon valley is full of Engineers who don't have to stumble in to work until 11 or noon, yet most places that serve food close at 9pm. what is with that?

Non-teaching of explicit rationality annoys me. The most fundamental, elementary, and basic concepts of rationality are not systematically explained anywhere that I know of. It is impossible to engage the average PhD in a dialogue with agreed-upon rules of reasoning because they do not know why you can't prove things about the real world by arguing about the definitions of a word, or why it's a bad idea to pick a conclusion first and then come up with arguments for it, or the Bayesian definition of evidence that forms the foundation of all belief updates in epistemic rationality, or why violating the expected utility theorem by failing to assign consistent utilities always means leaving some value on the table.

I am writing a book to solve this problem.

or why it's a bad idea to pick a conclusion first and then come up with arguments for it

Unless one had to start one's thesis with null hypotheses (increasingly less common, but still a notable approach.)

I would be interested in reading your book, as well as a summary if you have one somewhere.

He's still writing it. The huge numbers of blog posts it is a synthesis of are available at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

And for a less conventional overview, see Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

Interesting, this reminds me of a book I thought about writing at one point titled something like "How To Tell What Is True"

Which would cover topics like:

* Peer review * Double blind experiments * Anecdotal evidence * Statistical Significance

But I sort of lost interest and ended up just making it a blog post instead... http://www.startbreakingfree.com/504/how-to-tell-whats-bulls...

Parent's ideas are much more applicable to the general public, which is who needs this training the most.

Now there's an interesting question: how can you teach some low-hanging fruit of rationality to someone with maybe half an hour to spare? The best attempt at this I've seen is Carl Sagan's article "The Fine Art of Boloney Detection", from his book The Demon-Haunted World. Sagan was an engaging writer, and does a good job making it easy to understand. I found a copy here:

http://dannybhoy1.tripod.com/baloney.htm

It would be even better if we had effective sound bites. I suppose we have "Correlation does not equal causation", which rhymes nicely, but too many people think it means that correlation isn't evidence for causation, which is wrong. I guess this is a problem with soundbites in general.

This reminds me of a book I thought of writing, titled "The Limits of Certainty and the Quest for Authorization."

This sounds like skepticism. Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" is similar in nature, though hardly systematic. James "The Amazing" Randi has also written a handful of books aimed at debunking some of the more prominent results of irrational thinking (homeopathy, astrology, etc.)

Yes, the conflation of skepticism about UFOs with the general art of figuring out what's true and achieving your goals is part of the problem I'd like to address here.

You, Eliezer Yudkowsky, annoy me with your presence here.

Although your ideas aren't nearly as dire nor your followers as obnoxious, it feels like the 1960s Ayn Rand is all over Hacker News.

1. Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it.

This is just a tragedy.

2. Job interviews that require quizzes and an "intensive" multi-stage interview process.

As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code and offered to give you other code examples from my private repositories on request. I give you links to my previous work and letters of recommendation. Yet you insult me by being paranoid that I can't actually program and expect me to believe that this half-assed exam rife with trick questions and obscure trivia is actually going to tell you something about me?

This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process and made it more expensive, paranoid, and stupid than most other processes in a business. There has to be a better way to verify a candidates' potential. At least for programming jobs.

Maybe something like Ohloh's repo log-analysis tool that can create a dashboard view of a candidates' source-code contributions to the world? Obviously only works for candidates that can provide URLs to publicly accessible repositories. Probably ways to get around that.

Anyway, that has been really annoying me lately. :)

This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process...

It's not a myth.

I'll admit it's pure speculation on my part. I have a hard time believing that ninety-some-odd percent of applicants believe they can blatantly lie their way into a position they are clearly not qualified for. How embarrassing is it to be caught in such a lie? Not every needs to be keenly self-aware to at least have an intuition about the limits and potential of their own capabilities...

Maybe I'm just not cynical enough...

update: and even if it were true, it's still a pain for qualified applicants to get through these draconian hiring practices.

Well, remember that good applicants will only be applicants, per se, a few times before they land a job. Whereas bad applicants just keep buzzing around forever...

It's not embarrassing at all typically. Failing at applying to a single position does not instantly cause the depths of your ignorance in programming fundamentals to be broadcast to the world.

From my experience and observation it's generally very lucky if you get anything better than a 50:1 ratio from initial phone screen down to a hiring offer.

So many of the programmers I graduated college with were only book smart. They couldn't problem solve or do anything a book did not tell them how to do. They even had extremely high GPAs because they would memorize so much information for each test. It was only the project classes that hurt their GPA, sadly my college didn't have enough of those.

Its those kind of "programmers" that these tests are designed to find. A lot of companies seem to take it to far, as if to brag that their entry tests are harder, possibly even deterring the people they want.

> It's not a myth.

I refute your argument merely by stating the exact opposite.

> Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it.

Welcome to Atlanta. Or maybe many other cities. I've often thought that there must be some remote working solutions out there that just need to overcome inertia to be accepted. The benefits would be huge.

> As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code...

You're hired - just for having code out there. I'm not sure many hiring managers fully understand what open source is. That's part of the problem.

Wow I agree with you 100%. I hate job interviews like that! I've always wondered if interviews for other professions like accountants or dentists are this harsh.

I'm just guessing that you haven't yet worked in a large corporation yet, or else you'd have met the "programmer that can't program", or the "network engineer that can't network", or the "system administrator that can't sysadmin", or any number of IT professionals that are completely, and totally incapable of doing any meaningful work.

Large corporations are so risk-averse that they are usually afraid to fire people, even when they can't do their jobs. Also, the ones that stick around have gotten so good at working the political system and getting others to do their work that they can't fire them, because they will just say "you didn't ask me to do it in writing", or any number of other excuses why they didn't do their job.

Not to mention, let's say you do want to fire a programmer who can't program - you can't just fire them, they have to be given a verbal warning first, then a written warning, it needs to be documented with HR, then they are put on a 90 day probationary period, or "improvement plan." They claim they don't have enough training for the job, so then they need to be retrained, at additional expense.

The other factor is that some managers like to keep 10-20% dead weight around because it pads their department. Everyone is fighting for more direct reports; apparently whoever has the most employees wins some kind of management contest. So, they keep 10-20% slackers on staff, knowing that if layoffs come around, they can cut the dead weight and keep the good programmers.

It's frankly amazing that anything gets done at all in a large corporation.

>This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth

This is absolutely not a myth. I've seen it first hand in an interview. Having said that, it appears that you've been dealing with "interviewers who can't interview" or companies with really stupid hiring practices. These silly tests they do are designed to tease out what you've freely offered. They should just have their engineers look at your repos, verify which commits are yours and how good the code is.

But honestly, imagine working with a place that has such stupid rigidity. I seriously doubt this inflexibility would exist in HR in isolation. I think they did you a favor (accidentally).

Finding people to work on short, proof-of-concept projects with.

I have a list of more than 25 items that I would love to work on, but have little motivation without someone willing to help out. I don't necessarily want to form a startup on these ideas, just get the ball rolling and see where it leads.

I would like a site that enables me to find others and create prototype apps in a matter of days, almost like a flash mob. It should bring together graphic artists, designers, developers, and specialists as seamlessly as possible. I think this would work especially well for mobile apps, where project size is often small enough that a 3-4 person team could finish a reasonable version 1 in a weekend.

Example: I want to build a mobile app to answer the question "Does this fit me?" The app would enable users to scan a bar code, upload if it fits or not, get predictions about if it fits or not, and receive recommendations on other items that may fit.

I have no idea how the design should look. I have no idea how to write iPhone apps and limited Android experience. I don't have a lot of experience building web applications. I can't do graphics for the life of me. However, I have a TON of experience in AI and data mining, and what I imagine to most people would seem like the "hard part"-- predicting if something fits, recommending similar items, etc.-- is actually the fun part to me. So I need a designer and an iPhone/Android guy with a free weekend.

If we planned on selling the app, then the site could optionally include some auto-generated legal code for agreeing to revenue/equity split. That would make it more of a flash-startup idea, though.

I am the exact opposite of you. I can put up entire projects myself (design, code etc...) but when it comes to heavy lifting I try and out source it because even though I can do it, it would take as much time as putting up a whole mobile web app.

I am currently working on 3 apps (2 will go live in the next few weeks). If you are interested in working on some stuff together send me an email.

What do you mean by "heavy lifting"? Are you saying you tend to work on simpler mobile apps as opposed to more complex apps, since the back-end calculations are too intense?

If so, then we definitely need to work together. :)

Note: I don't see an email in your profile.

Well, sort of.

What I really mean is that I work on apps that are simple on the front end and require lots of heavy lifting (example: Sentiment Extraction from Unstructured Text using Tabu Search-Enhanced Markov Blanket.) on the backend.

I am not a programmer or engineer. I am a hacker; but I am also a brilliant problem solver so I can teach myself what i need to know to solve the problem at hand. Even so I am not naive enough to think that I come up w/ anything close to the "optimal" solutions (mathematically). IMO thats where people like you come in.

This is awesome! I really like this idea. I have a too general understanding from reading HN to really be of use. But, I've add this to ever note and once I get python/django/jquery down a little better and a project out of the way, I'll hit you up.

Not to recurse on your comment, but can we build a web app for this some weekend?

I would also love to help build a web app for a site like this. I tried to email you, but there is no contact info in your profile. Shoot me an email (in my profile) if you are interested!

If you make an app for this, please do announce it on HN. It sounds like a great idea.

Sure. Happy to work with you and conorgil if interested. See my profile for my email.

I would love this site if it existed. I also have a list of projects that I would love to work on, but I like working with other people the most so I haven't started many of them. This site would also be a great place to meet new people with similar interests.

It would probably be difficult to go from a joint "proof-of-concept" project to a company unless all parties are on the same page. Like you mention, maybe the site could have optional legal agreements or something. Perhaps you could partner with something like LegalZoom.com to take care of those agreements for the users.

Also... have you seen this https://squadedit.com/?

The fact that 100s of years of art and music are available, but people still gravitate towards whatever is being promoted--typically something recent and inferior. This is partly a function of marketing, partly of herding--both poor selectors of quality.

Things that were made in a different day and age will generally take more effort to understand or get into, though. It's easier to pick up what's already all around. I'm not saying it's better, but that's how it goes.

The biggest problem that I have with most pop music right now, is that so much of it is incredibly simplistic. I have no problem with simple music, but it never feels deliberate. It feels formulaic. I hear no artistry in most of it. That being said, there are a fair number of groups that I actually do enjoy.

Does anyone else here listen to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q50xzhDO9lI

I don't care much if other people like bad things, but it irritates me when societal structures don't exist to allow me to enjoy the good things properly.

For example, the other day I was listening to my opera channel on pandora, and because pandora has horrible displays for opera music, I could not figure out what aria I was hearing, and spent close to two hours trying to figure out what it was. ID3 is totally unsuitable for anything besides pop music.

Personally, I'm offended by the popularity of "Classic Rock" and the fact that marketing channels have broken down to the point where there's no connection between great music being made today and many listeners.

I grew up listening to "Classic Rock" in the 1980s, and it took years for me to realize that this had deprived me of the authentic music of my youth... It was the music of somebody else's youth, which makes it all the more dangerous and seductive. It appeals to geezers who were listening to it when it was new, and it still appeals to new generations of young people.

Classic rock dominates the airwaves in my locale; other than NPR, I find everything else unlistenable [there was ~one~ good urban music station a long time ago, but it's owned by Clear Channel and quit playing anything good rather abruptly after 9/11]

The situation has many dimensions (for instance, any credible 'new' rock has to make a rapprochement with punk) but the thing I hate the most is hearing the same doobie brothers song on the radio driving into work and driving home. I'll listen to NPR or a Shonen Knife or Red Red Groovy disc, but I feel bad for all the boomers who can't escape the gravity of 1968.

Do you by any chance live in New England? I recently traveled there and in several hours of driving over two weeks, could not locate more than one or two radio stations (per area) that did not play classic rock. I completely share your frustrations.

I grew up in New England and I'm still in the Northeast.

Yeah I have 2 (probably more) Clear Channel stations in my city and I can drive clear across town without hearing anything but ads and a dj talking. Then they proudly claim 50 minutes of (insert music type). Yet I just drove 20 minutes without a single song, and it happens all the time.

It seems worth investing in a station to replace these. (anyone have a good source on how to start one?)

I'd recommend streaming 89.3 The Current from Minnesota Public Radio.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/the_current/

It's fully independent music radio station that's publicly funded. They don't play commercials, and they play a wide variety of known and unknown music. I first discovered it when I moved up here (the Twin Cities) away from the Clear Channel dominated airwaves and I haven't turned back since.

Couldn't agree more. I discovered 89.3 when going to school in the cities. Now, even though I no longer live in the area, I stream them online almost every day.

Milwaukee's got what sounds like a similar station: http://radiomilwaukee.org

Broadcasts at 88.9 FM in the city and streaming at the site.

And 100, 200 or 300 years ago, some people were undoubtedly saying the same. It might be intellectually trendy to slam modern things, but it doesn't necessary make such criticisms universally true.

I didn't see a criticism of modern things per se. The argument was that people are flocking to things based on poor evidence of quality, like advertising and lists of the latest things, rather than finding good stuff regardless of when it was produced.

I went to a music camp years ago and had the chance to get a drive home from one of the instructors. He was really old and classically trained and I liked him b/c he taught an awesome class on odd time signatures.

Anyway, on the drive he asked what kind of music I liked and I said that I didn't like most contemporary music because so much of it was based on rip-offs of stuff that had already been done.

"Do you think classical composers are any different?"

That really annoyed me at the time but I totally understand and appreciate it now. As more things change, etc.

Advertisements!

They're obnoxious, obviously biased, and interfere with whatever it was you were doing (watching a show, visiting a website, reading a newspaper, whatever). It's just wrong. And we all know this, yet we just accept it like it's some fact of life.

In addition, it doesn't just affect customers, but all newspapers/magazines/sites that rely on "advertisement income" to make a buck. One thing that puzzles me greatly is, how pageviews and sales are apparently their #1 concern, yet at the same time they're talking, in all seriousness, about "being objective" and "journalistic integrity". It just doesn't go together.

Since the internet is already beating the hell out of pretty much all old business models, maybe it will get rid of this one as well, or at least transform it into something more palatable. But so far, the industry's response has been to make advertisements (on websites at least) even MORE obnoxious and intrusive.

Would you be willing to pay to remove the ads from a website? Pay for each show you watch without ads? Pay more for an ad free newspaper? If not, you shouldn't be complaining about ads (even though they are pretty obnoxious). The ads support the content that you consume. Or do you have a better way to compensate the people that create this content?

I knew somebody would bring this up. :-)

What many people don't realize is that in the current situation, instead of paying (more) for the show/newspaper/etc, we pay for advertisements instead. When a business spends $$$ to promote their product, that money didn't fall out of the air; it's part of the price of the product they sell (much like some part of it is production cost, etc). So whenever somebody buys product X, they're also paying (a tiny fraction) for that product's advertisement.

So no, I would not be willing to pay to remove the ads from a website, since I am already paying to put them on there in the first place.

Personally, I would much rather that the price of all products would be a bit lower (i.e. minus any advertisement costs), and pay more for content that I actually want to see/watch/read, without obnoxious advertisements and commercials.

Admittedly, the current situation isn't anything like this, so if it were to happen, maybe I would actually regret it, or maybe it would have unforeseen drawbacks. (As it is, many people seem to be unwilling to pay for content...) It does seem like a fairer system though, that doesn't force consumers to read/watch things they don't want to.

It is sort of crazy. Consider two products A and B. They are identical, except that A is more expensive and has advertising. B is cheaper, but has no advertising. Which one wins? A because nobody knows that B even exists.

However, everybody is worse off. Consumers got advertising displayed to them that they didn't want to see and they got to pay more for the privilege. The manufacturer of B lost totally. Even the manufacturer of A is worse off because without the advertising, he could have split the difference with the consumer and gotten a larger profit.

The only winner is the advertising company who is making something nobody wants.

That is totally inefficient. Can it be fixed somehow?

Consider if there were no advertising; the result would likely be that A and B would both lose because nobody would know they exist.

So it's not completely inefficient. How much would you pay to not have to look around who knows where for things that you want?

"Consider if there were no advertising; the result would likely be that A and B would both lose because nobody would know they exist."

This may have been true in the past, but this is 2010... I constantly find out about products (and other things, and people, etc) that I didn't know existed, through other means than advertisements. Without paying for it, in fact; people put reviews about ANYTHING online nowadays.

search engines provide some of the answer, but search engines have an upper bound to their effectiveness. If a search engine were more effective than an ad, people won't click on search engine ads, and the search engine wouldn't make any money.

I think what we really need is another business model for search engines.

Advertising would annoy me so much less if I perceived products as less expensive when they featured advertising. For example I feel incredibly ripped off that films have increasingly long rolls of trailers, ads, and commercials that run before them but continue to increase in price.

That's why I want to create an opt-in advertising revenue based pizza place. When you place an order you are offered the choice between paying full price and getting discounts based on how much advertising material comes with your pizza. I figure you could get a stack of coupons, Chinese food menus, brochures, car insurance fliers, and magazines that would roughly equal the cost of a pizza. Free pizza.

Informal music notation. Existing systems are fine enough for formal classical notation, but if you want to make a quick rough sketch (e.g., lead sheets in The Real Book) it's pretty cumbersome, and the amount of time & effort it takes doesn't seem commensurate with the sort of document desired.

I've been pondering this off and on for years; I think it might require a pretty fundamental switch in how the data is entered. So far the best I've come up with is, uh, pen and paper...

Sorry for the accidental downvote. I meant to upvote because I have been thinking about (more formal) music notation on and off for years, too, trying to come up with a better format than Lilypond.

Oh man... This one bugs me too, but I see a lot of potential for things like the iPad here...

Yes, agreed. I am actually working on an iPad app for this purpose.

Have you thought about piano rolls ? Either paper-based ones that you draw yourself, or use software like Reason that has a piano roll for note input or display, nor sheet music. Actually, most non-classic music software has piano rolls.

What do you want to jot down? only chords, chords + melody?

Payments - I am tired of entering 20 things every time I want to pay for something, paypal has been problematic with cancelling accounts and generally being untrustworthy.

Also I'd love to get email notifications from my bank when someone pays me, so I don't have to constantly poll their clunky website.

One work-around for that is services like Mint.com which will do the polling for you and alert you based on your own criteria.

The fact that most people seem to think that it's okay to get sick from the diseases of aging, get frail, suffer, and die, and that we shouldn't try to do something to fix that problem (really fix it, not just prolong suffering a bit).

I think it's probably partly rationalization because they think it's inevitable (but it is not inevitable, and I'd like that to become a more mainstream view so we can hurry up and work on this problem), and partly ageism, which makes a lot of people think that old people have less value so their pain and loss isn't as bad.

I might be the only one who thinks this around here, but I think the concept of mortality is kind of beautiful. However, ask me about that when I'm facing my own and the answer might be different.

I think it's a really powerful concept, and like religion and superstition, I think it's fine in fiction (books and movies would be boring without that imagery). But in the real-world, it's just plain bad and we need to do something about it.

Nobody is in favor of malaria or smallpox, but most people turn a blind eye to the diseases of aging even though they kill a lot more people.

The real question is: If dying of old age didn't exist (if everybody stayed physically as fit as 25 years olds indefinitely, until they get hit by a truck or whatever), would we miss frailty and decrepitude? Would we invent death by slow diseases that make our bodies and minds fall apart? I kinda doubt it.

You guys seem to think death isn't inevitable? Huh?

Not death, just the diseases of aging (which aren't so different from other diseases in their effects, when it comes down to it).

The general idea is that our bodies accumulate damage as a side product of metabolism (stuff that evolution hasn't equipped us to deal with - various long-lived molecules that we can't break down); over a certain threshold, that damage turns into pathologies. So your skin is less elastic, your arteries aren't as flexible, your immune system doesn't work as well, your brain accumulate beta amyloids that lead to alzheimer's, etc. If we could periodically repair that damage before the pathologies happen, we could potentially keep young bodies indefinitely and cure many diseases without having to understand how metabolism works, thus reducing human suffering tremendously (about 150k deaths each day).

For more on this, check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...

Or these presentations:

http://citywire.kuluvalley.com/player.html?pguid=E586AD51-41...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8554766938711591377&...

Or the work of this foundation (I'm in no way affiliated with them - I'm just a fan and individual donor):

http://www.sens.org

So that would result in immortality, right? How else would people die? The obvious problem here is overpopulation. What's your stance on that?

I come from a family history of physicians. My father is an MD and professor at Johns Hopkins.

It's difficult to conceive how little we know about the human body and biology in general. People are working on things related to it, but we're really nowhere near even understanding the problem. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't being worked on.

Indeed. But the approach that I support is a maintenance & repair approach. We don't need to know how metabolism works, or how to modify it for it to work. We just need to understand the types of damage that accumulate in our bodies as we age (and there aren't that many kinds) and periodically repair it before it reaches a certain threshold.

The problem is, almost nobody is working on that approach. It's all gerontology or geriatry, trying to squeeze out a year or two out of someone already frail and sick, or to mess with metabolism, something that will take way too long and might never be completely successful.

The third approach - aka the engineering approach - has a chance to work in our lifetimes IF we do the hard work and stop looking the other way. And few things are more worthwhile to support; if we bring forward these therapies by even 1 week, that's over a million lives saved.

If you want to know more about the biology of this, I recommend that you read this (and the papers cited): http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...

If you need more details, you can easily contact the SENS foundation or the authors of this book directly (they usually answer emails really quickly). This info should be enough to help you make up your mind about the feasibility of this kind of project. And if you need the latest science, there's a scientific journal called Rejuvenation Research that contains the most recent studies.

I wasn't planning to post in this thread, but now you mention it, what annoys me is people who seem to think that their particular utopia will be the first to have no unintended consequences whatsoever.

Double the annoyance factor when they refer to an engineering approach to the problem, given that the whole utopian premise is such stupendously bad engineering in the first place.

1) You are putting words in my mouth. I never said that. My stance on this is that if the new problems aren't bigger than the problems we have now of having about 150k people die each day, mostly after long periods of suffering, affecting whole families and losing humanity lots of knowledge and expertise, draining our resources into losing battles against diseases that are fatal, then we should do this. Everybody's already in favor of curing other diseases, so why not those of aging? It is also not up to us to decide for everybody that this shouldn't be developed (you can make a personal choice to refuse such therapies of you want - and we might have to chose between low birth rates or high death rates), just like if the creators of hygiene, antibiotics, better crops, vaccines, or whatever had decided that they shouldn't do what they did because "it might have bad consequences". Our current world is very different from the world a thousand years ago, and I'd rather live now. Maybe in a 100 years we'll look back and think that it was such a waste that young people died at 80, like we now think that dying at 40 is terrible (but it was common once upon a time).

2) Please be specific about what you think is "stupendously bad engineering". Thanks.

First off, I plead guilty to putting words in your mouth. My comment was an accurate description of what annoys me; I leave it up to the reader to decide whether it's an accurate description of your agenda.

1) If there were no aging, everybody would most likely spend all of their time playing WoW and never leaving the house for fear of being hit by a bus. All of those slogans about how life is short become pretty impotent when it's actually not.

2) In engineering we generally make incremental changes to society, test them and either back away from them or put in place feedback mechanisms to keep them in check. "Wouldn't it be great if we abolished death by natural causes (and everything else stayed exactly the same)" is about as far as you can get from this. See Billy Vaughn Koen, Discussion of the Method, pp. 233-236.

1) I don't think that argument has much weight. Considering how little healthy people think about death, and how the incredible extension of the average lifespan didn't seem to have catastrophic effects like that, I doubt we'd turn into some kind of sci-fi distopia where everybody doesn't do anything. You live one day at a time, and if you are healthy and like your life today, you'll want to live tomorrow. And so on. Doesn't matter if it's for 40 years, 80 years, or 120 years. Most people who say they want to die are frail, sick and suffering, and what they want is not death per se, but for the pain to stop. You don't see many healthy 20-30 years old wish for death unless they suffer from severe depression. The cliché about "death gives meaning to life" is just rationalization, trying to convince ourselves that something we think is inevitable is actually a good thing. But if there was no death from the diseases of aging, we certainly wouldn't invent it or miss it, just like we wouldn't invent smallpox or malaria.

2) I'm calling it the engineering approach because that's what it is (http://sens.org/sens-research/what-is-sens/engineering-solut...) as opposed to the gerontology approach or the geriatry approach. It is about simply repairing damage, the same way you maintain a vintage car or an old house for 10x longer than it was designed to last without necessarily having to understand exactly how that damage is created (by metabolism or physical and chemical reactions, etc), and without having to know how to cure all diseases (you repair damage before it becomes a pathology).

If you want to learn more about the biology and details of the proposals I'm talking about, check out the links I posted in other comments here. They have detailed plans for the 7 types of damages that accumulate from the operation of metabolism. Otherwise, your criticisms aren't specific, you are just attacking a vague idea of what you think this is about.

I couldn't agree more. What can we do about it, other than donating to organizations like SENS?

Banking - My bank has a website that the 90's would be proud of, it gives me little to no information about my spending habits, transferring money is a nightmare, and using kublax (similiarly mint) had my account banned for security purposes.

Especially doing anything that requires one bank to talk to another. Why does it take 5 days to move money between banks? It's ridiculous.

I once had mistakenly setup a transfer from one bank to another and I wanted to cancel it. So I called up the destination bank and they said there was nothing they could do. I called the source bank and had to pay 30 bucks to put a stop payment order on the account AND they couldn't guarantee it would stop the transfer.

I'd like to add that if you are/were in the U.S. Military at some point, (or even your parents, I'm pretty sure) then you should check out USAA. They have a fantastic website and awesome customer service.

note: I have no affiliation with USAA other than I use them and really like them.

USAA does have a mostly solid website (and a fairly customer service all around IMHO,) but it does have some rendering flaws with Firefox on Linux that are very annoying.

I believe USAA also supports check imaging - no need to physically deposit a check. take a picture / scan it from your home or office and it will be processed.

They do but it doesn't work that well. I have had to scan checks 3 or 4 times before.

You no longer need an association with the military to sign up for USAA's checking/savings accounts. They're just really quiet about it. I made the switch to them a couple months ago. Signed up online and had an account minutes later.

I agree. You do not have to be a member of the U.S. Military to open an account (or more) with USAA. It took me roughly 15 minutes to open accounts for myself and my family through their website.

What you cannot do (if you are not/were a member of the military) is use their direct deposit feature i.e. scan checks and upload them to their website. You are not also eligible to get insurance from them.

Other than that I agree that they have a fantastic website and awesome customer service. Because they do not have ATMs when you withdraw money from another bank's ATM, they refund up to $1.50 for the ATM fees up to 10 times a month.

I had completely the opposite experience - our service with USAA was terrible. My wife's father was in the military so she had USAA for everything when we got married. We got a cheaper quote from another company for auto insurance, and when we tried to cancel for USAA they refused to do it and got belligerent on the phone, claiming that "we are the best" and "why would you want to use anyone else" and that our other quote "must be a mistake." It took half a dozen phone calls before we were able to cancel the service.

Their credit card (which she still has) isn't much better. Huge delays posting payments, and the customer service has a huge chip on their shoulder whenever she needs to call them.

Online banking in South Africa is excellent - I was shocked when I moved to the US how archaic it is.

Transfers are a breeze, fast, and everyone does it. Integration with cell phone infrastructure is also great.

A specific bank in particular?

My experience is with Investec and Standard Bank. But I've heard good things about ABSA, Nedbank, and FNB as well.

Competition is pretty strong, so fairly comparable across the board.

I suspect transfers are archaic (inconvenient, expensive, and take several days or weeks to process) in the US because otherwise the credit card and payment processing industries would cease to exist.

It's really sad how many useless jobs exist in the US because someone thinks that these people would simply starve to death if they weren't able to e.g. hold a stop/slow sign at road construction sites.

Can I ask why you would even keep an account at such a bank then?

I have had accounts with 3 banks and they have all had similarly terrible experiences, if anyone has suggestions (UK based) more than welcome (halifax, lloyds and natwest are the 3 I have tried)

Nationwide is great for my needs.

Advertising - especially online. I believe one of pg's areas he thought YC would fund was an ad startup and there's a good reason for that. Online ads are still in their infancy. Ads are often clumsily placed on content sites using keyword matching that can misfire or even backfire (ads for airline tickets in a story about a crash).

To make matters worse, all content seems to covered with a slimy film - the sorts of ads that normally appear on late night TV seem to show up on the best of sites.

Believe it or not, there are people who enjoy well executed television or print ads, either for their entertainment value or for their effectiveness. I haven't heard the same for online ads, with possibly the recent exception of the "Old Spice Man Who Your Man Could Smell Like."

There's a lot of room here for improvement not only of the ads, but for the online experience overall. While Google and others are milking the contextual cow, some bright minds are going to come up with something revolutionary that will change how publishers monetize their sites. Ads will fit better, be more engaging and monetize sites and drive results for their buyers.

Perhaps then those ads for diet pills, get-rich-quick schemes and their ilk will be banished to the gutters of the internet where they belong.

Things to do - I find it really hard to find things to go out and do in my spare time, events listings never seem to have something that interests me, same with tourist guides although they can be better. Asking friends is always an order of magnitude better.

I've long thought there is a serious opportunity in connecting organizations who provide fun things to do with people looking for fun things to do. I had an (unpursued) idea a while back to create a single-serving site called, "What should I do this weekend?" Another idea was a subscription-based service that organizes adult "field trips" every weekend.

I am working on this problem right now.

What about sites like Meetup? I had this same problem after moving and found a lot of regular hobbies locally.

I've had a lot of success with the CouchSurfers community. It's a travel oriented site, but they also promote meetups for the people living in a city so as to form a tighter, most trusting community. When you throw travel-wise tourists, friendly city ambassadors, and generally open-minded go-out-and-tackle-the-world style people together in a room and have them share stories or plan events it gets crazy and amazing really, really quickly.

Likewise - If you have time and love meeting interesting people, Couchsurfing is awesome. I've met some very interesting people, and it's quite safe.

I wonder if you could make a list of public events on Facebook, searchable by town. There's a lot of stuff that happens; I just usually don't know about it until too late.

Living expenses.

Currently it takes nearly 30% of my income just to afford the physical shelter. Then pretty much the rest for basic necessities. Not to mention the time it takes to maintain all of this stuff. Pay bills, car maintenance, home maintenance, clothing, grocery shopping. I feel like just living takes up so much of my time.

Things that assume/require that I have exactly one physical address.

That includes banks, insurance companies, government agencies, utilities, and pretty much every business that I need to deal with to do anything.

90% of the pain I encounter during my life on the road stems from the fact that I don't own or rent property in the US, and therefore don't have a fixed address. There are tons of people in my situation (especially among the less well off), yet every time I have to deal with any official paperwork from any organization they make it seem like it's some novel situation they've never encountered before.

Or even just physical addresses in general. I wish there was an official registry a-la-dns, people would mail things to me, and the post office would route it to me based on what that registry said. Yes, you'd have to update it, but it beats having to update my address in a half-dozen places every time I move.

There are actually a few places that deal with this - http://earthclassmail.com/ being one of them.

There's a similar service, myus.com , which accomplishes this for non-US residents.

Thanks for the link, I was after something exactly like that and was at the point where I was just going to do it myself.

Lol, try doing that on a US nonimmigrant visa...

Airlines - They are nearly all just a pain in the ass to deal with. When was the last time you heard someone tell you how they had a great experience with an airline?

I know where you're coming from, but when the combination of online check-in and dedicated bag-drops is in place (unfortunately, sometimes, especially when flying on budget airlines, it's not), flying is pretty painless. And painless, affordable transfer from A to B is my definition of a great airline experience.

you don't hear about it because you don't know rich enough people, or because you're tuned out from it - like weathermen constantly being wrong. they aren't, you just remember it more when they are than when they aren't.

I had a great experience with two airlines recently, bmi and airberlin, but it was probably because i was prepared to pay a little more than my usual easyjet price.

Yeah, i think that it's probably more to do with the correlation of how much you pay to how much you will enjoy airlines though

I've had great experiences on Virgin America. It's cheap, the planes are nice, there is wifi, the terminals are better, the stewards and stewardesses are pleasant and good looking, etc.

Me too. I had no idea flying could be so enjoyable. I've made the Seattle -> SF trip a 4-5 times this year on Virgin and I've been over the moon at how easy and comfortable it's been.

Honestly, they can't come to Chicago soon enough. Too bad they seem to be having a dog of a time getting space in the airport.

I had a great experience with Brussels Airlines during the volcanic ash thing - unlike a lot of crappy airlines, they put me (and the rest of my flight) up in a hotel in Barcelona for 2 nights, then organised a coach for everyone to drive back to Brussels. The only slight quibble was the dropping us at the destination airport at 2am with no other transport connections (apart from taxis) running, but that was small potatoes against what a lot of others suffered during that period. Still, their customer service was top notch, and they were quick with getting information out.

The lesser of two evils.

There was an Aussie guy who ran British Airways for a while and then left to do other things. I remember an interview with him and they asked why he left the airline industry. The answer was something like: "The entire industry, from the Wright brothers until today, has made a net loss. I'd like to try something that makes a profit".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Eddington

I had a really great experience. I once pressed a series of buttons while at home in my underwear, giving a stranger enough cash for a nice night out or two. A few days later, I woke up at noon, drank some coffee, had a slightly fitful nap, and woke up 7000 kilometers away in the stratosphere. When I fell back down (softly), I spent a few days walking around a city whose inhabitants' ancestors had been utterly genetically and culturally decoupled from mine from 50,000 years ago until recently. Then I got bored and went home.

I'm pretty sure it was a good experience, because I keep reading books about how my trip usually takes months in transit living in your own filth, if you didn't bring your family you'd never see them again, and sometimes you'd die on the way. I had to pay $8 for a sandwich though.

Modern Psychiatry - Parts of it are updated for the modern world. The rest is still pretty much medieval guesses sans experimentation. Accurate unbiased information for someone in distress is hard to obtain, which compounds the problem.

What about it is disappointing? We're all human, so we all work pretty much the same way. Everyone has their problems, and typically those problems are similar to someone else's.

This means that the means to treating most of your problems apply to everyone.

Yes and no.

It is true that we have a similar brain structure and represent all but a mere point in the endless space of mind design possibilities, but there is a lot of variation within that point. Just think about the variables in operation over here. Billions of neurons with multiple connections in a chemical soup, firing in a patter and changing while sharing information.

It isn't surprising that we don't understand this, but you'll be amazed at the psuedo-science out there did you know that there was something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder (see: http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Oppositional-defiant-diso...)? I cannot name one scientific, unbiased experiment for the root causes behind expression and functioning in gender variant, or intersexed children.

There is some amazing work being done at the national institute of mental health in the underlying neurological basis of mental health disorders like depression and PTSD, but it isn't enough. (see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...)

The disappointing thing is not the lack of knowledge but the psuedo-science out there and the self proclaimed experts willing to ruin lives without a flinch. We've come a far way, but we have even farther to go.

Well, my point was that many - if not most - problems people have are "standard" problems that people just have because they're people and they all work in the same way.

For example, being lonely causes depression, bad parents cause a huge variety of problems, and so on. Human nature, our insecurities, our egos, our selfishness & greed, and so on - they're the same for everyone.

If you've got a problem, you can be pretty sure you're not the first one to have it, and that the way to treat you is no different from the way all the others with the same problem were treated.

So, I wouldn't think of it in terms of neurons, but in terms of humans.

Reading posts with a lot of comments in HN. I never know what comments are new without looking to the date (sometimes they are hundreds).

I've got a chrome extension called "hckr news". It shows you which comments on a HN thread that are new since the last time you visited that page. So far I'm liking it

I was thinking of this same problem yesterday. I will try to hack together a Firefox extension for this over the weekend to give the HN comments page Slashdot type filters (min. point thresholds), and date sorting.

Will post on HN if it works well.

Chrome can use Greasemonkey userscripts. Can you add collapse-able replies?

Good suggestion....will try to add that as well.

I built an extension for Chrome that lets you hide articles + collapse comments (HN HideIt); it's here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dibillbafbngeilo...

yeh if anyone has a firefox extension to fix this then it annoys me as well.

I generally try and batch read HN (via rss) daily, and sometimes I feel that I am missing out on new comments (made after I finished reading and closed the tab; most commonly the new/recent posts)...would be nice to avoid bookmarking and searching for the new comments

Yeah, though reading is not so bad until you post a comment (like now), at which point you end up back at the top... An inline comment feature would be great.

Psychological pricing - don't tell me that your product is $9.95; say $10.

I wonder if businesses actually sell more if their products are priced like $9.95 or $9.99 instead of $10, or that it's just based on the expectation that such prices are more attractive to the customer. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing] doesn't mention whether any research was done to verify this, much less any results.

It's probably more about phonetic symbolism: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119111051.ht...

I heard tell this practice arose because of some newspaperman who struck up deals with local businesses to salami-slice pennies off their prices so that people would have more pennies with which to buy his one-cent newspaper.

If true, I don't think he realized the Sorcerer's-Apprentice-like consequences of his actions, as I'm now AWASH IN USELESS PENNIES.

I know that most prices at Nordstrom end in .95 whereas Nordstrom Rack prices typically end in .97.

They have a very liberal return policy so it's a simple way to encode where the product was bought so customers can't pass off outlet store items as if they were bought from Nordstrom proper.

That's one beneficial use to psychological pricey but I too would rather pay nice round numbers. It makes it easier to calculate sales tax too.

And the consequence of that is that I sometimes can't remember some products' prices.

"Was it $699 that I mentally converted to $700, or was it $799?"

Yes. I bought some food from a place recently that had all of their prices listed on the board as whole numbers. It took me a couple seconds to register as a price because it's so unusual. I loved it though.

I am annoyed at how much the hacker/startup scene sucks here in India. All the cool people and projects are in the USA and the people who don't emigrate end up working on the outsourced Java/RoR enterprise program from hell simply because there aren't any technically interesting jobs. Beng teh greta outsourcing destination for crap legacy code creates an ecosystem of substandard "programmers" who all get certified in J2Ee (or whatever the latest crap is) and then move on to become "managers" asap.

I've found my niche in Machine Learning, and have escaped this fate somewhat, but damn, it is a small and lonely niche. It would be great to go out and have a beer with engineers working on technically challenging projects, like you can in San Fransisco. (I'd love to hang out with the Data Drinking group for e.g.). The amount of talent wasted on legacy enterpriseware maintenance is unimaginable.

I've lived in the USA and I love the place, but I don't want to choose between doing good work and living "at home".

Meanwhile, HN keeps me sane. I don't have great engineers to talk to and learn from in the Real World, but online is a different matter.

I tried to start something similar to the Data Drinking group in valley here in Bangalore with a bunch of Google, Yahoo ML/Distributed Computing guys but it didn't work out because of weird reasons. Maybe, its worth another shot. Ping me on my email address if you are interested in helping organize something like this.

Expense reports - eg. receipts collection, sorting them, scanning them (even if some solutions exist) but then accountants always want it in a different format/system that I use. (no standard especially outstide the US)

Agreed, I believe even small businesses could save hours each month if all the relevant receipts related to a month's bank transactions somehow magically got gathered in the same place.

This is so true. My company uses Concur and I'm sorry to say it's actually worse than doing it the old fashioned way. You wouldn't expect that from their homepage, but the actual app is godawful.

I know the receipts are an IRS thing, but why can't the rest be easier?

Email - Not a lot has changed in the past 20 years, I think we can do better.

Yes, Gmail was pretty innovative but I still think there are plenty of things to improve.

Fully agreed, I think wave was an awesome concept, but a terrible implementation.

Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I have yet to try lampson)

IMHO the only problem with Google Wave's implementation was that it didn't integrate with normal email, limiting its network to Google Wave users. This seems very obvious, but I rarely hear people mention this when Google Wave comes up. Did you have something else in mind when you said it had terrible implementation?

Oh man where to start.

It's just a noisy mess, poorly designed, with a lot of weird design decisions and exotic patterns that only added to the noise.

It starts with a way to complex proposition. Google basically created the entire vision instead of the basic core functionality and then expanded on that, optimizing in the detail rather than for the big shows.

Etherpad started the right way. It started very lean with a basic principle that then evolved with time, slowly. And now it got bought.

I agree that it was a terrible start.

But have you looked at it recently? I've been using Wave to manage most of my project-related communications (with one or two partners), and it's fantastic. Like Etherpad, but a lot more powerful. And fyi, the Etherpad team is now part of the Google Wave team.

I don't think its extraneous features detract from it as much as you're suggesting, but I also am probably not so qualified to judge since I barely use it (since there's no email integration). We've got highly portable hardware that integrates IM, SMS, email and media two-way/embedding (smartphones) but there's definitely room for a software or web application to provide all of these in one place on their respective platform. That's what I was hoping Google Wave would provide, but the rollout and self-containment is the critical factor in crippling it

I agree that they were missing some core features in the beginning. It has greatly improved though.

They've opened it up now so that you can design a better interface if you wish to. They've also opened it up to anyone with an email address now, and expanded on the robots and gadgets.

Now I don't use Wave that much because I don't often need the collaboration that it offers. However, if they could integrate Wave and Gmail, it would be immensely useful, especially the gadgets and robots.

I think there's room for a lot more innovation in this area. I'm working on some open source code for doing Wave-like stuff in a way that will be easy for people to integrate with other projects. Have you ever tried to edit a wiki page, only to discover that somebody else was editing it and had acquired a lock on the whole page? There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to both edit it, Etherpad-style. Or rather, the reason is that making something like that is hard. But it shouldn't have to be. I hope to have something release-worthy in about a month; right now I've got a distributed text editor prototype that looks like a cross between Etherpad and Notepad. It works, but the code needs an overhaul.

Another problem with Google Wave is that it's inherently centralized. They transform the insert/delete operations so they can be applied out of order and still converge on the same document state. Unfortunately, the method they use for this requires a central server to maintain causal ordering of the operations. There are ways of doing this that don't require a central server, which could be handy.

Agree 100%

The main thing was the integration with email, I was amazed it didnt have it from the start and convinced that it would be coming very soon.

But the UI also irked me, it was far far to bloated with features I didnt care about (replay), when the thing that I care about was it being as fast and responsive as gmail, which it wasnt close to.

Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I have yet to try lampson)

Is there an available solution for the reverse of SendGrid? Basically a service which would receive your emails and then post to a url on your application.

http://wiki.sendgrid.com/doku.php?id=parse_api

Not a built in solution for this, but have you seen lamson - http://lamsonproject.org/ ? Handle emails with python - would be trivial to simply post their contents to a url.

I remember reading an article from someone who've used email for 25+ years and he pointed out three or so fundamental changes to email since he started using it. I think it was readable email addresses, conversations, and search.

Anyone know which article I'm talking about?

Can you list some of the (possible) improvements you can think of?

Standards for email markup would be really nice for starters.

I think it would be great if email had a sort of simple XML data structure, it would be a lot easier to tie it in with modern day document formats.

I highly doubt both of these will happen in the foreseeable future, The standards for html email alone are still terrible

I've had a handful of specs and UI mockups for a completely new kind of desktop email client sitting around for months, but I haven't had the opportunity to take them any further. If only there were a Chicago co-founder meetup...

Would you really be kickstarted by a meetup if you don't have the gumption to do anything about it now?

Identity - I am sick of having to create accounts on every website in the world, OpenID is an awesome solution but it needs to be implemented ubiquitously, I do not want everything tied to my twitter or facebook account.

Systems like Password1 solve this for me, with the added benefit that if someone manages to hack one of these sites and capture my password for it they'll have a bunch of random characters that wont work for anything else I have.

Personally I don't like OpenID for this reason among others.

I recently switched to 1Password. Now I realize that I'm basically unable to use any sites that require login with my phone, since I don't know my own passwords.

1Password has an application for the iPhone

and an "export to html" option that exports all of your passwords into a single encrypted javascript/html file that you can put on a server. it acts as a self-contained web application that lets you browse and search through your passwords on-demand. i've been using such an exported file for months after i migrated away from mac os and frequently access the file from my android phone and other browsers.

People in the left lane driving with a speed <= or 1mph faster than the people in the right lane.

This is annoying but what is more annoying is when you're on a multiple lane highway and 2 or more people decide to drive at exactly the same speed right next to each other. It would be nice if there was a rule (a law would be nice, but I don't see how you'd enforce it) that you could not drive within two car lengths of the car next to you at speeds over 40mph.

The added bonus here would be that people would not be sitting in other people's blindspots all the time and should reduce accidents.

More infuriating is when the driver is so oblivious that he/she doesn't notice the 8-10 cars behind him/her trying to pass.

Ah the left lane squatters who squat but won't shit.

More infuriating are people who change into the left lane and slow down.

I am relieved to read that so few of you are annoyed by other people. The same question on reddit would be a bitch fest about fat people, stupid people, religious people, slow drivers, etc, at the intersection of tribalism, ego and impatience.

And you show this by talking about being annoyed by the people on reddit? Are you not seeing your own tribalism or am I just not getting your sarcasm? :)

* Having applied for three internships at major research labs, which obviously lack the courtesy of letting you know that they are not interested. (This pisses me of so much that I hardly find time to do productive work anymore.)

* Living in a comparatively rich country that is so full of asshole civil cervants playing shenanigans that it makes you wonder why the hell you should continue providing for these jerks. I for one cannot believe the insane amount of taxes I have payed in my country just to get lied, cheated and straightout harrassed by people who should actually sit down and listen before telling you off.

* No funding for PhD research and travel expenses for attending conferences. Even though there is a shitload of money set aside exclusively for women in CS, I cannot get this kind of funding because of my gender. My research group is underfinanced and a recent grant proposal has been denied because of minor improvement suggestions. Of course I can re-submit, but I figure that I will be finished before any decision can be made. Man, I've had it with my country, I cannot wait to turn my back and go somewhere else...

Where do you live?

Software patents. Need to spend time and energy to get around them.

The increasingly extended copyright term. Come on, create something new instead of milking the old stuffs forever.

Anything animated on a text-centric webpage. And it's not just ads: animated twitter feeds, scrolling lists of related posts, little twinkling Super-Best Awesome Blog Award .gifs, etc.

Cut it out. I am trying to READ your WRITING, and you are actively distracting me from doing so!

ageism. It's so common today that people who would never exclude women or minorities or the handicapped or whoever have no problem excluding people over forty.

When a male turns 18 in the USA, he is allowed to sign up for the Army, get a gun, go kill human beings in the Middle East and perhaps die for his country.

BUT if that man dares drink a single beer with his dad before being shipped off to war, he will be treated like a criminal. His dad may be taken to court and punished for letting a minor have alcohol. The 18 year old could face severe punishments, including not being allowed in the army.

WHY THE FUCK are 18-20 year olds not allowed to drink a beer in the USA, but they're allowed to kill and maim thousands of people?

Ageism goes both ways my friend. We may let our young kill others, but we sure as fuck won't let them drink a beer.

"BUT if that man dares drink a single beer with his dad before being shipped off to war, he will be treated like a criminal. His dad may be taken to court and punished for letting a minor have alcohol. The 18 year old could face severe punishments, including not being allowed in the army."

That is not true in most states: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_A...

(still a bad law, I agree)

It just hit me that there's a rational explanation.

Being a good soldier and being a responsible drinker are two very different things. Just because you make a good soldier does not immediately imply you will make a responsible drinker.

Quite frankly, 18 is a pretty darn good age to start soldiering, but I know a TON of < 21yo who are not responsible, so my idea doesn't seem completely baseless.

There are also a ton of >21yo who are not responsible. That's not a good reason. Let's just ban alcohol because there will always be people that can't handle it.

Instead, why don't we look at the problem. The largest problem is that it's forbidden, so the majority of kids growing up have to sneak around and drink with other kids that are irresponsible. Telling a kid he can't do something just makes him want to do it even more.

If we introduce kids to responsible drinking at an earlier age, it wouldn't be so intriguing and they could learn a little bit about responsibility. You'd still have problems but I bet they'd be fewer and we could get back a little more freedom.

You are pretty much totally right. However, my only aim was to point out what I believe to be the fallacious nature of the argument that you should be able to drink if you can be a soldier. It plays off emotion well, but the criteria for making good soldier material are unrelated to the criteria for making a responsible drinker.

Heh, in Ontario it is legal for parents to have beer and wine at home (or any other private dwelling) when the child is only 14. By 18 we take a trip to Quebec to have our first drunken stupor at a bar (but that happened long before then at house parties) and sooner or later voila, you are 19 and drinking. The funniest was when I went to the states and ordered a beer nonchalantly at a pub when I was 20. When I was ordering my second beer the waitress asked if she had checked my ID yet. "No you haven't, but don't worry I'm 20." "Uhhh, the legal limit is 21" "Oh yeahhh, America..." "Ah don't worry, I'll bring you a second one anyways." Small town USA waitresses are awesome.

People who can't keep their car at a constant speed on the highway; cruise control is the best way to do this if you don't want to keep checking your speedometer.

To elaborate: If everybody picks a slightly different speed and maintains it, any encounter between two vehicles will never last very long. There's more distance between any two vehicles, so it's safer, and large, impassable clumps of vehicles are less likely to form.

EDIT: bad markup

I want a global movement to make the acceleration pedal actually affect acceleration, not horsepower as it does now.

Imagine a pedal with a dead spot in the middle that represents 0 acceleration. Pushing down on the pedal increases the rate of acceleration. When you get to speed, ease back to the dead spot to maintain. Lift past the dead spot to decel.

Think of it as a hybrid cruise control. I'm convinced it would solve many traffic congestion problems associated with people not maintaining speed on, say, slight inclines.

How do you solve this problem for those of us in Colorado (or other non-flatlands) where nearly every drive involves mountains and hills. Would the idea be that in the dead zone, the car is smart enough to increase or decrease horsepower to adapt to these conditions and retain 0 acceleration or...? I think you would run into the same problem that cruise control runs into in the mountains - we don't have variable ratio transmissions, so at some point going up a hill it has to shift down a rev in order to stay the same speed. Doesn't work very well.

Yes, the whole idea is the car is smart enough to maintain a speed. You're right about having problems in the mountains. If someone doesn't want their car to downshift, they'd just slow down by lifting and returning to the zero point. I think it would be a little better than cruise control in the mountains, but not much.

I can't speak for tricky, but variable ratio transmissions do exist. They're called CVTs and while they're not super popular (there were some issues w/ them in the 80's), they're slowly being reintroduced to the market.

Accelerometers or gyroscopes.

How would that interact with a manual transmission?

How would you lift the pedal? Is your foot clipped in?

> large, impassable clumps of vehicles are less likely to form

I'm starting to think that there are a large number of people that feel some sense of comfort in these groups. Something that I've noticed is that a passing car will often slow up as they are passing another car so as to pace them. It drives me crazy.

People writing "loose", when they really mean "lose".

I can let any spelling mistake or grammatical murder slide except this one. I won't comment on it as that's a bit petulant, but I will seethe inside and often, almost without thinking, I'll disregard whatever else they wrote.

Silly I know!

Also: "payed" vs. "paid"; in grammar, "well" vs "good".

"your" and "You're" is my pet hate

Same goes for "alot" instead of "a lot".

Let's not forget about "it's" and "its".

Apostrophe mistake's are pretty jarring; seeing one is like tripping over a rock, for me.

a whole nother.

Another one is "phased" in place of "fazed."

Cyclists that disobey the rules of the road, but complain when motorists don't follow the rules of the road really bother me. (I am a cyclist.)

I agree everyone needs to obey the rules of the road... But the situation is such that when a cyclist disobeys rules, it never causes the automobile driver to die. Whereas when a giant SUV disobeys the rules, it can kill a cyclist.

Disclaimer: I live in Florida. State with the highest cyclist death rates.

Except when a disobedient cyclist causes the auto to swerve and hit another car head-on.

Arranging travel schedules, tying together train, plane and car hire.

The lack of people (or my inability to find them) who want to do the same thing as me. This goes for almost anything from playing board games to finding help for a side project.

laundry. i think it's absurd that we can put a man on the moon and send a message around the world instantly (from a touch screen computer in my pocket no less!) and i'm still stuck moving laundry from one machine to another machine 2 feet away.

There exist combination washer/dryers (all in one, no moving laundry!)

They're not very good, though. It's hard to make something that is both water-tight and has great air circulation.

> It's hard to make something that is both water-tight and has great air circulation.

I don't see how that's true - washer driers circulate fluids with the aim to get maximum interaction between the fluid and the clothing. In one instance that fluid is washing water and in the other it is hot air. They seem very similar things to me.

When the clothes dryer is in cool-down mode and approx. 1 min from completion, why can't it send me an SMS message?

I am not sure if I can sympathize you because I only have one washing machine. Is the second machine for drying I wonder if I should even want one, if it causes such annoyance. :-/

Death annoys me. People who can afford $300/year for a cheap cryonics membership and life insurance, and who don't sign up, annoy me. A lot of them are probably being held off by the trivial inconvenience of signing a few papers without a paid salesman to hold their hand. It therefore annoys me that cryonics is poorly marketed and that there are no paid salespeople - that no one gets a commission when you sign up for cryonics.

Does cryonics work?

When one with a cryonics membership dies, is his life insurance benefit still paid out? Assuming he can be revived via the cryonics process. Cryonics and life insurance seem incompatible.

Great question, I'd hate to be revived and then stuck with a 2 million dollar bill for previously paid out life insurance.

My guess is that insurance companies haven't bothered to write that fine print yet, but who knows.

When one with a cryonics membership dies, is his life insurance benefit still paid out?

Yes, as many people pay for their suspension by taking out a life insurance policy that names the cryonics organization as a beneficiary.

Links to good/cheap cryo? I will sign up today.

Cryonics Institute: http://www.cryonics.org/ Membership is $120/year.

You'll also need at least $50K of life insurance with them as beneficiary. I pay around $170/year for $250K, and went through Rudi Hoffman who does cryo-compatible life insurance.

Excellent. BTW do you know if any cryo companies are using the sort of suspended animation technology described in Mark Roth's TED talk? It would seem to have potential benefits.

I have no faith that a cryonics company is going to last for more than a few years. If the money doesn't run out (which it will because someone will get greedy), all it takes is one incompetent employee to open the wrong door or push the wrong button for my investment to be entirely wasted. (or it could be an earthquake, or a 100-year flood, or rising sea levels...)

"I have no faith that a cryonics company is going to last for more than a few years."

Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have been around since the '70s and don't appear to be in any danger.

true but your investment could help the industry evolve and help others in the future. these grateful folk wake up to a world with time travel and return the favor ;)

I do electron microscopy on nervous tissue. I know what it takes to get good brain preservation at the fine scale, at the level of synaptic connectivity. I know how small problems in fixation and embedding can completely trash the anatomy at this fine scale. I am skeptical that current cryonics methods can preserve the brain at anything better than 'massive stroke' quality.

Fixation? Cryonics involves cryoprotectant and vitrification at liquid nitrogen temperatures, not plastination, and the last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope. Also, think in terms of the brain being carefully examined on the molecular level by nanotech for tiny hints in the process of being restored to its exact old state, not in terms of trying to warm people up using present-day technology and hoping they pop back to life. The whole point of cryonics is to wait until technology advances to the point of being able to restore you so long as the necessary information is physically there in any form.

last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope

Do you have a reference to some images I could look at?

Fired off your question to Aschwin de Wolf and got back:

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html (Figure 4 and 5 for the more recent technology, earlier photos are older technology)

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm... (photos as of 1995 tech)

Aschwin also notes this paper is important: http://www.ijcep.com/707005A.html

Thanks for inquiring and relaying the response you got.

Here is an example of the scale I'm interested in: http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/atlas/1_6_2.stm

Things that look like the newtechnology.html's figs 4 & 5 can look very bad at higher mags. I know this from painful experience. I don't see any high mag pictures at newtechnology.html or in Lemler et al. 2004, which that page cites. These mags are quite accessible once one has gone to the trouble of preparing sections for transmission electron microscopy.

Sheleg et al. 2008 was interesting and surprising to me. It is published in a journal not included in the ISI Science Citation Index, so I can't tell at a glance how their paper might have been received by other workers. I might try replicating their results myself at some point down the road, it would be a pretty simple experiment for me to do (at least, the EM part, not the histology work).

I understand the hope that even anatomically degraded tissue could retain sufficient information for cryonics to be useful. I just don't plan to bet my own money on this hope, at least not at this time.

Aschwin says it's a reasonable request and he knows they've got those and he'll see if he can make them available. I'll reply again when/if the info is available. Any particular way in which I should contact you, if this conversation goes stale?

Yes, I'd be interested in seeing higher mag pictures if they become available. An email to <any address>@<the domain in my HN profile> will reach me.

One thing that supremely annoys me is Italian drivers who do not stop at crosswalks. My daydream solution is a golf club or baseball bat, but I think that solution probably has unintended consequences.

it annoys me when people come up to me to tell i shouldn't be using c++ for project X. Like I don't know exactly what I'm doing or exactly what C++ is for.

I mainly do game development, but if you've made a game you know how time consuming it is to actually get something usable/playable/fun at the end.

Between projects I like to take brakes and work on other smaller applications. some of those applications are in c++ so I have some testing grounds to come back to so I don't loose my edge - and too often I get some grade-A BOZO telling me I'm using the "wrong" language and the falling into his diarrhea diatribe about his favorite language X and how it's SOOOOOO COOL and SSSOOOO HIP and SSSOOO EXPRESSIVE as if those are things I care about.

it's such a handicap being a c++ coder in an environment like that, it's like I'm not eligible to hang out with the hip kids/zealots because they have some religious animosity against something they never use. what a joke of a culture that becomes.

Disconnection between articles of the same topic. There are plenty of material about particular subject, each of them describes it from a slightly different angle, it would be great to have them all come together in a single place, but without all the junk associated with every one of them (like ads) - true syndication

Apple fanboys.

Apple haters.

Both.

Lack of time - Seems as if I can't spend enough time with people I care about.

Productivity pr0n - it´s the number 1 productivity killer

Online Payment Transaction Costs - every time a new player enters the field like Amazon Payments/Google Checkout entering into Paypal's domain they all converge on the same relative pricing scheme.

Problem: Designing clean architectures to solve an unfamiliar class of systems programming problems

This goes beyond design patterns - I mean designing systems with a dozen or more components that interact in complex ways. My first few cuts have lots of rough edges, and as I redesign the system, cleaner solutions appear. I work on lots of almost-real-time robotics systems, and good solutions for normal apps have subtle-yet-fatal problems when you need a small average latency at 100% CPU load

Slow people in New York annoy me. It's like everyone is on vacation, even the people who live here.

Probably just enjoying life.

I try not to get annoyed, especially about things outside my control. It just makes you unhappy without changing anything. (I'm moderately successful.)

- Having multiple gadgets, one can connect to a network, the other can't, even though they both have WiFi

- Bureaucrats that could be replaced by web apps

Fanboys and bad journalism.

Something tells me you just read http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/apple-religion/.

Large Corporations/Associations ect.

Every time I have a problem with a large corporation it never gets resolved until it is convenient for them, and follows their screwed up procedure.

They deter innovation and could care less about their customers. Take a look at the cable, internet, automobiles, music industries. Anything new happen lately? Nope.

Pennies.

Actually, I'd rather just see cents go away for everything in the US and deal with integers for everyday purchases and floating point when necessary.

Isn't that called "dollars"?

Lack of transparency e.g., government, markets, business etc.

Traffic noise. Build quieter cars, give more thought to urban design. Make low noise a design property.

I have major problem with current way of handling reputation and value of text. I think karma & points system on HN is sloppy approximation of actual quality of a text. Also it is not absolute.

In real life whenever someone talks we get large number of inputs to process about a person. For example when we speak with someone we don't judge them merely what they are saying but who they are. In pure analytical conversation it is good but where opinions matter it is bad.

If someone on Hacker News says something is bad or you should do it that way, I have no way how it relates to me and what is the credential of that person. I don't want to get advice from bad programmer about some framework. This creates lots of noise in online communication.

I wish there was a better way.

Roaming cell fees - when traveling abroad (there are some ways around but very cumbersome)

And the ways around this are not necessarily working well sometimes. Recent experience: getting a prepaid SIM card for my iPhone in France. Turns out that it would randomly and without my knowledge connect to WiFi hotspots and completely drain my credits.

Colleges getting sponsored by Microsoft, Sun and corporations using those technologies. Churns out developers not having a choice of languages, and ends up working for the corporations sponsoring the college.

A circle destroying innovation.

Mosquito bites.

Paper receipts.

You ain't kidding.

http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&...

Newspapers delivering "news". One have to search hard and deep to get some truth in the morning. People reading "news" making the "journalists" write more "news" also annoys me.

Too much choice.

This is actually a valid point. Freedom of choice seems to be a given nowadays. Obtaining freedom FROM choice is a lot of work.

Repeated, unorganized debates online in comments, forums

Acne. Annoying me for 7 years.

BAD PARKERS annoy me so much.

a) People who can't center their vehicle within the lines. b) People who park SUVs in compact car spots. c) People who parallel park in the middle of two driveway openings (as opposed to an edge, which would open another parking space!)

I have seriously considered creating stickers with various versions of "YOU PARK LIKE AN ASSHOLE" printed on them, so I can distribute them at will.

Paperwork!

Overcrowding on the train.

Deception online. Tricking people into providing their personal information and reselling that information to third parties.

Customer Support.

If only they knew what they know forget what the customer needs. People trained to very politely deliver long quotes without really meaning an ounce of what that sentence is. And of course not knowing much to really resolve the issue unless it is listed.

A good trouble-shooting software would be less annoying and more truthful.

Phone screens are too small to do useful work on, and laptops are too inconvenient to carry around.

Fluorescent office lighting

On that note, offices that have the air conditioning turned down to extremely low temperatures. Even in the summer, when the cooling bills must be horrendous.

I suspect that the thermostats in many places are controlled by fat men in heavy suits.

Paypal.

I'd love to see a text editor that let you select text blocks by drawing a box. (ie, you could draw the box selection style and select the last 5 characters of each line)

Textpad does this.

Textmate and Vim as well

Are you talking about "column selection mode"? It exists in several editors, SlickEdit for example, and lets you select "boxes" (or columns) of characters.

My favorite editor nowadays is Sublime Text, which takes this concept much, much further. It allows having several cursors active at once, each one behaving like a real cursor, so you can do things like ctrl+right to move all the cursors to the next word, no matter the length of each specific word. Kinda like real-time macros, only much better.

You can do this in visual studio if you hold down the alt key and do your selection.

Emacs can do this!

Specifically, you set the mark at one corner (C-Space) and move the mark to the other corner. Then you can do rectangle editing with commands like kill (C-x r k), yank (C-x r y) or something to insert a string (C-x r t). These are hugely useful when moving blocks of Python code around, for fiddling with the indentation.

Many OS X text fields have built-in support this -- hold option and drag for rectangular selection. (And as someone else already noted, emacs of course can do this, albeit with a somewhat different UI mechanism -- see M-x apropos rectangle.)

To add to the list, Notepad++ (hold down alt and click+drag, I believe) does this, as does Eclipse (although it's annoying to enable in Eclipse (shift+alt+a to toggle it on, then block select, then toggle it off). It also only seems to work on some file types (e.g. .java, but not .xml) in Eclipse.

Thanks for the suggestions. No more importing text into a spreadsheet, splitting into columns, and copy/pasting it back to a text editor for me.

College. It interferes with my startup more than it helps it (and I'm still a sophomore going to junior year).

going to the grocery store. why doesn't food just show up at my house automatically by now?

All you have to do is sign up. There are a number of services that deliver groceries, at least there are in Portland, OR. Some even specialize in local/sustainable produce.

Texting while walking down crowded streets or driving. You are doing both badly.

Drivers that run red lights.

lies & laziness.

I see people around cribbing why they are not rich or can't or not being treated at par or not getting due credits. Dig in a little and you see they don't even want to work hard.

I knew a person who was rather honest about their laziness. One day at lunch he just said "Yeah, I'm ready to be a millionaire." I said "Well, you better get busy!" With all sincerity he said, "Oh, no! I didn't want to work for it!"

So ?

Its not about one off instance where laziness might be welcome. I am talking about people who add no value to their existence, to the well being of anyone.

ps: I don't understand why my previous comment has to be downmodded. It is to the point of what the post asked for, nothing against the terms. This has been happening too much, I see it everywhere on HN. People downmodded for they don't agree.

Reloading whole pages when an iFrame would be much better.

Ive always had the belief that iFrames are bad news. They are rarely needed in the days of simple AJAX and DOM manipulation. Come to think of it, I haven't used one in about 5 years...

*nix. Too bad its the best thing out there.

Naggers

first thing i thought of too

Did you create this account just to post this?

it annoys me that staring at a computer screen kills my eyes.

Does it, really?

Bureaucracy

and

The positive effects of democracy made negative by the conservative older generations.

Iran. The Twitter Fail Whale. No excuse for either.

The Fail Whale is cute enough that I actually don't mind when Twitter goes down. If I used Twitter more, I might feel differently.

I also don't like when people downvote when they merely disagree.

I would guess that you were downvoted because of extreme brevity (e.g. "Iran") or because your comment trivialized the tough business of making and running something like Twitter. If that's the case, then the downvoting doesn't just mean "I disagree"; it means "I disagree, and don't think this guy is worth arguing with." It's a reply to tone as well as content.

Mind you, that's just speculation. I didn't vote on your comment. But most of the time when someone complains about a comment being downvoted "just because you disagree", there's another reason he's overlooking.

Well, fwiw, I get the fail whale more often than not when signing in. How much funding have they received again? Iran - well, I am not the only one annoyed. Pretty much the entire middle east dreads the thought of it with a nuclear arsenal, let alone the damage it can do around the world with its proxies.

The absolute disgusting nature of standardization of data sets in the world, and this insane notion that we should maintain legacy data as the status-quo of doing things.

Just look at the airline industry. IATA, ICAO, ISO, all competing and separate, all with insane and bat-shit psychotic rules and conventions (eg, IATA lets multiple airlines have the same "two letter designator" [by the way, it's sometimes three, but you never know for sure] if they operate on different parts of the globe and 'rarely if ever will confuse an operator'). When the hell did computers need human-understandable designation short-hand codes for things? What the hell was wrong with 1 - American Airlines, 2 - Air Canada, 3 - Delta, 4 - SAS, 5 - That small one that flys between A and B once a year you've never heard of. Why the HELL do we have a system that has "AA" and "AA*" ? This is basically the worst thing you can do for normalization of global data. Travel GDSs are even worse, they don't actually follow along with these standards because they cannot, so while you take your "AA" flight number 123456 (oh, by the way, we recycle flight numbers instead of archive forever historical tickets) from airport zzz to xxx (by the way, depending on the standard they came from, your airport might not even exist), which are actually city codes for airports, so when you're flying to a city with multiple airports you have two cities in the GDS just to deal with this.

We can't even agree on how to measure distance, it's like we're stuck in the stone ages. What the hell is wrong with measuring in kelvin degrees? Why do we have MORE THAN FIVE separate standards for systems of measurme for what most people think is one (the metric system)?

Fact: We do not live in 1950 or any time before then, computers don't give a flying rats ass if the letters make sense to you as a short-hand abbreviation, you should just number them. That's what databases are for, to relate data. Major airports alone have several names people call them anyway, some airlines go by a few names (for example, SAS airlines is actually "Scandinavian Airlines").

Fact: We do not need to encode data about the data into the primary key of our data. For example, we do not need to generate employee numbers like "Q100-5-TR-9" where Q is the building they work in, 100 is their pay grade, TR is their last name's first two letters, 9 is that number we introduced for separating all duplicates of Q100-5-TR. This is just stupid, stop this insanity NOW.

People working on global standards, you should be ashamed. Do you have ANY idea how much time is wasted because we do not have UUIDs for so many things, even something as simple as an airport? There's only 50,000~ of them, and we have duplicates? Did we run out of beads on the abacus??

Medical information standards are similarly convoluted, but getting better.

I've seen medical stuff and there's a good reason I won't work in that industry...

What REALLY bothers me is things like credit cards.

http://www.merriampark.com/anatomycc.htm

There's encoded data on something that's supposed to be a UUID thing: Industry, Issuer (card company), Lender (banking institution), Account number, and Checksum

This is a good way to prevent fraud? Or have they just given me the keys to generate "valid" credit cards?

http://www.darkcoding.net/credit-card-numbers/

Slap a name from the phonebook on there and see what you can purchase. Now we have PCI compliance trying to tell people to somehow lock this crap down? So they invent the CV2 codes, a 1 in 1000 hit-or-miss, I don't think my odds are too bad when I can generate any creditcard. Dates will also only fall into a specific range of time anyway. Yeah, we keep putting up bandages to creditcard security processing, but why do we need to? Honestly, the world of standards sucks.

"Identifiers should not carry meaning": for some reason people just hate this rule and try everything to circumvent it. It drives me crazy too.

Phone calls - makes a lot of noise and interrupts me regardless of what I'm doing.

I want some people to be able to reach me right away, while I couldn't care less for others. Creating barriers for interruption based on:

a) the person calling

b) the time of day

c) the activity I'm involved in

needs to become more accessible and intuitive.

Something I've always wanted is to be able to set up my home phone so that between (say) 9pm and 9am, when people call they get an automated response that says, "The person you are calling doesn't want to be disturbed at this hour. If your call is urgent, press 1 to ring them; otherwise, press 2 to leave a voicemail without ringing them." Technologically, it's nearly trivial.

I believe google voice does this

I don't know if Google Voice can do that out-of-the-box, (though it technologically could) but services like Twilio/OpenVBX or Tropo can definitely do that.

I would think that one problem right now is that not many people are really thinking like that yet. So amongst the people who do think about that kind of setups, each solution tends to be pretty specific to their own use.

That's why you have on one hand Google Voice which presents some options around what I would call "programatic telephony" but not fully customizable, and on the other, OpenVBX's kind of solutions which are highly customizable but not trivial to setup for "regular" people.

But yeah, it's now trivial to do and I'm sure it'll come with time.

Dealing with random candy attraction aka dopamine email effect.

The reason I and other people keep refreshing email, fb and hn all day long is because you never know when something good is coming up. Maybe one email that will change your life. A wall post from a potential partner. A insightful reply to your comment.

Limiting one's usage to predefined periods (eg mail only at lunch) is a start, but far from enough if we are to keep increasing our connectivity with the world.

I'm skeptical that there will be a good enough technological solution for this, which makes it all the more scary (scale/reach problems).

This is something I have thought about as well, I think its 2 problems, notifications and filtering, I have gmail notifier but it would be nicer to see it come natively to more apps (facebook / twitter / email / comments)

and filtering which is much harder and specific to each application

I advise to only check email/IM/what have you once a day at most. In the evening, when you have done the meaningful work. Don't use notifications. Only launch email, IM client when you need them.

See Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule if you haven't:

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Sheep herd mentality. It also annoys me when my CD skips

Get a mp3 player.

Politicians

HN has really changed. This question is an example. This is not readdit.

I don't consider the parent a troll comment, but I could be wrong. KQueue, Finding out what annoys a group of people is an excellent way to collaborate and list all things that "need fixing". Some of these things, as you may have seen in this list, are things that other collaborators can fix (or work on fixing). I think polls like this should be a quarterly occurrence here.

You may be right that the question is common on Reddit, but probably for a completely different reason: people like to vent, and the OP wanted karma. [although reddit does have: http://www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis/ ]

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