Post it here to potentially motivate someone to work on a solution!
Last thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29796099
My personal frustration: (0) have someone answer the phone, (1) tell me when are you coming, and (2) be there. I suspect they all have a family member with QB and an answering machine as their whole back office.
Someone should set up simple SaaS to do automated appointment slots, schedule updates to customers, and billing. Charge $1 per slot. Sign up all the contractors.
This is going to end up bad for the contractors. Just look how Uber Eats et al robbed restaurant owners from the profitability of their businesses.
The real problem is a lot of these contractors and subcontractors are running micro businesses—with just a person or two involved—and it’s usually independent subs all the way down. But they don’t treat it as a business—it’s just work. It’s how they earn a living. They don’t want to be businesses. The ones who care and think of it like a business are night-and-day different.
It ended up failing. You know why? People were cheap. They didn’t care at all about the quality of service until after the job was done and they paid bottom dollar.
People are incredibly price sensitive. If there’s a service that is 1% cheaper, they’ll go with that even if it causes 10x as many headaches. The reason? Money is obvious but luck isn’t.
It’s only when you get into business scale of stuff that do people care about quality. For most people - they’re shopping once a year for some handyman service. In those cases, they’ll do whatever they can to get the lowest promised rate upfront. This means they’ll go with untested folks as long as they’re cheap.
Truly, I think there is a way to have both cheap and good but it’s just not in the best interests of a capitalist. If you’re good, you raise your prices as high as possible. You don’t need to compete with shitty - you’re inherently better and thus feel you can charge more. Your clients will feel the same. But I think your clients aren’t likely typical homeowners in those cases. Maybe it’s commercial.
after some point, no flakes on the platform.
I have spent the last year sorting a number of repairs that involved plumbing, drywall, paint, and trim to walls, floors, and ceilings to repair damage. In every case, I’ve had to ask for things to be done 2 or 3 times at a minimum just to get things done right and look the way they did before the damage occurred and the work began. Not once has the job ever been done correctly the first time I’m asked to take a look and sign off on completion. I feel I’ve only been able to leverage such refusal because I’ve been able to refuse to write a check (or asked my insurance company to do the same) until the work was right. I’m always told I’m wrong when I call attention to something, and I’ve even had to track down the original builder for records and materials to prove I was correct. And that’s excluding when the workers carelessly cause more damage by doing things wrong, making shitty cuts, doing poor work on drywall mud and corners, carelessly paint edges onto opposing surfaces with different colors, or, you know, split my granite countertop in two.
It is exhausting.
Edit: in the childcare and education side, something more informative than Greatschools. I know some neighborhood schools that have been gentrified and test scores have gone up, but it's still the same teachers, admin, and available resources. The ratings aren't a great signal. Things like how well resourced the district is for IEPs would be super useful as a parent.
Edit 2: tie in something better than Greatschools with a search engine for preschools, after school programs, and the rest, and you would have a compelling product. The service would be to get your kid on the wait-list for the places you want them to attend :)
Climate change. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). I frown on chemical and mechanical means because they can't scale inherently and would be very expensive. Farming oceanic life is likely the main answer to it, such as GM kelp or phytoplankton.
From your description, it seems like what would really help is better policies and approach to public schools. Assuming that private schools would tend to pick better educational approaches seems flawed to me.
In other countries like Finland, they have it right compared to US education system the genius W contributed to breaking: homework has no value, teaching answers to excessive standardized tests (NCLBA) has little value, and grading teachers on immediate performance of said standardized tests has little value.
To solve this problem of finding good schools, I believe word-of-mouth advice from more successful folks is more valuable than any website filled with sour grapes or unverifiable claims made by random, anonymous people. It also can be a problem that better areas tend to have better schools, so no website will be able to find what doesn't currently exist in low population or not-as-nice areas.
There are websites like USNAWR who attempt to rate K-12 schools, private and public. https://www.usnews.com/education/k12
the problem has multiple aspects. funding is one, management another, actual teaching methodologies yet another. for all of those examples can be found. not everything is directly applicable and it takes some experimentation.
but a part of the problem is also the definition of success. the goalpost on that keeps changing too.
for adults to be successful the environment needs to be supportive too.
aren't there studies that show that children from poor families are less successful despite good schooling? so if we want children to be successful we also need to eliminate poverty. these things go hand in hand. and i suspect that some attempts at better schooling fail because other aspects like this are not being addressed.
A truly liberal idea could be to reset the "score" when the game is over. Try to be the best you can and earn as much as you can - when you die, most of your wealth flows back into a large pond to the benefit of all.
It’s called property tax. They all know what it’s used for.
The issue with a wealth tax is purely a marketing one. Rich people have truly done a great job distorting the wording around a wealth tax.
The practical problems are all very solvable. Again - this is just propaganda the rich sell into the minds of the masses to avoid taxation further. Don't buy into it. And stop spreading it.
I’m more interested in making the existing set of taxes more equitable and less favorable to capital (extending equal taxation to capital income as labor income) than adding additional layers of complexity to the tax system.
these problems their solutions and nothing new, I think many people just don't want to pay more for "socialism"
1. You're heavily disincentivizing people from doing their most to earn more money. Assuming you buy into capitalism in the first place (which I do), the result of this is generally worse for society. Less new inventions, less new medicines, less new technologies, etc.
2. The second problem is more philosophical, but... what right does society have to take away someone's property, which they presumably worked hard for? People often work hard to give to their children (hence point 1 above), what makes you think it's a legitimate use of the force of government to take everything from them? Most people think it's fairly unfair.
There's also the question on whether inventions, medicine, technology are what we should be optimizing for? Depression and mental health are high despite all this, probably worse in wealthier countries than poorer ones.
The real cost to inequality is that it correlates with political polarization. Countries that are more equal tend to have politics that agree on more things. Political instability is one problem, but it also leads to distrust of the government, leading to the anti-police and anti-vaccine movements we've been seeing lately.
>There's also the question on whether inventions, medicine, technology are what we should be optimizing for?
Only the whole economy can accurately decide what we should optimize for. If you try to centrally plan an economy, it will fail because you remove pricing from the equation which is a signal to where resources should be allocated. For things that may not have a current market, this is what privately funded research and charities should be used for.
>The real cost to inequality is that it correlates with political polarization
This is only an issue because for some reason we have decided we need these huge government bureaucracies to run our day to day lives. Without this, peoples politics wouldn't matter. As for the anti-police movement's, this is manly due to people starting to realize the only thing the police protect is the State. The anti-vaccine movement hasn't grown. The government and the media have changed the definition of anti-vaccine. If you don't believe the government should or has the right to implement vaccine mandates on the populace you are anti-vaccine. If you aren't sure there is evidence the vaccine slows the spread of COVID, you are anti-vaccine. So basically the government and the media have labeled anyone who is unsure about this specific vaccine to be the same as the person who believes essential oils will heal everything and that vaccines in general cause autism.
It’s understandable why this is. Writing introductory textbooks in your area of study is not prestigious work valued by your peers, takes a huge amount of time, and rarely makes money.
Perhaps the learning materials do exist, but there is no easy way to divine their existence. Expert-curated learning tracks might be valuable here. I’ll tell you what is not valuable, though: giant lists of “learning resources” in a github README that have no particular relation or sorting order and that the author/maintainer has never personally read.
Perhaps the struggle is necessary for learning. I’ll never forget those times my mind finally makes by itself the leap to understanding, although I constantly forget whatever smoothed-down introductory learning material I have consumed in the past. Perhaps the solution is simply to hire a grad student for 1:1 tutoring at $50-$100/hr.
I agree that competent, thoughtful textbooks combined with amazing lecturers/TAs/peers are needed to transfer knowledge.
As for phones/tablets; I've only ever used them as consumption devices and no 'deep work' gets done on them like you would with a desktop PC. My strategy is to take regular breaks from the PC and stand up every 8 minutes and walk around to straighten my back, but it doesn't have to be that way. I just want to be plugged in for hours like I could do in my twenties. Solve that!
Perhaps we should not be chasing the One True Ergonomic Body Position but should instead rotate through various positions during the day.
-Herman Miller Aeron
-adjust height of chair so that feel are flat on the floor
-adjust desk so that keyboard is at elbow level and arms don't have to be raised
-raise monitors to put top 3rd at eye level
-scoot back and sit straight in the chair
I find if I check all these boxes I can work for 12 or 14 hours, stand up, and feel just as good as when I sat down.
Standing. Kneeling chairs. Posture ball chairs. Laying down (what's lower stress than this?).
This is why adjustable standing desks are important. It's not good to be standing all day either. The best approach is changing your position between sitting and standing throughout the day, with frequent breaks.
> [VR], on the other hand, gives you the ability to move windows or even your entire workspace around at will, allowing you to change positions and achieve more ergonomic working stances throughout the day. You can even experiment with supine computing without purchasing any expensive desk setups.
VR computing also allows you to walk while computing (using an "AR mode" supported by passthrough front facing cameras).[1]
[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/why-vrcs-are-better-than-pcs-and-l...
Given the state of machine learning with unstructured audio data, machine translation, and robotics, I would have hoped for better methods to communicate with wild animals, cattle and our pets by now.
This is more important than apps that make $WHATEVER more convenient by an infinitesimal amount.
But, probably not the kind of problem that you wanted to hear about.
Looking to the future, I'd like to see a full body scanner that you lie down in and it can diagnose the vast majority of ailments. See it has a combined x-ray/CT scanner. Sounds like science fiction? Would return instant results.
Online dating is pretty rough. I need a company to get extremely serious about desktop Linux and charge me $100/yr for something that actually works. Yes. It’s okay to charge for copyleft software.
Once you build a sufficiently big group of mutuals on Twitter and get to know them a little bit without the pressure of relationship expectations, sparks seem to happen so much more naturally and organically just as they might in a workplace or school setting.
I don’t have much hope for online dating in its current form unless it gets to a level of AI invasiveness like in that one Black Mirror episode. Gatling gun dating just isn’t fun or effective.
Funnily enough, I threw together a landing page a couple of days ago [1] to run Google Ads and gauge whether there's wider interest in a solution that would avoid you having to come up with a "hook" + reinvigorate those sparks you mention.
The thought so far is that you'd fill out a pretty invasive character assessment that would be analysed by AI + professional matchmakers to set up one date a month for you with another user (who you won't see or speak to until you actually meet in person).
Could you briefly describe, what you'd be looking for?
Solving would be great but I would also settle for a theory of mind as to why we haven't been able to for the last 50 years or so.
Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler moved fast. But they were wrong. It was some of the largest disasters the world has ever experienced.
We had these things up until Nixon and Reagan realized they could attack those institutions for short term gain, redirecting the funds to the 1% and calling it trickle down.
Now we're paying for it.
The Covid Vax was sent to the first round of testing before the disease showed up in the US. If we all the tests weren't legally required, many people wouldn't have died.
More than 900.000 dead. 2977 died on 9/11, so this delay is more 100 times worse.
Now imagine this, but for everything.
We need something to replace bureaucracy.
The second can be improved by eliminating anonymous speech accounts. It doesn't have to be visibly tied to your legal name. But Socrates was right. Without accountability people will immediately do awful things.
https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/the...
Neil Stephenson had a great idea in "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell", a fix. Online accounts had blockchain identities.
But then again people will probably never stop feeding trolls and take into account other people's posting history. Nor will online forums come down as hard as they need to on abuse.
It was crazy to see how quickly we "solved" this problem during COVID, if only temporarily. I just wish to see more collective action to solve this on a more permanent basis. I'm partial to WFH plus moving away from car-dependence in North American towns and cities.
The current solution is to remove the diseased bone and fitting a prosthesis, it has risks and hearing doesn't always return to normal.
I always wondered why this can't be fixed using ear drops to administer Biophosphonates in the effected ear for a non invasive solution. In terms of 'lossening' an already fixated Stapes, why not a solution that is found to effectively dissolve the abnormal bone together with Biophosphonates.
It could be administered every so often to ensure minimal progression.
Basically write what you wrote and ask if they are the right person or know someone in that area of research.
1. Figure out which field of science you are interested in 2. Find a couple of universities that teach this field of science or you think have someone specialising in that on staff 3. Go through their list of researchers 4. Pick one out and send them an email. Or if you cannot find a mail address, send an old school letter to the university
How would you incentivise or why would any researcher want to help out in this endeavour from a seemingly stranger? How best to cover come this.?
As for whether or not they would want to help you out, it never hurts to try. Even if that particular researcher can't, he might be able to refer you to someone who can or depending on the scope of the research hook you up with a student in need of a thesis / project etc.
Academics often are in need of funding, if your idea has merit then I am sure you will he able to find someone that will research for you fairly quickly.
It looks like there isn’t market demand for this without the associated speaker business or intelligent assistant.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28273131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28273131
If you’ve ever seen (and some milliseconds later heard) someone dribbling a basketball at the other end of a long quiet street you’ll know what I mean.
It looks really interesting.
Have an open source smalltalk environment with working concurrency, in order to efficiently use all the core available
There is also U8, which has an unusual UI, but it is Smalltalk. http://u8.smalltalking.net/
- what’s the demand for travel from Birmingham to Chicago?
- what’s the ecological cost of laying rail from Birmingham straight north?
We could subsidize a lot of plane flights / busses on existing highway infrastructure before it makes sense to lay down rail, even between Birmingham and Nashville.
And it looks like Birmingham > Nashville is a < 3 hour car ride. So would most people want to drive to a train station, wait at the train, then take the train 1.5 hours (assuming high speed at 140 mph) then deal with last mile transit / car rental in Nashville?
Never mind that train route runs right through Franklin, which has insane property costs and I can imagine NIMBY-ism going on, so you’d have to route around it.
The cost for a high speed rail is estimated at $154 million per mile, which would be $30 BN to build the segment between Birmingham and Nashville.
Then it’s a billion dollar soft target, so security and terrorism are a concern, especially being the first example of high speed rail in middle America. It would take one extremist with a rifle to shut it down / reduce ridership. They wouldn’t even have to hit anyone, just shoot at it as it went past one of the many fields.
And at 30 BN, you won’t ever see the ROI, and it would require federal funding - which many would ask why someone in Montana should pay for rail transport in between Birmingham and Nashville, and it would probably die before funded. The government spends $315 Million to subsidize small airports around the country per year, which may be a more effective use of tax payer dollars.
All that said, I understand why you want someone to solve this problem - it would open up all sorts of towns for lower cost of living in Nashville / surrounding cities. Especially if it was subsidized for riders. If the hyper loop becomes a thing, I’ll be excited. I also understand there are people who just won’t get on planes.
Cost estimate: https://reason.org/commentary/on-high-speed-rail-look-at-the...
EAS subsidy: https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-aviations-battle-serv...
there is currently no amtrak from birmingham to nashville. the only way is via bus. obviously the south is very car-centric but that's a legacy of the infrastructure we built in the past. i don't see why we can't try to build infrastructure with a bigger emphasis on better public transit (primarily trains) rather than automobiles, so we can have that legacy in the future.
idk if the terrorist concern is a strong argument? you could make the same argument against planes. and how would an extremist with a rifle shut down a train? what is stopping them from doing that on a backed up, slow moving interstate highway, today? that seems easier to hit than a high speed train. have you ever shot a gun at a moving target? extremists with rifles are already, in 2022, a bigger risk in public spaces like churches and restaurants and malls and town squares and schools.
I suspect that several years of my life throughout my career will end up fed to a Scrum monster.
Sometimes just the plain phone number to call support, instead of jumping multiple hoops of "have you tried XYZ" FAQ answers
Like this? In most cases, the queues and prompts are in place because the majority of callers really don't need to talk to a human and waste support's time with very simple tasks.
Honestly , I'm surprised that there hasn't been any breakthroughs on a problem that affects half of the world population.
We are even tackling aging but no one has bothered to massively invest in researching this and coming up with a potential cure? One could argue that it's not as important as deadly diseases but I would say the ROI could be phenomenal..
Admittingly I have no medical or scientific background so perhaps there is a good reason for this that I am not aware of.
Fold my laundry with a reasonably sized device and you can take my money.
It's been ~60 years since there has been any innovation in household appliances, and I just loathe folding clothes.
I'm guessing if I said, "I would like a device to cook me dinner," your response would be "The better solution is eliminating the need to cook anything," and I'd be eating out of some NASA-approved squeeze tube or eating TV dinners for the rest of my life.
As I am a normal human, no, the answer is a device that actually organizes and folds laundry when I dump it into a pile out of the dryer.
This is surprisingly difficult to find, and many squirrel proof feeders on Amazon actually get destroyed by squirrels in no time. Those that can resist the squirrel assaults have a cage that's too narrow for robins to get inside.
One solution is cage suet feeders. Squirrels can't peck into them.
Another is throwing out enough seed / feed on the ground over a large enough area so that a variety of critters can get access. Crows, finches, jays, wild turkeys, and deer would feed at the same time.
Yet another solution is to place a tree feeder on top of a greased pole away from trees so squirrels can't jump down to it or climb up it.
Bird baths or other fresh water sources that are kept from producing mosquitoes larva are also good.
The other critters of concern in the area were red foxes, vultures, hawks, and black bear.
And it was just the feeder, btw. So nothing else.
Well, with a feeder you need to put it somewhere. Tried trees. It was a squirrel feeder.
Then I got a pole for the middle of my yard, away from all high objects a squirrel could jump from. Quickly became a squirrel feeder, as they can climb the pole. Looked at greasing the pole, laying out with a BB gun, and other options, but settled on a metal cone below the feeder.
The squirrels in my neighborhood have bad short term memory, so they will see the feeder, make the association with food, start to climb the pole, get under the cone, and then sit there for a couple of seconds before forgetting their mission.
I’ve had squirrels try to reach to the exterior of the cone, but it’s not stable, so as soon as they put weight on it they fall.
I’ve heard squirrels elsewhere are smarter than this system (not sure how - team work?) but here they can’t figure it out.
All that said, the “gift” of the bird feeder lead to $100 in purchases, regular seed refills, and hours of research. But I ended up with birds near my office window, so that’s nice.*
6/10 would receive again.
Feeder pole: Your friend has shared a link to a Home Depot product they think you would be interested in seeing.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Vigoro-84-in-Black-Steel-Traditi...
Feeder: Audubon NAGOGREEN1 Going Green Ranch Style Bird Feeder
Cone: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0010QD5QO?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...
* in searching my Amazon order history to find the products I got, I realized we also had a ton of bird strikes into our windows, to the point that I had to get clings to go on the windows. These have been mostly effective in stopping birds from hitting the house.
I guess it's usually an infrastructure problem. Plots are cheap in locations with bad infrastructure so the solution could also be to get infrastructure wherever you want.
Modern (fast and secure) Hash Tables for C.
Working on both, but not enough time.
Finding me problems to work on.
(The world may never know.)
I'd be really curious to see if the output is comprehensible and informative. There's a huge training corpus for this do I'd assume this would work.
1. document should be about why, not what.
2. not all decisions can be revealed in code itself. (for example, adding a delay to workaround a hardware bug.)
3. the biggest part missing from code documentation is the big picture document, not really the code level document. even you know what a class/function is, you don't know how it is used in the entire project, its life cycle, etc.
Education is probably quite important, but it seems there are other important components.
Are there any countries where level of corruption is much lower, adjusted for education?
I'd wager most high-trust countries would do better on measures of corruption, adjusted for education levels.
science and arts is not enough. we also need to learn to care for each other, to be kind, generous, not hurtful, treat others with love and respect and many more virtues...
A note taking system that works like my thought process does AND lets me very quickly add notes from my phone. (Android)
needs search functionality and RTF.
I use Google Keep for note taking. It's not really fancy though.
(Think globally)
How can we do the same locally - and provide help where we can - or individually where we think it is needed.
(Act locally)
TLDR A Craigslist.org that is focused on a specific zip code.