Ask HN: As ruler of all software/technology, what would you change to be better? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: As ruler of all software/technology, what would you change to be better?

7 pointssamsquire5 comments

Hi everyone,

I'm really curious what you want software vendors, operating system vendors, linux distributions, programming language maintainers/authors, mobile phone manufacturer, technology manufacturer, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, AWS, GCP, Azure would do but never would?

Would you remove all adverts from Ubuntu? Would you remove adverts from paid services? Would you replace all subscriptions with lifetime prices? Would you pour resources into cross platform UI toolkits? Would you change the licence of Qt? What Javascript framework would you want people to standardize upon? What language would you want your favourite tool to be written in?

What would make you extremely happy and satisfied?

To clarify, these aren't my positions, but I'm curious what people truly want from technology/software that they use day-in-day-out or themselves develop on but their companies would never let them do what they want.

Microsoft: Reassign the people responsible for Windows and start over, hiring people who grew up in the 90s/00s and task them with first restoring the product experience to the XP era, then extrapolating from there to evolve it. No more forced login, no more built-in advertisements or pre-installed spamware, reintroduce proper customization options.

Apple: Make the iPhone fatter (more battery, less camera bump). Also go back to the team that made Stage Manager on macOS and have them try again. The desktop window experience hasn't evolved much in 20 years and we can do better, so let's keep trying. Also: why do I need a third party tool for a proper clipboard?

Google: Leave "Google" search engine as-is (or with Bard or whatever) and introduce a Google Web search engine. No fancy answer machine, no embedded info. Just search websites like you used to. Allow the old operators that work at best half the time now (putting things in quotes). Aggressively fight blog spam (hire thousands of people to do this if necessary). Allow users to filter results themselves. Pay $1/mo for it. Mission statement: be good denizens of the web and help reignite the spirit of the indie web.

Amazon: Ban seller spam and try to return to a time when the seller actually mattered. I'm tired of sifting through bullshit companies like "Stouchi", "iBirdie", "DGHUMEN" that are all selling the same product just rebranded. Amazon should be an agent of the buyer, aggressively filtering out these blatant abuses and helping me find what I want, and have confidence in it.

Spotify: Stop. Forcing. Podcasts. I'm so tired of the UI filling with trash I don't want to see (and now they're doing audiobooks too?) and giving me no recourse at all to ignore it. Also: suck it up and place nice with Apple. You're not going to win that one and you're just making me dislike your service more.

Software in general: more customization options for the user, stop being afraid of complexity and asking your users to think for a minute when using your tools, more information density, less tracking/telemetry.

Agreed on all fronts. Although I’ve not experienced needing a third party clipboard, am I missing something?

I just think it's another example of failing to advance a feature that has stayed bare-bones for decades for no good reason. All major operating systems treat clipboards as a single "register": one location, you copy/cut to it and paste from it.

If I was the head honcho of macOS I would have a whole team dedicated to just this feature alone. A simple first step would be "clipboard history", where each time you cut/paste it replaces the contents of the register but you can see previous entries. This is what most third party tools do and is what I use on macOS.

But it could be so much more than that too. Clipboard should be a whole application you can launch with a catalog of all of the stuff you've copied to it. Images in one location, code snippets in another, text. From there you should be able to send it to other places for storage: send image to photos, send text to a file somewhere / notes app.

"As ruler of all software/technology, what would you change to be better?"

Physical buttons/switches in vehicles. Less reliance on tech as a replacement for, and more as an enhancement for, human ability to drive.

Here's something I'd consider doing, which I think would change things for the better, although I'm not 100% convinced:

How about enacting new laws that force all APIs to be open and all software to be offered with a free (copyleft) open-source license, forcing software and software-service companies to compete without lock-in and *without network effects*? Again, not 100% sure about this, but I imagine it wouldn't be a bad thing.

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