The Biggest Tech Problems So Obvious We Aren’t Fixing Them
medium.com
medium.com
No. It's that we don't want to have the equivalent to "certificate authorities" mess for our identities too. We don't want the "obvious" "solutions" because we are aware of the bad effects of them.
It sure would be nice to not have to update so many payment details after a card number gets stoken though.
Last time my card was stolen I had to update a tremendous number of services. Usually I just wait until I get some sort of notice or my account stops working somewhere but it's a pain in the butt.
Are you sure it's possible to have a solution with all requirements the article specifies yet without infringing on anonymity?
A bunch of solutions I'm thinking about suffer from one or more shortcomings.
Then create an API so third parties can use FB as a public key server for baking encryption into applications. Doing this you get identity and encryption for free. While identity guarantees aren't quite as good as Keybase's tracking mechanism it's decent since FB accounts can be verified with lots of friends/connections and it's way better than the fantasy of key-signing parties taking over.
As a bonus over a seventh of the earth is already on FB and that's including everyone who doesn't have internet access. I wouldn't be surprised if it was nearly half of all internet users. Plus it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to implement, but maybe I'm underestimating the complexity.
Seems like it'd be a big win for encryption and PGP.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
If you're worried about them holding your private key then you could generate your pair locally and only upload your public one.
Google is certainly the second "omniknowing," and I'm not happy with that too. And I don't use Facebook.
Is there anybody here who'd like that Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Verisign or the government opens all the sites he visits? The named entities would be happy, it seems.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8340495/how-does-rsa-toke...
Some advice I received years ago was to forgo a color printer altogether and use Kinko's/UPS Store to do color. The cost savings are very good if you dont require a lot of color printing.
I think it was $120. Still on the original colors (replaced the black). Toner gives me a lot more prints, never goes bad because of disuse, and looks better. I love it.
Now I just wish I could find a no-drivers AirPrint compatible Color Laser with the same reliability and price point that was as small or smaller (so it still fit in my IKEA printer stand with rolling door). Haven't turned up such a device yet so I'll stick with this USB printer for awhile yet I guess.
It was discontinued years ago, but toner refills are still readily available, for about the same price as a new set of Inkjet cartridges (except again, more capacity, and if you only use it once every 6 months it won't complain and make you buy a new set).
Anyways, IMO Color Laser is definitely the way to go for the home user. The printers are pretty reasonably priced these days, and the TCO is drastically lower than any Inkjet printer I've ever owned.
My hypothesis is that inkjet is just an error-prone technology.
I think that on some instinctual level, I have always known that the home consumer market for color inkjet printers is absolutely saturated with crap. It all just seemed like a massive conspiracy to sell ink at prices higher than an equivalent quantity of heroin. I know a photo-artist who uses a higher-end inkjet to make archival-quality prints, and he buys 6 colors of UV-stable pigment inks, by the bottle, for less than most people pay for one dinky, chipped, proprietary replacement cartridge for their printer. Those consumer-level printers are engineered to be the absolute minimum-cost solution to get people to empty their ink cartridges.
So I'm not entirely certain that the two breeds of printer are comparable. Mono lasers are almost certainly considered by the industry to be small-office/home-office (SOHO) goods, wherein a perceived deficiency in quality or operating costs might hurt future large-office purchases.
Same here. Rescued an HP Laserjet 2100 from the trash, it lasted 10 years and would have kept going with more toner but I got a Brother something-or-another for $69 at OfficeMax.
I bought a Laserjet cp1525nw+ Color Laser printer for $200 a few years ago and have never looked back. It's a network postscript laser printer so you never have driver hell and forced obsolesce. It prints beautifully. The paper tray is plenty big for home use. It even came with a spare black cartridge! I intend for it to be the last printer I ever buy.
There is no reason to buy some messy finicky quickly obsolete expensive-refill ink jet piece of crap ever again.
Ok, so that's not 100% true. You can't print on CDs or T-Shirts with a laser printer, so there is still a use for ink jets as specialty craft printers. For day to day printing however they are completely obsolete.
I recognize that I am biased against paper personally, but in this case I feel like it makes me notice people who cling to it and photos are a case where people seem to be clinging to paper less and less over time.
Still snappy to use. It's disappointing how little things have improved in 8 years.
I am about to replace it but it had incredible value for money. while waiting for the next intel cpu iteration I got a cheap samsung 850 and it feels like new!
I wish the manufacturers would come up with a common standard for remotes - perhaps over BT - and just have one "universal" app for my phone. Ehh.
Also, now that you can control the hub remotely, it makes purchasing home automation items more appealing.
The purpose of all of this was so the receiver could IR blast commands to the rest of the customers' devices. AFAIK the only place this was used was for triggering VCR recording, which was amusing given we were working on early DVRs.
The whole time I was thinking how short-sighted this was given we'd certainly be using some standard protocol in a few years since the home media center was going digital. In the early 2000s all the incidental annoyances in digital electronics still seemed like temporary problems that would be swept away by constant disruption as they had been in the 90s, as opposed to the entrenched problems we were stuck with in other technologies.
They're the pinnacle of 1980s consumer electronics technology. Or, well, they're close to the top of the digital electronics we put into analog TVs, anyway.
> Why is no one fixing them?
Because "TV" manufacturers haven't fully internalized the idea that all screens in a consumer's home are, fundamentally, display devices for various computing equipment, all of which is likely on a WiFi LAN, or should be. Some of that computing equipment includes an ATSC tuner, and is likely built into the display itself, but we have HDMI for a reason.
This means that there's no need to have a separate remote. Now, all that needs to happen is the number of buttons per remote need to be reduced as the menus improve, and as some features are automated.
It works well with the Nexus Player, for example.
On the one hand it's simple, it's sleek, and it works.
On the other hand it's so small it gets lost all the time, typing is awful, and for a while when I was getting used to it I'd hit the arrows when I was trying to click the center button.
I'm devoted to solving one of those myself, in the configuration management space. When I get it off the ground, lots of happy fish (well, engineers) will know about the water.
Perhaps HN is an aquarium full of fishes, so to speak.
Which I think is a reasonably reality based point of view.
- No human culture has a concept of air.
- Humans can't tell whether wind is blowing or not.
- Abolitionism couldn't happen, since slavery was present everywhere, and therefore the concept of not having slavery didn't exist.
It's the idea that you are more likely to ask yourself why traffic lights use red for stop and green for go instead of, say, the reverse the first day you visit a country that uses different colors than you were the previous day.
- Humans don't realize the possibility of living on the bottom of the ocean or in space. We overwhelmingly assume that we must live on land and above water. Nobody builds houses under rivers or ponds.
Either way, it's just a metaphor.
Look at the comment I responded to. He referred to "fish don't know they live in water" problems. That is not at all analogous to humans thinking that living underwater would be a bad idea (it would!). It's analogous to humans not knowing that air exists at all. You can't know that living underwater doesn't work unless you do know about the air.
Citation needed.
I think the push to learn everyone to code might fix that. That is the open source way right? You have a problem, you can fork it, fix it, create it. It works great for determined people.
Otherwise my response is to learn how to fix it yourself. I learned to code, I taught myself, made the investment, and by gosh I am going to fix and contemplate my navel.
My paid jobs however have taken me all over the place, in all sorts of fields, but each shared the same thing, there was money to be made. Find a way to make money and serve the under-served and you will shortly have developers developing there of their own accord or as employees.
My printer has worked for years without an issue. I don't use too many tabs. I'm perfectly fine with my collaborative editing tool [git].
Credit card fraud authentication is a massive problem....but no solution can actually be completely secured so its a cost/benefit. Sure, the author cares...but ultimately, authenticating the new vs. old credit card number and choosing which vendors to provide it to is a choice the author has to make as he is the only one who can do it securely. :/
secondly there already are solution in the space that split authentication from payment tokens (i.e. paypal and more recently the super annoying verified by visa / mastercad securecode) and are safe enough and good enough
Currently I browse in Chrome, keep a window with things I prefer to read later, then go back to that tabbed window when I have the time, or more conveniently, access those tabs from Chrome on my Android phone when I'm out and about and have some time to kill.
Just read the damn page, close it, and move on.
I've organized my web browsing into a few different Chrome windows based on tasks, one window for personal browsing (articles, a forum post I'm monitoring, a tutorial I'm following, etc), web development projects (self explanatory), job hunting (can't apply to every listing at once but I also don't want to misplace these), DIY electronics projects I'm working on (schematics, build manuals, references), and items to read later/long form stories I can't finish in one sitting.
If I end up putting some of these topic areas on the backburner I'll close out an entire window and uses Session Buddy to save those links. I'll have to check out OneTab as suggested, looks somewhat similar.
It's not perfect but it works. I use one desktop as my personal and work computer so I need to organize myself around those divergent areas or else I really get lost. When I want a mental break from work I'll go browse HN and open the stories that interest me in new tabs but I'm aware that I don't have the time to read all these items (hence the need to keep an active tab on a background window). Mental break #2 comes along and I already have a few articles ready to digest.
Municipal services are still driven by lumbering bureaucracies that worship paper forms and take weeks to make a decision on anything. This makes the process of interacting with them tedious, error prone, and daunting. Worse still is that it can take weeks for program approvals and to issue permits for repairs and renovations.
The identification issue is that almost all of the above and for legal documents often the only "proof" of identity is a signature. We have much stronger guarantees available that are verifiable and terribly difficult to impersonate. When I bought my house there was a stack of papers to sign that relied on good faith that I wasn't forging the signature and representing myself faithfully... but they could never know that for sure. They were also happy with having me email them sensitive documents without any encryption or verification at all.
Andy Rooney would be rolling in his grave [0].
So how do you see into such a blind spot? How can we periscope around the corner of our assumptions and peer into the future? If we want to create a list of the blind-spot problems that await better solutions from tomorrow’s innovators — which is what I want to do with this piece — where do we begin?
I wonder a lot about how new things start successfully. The piece that intrigues me is: If you know you are doing something genuinely different and valuable, how do you cross the chasm from everyone telling you it will never work to actually having some meaningful number of users? How do you get other people to see what you see and that you are not just another dime-a-dozen loser with some half-baked idea?
That intrigues me and I don't know the answer to it.
Unfortunately instead of tax they'll just sell everything they know about you advertisers!
For what it's worth, I don't really see any of the points as blind spots. I think there have been many attempts to solve all of them.
Until then, he is nothing but an "idea guy."
Blind Spot 2: Tab overload, It is called bookmarks...
Blind Spot 3: Collaborative editing, Google Docs.
Blind Spot 4: A printer that isn’t junk, You get what you pay for.
Blind Spot 5: Everything Beyond the Developer’s Over-Contemplated Navel, vote with your wallet.