I've noted the printer problem in the past (I tend to call it crapitalism, the equilibrium point between price tolerance and crap tolerance, and a lot of people are way more crap tolerant than I am.) But I think for folks here who are wondering what sort of startup to create its a good way of thinking about the question.
The problem with crap tolerance is that crappiness doesn't become apparent until after you make the purchase, whereas price is obvious beforehand. People heavily discount the future in favor of the present, so people will naturally favor something that's cheaper but worse even if their overall experience will suffer for it.
Funny, I came to the comments to dispute the printer point. I have a <$100 wireless duplex laser printer (Brother HL-2270DW) which works really well. It's not color, but does everything I need it to do. Maybe $100 doesn't qualify as cheap.
In my experience Laser jets have always been much better than ink jets. My ink jet printer requires $120+ dollars for color and black cartridges. Black cartridges are usually much cheaper.
Some advice I received years ago was to forgo a color printer altogether and use Kinko's/UPS Store to do color. The cost savings are very good if you dont require a lot of color printing.
I bought a Konica Minolta 1600W Color Laser Printer on Amazon a few years ago after being frustrated at the infrequently used ink-jet cartridges going bad yet again because I didn't print enough.
I think it was $120. Still on the original colors (replaced the black). Toner gives me a lot more prints, never goes bad because of disuse, and looks better. I love it.
Now I just wish I could find a no-drivers AirPrint compatible Color Laser with the same reliability and price point that was as small or smaller (so it still fit in my IKEA printer stand with rolling door). Haven't turned up such a device yet so I'll stick with this USB printer for awhile yet I guess.
It was discontinued years ago, but toner refills are still readily available, for about the same price as a new set of Inkjet cartridges (except again, more capacity, and if you only use it once every 6 months it won't complain and make you buy a new set).
Anyways, IMO Color Laser is definitely the way to go for the home user. The printers are pretty reasonably priced these days, and the TCO is drastically lower than any Inkjet printer I've ever owned.
I had an old HP inkjet printer that was flawless for many years, until the belt that moves the head wore out and shredded itself. I believe I got my money out of that one. But in the drive to make the printers ever cheaper, quality has gone out the window. Plus the price of ink cartridges vs. their capacity has become totally out of whack. When that printer died, I didn't even consider another inkjet.
I also have a monochrome laser printer at home. It replaced a monochrome laser printer that lasted about 10 years, including a jury-rig home repair of the solenoids.
I think that on some instinctual level, I have always known that the home consumer market for color inkjet printers is absolutely saturated with crap. It all just seemed like a massive conspiracy to sell ink at prices higher than an equivalent quantity of heroin. I know a photo-artist who uses a higher-end inkjet to make archival-quality prints, and he buys 6 colors of UV-stable pigment inks, by the bottle, for less than most people pay for one dinky, chipped, proprietary replacement cartridge for their printer. Those consumer-level printers are engineered to be the absolute minimum-cost solution to get people to empty their ink cartridges.
So I'm not entirely certain that the two breeds of printer are comparable. Mono lasers are almost certainly considered by the industry to be small-office/home-office (SOHO) goods, wherein a perceived deficiency in quality or operating costs might hurt future large-office purchases.
>> I also have a monochrome laser printer at home. It replaced a monochrome laser printer that lasted about 10 years
Same here. Rescued an HP Laserjet 2100 from the trash, it lasted 10 years and would have kept going with more toner but I got a Brother something-or-another for $69 at OfficeMax.
Ahhh! I too have a Brother HL-2270DW sitting at my feet currently! Its probably the best $100 I've ever spent on tech gear. Miser on the toner, and a solid piece of hardware even after thousands of pages have been run through it.
Brother HL-2030 the best 80 € I ever spent on a printer. It's been printing perfectly for years and is on its second toner cartridge now. I sometimes wish it had automatic duplex. But I print less and less.
Also had a Brother Laser printer. $100 as well and came with a 4gb flashdrive (which would've cost~$30 at the time). Thing lasted 9 years without changing the toner. Sad that I couldn't find the same model anymore.
The whole line of Brother printers is surprisingly good for the price. Also, the Ricoh printers do a good job, but send a lot of e-mail about how they are doing.
I have PC desktops from 2009 that are still functional. In contrast, I have gone through three printers since then and in fact I no longer own one. See also mobile phones/tablets with annoying 18-24 month lifespans before they develop pathological HW issues and/or just die, usually a few months before their contract is up.
I have a PC from 2007 that is not only functional, but reasonable even now. 2.4 GHz Core2Quad Q6600, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 8800 GTS. 120 GB SSD replaced original hard disk.
Still snappy to use. It's disappointing how little things have improved in 8 years.
same, got a beefy one in 2008 with the core 2 quad q9400, only upgraded the videocard midlife as the 8800 gts overheated and died.
I am about to replace it but it had incredible value for money. while waiting for the next intel cpu iteration I got a cheap samsung 850 and it feels like new!
A phone sold in the EU that fails before 24 months have passed will be returned and replaced for no cost, so either they're making specially durable editions for the European market, or the failure rate <24m can't be that high.
I was going to comment that his problem with crap printers is that he apparently keeps buying crap printers.
I bought a Laserjet cp1525nw+ Color Laser printer for $200 a few years ago and have never looked back. It's a network postscript laser printer so you never have driver hell and forced obsolesce. It prints beautifully. The paper tray is plenty big for home use. It even came with a spare black cartridge! I intend for it to be the last printer I ever buy.
There is no reason to buy some messy finicky quickly obsolete expensive-refill ink jet piece of crap ever again.
Ok, so that's not 100% true. You can't print on CDs or T-Shirts with a laser printer, so there is still a use for ink jets as specialty craft printers. For day to day printing however they are completely obsolete.
While I think the printer problem is real I think it is less of a long term opportunity because paper is becoming less valuable. When everyone has a phone or tablet with them all the time they'd much rather have photos there than print them on paper. Even older people with photo album collections they enjoy seem to be shifting towards mobile devices for photos in my experience. So having a printer is still useful but the requirements are shifting away from the crappy inkjet product anyway.
I recognize that I am biased against paper personally, but in this case I feel like it makes me notice people who cling to it and photos are a case where people seem to be clinging to paper less and less over time.
I didn't read the detailed list of what the author thinks we need to fix, but I enjoyed the beginning of the piece. I especially liked this paragraph:
So how do you see into such a blind spot? How can we periscope around the corner of our assumptions and peer into the future? If we want to create a list of the blind-spot problems that await better solutions from tomorrow’s innovators — which is what I want to do with this piece — where do we begin?
I wonder a lot about how new things start successfully. The piece that intrigues me is: If you know you are doing something genuinely different and valuable, how do you cross the chasm from everyone telling you it will never work to actually having some meaningful number of users? How do you get other people to see what you see and that you are not just another dime-a-dozen loser with some half-baked idea?
That intrigues me and I don't know the answer to it.
"To wit: our digital world doesn’t have a good system for identifying us, or helping others confirm that we are who we say we are. Because no one has solved this problem, we all live in dune-drifts of lousy passwords."
No. It's that we don't want to have the equivalent to "certificate authorities" mess for our identities too. We don't want the "obvious" "solutions" because we are aware of the bad effects of them.
Probably, authentication will be solved by Apple's fingerprint-reading phone, or the iwatch. They have to use that mechanism anyway for the iWallet (or whatever it is called).
A solution for identity doesn't necessarily imply a lack of anonymity on the entire internet.
It sure would be nice to not have to update so many payment details after a card number gets stoken though.
Last time my card was stolen I had to update a tremendous number of services. Usually I just wait until I get some sort of notice or my account stops working somewhere but it's a pain in the butt.
The reason the new number is issued depends on the update procedure being non-trivial and hopefully less broad than the last time. Otherwise, they'd just let you continue using the same one. That's the most convenient solution.
Why wouldn't you be able to use your theoretical identity card only where you wanted? I don't show my id when I buy toilet paper, and neither would I to post on reddit.
Yeah, the prologue to this was an example about credit card fraud. It seems like by far the weakest link is the poor security around credit card numbers.
Chip and pin is a highly regarded approach to securing CC #s. Maybe to secure web logins, everyone should pony up for one of those rsa [the company] SecureID dongles that generates identifiers
Credit card fraud detection is actually the "good working system." The author complains that he has to enter the new one on all the sites he uses. Well duh, the reason he got the new cc number is that only the vendors he really needs get the new one. And he complains that the sites don't know that "it's he" so he has to write down the passwords to which I answered that the alternatives are central authorities and they appear to be the worse solution than the problem.
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.
I remember when Microsoft first suggested single signon for the Internet (Passport) and everybody on Slashdot had their pitchforks out and started writing long screeds against giving a single company so much aggregate data about their browsing habits.
Yes, I remember that I was almost scared as I imagined how wrong it can go. I remember being on some MS organized conference then, even the attendees there, you know, at that time every new technology from MS was cheered by default, were highly skeptical. The guy on the stage wanted to "sell" it, he even did something like "who trusts MS" and raised the hand, an almost nobody followed him. Then he said "I trust them, because, why would they not be straight?" Really.
It's an awfully quaint notion that you should be able to take money from someone's account (credit/debit/checking/etc.) just by knowing the account numbers. This unauthenticated, default-trusting system needs to be entirely replaced.
While this might be contentious on HN - I wish Facebook would just follow Keybase.io's lead and give everyone a generated public/private key pair. Users that wish to can upload their own public key (FB recently implemented this part) while all other users would just have their private key generated by FB and saved by FB encrypted.
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.
Not sure how that's relevant - it's a platform and a very widely accepted one. It'd be a very convenient keyserver for third party applications (or really everyone).
If you're worried about them holding your private key then you could generate your pair locally and only upload your public one.
Actually, I don't want having to use Facebook for anything. Or any other big site or company. From all the companies, the internet provider can "know" the most about me, but I wouldn't even like them doing more than they are already doing.
Google is certainly the second "omniknowing," and I'm not happy with that too. And I don't use Facebook.
As interesting as the idea of the piece is....none of the mentioned problems are actually problems for me.
My printer has worked for years without an issue. I don't use too many tabs. I'm perfectly fine with my collaborative editing tool [git].
Credit card fraud authentication is a massive problem....but no solution can actually be completely secured so its a cost/benefit. Sure, the author cares...but ultimately, authenticating the new vs. old credit card number and choosing which vendors to provide it to is a choice the author has to make as he is the only one who can do it securely. :/
meh I don't see it so big of a problem. first is a problem for banks, not ordinary people, they bear the cost of fraud
secondly there already are solution in the space that split authentication from payment tokens (i.e. paypal and more recently the super annoying verified by visa / mastercad securecode) and are safe enough and good enough
I'm at a happy medium with the Tab Overload situation, though I would welcome a fantastic app that helped me save content in an intelligent way for consuming later.
Currently I browse in Chrome, keep a window with things I prefer to read later, then go back to that tabbed window when I have the time, or more conveniently, access those tabs from Chrome on my Android phone when I'm out and about and have some time to kill.
I don't understand people with a bajillion tabs open. If you're referencing a bunch of man pages, sure, but generally it just seems like people load up with the intention of reading later, and never do.
Agreed. I used to be one of those people with 10 windows open with 20 tabs each thinking that it's an efficient way to work. Nowadays I never keep tabs around, if I really will need to reference it later I drop it into the bookmarks bar, otherwise I close it and find it again when I need it some other time. If it's an article, I use Instapaper. That, combined with Inbox Zero, has really helped declutter my brain of unnecessary digital hoarding.
Well bookmarks never quite worked for me, they're more clutter than they're worth and tend to get lost in the pile.
I've organized my web browsing into a few different Chrome windows based on tasks, one window for personal browsing (articles, a forum post I'm monitoring, a tutorial I'm following, etc), web development projects (self explanatory), job hunting (can't apply to every listing at once but I also don't want to misplace these), DIY electronics projects I'm working on (schematics, build manuals, references), and items to read later/long form stories I can't finish in one sitting.
If I end up putting some of these topic areas on the backburner I'll close out an entire window and uses Session Buddy to save those links. I'll have to check out OneTab as suggested, looks somewhat similar.
It's not perfect but it works. I use one desktop as my personal and work computer so I need to organize myself around those divergent areas or else I really get lost. When I want a mental break from work I'll go browse HN and open the stories that interest me in new tabs but I'm aware that I don't have the time to read all these items (hence the need to keep an active tab on a background window). Mental break #2 comes along and I already have a few articles ready to digest.
"Everything Beyond the Developer’s Over-Contemplated Navel"
I think the push to learn everyone to code might fix that. That is the open source way right? You have a problem, you can fork it, fix it, create it. It works great for determined people.
Otherwise my response is to learn how to fix it yourself. I learned to code, I taught myself, made the investment, and by gosh I am going to fix and contemplate my navel.
My paid jobs however have taken me all over the place, in all sorts of fields, but each shared the same thing, there was money to be made. Find a way to make money and serve the under-served and you will shortly have developers developing there of their own accord or as employees.
This is a highly stupid article, written by... some dude(?) who then goes and berates the developers who he wants to fix these gripes of his for "navel gazing".
For what it's worth, I don't really see any of the points as blind spots. I think there have been many attempts to solve all of them.
I think of "fish don't know they live in water" problems... problems so deeply endemic to a specific field that the practitioners of that field don't realize it. It's as ordinary as breathing to them.
I'm devoted to solving one of those myself, in the configuration management space. When I get it off the ground, lots of happy fish (well, engineers) will know about the water.
I think it's amusing that as of this writing nearly all the other comments on this post are somewhat snarky and dismissive of the problems the author mentioned. Personally I thought several of them were quite compelling, especially the authentication one.
Perhaps HN is an aquarium full of fishes, so to speak.
Yes, a lot of them are compelling. The problem, from my point of view, is that these aren't blind spots, especially authentication. Lots of people and companies have tried, lots of people and companies are still trying. I was hoping to gain insight into problems I didn't already know about when I clicked the link. This article is not really adding value. It's just complaining. That's not a particularly useful thing to hear.
He's not saying that they are literally invisible, his actual quote is "those problems that we don’t bother changing because we’ve stopped seeing them as solvable"
Which I think is a reasonably reality based point of view.
- 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.
Nope. The idea isn't that fish don't think they can live outside of the water. For most fish, that would be completely correct. This imagery is always used to say that fish don't (and can't) know what water is, or realize that there's anything there at all.
In that case, why would the fish care? A fish is helpless with regards to its knowledge of water, and that's the salient point. If you are not helpless (or don't think you are), you will know what your environment is, because it is that knowledge that makes you powerful.
For the same reasons humans might care about air and wind? There was a widespread belief that cities had "bad air" and the countryside had "good air" (actually, this belief persists today). Regardless of the truth... why would anyone care?
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.
The concept is not that fish CAN'T recognize water, it's that it's more difficult for (metaphorical) fish that have always been immersed in water to notice water than for (metaphorical) animals that have seen both water and no water situations. The way it's usually stated is that fish are likely to be the last ones to notice water.
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.
Remote controls. Why are they terrible? Why is no one fixing them? Why is it literally impossible to walk into a friend's house and decipher the tangle of remotes for TV, cable box, XBox, sound system, etc, etc. I'm staying with friends for a few days and literally couldn't watch TV.
I believe HDMI CEC is a potential solution to this. It is a way to send keystrokes (remote-strokes?) back up the HDMI cable from the TV to the set-top box.
This means that there's no need to have a separate remote. Now, all that needs to happen is the number of buttons per remote need to be reduced as the menus improve, and as some features are automated.
Even Apple didn't bother to put in any thought into their remote control design. They ship the Apple TV with an IR remote (in the era of Bluetooth LE!) which is too painful to operate. Luckily, the Remote App works pretty well.
Yea I'm pretty conflicted about my opinion of that remote
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.
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.
Universal remote controls are a solved problem.[0] Don't blame the technology industry, blame your friend for not including the small cost of a proper remote into their home entertainment budget.
I have a Harmony remote, and love it, but it is slower to respond for many devices. It is also absolutely inferior when compared to BT devices (my Roku and my PS3 come immediately to mind).
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.
I interned at a digital subscription television receiver manufacturer eons ago. One day I was given several boxes full of random remotes, a microcontroller with an IR receiver, and an oscilloscope. I spent the next month deciphering coding schemes for dozen of remotes, which were usually undocumented or documentation-contradicting. The amazing part was how little standardization even individual vendors had, with few encodings having any real advantage over others.
The purpose of all of this was so the receiver could IR blast commands to the rest of the customers' devices. AFAIK the only place this was used was for triggering VCR recording, which was amusing given we were working on early DVRs.
The whole time I was thinking how short-sighted this was given we'd certainly be using some standard protocol in a few years since the home media center was going digital. In the early 2000s all the incidental annoyances in digital electronics still seemed like temporary problems that would be swept away by constant disruption as they had been in the 90s, as opposed to the entrenched problems we were stuck with in other technologies.
The market leader in this space appears to be crestron and personally I find their technology to be terrible in so many ways. It seems like a big opportunity, but the problem is fairly difficult to solve and device manufacturers are working against progress in many cases.
Random question: is there any way to disable that menu from popping up when you highlight text on Medium? I could write a little chrome extension to strip it out but would rather just turn it off for good.
My current favourite "blind spots" are municipal services and identification in the notary sense.
Municipal services are still driven by lumbering bureaucracies that worship paper forms and take weeks to make a decision on anything. This makes the process of interacting with them tedious, error prone, and daunting. Worse still is that it can take weeks for program approvals and to issue permits for repairs and renovations.
The identification issue is that almost all of the above and for legal documents often the only "proof" of identity is a signature. We have much stronger guarantees available that are verifiable and terribly difficult to impersonate. When I bought my house there was a stack of papers to sign that relied on good faith that I wasn't forging the signature and representing myself faithfully... but they could never know that for sure. They were also happy with having me email them sensitive documents without any encryption or verification at all.
Networking. Every time I see a non-technical friend have to know anything about the DNS to set up a website it makes me cringe. And while we're at it, why isn't my new laptop online by default? I realize that there are tremendous problems of configuration and security, but I should be able to unbox my laptop and not care about how many G's there are what the wifi passkey is or what the letters CDMA stand for. It should be as invisible to the end user as memory management.
i didn't believe hacking is real until i was introduced to a hacker named frank. I promised him I'm going to testify to his job well done and i'm fulfilling that obligation by telling you frank_zues@outlook.com is the big thing if you need to hire a real hacker. Once again thanks Frank, i'm letting the world know about you.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadSome 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8340495/how-does-rsa-toke...
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://www.statisticbrain.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Citation needed.
- 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.
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.
http://fishcantseewater.com/
Unfortunately instead of tax they'll just sell everything they know about you advertisers!
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.
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.
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.
[0]http://www.logitech.com/en-us/harmony-remotes
Also, now that you can control the hub remotely, it makes purchasing home automation items more appealing.
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.
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.
Municipal services are still driven by lumbering bureaucracies that worship paper forms and take weeks to make a decision on anything. This makes the process of interacting with them tedious, error prone, and daunting. Worse still is that it can take weeks for program approvals and to issue permits for repairs and renovations.
The identification issue is that almost all of the above and for legal documents often the only "proof" of identity is a signature. We have much stronger guarantees available that are verifiable and terribly difficult to impersonate. When I bought my house there was a stack of papers to sign that relied on good faith that I wasn't forging the signature and representing myself faithfully... but they could never know that for sure. They were also happy with having me email them sensitive documents without any encryption or verification at all.
Andy Rooney would be rolling in his grave [0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6U4IF39kqM