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Things I still can't do in November 2014

80 pointsby imd23over 10 years ago

38 comments

gordacoover 10 years ago
Honestly, I find some of these points quite disturbing. And a lot of them are not a matter of technology.<p><i>13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now.</i> I don&#x27;t want to work with you, ever. 40 hours a week are for the team, sure, but during the remaining 128 you don&#x27;t have any business in my life. What you propose is creepy.<p><i>25. Be able to take a course online and get graded -- and get a diploma that means something. Education is really ripe for disruption: Coursera is OK, but we need to invent Stanford 2.0</i> For a diploma to mean something, what you need is not to make the courses better, or harder to pass, or whatever you&#x27;re thinking; what you need is to convince your employer that you have the required skills for your job. The diploma may or may not have something to do with it, but in any case it&#x27;s your employer&#x27;s criterion. What you want may happen over time, but it&#x27;s definitely not a matter of technology.<p><i>26. Be able to sell my advice online. It&#x27;s worth something and I should have some way to monetize it.</i> Again, it&#x27;s other people, not you, who will judge whether your advice is valuable. Aside from that, it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s difficult to become some kind of consultant.<p><i>30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers.</i> What.<p><i>31. Be able to get a $100 MRI. It can be done for this price.</i> There are a LOT of things that will cost you far, far, far more than what they cost [EDIT: to clarify, that I mean is: far than what they cost <i>to your provider</i>]. This is pretty basic economy, IMHO. Also you may get it for free when you actually need it, if you live in a place with a sane health system (i.e., not the USA).<p>But yeah, as jokoon said in <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648325" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8648325</a>, most of those &quot;problems&quot; arise from politics and economy. I suspect that a few of them have actually been tried, and either they&#x27;re doing fine but in a local scale, or they failed.
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nikcubover 10 years ago
&gt; 26. Be able to sell my advice online. It&#x27;s worth something and I should have some way to monetize it.<p>It is called Google Helpouts[0], and it isn&#x27;t going very well. Reason why - almost everybody overvalues what their advice is actually worth. People who can provide value usually already are through their usual economic activity - be it a job or entrepreneurialism (ie. If your advice was worth something, you&#x27;d already be monetizing it).<p>Websites that create Shingy[1] As A Service type markets around paid advice often just become cesspools of psychics and webcam sex operators.<p>[0] <a href="https://helpouts.google.com/home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;helpouts.google.com&#x2F;home</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;crystal-ball-3</a>
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jsnellover 10 years ago
&gt; 4. Locate where my dog is right now using a barely noticeable GPS chip.<p>&gt; 13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now.<p>I think we can kill two birds with one stone here. Your team is collared, right?
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sgt101over 10 years ago
1) Make everyone else do what I want, for free. 2) Discount the cost of other peoples investment (capital and social) to zero. 3) Never have things go wrong. 4) Magic.
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crdoconnorover 10 years ago
&quot;Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers&quot;<p>This argument seems to be pretty common among the glitterati from Wall Street.<p>I wonder why they don&#x27;t see the incredible irony.
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jokoonover 10 years ago
first world problems of somebody living in the silicon valley ?<p>sorry but most of those things either stems from politics or lack of market development.
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fphhotchipsover 10 years ago
I remain frustrated that world financial systems are unable to handle instant money transfers between institutions. There seems to me to be no good reason that I shouldn&#x27;t be able to transfer money between my accounts without waiting until midnight for the funds to clear. Worse, the routine seems not to run on weekends. Why is this? Is power unavailable on Saturday night?
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ElectricMonk79over 10 years ago
&gt; 30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers<p>Perpetuating the myth that unhealthy people are a financial and social burden. That&#x27;s wrong because....<p><i></i>* MIND QUAKE: Fat people are &#x27;on average&#x27; healthier!! <i></i>*<p>Why? Because they clutch their heart and die in an instant. &#x27;Healthy people&#x27; drag their boney carcasses from care home to care home for <i></i>decades<i></i>. Do the world a favour - grab yourself a beer, a burger and some cigarettes. Knock yourself out; literally.
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S4Mover 10 years ago
&gt; 6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon &quot;Clean&quot;).<p>Isn&#x27;t this what HomeJoy is doing? If not, I have a friend who tried that, but failed. I&#x27;d be happy to forward his details.<p>&gt; 9. Send $10,000 to my caretaker in France and have her get the cash and withdraw it from an ATM that same day.<p>Within Europe, you can.<p>&gt; 10. Get investors for my startup by advertising the stock offering on the web and selling shares directly.<p>Isn&#x27;t that what KickStarter does?<p>&gt; 11. Get a quick, binding divorce online.<p>I think it&#x27;s better that you can&#x27;t divorce that way.
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shruubiover 10 years ago
The fact that this guy seems to want to be able to track his teams physical location, sell his advice for a large sum of money and be able to get quick divorces tells me this isn&#x27;t the kind of person I want in any kind of real power...
skrebbelover 10 years ago
All of these score 1 on one of my favorite HN comments, the Yudkowski Ambition Scale[0]. That&#x27;s OK, but it&#x27;s a bit disappointing for a post that clearly tries to come off as visionary.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510702" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4510702</a>
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Omniusaspirerover 10 years ago
Most of these revolve around non-tech industries having horrendously bad tech&#x2F;web presence. Laundry, musicians, hospitals, government, banks- all of these are extremely traditional fields with many of them mired in incredible amounts of regulation.<p>Hospitals are particularly embarrassing- even just moving to electronic records is taking them over a decade and ~100 billion dollars to do. Many hospitals are still fighting the transition heavily despite every estimate I can find pointing to massive cost savings several times the initial expense. Unfortunately I suspect we&#x27;ll all be waiting a long time for even basic conveniences like home blood drawings, let alone cheap MRI&#x27;s.<p><a href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/5/1103.long" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.healthaffairs.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;24&#x2F;5&#x2F;1103.long</a>
estebankover 10 years ago
&gt; 30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers<p>Am I the only one finding this insulting, disgusting and backwards? People can be overweight for a multitude of reasons, some of which are:<p><pre><code> * Genetics * Medication * Health conditions * Smoking * Enviromental reasons * Lack of sleep * Age * Pregnancy * An inactive lifestyle coupled with high consumtion of lipids </code></pre> You want the government to spend less money in fat people? Make the government first invest money to avoid having an epidemic of overweight people.<p>Some people have reasons other than stuffing their faces for being fat. It&#x27;d be impolite of me to say what I think of this person for implying there aren&#x27;t.
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vermootenover 10 years ago
&quot;32. Be able to get into an ER for under $100. It&#x27;s ridicoulous that a mere 15 min consultation can cost somebody (the system) $1000+.&quot;<p>You can. It&#x27;s called &#x27;living in Europe.&#x27;
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frtabover 10 years ago
Some of those already exist, and some of those should never exist.
hakankibarover 10 years ago
6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon &quot;Clean&quot;).<p>We do exactly that :) <a href="http://temizlikyolda.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;temizlikyolda.com&#x2F;</a>
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lazyjonesover 10 years ago
Underwhelming, mostly &quot;luxury problems&quot; other people don&#x27;t have. He can probably fund a bunch of startups to tackle most instead of complaining.<p>You know what I miss most? While there are plenty of online courses, some even for particular specializations, noone offers &quot;synthesizable&quot; courses targeted at arbitrary special fields with arbitrary preexisting skills. For example, I want to learn everything about state-of-the-art battery production (e.g. how factories operate, what the scaling issues are etc.). I have a background mostly in IT, physics from school, strong in mathematics. I should be able to choose this specialized topic and then &quot;add&quot; prerequisite courses until I&#x27;m confident that I can build on my existing knowledge and get exactly what I need to know to become proficient in battery production.<p>My current choices are either to study physics at a major university and try to find courses that cover my target topic to specialize towards the end (realistically, I&#x27;d have to read 100+ publications to cover recent advances), or to find books on the topic and whenever I feel I lack knowledge to understand a book, other books to cover these holes. Very difficult, trial-and-error and slow. Or I could hire a personal trainer(?) proficient in the field (how to find?) to get me there.<p>Neither of these seem very attractive and efficient and having a flexible online course system for this purpose would really help. Any takers? Don&#x27;t you want a simple, effective way to become proficient in a particular field without wading knee-deep through useless material for years?
pmontraover 10 years ago
Most of the points are about scarce resources that must be retrieved using a specialized network of experts. If a company has to build a solution, there must be a market large enough to make it profitable in the long run. If no, we need some crowdsourced enterprise similar to what OpenStreetMap did for maps or Wikipedia did for general knowledge.<p>Some random thoughts on some points that stand out more for me.<p>There are tools for 4, but non barely noticeable. There are problems with batteries too.<p>13 is disturbing. I won&#x27;t work with him and he probably won&#x27;t be willing to hire me.<p>14 would be great but I&#x27;m afraid paper and pencil are still the best tools if we want to trust the results of an election and keep ballots anonymous, notwithstanding a lot or research on the subject. I won&#x27;t trust any solution with an IP header that can be traced to me or with a database that could receive fake votes. At least in physical elections parties can send their representatives to polling stations and check if anything strange is going on.<p>29. Indoor Maps from Google is tackling that problem. Probably they are not the only ones working on that.<p>Getting 31 for free is pretty common in Europe and probably in other areas of the world. That&#x27;s not a matter of being in 2014 but of where one lives.
sarhusover 10 years ago
&gt; 22. have all my accounting being done as a SASS.<p>In UK that&#x27;s done by Crunch (<a href="http://www.crunch.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunch.co.uk&#x2F;</a>)
rdc12over 10 years ago
Most of these seem possible and some of them are really creepy take this for example [1], first off that would be unmanagable list, allready exists (dating services, tinder, etc) and is presented in a very dodgy way.<p>[1] &quot;27. Be able to see a list of all single people in LA right now and efficiently sort through this data, with two way opt-in, to find an ideal match&quot;
Beltirasover 10 years ago
Much of this list is things you can do with a little ingenuity.<p>ER problem is US specific. Scandinavian countries don&#x27;t have that problem (to name 1st world countries that have &quot;solved&quot; HC).<p>What does he want to test via blood? There are a lot of specific solutions available.<p>Some would argue he should buy a Tesla and that&#x27;s that on the car front.<p>And then there&#x27;s just the stupid stuff like &quot;call FD with an app&quot;..... cuz 911 is soo hard to remember. And the gross misunderstanding of Bitcoin. The value fluctuates. That&#x27;s any currency, not just Bitcoin. Even the value of the dollar is volatile (inflation).<p>He couldn&#x27;t find a physicist to teach him GR? That&#x27;s so amusing it brought me to tears. Did he try .... a local university?<p>The invasion of privacy he calls for is .... disturbing.<p>If he can get MRI&#x27;s done @ 100$ per pop, he&#x27;s got a business to run and money to make. Go do it!<p>I could go on tearing that list to shreds.
mkaroumiover 10 years ago
&quot;Liked&quot;<p>6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon &quot;Clean&quot;).<p>There&#x27;s actually a new Swedish startup (I&#x27;m not a part of it) that does exactly this! <a href="https://twitter.com/LaundryOnlineSE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;LaundryOnlineSE</a><p>&quot;LaundryOnline is a swedish startup created to make ur day more awesome by taking care of ur laundry. We pick up and deliver ur laundry fast and easy.&quot; Seems cool!
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ryandvmover 10 years ago
&gt; 7. Have my car keep a web record of everywhere it has been, how it is doing, and what needs fixing or updating.<p>There are a lot of worthy problems on this list, but #7 has been completely solved by the current connected car devices like Zubie (<a href="http://zubie.co/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zubie.co&#x2F;</a>) or Automatic (<a href="https://www.automatic.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.automatic.com&#x2F;</a>).
thomasfoster96over 10 years ago
I&#x27;m sure 30 is probably best achieved by putting a 5% GST-like tax on food and drinks that exceed a certain calorie, sugar or fat content. Making people get weighed for their taxes isn&#x27;t exactly going to be logistically, morally or politically possible in the foreseeable future.
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plus9zover 10 years ago
&quot;28. Find a teacher of general relativity online. I tried.&quot; Really? <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0&amp;list=PLPPSIjDe9T-81p1CjN49_Zi_L4-NQorTp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0&amp;list=PLPPSIjDe9T...</a>
netcanover 10 years ago
18. Invest $10,000 in Uber in the secondary market by buying some shares from an existing shareholder -- with just a few clicks.<p>If this one gets solved, it would be weirdly ironic. That&#x27;s supposedly what public markets are for. This BTW, is one an entrepreneurial government could tackle.
ddwover 10 years ago
Most of these come down to &quot;give me what I want now for less money!&quot;<p>Is this all that technology is good for?
bryanlarsenover 10 years ago
For #4: <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/findster-the-gps-tracker-without-monthly-fees--2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;findster-the-gps-tracker-...</a>
Sgoettschkesover 10 years ago
15. Call the police or the fire department or paramedics using an app.<p>I think this app is called telephone. You use it by typing an identifier of the service you want to reach (e.g. 911) and a call is dispatched.
therobot24over 10 years ago
&gt; 32. Be able to get into an ER for under $100. It&#x27;s ridicoulous that a mere 15 min consultation can cost somebody (the system) $1000+.<p>Thought this was basically urgent care.
theklubover 10 years ago
Half of these are already available, I&#x27;m too lazy to go through and list them. On a side note google &quot;Fred Krueger&quot;
GFK_of_xmaspastover 10 years ago
&quot;11. Get a quick, binding divorce online.&quot;<p>If you google &quot;divorce online&quot; you get a shitload of links for existing services.
recursiveover 10 years ago
&gt; 5. Share my health and fitness data with my doctor and my trainer in real time and get advice.<p>This is exactly what TrainingPeaks does.
supover 10 years ago
&gt; 21. take a picture of any object and find out where to buy it (Shazam for things)<p>Like Amazon Firefly.
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vselovedover 10 years ago
Lots of 1st world problems here
peterkellyover 10 years ago
&gt; 11. Get a quick, binding divorce online.<p>Umm... really???
bcardarellaover 10 years ago
#12 is trying to be solved by learnivore.com
krc5kzover 10 years ago
I could see Theranos trying to solve #1