
Ask HN: Which tools are ubiquitous but badly in need of a redesign/reboot? - oliv__
Which tools&#x2F;businesses would you love to see modernized? Where can friction&#x2F;pain be taken out?
======
sundarurfriend
LaTeX. The tooling is awful, the error messages are close to useless, and any
moderately complex document needs hacks and workarounds to accommodate the
various quirks it has accumulated.

I remember reading online somewhere "the best use of a 1 million dollar grant
today to advance physics and math would be to redesign and develop LaTeX from
scratch. The amount of productivity lost fighting against it is enormous."
(Probably heavily paraphrased, since I don't remember the source.)

Dr. Christoph Schiller, creator of the "Motion Mountain" physics book done
entirely in LaTeX, mentions some of its other shortcomings here:
[http://www.motionmountain.net/onlatex.html](http://www.motionmountain.net/onlatex.html)

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marmot777
* Airlines - I have no idea how but it's more important than the latest app.

* Basic Infrastructure (e.g.,clean water, well maintained roads, sound bridges, beautiful parks)

* domain information groper (dig) - Build a better dig and the world will beat a path to your door!

~~~
mysterypie
> Airlines

Airplanes are cool, so people keep pouring time and money into it, but the
airline industry as a whole has made a cumulative loss during its 100-year
history[1]. It's better to avoid any startup idea related to airlines.

> Basic Infrastructure (e.g.,clean water, well maintained roads, sound
> bridges, beautiful parks)

Ugh, local/state government with petty politics, corruption, insane levels of
bureaucracy. Stay away as well.

> domain information groper

Have you seen the typical web service that provides information like that?
It's either someone's hobby project, in which case they'll tire of maintaining
it and paying bandwidth, or it'll turn into a spam-infested site like
whatismyipaddress.com. You could make a good free tool, but you can't make
honest money on those.

On a related note, no one has been able to find an honest way to make money on
caller-ID lookup (telephone directory lookup). Useful phone lookup did exist
in the early web days, but today they are _all_ unreliable, spam-infested,
dishonest sites. The information on some sites is literally 100% fraudulent,
giving fake names and addresses for every possible phone number.

If it were possible to provide an honest, useful, and profitable service, it
would be the top Google listing every time you searched for a phone number;
the fact that it doesn't exist, means that it is not possible[2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline#Economic_consideration...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline#Economic_considerations)

[2] A significant factor is probably due to the lack of useful phone number
databases since individuals and telecom companies want to keep their numbers
private. But this can't be the entire answer since at least 80% of landline
numbers are "published", but even landline lookup has become useless.

~~~
jermaustin1
There is nothing wrong with government. You just need to know someone. I have
worked on multiple government contracts, typically through someone I knew who
needed something done. I built a product and sat down with their purchasing
manager, and grossed a few grand a month for pretty minimal effort.

And the government is already so used to bad software, so long as it works,
you are doing them a favor.

As with most industries, you need to know a person, a problem, and a solution
to make any money.

~~~
marmot777
Why is government software so bad? Also, why did you put in minimal effort?

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danbolt
I've heard the source code for GNU Screen is pretty ugly and in need of a
refactor, but I haven't had much issue with things user-side, so it's hard to
say if that's really necessary.

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mikro2nd
Mail servers for personal deployment.

