

Ask HN:  Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough? - amichail

As an example, I am irritated by evolution not being taken far enough on the net.<p>Sure, you can view open source as evolution in action, but much of that relies on human intelligence rather than a more direct evolutionary process (e.g., like genetic programming).<p>One can imagine some sort of evolutionary process that is midway between genetic programming and human intelligence.<p>See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation
======
patio11
I think all of the test & measure stuff we talk about so much in the web
context -- A/B testing, analytics, etc -- would revolutionize the world if it
were applied with one tenth the dedication by human institutions which are not
teeny little web startups.

This isn't to say that we have the patent on The Scientific Method. However,
there are darn few organizations which seem to have it written into their DNA.
Toyota does, famously. Imagine what would happen if your typical big-city
school system did. ("First order of business: we had 37 A/B tests running in
first grade classrooms last week. 31 of them did not lead to substantial
results. Let's hear from our lead statistician about one promising innovation,
which improved vocabulary retention among our lowest performing quartile of
black students by 15%...")

~~~
staunch
Multivariate testing is an _extremely_ limited tool. It's great when you're
doing _everything_ else right and not much better than rearranging the deck
chairs on the titanic in ever other case.

I think it's dangerous (but very tempting) to try to apply it too generally.
One passionate visionary thinking outside the box can do more than 1,000
statisticians ever could.

------
human_v2
COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS!

I sort of feel like the internet is as close as we get to it now, with Twitter
and other microblogging services bringing us a step closer. But really, I want
full-on instant telepathic communication with anyone. Cell phones don't cut
it. Gone would be the days of humming a tune in your head, whose name you do
not know, only to realize you cannot emulate those noises with your mouth.
Good luck finding out who plays that song. If everyone could read everyone
else's thoughts, you'd just hum the tune in your head and the name would come
to you right away.

I don't think we're good enough with gen. prog. right now to do anything
useful or safe with it. GM crops seems to have negative health and environment
effects. When we can open up notepad and write the ooDNA code for my new pet
mini-liger, then we could probably start programming our food.

Also, I kind of think we need a new form of math. While maths currently
describe our universe well, I think it is overly complex and non-intuitive.
This leads me to believe that we could create a simpler language, one that
builds off itself -- like a programming language which is built from AND, NOT,
OR -- which is naturally recursive like the universe. These days you have to
build an entire framework to encompass your latest quantum theory.

~~~
shrughes
How is math not intuitive? Where is it needlessly complex? How is math not
already "naturally recursive"? (What does that mean?) How is the universe
naturally recursive? What does it mean to "build math off itself"? Are we not
doing that already? I think you are complaining about math and then proposing
that we build math back up exactly as it is now.

~~~
human_v2
Math isn't NOT intuitive as far as math itself goes. It happens to be a very
nice language. I tend to think that relativity and quantum mechanics do not
mesh well because of the language we use to describe them. While standard
maths is NP complete, it does not seem to inherently describe the universe
without getting all crazy complex. I encourage you to try and comprehend even
some of the simplest M-Theory equations. (not saying I do, but if math was
really the language of the universe m-theory equations would be quite simple).

You know how in science and math people describe certain things as 'elegant' ?
For example, E=mc^2 is very elegant. If math were elegant, you could get from
here (higgs bosons) to there (atoms) with a simple equation which has been
recursed x times to produce a mathematical model of an atom.

Math isn't bad, it's quite useful in fact. It's just not the natural language
of the universe like everyone thinks it is.

~~~
nopinsight
There is a good _possibility_ though that the universe is inherently complex
in certain aspects for _our_ brains. Human brains are evolved to survive in
the part of the physical world observable by human organs, not to comprehend
the essential forms of the universe.

E=MC^2 could be just an aspect of reality that happens to coincide with the
way observable physical world works.

Maybe a different math for describing the universe written by an alien
intelligence with different sensory organs could be simple for them, not still
incomprehensible for us. And that alien intelligence is just a jackpot hit in
the evolutionary possibility space (and the jackpot may well have never been
hit).

~~~
shrughes
_E=MC^2 could be just an aspect of reality that happens to coincide with the
way observable physical world works._

All aspects of reality coincide with the way the physical world works. Or,
what does that sentence mean?

 _Maybe a different math for describing the universe written by an alien
intelligence with different sensory organs could be simple for them, not still
incomprehensible for us._

I think there is a strong argument against this. That some alien race is
really good at visualizing certain kinds of N-dimensional systems of some
weird kind of space is plausible, but to throw all of mathematics out, I
think, is not. They would have a mere superset of the mathematics we have.

In particular, take computation. Are aliens never going to deal with strings
of units of data? If they do, right there you have the notion of their length,
and of natural numbers. You have notions like concatenating strings. And the
homomorphism between the two. And we're off on the road to abstract algebra.

It's very unlikely for smart aliens not to develop the same study of discrete
math and abstract algebra that we do, unless they were never to use discrete
units of information, and were only capable of processing infinite amounts of
information at a time. Would they then have no use for the idea of
associativity? Of proofs that consist of a finite set of symbols in a finite
alphabet? Of proofs that consist of a finite set of symbols in an uncountably
infinite alphabet? With any of these they would on the road to having a
superset of our mathematical knowledge, rather than something different. We
don't know how such a being would be physically possible, in the first place.

I think it would be more correct, and less exciting, to predict that some
aliens might be smarter than us in certain ways.

~~~
roundsquare
_All aspects of reality coincide with the way the physical world works._

I think observable is the keyword here... we happened to be able to observe
enough that we can conclude that E = mc^2

As for your second point... I don't think I agree. The fact of the matter is
that as humans, we are essentially unable to reason about how beings with a
different set of senses would think. With respect to cosmology, we basically
react to how light moves around and that forms the basis of our science (our
other senses don't really come into the picture). Its very difficult to think
about an intelligence based on some other source of information and impossible
to know what sort of data would be present (since we don't have access to the
information).

------
jrockway
Functional programming.

I really like it when my computer crashes because someone decided that
checking whether or not "-5435" was a valid array index was "too time
consuming". Wait, I hate that. I have 4 cores that are idle 99% of the time.
Let the computer do some self-checks that will keep my data intact.

(Read the ext3 source code some time and tell yourself that you trust
important data to it. The only reason it works at all is because everyone has
already been burned by the most obvious bugs.)

~~~
Hexstream
?... Automatic array-bounds checking doesn't require functional programming.

Besides, functional programming is not The One True Paradigm To Rule Them All
either. Dataflow, for example, is an example of another superb paradigm.

~~~
jrockway
The general argument is against "it's too slow". People avoid FP because "it's
too slow" in favor of languges like C that get you the wrong answer really
quickly. (Functional programming is not "too slow", of course; consider the
popularity of Ruby and realize that SBCL, OCaml, GHC, ... are often 50x
faster. Of course, those are all 3x slower than C, so clearly should be
avoided...)

------
Isomer
* The network is the computer.

I want processes that migrate with me. When I login at work, I should be able
to grab my webbrowser from home and continue it executing on my work machine.
Or perhaps on my cellphone (although the UI probably would be horrible). When
I reboot my laptop, processes get migrated onto another machine I have
permissions for (my desktop?), and come back when the reboot completes.

* Distributed Storage.

I have a string of PC's I have own and/or have (legitimate!) access to, but I
have problems storing data. Eg my desktop at home has gigs of local storage,
but my home directory is mounted off the file server which is running out of
space. Why can't I easily merge those two file stores?

* Augmented Reality.

* Mesh based Free Space Optics.

To be able to set up a wireless AP that has line of sight to another AP, that
then sets up a mesh using FSO. FSO is near interference free.

* FPGA's for accelerating computation and reducing power consumption.

* Location/Situational awareness in cellphones.

Guessing better if it should be a loud ringtone based on ambient noise?
Guessing who I'm going to call given that I always call this person at this
time at this location?

* Better internet file distribution.

Knowing/Guessing something about network topology and doing something smart
about it w.r.t choosing who to download from. (TCP_INFO to get TCP's estimated
RTT for a link? Measuring how long it takes an IP address to download from
you/to you and remembering that for your current network, and biasing which
peer/server you use in future based on this). Using Source Specific Multicast
when available to get network multiplier effects.

* End to End Encryption of communications.

* Natural Language Parsing

We know that computers have problems with ambiguous sentences, but a search
engine where you give it a natural language query, and it parses it, and then
asks for which parsing is correct, or asks you to resubmit your query in a
less ambiguous way. People seem quite happy to iteratively query a search
engine to get an answer they want, having a NLP guess the wrong meaning is
easily rectified with a more specific query. Wolfram Alpha tries this. It
however doesn't seem to provide you any obvious way to improve your query,
variations on a theme tend to result in the same parse.

------
staunch
Everything. I wish I was born at least 500 years in the future. Science is
just beginning and I was born at the wrong damn time. I could be flying my own
space ship and visiting HN over The Subspacenet. No single advance could ever
satisfy me or make up for my disappointment at being born too soon.

(Not that I'm not appreciative for being alive at all. I'm fortunate in _many_
ways, but that doesn't stop me from imagining what could have been.)

~~~
WalkingDead
If we look back at human history and extrapolate that trend, 500 years on we
could be worse off than what we are now in technology. Civilizations no matter
how strong they look, have a trend of rising and falling. And when it falls,
it's knowledge gradually gets lost.

40 years back, human where more capable of visiting the moon then they are
now.

Fundamental discoveries in physics is almost stuck now for 60 years, since
discoveries of quantum mechanics.

The only gain we are seeing is in medical science, and information technology
(in Engineering, not Science).

That's what I feel.

~~~
staunch
No. Technology has _progressed_ over thousands of years.

Of course the world could go to complete shit. If it doesn't though, we'll end
up with technology that's unimaginably advanced. Whether that's in 500 years
or 50,000 years makes no difference.

------
jasonlbaptiste
there's not enough going on with 10 Foot Interface advancements. Boxee and
XBMC rock, but a lot is happening and about to happen in this space. What's
possible today was not possible 18 months ago whether it be hardware OR
software. Boxee already has 600k users and that's with their alpha. I'd love
to see hayzap or a casual games developer launch something on their platform.
With that said, seeing more sites have a "10 foot interface" alternative, just
like they have a gui for mobile devices would be great.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-foot_user_interface>

------
matthodan
Here are a couple that came to mind:

1) Constructive feedback -- I want more, now :)

2) Web UI technologies -- progress, but at a snail's pace

3) Web APIs -- bring down those "walls"

4) Internet-driven TV apps -- why not?

~~~
rs
For no. 1 - are you referring to the "casual observer" problem ?

------
Coax
Capitalism-driven legislation. Particularly the taxation of negative
externalities.

------
CulturalNgineer
Democracy's design...

The scarce use of technology to encourage and access crowd wisdom. (Rather
than the cleverness invested in things like gerrymandering and misleading
advertising techniques.)

This is a similar phenomenon to the pathological cleverness used in so much
social network advertising... you know, bait and switch, the devil's-in-the-
details approach to supposed fellow decision makers.

I'm an anthropologist not a software guy. But the solutions are fairly obvious
which I try to address elsewhere. Fortunately the reception is getting better
in some places.

------
teeja
Voice-command computing. As Scotty said, "A keyboard? How quaint!"

(NOT for offices!) I want to tell my wearable to look up facts, do math,
remember everything I tell it to remember, and comb through ALL the news
keeping my personal preferences in mind. And quick instructions on what I can
cook with the food I've got on hand ... which it remembers.

------
iamwil
Bandwidth as a constitutional right in addition to life, liberty, and pursuit
of happiness.

~~~
patio11
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not guaranteed anywhere in the
Constitution. Those three are a rhetorical flourish in the Declaration of
Independence, and do not create enforceable legal rights for Americans. The
Constitution guarantees enforceable negative rights, for example, it forbids
the government from killing (or otherwise punishing) you without due process
of law.

The Constitution, by design, doesn't establish positive rights. An example of
a positive right is "You have the right to an education."

Positive rights suffer from implementation issues, expanding government creep
as pressure groups suffer rights-envy, and the generic problems associated
with state-provided services.

An example of an implementation issue: the Japanese Constitution guarantees
that "All people shall have the right to receive an equal education
correspondent to their ability, as provided for by law." This has been
interpreted as making it unconstitutional to remove students from mainstream
classrooms, regardless of behavioral disability or a distressing propensity to
stab teachers in the neck.

An example of rights-envy: Once you have one positive right, every pressure
group under the sun will want their own mandate. The argument will sound
something like this: "The constitution guarantees bandwidth, food to eat is a
lot more important than bandwidth, the constitution should guarantee food,
too." Other favorites for expansion are health care, education, and sexual
services. (Oh, Europe, what a continent.)

The American political consensus is that positive rights are not desirable at
the federal constitutional level.

~~~
detcader
Nice comment; though, I think the OP was just comedically endorsing Net
Neutrality, which, iirc, asserts a negative right.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Net Neutrality isn't a negative right. If you own a network, net neutrality
takes away from your ability to use it as you see fit; if you want, for
whatever reason, to dick around with your customers and block Craigslist, you
should be able to do so -- just like a newspaper can refuse to run an ad, or
even refuse to write about a story.

~~~
netcharmer
In my opinion, newspaper is not a right analogy. Newspapers provide content,
ISPs don't. I can understand if, say, National Geographic puts some
restriction on the online content but why should my ISP decides if I can
access National Geographic or not. Telephone networks is the right analogy
here - will you allow your telephone provider to control whom you can call?

~~~
roundsquare
_will you allow your telephone provider to control whom you can call?_

Not now I won't, because that would be changing the service I'm getting to
something I didn't sign up for.

If I got an offer tomorrow for a "limited" phone service I would turn it down,
but I wouldn't consider it immoral or bad or something that shouldn't exist.

------
petercooper
Geoengineering and practical solutions to climate issues - as opposed to the
rampant, ineffective cult of "environmentalism." Smart minds are working on
geoengineering solutions - they just need cash and government support.

------
rokhayakebe
Ending world hunger. Children Education. Peace.

~~~
fnid
You know why we will never have peace? Because it upsets the status quo. The
status quo gives power to many people who have, at present, sufficient power
to maintain their ability to stifle the opportunity for peace.

It's really simple really, just stop blowing things up. Stop killing people.
If people kill your people, ignore them. Repair the damage and keep going.
Eventually, they'll give up.

------
bayareaguy
I'd like our government to do more to help rather than hinder folks like Carl
Malamud and the others at <http://public.resource.org>

------
paraschopra
Regional conflicts. And the idea of countries, in the first place.

~~~
wlievens
The idea of countries is not taken far enough?

~~~
roundsquare
And/or the idea of regional conflicts? :)

Actually, paraschopra probably means the opposite, that is, these ideas are
taken too far... or at least, thats my read.

~~~
paraschopra
Yep, right. I think resolution of regional conflicts hasnt taken far. Plus
solution to arbitrarily defined regions called countries hasnt taken too far

~~~
roundsquare
Well, its actually a fairly new idea.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia>

In any event, whats your better solution? Not to say you don't have one, but
I'm curious.

------
cmelbye
Platform as a Service.

Federation of micro-blogging.

------
raintrees
One vote per registered person for elections, alleviating the need for the
Electoral College. And maybe even representative government?

~~~
cmelbye
I think that every election year when the local polling place is packed to the
brim with people waiting to get registered by slow, old people. Register every
citizen centrally and put voting kiosks (that could double as places to pay
taxes, etc maybe?) in grocery stores, gas stations, etc.

------
RevRal
Tesla's global wireless communication and energy.

------
Hexstream
Intelligence, truthfulness, purposeness and politeness in advertising.

I'm continually amazed at the sheer stupidity of it all.

------
wlievens
VR goggles, that stuff. But not with the huge 90's style visors, obviously.
Displays integrated into sunglasses, etc.

------
BigCanOfTuna
Probably one of the most promising ideas that has lost much of its
meaning....We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect
Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common
defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
United States of America.

~~~
detcader
"insure" domestic "Tranquility"?

~~~
raintrees
Great. More insurance scams to pay high monthlies for.

------
chrischen
Linus views open source, or at least the kernel, as _guided evolution_

------
rphlx
teledildonics

~~~
heyrhett
One of the inherent problems with tactile feedback over a distance is the
speed of light. The last haptic device I used received feedback from a
computer every ms. Too much latency kills the experience for long distance
tactile communication. How far could you reasonably "reach out and touch"
someone? I'd guess maybe a hundred or few hundred miles.

~~~
a-priori
As a general rule, the human brain doesn't notice any delay of less that
100ms. Anything less than that is "instantaneous".

Light takes 1.6ms to travel 300 miles, or 3.2ms for a round-trip, which is
well below that threshold. To get up to a 100ms round-trip, the two parties
would have to be 0.05 light-seconds apart, or just shy of 15000km (9314
miles).

That's plenty to get you North America, Europe and East Asia, but
unfortunately Australia is a bit far from North America or Europe.

Obviously, that's assuming the signals are transferred at the speed of light
with no other sources of latency, which is an ideal. But still, it's a far cry
from "a hundred or few hundred miles".

------
nazgulnarsil
marginal utility. hell i'd be satisfied if people would just accept supply and
demand.

------
detcader
Pocket touch screen devices.

I want cheap, low-functionality touch screen devices. Like, an iPhone, but
with only a calculator, a dictionary/thesaurus, and some other useful but
simple applications (text reader/editor, todo list, etc).

Or how about an open-development touch screen device? Where programmers can
create their own applications for it easily?

~~~
keenerd
Sounds like you want any Palm or Windows CE device made in the last decade. I
am not kidding, you described 90% of what I do on the 2003 PDA I picked up for
$15. (The remaining 10% is gmail, skype, and an NES emulator.) Did I mention
it is easy to program for? I've got every language from Scheme to J on board.

Welcome to the past, your dreams may be found at any yard sale.

------
x3m
open source hardware

------
kasunh
Individual Freedom!

