
Ask HN: What annoys you? - daleharvey
A lot of recent threads have been talking about sharing ideas, I would rather share our problems. Hopefully some people can be lead towards solutions that already exist, and it might be useful for those looking to startup something new.<p>List the problem you have, and why you find it a problem, possibly saying why other things you have used havent solved it.<p>Make 1 comment per problem, and try to upvote / comment on problems to expand on them.
======
mirkules
1\. Technologically possible things that have been castrated/restricted by
business people (or that need to be hacked, i.e. can't be done by your mother,
in order to get them to work properly). Examples: phone tethering, ring tones,
lack of power outlets in economy class on airplanes, VOIP over 3G, media
licensing (aka dvd zoning), inability to stream Netflix from different
countries, inability to watch streams on ESPN3.com/Univision from non-approved
ISPs (wtf?), general lack of TV/radio streams on the internet (major annoyance
during the world cup)

2\. Things that are obscenely expensive but don't cost much to
produce/service. Examples: mobile broadband ($30-60 that you can't share, see
above), mobile text messaging ($0.25 per 160 bytes!?), dealership car service,
iPhone cases, Monster cables, etrade transactions, international roaming
(data: $20 PER MB, voice $2.29/min), laptop batteries, retail books, music,
DVDs, basic software (such as FTP/ssh clients, PDF readers, etc).

3\. Getting ripped off, knowing I can't do anything about it. Examples:
exchanging foreign currency, used video games

~~~
judofyr
Actually, it's 160 7-bit bytes, so that's $0.25 per _140_ bytes.

~~~
mrduncan
Some interesting conversions to put it into perspective:

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 0.18 U.S. cents / byte

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 1,872 U.S. dollars / megabyte

~~~
trafficlight
But you have to admit, it's an impressive marketing accomplishment. Millions
of people paying for something at a 1000%, or more, markup.

------
SandB0x
Food. I miss the healthy, affordable, sociable dining halls from university.
There are people who cook better than I do, and who should be able to make
great food at a reasonable price by buying fresh ingredients in bulk.

My options for eating are

* Cook it myself [1]. Cheap but takes time and effort to make good food.

* Restaurant. Good food but expensive and takes time. I don't always want table service and small portions.

* Fast food. Quick and cheap, but unhealthy.

* Supermarket ready meals. See above.

So yeah, I would love an urban cafeteria serving a handful of healthy, cheap,
fresh meal options. I'm sure it can be done.

Edit, re Tel: [1] I _love_ to cook, but not when I'm in a rush, and I'm not
always near home.

~~~
tel
It's not quite the replacement for a dining hall, but learning to cook is not
only cheap but really enriching in other ways as well.

    
    
      1. It's easier to be healthier (and in time this transforms
         to "impossible to not be healthier".
      2. It's an impressive skill for attracting relationships 
         both friendly and romantic.
      3. Once you're confident, cooking for a party of friends and
         second degree strangers is a GREAT way to meet new people.
    

I forget who it is, but there's a HNer around who's had great successes
throwing open-to-all, multi-course Hacker Dinners and taught himself the
skills more or less on the fly. At the end of the day, everybody eats; almost
everybody can enjoy interesting, tasty food; and those who can skillfully,
confidently serve that up become a social hub.

~~~
sliverstorm
It is indeed a great skill, but time is limited and it feels so incredibly
futile to spend 30 minutes preparing nice food for the millionth time, when in
10 minutes it will only be a memory in my stomach.

~~~
tel
Eat slower?

(edit: removed a superfluous link, so instead I'll just be anecdotal. Cooking
and eating are great social activities when done right. In my mind it's
incredibly relaxing to cut vegetables and manage a meal. Conversations can
spring into new inspiration or just better bonding with friends. I understand
that not all meals can put striving for that kind of bliss as a major goal,
but I'm not trying to defend _all_ meals.)

~~~
DaemonXI
Make more food. Leftovers!

Every time I make pasta, I boil the entire box and make too much sauce so I
can eat later.

------
Eliezer
Non-teaching of explicit rationality annoys me. The most fundamental,
elementary, and basic concepts of rationality are not systematically explained
anywhere that I know of. It is impossible to engage the average PhD in a
dialogue with agreed-upon rules of reasoning because they do not know why you
can't prove things about the real world by arguing about the definitions of a
word, or why it's a bad idea to pick a conclusion first and then come up with
arguments for it, or the Bayesian definition of evidence that forms the
foundation of all belief updates in epistemic rationality, or why violating
the expected utility theorem by failing to assign consistent utilities always
means leaving some value on the table.

I am writing a book to solve this problem.

~~~
barmstrong
Interesting, this reminds me of a book I thought about writing at one point
titled something like "How To Tell What Is True"

Which would cover topics like:

* Peer review * Double blind experiments * Anecdotal evidence * Statistical Significance

But I sort of lost interest and ended up just making it a blog post instead...
[http://www.startbreakingfree.com/504/how-to-tell-whats-
bulls...](http://www.startbreakingfree.com/504/how-to-tell-whats-bullshit-and-
whats-true-part-1/)

~~~
TheSOB88
Parent's ideas are much more applicable to the general public, which is who
needs this training the most.

~~~
pjscott
Now there's an interesting question: how can you teach some low-hanging fruit
of rationality to someone with maybe half an hour to spare? The best attempt
at this I've seen is Carl Sagan's article "The Fine Art of Boloney Detection",
from his book _The Demon-Haunted World_. Sagan was an engaging writer, and
does a good job making it easy to understand. I found a copy here:

<http://dannybhoy1.tripod.com/baloney.htm>

It would be even better if we had effective sound bites. I suppose we have
"Correlation does not equal causation", which rhymes nicely, but too many
people think it means that correlation isn't _evidence_ for causation, which
is wrong. I guess this is a problem with soundbites in general.

------
agentultra
1\. Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it.

This is just a tragedy.

2\. Job interviews that require quizzes and an "intensive" multi-stage
interview process.

As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where
you can review my code and offered to give you other code examples from my
private repositories on request. I give you links to my previous work and
letters of recommendation. Yet you insult me by being paranoid that I can't
_actually_ program and expect me to believe that this half-assed exam rife
with trick questions and obscure trivia is actually going to tell you
something about me?

This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring
process and made it more expensive, paranoid, and stupid than most other
processes in a business. There has to be a better way to verify a candidates'
potential. At least for programming jobs.

Maybe something like Ohloh's repo log-analysis tool that can create a
dashboard view of a candidates' source-code contributions to the world?
Obviously only works for candidates that can provide URLs to publicly
accessible repositories. Probably ways to get around that.

Anyway, that has been really annoying me lately. :)

~~~
rdouble
_This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring
process..._

It's not a myth.

~~~
agentultra
I'll admit it's pure speculation on my part. I have a hard time believing that
ninety-some-odd percent of applicants believe they can blatantly lie their way
into a position they are clearly not qualified for. How embarrassing is it to
be caught in such a lie? Not every needs to be keenly self-aware to at least
have an intuition about the limits and potential of their own capabilities...

Maybe I'm just not cynical enough...

 _update_ : and even if it were true, it's still a pain for qualified
applicants to get through these draconian hiring practices.

~~~
iron_ball
Well, remember that good applicants will only be applicants, per se, a few
times before they land a job. Whereas bad applicants just keep buzzing around
forever...

------
tansey
Finding people to work on short, proof-of-concept projects with.

I have a list of more than 25 items that I would love to work on, but have
little motivation without someone willing to help out. I don't necessarily
want to form a startup on these ideas, just get the ball rolling and see where
it leads.

I would like a site that enables me to find others and create prototype apps
in a matter of days, almost like a flash mob. It should bring together graphic
artists, designers, developers, and specialists as seamlessly as possible. I
think this would work especially well for mobile apps, where project size is
often small enough that a 3-4 person team could finish a reasonable version 1
in a weekend.

Example: I want to build a mobile app to answer the question "Does this fit
me?" The app would enable users to scan a bar code, upload if it fits or not,
get predictions about if it fits or not, and receive recommendations on other
items that may fit.

I have no idea how the design should look. I have no idea how to write iPhone
apps and limited Android experience. I don't have a lot of experience building
web applications. I can't do graphics for the life of me. However, I have a
TON of experience in AI and data mining, and what I imagine to most people
would seem like the "hard part"-- predicting if something fits, recommending
similar items, etc.-- is actually the fun part to me. So I need a designer and
an iPhone/Android guy with a free weekend.

If we planned on selling the app, then the site could optionally include some
auto-generated legal code for agreeing to revenue/equity split. That would
make it more of a flash-startup idea, though.

~~~
Kisil
Not to recurse on your comment, but can we build a web app for this some
weekend?

~~~
conorgil
I would also love to help build a web app for a site like this. I tried to
email you, but there is no contact info in your profile. Shoot me an email (in
my profile) if you are interested!

~~~
pjscott
If you make an app for this, please do announce it on HN. It sounds like a
great idea.

------
mynameishere
The fact that 100s of years of art and music are available, but people still
gravitate towards whatever is being promoted--typically something recent and
inferior. This is partly a function of marketing, partly of herding--both poor
selectors of quality.

~~~
terra_t
Personally, I'm offended by the popularity of "Classic Rock" and the fact that
marketing channels have broken down to the point where there's no connection
between great music being made today and many listeners.

I grew up listening to "Classic Rock" in the 1980s, and it took years for me
to realize that this had deprived me of the authentic music of my youth... It
was the music of somebody else's youth, which makes it all the more dangerous
and seductive. It appeals to geezers who were listening to it when it was new,
and it still appeals to new generations of young people.

Classic rock dominates the airwaves in my locale; other than NPR, I find
everything else unlistenable [there was ~one~ good urban music station a long
time ago, but it's owned by Clear Channel and quit playing anything good
rather abruptly after 9/11]

The situation has many dimensions (for instance, any credible 'new' rock has
to make a rapprochement with punk) but the thing I hate the most is hearing
the same doobie brothers song on the radio driving into work and driving home.
I'll listen to NPR or a Shonen Knife or Red Red Groovy disc, but I feel bad
for all the boomers who can't escape the gravity of 1968.

~~~
paylesworth
I'd recommend streaming 89.3 The Current from Minnesota Public Radio.

<http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/the_current/>

It's fully independent music radio station that's publicly funded. They don't
play commercials, and they play a wide variety of known and unknown music. I
first discovered it when I moved up here (the Twin Cities) away from the Clear
Channel dominated airwaves and I haven't turned back since.

~~~
tedkimble
Couldn't agree more. I discovered 89.3 when going to school in the cities.
Now, even though I no longer live in the area, I stream them online almost
every day.

------
zephyrfalcon
Advertisements!

They're obnoxious, obviously biased, and interfere with whatever it was you
were doing (watching a show, visiting a website, reading a newspaper,
whatever). It's just wrong. And we all know this, yet we just accept it like
it's some fact of life.

In addition, it doesn't just affect customers, but all
newspapers/magazines/sites that rely on "advertisement income" to make a buck.
One thing that puzzles me greatly is, how pageviews and sales are apparently
their #1 concern, yet at the same time they're talking, in all seriousness,
about "being objective" and "journalistic integrity". It just doesn't go
together.

Since the internet is already beating the hell out of pretty much all old
business models, maybe it will get rid of this one as well, or at least
transform it into something more palatable. But so far, the industry's
response has been to make advertisements (on websites at least) even MORE
obnoxious and intrusive.

~~~
ssp
It _is_ sort of crazy. Consider two products A and B. They are identical,
except that A is more expensive and has advertising. B is cheaper, but has no
advertising. Which one wins? A because nobody knows that B even exists.

However, everybody is worse off. Consumers got advertising displayed to them
that they didn't want to see _and_ they got to pay more for the privilege. The
manufacturer of B lost totally. Even the manufacturer of A is worse off
because without the advertising, he could have split the difference with the
consumer and gotten a larger profit.

The only winner is the advertising company who is making something nobody
wants.

That is totally inefficient. Can it be fixed somehow?

~~~
drblast
Consider if there were no advertising; the result would likely be that A and B
would both lose because nobody would know they exist.

So it's not completely inefficient. How much would you pay to not have to look
around who knows where for things that you want?

~~~
zephyrfalcon
"Consider if there were no advertising; the result would likely be that A and
B would both lose because nobody would know they exist."

This may have been true in the past, but this is 2010... I constantly find out
about products (and other things, and people, etc) that I didn't know existed,
through other means than advertisements. Without paying for it, in fact;
people put reviews about ANYTHING online nowadays.

------
tjr
Informal music notation. Existing systems are fine enough for formal classical
notation, but if you want to make a quick rough sketch (e.g., lead sheets in
_The Real Book_ ) it's pretty cumbersome, and the amount of time & effort it
takes doesn't seem commensurate with the sort of document desired.

I've been pondering this off and on for years; I think it might require a
pretty fundamental switch in how the data is entered. So far the best I've
come up with is, uh, pen and paper...

~~~
dingle_thunk
Oh man... This one bugs me too, but I see a lot of potential for things like
the iPad here...

~~~
zefhous
Yes, agreed. I am actually working on an iPad app for this purpose.

------
daleharvey
Payments - I am tired of entering 20 things every time I want to pay for
something, paypal has been problematic with cancelling accounts and generally
being untrustworthy.

~~~
bemmu
Also I'd love to get email notifications from my bank when someone pays me, so
I don't have to constantly poll their clunky website.

~~~
Timothee
One work-around for that is services like Mint.com which will do the polling
for you and alert you based on your own criteria.

------
MikeCapone
The fact that most people seem to think that it's okay to get sick from the
diseases of aging, get frail, suffer, and die, and that we shouldn't try to do
something to fix that problem (really fix it, not just prolong suffering a
bit).

I think it's probably partly rationalization because they think it's
inevitable (but it is not inevitable, and I'd like that to become a more
mainstream view so we can hurry up and work on this problem), and partly
ageism, which makes a lot of people think that old people have less value so
their pain and loss isn't as bad.

~~~
Locke1689
I come from a family history of physicians. My father is an MD and professor
at Johns Hopkins.

It's difficult to conceive how little we know about the human body and biology
in general. People are working on things related to it, but we're really
nowhere near even understanding the problem. Just because you don't understand
something doesn't mean it isn't being worked on.

~~~
MikeCapone
Indeed. But the approach that I support is a maintenance & repair approach. We
don't need to know how metabolism works, or how to modify it for it to work.
We just need to understand the types of damage that accumulate in our bodies
as we age (and there aren't that many kinds) and periodically repair it before
it reaches a certain threshold.

The problem is, almost nobody is working on that approach. It's all
gerontology or geriatry, trying to squeeze out a year or two out of someone
already frail and sick, or to mess with metabolism, something that will take
way too long and might never be completely successful.

The third approach - aka the engineering approach - has a chance to work in
our lifetimes IF we do the hard work and stop looking the other way. And few
things are more worthwhile to support; if we bring forward these therapies by
even 1 week, that's over a million lives saved.

If you want to know more about the biology of this, I recommend that you read
this (and the papers cited): [http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-
Breakthrough...](http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-
Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/B001O9CHRA/)

If you need more details, you can easily contact the SENS foundation or the
authors of this book directly (they usually answer emails really quickly).
This info should be enough to help you make up your mind about the feasibility
of this kind of project. And if you need the latest science, there's a
scientific journal called Rejuvenation Research that contains the most recent
studies.

~~~
zb
I wasn't planning to post in this thread, but now you mention it, what annoys
me is people who seem to think that their particular utopia will be the first
to have no unintended consequences whatsoever.

Double the annoyance factor when they refer to an engineering approach to the
problem, given that the whole utopian premise is such stupendously bad
engineering in the first place.

~~~
MikeCapone
1) You are putting words in my mouth. I never said that. My stance on this is
that if the new problems aren't bigger than the problems we have now of having
about 150k people die each day, mostly after long periods of suffering,
affecting whole families and losing humanity lots of knowledge and expertise,
draining our resources into losing battles against diseases that are fatal,
then we should do this. Everybody's already in favor of curing other diseases,
so why not those of aging? It is also not up to us to decide for everybody
that this shouldn't be developed (you can make a personal choice to refuse
such therapies of you want - and we might have to chose between low birth
rates or high death rates), just like if the creators of hygiene, antibiotics,
better crops, vaccines, or whatever had decided that they shouldn't do what
they did because "it might have bad consequences". Our current world is very
different from the world a thousand years ago, and I'd rather live now. Maybe
in a 100 years we'll look back and think that it was such a waste that young
people died at 80, like we now think that dying at 40 is terrible (but it was
common once upon a time).

2) Please be specific about what you think is "stupendously bad engineering".
Thanks.

~~~
zb
First off, I plead guilty to putting words in your mouth. My comment was an
accurate description of what annoys me; I leave it up to the reader to decide
whether it's an accurate description of your agenda.

1) If there were no aging, everybody would most likely spend all of their time
playing WoW and never leaving the house for fear of being hit by a bus. All of
those slogans about how life is short become pretty impotent when it's
actually not.

2) In engineering we generally make incremental changes to society, test them
and either back away from them or put in place feedback mechanisms to keep
them in check. "Wouldn't it be great if we abolished death by natural causes
(and everything else stayed exactly the same)" is about as far as you can get
from this. See Billy Vaughn Koen, _Discussion of the Method_ , pp. 233-236.

~~~
MikeCapone
1) I don't think that argument has much weight. Considering how little healthy
people think about death, and how the incredible extension of the average
lifespan didn't seem to have catastrophic effects like that, I doubt we'd turn
into some kind of sci-fi distopia where everybody doesn't do anything. You
live one day at a time, and if you are healthy and like your life today,
you'll want to live tomorrow. And so on. Doesn't matter if it's for 40 years,
80 years, or 120 years. Most people who say they want to die are frail, sick
and suffering, and what they want is not death per se, but for the pain to
stop. You don't see many healthy 20-30 years old wish for death unless they
suffer from severe depression. The cliché about "death gives meaning to life"
is just rationalization, trying to convince ourselves that something we think
is inevitable is actually a good thing. But if there was no death from the
diseases of aging, we certainly wouldn't invent it or miss it, just like we
wouldn't invent smallpox or malaria.

2) I'm calling it the engineering approach because that's what it is
([http://sens.org/sens-research/what-is-sens/engineering-
solut...](http://sens.org/sens-research/what-is-sens/engineering-solution)) as
opposed to the gerontology approach or the geriatry approach. It is about
simply repairing damage, the same way you maintain a vintage car or an old
house for 10x longer than it was designed to last without necessarily having
to understand exactly how that damage is created (by metabolism or physical
and chemical reactions, etc), and without having to know how to cure all
diseases (you repair damage before it becomes a pathology).

If you want to learn more about the biology and details of the proposals I'm
talking about, check out the links I posted in other comments here. They have
detailed plans for the 7 types of damages that accumulate from the operation
of metabolism. Otherwise, your criticisms aren't specific, you are just
attacking a vague idea of what you think this is about.

------
daleharvey
Banking - My bank has a website that the 90's would be proud of, it gives me
little to no information about my spending habits, transferring money is a
nightmare, and using kublax (similiarly mint) had my account banned for
security purposes.

~~~
davidwparker
I'd like to add that if you are/were in the U.S. Military at some point, (or
even your parents, I'm pretty sure) then you should check out USAA. They have
a fantastic website and awesome customer service.

note: I have no affiliation with USAA other than I use them and really like
them.

~~~
klous
I believe USAA also supports check imaging - no need to physically deposit a
check. take a picture / scan it from your home or office and it will be
processed.

~~~
stonemetal
They do but it doesn't work that well. I have had to scan checks 3 or 4 times
before.

------
dabent
Advertising - especially online. I believe one of pg's areas he thought YC
would fund was an ad startup and there's a good reason for that. Online ads
are still in their infancy. Ads are often clumsily placed on content sites
using keyword matching that can misfire or even backfire (ads for airline
tickets in a story about a crash).

To make matters worse, all content seems to covered with a slimy film - the
sorts of ads that normally appear on late night TV seem to show up on the best
of sites.

Believe it or not, there are people who enjoy well executed television or
print ads, either for their entertainment value or for their effectiveness. I
haven't heard the same for online ads, with possibly the recent exception of
the "Old Spice Man Who Your Man Could Smell Like."

There's a lot of room here for improvement not only of the ads, but for the
online experience overall. While Google and others are milking the contextual
cow, some bright minds are going to come up with something revolutionary that
will change how publishers monetize their sites. Ads will fit better, be more
engaging and monetize sites and drive results for their buyers.

Perhaps then those ads for diet pills, get-rich-quick schemes and their ilk
will be banished to the gutters of the internet where they belong.

------
daleharvey
Things to do - I find it really hard to find things to go out and do in my
spare time, events listings never seem to have something that interests me,
same with tourist guides although they can be better. Asking friends is always
an order of magnitude better.

~~~
ganley
I've long thought there is a serious opportunity in connecting organizations
who provide fun things to do with people looking for fun things to do. I had
an (unpursued) idea a while back to create a single-serving site called, "What
should I do this weekend?" Another idea was a subscription-based service that
organizes adult "field trips" every weekend.

~~~
p01nd3xt3r
I am working on this problem right now.

------
0x47
Living expenses.

Currently it takes nearly 30% of my income just to afford the physical
shelter. Then pretty much the rest for basic necessities. Not to mention the
time it takes to maintain all of this stuff. Pay bills, car maintenance, home
maintenance, clothing, grocery shopping. I feel like just living takes up so
much of my time.

------
jasonkester
Things that assume/require that I have exactly one physical address.

That includes banks, insurance companies, government agencies, utilities, and
pretty much every business that I need to deal with to do anything.

90% of the pain I encounter during my life on the road stems from the fact
that I don't own or rent property in the US, and therefore don't have a fixed
address. There are tons of people in my situation (especially among the less
well off), yet every time I have to deal with any official paperwork from any
organization they make it seem like it's some novel situation they've never
encountered before.

~~~
fragmede
Or even just physical addresses in general. I wish there was an official
registry a-la-dns, people would mail things to me, and the post office would
route it to me based on what that registry said. Yes, you'd have to update it,
but it beats having to update my address in a half-dozen places every time I
move.

There are actually a few places that deal with this -
<http://earthclassmail.com/> being one of them.

~~~
Maciek416
There's a similar service, myus.com , which accomplishes this for non-US
residents.

~~~
decadentcactus
Thanks for the link, I was after something exactly like that and was at the
point where I was just going to do it myself.

------
mrduncan
Airlines - They are nearly all just a pain in the ass to deal with. When was
the last time you heard someone tell you how they had a great experience with
an airline?

~~~
rdouble
I've had great experiences on Virgin America. It's cheap, the planes are nice,
there is wifi, the terminals are better, the stewards and stewardesses are
pleasant and good looking, etc.

~~~
spudlyo
Me too. I had no idea flying could be so enjoyable. I've made the Seattle ->
SF trip a 4-5 times this year on Virgin and I've been over the moon at how
easy and comfortable it's been.

------
todayiamme
Modern Psychiatry - Parts of it are updated for the modern world. The rest is
still pretty much medieval guesses sans experimentation. Accurate unbiased
information for someone in distress is hard to obtain, which compounds the
problem.

~~~
gizmomagico
What about it is disappointing? We're all human, so we all work pretty much
the same way. Everyone has their problems, and typically those problems are
similar to someone else's.

This means that the means to treating most of your problems apply to everyone.

~~~
todayiamme
Yes and no.

It is true that we have a similar brain structure and represent all but a mere
point in the endless space of mind design possibilities, but there is a lot of
variation within that point. Just think about the variables in operation over
here. Billions of neurons with multiple connections in a chemical soup, firing
in a patter and changing while sharing information.

It isn't surprising that we don't understand this, but you'll be amazed at the
psuedo-science out there did you know that there was something called
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (see: [http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-
Ps/Oppositional-defiant-diso...](http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-
Ps/Oppositional-defiant-disorder.html))? I cannot name one scientific,
unbiased experiment for the root causes behind expression and functioning in
gender variant, or intersexed children.

There is some amazing work being done at the national institute of mental
health in the underlying neurological basis of mental health disorders like
depression and PTSD, but it isn't enough. (see:
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-
circ...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits))

The disappointing thing is not the lack of knowledge but the psuedo-science
out there and the self proclaimed experts willing to ruin lives without a
flinch. We've come a far way, but we have even farther to go.

~~~
gizmomagico
Well, my point was that many - if not most - problems people have are
"standard" problems that people just have because they're people and they all
work in the same way.

For example, being lonely causes depression, bad parents cause a huge variety
of problems, and so on. Human nature, our insecurities, our egos, our
selfishness & greed, and so on - they're the same for everyone.

If you've got a problem, you can be pretty sure you're not the first one to
have it, and that the way to treat you is no different from the way all the
others with the same problem were treated.

So, I wouldn't think of it in terms of neurons, but in terms of humans.

------
grep
Reading posts with a lot of comments in HN. I never know what comments are new
without looking to the date (sometimes they are hundreds).

~~~
tsycho
I was thinking of this same problem yesterday. I will try to hack together a
Firefox extension for this over the weekend to give the HN comments page
Slashdot type filters (min. point thresholds), and date sorting.

Will post on HN if it works well.

~~~
username3
Chrome can use Greasemonkey userscripts. Can you add collapse-able replies?

~~~
bambax
I built an extension for Chrome that lets you hide articles + collapse
comments (HN HideIt); it's here:
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dibillbafbngeilo...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dibillbafbngeiloehmhhibhjhipeoig)

------
ExtremePopcorn
Psychological pricing - don't tell me that your product is $9.95; say $10.

~~~
zephyrfalcon
I wonder if businesses actually sell more if their products are priced like
$9.95 or $9.99 instead of $10, or that it's just based on the _expectation_
that such prices are more attractive to the customer. Unfortunately, the
Wikipedia article [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing>]
doesn't mention whether any research was done to verify this, much less any
results.

~~~
dminor
It's probably more about phonetic symbolism:
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119111051.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119111051.htm)

------
plinkplonk
I am annoyed at how much the hacker/startup scene sucks here in India. All the
cool people and projects are in the USA and the people who don't emigrate end
up working on the outsourced Java/RoR enterprise program from hell simply
because there aren't any technically interesting jobs. Beng teh greta
outsourcing destination for crap legacy code creates an ecosystem of
substandard "programmers" who all get certified in J2Ee (or whatever the
latest crap is) and then move on to become "managers" asap.

I've found my niche in Machine Learning, and have escaped this fate somewhat,
but damn, it is a small and lonely niche. It would be great to go out and have
a beer with engineers working on technically challenging projects, like you
can in San Fransisco. (I'd love to hang out with the Data Drinking group for
e.g.). The amount of talent wasted on legacy enterpriseware maintenance is
unimaginable.

I've lived in the USA and I love the place, but I don't want to choose between
doing good work and living "at home".

Meanwhile, HN keeps me sane. I don't have great engineers to talk to and learn
from in the Real World, but online is a different matter.

~~~
lazy_nerd
I tried to start something similar to the Data Drinking group in valley here
in Bangalore with a bunch of Google, Yahoo ML/Distributed Computing guys but
it didn't work out because of weird reasons. Maybe, its worth another shot.
Ping me on my email address if you are interested in helping organize
something like this.

------
harscoat
Expense reports - eg. receipts collection, sorting them, scanning them (even
if some solutions exist) but then accountants always want it in a different
format/system that I use. (no standard especially outstide the US)

~~~
nostromo
This is so true. My company uses Concur and I'm sorry to say it's actually
worse than doing it the old fashioned way. You wouldn't expect that from their
homepage, but the actual app is godawful.

I know the receipts are an IRS thing, but why can't the rest be easier?

------
mrduncan
Email - Not a lot has changed in the past 20 years, I think we can do better.

Yes, Gmail was pretty innovative but I still think there are plenty of things
to improve.

~~~
daleharvey
Fully agreed, I think wave was an awesome concept, but a terrible
implementation.

Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid
is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I
have yet to try lampson)

~~~
mslate
IMHO the only problem with Google Wave's implementation was that it didn't
integrate with normal email, limiting its network to Google Wave users. This
seems very obvious, but I rarely hear people mention this when Google Wave
comes up. Did you have something else in mind when you said it had terrible
implementation?

~~~
ThomPete
Oh man where to start.

It's just a noisy mess, poorly designed, with a lot of weird design decisions
and exotic patterns that only added to the noise.

It starts with a way to complex proposition. Google basically created the
entire vision instead of the basic core functionality and then expanded on
that, optimizing in the detail rather than for the big shows.

Etherpad started the right way. It started very lean with a basic principle
that then evolved with time, slowly. And now it got bought.

~~~
pjscott
I think there's room for a lot more innovation in this area. I'm working on
some open source code for doing Wave-like stuff in a way that will be easy for
people to integrate with other projects. Have you ever tried to edit a wiki
page, only to discover that somebody else was editing it and had acquired a
lock on the whole page? There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to both
edit it, Etherpad-style. Or rather, the reason is that making something like
that is _hard._ But it shouldn't have to be. I hope to have something release-
worthy in about a month; right now I've got a distributed text editor
prototype that looks like a cross between Etherpad and Notepad. It works, but
the code needs an overhaul.

Another problem with Google Wave is that it's inherently centralized. They
transform the insert/delete operations so they can be applied out of order and
still converge on the same document state. Unfortunately, the method they use
for this requires a central server to maintain causal ordering of the
operations. There are ways of doing this that don't require a central server,
which could be handy.

~~~
ThomPete
Agree 100%

------
daleharvey
Identity - I am sick of having to create accounts on every website in the
world, OpenID is an awesome solution but it needs to be implemented
ubiquitously, I do not want everything tied to my twitter or facebook account.

~~~
loewenskind
Systems like Password1 solve this for me, with the added benefit that if
someone manages to hack one of these sites and capture my password for it
they'll have a bunch of random characters that wont work for anything else I
have.

Personally I don't like OpenID for this reason among others.

~~~
bemmu
I recently switched to 1Password. Now I realize that I'm basically unable to
use any sites that require login with my phone, since I don't know my own
passwords.

~~~
himmel
1Password has an application for the iPhone

~~~
there
and an "export to html" option that exports all of your passwords into a
single encrypted javascript/html file that you can put on a server. it acts as
a self-contained web application that lets you browse and search through your
passwords on-demand. i've been using such an exported file for months after i
migrated away from mac os and frequently access the file from my android phone
and other browsers.

------
Mc_Big_G
People in the left lane driving with a speed <= or 1mph faster than the people
in the right lane.

~~~
logicalmind
This is annoying but what is more annoying is when you're on a multiple lane
highway and 2 or more people decide to drive at exactly the same speed right
next to each other. It would be nice if there was a rule (a law would be nice,
but I don't see how you'd enforce it) that you could not drive within two car
lengths of the car next to you at speeds over 40mph.

The added bonus here would be that people would not be sitting in other
people's blindspots all the time and should reduce accidents.

------
pradocchia
I am relieved to read that so few of you are annoyed by _other people_. The
same question on reddit would be a bitch fest about fat people, stupid people,
religious people, slow drivers, etc, at the intersection of tribalism, ego and
impatience.

~~~
Goosey
And you show this by talking about being annoyed by the people on reddit? Are
you not seeing your own tribalism or am I just not getting your sarcasm? :)

------
doyouknow
* Having applied for three internships at major research labs, which obviously lack the courtesy of letting you know that they are not interested. (This pisses me of so much that I hardly find time to do productive work anymore.)

* Living in a comparatively rich country that is so full of asshole civil cervants playing shenanigans that it makes you wonder why the hell you should continue providing for these jerks. I for one cannot believe the insane amount of taxes I have payed in my country just to get lied, cheated and straightout harrassed by people who should actually sit down and listen before telling you off.

* No funding for PhD research and travel expenses for attending conferences. Even though there is a shitload of money set aside _exclusively_ for women in CS, I cannot get this kind of funding because of my gender. My research group is underfinanced and a recent grant proposal has been denied because of minor improvement suggestions. Of course I can re-submit, but I figure that I will be finished before any decision can be made. Man, I've had it with my country, I cannot wait to turn my back and go somewhere else...

~~~
lovskogen
Where do you live?

------
ww520
Software patents. Need to spend time and energy to get around them.

The increasingly extended copyright term. Come on, create something new
instead of milking the old stuffs forever.

------
nollidge
Anything animated on a text-centric webpage. And it's not just ads: animated
twitter feeds, scrolling lists of related posts, little twinkling Super-Best
Awesome Blog Award .gifs, etc.

Cut it out. I am trying to READ your WRITING, and you are actively distracting
me from doing so!

------
ojbyrne
ageism. It's so common today that people who would never exclude women or
minorities or the handicapped or whoever have no problem excluding people over
forty.

~~~
cryptoz
When a male turns 18 in the USA, he is allowed to sign up for the Army, get a
gun, go kill human beings in the Middle East and perhaps _die_ for his
country.

BUT if that man dares _drink a single beer_ with his dad before being shipped
off to war, he will be treated like a criminal. His dad may be taken to court
and punished for letting a minor have alcohol. The 18 year old could face
severe punishments, including not being allowed in the army.

WHY THE FUCK are 18-20 year olds not allowed to drink a beer in the USA, but
they're allowed to kill and maim thousands of people?

Ageism goes both ways my friend. We may let our young kill others, but we sure
as fuck won't let them drink a beer.

~~~
sliverstorm
It just hit me that there's a rational explanation.

Being a good soldier and being a responsible drinker are two very different
things. Just because you make a good soldier does not immediately imply you
will make a responsible drinker.

Quite frankly, 18 is a pretty darn good age to start soldiering, but I know a
TON of < 21yo who are not responsible, so my idea doesn't seem completely
baseless.

~~~
detst
There are also a ton of >21yo who are not responsible. That's not a good
reason. Let's just ban alcohol because there will always be people that can't
handle it.

Instead, why don't we look at the problem. The largest problem is that it's
forbidden, so the majority of kids growing up have to sneak around and drink
with other kids that are irresponsible. Telling a kid he can't do something
just makes him want to do it even more.

If we introduce kids to responsible drinking at an earlier age, it wouldn't be
so intriguing and they could learn a little bit about responsibility. You'd
still have problems but I bet they'd be fewer and we could get back a little
more freedom.

~~~
sliverstorm
You are pretty much totally right. However, my only aim was to point out what
I believe to be the fallacious nature of the argument that you should be able
to drink if you can be a soldier. It plays off emotion well, but the criteria
for making good soldier material are unrelated to the criteria for making a
responsible drinker.

------
nollidge
People who can't keep their car at a constant speed on the highway; cruise
control is the best way to do this if you don't want to keep checking your
speedometer.

To elaborate: If everybody picks a slightly different speed _and maintains it_
, any encounter between two vehicles will never last very long. There's more
distance between any two vehicles, so it's safer, and large, impassable clumps
of vehicles are less likely to form.

EDIT: bad markup

~~~
tricky
I want a global movement to make the acceleration pedal actually affect
acceleration, not horsepower as it does now.

Imagine a pedal with a dead spot in the middle that represents 0 acceleration.
Pushing down on the pedal increases the rate of acceleration. When you get to
speed, ease back to the dead spot to maintain. Lift past the dead spot to
decel.

Think of it as a hybrid cruise control. I'm convinced it would solve many
traffic congestion problems associated with people not maintaining speed on,
say, slight inclines.

~~~
sanderjd
How do you solve this problem for those of us in Colorado (or other non-
flatlands) where nearly every drive involves mountains and hills. Would the
idea be that in the dead zone, the car is smart enough to increase or decrease
horsepower to adapt to these conditions and retain 0 acceleration or...? I
think you would run into the same problem that cruise control runs into in the
mountains - we don't have variable ratio transmissions, so at some point going
up a hill it has to shift down a rev in order to stay the same speed. Doesn't
work very well.

~~~
tricky
Yes, the whole idea is the car is smart enough to maintain a speed. You're
right about having problems in the mountains. If someone doesn't want their
car to downshift, they'd just slow down by lifting and returning to the zero
point. I think it would be a little better than cruise control in the
mountains, but not much.

------
seiwyn
People writing "loose", when they really mean "lose".

~~~
ciupicri
Let's not forget about "it's" and "its".

~~~
pjscott
Apostrophe mistake's are pretty jarring; seeing one is like tripping over a
rock, for me.

------
heycarsten
Cyclists that disobey the rules of the road, but complain when motorists don't
follow the rules of the road really bother me. (I am a cyclist.)

~~~
himmel
I agree everyone needs to obey the rules of the road... But the situation is
such that when a cyclist disobeys rules, it never causes the automobile driver
to die. Whereas when a giant SUV disobeys the rules, it can kill a cyclist.

Disclaimer: I live in Florida. State with the highest cyclist death rates.

~~~
mcknz
Except when a disobedient cyclist causes the auto to swerve and hit another
car head-on.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Arranging travel schedules, tying together train, plane and car hire.

------
eel
The lack of people (or my inability to find them) who want to do the same
thing as me. This goes for almost anything from playing board games to finding
help for a side project.

------
joshfraser
laundry. i think it's absurd that we can put a man on the moon and send a
message around the world instantly (from a touch screen computer in my pocket
no less!) and i'm still stuck moving laundry from one machine to another
machine 2 feet away.

~~~
himmel
There exist combination washer/dryers (all in one, no moving laundry!)

~~~
jtbigwoo
They're not very good, though. It's hard to make something that is both water-
tight and has great air circulation.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> It's hard to make something that is both water-tight and has great air
> circulation.

I don't see how that's true - washer driers circulate fluids with the aim to
get maximum interaction between the fluid and the clothing. In one instance
that fluid is washing water and in the other it is hot air. They seem very
similar things to me.

------
Eliezer
Death annoys me. People who can afford $300/year for a cheap cryonics
membership and life insurance, and who don't sign up, annoy me. A lot of them
are probably being held off by the trivial inconvenience of signing a few
papers without a paid salesman to hold their hand. It therefore annoys me that
cryonics is poorly marketed and that there are no paid salespeople - that no
one gets a commission when you sign up for cryonics.

~~~
ww520
Does cryonics work?

When one with a cryonics membership dies, is his life insurance benefit still
paid out? Assuming he can be revived via the cryonics process. Cryonics and
life insurance seem incompatible.

~~~
ben1040
_When one with a cryonics membership dies, is his life insurance benefit still
paid out?_

Yes, as many people pay for their suspension by taking out a life insurance
policy that names the cryonics organization as a beneficiary.

------
davidw
One thing that supremely annoys me is Italian drivers who do not stop at
crosswalks. My daydream solution is a golf club or baseball bat, but I think
that solution probably has unintended consequences.

------
ramy_d
it annoys me when people come up to me to tell i shouldn't be using c++ for
project X. Like I don't know exactly what I'm doing or exactly what C++ is
for.

I mainly do game development, but if you've made a game you know how time
consuming it is to actually get something usable/playable/fun at the end.

Between projects I like to take brakes and work on other smaller applications.
some of those applications are in c++ so I have some testing grounds to come
back to so I don't loose my edge - and too often I get some grade-A BOZO
telling me I'm using the "wrong" language and the falling into his diarrhea
diatribe about his favorite language X and how it's SOOOOOO COOL and SSSOOOO
HIP and SSSOOO EXPRESSIVE as if those are things I care about.

it's such a handicap being a c++ coder in an environment like that, it's like
I'm not eligible to hang out with the hip kids/zealots because they have some
religious animosity against something they never use. what a joke of a culture
that becomes.

------
alexro
Disconnection between articles of the same topic. There are plenty of material
about particular subject, each of them describes it from a slightly different
angle, it would be great to have them all come together in a single place, but
without all the junk associated with every one of them (like ads) - true
syndication

------
olalonde
Apple fanboys.

~~~
mortenjorck
Apple haters.

~~~
lovskogen
Both.

------
xsc
Lack of time - Seems as if I can't spend enough time with people I care about.

------
ptn
Productivity pr0n - it´s the number 1 productivity killer

------
CatalystFactory
Online Payment Transaction Costs - every time a new player enters the field
like Amazon Payments/Google Checkout entering into Paypal's domain they all
converge on the same relative pricing scheme.

------
jakevoytko
Problem: Designing clean architectures to solve an unfamiliar class of systems
programming problems

This goes beyond design patterns - I mean designing systems with a dozen or
more components that interact in complex ways. My first few cuts have lots of
rough edges, and as I redesign the system, cleaner solutions appear. I work on
lots of almost-real-time robotics systems, and good solutions for normal apps
have subtle-yet-fatal problems when you need a small average latency at 100%
CPU load

------
rdouble
Slow people in New York annoy me. It's like everyone is on vacation, even the
people who live here.

~~~
lovskogen
Probably just enjoying life.

------
lutorm
I try not to get annoyed, especially about things outside my control. It just
makes you unhappy without changing anything. (I'm moderately successful.)

------
slater
\- Having multiple gadgets, one can connect to a network, the other can't,
even though they both have WiFi

\- Bureaucrats that could be replaced by web apps

------
imagii
Fanboys and bad journalism.

~~~
olalonde
Something tells me you just read <http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/apple-
religion/>.

------
CoryMathews
Large Corporations/Associations ect.

Every time I have a problem with a large corporation it never gets resolved
until it is convenient for them, and follows their screwed up procedure.

They deter innovation and could care less about their customers. Take a look
at the cable, internet, automobiles, music industries. Anything new happen
lately? Nope.

------
ganley
Pennies.

~~~
mortenjorck
Actually, I'd rather just see cents go away for everything in the US and deal
with integers for everyday purchases and floating point when necessary.

~~~
judofyr
Isn't that called "dollars"?

------
sagres
Lack of transparency e.g., government, markets, business etc.

------
knweiss
Traffic noise. Build quieter cars, give more thought to urban design. Make low
noise a design property.

------
astartup1
I have major problem with current way of handling reputation and value of
text. I think karma & points system on HN is sloppy approximation of actual
quality of a text. Also it is not absolute.

In real life whenever someone talks we get large number of inputs to process
about a person. For example when we speak with someone we don't judge them
merely what they are saying but who they are. In pure analytical conversation
it is good but where opinions matter it is bad.

If someone on Hacker News says something is bad or you should do it that way,
I have no way how it relates to me and what is the credential of that person.
I don't want to get advice from bad programmer about some framework. This
creates lots of noise in online communication.

I wish there was a better way.

------
harscoat
Roaming cell fees - when traveling abroad (there are some ways around but very
cumbersome)

~~~
Timothee
And the ways around this are not necessarily working well sometimes. Recent
experience: getting a prepaid SIM card for my iPhone in France. Turns out that
it would randomly and without my knowledge connect to WiFi hotspots and
completely drain my credits.

------
lovskogen
Colleges getting sponsored by Microsoft, Sun and corporations using those
technologies. Churns out developers not having a choice of languages, and ends
up working for the corporations sponsoring the college.

A circle destroying innovation.

------
gruseom
Mosquito bites.

------
arethuza
Paper receipts.

~~~
tmsh
You ain't kidding.

[http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&...](http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=bpa)

------
lovskogen
Newspapers delivering "news". One have to search hard and deep to get some
truth in the morning. People reading "news" making the "journalists" write
more "news" also annoys me.

------
jacquesm
Too much choice.

~~~
zephyrfalcon
This is actually a valid point. Freedom of choice seems to be a given
nowadays. Obtaining freedom FROM choice is a lot of work.

------
username3
Repeated, unorganized debates online in comments, forums

------
chanux
Acne. Annoying me for 7 years.

------
char
BAD PARKERS annoy me so much.

a) People who can't center their vehicle within the lines. b) People who park
SUVs in compact car spots. c) People who parallel park in the middle of two
driveway openings (as opposed to an edge, which would open another parking
space!)

I have seriously considered creating stickers with various versions of "YOU
PARK LIKE AN ASSHOLE" printed on them, so I can distribute them at will.

------
binarymax
Paperwork!

------
cjg
Overcrowding on the train.

------
heycarsten
Deception online. Tricking people into providing their personal information
and reselling that information to third parties.

------
jyothi
Customer Support.

If only they knew what they know forget what the customer needs. People
trained to very politely deliver long quotes without really meaning an ounce
of what that sentence is. And of course not knowing much to really resolve the
issue unless it is listed.

A good trouble-shooting software would be less annoying and more truthful.

------
orangecat
Phone screens are too small to do useful work on, and laptops are too
inconvenient to carry around.

------
cmarv
Fluorescent office lighting

~~~
pjscott
On that note, offices that have the air conditioning turned down to extremely
low temperatures. Even in the summer, when the cooling bills must be
horrendous.

I suspect that the thermostats in many places are controlled by fat men in
heavy suits.

------
tomh-
Paypal.

------
jsz0
I'd love to see a text editor that let you select text blocks by drawing a
box. (ie, you could draw the box selection style and select the last 5
characters of each line)

~~~
Naga
Emacs can do this!

~~~
pjscott
Specifically, you set the mark at one corner (C-Space) and move the mark to
the other corner. Then you can do rectangle editing with commands like kill
(C-x r k), yank (C-x r y) or something to insert a string (C-x r t). These are
hugely useful when moving blocks of Python code around, for fiddling with the
indentation.

------
fezzl
College. It interferes with my startup more than it helps it (and I'm still a
sophomore going to junior year).

------
joshfraser
going to the grocery store. why doesn't food just show up at my house
automatically by now?

~~~
postfuturist
All you have to do is sign up. There are a number of services that deliver
groceries, at least there are in Portland, OR. Some even specialize in
local/sustainable produce.

------
bingaman
Texting while walking down crowded streets or driving. You are doing both
badly.

------
uptown
Drivers that run red lights.

------
jyothi
lies & laziness.

I see people around cribbing why they are not rich or can't or not being
treated at par or not getting due credits. Dig in a little and you see they
don't even want to work hard.

~~~
dabent
I knew a person who was rather honest about their laziness. One day at lunch
he just said "Yeah, I'm ready to be a millionaire." I said "Well, you better
get busy!" With all sincerity he said, "Oh, no! I didn't want to work for it!"

~~~
jyothi
So ?

Its not about one off instance where laziness might be welcome. I am talking
about people who add no value to their existence, to the well being of anyone.

ps: I don't understand why my previous comment has to be downmodded. It is to
the point of what the post asked for, nothing against the terms. This has been
happening too much, I see it everywhere on HN. People downmodded for they
don't agree.

------
larsalan
Reloading whole pages when an iFrame would be much better.

~~~
Pengwin
Ive always had the belief that iFrames are bad news. They are rarely needed in
the days of simple AJAX and DOM manipulation. Come to think of it, I haven't
used one in about 5 years...

------
JoelMcCracken
*nix. Too bad its the best thing out there.

------
rperkins
Naggers

~~~
username3
Did you create this account just to post this?

------
rxever
it annoys me that staring at a computer screen kills my eyes.

~~~
gizmomagico
Does it, really?

------
vegai
Bureaucracy

and

The positive effects of democracy made negative by the conservative older
generations.

------
adrianwaj
Iran. The Twitter Fail Whale. No excuse for either.

~~~
pjscott
The Fail Whale is cute enough that I actually don't mind when Twitter goes
down. If I used Twitter more, I might feel differently.

~~~
adrianwaj
I also don't like when people downvote when they merely disagree.

~~~
pjscott
I would guess that you were downvoted because of extreme brevity (e.g. "Iran")
or because your comment trivialized the tough business of making and running
something like Twitter. If that's the case, then the downvoting doesn't just
mean "I disagree"; it means "I disagree, and don't think this guy is worth
arguing with." It's a reply to tone as well as content.

Mind you, that's just speculation. I didn't vote on your comment. But most of
the time when someone complains about a comment being downvoted "just because
you disagree", there's another reason he's overlooking.

~~~
adrianwaj
Well, fwiw, I get the fail whale more often than not when signing in. How much
funding have they received again? Iran - well, I am not the only one annoyed.
Pretty much the entire middle east dreads the thought of it with a nuclear
arsenal, let alone the damage it can do around the world with its proxies.

------
9ec4c12949a4f3
The absolute disgusting nature of standardization of data sets in the world,
and this insane notion that we should maintain legacy data as the status-quo
of doing things.

Just look at the airline industry. IATA, ICAO, ISO, all competing and
separate, all with insane and bat-shit psychotic rules and conventions (eg,
IATA lets multiple airlines have the same "two letter designator" [by the way,
it's sometimes three, but you never know for sure] if they operate on
different parts of the globe and 'rarely if ever will confuse an operator').
When the hell did computers need human-understandable designation short-hand
codes for things? What the hell was wrong with 1 - American Airlines, 2 - Air
Canada, 3 - Delta, 4 - SAS, 5 - That small one that flys between A and B once
a year you've never heard of. Why the HELL do we have a system that has "AA"
and "AA*" ? This is basically the worst thing you can do for normalization of
global data. Travel GDSs are even worse, they don't actually follow along with
these standards because they cannot, so while you take your "AA" flight number
123456 (oh, by the way, we recycle flight numbers instead of archive forever
historical tickets) from airport zzz to xxx (by the way, depending on the
standard they came from, your airport might not even exist), which are
actually city codes for airports, so when you're flying to a city with
multiple airports you have two cities in the GDS just to deal with this.

We can't even agree on how to measure distance, it's like we're stuck in the
stone ages. What the hell is wrong with measuring in kelvin degrees? Why do we
have MORE THAN FIVE separate standards for systems of measurme for what most
people think is one (the metric system)?

Fact: We do not live in 1950 or any time before then, computers don't give a
flying rats ass if the letters make sense to you as a short-hand abbreviation,
you should just number them. That's what databases are for, to relate data.
Major airports alone have several names people call them anyway, some airlines
go by a few names (for example, SAS airlines is actually "Scandinavian
Airlines").

Fact: We do not need to encode data about the data into the primary key of our
data. For example, we do not need to generate employee numbers like
"Q100-5-TR-9" where Q is the building they work in, 100 is their pay grade, TR
is their last name's first two letters, 9 is that number we introduced for
separating all duplicates of Q100-5-TR. This is just stupid, stop this
insanity NOW.

People working on global standards, you should be ashamed. Do you have ANY
idea how much time is wasted because we do not have UUIDs for so many things,
even something as simple as an airport? There's only 50,000~ of them, and we
have duplicates? Did we run out of beads on the abacus??

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Medical information standards are similarly convoluted, but getting better.

~~~
9ec4c12949a4f3
I've seen medical stuff and there's a good reason I won't work in that
industry...

What REALLY bothers me is things like credit cards.

<http://www.merriampark.com/anatomycc.htm>

There's encoded data on something that's supposed to be a UUID thing:
Industry, Issuer (card company), Lender (banking institution), Account number,
and Checksum

This is a good way to prevent fraud? Or have they just given me the keys to
generate "valid" credit cards?

<http://www.darkcoding.net/credit-card-numbers/>

Slap a name from the phonebook on there and see what you can purchase. Now we
have PCI compliance trying to tell people to somehow lock this crap down? So
they invent the CV2 codes, a 1 in 1000 hit-or-miss, I don't think my odds are
too bad when I can generate any creditcard. Dates will also only fall into a
specific range of time anyway. Yeah, we keep putting up bandages to creditcard
security processing, but why do we need to? Honestly, the world of standards
_sucks_.

------
zyfo
Phone calls - makes a lot of noise and interrupts me regardless of what I'm
doing.

I want some people to be able to reach me right away, while I couldn't care
less for others. Creating barriers for interruption based on:

a) the person calling

b) the time of day

c) the activity I'm involved in

needs to become more accessible and intuitive.

~~~
ganley
Something I've always wanted is to be able to set up my home phone so that
between (say) 9pm and 9am, when people call they get an automated response
that says, "The person you are calling doesn't want to be disturbed at this
hour. If your call is urgent, press 1 to ring them; otherwise, press 2 to
leave a voicemail without ringing them." Technologically, it's nearly trivial.

~~~
Timothee
I don't know if Google Voice can do that out-of-the-box, (though it
technologically could) but services like Twilio/OpenVBX or Tropo can
definitely do that.

I would think that one problem right now is that not many people are really
thinking like that yet. So amongst the people who do think about that kind of
setups, each solution tends to be pretty specific to their own use.

That's why you have on one hand Google Voice which presents some options
around what I would call "programatic telephony" but not fully customizable,
and on the other, OpenVBX's kind of solutions which are highly customizable
but not trivial to setup for "regular" people.

But yeah, it's now trivial to do and I'm sure it'll come with time.

------
zyfo
Dealing with random candy attraction aka dopamine email effect.

The reason I and other people keep refreshing email, fb and hn all day long is
because you never know when something good is coming up. Maybe one email that
will change your life. A wall post from a potential partner. A insightful
reply to your comment.

Limiting one's usage to predefined periods (eg mail only at lunch) is a start,
but far from enough if we are to keep increasing our connectivity with the
world.

I'm skeptical that there will be a good enough technological solution for
this, which makes it all the more scary (scale/reach problems).

~~~
listic
I advise to only check email/IM/what have you once a day at most. In the
evening, when you have done the meaningful work. Don't use notifications. Only
launch email, IM client when you need them.

See Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule if you haven't:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

------
mdg
Sheep herd mentality. It also annoys me when my CD skips

~~~
maushu
Get a mp3 player.

------
noverloop
Politicians

------
kqueue
HN has really changed. This question is an example. This is not readdit.

~~~
thebigshane
I don't consider the parent a troll comment, but I could be wrong. KQueue,
Finding out what annoys a group of people is an excellent way to collaborate
and list all things that "need fixing". Some of these things, as you may have
seen in this list, are things that other collaborators _can_ fix (or work on
fixing). I think polls like this should be a quarterly occurrence here.

You may be right that the question is common on Reddit, but probably for a
completely different reason: people like to vent, and the OP wanted karma.
[although reddit does have: <http://www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis/> ]

