

Ask HN:  If you could 'reinvent' anything what would it be? - keltecp11

I was discussing looking into reinventing the 'umbrella' making it something less clunky, more compact, and certainly something lighter (maybe a string type of mechanism)?
======
nico
Credit cards / payment management.

I hate that I cannot lock/unlock my credit card (online wire transfers, checks
or other payment methods) at will, with a simple click of my mouse.

I'd really like being able to choose when my credit card can be used, maybe
using rules like: "only on weekends, between 11am and 7pm. never online.".
Then if these rules are not met, no payment should be authorized.
Alternatively, I should be able to have more lax rules like: (all the above)
"And only with automatic phone confirmation on weekdays between 12pm and 2pm".
Then if I needed to pay for lunch, I could do so with my credit card, but
authorization would be granted only after I got an automatic call with a
recording asking me to confirm payment and maybe enter a pin number.

~~~
systemtrigger
You described a corporate purchasing card. Purchasing cards are designed to
let you manage on-the-fly all kinds of spending parameters e.g. "no hotels in
zip code 10001 Friday through Sunday." You'll pay more for these programs of
course.

Here's an idea: a card with a magnetic strip on each of its 4 (or 6 or 8)
edges. Now instead of carrying multiple cards you carry just one. If you use
both sides of the card, you could fit 16 mag strips on an octagonal card.

~~~
nico
Thanks for the info. I think "purchasing cards" should be for everybody, not
only for large companies. And the concept could be applied for checks, money
wires, debit cards, paypal, etc.

Here in my country, banks make a large profit out of fraud, albeit indirectly.
They offer fraud insurance. They purchase the insurance from someone else for
about USD 1/month, and sell it to you for USD 6/month. Of course most people
never get to claim anything. Each time there's anything related to credit card
fraud on the news, banks get more people buying their insurance (here banks
are the only credit card-issuing institutions). If banks offered a
cheaper/free way to reduce or eliminate fraud, they would also kill their
insurance business.

About the multiple strips cards: In Japan they're already using NFC cards with
internal chips that can store several different cards information. The info is
encrypted so that only certain authorized card readers may read corresponding
card info. Checkout: <http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa>

------
tolmasky
Addresses. They should work just like cell phone numbers, if I get a new cell
phone the old number still works. I should similarly have an address "number"
(which is mapped to a physical location by the post office). That way, when I
move, I don't need to contact every magazine I subscribe to, every friend I
have, every bill I pay, EVERYONE. People could continue sending their mail to
my "number" and it would still get to my new place.

~~~
synnik
This is very similar to emailing someone the password to their email account.

Fine, lets say your address is constant no matter where you move... then how
does the post office know where you are? You'd need... yup, a secondary
Address. Addresses would still exist, you'd just have a consistent 'alias' for
yours.

And sure, the post office could update your new 'address' when you move. But
they already have that service. It is called a change of address form.

~~~
tolmasky
Yes, as I clearly stated in my original post, the post office holds the
mapping of "address numbers" to actual "addresses". (The same way that even
addresses can be considered mappings to GPS locations). The key difference is
that you now only have to update your address in one place (this official
mapping). This is _not_ how change of address forms work today. The post
office will only _forward_ your mail for one year, which means I still have to
inform every single person that has my address that my address has changed,
which is really silly in my opinion (like having to give everyone a new email
address every time I purchased a new computer). The system I'm proposing is
exactly equivalent to phone numbers, in that you don't care about calling a
_location_ , you care about calling a _person_.

------
mc
Human travel.

You know those moving walkways (Trav O lators?) that they have in airports to
speed up travelers?

I'd place those everywhere.

Want to go to the grocery store? Walk there in 5 minutes. Living in LA and
need to visit SF for the weekend? Get off your ass and walk there.

The thing that bugs me most about cars, in addition to wasting gas, is that
they're isolating devices. They prevent me from admiring scenery, meeting
interesting people, and walking more often.

(This idea is more a revolution than a reinvention.)

~~~
jrockway
_Want to go to the grocery store? Walk there in 5 minutes._

It's called a bicycle.

(It also makes it significantly easier to bring 50 pounds of groceries home;
saving you from having walk there before every meal.)

~~~
david927
_It's called a bicycle_

No, it's called elimination of zoning laws.

~~~
jrockway
This seems to be a problem with the suburbs. If you want to live within
walking distance to the grocery store, move to somewhere within walking
distance of the grocery store. I can walk to three (different chains), and
take the L to one more. (I still take my bike, though, much easier!)

~~~
david927
I agree. If you get a chance, James Howard Kunstler's "The Geography of
Nowhere" is an interesting read about this and other travesties of modern
architecture and infrastructure.

------
JimmyL
Power adapters for electronics - no reason they shouldn't be a hell of a lot
more standardized than they are (I don't mean just for mobile phones, which is
underway - I mean for everything).

~~~
nico
Add in different voltages and plugs on different countries and you get quite a
mess!

~~~
jacquesm
standardize those as well.

------
dkokelley
Probably the US tax code. Does it matter that it's not a consumer product?

------
noblethrasher
The U.S. Constitution. I'd explicitly list the underlying first principles for
everything.

For example:

1\. The law of noncontradiction - something can't be A and not A

2\. Treat like things the same and different things differently

Those principles inform the 4th, 5th and 6th amendments.

------
SwellJoe
The music industry.

Some of the practices and licensing processes date back to _before_ recorded
music existed. Publishing, mechanical, and performance rights, as well as
royalty organizations like ASCAP/BMI/etc., are all more than a little strange
in a world with the Internet. And, I don't think I even need to explain why
the major labels should go to hell.

~~~
jacquesm
Don't worry too much about it, this will take care of itself soon enough. Give
them enough rope and I'm sure they'll find a creative way to use it.

~~~
SwellJoe
True to some degree. But, the magical thinking behind things like ASCAP/BMI
isn't going to go away any time soon, despite the fact that the metrics by
which those royalties are disbursed become less and less accurate every day
and as the old music supply chains die. The entirety of the industry is
bizarre from a modern perspective, not _just_ the record labels and consumer
music supply chain.

But, yes, the worst pieces of the puzzle are busy destroying themselves as we
speak, and better solutions are bound to spring up.

~~~
jacquesm
I would like to change 'industry' to 'media industry', it's not just the
record labels that have a problem.

The reason why books are not yet as much subject to copying as music and
movies is because they're still distributed in a format that makes it
reasonably hard to copy them. It actually takes some effort.

As soon as books become available widely in electronic formats (not just the
select few that you can get for your kindle today, Amazon claims to have
300,000 titles available but there are substantially more books than that) and
without DRM the publishers will be right up there on the barricades.

I don't think there has ever been a technology as disruptive to established
businesses in terms of jobs and dollars as the internet has been to the media
corporations.

------
tokenadult
The usual typewriter keyboard, as it is much too hard on the human hand. No,
wait, the typical computer mouse is even worse than that. I would reinvent
both to let persons who age into osteoarthritis continue to use those tools
more comfortably.

------
lionhearted
Is it cheating to pick an international policy? I'd like to see completely
open borders for non-criminals across the world, with no restrictions on
working, schooling, relationships, or associations. Go where you like, when
you like, unrestricted, without needing permission from anyone.

~~~
csomar
You are talking about Open-Globalization. This is not possible, since
countries are not all allies.

May be in the future, when a country have all power over the others; or all
the countries have the same power.

~~~
jacquesm
You are absolutely right, but it clearly shows that countries have too much
control over their citizens.

------
jrockway
UNIX. Not everything is a stream of bytes.

~~~
derefr
But everything can be _serialized_ to a stream of bytes. UNIX (and moreso
Plan9) is REST for OOP.

~~~
jrockway
The problem was that everyone wrote their own serialization formats, and
called them all the same thing. (Example: mbox.)

~~~
derefr
If they had URLs or GUIDs back then, they could have made magic cookies (the
four-byte signatures for file types) a lot smarter. I wonder if we could
reinvent _those_?

------
neuromanta
I'd reinvent money, by making it vanish completely. It causes so much damage
to people and the planet.

~~~
derefr
I'd reinvent money to represent the underlying trust metrics (e.g. Whuffie),
or, even more directly, the prediction-market value of a person's life-
potential, post-trust-investment. To put that more simply, "People's faith in
X" would be a stock.

------
pegobry
Wireless. Have a technology that combines mesh networking & resilient hardware
a la Meraki and WiMax but without the standards wars and the proprietary-ness
so that everyone can have cheap, abundant, reliable, free-as-in-speech
wireless internet everywhere.

ESPECIALLY in the developing world, so that people in countries like, say,
Kenya can have access to education, microbanking and the mobile startup
ecosystem on their phones and leapfrog our asses.

In the same vein, the OLPC project is a clusterfuck and is a prime example of
never missing an opportunity to screw up. Someone needs to turn it into a
project that is viable and actually gets laptops and modern education software
into the hands of kids everywhere.

------
udfalkso
The wheel, of course.

~~~
cubicle67
ok then, how would you do it differently? :)

~~~
skermes
As a hovercraft, of course. If we'd started the history of transportation by
floating instead of rolling, I think we can all agree humanity would be a much
better place right now.

~~~
pegobry
Yes, those Stone Age hovercrafts were really something. ;)

------
lucumo
Some guys here in Delft reinvented the umbrella, making it wind-proof. It's
actually pretty cool: <http://www.senzumbrellas.com/>

~~~
jacquesm
And these guys really did get close to reinventing the wheel:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoQj-tobYOw>

------
coconutrandom
Computer logic. Having trits instead of bits specifically.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun>

------
stevedekorte
Government - a minimal direct democracy on state and federal levels and
replace all social programs with a negative income tax.

------
rs
I would reinvent airplane travel - the long distance flights are way, way, way
too long

------
asciilifeform
Computing.

