[HN Gopher] One Hundred Ideas for Computing
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One Hundred Ideas for Computing
Author : yesenadam
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-05-19 09:11 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| kleiba wrote:
| I think it's a great idea to keep lists like that.
|
| There was a point in my life where I was working on a long-
| winded, personal project. It really put a strain on my
| psychological health but I knew I needed to finish it. But as
| things go in situations like that, suddenly all kinds of other
| things started to sound so much more interesting (hello,
| procrastination!).
|
| After too long, I finally noticed that by starting new exciting
| side-projects all the time, I was just dragging out my main
| project. So I decided that in order not to get side-tracked any
| more, I wouldn't jump head over heels right away any more into
| every "great idea" that popped into my head. Instead, I started
| writing all these ideas down on a list so I could come back to
| them _after_ the other project was finally done.
|
| And I actually did go back to the list! It had some 25 ideas on
| it... and, of course, by then, _none_ of the ideas that sounded
| so amazing when I first came up with them excited me at all any
| more. So for sure, I would have never finished any of them-- but
| I would have _started_ all of them had it not been for that list.
|
| These days, I still stick to that general approach. Writing ideas
| down on a list is a little bit like _not_ writing an angry reply
| _right away_ to something that upset you but to sleep a night
| over it first. It 's the short version of the "test of time", and
| it really helps you focusing on stuff that's actually worth it.
|
| Time is a valuable resource and you only have so much of it. Even
| if your ideas are better than mine were (and they probably are),
| it still does not hurt to let them sit on a list for a little
| while.
| teddyh wrote:
| "I remember working on Excel 5. Our original feature list was
| huge and would have gone _way_ over schedule. Oh my! we
| thought. Those are _all_ super important features! How can we
| live without a macro editing wizard?
|
| As it turns out, we had no choice, and we cut what we thought
| was "to the bone" to make the schedule. Everybody felt unhappy
| about the cuts. To assuage our feelings, we simply told
| ourselves that we weren't _cutting_ the features, we were
| simply _deferring them_ to Excel 6, since they were less
| important.
|
| As Excel 5 was nearing completion, I started working on the
| Excel 6 spec with a colleague, Eric Michelman. We sat down to
| go through the list of "Excel 6" features that had been cut
| from the Excel 5 schedule. We were absolutely _shocked_ to see
| that the list of cut features was the shoddiest list of
| features you could imagine. Not _one_ of those features was
| worth doing. I don't think a single one of them was ever done,
| even in the next three releases. The process of culling
| features to fit a schedule was the best thing we could have
| done."
|
| -- Joel Spolsky, _Painless Software Schedules_ ,
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/03/29/painless-software-...
| kleiba wrote:
| Nice, thanks a lot!
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I completely agree with using email as "social network". I really
| think "email" should be the backbone of social, planning, chat,
| etc. Nobody "owns" email. Yeah, there are service providers, but
| you can switch easily enough.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| For "chat built on email" there's Delta Chat.[0]
|
| For "social built on email" I think that the Fediverse[1]
| solves the "nobody owns" part, but there's an impedance
| mismatch between social networks and email because people want
| to be able to join conversations with strangers on Twitter, but
| don't want those strangers to necessarily be able to send them
| direct messages.
|
| Perhaps what email really needs is a concept like "Following",
| so you could have an account which only accepts messages from
| people you've whitelisted, and their mail client could check
| your server to discover whether they are on that whitelist or
| not.
|
| [0] https://delta.chat/en/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
| aliswe wrote:
| A word of caution, from my own experience. Do not get hooked on
| the likes of these lists, they will accustom your mind to
| consuming creativity, rather than generating it yourself.
|
| You should be doing your own lists!
| imvetri wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I had been googling a lot to find something
| like this.
| ramboldio wrote:
| Especially the ideas linked to package managers and shells make
| me question why these tools have been stagnant for so long.
|
| Even small improvements in those areas would save millions of
| dollars and countless hours of frustration.
| ramboldio wrote:
| Clicking on the related work on the idea "Shell with
| autocompletion" lands you at a page that says " Finally, a
| command line shell for the 90s".
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I don't understand why programmers use github for everything, in
| particularly for lists. This should be a blog. Then you could
| easily subscribe to it, you could have a discussion for every
| single idea. And you wouldn't need several lists of ideas. The
| only thing that would be harder would be to edit ideas. Is this a
| feature that would make sense for blogging platforms? A
| combination of blog and wiki? But even without that, suggesting
| an edit in a comment would work as well as a pull request.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Because publishing a blog takes effort, spinning up an
| additional public repo takes 2 seconds.
|
| Github proves that you only really need 2 things: versioning
| and displaying on the web. Theming, templates, CMS, whatever.
| Easy versioning + trivial deploys (git push) are a winning
| combo.
| the-dude wrote:
| Ideas have little value.
|
| But they feel good. Braincrack :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8&feature=emb_logo
| karlicoss wrote:
| Some of my favourites:
|
| - "5. Life engine" and "92. Personal Data API"
|
| I'm working on this in "Human Programming Interface" :)
| https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme It's far from solving
| these in general, but it works for me very well.
|
| - "73. Web Of Trust Recommendations"
|
| Oh yes, I wish this so much -- it's much more meaningful to see
| recommendations from someone I know than generic ratings on
| Amazon. Also I don't think it should be limited to products and
| services -- imagine if you could also have some decentralized
| reputation framework for politicians/public figures etc.
|
| - "33. Personal infrastructure" and "64. Peer to peer backup"
|
| Syncthing is missing, who have added 'untrusted devices' recently
| https://docs.syncthing.net/users/untrusted.html This lets you
| keep encrypted files on the other end.
|
| Great list, also see
|
| - https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2
|
| - https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Life Engine will be awesome once you can (with a google glass
| type thing) record all your vision and audio, and have
| something index for you.
|
| Ugh the privacy concerns. Wow the benefits.
|
| It's kind of like what wikipedia did to the "knowledge expert
| geniuses". Back before wikipedia there would routinely be
| conversations about some subject where people would argue about
| their knowledge pools and compare and debate them.
|
| Those convos don't happen anymore. You wikipedia something and
| its basically settled. Might be why everything is drama and
| opinion these days.
|
| But that would basically be wikipedia for "I said this" "Nuh-
| uhh" in addition to a host of other things for recall,
| tracking, etc.
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(page generated 2021-05-19 23:01 UTC)