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.

List the problem you have, and why you find it a problem, possibly saying why other things you have used havent solved it.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[illumin8]

I'm just guessing that you haven't yet worked in a large corporation yet, or else you'd have met the "programmer that can't program", or the "network engineer that can't network", or the "system administrator that can't sysadmin", or any number of IT professionals that are completely, and totally incapable of doing any meaningful work.

Large corporations are so risk-averse that they are usually afraid to fire people, even when they can't do their jobs. Also, the ones that stick around have gotten so good at working the political system and getting others to do their work that they can't fire them, because they will just say "you didn't ask me to do it in writing", or any number of other excuses why they didn't do their job.

Not to mention, let's say you do want to fire a programmer who can't program - you can't just fire them, they have to be given a verbal warning first, then a written warning, it needs to be documented with HR, then they are put on a 90 day probationary period, or "improvement plan." They claim they don't have enough training for the job, so then they need to be retrained, at additional expense.

The other factor is that some managers like to keep 10-20% dead weight around because it pads their department. Everyone is fighting for more direct reports; apparently whoever has the most employees wins some kind of management contest. So, they keep 10-20% slackers on staff, knowing that if layoffs come around, they can cut the dead weight and keep the good programmers.

It's frankly amazing that anything gets done at all in a large corporation.

[dabent]

> Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it.

Welcome to Atlanta. Or maybe many other cities. I've often thought that there must be some remote working solutions out there that just need to overcome inertia to be accepted. The benefits would be huge.

> As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code...

You're hired - just for having code out there. I'm not sure many hiring managers fully understand what open source is. That's part of the problem.

[loewenskind]

>This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth

This is absolutely not a myth. I've seen it first hand in an interview. Having said that, it appears that you've been dealing with "interviewers who can't interview" or companies with really stupid hiring practices. These silly tests they do are designed to tease out what you've freely offered. They should just have their engineers look at your repos, verify which commits are yours and how good the code is.

But honestly, imagine working with a place that has such stupid rigidity. I seriously doubt this inflexibility would exist in HR in isolation. I think they did you a favor (accidentally).

[tocomment]

Wow I agree with you 100%. I hate job interviews like that! I've always wondered if interviews for other professions like accountants or dentists are this harsh.

[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.

[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.

[delano]

I went to a music camp years ago and had the chance to get a drive home from one of the instructors. He was really old and classically trained and I liked him b/c he taught an awesome class on odd time signatures.

Anyway, on the drive he asked what kind of music I liked and I said that I didn't like most contemporary music because so much of it was based on rip-offs of stuff that had already been done.

"Do you think classical composers are any different?"

That really annoyed me at the time but I totally understand and appreciate it now. As more things change, etc.

[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.

[petercooper]

And 100, 200 or 300 years ago, some people were undoubtedly saying the same. It might be intellectually trendy to slam modern things, but it doesn't necessary make such criticisms universally true.

[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?

[what]

Would you be willing to pay to remove the ads from a website? Pay for each show you watch without ads? Pay more for an ad free newspaper? If not, you shouldn't be complaining about ads (even though they are pretty obnoxious). The ads support the content that you consume. Or do you have a better way to compensate the people that create this content?

[Gianteye]

Advertising would annoy me so much less if I perceived products as less expensive when they featured advertising. For example I feel incredibly ripped off that films have increasingly long rolls of trailers, ads, and commercials that run before them but continue to increase in price.

That's why I want to create an opt-in advertising revenue based pizza place. When you place an order you are offered the choice between paying full price and getting discounts based on how much advertising material comes with your pizza. I figure you could get a stack of coupons, Chinese food menus, brochures, car insurance fliers, and magazines that would roughly equal the cost of a pizza. Free pizza.

[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...

[ovi256]

Have you thought about piano rolls ? Either paper-based ones that you draw yourself, or use software like Reason that has a piano roll for note input or display, nor sheet music. Actually, most non-classic music software has piano rolls.

[s-phi-nl]

Sorry for the accidental downvote. I meant to upvote because I have been thinking about (more formal) music notation on and off for years, too, trying to come up with a better format than Lilypond.

[dingle_thunk]

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

[wazoox]

What do you want to jot down? only chords, chords + melody?

[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.

[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.

[brettnak]

I might be the only one who thinks this around here, but I think the concept of mortality is kind of beautiful. However, ask me about that when I'm facing my own and the answer might be different.

[orangecat]

I couldn't agree more. What can we do about it, other than donating to organizations like SENS?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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).

[bluemetal]

I've got a chrome extension called "hckr news". It shows you which comments on a HN thread that are new since the last time you visited that page. So far I'm liking it

[BJakopovic]

I generally try and batch read HN (via rss) daily, and sometimes I feel that I am missing out on new comments (made after I finished reading and closed the tab; most commonly the new/recent posts)...would be nice to avoid bookmarking and searching for the new comments

[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.

[lutorm]

Yeah, though reading is not so bad until you post a comment (like now), at which point you end up back at the top... An inline comment feature would be great.

[daleharvey]

yeh if anyone has a firefox extension to fix this then it annoys me as well.

[ExtremePopcorn]

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

[Timothee]

And the consequence of that is that I sometimes can't remember some products' prices.

"Was it $699 that I mentally converted to $700, or was it $799?"

[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.

[bitwize]

I heard tell this practice arose because of some newspaperman who struck up deals with local businesses to salami-slice pennies off their prices so that people would have more pennies with which to buy his one-cent newspaper.

If true, I don't think he realized the Sorcerer's-Apprentice-like consequences of his actions, as I'm now AWASH IN USELESS PENNIES.

[Timmy_C]

I know that most prices at Nordstrom end in .95 whereas Nordstrom Rack prices typically end in .97.

They have a very liberal return policy so it's a simple way to encode where the product was bought so customers can't pass off outlet store items as if they were bought from Nordstrom proper.

That's one beneficial use to psychological pricey but I too would rather pay nice round numbers. It makes it easier to calculate sales tax too.

[detst]

Yes. I bought some food from a place recently that had all of their prices listed on the board as whole numbers. It took me a couple seconds to register as a price because it's so unusual. I loved it though.

[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.