Ask HN: What product/service would you be willing to pay for? |
Ask HN: What product/service would you be willing to pay for? |
The problem, when I'm hiring, is that so much of the interviewing process is about determining competence. When I'm job-seeking, a lot of my time is spent determining the competence of the people in charge of the company.
In the medical field, doctors and hospitals are accredited. Thus the interviewing process isn't really about a doctor proving his or her competency, nor does a doctor have to worry about the hospital going bankrupt three years after taking the job.
We really need a professional licensing process for software engineers and the firms that hire us. Even though the tools we use change from year to year, the fundamentals of software development change about as fast as the medical field.
I haven't really come across any hiring firm or headhunter who is really good at determining the competency of a software engineer or the legitimacy of a business trying to hire. It doesn't matter who they are, they always boil down to middle men trying to sell whatever goods they have on hand while making a honest attempt to manage their reputation. They need the licensing process as much as we do because they just don't have the background to determine competence.
1. The former is highly regulated because of potentially highly catastrophic outcomes in most cases.
2. The former also is several thousand years older than the latter.
We could do a lot better if we got over our hubris and tried to learn from how other more mature feilds run themselves.
With self-driving cars on the horizon, and with our entire communications infrastructure defined by software, the potential for catastrophe in our industry is greater than the medical industry.
Currently, when I search for fresher jobs, I always end up getting jobs for 5-6 year experience, or those way away from cities I entered, or those from completely irrelevant fields.
NLP and Deep Learning should be able to do this.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/mar/06/bt-keeps-ch...
An example: I have one of the new macbook pros, and it came with a "free" 3rd party cheap-china usb C -> usb 3.0 hub. The problem (which I believe is quite common) is that attaching it, disables wifi - I guess it's just crappy low end chinese design and total lack of care for wireless compliance, etc.
So, I'd like to buy another hub that actually works without disabling my wifi. I don't want to pay Apple prices. I don't want to spend a day reading between-the-lines on aliexpress/ebay to ensure that it is genuinely compatible and non-interfering with my macbook wifi. I'll pay a premium (but not too much) for the best/best-value usb C hub for my purposes.
There are numerous examples of this kind of problem when buying products, particularly electronics, of having to read the fine print to get particular revisions that support some obscure use-case that I'm particularly interested in, and it's a real drag to try and hunt the right combinations.
Another example: I got interested in mechanical keyboards. (I think) I'd like a 68-key layout with rgb backlighting and gateron brown switches. Find one for me.
+ Accurate food product reviews that test what is inside of the item and reflect if the nutrition labels are correct.
So they are all ok but far away from a Disqus alternative.
Services like this exist, but you is really need to do your own research. Your research is required in order to help keep scams out of the system.
The major investment firms, like fidelity, Ameritrade, T Rowe Price, Etc, can probably recommend conservative investment vehicles for you that get pretty close to your goal. It just takes a phone call or a chat session.
Then there are more modern investment sites where you just tell them your risk profile and they choose the Investments for you.
Maintaining an U.S. lifestyle OTOH is much more expensive, but healthcare is a BIG plus.
And you WILL pay a lot of taxes - Healthcare-only taxes are 4.5 to 6% of your gross income, and sometimes more on top of it. And then you have 22% VAT and something like 30% of your salary if you're a software developer, and the 12.5% social security tax (all of those on your GROSS salary, and almost no deductions)... prepare to get paid less than half your gross salary in hand.
Promising software updates alone for 10+ years is going to be a difficult sell, even if you really intend to. And it's going to cost a significant amount of money.
And 10 years is a LONG time. 10 years ago android didn't exist, iOS had JUST come out, basically every "smartphone" out there was called a "PDA" and used windows mobile with a stylus. Even getting connectivity hardware that would work on those timescales is starting to get hard.
And let's be honest, the market would be extremely small. Most people want the newest device every year, because hardware is still improving, new features are added, form factors change, and styling is important. Trying to sell a device which looks worse, costs more, is larger and has less features to the general public just isn't going to work.
I get 5 years, but 10 seems to be really pushing it.
Looking back 10 years doesn't make sense because development was rapid then. But look back 5 years and there isn't a huge difference. A phone from 5 years ago would be fine in 5 more years.
Software updates and hardware serviceability are the bottle necks in phone longevity. The challenge is economical, cultural and political, not technical.
My current phone's battery goes 3-4 days before I need to charge it, cost around $30 and it's currently been in use for 3 years with no signs of getting worse or breaking.
I've been considering moving to a dumb phone, but I do need some basic features.
http://run-belay.ru/to-completely-disassemble-the-nokia-3310...
I actually had to stop using the 5110 because the technology wasn't supported anymore (the frequencies were re-purposed for something else), and that's probably what will happen to your 10+ year phone.
You can still purchase a Nokia 1100. It's the world's best-selling handset because you can do all you mentioned.
I still have both in a drawer, and they boot when charged.
I also looked into a washer dryer unit that I could plug into my sink. They are really common in Europe but not in the United States. The problem is that American voltage is too low to run a dryer without a dedicated outlet.
With the way that batteries are going, you could probably make a dryer that has a battery in it so it doesn't need a dedicated high voltage and high amperage plug. Because all dryers need counterweights, the battery really won't add weight to the dryer.
Without technology changes, you can still get an apartment washer dryer unit. Most appliance store should be able to special order one for you. The problem is that they will take all night to dry your clothing, because you are stuck with the limited voltage and amperage that comes out of the standard American wall outlet.
That those attempts didn’t work out probably has less to do with developer hubris but with software engineering indeed being different from other engineering disciplines.
After all, we don’t think of medicine in terms of ‘medical engineering’ or ‘human bio-system maintenance’ either, simply because it’s something else.
Besides, certificates are rampant in the IT industry. Most of those however tend to say very little about the actual skills of the ones certified.
I suggest you take a look at EffectiveDiscussions: it's open source + hosted for €2. Demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments
It has improvements over Disqus ... and HackerNews: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can....
GitHub: https://github.com/debiki/ed-server. It's more lightweight: the script bundle is just 140kb in comparison to Disqus 750kb. (I'm developing it.)
Demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments
It has improvements over Disqus and HackerNews: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can.... GitHub: https://github.com/debiki/ed-server. (I'm developing it.)
The change in laptops hasn't gone a fraction as far as it has in cell phones in the past decade. That might stop soon, but until it does getting a phone to last 10 years is a pipe dream, unless you are okay with a severely out of date device, which again, I don't think that 99% of the public will be.
And without customers, a company won't be able to support a phone for that long, so you'd end up with a slow, expensive, dated looking, insecure device.
If your criteria are specifically a single-household-only washer and dryer setup, and not just avoiding poorly-maintained central facilities, then my suggestion will not suffice.
>The challenge is economical, cultural and political, not technical.
While there are some technical hurdles to overcome to make a phone that lasts 10 years, they aren't that big comparatively. The real problem comes when you need to support software for a decade, getting people to buy a phone that's more expensive, larger, and slower than the competitors, selling enough to make the whole thing economically feasible, and getting people to be okay with a dated looking device.
I just don't see that being possible right now, especially while phones are still getting higher resolution, more capability, larger batteries, and smaller form factors. Maybe when phones hit the same plateau that laptops did a few years ago it will be possible, but I would not want to be part of a company attempting it right now.
How is a phone a status symbol? When most people say that, they are referring to iPhones. But when 40% of all phones in the US are iPhones how is it a status symbol? Even if you refer to the price, almost anyone can afford any iPhone - all of the carriers offer monthly 0% interest payment plans.
Once anyone can afford it, it's no longer a status symbol.
I completely disagree. There are plenty of things which are status symbols that aren't overly expensive. "Status symbol" doesn't mean "unobtainable", often people get them just to fit in with their perceived "status" among their peers.
Little things like being able to automatically share WiFi passwords, Apple Pay between people, FaceTime, iMessage, being able to share my location continuously with my wife when I'm on the road (or before when I was running long distances), etc.