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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=725191

by keltecp11 • 17 years ago

21 55 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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)?

nico3• 17 years ago

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.

dkokelley2• 17 years ago

This is a great idea. I wonder if there's a way to do this through your own offered credit/debit card, instead of having to work with the likes of visa, large banks, or payment processors.

cubicle672• 17 years ago

What about if we could reverse the way credit cards work, so instead of a company taking money from me I give the money to them; instead of supplying them my cc number, they supply me with their credentials and I transfer the money and then they verify the transaction has taken place.

I'm not sure about US or European banking, but in Australia we have three methods that work like this - BPay, direct deposit and cash/cheque. BPay is a company that sits in the middle and is, I gather, not financially viable for smaller companies, a direct deposit can take days to appear, and cash is not that great for online transactions.

systemtrigger• 17 years ago

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.

nico3• 17 years ago

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

jacquesm7• 17 years ago

why a magstripe, just a simple chip and a confirmation dialog on the reader would do the same trick. Set one card as the default for old style equipment and you're backwards compatible.

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

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.

manish• 17 years ago

This would be great !!

csomar2• 17 years ago

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.

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

Upvoted as you, sir, are correct. I actually have serious problems with the current view of nations and citizenship.

To put a proper criticism of the current system together would take me pointing out premises and assumptions that people do not even know they have. I'd have to start by sharing some history going from the Peace of Westphalia to the end of WWII to talk about how the current notion of nations and borders developed.

Then I'd put my case together that I think there's some fundamental human rights that I reckon everyone should have, that no local government should have any jurisdiction over. One of those, of course, is full mobility like I put above, but also free speech, free assembly, and so on. Then I'd mention that localities could make local laws to handle things a bit different and specific to the particular place.

Finally, I'd take some guesses about how this would happen, where some set of armed group(s) or allied nations would declare a global constitution that all people had a right to, and a slow change would take place. Or perhaps decentralization of information makes enforcing borders effectively pointless. Or maybe warfare evolves even further away from conventional warfare as seems to be happening now.

Who knows? It's a complicated mess of a topic. I just think it'd be a really nice thing :)

jacquesm7• 17 years ago

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

jacquesm7• 17 years ago

It's not cheating (hey, this is hacker news right, and part of hacking is to 'bend the rules' a bit every now and then) and I think it is a fantastic idea.

There is nothing that pisses me off more than one human standing in front of another saying they can't go somewhere.

This planet belongs to none of us.

As long as somebody does no actual harm to it they should be free to go anywhere. Borders are one of the worst inventions ever and there ought to be a universal human right associated with your idea.

csomar2• 17 years ago

No one will refuse the idea of Open Borders; if the borders where opened in his face!

halo2• 17 years ago

I'm honestly surprised that there has been no attempt to form an open-worker policy among a group of more developed nations, similar to the one the EU has.

Ardit202• 17 years ago

I thought that individuals from the western world, i.e EU, America, Australia, etc, can go anywhere they like. It is the rest of the world which is restricted on travel, say India, the balkans, brazil, africa of course.

samueladam• 17 years ago

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."

-- Albert Einstein

Ardit202• 17 years ago

Well, the first argument is that it would not work. When the ten new EU states joined, only the UK and Ireland opened its borders and we were flooded with Polish people, about 500k which is roughly about 1% of the UK population. There was this report I read which stated that unlike the fears of UK citizens, these polish wave of migration has contributed to the economy more than they have taken in benefits, housing, nhs, schooling.

Now it has quietened a bit, I suppose who wanted to go went in that first wave.

Now, suppose we opened the borders to India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Pakistan, etc. The Mexican and Brazilians will probably go to the US rather than UK, the Indians and Russians will probably want to come to the UK rather than US. India is 1 billion however, Russia 300 million. If a fraction of these people came to the UK the country would be flooded and go into a period of complete transformation and utter confusion and most probably civil unrest as the primitive territorial instincts take hold. The Indians will then demand that their culture is respected and therefore push for laws rather than integrate and do what they do in Rome.

In principle it is a noble idea. That is why although the EU project has its downsides, most people think it unthinkable to leave the EU. We like being able to travel freely in this continent, to allow trade to be completely unrestricted, but we did not sit one day and say, hey let us open our borders to all the EU. It has instead taken about 60 years for this project to evolve to what it has and still not all of the geographical europe is within the EU. So perhaps we should gradually have an EU style project in a world scale. That is, I suppose, what the UN was meant to be, but it has effectively failed. Maybe now we should try and set up institutions and a judiciary for a United Western World, whereby people are able to move freely within Europe, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and then gradually incorporate Russia, India, Brazil, etc.

dkokelley2• 17 years ago

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

udfalkso• 17 years ago

The wheel, of course.

cubicle672• 17 years ago

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

skermes• 17 years ago

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.

tolmasky2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

tolmasky2• 17 years ago

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.

rs• 17 years ago

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

JimmyL• 17 years ago

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).

nico3• 17 years ago

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

jacquesm7• 17 years ago

standardize those as well.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

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.

mc• 17 years ago

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.)

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

Living in LA and need to visit SF for the weekend? Get off your ass and walk there.

Umm...what? Are these moving sidewalks going to travel at 50mph?

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.

Suggestion: ride the train. You can talk to people, admire the scenery, and walk around.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

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.)

david9272• 17 years ago

It's called a bicycle

No, it's called elimination of zoning laws.

ersi• 17 years ago

I somehow think of the 'expressways' or whatever Isaac calls them in his book 'The Caves of Steel'. Basically just what you described, I think.

(They're some kind of walk-escalators that stretch all around towns, cross towns, cross land. Which you move onto the slower one, escalate your speed for the next strip, jump over to the next strip, etc. )

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm7• 17 years ago

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.

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

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.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

UNIX. Not everything is a stream of bytes.

derefr3• 17 years ago

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

jrockway4• 17 years ago

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

lucumo• 17 years ago

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

jacquesm7• 17 years ago

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

neuromanta• 17 years ago

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

derefr3• 17 years ago

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.

noblethrasher• 17 years ago

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.

pegobry2• 17 years ago

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.

stevedekorte• 17 years ago

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

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

Computing.

coconutrandom• 17 years ago

Computer logic. Having trits instead of bits specifically.

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

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

Related Stories