14 ms·

Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

• davidw 7y ago
  IDK, mostly thinking about really difficult things that affect a lot of people and are mostly political in nature: * The housing crisis. * Our cities and how they relate to the environment. * The education system in the US (I'm quite stumped by this one).
• neuroticfish 7y ago
  Climate change should be anyone's first answer.
  • quedicestu 7y ago
    This is a big one, but it’s almost too big. Perhaps better broken down into smaller (though still big) chunks: innovate in renewable energies, spur higher participation rates in local elections, research ways to deplete gases harmful to the ozone, etc
  • Finnucane 7y ago
    We can't make real progress on a lot of other problems unless that is addressed. There's always calls for more housing in the cities, but it's going to be real hard for the cities to support growing populations if transportation infrastructure becomes harder to maintain, if coastal land is encroached by the sea, if water supplies can't be secured. If large-scale agriculture isn't sustainable, cities won't be sustainable.
    • quickthrower2 7y ago
      Maybe we can reduce our reliance on cities. The main thing we need is ways for average joe to make a living outside of the city. Remote working would help. Maybe those dying shopping malls become shared office spaces, and you pick your office and your company separately. You get the social side with people working for other people in the same room!
      • Finnucane 7y ago
        Sure that is part of the solution. But when everyone is shouting for more housing in already densely-built cities, it's hard to tell everyone, move to somewhere where there's still more space (though that is happening to some degree, just by basic economic force).
  • omosubi 7y ago
    If you're a software developer, how would you go about doing this if you have no skills related to any of the areas that can have some impact on climate change? I've been a developer for a few years and have no hard science background. Should I go back to school to try and learn this sort of thing? Go into politics in some capacity? Keep working where I am and spend my free time and cash on climate change initiatives? Something else?
    • BjoernKW 7y ago
      Software developers have tremendous potential for leverage at their disposal. Some time ago I talked to a software developer who was both impressed by non-profit efforts by NGOs to combat Ebola in Sierra Leone and depressed at the same time because he thought that as a software developer (and not a medical professional, for instance) he couldn't contribute anything to such efforts. I told him that a huge part of that specific effort in Sierra Leone was a piece of EMR software that allowed physicians and nurses to efficiently capture and retrieve patient data without being able to depend on a reliable local network infrastructure. I'm certain similar opportunities exist with climate change, too.
• quaquaqua1 7y ago
  There are a lot of things I want to do in life that someone tells me I can't do. For example, I can't buy a house for an affordable price because the supply is artificially constrained for less-than-ideal reasons. Similarly, I want to work remotely but can't because of company culture. I am willing to negotiate but they are not. Even if I could work remotely, other countries won't let me stay for more than a month or without me arbitrarily flying out and then flying back in. These are all problems that I'm having in my life right now, and they aren't really tech problems compared to people ones. Influential people need to be the ones to solve these problems, but none of them have taken action. I hope this can be fixed somehow. In the 2010s, I went from not being able to text my international friends on my phone to it being trivial and near-zero in price (thanks Whatsapp!). I hope something big changes in 2020.
  • s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
    Bought a 3 bedroom house for $75k because I work remotely. There are cheap places to live in America, you don't have to fly out of country.
    • sfblah 7y ago
      Out of curiosity where did you buy?
      • s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
        Texas
    • untog 7y ago
      That's a valid choice, but it isn't for everyone for a variety of reasons (perhaps they like the amenities a city offers, perhaps they have family nearby and don't want to move away). Point is, cities could be building a lot more housing, but typically can't because of zoning regulations and NIMBY activism. It's a shame.
      • non-entity 7y ago
• arvinsim 7y ago
  Increasing social and economic inequality.
• jdc 7y ago
  Ergonomic molecular design & simulation
• Finnucane 7y ago
  Peace in the Middle East.
• overshard 7y ago
  It still seems insanely difficult to track calories and macros with all the apps out there to do it. Most of the content for searching for your food is "community generated" so if I try to add a "Big Mac" (example, not eating big macs...) then I get like 30 results all with different amounts of calories and nutrition amounts also with slightly different naming. Maybe this exists somewhere??? But if someone can make an app to help me keep track of my food intake in an organized, managed (only one big mac when I search big mac and maybe options to add/remove toppings), fashion I would be slightly less insane counting my protein intake. Yes, this is a difficult task with how much food is out there and thus it has great value if someone does it extremely well.
  • non-entity 7y ago
    Oh this is a pain. Even worse is trying to enter calories when you eat at local businesses and non chains
  • rebelrexx858 7y ago
    locale is likely a big problem with this, as a canadian big mac might not have the same ingredients as a french or united states big mac
  • m_ke 7y ago
    We're working on something like that with Bitesnap. We added "builders" that let you customize the ingredients for common foods and for now we don't mix user submitted items across users. We plan on adding a way to cross verify user submitted data to keep the DB clean. If you have any other ideas/requests I'd love to hear them. I can be reached at "michal at bite.ai"
    • Beefin 7y ago
      This looks awesome, I'm going to give it a try. Do you offer API's for partner integrations? I have a platform (https://meports.com https://meports.com) that I'd see some super valuable synergies with.
  • roland35 7y ago
• rfc 7y ago
  Modular housing that grows with your life. Biggest problem there is effective expansion joints that would hold the houses together. Affordable container ship that is electric. A personal finance software that solves upper-middle class issues (eg. primary income, side business, rentals, etc.). A product/service that makes CROs obsolete in drug development (CROs = 25% of cost of drugs; admin overhead) Idk, those are some that immediately come to my mind.
  • dazc 7y ago
    'Modular housing that grows with your life.' Like a giant kit of Lego, maybe?
• srijanshetty 7y ago
  My top picks would be: Fake news and media credibility. In the 21st centurty it's become hard to trust content, especially viral content shared on social media like WhatsApp. Hopefully we make progress on this front. Sustainable funding models for the fourth estate in developing nations. The lack of sustainable funding leads to slashing of investigative journalism in developing countries which makes corruption more rampant. Solving this issue will help unearth fraud and keep the government in check. Climate Change discourse and discourse for the masses. It's difficult to convey facts to the masses today in a reliable manner.
• saalweachter 7y ago
  Garbage. How do you take a bag of mixed garbage and perform a fractional distillation of it, pulling out components and recycling and reusing them efficiently, until you are left with a tiny residue, ideally nothing, of true waste? How do you do this in a cost effective manner without relying on absurdly cheap labor and lax health, safety and environmental protection regulations?
  • MandieD 7y ago
    Sadly I have but one upvote to give, because making that kind of optimal use of garbage would solve a bunch of other problems.
    • saalweachter 7y ago
      It's also such a rich technical problem, that spans every sort of engineering, from machine learning to robotics to chemistry and materials engineering. And it's like, purely a technical business. If you have a company that can "buy" garbage for $X and sell your outputs for $Y > $X (+costs), you don't need to deal with politics and lobbying and building buzz.
      • louisguitton 7y ago
        200% agreed. But sadly, PhD positions in the field are so hard to find. A friend of mine is an engineer set out to do just that and even the biggest private sector players struggle to fund. Have you experienced the same?
  • buboard 7y ago
    The question is even if it material separation worked, are they really being recycled?
    • saalweachter 7y ago
      If your end product isn't salable, your job isn't done yet :-) For some components of "garbage", simple mechanical separation may be sufficient, and there may already be buyers happy to buy your product if you can reach a sufficient level of purity and offer it at a sufficiently low cost. Simply separating out those components of garbage efficiently enough is one huge unsolved problem, and once you have solved that, you can get to work on the fun part, which is how to further refine every unwanted component until you have broken it down or built it up into something someone wants.
• tyleo 7y ago
  Having seen many employees grow their careers quickly by ping-ponging jobs at Microsoft and Amazon (and vice-versa), I’m thinking about a platform for enabling this. Essentially you would put in your level, current company, and genre of jobs you are interested in and the platform would find jobs for you which are the next level up and help you apply. The employer would have no idea you were using the platform. I’ve seen a handful of people boost their salary very quickly this way right out of college.
  • thewarrior 7y ago
    You can do this by using linked in + Glassdoor + levels.fyi smartly.
• hprotagonist 7y ago
  - voting rights, disenfranchisement, and election security. - climate change. - vigorous enforcement of international law guaranteeing human rights for refugees. - closure of industrial-grade CO2 emission sites like coal power plants.
  • jdc 7y ago
    even turn-key products/services to measure (by proxy or otherwise) GHG emissions would probably be a tremendous boon to enforcement
  • gremlinsinc 7y ago
    I think paramount to all of those is the revolving door / political corruption that is Washington. Remove money from politics and many of those issues will resolve themselves. Make it so politicians may never become lobbyists, and in fact make it so lobbyists can't give money to campaigns, politicians, or PACS and Super PACS. Make it super hard to raise money except via grass roots and small donors. This may cause some career politicians to throw in the towel and retire and make way for fresh ideas. Replacing these career politicians opens the way for fresh ideas on Climate change, voters rights, etc... I see nothing so wrong as our corrupt political apparatus. It's not just us though, it's all politics everywhere, but it's definitely blatant in America.
• vessenes 7y ago
  So many — here are a few large scale problems I think about lately. * Trustworthiness of content (text and soon photo and video) is and will be a fundamental problem. This is the basic attack vector for national and global politics in the last few years. Anyone with a good solution would help the world immeasurably and have their pick of customers. * fall out from monetary policy in the us and Europe: take your pick, but for example - home prices in urban areas; figuring out how to house families for 1/2 or 1/3 current prices in the United States would have a lasting impact on stability and wealth creation. * the continued effectiveness of state propaganda; related to my first suggestion above. * obesity in the us and soon Western Europe. * data security - fixing large scale data breaches. * what I call long range to short range : problems too big for people to think about or accept abound, like climate change. Finding one and figuring out how to tie to short term incentives creating a positive feedback loop would be a real game changer. Oil does this all the time but usually not with good long term consequences - cf fracking turns North Dakota into a boom zone — creativity around good not pernicious cycles would be a boon for the world.
  • espeed 7y ago
    > Trustworthiness of content (text and soon photo and video) is and will be a fundamental problem. This is the basic attack vector for national and global politics in the last few years. Anyone with a good solution would help the world immeasurably and have their pick of customers. SOS HN: Set up live early warning system for spoofed/deep fake news feeds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20748195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20748195
    • bradenb 7y ago
      This would help, but it would be nice if there was a way to somehow verify a chain of custody of media where each modification somehow added to the chain and could be independently verified. I don't really see how that could be done but it would be really amazing.
      • toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Internet Archive on steroids?
• atlasunshrugged 7y ago
  There are a ton of great ideas backed up by a considerable amount of research done by 80,000 hours (https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/) about problems worth solving (although most I think would take longer than a year). They also have a nifty job board in case you want to work for an existing high impact org rather than start your own
  • rognjen 7y ago
    I've heard of 80000 hours before but if I'm not mistaken it's more for people who don't _have_ to work to earn money. A while ago one of their career advice blog posts gained traction and it read absolutely as advice for someone who doesn't have to worry about money at all. One of the pieces of advice was something like "don't make long term plans" and there was no advice at all about compensation. E: Found the blog post: https://80000hours.org/2019/04/career-advice-i-wish-id-been-given-when-i-was-young/ https://80000hours.org/2019/04/career-advice-i-wish-id-been-... It includes advice such as "Don’t focus too much on long-term plans" and "Crowdsource your career decisions".
    • atlasunshrugged 7y ago
      Maybe for that one person who wrote that article that's true, at least for myself who has followed some of their advice (and many people in my network) we definitely all have to work to earn money and survive. I also think there is lots of other advice and frameworks for how to think about your career on the site so I would take one anonymous contribution with a grain of salt, even if they did have a high impact career.
• untog 7y ago
  I was just thinking the other day that we're in (or are at least entering) a slightly sad era as far as tech is concerned. Not too long ago (it feels, anyway) there was this explosion of possibilities when smartphones arrived on the scene. People were doing genuinely impressive and innovative things at a fair clip. That's kind of dried up now. The latest iterations of smartphones are just minor progressions on previous models. Supposed new frontiers (AR/VR, self driving cars) have largely disappointed. The problems (the real problems) we face today like climate change, growing income inequality, stagnating public transit, aren't really solvable by most of us in tech. In fact, in retrospect I wonder how many problems we were really solving anyway (is Uber just a giant VC investment bubble? Will we look back on it as a distraction from improving public transit?) ...so yeah, I dunno. Feels like we're in a fallow year or few. It's not that problems aren't solvable, it's that they will take wide scale activism and a great deal of human work. A new API or tool isn't going to cut it.
  • buboard 7y ago
    Otoh, smartphones dumbed down technology. Research in new interfaces got limited to touchscreens, and content got limited to whatever fits in a feed. I think smartphones took us back. We re still typing out thoughts through keyboards
  • wait-a-minute 7y ago
    5G will probably bring in another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation. Imagine what can be done when sensors/cameras can transmit 10x the amount of data per second that they can now. I'm especially interested in how this might enable low-cost high-quality telemedicine.
    • untog 7y ago
      > Imagine what can be done when sensors/cameras can transmit 10x the amount of data per second that they can now. I've thought about this before and honestly I can't come up with many things. Telemedicine in terms of speaking to a doctor over video is already very possible over the connections we have today. Bringing that to a wider audience (say, third world countries) is an interesting possibility, but it also requires bringing 5G to third world countries, so I don't think that's going to happen too quickly. Aside from that, what does 5G really bring us? The same stuff, only faster. I mean, good, sure. But it's not that inspiring.
• ericb 7y ago
  Allergies. Something has changed to make us allergenic to a degree that was never previously the case. We need to understand and fix it.
  • krel 7y ago
    Is this true? Or did we just not care about allergies before when we had much bigger issues (like dying at age 30)? Some reference/data to back up your claim would be nice.
    • ericb 7y ago
      https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db121.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db121.pdf https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46302780 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46302780 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254585/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254585/
• AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  People with different viewpoints can't talk to each other. Or rather, on several important topics, too many people can't or won't talk to people with different views.
  • antisthenes 7y ago
    The assumption here is that viewpoints have an equivalent value. That assumption is probably the most toxic element contributing to the demise of intelligent public discourse and disagreement in the last decade. I see no problem in refusing to argue with someone who is ranting against established science and refuses to look at the evidence or to reproduce the scientific results themselves.
    • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      You're assuming that about what I said. And, in fact, someone who genuinely considers that all viewpoints have equivalent value should be more willing to consider different viewpoints, not less.
    • mo1ok 7y ago
      I think opinions can have equal value - in a roundabout way. I.e. climate denialism is usually an expression of anti-establishmentarianism married with a fear of downward mobility.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • importantbrian 7y ago
    I think the issue is more that they won't talk to each other. There are plenty of places on the internet where you could go to talk to people who hold different viewpoints from you, but most of them seem to follow a common pattern where one viewpoint becomes the majority viewpoint and then become more and more hostile to the minority viewpoint until everyone who holds the minority view leaves.
  • BnMcGn 7y ago
• n-exploit 7y ago
  Global wealth inequality and social insecurity. I'm a firm believer in real-time payment systems and its ability to quickly address issues vital issues like the above, and related issues like climate change. Markets operate in real-time, and the current banking infrastructure - which creates an artificial bottleneck via ACH delays - is an old and dying dinosaur. I imagine a world of daily paychecks is just a few years in the future.
  • daneyh 7y ago
    Why would real time payment actually improve either climate change or wealth inequality and social insecurity?
• Mizza 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture... This is basically the only problem in the world that matters.
• human20190310 7y ago
  I'd like to see a pushback on privacy intrusions and the dark user-interface patterns that trick people into allowing them. I just installed Windows 10 for the first time, and the number of things I had to turn off just to get to a sub-totalitarian level of monitoring my activities was ridiculous. The kicker was that Windows Home edition doesn't have disk encryption, so anyone who steals my laptop can help themselves to my private information too. This probably isn't solvable by technology in and of itself, but consumer education and consumer action against tech companies might make a dent.
• adamnemecek 7y ago
  Global warming. I think a good approach would be growing sea weed. Sea weed is much better at consuming CO2 than land based plants. https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/seaweed-climate-change/ https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/seaweed-climate-change/
• bch132 7y ago
  Figuring out how to keep the ignorant masses from blaming everything on climate change.
• Robotbeat 7y ago
  Short-haul and medium-haul and long-haul conventional take-off electric aircraft. There's a lot of work on VTOL electric aircraft and hybrid aircraft. There's a lot of capturing low-hanging fruit by trying to electrify existing airframes. On the higher end, there's a lot of work on enabling lithium-air or lithium-sulfur or solid state lithium or metal electrode lithium ion batteries. However, there's not a lot of work on combining extremely high efficiency airframes (i.e. glider-like) with extremely high performance batteries (and high battery mass fraction, i.e. 60%, not 25%). Often one or the other is the focus, but a combination is essential to enable decent range (1000km) with existing batteries and long-haul range (at 4000-10,000km) with advanced chemistries (lithium air). Another issue is low capital cost hydrogen production. There has been a lot of work on reducing the cost-per-watt of solar and wind power and fuel cells, but progress on cost-per-watt on hydrogen production (i.e. electrolysis) has been lacking. That means it's not financially viable to produce hydrogen from excess intermittent renewable energy, in spite of the clear potential (if the cost-per-watt of your electrolysis equipment is much higher than the cost-per-watt of wind or solar, you need to run near constantly to make your capital investment make sense... hydrogen doesn't work as a flexible demand source if the capital cost is so high the plant has to run all the time). Microbiome modification to reduce methane emissions from ruminants (cows and sheep and goats). Liquid hydrogen powered container ships or long-haul aircraft (and a method of dealing with the water emissions so as not to release water vapor at high altitudes). High efficiency deep cryogenic liquefaction of hydrogen. Battery-electric long haul locomotives (perhaps with intermittent charging via catenary). Extremely cheap Level 1 or 2 electric charging outlets. Literally an outdoor outlet with a relay controlled by an app that can be deployed at just ~$30 extra beyond a regular outdoor outlet. Could enable mass deployment of electric car infrastructure at very little cost (possibly even self-funding due to a small fee). Carbonfree (or carbon negative) steel, aluminum, and cement production.
  • xenocratus 7y ago
    Related to methane reduction from ruminants: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/gamechanging-pink-seaweed-reduces-cow-emissions/ https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/gamechanging-pink-seaweed-re...
• buboard 7y ago
  Remote worker stuff. I think with a little more tech, we can make a lot of people happier, having free time, living where they want, spend more time near family and commute less which would reduce emissions. This is short term and the impact could be enormous Also, we need to standardize GDPR and cookie consent forms, so i can use a blocker for them , they are seriously messing my productivity
  • Down_n_Out 7y ago
    Definitely the remote work stuff, it's ridiculous how many people sit at the desk in a stuffy or crowded office while they could do the same work at home or wherever. Less cars (and less company cars needed, so potentially better pay), less commuters, less pollution. This is something that could benefit the environment, overall health and happiness of people and so much more. Just wish companies would get on board already, it's improving but a lot of countries and companies are still far behind.
• flooo 7y ago
  Integrating control in adaptive systems. We see a big trend where (parts of) systems can adapt their behaviour to particularities of the environment they are deployed in with the biggest technical driver being machine learning. Controlling this adaptivity is usually done in an ad hoc fashion by writing code surrounding the adaptive component, usually a ml model This yields many problems ranging from "artificial stupidity" to problems with safety and degraded power of users. By integrating control into adaptive systems, we might get the best of both worlds: tell the program what (not) to do where you know this upfront and let it figure out how to act by itself elsewhere
• michael_j_ward 7y ago
  I'm not familiar with the "rfs page"- what is it?
  • tlb 7y ago
    YC's list of startup ideas it wants to fund at https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
• espeed 7y ago
  One of the problems that just surfaced in the news ... is the realization that almost all prescription meds are manufactured in China. The risk that poses to the US population and DoD is incalculable. How do we get off China meds? Fake chips have been a problem too, polluting the supply space. All the more reason to protect and verify IP. There's new tech for that. Maybe the next big thing. Hardware verified. Authenticity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594065
• zmix 7y ago
  * Environmental protection * more poetry overall!
• espeed 7y ago
  Election security is ripe to be solved. Trust is key. "16M Americans will vote on hackable paperless machines" https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614148/16-million-americans-will-vote-on-hackable-paperless-voting-machine/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614148/16-million-america... See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20759306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20759306 NB: Ben Adida is one person who has been thinking about and working on this problem for years https://ben.adida.net/ https://ben.adida.net/
• RocketSyntax 7y ago
  Small scale nuclear power
• known 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems
• sitkack 7y ago
  Global Warming and the complex graph of externalities that incentivize organizations to continue on status quo or ignore huge signals. Economies need to switch to steady state instead of growth. We need to reduce the total output.
• moetsi 7y ago
  Compressing and streaming sensor data to prep for 5G definitely deserves a mention here.
  • p1esk 7y ago
    You’re shadow banned
• bobosha 7y ago
  Reduce plastic bag usage. Everyday shoppers across the world, carry groceries and other items in billions of mostly one-time-use bags that are very destructive to the environment. Perhaps come up with a simple shop-to-home cart that reduces (eliminates) plastic bags.
  • buboard 7y ago
    where i am we used those plastic bags as garbage bags. While usage has gone down extremely after a tax was introduced, i now use the large bags. I dont know if the impact was that important.
• leet_thow 7y ago
  Rising male virginity and the 'incel' epidemic: https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120 https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120
  • buboard 7y ago
    so, prostitution?
    • leet_thow 7y ago
      Not sure, just have a hunch it will be a problem in the coming years. Look at Japan.
      • buboard 7y ago
        There is an enormous drop in T levels and sperm motility in the past decades. Don't know if related
        • gremlinsinc 7y ago
          I wonder if maybe it has to do with more screen time and less real-world socializing. Can't meet a girl when you never leave mom's basement. Also staying in breeds phobia's of crowds and people and social interactions which causes probably a lot of the incel behaviors in the first place.
          • buboard 7y ago
            > with more screen time and less real-world socializing That would imply that girls overwhelmingly don't do the same, which is not the case. Maybe it's online dating https://www.icoderzsolutions.com/blog/facebook-online-dating-app-development/ https://www.icoderzsolutions.com/blog/facebook-online-dating...
            • gremlinsinc 7y ago
• jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  In no particular order: Overpopulation Climate change War U.S. congress transferring its powers to the executive branch. Global dependence on cheap oil Global food unsecurity Dwindling access to drinkable water and breathable air, or more broadly: pollution
• godelski 7y ago
  How do you create a global and free internet? Speeds aren't as important as just the ability to communicate, i.e. at least a text chat system. You could do something like meshing with HAM or other radios (or combine a lot of messing networks together depending on the hop distance). We can already communicate globally with HAM. The question to me is how do we advance this more for higher reliability, better speeds, and create tools that everyone can use (essentially a zero, or low, knowledge system, like a cellphone). The major factor I see is reliability, so that it is difficult for an oppressive regime to shut it down (would also serve as an extremely reliable method when other systems fail during things like natural disasters. You can probably see more advantages to this backbone network). So we could have an open alternative to the segmenting internet that is currently happening. I honestly believe global communication is one of the fundamental necessities to achieving a more peaceful world.
  • ohiovr 7y ago
    High Speed Multimedia or HSMM is a mesh network for ham operators. I would be interested in getting into it but the off the shelf equipment is microwave band and does not propagate like 20 meter. So it has a kind of chicken vrs egg problem for now.
    • godelski 7y ago
      That's why I'm thinking just a communication platform. Start small. Rebuild from the ground up. Robustness is more important than any other factors imo. I want something that is near impossible to take down and can reach globally. I would think this would have to be some large mesh network. There's definitely a lot of challenges in just getting text to transmit across something like this. But it has a ton of uses.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • ohiovr 7y ago
        Sounds like a cool project. Would it be possible to vastly undertune a wifi router to work on 20 meter? Would be cool to keep it on the cheap too.
• a1exyz 7y ago
  Good startups are about making something that people will love. Not something that solves a global crisis. Thinking of the latter instead of the former often results in "playing house" ideas that sound like startup ideas but aren't actually. At least this is what happens to me when I follow the thought process you are laying out.
• konschubert 7y ago
  - energy storage as the solution to climate change - self driving cars - a cure for a cancer or a heart disease - improving the effectiveness of remote-only companies
  • mixandgo 7y ago
    What, in your opinion, could be improved for remote-only companies?
    • konschubert 7y ago
      Anything that improves communication. Being able to drop into a call with somebody without them having to pick up. Having an indicator that shows if people are afk or not.
• batsy71 7y ago
  Hassle-free international retail trade of equities. A middle class Joe sitting in Maldives being able to buy Beyond Meat stocks on the day of it's IPO. Also stock markets getting fully automated to remain open 24x7.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• quickthrower2 7y ago
  I wonder naively why a country like Australia (lots of sun and land and raw material) doesn’t go all in for solar and batteries. Print a bunch of QE money and invest it in building infrastructure to create store and export energy from solar (ship charged batteries? Under sea electric cables?). It would boom the local economy while creating a long term asset and help the planet. Assuming the panels can be made, constructed and installed without too much environmental impact.
  • tomtomau 7y ago
    Politics and lobbying mostly I'd guess. Resources sector are the major donors to the two major parties. Resources supported boom growth through the 2000s but we didn't do a great job transitioning to "new technology industries". There is a national debate on the outcome of the Adani coal mine which in oversimplified terms is willing to risk X0,000 tourism industry jobs to save X00 resources jobs. "Australians are good at two things, digging things up out of the ground and selling property to each other"
• jammygit 7y ago
  Superbugs. Sam Harris’s has a scary podcast recently with the author of the book by that name. Preventing the superbug future would be world changing
• gHosts 7y ago
  Graph Theory in the presence of modules and dependencies between modules. Every thing in computing is modular and multiple levels of modules and has coupling and dependencies between modules. It's the hottest and hardest problem in real world computing... it's nicely representable in a graph theoretic framework.... but graph theorists aren't looking at it.
  • princesse 7y ago
    Can you provide more details? Are you talking about algorithms like modular decomposition[1]? Any specific challenge you'd like to see addressed in the following years? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_decomposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_decomposition
    • gHosts 7y ago
      Especially automatic refactorings... If you look at real code, often the main reason why this routine was added to this file... was that the programmer worked in this file last. Is that a Good Reason? No it's a bloody awful reason. An automated tool should be able to look at the network of declarations, definitions and references and work out which module each thing should be in.
      • thecupisblue 7y ago
        I'm using a datastructure like that in my sideproject (a new "software" editor aka a list editor) - you got a data point that exists in multiple dimensions - it has representations in backend, frontend, graphql schema, UI, db, mobile client) and different relationships in each of those dimensions. And it can have subdimensions and they can have their subdimensions etc. So when you update the core representation, all get the update in the dimension they care about. It's a pretty great datastructure for writing code, you get automatic refactor everywhere. If you're interested to take a look ping me, would love fresh eyes
• omosubi 7y ago
  - climate change - loss of topsoil in agricultural areas - loss of biodiversity - reducing dependence on cars in the US/Canada - bringing down cost of infrastructure - anxiety epidemic - loneliness epidemic
• app4soft 7y ago
  The biggest problem: recycling of refuse.
• tmaly 7y ago
  Education - I think if we can drastically improve it, that is our best chance at solving other problems. Glenn Doman in his book How to Teach Your Baby to Read, said every child has the potential for genius. That has kinda stuck in my mind this thought. Plastics - the oceans are filling up with them. Stuff is not getting recycled despite people putting things in blue bins. Some research in material science to make something that breaks down faster would be huge
• JSeymourATL 7y ago
  According to Google Trends, the Josephus Problem recently spiked. I had to look it up > https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/josephus-problem-set-1-a-on-solution/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/josephus-problem-set-1-a-on-so...
• antisemiotic 7y ago
  Whether P=NP.
• Can_Not 7y ago
  Not enough Phoenix svelte starter templates. Not enough SSE instead of web sockets.
• aledalgrande 7y ago
  Security in IoT devices - how to stop millions of new computers from getting hacked?