30 ms·

Ask HN: What are the big/important problems to work on?

• entropicgravity 3y ago
  For those concerned about CO2 (as they should) don't forget that were it not for human CO2 we would very soon be on the cusp of another ice age. The point is that we're at a tricky balancing point either way.
• local_issues 3y ago
  The housing crisis.
  • gremlinsinc 3y ago
    I have a solution for this, but I'd need investors to pull it off. Essentially cheap communities of tiny homes and non traditional homes, like using earth bags which also have an insulation effect. we could also build out a few extra beds per community for free hotel stays when you travel to a place with our network of communities. Each community would have a huge warehouse to store shareable like cleaning supplies, tools, drills, recreational vehicles, lawnmowers, etc. These all then are loaned out like a library. How many things do you own that really are used every single day and how many only a few times per year? What if you could use it wherever you wanted but didn't need a place to store it? We'd also build in some fun things, and if we have enough land we could do glamping sites for extra money for the community.
    • eldritch_4ier 3y ago
      I think things like this have been tried (like shipping container homes). Problem isn’t lack of capital for a solution like this, it’s lack of demand and zoning issues. Houses made out of dirt or cargo containers don’t appreciate all that well, so while you have a shelter over your head, you’re still just throwing money away as if you’re renting (except you also have a mortgage with a big down payment and interest). Maybe you could address homelessness with enough of these and made cheaply enough, but it won’t affect the housing crisis so much, because people want affordable but appreciating homes. Like the desire to buy cheap stocks that go up a lot, it’s easier said than done.
    • local_issues 3y ago
      The issue isn't capital or demand, it's the insane Single Family regulations and the NIMBYs that defend the status quo to the death.
• instagib 3y ago
  1. Books or e-books, send books to countries with low literacy rates. 2. Get non-fossil fuel energy to poor countries. They are burning coal or without power due to cost/availability. They still need to go thru all the ages richer countries have gone thru. 3. Clean water. Feel free to research water wars and Wikipedia doesn’t list all of them. 4. Weather forecasting. It is not great especially for disasters. I think the goal is 2 weeks of accurate forecast globally. 5. Getting people together without social media. Like a church but not religious, it is good to have a network of people to speak to. 6. Wicked problems: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem 7. Natural language processing. We are repeatedly doing work that has already been completed or solved but we do not know about it. Ex: underground flowering and underground fruiting palm “discovered” but known to locals for a very long time. 8. Communications. It seems to be the problem almost always. Too much data to digest, not enough, frequency of data, etc. 9. tried to get to 10 but just search: difficult problem, Unsolved problems in (math, physics, philosophy, etc)
• gavinhoward 3y ago
  If we lose the war on general-purpose computing, authoritarianism and corporatism are likely to rule the world. Winning that war is prerequisite to everything else. If you're worried about climate change, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care about climate change. If you're worried about injustices, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care about them and actually manufacture them. If you're worried about any particular political thing, remember that authoritarian regimes don't even let you speak your dissent. If you're worried about economics and making a living, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care if you have enough food. Authoritarian regimes only care about themselves and their power. They'll make sure they're insulated from climate change. They'll make sure the law doesn't apply to them. They'll make sure they have megaphones for their propaganda. They'll make sure they always have food and shelter. So what can you do? Write Free Software. Get people to use Firefox and Ladybird (once it's ready). Refuse to work for companies that are locking down computers. Shift the culture until it is shameful to even do so. Reject remote attestation. Accept inconvenience in the software you use. Preach to everyday people about using Free Software. Teach them about privacy and control issues. Help them install Linux on their laptops. Root their phones for them. Be their tech support when things go wrong. Most of all, learn UX and make your Free Software more usable and convenient than the freedom-snuffing software. Until Free Software is more convenient, there is very little way we can win this war. This is something Free Software enthusiasts are really blind about: we can't just make software how nerds want it; we need to make software that will be useful and convenient for everyday people.
  • Const-me 3y ago
    Authoritarian regimes are actually correlated with the popularity of free software. Russia and China both have government-mandated forks of Linux. Chinese companies like Linaro, Huawei and Alibaba contribute to Linux kernel very actively. When the war against Ukraine escalated 1.5 years ago, proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Apple quit Russia due to international sanctions and reputational risks. Since then, pretty sure free software became even more popular over there.
    • gavinhoward 3y ago
• safetynetapps 3y ago
  [dead]
• JohnFen 3y ago
  There are more big & important things than can be listed. I think the best idea I ever heard is to pick the one that you are most energized about and do that. > I keep seeing critiques against working on tasks that are meant to maximize user engagement. Well, sure, because that's work against the best interest of users. Even if there were no big & important things to be done, that's one that should not be done.
• qup 3y ago
  Top priority: ensure our continued existence as a species/planet against all existential threats. Next most important: human aging and longevity. Next most important: AI, energy After that: we're into sci-fi very, very quickly. It's hard to imagine what will be important, we're going to be sprinting in every direction. A million things are incredibly important to support what we're already doing, too. These are just the most important frontiers. There's some other incredible problems falling by the wayside, like loss of biodiversity that is billions of years of code written by nature. For most of us as individuals, I think the most ambitious work is to help solve human aging and death in our own lifetimes. We're probably the first generations who can call that possible, if it is possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwEKg5cjkKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwEKg5cjkKQ
• sn9 3y ago
  Rutger Bregman recently twote about a "Hogwarts for do-gooders" which is an incubator for charities/non-profits for problems that are important, neglected, and tractcable [0]. Because there isn't a profit-incentive, there are many gaps in the market with a lot of low-hanging fruit with high ROI for every charitable dollar. [0] https://twitter.com/rcbregman/status/1688526388004077568 https://twitter.com/rcbregman/status/1688526388004077568
• JanisErdmanis 3y ago
  I do fear that as climate change evolves and we get to face more severe consequences of that the democracies will turn to authoritarianism as there would no longer be a win-win game to play. Together with surveilance and deception tech this might cement and worsen conditions of the poor as their power to organise would diminish whereas they would be most affected by the worsening climate. Thus one of the important problems in my opinion is a solution which could circumvent surveilance and deception tech and help people to organise more effectivelly. Personally I am interested in publically verifiable software independent remote voting systems.
• hollerith 3y ago
  The biggest problem IMHO is preventing AI research from killing all the people. (In contrast, people's becoming enslaved is a much smaller risk because the kind of AI capable of enslaving people will probably also be able to create robots that are more reliable and efficient than people at whatever task the AI is contemplating enslaving people for.)
• wildermuthn 3y ago
  Looking at the responses here, I see a pattern: generality in the form of downstream consequences rather than specificity of upstream causes, e.g., “world hunger” rather than “lack of low-cost drought-resistant soil-regenerating edible plants” (I’m making that up — I have no idea why hunger still exists, and I’d assume it is mostly political). “Make something people want” sounds simple, but it is really hard to identify specific gaps in people’s lives that are the primary, but many-step-removed, cause of the problems in people’s lives. Maybe it is possible to go from general to specific by asking, “Why? What’s missing?” until you get to something very specific that is missing that is the root problem.
  • warrenm 3y ago
    >I have no idea why hunger still exists, and I’d assume it is mostly political You're dead right "World hunger" has been a solved problem for 40 years Distribution is hard - but doable It's corruption that needs to be solved
• mikewarot 3y ago
  We need to widely adopt Operating Systems implementing capability based security.[1] It doesn't help that there is widespread confusion with the horrible permission flags systems in phones, tablets, etc. Without capability based security, our current situation is analogous to having a power grid with no breakers or fuses, anywhere. (One bad load would take down the grid, or set things on fire, etc). We've improvised systems to make up for the deficiency including Virtualization, Containerization, and systems like WASM. Mainframes hold on partially because they run processes without ambient authority, which is also a form of capabilities. The general inability to secure general computing, in turn, leads to practices like blaming the users, or applications, or operating system vendors. It leads to band-aids like virus scanners, and immensely draconian IT management. It threatens to lead to government regulation of IT systems and US. It also leads to users playing it safe. Since you can't safely run a program, no matter how clever you are, you're going to avoid any novel software, or web sites, to try to avoid compromise of your system. This leads us to Facebook, and all the other walled gardens. It also leads to app stores and all the evil that entails. This leads, eventually to the loss of the war on general purpose computing. --- Next, the Von Neuman architecture has hit its limits, we need to explore other techniques to get the most out of the billions of transistors we can put on a chip. I have some ideas[2], but welcome others. As Kevlin Henney states, when you introduce concurrency, you change the laws of physics for software. I don't think this is widely understood. --- We need a Memex, but copyright restrictionists will fight extremely hard against it, as the primary purpose is to copy information and the context it belongs in. --- We need to push for internet connectivity, instead of internet "access". Everyone should be able to run their own hosts, servers, and services. --- We need to build a second supply chain for everything, with full open source documentation. There should be laws to allow commercial trade secrets to be escrowed for some period of time, perhaps as long as 50 years, with the national archives, or other suitable organization. Nothing, anywhere, should have a single source. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security [2] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid
• shaunxcode 3y ago
  Resource allocation.
• supportengineer 3y ago
  Being a good person. Caring for others.
• prepend 3y ago
  I think there’s a lot of value if it’s possible to make saas as low cost as software. Software that I write and you run on your machine costs me nothing extra per user to run (assuming I provide zero user support). So I, and others, don’t mind sharing so much. That’s not the same for saas as there’s a cost for each user. It seems to me that there are more saas utilities that are needed and that’s resulting in less free software. Figuring out some kind of super low cost grid/distributed compute that doesn’t get abused to death seems important to having more software shared and thus a wonderful future state for humanity. So even basic stuff like a password manager service is costing $5/month/user and I don’t think they scales. I run hundreds of little utilities thatI accumulate over my life. I can’t afford to pay $5/month for all of them and so would like to find some way to solve this so when there are real non-zero costs per user it can be covered and scaled. (Obviously some companies and people don’t want to give their stuff away for free and wish to sell their service, more power to them, but there’s not really a way for me to offer something that needs saas functions without me standing up and running a server and that’s a very different task than just writing software, giving it away and buggering off).
  • warrenm 3y ago
    SaaS is "as low cost as software" ... or, at least, the "Saa" part is It's the Service that you're paying for - not the Software You cannot rationally compare a provided Service to your "zero user support" offering People pay for SaaS precisely because it's simpler/cheaper (at least on some vectors of analysis) then running it yourself You can run a "free" email server, for example But the amount of cost you will incur doing so (time, effort to get other servers/services to accept you, etc) is almost guaranteed to be more than just paying someone who does that for their service
• cluse 3y ago
  As some others have mentioned in this thread, the most important problems are often not the most interesting. For example, Code for America has several "civic tech" projects where volunteer software engineers can make apps to make it easier for recipients of government benefits to navigate the system. These kinds of "civic tech" apps make government more efficient. They have a direct and measurable positive impact on poverty and inequality. But these projects are not particularly interesting from a technological perspective. They are not rocket science. They are just web apps. A lot of the time, solving important problems is not particularly complicated or difficult. You just have to care. In other words, you have to be able to prioritize your values over your ego. Will you be able to put on your resume that you learned a fancy new technology? Probably not. But will you be able to say that you had a positive impact? Probably yes. If you are a software engineer looking to make a positive impact, you should search for terms like "civic tech" or "humane tech" to find projects that are driven by humane values, not profits. Or you should reach out to a nonprofit organization and ask if they need help with their website. They could often use help with making it easier to get donations, communicate their message, contact a politician, or do other stuff related to their website. The other thing to remember is that solving the most important problems is not just thankless, most of the time. It also doesn't pay well, because it often involves serving people and communities who don't have the ability to pay much. But if you are one of those patient people who prioritizes your values over your ego and your finances, I respect you, and even though I don't know your name, you are my favorite kind of person. I think the world would be a beautiful place if the most important problems were also the most financially lucrative to solve. But we don't live in that world. We can't expect the financial incentives to line up with what's important. If you serve a nonprofit that aims to make the world a better place, you probably can't do it for the money. It has to be because you care.
• hnaccountme 3y ago
  If you hear it on the news everyday, it is not a important problem
  • qup 3y ago
    I don't watch the news. What are you hearing about everyday?
• austin-cheney 3y ago
  Pushing IPv4 to end of life. If we can get even just half way there our approach to online technologies will change wildly. For example, we can do so much more with so much less without reliance upon a server between two people trying to message each other. That means superior capabilities and you get things like inherent privacy and end-to-end encryption for free (and with less effort).
• mschoeffler 3y ago
  Social media fracturing relationships. This hurts on a personal level (families, friendships). More importantly, what is the effect on society when we can't listen to each other? Our contempt for each other has increased civil strife and violence, and we simply can't tackle large problems. Think about COVID-19, where political issues have prevented us from even agreeing on the cause of this plague - to say nothing of preventing the next one. And now imagine coordinating to prevent possible AI catastrophe. We don't need to all think alike. But we better repair civil discourse if we're going to address any other problems.
• danpalmer 3y ago
  Climate change.
  • h4kor 3y ago
    + Ecological collapse
• NLPaep 3y ago
  Diseases of aging
• solomatov 3y ago
  I would call understanding what's the underlying mechanism behind LLMs and other deep models such a problem. I.e. what's the internal representation? How it emerges over training? What its failure modes. There're two reasons: - In order to substantially improve these models we need to understand what they do. Something similar happened with steam engines when thermodynamics helped to explain what they do and improve them substantially. - We need to understand their failure modes in order to understand their safety profile. I.e. it's AI safety problem.
• AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  If you can solve human greed then all other problems will resolve
  • ElectronBadger 3y ago
    This.
  • p-e-w 3y ago
    What does it mean to "solve human greed"?
    • em-bee 3y ago
      teach people not to be greedy. see my other related comments on this page.
    • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Create a system or structure that naturally dis-incentivizes greedy activity and promotes pro-social community development
      • gremlinsinc 3y ago
        if everything was automated and the only fields left were science or arts, ie exploring the universe or entertaining those who do, well imagine a world where half the people are researching scientific endeavors, I don't think you can get much closer to star Trek unless we have first contact with the vulkans.
        • em-bee 3y ago
          imagine a world where half the people are researching scientific endeavors exactly this. most people i talk to about this feel their mind blown when they think about the implications. i don't know why this is so hard to imagine.
          • 3y ago
• surprisetalk 3y ago
  The world's hardest problems are generally uninteresting because they aren't problems you personally can do anything about without years of training. "What is the highest-impact problem you are capable of solving?" ^^ I think this question is more powerful and much more difficult. Learning your limits is incredibly hard. You have to border between optimism and pessimism -- between ego and humility. After you understand your capabilities, follow your curiosity to find great problems. I think the discovery of good problems is itself the important trait. If you rely upon others to tell you which problems are important, you will spin directionless without understanding the underlying principles.
  • tracker1 3y ago
    There's almost always more you can do. 1. Get your home in order, groom yourself, take care of your family. 2. Get more involved in your local community, church, charity, local politics 3. Get some issue awareness and vote without being a useful idiot Those three categories are all things that most people are more than capable of and simply don't... "I don't have time..." meh, most people have time to spend an hour on social media, hours on youtube or playing games every day. There's plenty of time. I was in the dating pool about 7 years ago, and one thing I always remembered was how much people would say they wanted a relationship, but wouldn't actually take the time to meet someone during the week after work. I mean, if it's something that matters to you, it's something you want in your life to accomplish you make the time. You don't reap rewards and accomplishments without effort.
  • glutee 3y ago
    Great answer!
  • bluGill 3y ago
    Even if you could solve the hardest problem, you still need to eat while working on it. This means that one of the most important problems to solve is more efficient basics. 500 years ago 95% of the world males were farmers (maybe enslaved, but still farmer). Women had to spend 10 hours per day making clothing. (Historians can give better numbers and details of the sex difference, but for this discussion the above is close enough despite missing many details) Making the basics more efficient is always helpful. Though this is hard as a lot of smart people are already on the job.
• p-e-w 3y ago
  "What does it mean to be human?" We are about to see machines surpass human performance at every conceivable task. I therefore consider the problem of understanding what humans are at the fundamental, existential level (besides second-class machines) to be the deepest and most important problem of today. And I suspect it will be the only problem left for the humans of tomorrow.
• nthypes 3y ago
  LLM context window limitation.
• aa1234556 3y ago
  [dead]
• jehb 3y ago
  Non-exploitative business models.
  • bentoniteclay 3y ago
    Maybe to expand on this a bit, I suspect supply chain transparency is an important goal. It's generally accepted that if you're using a phone, you're probably using a product that at some level relied on slave labor / forced labor. Some companies, like Fairphone, have made huge strides into addressing this problem, but there's a big question about how sustainable they are in our present economy. They may fail because of restrictions they have imposed on themselves, that every other company should be operating under as well.
• LeonB 3y ago
  Richard Hamming gave a very influential lecture called “You and your research” — there are a few versions of it online and it’s been discussed here a few times before. He poses the same question in pretty much the same way, “why aren’t you working on the most important questions in your field?” I would say that what he defines as “important” is along the lines of “what will be the most influential?” - the sorts of things that bring Nobel prizes and glory. But no one can tell you what is important: it depends on your own values; it’s a question you have to ask yourself.
• seaucre 3y ago
  This might be helpful: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/ https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/
• cnity 3y ago
  I would take a different approach than many other problems here. - Healing damaged relationships in your life. - Addressing unresolved internal traumas and fully integrating them. - Replacing addictive and avoidant behaviours and taking care of the problems in your life head on. I don't have "the answer" to any of these, obviously, but they are certainly big and important.
  • tracker1 3y ago
    Get yourself and your house in order first. You can't help someone else effectively if you are a total mess. That said, community engagement, volunteering and charity are all things that help you get your priorities straight as well. But you need to get your own shit in order pretty early on.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    This is probably close to the correct answer. The “real big” problems are also things you have little influence on - but your own like you have major influence on. And you can’t easily change others, but you can work on yourself. (It won’t be easy.)
  • paulcole 3y ago
    Yeah this is where my mind went as well, instead of something like "climate change" or "self-driving cars". If you're in the United States, I think the biggest problem you can solve is to make sure that you and your family are as insulated as possible from the US healthcare system. - Get and stay as healthy and fit as possible - Get enough money to where you can afford the majority of the care you and your family need (either through work insurance or straight cash) - Learn how to advocate for yourself and your family - Understand how to minimize your chances of going broke as a result of a health issue
    • gnz11 3y ago
      This is one of the saddest comments I’ve read of late.
      • 3y ago
• sph 3y ago
  Tearing down the political circus, big government and achieving a pocket of anarchism powered by free, unconstrained trade. Green, sustainable, plentiful energy. Turning trash into products. Achieve greater and more harmonious integration of technology and nature. Fostering small decentralised groups, communities, instead of large institutions, companies, projects. Doing more research on how small groups of people behave, as opposed to what sociology has been doing for the past 75 years. Making technology work for us. Dedicating 40 hours a week for 50 years to full time employment, for the privilege of hiding from the rain, is a level of slavery most people are happy to defend. Declaring the current computing stack as bankrupt and unsustainable and explore novel ways of expanding human intellect through technology. The current code-compile-run model was already ancient in the 1970s. We have reached a local maxima, time to try something different. -- These are the things I care about, and not enough time nor connections to make a significant dent to any of them, just yet. Happy to chat about any of this with other restless souls.
  • HKH2 3y ago
    > Doing more research on how small groups of people behave, as opposed to what sociology has been doing for the past 75 years. I think that's one of the roles of anthropology.
    • sph 3y ago
      OK, perhaps not how they behave, but how best to leverage their potential, while sociological research has mostly been applied to making people work in harmony in large companies or institutions. In fact during my short research on the matter, one source explicitly lamented the fact that pretty much no one has been doing any significant study on small group dynamics since the 70s. All the money is how to make us efficient cogs for the Machine, not how to form small, nimble groups up to of 5 or 6 that are tightly united and motivated in the pursuit of a single goal, often massively more productive than a large system that mostly relies on politics and hierarchy to keep everyone marching in the same direction.
      • HKH2 3y ago
• samsquire 3y ago
  My thoughts: * Some new kind of wholesome work that gives anybody with a mobile phone a source of income, enough to pay for shelter and food. * Invent a way that an organisation's operations that cannot fail because the operations are desired by people and it is not dependent on funding or property. * Abstract the problem of costs so that we can indeed have good things and they are sustainable and kept alive. * Heal the world wide web.
• kristopolous 3y ago
  The internet seems to be a really good tool for sliding some people into ideologies of hate. If you could avoid or correct that course, like at an architectural and protocol level that'd fix a big problem of the internet. I'd only accept that it's not possible if someone could somehow demonstrate a logical proof (such as, presume a system existed, then prove by contradiction that it's not possible, etc). That would be an achievement in itself.
  • calny 3y ago
    Great answer. Related: attention hijacking. There's so much online psychological manipulation that manipulates people's attention and intentionality.
  • cinntaile 3y ago
    I doubt the solution to ideologies of hate is blocking them at the architectural or protocol level. That sounds just as dystopic, if not more.
    • calny 3y ago
      I agree but I don't think the suggestion was to block ideologies. Rather, change the online ecosystem to stop driving people toward rage. How to do it is another question.
    • kristopolous 3y ago
      blocking wasn't the suggestion. It was the identification of the problem. It's a complex and sophisticated topic. Mass shootings that start with people being radicalized by some kind of online patterns and systems is certainly a problem worth trying to fundamentally tackle somehow. I've got no fixes so that's why I mentioned it.
      • cinntaile 3y ago
        I see, then I misunderstood. My bad
  • 3y ago
• mg 3y ago
  I have the feeling that we are looking at climate change wrong. All the discussion is about reducing CO2 emissions. But we have nothing to show for it. Even the during the Covid lockdowns, CO2 emissions were reduced by only 10%: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. That means even if we permanently take the extreme measures of the Covid lockdowns, global warming would be in 11 years were it would be in 10 years if we did nothing. Yes, we should continue to push towards reducing CO2 emissions. A carbon tax would probably be the most effective way to achieve that. But that will only give us more time to prepare for the inevitable: Living on a planet with higher temperatures and all kinds of problems that arise from it. It will happen. What technologies can we develop to cope with it?
  • amerkhalid 3y ago
    Recently, my friends and I were discussing same thing about climate change that we are focused on symptoms instead of the main cause. It is a bit controversial but I think the best way to deal with climate change is to have less kids. I say that as a parent. It sounds authoritarian and having kids is basic animal instinct. And probably smarter minds have already thought about it and realized that it would be easier to do everything else except ask people to have less kids.
  • seesawtron 3y ago
    CO2 absorption is the new technology that is more promising than reducing CO2 emissions. Imagine, you could buy a device that can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and which can subsequently be either converted to a form that is more eco friendly or could be stored in a way that doesn't contribute to global warming, governments and people would invest in that.
    • matthewfelgate 3y ago
      Carbon capture is a scam.
      • wslh 3y ago
• wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Scaling worker cooperatives. Giving tools/automation that makes it viable. Building HR-alternative software for workers to organize with and provide for themselves the things that HR denies them (pay transparency, mutual aid, feedback accountability, worker rights training, etc)
• acqbu 3y ago
  Affordable electric vehicles
• bloopernova 3y ago
  Apologies for the USA centric views: Tackling climate change mitigation and remediation. Getting more people off social media. Protecting libraries. Making the police more professional. Raising the bar for police candidates. Stopping the racism and fascism embedded in some police department cultures. Overhauling the US political system to work for the people rather than the rich. Protecting the rights of women, including bodily autonomy. Protecting the rights of queer people. Protecting the rights of non white people. Reducing plastics use. Planting more trees. Improving housing construction standards. Giving everyone a permanent place to live. Decoupling healthcare from employment. Universal healthcare. Increasing the number of doctors and nurses. 4 day working week. Forcing healthcare professionals to work normal number of hours. Teaching good parenting at school. And various other life skills. Improving teacher conditions. Preventing fascism from continuing to rise in America.
  • throw1234651234 3y ago
    At least you are easy to filter, thank you.
  • EdTechAndrew 3y ago
    Fantastic list. A lot of each are places anyone can start helping with too.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • androidbishop 3y ago
    I enthusiastically support this list
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Would add "encouraging public policy around walkable communities" to your already top notch list. chef kiss
  • eldritch_4ier 3y ago
    This list is biased in a few ways, so it’s harder to calm these “major problems” when some of them are just fear mongered out of proportion. To round it out though, here’s another list: Uplifting the many men falling out of society Protecting children and their parental rights Reforming harmful public sector unions like schools and police Eliminating systemically racist anti white laws in everything from affirmative action to farm subsidies Eliminating anti white bias in hiring Reversing the rapidly declining birth rates Reducing the normalization of sexual degeneracy from porn addiction to the proliferation of digital prostitution (onlyfans) Reversing the declining trust in institutions (media, public health, DOJ, etc)
• marmarama 3y ago
  Solving the trust and bad actor problems on the internet, without turning the internet into a set of restrictive walled gardens. Personally I think it's partly solvable with a combination of cryptographically signed HTML elements and a web of trust similar to Raph Levien's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato or https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/ But it's going to be a big piece of work.
  • louwrentius 3y ago
    That’s a political not a technical problem.
    • em-bee 3y ago
      it's a social problem, and the only way i believe we can ultimately solve it is by teaching everyone to be better people. until we do that there will always be people who will try to take advantage and become a bad actor. teaching people to be better is the only way to avoid oppressive technical measures. because most technical measures will end up being oppresive at least for some minority or corner cases that don't fit the expectations. i also fear that technical measures have a tendency to get in the way of diversity as they force the same behavior on everyone and punish or prevent people doing things differently.
      • warrenm 3y ago
        ...but mere education doesn't work (not against those who want to be a "bad actor") ... if anything, more education makes it possible for more people to be "bad actors"
        • em-bee 3y ago
          you are right, mere STEM education could help enable bad actors. but children are not born wanting to be bad actors. part of the education needs to be moral education, starting from childhood, about what is good and bad behavior. good rolemodels, etc. we will never completely eliminate bad behavior but we can reduce the likelihood of it occurring by teaching everyone about good behavior.
• oliverbennett 3y ago
  In 2015 the UN created 17 ‘Global Goals’ (https://www.globalgoals.org/ https://www.globalgoals.org/) that are meant to be a "shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future": Goal 1: No poverty Goal 2: Zero hunger (No hunger) Goal 3: Good health and well-being Goal 4: Quality education Goal 5: Gender equality Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure Goal 10: Reduced inequality Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production Goal 13: Climate action Goal 14: Life below water Goal 15: Life on land Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions Goal 17: Partnership for the goals Each one is broken down into subtasks and targets. Making a dent in any of them would be worthwhile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sustainable_Development_Goal_targets_and_indicators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sustainable_Developmen...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• spacebanana7 3y ago
  Local government SaaS. There's so much business processing in local government whose cost could be cut by an order of magnitude if extracted into external software. In an inflationary world with stretched budgets, this could add much needed resources to public services. For example, instead of each police force building their own video reporting system they could share an external one. Similar for booking GP appointments, managing jury duty, applying for council tax discounts and managing parking permits. People might critique this comment by referring to SaaS solutions which already solve these problems. However, none of these are adopted at scale. The biggest barrier to widespread adoption lies in the sales process. Marketing to governments is hard and the challenge of effectively addressing privacy/ethics/sovereignty concerns is bigger than with most private sector actors.
  • warrenm 3y ago
    That was more-or-less the premise of the company profiled in Startup.com[0], govWorks They were somewhere between 6-10 years too early - but had a great premise for a company ------- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com
  • mu53 3y ago
    [dead]
• ashaikh 3y ago
  Making child care affordable.
• boredumb 3y ago
  universal access to internet, universal access to hover powered transportation devices.
• Barrin92 3y ago
  I don't think big and important are synonymous. One of the most important problems in many communities is the vanishing of so called 'third places'. The places people go that isn't their home or work. Many communities lack them them nowadays. This is something everyone can work on, you don't need to be a climate scientist or solve global peace. If you're a programmer as many people here are you can work on buildings things for your community, your neighborhood, a civic organisation, and so on. The alternative to building some soulless ad platform isn't some world changing thing, it's simply to build small scale things with good incentives for people around you. That is important, and if enough people do it, collectively it will have a big impact.
• dinopete 3y ago
  I have moved from scientific research to the tech industry working on inane problems to working in health data science. I get infinitely more reward working on what I feel are important issues than I did working for something I didn’t care about (even though the money was much better!). The important issues as I see it: * improving health care, access to health care and generally helping people to live healthier lives. * helping in some way those in poverty around the world. * Climate change
• EdTechAndrew 3y ago
  I feel like this can really vary by person. Some things may be more important to others. I personally think seeking ways to improve transit and reduce car dependency is an important task. A lot of other commentors mention electric cars. These are conflicting goals but both solve similar problems and may be worthwhile to work on. If you are interested in seeing what jobs are actually out there, I think "80,000 Hours" is a good place to start: https://80000hours.org/start-here/?int_campaign=2021-12--primary-navigation__start-here https://80000hours.org/start-here/?int_campaign=2021-12--pri.... I don't think they are always perfect, but I think the idea is in the right place and their job board often has roles that are working on important problems for humanity.
• numbers_guy 3y ago
  With regards to global warming, one important task is to more accurately and convincingly measure the cost of climate change. People are already working on this topic, but all the work is quite napkin-mathsy at this point, and of course heavily politicized. If one could very convincingly predict the future cost of climate change it would do a lot to convince people to pay today to avoid the worst in the future.
• konschubert 3y ago
  Self driving vehicles will eliminate the leading cause of death for grownups under 40.
  • dsm4ck 3y ago
    Is it realistic to think self-driving cars will have a 0% fatal accident rate?
    • konschubert 3y ago
      No of course not. But even a 50% reduction would reduce immense amounts of suffering.
      • robotresearcher 3y ago
        You said ‘eliminate’ the leading cause of death, not ‘greatly reduce’, hence the push back.
        • konschubert 3y ago
          Okay, fair point.
  • phyllistine 3y ago
    Mass transit construction, promotion, and adoption would solve the same problem with technology that is easier to build and distribute.
    • konschubert 3y ago
      The sad reality of our world is that transit hasn’t so far been able to eliminate cars. We should keep on improving transit, but in the meantime, self driving cars will bring immense safety benefits for cyclists and pedestrians. People will cycle more around self driving cars because they won’t tailgate and they will pass with the appropriate margin.
• sshine 3y ago
  - Sustainable *and* scalable agriculture - Energy sector transition to renewable I quit finance and work on EV chargers. The energy sector seems like an interesting place to be as a software engineer. A lot of the software problems has to do with customer acquisition, user interaction, and pricing, but there are lots of real engineering problems, too.
• lumb63 3y ago
  I recommend taking some time to consciously assess your own values. When I went through this exercise several years ago, I wrote down things like “family”, “helping others”, “pursuit of knowledge”, “health”. Once you understand what is important to you, set out to find ways to align your actions with those values. For instance, if I value family and don’t think I’m spending enough time with my family, I should make a goal to spend a certain amount of time with my family. The “real problems” are whatever you decide they are.
• brianbreslin 3y ago
  I think you need to think of it from 2 perspectives. What if I only had 5 years to make an impact and what if I had 20. The UN has its 17 sustainable goals [1] which can give you a better idea of what challenges face us at a macro level. Start with your skill set, what do you have a unique advantage in that others don't? Are you a biologist? Work on creating more nutrient-dense banana or something. Know how to code? Solve a simple problem that wastes tons of time at a large scale (help your DMV or help people navigate something cumbersome using tech). [1] https://www.globalgoals.org/take-action/?id=1 https://www.globalgoals.org/take-action/?id=1
• jacknews 3y ago
  We need new ways of living in large-scale societies. Current political systems at almost every scale are still essentially just monkey-troup dominance hierarchies. Market capitalism does not work at this scale, or rather, it works too well, converting everything to paperclips. We want the dynamism and innovation that markets bring, without the rentier-ing and enshitification. I notice a strand in recent reporting trying to distinguish 'rentiers' (bad) from 'capitalists' (good), but it's a false distinction; capitalism almost by definition is people with money using it (by owning the means of production, or of existence) for the goal of making more money. All other goals seem to have become incidental, and the environment, social harmony, individual wellbeing and sanity are all victims. So many problems stem from the incentives these broken systems create. Unconstrained fossil-fuel use, deforestation, pollution of the commons, junk products designed for obsolescence, junk addictive diets, corruption, rash emotive decisionmaking, and on and on.
• jl6 3y ago
  Not really answering the question, but… Ignore those people - it’s perfectly OK to work on small problems, or even just to work to support a family or put food on the table. Little things add up to big things. Don’t beat yourself up about doing “just” earthly tasks. Enjoy the moment. Quit comparing yourself to a straw man aggregated from the best slivers of imperfect people. There’s a good chance any given person’s grand vision of what’s important turns out to be misguided anyway.
• MrsPeaches 3y ago
  Provding access to electricity to people in less-econmically developed nations. South, East and West Africa still have massive issues with providing one of the most transformative technologies ever, to their populations, particularly in rural areas. Average rural electrification rate across Africa is 29%, with places like Zambia at only 11%. https://www.usaid.gov/powerafrica/zambia https://www.usaid.gov/powerafrica/zambia Access to electricity obviously has impact across many aspects of life, but for many of the people I have spoken with, their immediate priority is improving their kids education. If you don't have electricity you can't study after dark. This particuarly impacts girls, who not only don't get the light to study after dark like the boys, they are also responsible for collecting firewood, which is used to get even a little (crappy) light. So after a day at school, the girls go out to collect additional firewood to create light, then are obvisouly exahsted, don't have very good light to study and fall behind in school. That's just at the bottom of the ladder. All the way up industry, they are all impacted by poor electircity supplies. In my opinion, it's a transformational area to be working in.
  • eternityforest 3y ago
    Seems like the tech side is solved on that, we just need more people actually making and distributing the stuff. I wonder what the goal of all the education initiatives are over there though. Are they planning to go to college and do STEM? Do they intend to come to the US, or work there? Is better math skill more useful in daily life aside from STEM than it is here? Seems like the stuff that comes after getting an education is just as important.
    • MrsPeaches 3y ago
      I’d strongly disagree that the tech is solved. We are talking about providing an 1/8th of the worlds population with electricity for the first time. That is a huge challenge. Now add into that doing it in a way that won’t destroy the planet and the fact these people are in some of the remotest areas of the world, it’s definitely not a solved problem on the tech side. We haven’t even figured out how to supply the current population sustainably let alone another 850 million.
• countWSS 3y ago
  In non-software domains: 0.De-acidification of ocean water and rapid fossil fuels phaseout in all industries, preferably before the marine foodchain collapse and de-oxygenation of oceans. 1.Methods for clearing microplastic, PFAS and heavy metals(both of which accumulate in microplastic). 2.developing a sustainable plastic/rubber alternatives without fossil fuels. 3.Development of better supercapacitors and decentralized/distributed electricity storage(as alternative to fossil fuels). 4.Development of non-chemical space launch methods, space factories and asteroid mining. 5.Development of cheap/effective desalinization methods. 6.Development of environmentally friendly re-usable building materials and replaceable building components/parts. In software: Open-source decentralized alternatives for proprietary AI APIs/tools would have biggest long-term impact. Its probably the most important field in software engineering right now, having this power locked in proprietary corporate walled gardens like "Open"AI would also force mainstream AI use to depend on whims of centralized API providers.
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    > Development of cheap/effective desalinization methods. Turns out this is largely impossible due to thermodynamics. The best we'll ever get is something like half the cost of what we're able to do today, which is very far from cheap.
• joefreeman 3y ago
  I think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is good place to get inspiration for this. It's guided my last two job roles in agritech and biotech. But I'm becoming aware that there seems to be an (inverse) correlation between how much money/funding is available as you go down the triangle.
• al_be_back 3y ago
  The worlds is full of problems, no shortages there, the evolution engine is still churning. however, the problems occur with what is meant by "big" [more quantitative, utilizing science + engineering] or "important" [more qualitative, utilizing humanities]. without a common framework of tools, standards and ways it's hard-to-impossible to agree on the existence of 'the problem' and/or how 'big/important' it is.
• dmn322 3y ago
  IMO the #1 biggest most important problem is the design of institutions. Specifically we need to design institutions that can accept higher information throughput from their members. This applies to corporations, governments, academia, etc. When I say information throughput, I mean, accept information from its members and change its own behavior in accordance. Our current institutions were designed when people had to travel days to go contribute to law writing etc. That's no longer the case. The amount of information going to and from our institutions is much larger, but the institutions themselves have not scaled. Institutional processes can be very similar if not equivalent to software. And there are a lot of preventable problems just from scaling. For instance look at our red/blue culture wars and how obviously it corresponds to population density... maybe we need to have variation in policy based on population density. Instead whoever is in power pushes their policies on everyone. When a republican is in, the cities suffer, when a democrat is in, the countryside suffers. We also have corporations making decisions that would not be made if the shareholders and employees were given all the information and polled for the best decision. We have policies that are made "for the greater good" that don't compensate those who lose out. This makes them unpopular. Any policy that is against fossil fuels should also focus on providing compensation to the millions of people who depend on it for their livelihood. We have insane amounts of waste in the government and 20% of people think their jobs that they're forced to work are meaningless. The fact that there are some readily identifiable, strong patterns for some of them indicates that there could be a relatively straightforward cause. IMO these problems aren't impossible to solve. They just need a systematic approach. They need to be studied in academia like we study physics. Imagine if we spent the amount of money we do on particle accelerators to instead create a few dozen "test cities" where people can move there and experiment with different economic and social systems. Until then, though there's still a whole lot of theoretical work that can be done understanding how information flows through an institution and ultimately affects and constrains its behavior
• rado 3y ago
  Cure for cancer
• marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Biggest unsolved problem I'm aware of is product discovery. Given an intention, I want to buy a thing, say a TV; finding an actual good product (according to whatever criteria) has gotten absurdly difficult due to a confluence of effects, including the closure of brick and mortar stores, the death of magazines, the rise of e-commerce market platforms, dropshipping, paid reviews, straight up scams, etc.
  • swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
    All of the original product discovery avenues were bought and paid for by advertisers - magazines, news columns, tv ads. But in the past it was still useful. These days it’s still paid for by advertisers but now you’ve got dropshippers, scammers, cheap ali-baba goods, and almost no verification of quality or authenticity. Is the problem exacerbated accepting advertising money? Can it be solved by only accepting consumer money? Consumer reports is one of those.
  • eternityforest 3y ago
    I have not noticed that. All I ever need to do is look at a the first few Google results and the big brands I already know, and read then one-star reviews on Amazon. They all have the same 4.9 star rating, but some will say "Feels cheap and plasticky", while others will say "Started smoking after a day". I've had a lot of bad results with anything niche and unusual, now I try to stick with really popular products that are so well known that someone would have told me if there was a problem. Power tools don't break. Flashlights charge with USB and are way brighter. The pasta can be whole wheat or made with chickpeas. Pretty much everything mass produced is pretty great at least for the buyer. I suppose I do hear a lot about simple hand tools and the like not being what they used to be though. It seems like most stuff people complain about is low tech stuff that has mostly need replaced by something high tech, causing everyone to forget how to make the simpler stuff, that often wss as much art as science to make.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      > bad results with anything niche and unusual In a way, this is exactly the problem. Product discovery for consumer items is pretty much solved. However, product discovery for niche industrial or scientific items is a difficult area. If you have tons of $$$, it's easy to find representatives for the big suppliers. However, for each of these large suppliers, there are 10 or 100 smaller or even "cottage industry" suppliers. The problem is how you find them in the first place, and how to gain confidence in the quality of what they offer.
• androidbishop 3y ago
  I think an inevitable but mostly untapped direction of research is to leverage biotechnology to manufacture materials to replace plastics, metals, chemicals etc., that either don't have renewable sources or can't be biodegraded back into source material. We can go even further and create new biological machines, bioengineered motors and computers and all kinds of shit scaled up from existing models in nature. The technology of nature and life is far more advanced than anything we have conjured up ourselves, and the more we learn from it and harness it, the more we will be able to advance and evolve our technological progress without creating all the geopolitical and environmental problems that usually come with these advancements.
• JaDogg 3y ago
  Make star-trek replicator.
• ezedv 3y ago
  It's an interesting dilemma; while maximizing user engagement has its place, focusing on solving pressing societal challenges is equally crucial. Issues like climate change, healthcare accessibility, and social inequality are significant problems that require innovative solutions. Perhaps a balanced approach can lead to meaningful contributions that address both user needs and broader global concerns.
• atomicnature 3y ago
  Wonderful question! The most important problem at the societal level is: sustenance, stability, avoidance of complete ruin. And by extension, all the sub-processes that contribute to those goals. Education, economy, law, healthcare, training -- all these contribute to the resolution of social problems. The most important problem at the individual level is: that of realising the nature of self, the mind, the system called "thought"; moving towards an understanding of what the actual position of the individual is in the greater universal order. In most popular culture discourses, one rarely sees any focused activity towards these goals in meaningful ways.
  • em-bee 3y ago
    i like to be more direct and outright state that everyones position in the greater order is that of a contributor to a better world. there is nothing else that is required from the individual besides that. i find that this is important because an "understanding of what the actual position of the individual is in the greater universal order" also works when i say "your position is to be a slave, deal with it." so moving towards an understanding of the position of the individual is not enough. we also need to be clear that this position is the same for everyone, and that we are all part of this equally. there is no hierarchy. combine that with the realization that progress is only achievable through collaboration and you realize that if we want to solve the worlds problems we need to contribute and collaborate.
    • atomicnature 3y ago
      Whether a billionaire in the condo or a beggar on the street, both are equally subject to laws of the universe. This is true under both physical and mental platforms. That's the position of every human. The so-called master and slave both "obey" the dictates of the universe. For instance, you were given no choice about where/when and in what conditions you were born. There is no choice on the matter of upbringing either. Upto an extent, no influence over the early education process as well. You have zero control over most of your bodily and mental processes. The body ages and disintegrates over time. And there's not much you can do about it. And let's not get started about the mind. Quick check: What's going to be your next thought? You have no idea what your next thought is going to be. Given these indisputable indications at human helplessness (mostly), we still go on about all sorts of narratives about master, slave, freedom, equality, whatnot. I recommend you read David Bohm's Thought as a System [1] to learn about what I am talking about in more depth. It may free you from some potentially problematic assumptions you make in your answer. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Thought-as-System-Key-Ideas/dp/0415110300 https://www.amazon.com/Thought-as-System-Key-Ideas/dp/041511... PS: It is important to differentiate action from understanding. More and more action doesn't clear up mental fog on its own (that is, more "contribution", will not automatically give more "clarity"). Bohm recommends "dialogue" as a way to cultivate insight (not that it always works, but there's some potential in it).
• dilippkumar 3y ago
  Here are my two: 1. Software supply chains. Our civilization is built on top of a layer of software that has a gaping security hole the size of a gas giant planet. It's also recursive - software dependencies themselves have further dependencies and so on. As we get into a world with autonomous trucks driving down highways at 60mph and cars that collect a complete profile of location data history of unsuspecting drivers and upload them for "analysis", this problem will explode in ways that very few people can even imagine much less predict. 2. Linux distro upgrades. An Ubuntu LTS release or an RHEL release will eventually come to end of life. At that time, performing an upgrade across a fleet of servers is a complete fucking nightmare. You test everything that you know to test, hit deploy and watch as your servers go down and reboot with a new software version and restart various services and containers and hope everything will be ok. This is not sustainable. A solution is needed and is worth $$$.
• creer 3y ago
  See the recent "Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36651506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36651506
• jeffreygoesto 3y ago
  Did really nobody answer "raising kids" yet? Then I'll do.
• tardismechanic 3y ago
  Get all humans on earth to ponder deeply on the question "Who am I?" - not until they find an answer - but until the question disappears. This is the end of misery.
• blooalien 3y ago
  The biggest, most important problem to work on right now is any and every problem that's currently leading to the destruction of our planet's natural systems. Unchecked greed, rampant extreme inequality, resource abuse/waste, dis/misinformation, political extremism, all of the general stupidity that many (most?) of our richest, most powerful humans are guilty of encouraging/contributing to in the general populace of Planet Earth these days. If you can "increase user engagement" in anything that improves one of these critical areas, or anything related, you're doing humanity (and all life on Earth, really) a service.