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Ask HN: What Problem Would You Solve with Unlimited Resources? [May 2025]
I love the innovative ideas and unexpected insights from HN citizens. Let’s go deep—what challenge would you tackle if you had unlimited resources, like boundless funding, talent, or time?
Why would you choose to solve it? Do you actually need unlimited resources to start?
- alganet 1y agoThe problem I want to solve has nothing to do with limited resources. Lack of kindness. There is no way to solve it. No amount of resources, talent, funding or media can solve it. It's a very simple problem with no solution.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoBuild community and protect it.
- alganet 1y agoI am sorry, it makes no sense. You will just alienate whoever is kind. Trust me, this problem has no solution. Kindness will be gone, and no one will ever notice.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoI built community with a core group of kind people. Kind people allowed, unkind people not. Totally possible.
- alganet 1y agoI thought a lot about it in the past. Sounds simple, it's not.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoReally it is simple, just not easy. More accurately, somewhat difficult, and takes a bit of focused effort. Which can more than overwhelm the simplicity. Regardless, a lot of the most worthwhile things are neither easy nor simple. So this has at least something going for it that most things do not.
- alganet 1y agoYou haven't addressed the issue.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoGood call. But it's not my issue. I've got my hands full with things that are neither simple nor easy :)
- alganet 1y agoSeems like you're wasting time then.
- owebmaster 1y agoRivalry between communities is what creates most cruelty. Why not starting by considering the whole humanity a community?
- alganet 1y agoYou all have too many competing interests. Uniting humanity is a pipe dream, not a solution for the lack of kindness.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoLot of low quality in humanity in the aggregate. I am only interested in emotionally healthy, high empathy humans who want to defend and empower other humans. Selfish? Controlling? Not respecting of the human rights of others? Hard pass. Life is too short to compromise on who you associate with and are there for imho.
- owebmaster 1y agoThat's not kindness, that selfishness and tribalism, just like we have today.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoYou asked, I shared, I’m comfortable with the mental model and not concerned about the opinion of others on the topic.
- hedayet 1y agooff topic but I'd be very curious to know what role resource plays on kindness. i.e., to proof or disproof this hypothesis - "lack of resource increases cruelty"
- apothegm 1y agoStudies show that greater wealth tends to make people less considerate and prosocial. One theory is that this is because they’re no longer as interdependent on others.
- mrtomservo 1y agoI live in a city with a large number of unhoused people. I think I would use unlimited resources to buy and renovate old buildings[1] downtown to build housing, and fund support services on-site to help people escape homelessness and addiction. I would want to solve this because unhoused people are suffering, and downtown (as a neighborhood) has been sort of hollowed out by business choosing to leave for practical reasons (WFH) and because of the perception of "too many" unhoused people. I love downtown, it's just not a pleasant place to spend time, especially at night. I do not have the resources nor the political acumen for these kinds of initiatives, and I think it would take a great deal of resources to not only buy the land but demolish or renovate the buildings. It would create a lot of jobs (construction at first) but I think there's a large amount of activation energy required to get started. [1]: https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/legal-action-taken-against-owner-of-california-theatre/509-27b417a3-bd76-47b4-bd6f-33eb63eee529 https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/legal-action-taken-a...
- AStonesThrow 1y agoBut why would you do that when you are guaranteed to fail? It's very twee of people to believe that solving homelessness is a matter of resource allocation, or if we were all just more philanthropic, or if only there were more services and we could get to people where they're at. But it's never a matter of these things. Being homeless has many advantages, many perks, and indeed there are non-negligible percentages of homeless people who prefer to be that way. And if you try to talk them out of it, they will resist. And there are also non-negligible percentages of homeless people who don't know how to be anything but, and when it becomes a way of life for them, they are technically feral, and it is simply a monumental effort to change them into "housed people" who can actually manage a stable household. That's a big ask for so many people, including those who do not struggle with mental health and addiction issues. The root causes of homelessness are manifold and varied. There may be a dozen identifiable root causes here; are you going to attack all of them equally? Even your unlimited resources cannot. You need to work with a willing population here. Many homeless people are simply unwilling. Many others are not so selfish that they wouldn't share those resources with others, and that's a huge problem. Section 8 regularly chases people out after they've let in undesirable guests. SNAP has to close out people who are sharing their food resources. If you've got unlimited resources, then who's going to tell you that you need to allocate them judiciously to get the best impact? One huge reason that people are out on the streets is because, 50 years ago, they may have been institutionalized. And that can't be done presently, so they are held by "virtual restraints" such as drugs and clinics. And so, if you really wanted to get people off the streets, would you ramp up imprisonment and incarceration? Would you lower the standards, to institutionalize people who cannot care for themselves? What sort of mass labor camps and imprisonment looks attractive to you at this point, Mr. Unlimited Resources? Would you also pay for the trains to cart them off to wherever they are designated? It doesn't feel so good to "get people off the streets" when your realistic alternatives have an unsavory edge to them.
- BMc2020 1y agoThe problem of evil men. I would start by seperating the evil billionaires from their property.
- solardev 1y agoI'd start a private army big enough to take on the E.U., then use it to hunt down every last cookie banner in the world. Nobody will ever have to click one again. Nobody would ever dare make one again.
- perilunar 1y agoSites wouldn’t need cookie banners if they didn’t set cookies — you don’t need to take on the EU, just convince companies to stop tracking us.
- perilunar 1y agoUnlimited? Mine asteroids, build giant habitats in Earth and Solar orbit. Explore and colonise the Solar System.
- owebmaster 1y agoFor what reason? Fun?
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y agoAll of them? "Unlimited" isn't a very interesting category for that reason.
- _luiza_ 1y agogot a list?
- fuzzfactor 1y agoI figure different people have different lists, and I'm one of them :) I'd start small, whatever it takes to overcome violence, hate, superstition, pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Things like that. With all those failings left behind forever, any lingering problems after that could then be addressed with a lot more clarity. Finally with the resulting peace dividend, I would throw a party like you could never do with all the resources in the world beforehand. But that's just me. Whatever you do have at your disposal, you can always start right now at least on your own self, very few people have enough resources to reach very far anyway.
- 9o1d 1y agoI solved the problem of finding factors for the product of prime numbers. I solved it for five years. I used different methods. There is even a graphical method https://github.com/azhibaev/c3_opengl https://github.com/azhibaev/c3_opengl As a result, I came to the creation of a new programming language based on the C language. I realized that the C++ language was an evolution, but incorrectly implemented. The mistake is that a person is forced to write classes. But a person is not able to write a correct class. Only a translator can do this. I started doing this in my work https://github.com/azhibaev/c3 https://github.com/azhibaev/c3 but I do not have enough funding. I plan to build a parser for the C language https://github.com/azhibaev/c_parser https://github.com/azhibaev/c_parser , and create a new grammar. I plan to support the old grammar for Python and JavaScript. In general, you will be able to write strings in these languages inside a C program. I am inventing new ways to automatically generate programs. One new way is the ability to call a non-existent function from a program with a non-existent data structure that should be created automatically when compiling the program. I'm looking for a job, but work takes up all my time and I can't do this project then.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoThe progress you make on difficult problems using insignificant resources can indicate such an extreme leverage of those resources, that it can be truly intimidating to those having actual significant resources themselves. Even more threatening to those having "abundant" resources, and again a whole new level of fear by those whose resources are not a result of challenging efforts they themselves have made. Be careful of downward pressure from those who almost never perceive any chance of being "leapfrogged" in some way or another, the unfamiliar feelings can trigger an almost instinctual response that acts to keep you separated from enough resources to become self-sustaining, if possible.
- sky2224 1y agoSomething to address the overwhelming spread of information (whether or not it's accurate). We are destroying each other cognitively and it is tearing society to pieces. Frankly, if the solution was to develop some technology that destroyed all the technology that overly connects us, I'd fund and build it. We need to put our phones away.
- morisil 1y agoI would support every political and social movement progressing us on the spectrum from patriarchy to matriarchy. In particular I would put pressure on the legal system of countries where women are still not allowed to inherit land and property. The next biggest problems to tackle: - the way we are producing proteins - the way we are producing energy Short term problems to address: - adoption of cognitive AI in scientific research I am building very potent autonomous AI agents now, so soon I will be able to unleash them to crunch all these problems, hopefully. :)
- owebmaster 1y ago> I am building very potent autonomous AI agents now, so soon I will be able to unleash them to crunch all these problems, hopefully. :) We still need the people that enforces patriarchy over matriarchy to use inferior agents.
- owebmaster 1y agoNot tech, but I would urbanize every slum/favela in my country which would make the GDP grows explosively and finally bring the marginalized to XXI century.
- scarface_74 1y agoI would get rid of the Electoral College and gerrymandering.
- nextos 1y agoAging. Increasing the healthspan, i.e. the proportion of healthy years everyone has before their body starts to decay, would unlock lots of good things. You don't need unlimited resources to start. Some approaches, such as making sure the number of immune cells that clear senescent cells stays high as we reach 40 or 50, are not that complex and could be delivered within a decade, provided sufficient funding and focus. The biotechnology is there, but we need better data to design the interventions.
- sepidy 1y agoHealthcare. I would loved to change things and change the incentives from them making money of ppl being sick to actually make money on people being healthy and happy. I would probably started to replace all the current doctors with AI and robots who don't make decisions based on their emotions but based on the actual data and patterns they know.