Optimizing human health through nutrition, robotics, human colonization of space and the planets.
Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#32A fair economy.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#33One strategy that I adopt is to think of industries that are highly manual labor and dream of ways to fix that. I forget the name of the company, but there's a startup in the Bay Area that builds drones for farmers. Right now, farmers wake up early in the morning and drive through small sections of their fields and spot check things to decide what needs water or fertilizer or what-have-you. They have to spot check, b…
DroneDeploy does that: https://www.dronedeploy.com/
One of the best hiring prcoesses I've experienced (didn't end up working there, though)
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#34"I'm not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app"
I think I made the very 1st one of those and I'm working on an upgrade now. lol.
A few areas come to mind that are obvious, like food, shelter, income, energy.
There's a lot of work being done on growing food for personal and community use with controlled systems but there looks (to me) like there's plenty of room for improvement and innovation there still.
From what I've read recently inexpensive, durable, and accurate soil moisture sensors are needed. It looks like a "Pick one feature" situation there right now. I've been pondering that a bit lately.
I've seen some interesting innovation in how weeds are managed in large scale agriculture that include using organic "grit" to "sandblast" weeds with remote controlled mechanically articulated nozzles using image recognition software to direct the blast. This eliminates the need for herbicides so it attempts to solve a very pressing issue.
I recently saw a robotic "weed whacker" on a social funding site that got a lot of attention, but the prototype they showed didn't inspire confidence in me that it'd do much.
Pest control is another obvious pressing problem in agriculture, as is efficient use of water.
I'm currently designing a simple experiment to grow salad veggies outdoors in the winter using low hoop row covers and passive solar heating.
Growing food closer to where it's consumed has the potential to greatly reduce costs, environmental impact, and hunger, and it looks to me like there's a lot of headroom there for improvement.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#35Journalism!
If you haven't noticed, the world around us is falling apart. Personally, I consider this malady of discontent just a result of letting every idiot post their comments on the internet. But that doesn't change the fact that something needs to be done, and I think it's more of a problem of teaching people how the process works, not so much to change the outcomes. Generally, I see people reaching for conspiracy theories or accusations of corruption whenever they don't understand the complexity of a problem. I. e. "Why don't they just build nuclear power plants? It's CO_2 neutral, and Obama's solar power mafia is just trying to stop the neutron-emitting pebble-fusor that will be 10x cheaper! Scandalous!"
Unfortunately, I haven't found the silver bullet to do this. So, second best: somehow help today's quality publishers to survive, and hope they have better ideas. There are two tech/business ideas I would love to see:
a. "The world's worst ad-blocker"
Currently, all ad blockers are focused on blocking as much as possible. That, and speed, are basically the metrics they show you.
I think (hope) there's a sizeable fraction of people that wouldn't mind unobtrusive, non-spyware advertisement if it helps their favourite writers to make rent. What's needed is an ad blocker that constantly evaluates parameters including the page publisher's reputation, the ad network, the product/company being advertised, the file sizes, ad positioning, movement and/or sound, and privacy implications. Then allow. the user (some) leeway to influence it to their liking.
b. A netflix-like subscription
This is more of a business problem. I guess publishers are afraid of losing their current $200/yr subscribers to a service that only pays them $10/yr or so, because it divides those $200 among a number of publishers.
They may be right. But personally, I have just one subscription, and that's the really cheap New Yorker, which I bought just to not be a complete free rider. I have a few hundred $ for whoever wants it, and gets me the NYT/Economist/WSJ/FT/etc. as a package deal.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#36I would be interesting in knowing a major pure programming problem, not one motivated by the outside world. Like the open problems of pure math.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#37The lack of empathy that online communication encourages. Empathy defined as conscious attempts to think and feel what the person you're talking to thinks and feels. It's quite natural with in-person and even voice communication. An extension of this problem is the lack of empathy online bleeding into offline communication.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#38Batteries. Batteries are the number one technical problem right now. A battery with energy density approaching crude oil would revolutionize the world beyond even what the Internet did. We really don't have an energy generation problem, we have an energy storage problem.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can only assume you haven't spent a lot of time in the EU... Switzerland (which is not in the EU) is the only European country I've been to that does not have a very visible population of homeless people.
20 years in Europe. I've never never never never tripped over crazy homeless. It's all I do in Berkeley and SF. It's not a small, nuanced difference but literally night and day. Have you really seen tents downtown in any city in Europe? I'm American but most Europeans I know struggle with living in the Bay Area because it's such a shock for them.
SF is also an extreme example of homeless problems because of various factors (weather, systems which attract homeless, etc).
There's a homeless problem in other cities, but we don't have tents downtown.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#40The biggest problem we are currently facing, as a species, is self-destruction. The two problems are:
1. How do we stop destroying our climate and planet as quickly as possible?
2. How do we look for new planets to colonize?