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Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#861

Post by eitland »

faluzure wrote: post #670

Human Longevity. 150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. Peopl…

Probably controversial here but as far as I can see correct:

This seems like a shortcut to hell on earth.

Who do you think will have the means to pay for this first?

It won't be the saints, it will be the greediest ones.

So we (or rather out descendants) would probably be stuck with a ruling class of demigods.

Why?

1. They were already pretty well off (since they are the ones who can pay for this treatment in the first place.

2. Now they suddenly also have all the time they want and need.

3. They will now have generations to build alliances etc.

Within three generations no normal person has a chance anymore.

Also for many of those persons I guess it will become nightmarish after a while: the though of dying from a car crash at age 100 probably feels much worse if you are planning to live forever than if you know your lifespan is lifespan.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#862

Post by Toutouxc »

seibelj wrote: post #336
TrackerFF wrote: post #319

It IS being worked on, but things move quite slow - and there doesn't seem to have been much progress for decades, but: Cure for hair-loss. Some might say it's just vanity, but if someone could come up with a cure, and sell it affordably, that would be a multi-billion, maybe even trillion dollar industry. Going from quite balding (NW4-NW7 in balding terminology) to a full head of hair makes most guys look a solid 10-…

Just shave it off / short. The person it affects most is yourself, and confidence does not come from hair.

You seem to be forgetting that women suffer from hair loss too and shaving it off is not an option for them.

Like it or not, bald women are a taboo in our society.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#863

Post by jgwil2 »

DrRobinson wrote: post #759
syndacks wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End of life care is an incredibly expensive endeavor; why are we so adamant about extending the inevitable? IMO it's a subconscious projection of the fact that we do _not_ live meaningful lives in our day to day, and so we fixate on a fantastical (yet inspiring, universal) compensation of extending it forever. "Left to take care of the elderly" suggests we don't value life in the first place. Why extend it further?

The idea isn't that people will live in that fragile and unhealthy state even longer, the idea is to also extend how long we're healthy. Imagine being as healthy as a 30 year old when you're 70 for example. This is often also called healthspan and we probably don't want to extend lifespan too much without also extending the healthspan.

Yes but aging and death are inevitable regardless. Delaying them on an individual basis does nothing to solve that problem.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#864

Post by pdimitar »

fspacef wrote: post #859

Information discovery and what search looks like post Google. Seems like we got to a search bar that can answer any question we type in but haven't thought beyond it. Like what if we were recommended what questions to ask in the first place? Thinking out loud here: we generate a ton of data just by browsing and existing on the internet. This data is plugged into recommendation algos to serve ads. What if instead thes…

> Like what if we were recommended what questions to ask in the first place?

That's what Google is doing in the last several years and it's very annoying. They don't try to look for niche sources and articles and just gently correct your query to pertain to something more popular or trendy. We don't need more of that.

> What if instead these algorithms were tuned to serve us direct websites or text that could provide our next source for inspiration?

Sure, I like that. But how do we ensure it would also not be used for ads and tracking again? I feel companies are just too easily tempted and can't be trusted.

> Seems like we got to a search bar that can answer any question we type in but haven't thought beyond it.

IMO a lot of us here thought about it but (a) it's not easy, it's likely a rather gigantic undertaking and (b) nobody funds such research and (c) we can't do it as a hobby while maintaining a $dayjob so in the end we are the mercy of the corps.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#865

Post by Toutouxc »

aminozuur wrote: post #631
gullywhumper wrote: post #543

Car-free or significantly car-limited communities. Cars that are safer for pedestrians (not just for occupants in cars). Better traffic safety enforcement. Automobiles kill ~6k pedestrians and almost 140k are sent to the ER in the US - many of which will have life-altering injuries. https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...

this already exists google: Western Europe.

I don't understand. Europe has both urban and rural areas, just like any other continent. I believe you can get by without a car in any town that has a school, some shops, a cinema and a pub, anywhere in the world.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#866

Post by slothtrop »

baron816 wrote: post #243

In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…

I believe this will be more important as the nature of work changes. In the short run, owing to more remote work as you say, and in the long-run, owing to jobs themselves being increasingly automated away.

Irl organizations surrounding particular interests do materialize as extensions of online enthusiasm (we see this for meetup groups) but this is still insufficient. What's missing is accessible infrastructure to facilitate new connections. For instance, there are today collaborative workspaces and makerspaces (or even University grounds): these can be a good spatial medium for meeting like-minded people. However, the cost of renting is a deterrent. So, that can be addressed in a myriad of ways. As a remote worker, prior to COVID, I'd periodically hit the coffee shops but this did not appear to be an appropriate medium for engaging others.

We are going about things backwards, because it was all we could do: create organizations surrounding particular subjects, then have people join in. In many cases people are surfing around these groups as a means to an end, they don't care the slightest about the subject but they need it as a medium to connect with others. Not only is this contrived, it can lead to friction between individuals who want to focus on the subject and others who want to go on tangents away from it. This problem disappears if you simply have a space where people can choose to mingle or focus on their projects. Historically, physical spaces like this were always important large communities. Now our socially acceptable avenues for engaging others we don't know include very loud pubs, just barely, sports complexes and the like.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#867

Post by froh »

kreeben wrote: post #477
acd wrote: post #401

That all parents must attend parenting classes. We have drivings licenses to drive a car. Yet there’s no such skill requirements for parents on how to raise children. Cost of dealing with miss raised children is very high.

But sometimes "miss raising" a kid is the right thing to do. This is especially true in a society that has gone awry. Shouldn't I as a parent and who knows my kids and their needs better than anyone be free to raise them as I see fit?

If you don't have any 'baggage' then yes, you'll most probably raise your kid just fine.

But then: what harm would it do if you'd anyhow participate in a training, that, in said happy case, would just reiterate and reinforce what you'd do anyhow?

And has the society possibly gone awry exactly because some common sense in child bearing has been buried? Dunning Kruger tells us we might just not know what we don't know...

So, if the curriculum can be freely chosen for the "parental drivers license" what is the problem?

There is plenty of research on the outcomes of parental training, btw, one random example of a training that has proven useful:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=bris...

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#868

Post by walleeee »

dartharva wrote: post #714
walleeee wrote: post #500

Sustainable agriculture. Ag is the material basis of human society. We have to stop destroying soil. We have to stop poisoning ecosystems. We have to minimize artificial fertilizer inputs. We have to stop emitting and start sequestering atmospheric carbon to mitigate climate instability. If we don't do this we will likely see widespread crop failures and food shortages within 50 years. Land use practices must be refo…

It seems like there do exist more than enough research to perfect agriculture, it's just that it's socioeconomically inviable. Set up optimized, automated farms and you'll be seeing unemployment by the millions as traditional farmers are suddenly deemed obsolete, especially in poor countries that still have majorly agrarian economies.

I'm not convinced agriculture can be "perfected", or that automation is necessarily the way to go. In some situations (e.g., dense urban environments) it seems to make sense, but I think there will remain an important role for smallholders. Huge industrial outfits may make sense under some circumstances, but I think we need a renaissance in small- and medium-sized farms in the developed world, and their protection in the developing world, with farmers incentivized to diversify their output, rejuvenate their land, and produce primarily for their local and regional communities, rather than barely scraping by with destructive practices and federal subsidies as they are often forced to do today. Many farmers in the United States do not even own the land they work, reducing incentives for responsible management.

The fact that our political and economic systems do not prioritize long-term agricultural viability, as you point out, ought to give us pause.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#869

Post by TeMPOraL »

cookiengineer wrote: post #697

Web Filtering, Web Automation and especially the UX behind it. I don't understand why the Web Browser ecosystem is stuck with Extensions, and why Web Browsers, the most used programs on the planet, are still unautomated for 99% of humans. This just doesn't make sense in any economical or rational view. Web Filtering and Ad Blocking are things that are stuck UX wise, because currently there are basically two different…

> I don't understand why the Web Browser ecosystem is stuck with Extensions, and why Web Browsers, the most used programs on the planet, are still unautomated for 99% of humans.

It's simple, really: because it's strongly against the interest of people with money. And I don't mean some shady megacorps like Google here. A sane web goes against most of the commerce, big and small alike.

Ad blockers are what they are because there's no money in making them, and a lot of money in making them go away. That's why they're not included in browsers by default (all two relevant browsers being directly or indirectly ad-funded). A good chunk of the Internet - including all the little content creators - makes money from ads, and would like to see the blockers go away.

> once a Web Browser gets smart enough to understand the semantics of a website, and the implications of user interactions ( e.g. "make a payment" or "subscribe to channel") - it can be recorded, trained, and automated

Again, entirely against the interests of everyone with money. Pretty much every business on-line wants to control the interaction between their sites and you, and most of them want to use that control to screw you over. Expose you to extra advertising, upsell you some of their other wares, make sure you choose the option that's profitable for you and not them, etc. Whether you (generic you) realize it or not, the relationship between you and a commercial site is almost always antagonistic. Any automation and browser smarts that makes your experience better is one that cuts into site owners profits.

In short, the problem isn't technology. The problem is business incentives. The web is a wild west, built for people with means to exploit those without.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#870

Post by dandare »

Baby crib connected to a senior. You have countless of lonly seniors and countless of babies that need constant attention during their sleep. The solution is an automated arm mountable to any crib, two refurbished tablet and a decent software to connect the two. The senior could: watch the baby, check that it breaths, take its temperature, talk/sing to the baby, use the hand to give it a dummy, cover the baby with a blanket, reposition the baby slightly or alert the on place caregiver.
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