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Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

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131–140 of 231 posts

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#131
Establish conventions for academic publications that maximize easily machine-readable content instead of looking good when printed to a paper journal. Build a search engine that can answer advanced queries about existing research based on the citation links, machine-readable datasets and formal description language descriptions of the main contents of the articles.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#133
post #23

Job search is very broken. Monster/Dice/Craigslist &c are broken. Not sexy, I know, but I imagine the people who solve that problem will become quite rich.

Isn't this covered by Indeed/Simplyhired?

SimplyHired and Indeed are mostly aggregators of other boards. It's just a slick interface on a broken system.

I'd like to see something that's a little more direct, that gets me to HR/hiring managers with fewer people in the middle.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#134
post #87

Safe liposuction. (Going to be a few self-righteous "just eat less and exercise" replies to this one by metabolically advantaged folks who haven't got the slightest clue how difficult it can be to lose weight when your body doesn't want to cooperate.) Alternatively, put some rats on Seth Roberts's set-point diet (aka Shangri-La diet) and figure out the path of action, then develop it in pill form for those of us wher…

If you're going to be putting a lot of R&D into changing people's bodies, why not do it in something cool like regulating myostatin production? Get that one done safely, and we can all be Mr. Olympia.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#135
post #87

Safe liposuction. (Going to be a few self-righteous "just eat less and exercise" replies to this one by metabolically advantaged folks who haven't got the slightest clue how difficult it can be to lose weight when your body doesn't want to cooperate.) Alternatively, put some rats on Seth Roberts's set-point diet (aka Shangri-La diet) and figure out the path of action, then develop it in pill form for those of us wher…

Safe liposuction. (Going to be a few self-righteous "just eat less and exercise" replies to this one by metabolically advantaged folks who haven't got the slightest clue how difficult it can be to lose weight when your body doesn't want to cooperate.)

Metacognition can help with this (at least until safe weight-loss pills are invented).

The following worked for me: I taught myself to enjoy the suffering associated with weight loss/fitness. Basically, I made feeling hunger/muscle soreness my short term goal. When I didn't feel feel hungry/tired, I actively tried to feel it.

Using that strategy, I went from about 300lb to 210lb. (Switching that strategy off once I reached 210lb was also a bit tough. )

In the past year, I've used the same strategy (making muscle soreness my goal) to gain about 15 lb of muscle.

To learn Eskrima (fighting with a short club), I also make bruises a short term goal. This encourages me to fight people far above my level, which teaches you far more than fighting people at your level.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#136
easy to setup music system: buy x speakers, just put them where you want them (connect to electricity), decent music quality (varying sizes of speakers), they all play music from one computer somewhere in the house (wifi). About 80$ per average speaker (not 3 or 400$ as the current systems)

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#139
A good photo management system for Windows that is designed to be useful over 10, 20 years (ie. keeps your photos stored, backedup, organized in a way that's not too proprietary). Picasa is powerful but has a CRAP ui, iPhoto is much better, but Mac only.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#140
post #109

The problem of induction. No one has answered Hume, except Kant and he dodged the question. This is the big question, underlying integration of QM/GR, the nature of time, P=NP?, AI, a stable credit-money system, scientific ethics, chicken or egg?, etc, etc. Once this is resolved, I feel sorry for future generation (not really) because its "only" applications forever after.

ET Jaynes solved it indirectly in his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science(1). As a tl;dr, it turns out that knowledge--as it's defined in the problem of induction--doesn't exist.

(1) http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html

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