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Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

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Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

#51

Post by david927 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #39
david927 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was in LA recently and there was an entire tent city in the heart of downtown Orange County.

The link below lists around 30 US cities with tent cities downtown.

Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

#54

Post by phillc73 »

A better way to connect funding with research.

This applies to many fields, but in general the academic and R&D funding process feels broken. Researchers and scientists spend a disproportionate amount of time writing funding applications, rather than researching or doing science.

Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

#55

Post by stcredzero »

wbl wrote: post #9

Make formal methods cheaper and easier to use.

That's the wrong way to frame that problem. Formal methods generally have a mindshare problem that underlies their cost problems. Make formal methods more accessible to the average programmer.

Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

#56

Post by icameron »

Autonomous cars. Traffic is bad for the environment, safety, and psychological health of drivers. Let's reclaim years of our lives that are spent in traffic.

Litter drone. Design a solar powered robotic beach sweeper, to identity and collect the trillions of plastic chips that are covering the beaches. Extend the idea to a fleet seaworthy drones to remove floating micro debris and call in help for large floating debris.

Thanks for asking!

Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

#57

Post by PaulHoule »

tedmiston wrote: post #16

Making good financial advice and planning accessible to everyone, especially those who need it most.

It's not clear what that means. Frequently the "financial planning" drumbeat seems oriented towards doing what is good for Wall Street.

Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

#58

Post by jd3 »

peterwwillis wrote: post #50

A big difference how? You could work for the NSA and make it easier for the government to know people's thoughts, that would sure make a big difference in the world. Or you could build an information sharing and vetting platform which could use proofs from multiple independent sources to certify data as true by tying it to factual evidence, a kind of scientific reddit to combat disinformation. You could use it as a b…

I suppose you're referring to wikitribune?

Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

#59

Post by lazyjones »

Automatic translation/interoperability between programming languages. The fragmentation of software into dozens of major languages hurts software quality, limits language choices, limits adoption of new languages, limits availability of software on new/less popular platforms, increases cognitive load for developers and sysadmins...

(and JavaScript as the most popular transpiler target today is depressing)

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