Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely feels like SpaceX just ate Boom's lunch last night.
Tell me about it! I think it's going to come down to cost. If SpaceX is anywhere near $2,500 a flight, it's going to be a tough slog for Boom.
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Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#102Improving voter turnout. Enabling food ingredient dissemination. Job and educational opportunities for ex cons and poor disadvantaged people. Doing something modern with all those idle train tracks. 100x roi blood tests (the thing theranos lied about). There are dozens of big problems. Please share what your short list is and please tone down the saas put downs. A lot of good people have put a lot of their life into building honest businesses.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#103When a scientist wants to make progress in some field, the scientist first educates herself on the state of the art, and then does novel research that pushes the frontier. When you have a discussion on facebook/reddit/HN about your favorite political issue, you just post your gut feeling and what you heard on TV instead of educating yourself on the issue, learning what the foremost experts are currently debating and…
Well education is how you solve this but we chronically underfund it and every kid is a blank new mind so progress is lost when we don’t teach. In the West we have two general views on the nature of humans; intrinsically good or fundamentally bad. The rest of modern politics is shaped from this. The internet and Facebook helps to find a diversity of thought but also in general does not promote critical thinking skill…
Education doesn't fully solve it. Education remedies the deficiencies.
To use PG's method: in 200 years, do you think that we will have 100M parallel, entry level discussions about the merits of abortion (or the political issue du jour)? No, obviously our discussion experience will be augmented such that we are easily led to the forefront of the debate and build on top of the pertinent points and progress being made. How do we invent that future?
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#104Create accessible tech that:
1. amplifies people's abilities to reasonably assess evidence on topics of significance, analogously to how literacy has amplified collective memory.
2. enables online collective environments that cultivate the capacity to use such amplified abilities in interaction between non-like-minded people, along with related attributes such as curiosity and humility.
You'd probably need to be some kind of genius to pull either of these off, though the type of genius required is probably not that of engineering.
It's what I'd do if I had the concrete ideas but, unfortunately lacking genius (of any type), I don't.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well education is how you solve this but we chronically underfund it and every kid is a blank new mind so progress is lost when we don’t teach. In the West we have two general views on the nature of humans; intrinsically good or fundamentally bad. The rest of modern politics is shaped from this. The internet and Facebook helps to find a diversity of thought but also in general does not promote critical thinking skill…
Education doesn't fully solve it. Education remedies the deficiencies. To use PG's method: in 200 years, do you think that we will have 100M parallel, entry level discussions about the merits of abortion (or the political issue du jour)? No, obviously our discussion experience will be augmented such that we are easily led to the forefront of the debate and build on top of the pertinent points and progress being made.…
I don’t think it will happen that way. The courts already ruled in roe vs wade and yet people still go back to first principles to argue.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Education doesn't fully solve it. Education remedies the deficiencies. To use PG's method: in 200 years, do you think that we will have 100M parallel, entry level discussions about the merits of abortion (or the political issue du jour)? No, obviously our discussion experience will be augmented such that we are easily led to the forefront of the debate and build on top of the pertinent points and progress being made.…
I don’t think it will happen that way. The courts already ruled in roe vs wade and yet people still go back to first principles to argue.
People can disagree with Roe v Wade. There's still a foundation, that I think you're not noticing - we as a culture have made progress on it, the arguments are not the same as they would have been 100 years ago. More dramatically, the arguments about slavery are not the same, we are past it.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Australia has the same issue. Unless you can argue Australia isn't a 1st world country.
Did you read the full comment? Australia, I'm guessing, is more similar to Idaho than California.
Homeless is increasing fast in Australia, largely a consequence of property speculation. It's also increasing in every European country except Finland (https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/sep/14/less...).
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#108Human population control. We are not on a sustainable population growth track.
Really sad to see this being downvoted.
Overpopulation is the root cause of many other serious issues such as hunger, lack of access to sanitation/medical treatment/education. We live in a world with finite resources, so the more of us there are, the less each of us gets.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know from being involved with a Washington state based NGO That there are entire unincorporated Spanish speaking villages in Washington. Even in places like Germany and Japan, you have itinerants. I highly doubt any country has a zero homeless population. That said, there is a big difference between such people who are largely self sufficient and stay out of the public eye, and those that don't. The latter are iden…
It's really not an issue of visibility. European countries tend to spend less of their money on military and more on social programs so that it's both harder to become homeless in the first place and, if it happens, there are programs to help you.
They do. But I would like to see homeless populations as a percentage of the whole population before making a judgement. I would still expect the US to have a larger percentage but not that much higher. I was in Denmark/Germany/Netherlands/France/Greece this year and saw a good amount of homeless -- though they've been dealing with a migrant crisis unlike the U.S. has experienced.
Many commenters here are extrapolating on their experiences in SF/Oakland/LA/Seattle/Portland and thinking the rest of the US has a commensurate homeless population. Spoiler: they don't.
Re: Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
#110Autonomous 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 debr…
This is one of my dreams. Helping myself with the udacity nanodegrees