Rising male virginity and the 'incel' epidemic: https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120
so, prostitution?
Not sure, just have a hunch it will be a problem in the coming years. Look at Japan.
Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
71–80 of 148 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#72Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#73Climate change should be anyone's first answer.
We can't make real progress on a lot of other problems unless that is addressed. There's always calls for more housing in the cities, but it's going to be real hard for the cities to support growing populations if transportation infrastructure becomes harder to maintain, if coastal land is encroached by the sea, if water supplies can't be secured. If large-scale agriculture isn't sustainable, cities won't be sustainable.
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#74So many — here are a few large scale problems I think about lately. * Trustworthiness of content (text and soon photo and video) is and will be a fundamental problem. This is the basic attack vector for national and global politics in the last few years. Anyone with a good solution would help the world immeasurably and have their pick of customers. * fall out from monetary policy in the us and Europe: take your pick,…
> Trustworthiness of content (text and soon photo and video) is and will be a fundamental problem. This is the basic attack vector for national and global politics in the last few years. Anyone with a good solution would help the world immeasurably and have their pick of customers. SOS HN: Set up live early warning system for spoofed/deep fake news feeds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20748195
This would help, but it would be nice if there was a way to somehow verify a chain of custody of media where each modification somehow added to the chain and could be independently verified. I don't really see how that could be done but it would be really amazing.
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#75I was just thinking the other day that we're in (or are at least entering) a slightly sad era as far as tech is concerned. Not too long ago (it feels, anyway) there was this explosion of possibilities when smartphones arrived on the scene. People were doing genuinely impressive and innovative things at a fair clip. That's kind of dried up now. The latest iterations of smartphones are just minor progressions on previo…
For smartphones, I think there's a huge amount of work still needed to make them accessible/understandable/safe for the uninitiated, including but not limited to the elderly and isolated. If, as seems horribly likely, we're moving toward a future where smartphones are not optional, something has to give. The obvious problem is that it's not a glamorous or technically impressive thing to be working on, and isn't going…
Just add physical knobs and buttons. Older people are much more familiar with those. It might also improve accessibility
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#76Garbage. How do you take a bag of mixed garbage and perform a fractional distillation of it, pulling out components and recycling and reusing them efficiently, until you are left with a tiny residue, ideally nothing, of true waste? How do you do this in a cost effective manner without relying on absurdly cheap labor and lax health, safety and environmental protection regulations?
The question is even if it material separation worked, are they really being recycled?
If your end product isn't salable, your job isn't done yet :-)
For some components of "garbage", simple mechanical separation may be sufficient, and there may already be buyers happy to buy your product if you can reach a sufficient level of purity and offer it at a sufficiently low cost.
Simply separating out those components of garbage efficiently enough is one huge unsolved problem, and once you have solved that, you can get to work on the fun part, which is how to further refine every unwanted component until you have broken it down or built it up into something someone wants.
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#77In no particular order:
Overpopulation
Climate change
War
U.S. congress transferring its powers to the executive branch.
Global dependence on cheap oil
Global food unsecurity
Dwindling access to drinkable water and breathable air, or more broadly: pollution
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#78Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#79People with different viewpoints can't talk to each other. Or rather, on several important topics, too many people can't or won't talk to people with different views.
The assumption here is that viewpoints have an equivalent value.
That assumption is probably the most toxic element contributing to the demise of intelligent public discourse and disagreement in the last decade.
I see no problem in refusing to argue with someone who is ranting against established science and refuses to look at the evidence or to reproduce the scientific results themselves.
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
5G will probably bring in another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation. Imagine what can be done when sensors/cameras can transmit 10x the amount of data per second that they can now. I'm especially interested in how this might enable low-cost high-quality telemedicine.
> Imagine what can be done when sensors/cameras can transmit 10x the amount of data per second that they can now. I've thought about this before and honestly I can't come up with many things. Telemedicine in terms of speaking to a doctor over video is already very possible over the connections we have today. Bringing that to a wider audience (say, third world countries) is an interesting possibility, but it also requ…
https://www.geek.com/tech/worlds-first-5g-powered-remote-bra...
https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-sm...
There's also the possibility of much faster speeds even in areas without 5g, since the competition will make 3g speeds a really bad look.