I wonder naively why a country like Australia (lots of sun and land and raw material) doesn’t go all in for solar and batteries. Print a bunch of QE money and invest it in building infrastructure to create store and export energy from solar (ship charged batteries? Under sea electric cables?). It would boom the local economy while creating a long term asset and help the planet. Assuming the panels can be made, constructed and installed without too much environmental impact.
Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
101–110 of 148 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#102Superbugs.
Sam Harris’s has a scary podcast recently with the author of the book by that name. Preventing the superbug future would be world changing
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#103Graph Theory in the presence of modules and dependencies between modules.
Every thing in computing is modular and multiple levels of modules and has coupling and dependencies between modules.
It's the hottest and hardest problem in real world computing... it's nicely representable in a graph theoretic framework.... but graph theorists aren't looking at it.
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#104Climate change should be anyone's first answer.
If you're a software developer, how would you go about doing this if you have no skills related to any of the areas that can have some impact on climate change? I've been a developer for a few years and have no hard science background. Should I go back to school to try and learn this sort of thing? Go into politics in some capacity? Keep working where I am and spend my free time and cash on climate change initiatives? Something else?
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#105People 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.
I think the issue is more that they won't talk to each other. There are plenty of places on the internet where you could go to talk to people who hold different viewpoints from you, but most of them seem to follow a common pattern where one viewpoint becomes the majority viewpoint and then become more and more hostile to the minority viewpoint until everyone who holds the minority view leaves.
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#106- climate change
- loss of topsoil in agricultural areas
- loss of biodiversity
- reducing dependence on cars in the US/Canada
- bringing down cost of infrastructure
- anxiety epidemic
- loneliness epidemic
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#107How do you create a global and free internet? Speeds aren't as important as just the ability to communicate, i.e. at least a text chat system. You could do something like meshing with HAM or other radios (or combine a lot of messing networks together depending on the hop distance). We can already communicate globally with HAM. The question to me is how do we advance this more for higher reliability, better speeds, an…
High Speed Multimedia or HSMM is a mesh network for ham operators. I would be interested in getting into it but the off the shelf equipment is microwave band and does not propagate like 20 meter. So it has a kind of chicken vrs egg problem for now.
That's why I'm thinking just a communication platform. Start small. Rebuild from the ground up. Robustness is more important than any other factors imo. I want something that is near impossible to take down and can reach globally. I would think this would have to be some large mesh network. There's definitely a lot of challenges in just getting text to transmit across something like this. But it has a ton of uses.
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#108I wonder naively why a country like Australia (lots of sun and land and raw material) doesn’t go all in for solar and batteries. Print a bunch of QE money and invest it in building infrastructure to create store and export energy from solar (ship charged batteries? Under sea electric cables?). It would boom the local economy while creating a long term asset and help the planet. Assuming the panels can be made, constr…
Politics and lobbying mostly I'd guess. Resources sector are the major donors to the two major parties. Resources supported boom growth through the 2000s but we didn't do a great job transitioning to "new technology industries".
There is a national debate on the outcome of the Adani coal mine which in oversimplified terms is willing to risk X0,000 tourism industry jobs to save X00 resources jobs.
"Australians are good at two things, digging things up out of the ground and selling property to each other"
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There is tech for this, but you also ha e to think about the Xanadu side of things - truthiness and attribution essentially.
Fully validated flat earth selfie videos aren’t really any less bad than ones of questionable provenance.
Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?
#110There are a ton of great ideas backed up by a considerable amount of research done by 80,000 hours ( https://80000hours.org/ ) about problems worth solving (although most I think would take longer than a year). They also have a nifty job board in case you want to work for an existing high impact org rather than start your own
I've heard of 80000 hours before but if I'm not mistaken it's more for people who don't _have_ to work to earn money.
A while ago one of their career advice blog posts gained traction and it read absolutely as advice for someone who doesn't have to worry about money at all. One of the pieces of advice was something like "don't make long term plans" and there was no advice at all about compensation.
E:
Found the blog post: https://80000hours.org/2019/04/career-advice-i-wish-id-been-...
It includes advice such as "Don’t focus too much on long-term plans" and "Crowdsource your career decisions".