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Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

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141–148 of 148 posts

Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

#141
post #9

Modular housing that grows with your life. Biggest problem there is effective expansion joints that would hold the houses together. Affordable container ship that is electric. A personal finance software that solves upper-middle class issues (eg. primary income, side business, rentals, etc.). A product/service that makes CROs obsolete in drug development (CROs = 25% of cost of drugs; admin overhead) Idk, those are so…

'Modular housing that grows with your life.'

Like a giant kit of Lego, maybe?

Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

#142
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

#143
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a cool project. Would it be possible to vastly undertune a wifi router to work on 20 meter? Would be cool to keep it on the cheap too.

Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

#144
post #32

It still seems insanely difficult to track calories and macros with all the apps out there to do it. Most of the content for searching for your food is "community generated" so if I try to add a "Big Mac" (example, not eating big macs...) then I get like 30 results all with different amounts of calories and nutrition amounts also with slightly different naming. Maybe this exists somewhere??? But if someone can make a…

We're working on something like that with Bitesnap. We added "builders" that let you customize the ingredients for common foods and for now we don't mix user submitted items across users. We plan on adding a way to cross verify user submitted data to keep the DB clean. If you have any other ideas/requests I'd love to hear them. I can be reached at "michal at bite.ai"

This looks awesome, I'm going to give it a try. Do you offer API's for partner integrations? I have a platform (https://meports.com) that I'd see some super valuable synergies with.

Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

#145

So 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,…

Late to the party, but obesity (and general preventable health conditions) is what I'm looking to address: http://meports.com

Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

#146

- energy storage as the solution to climate change - self driving cars - a cure for a cancer or a heart disease - improving the effectiveness of remote-only companies

What, in your opinion, could be improved for remote-only companies?

Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

#147
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I have but one upvote to give, because making that kind of optimal use of garbage would solve a bunch of other problems.

It's also such a rich technical problem, that spans every sort of engineering, from machine learning to robotics to chemistry and materials engineering. And it's like, purely a technical business. If you have a company that can "buy" garbage for $X and sell your outputs for $Y > $X (+costs), you don't need to deal with politics and lobbying and building buzz.

200% agreed. But sadly, PhD positions in the field are so hard to find. A friend of mine is an engineer set out to do just that and even the biggest private sector players struggle to fund. Have you experienced the same?

Re: Ask HN: What problems do you see worth solving in 2019-2020?

#148

- energy storage as the solution to climate change - self driving cars - a cure for a cancer or a heart disease - improving the effectiveness of remote-only companies

What, in your opinion, could be improved for remote-only companies?

Anything that improves communication.

Being able to drop into a call with somebody without them having to pick up.

Having an indicator that shows if people are afk or not.

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