Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field? • Hacker News Board

ggambetta wrote: post #3

> The length of pi is continually increasing, and there doesn't appear to be an end. Huh? How is this an unsolved problem? It's known that pi is an irrational number, so it doesn't have an "end". We can always compute more digits. Or did you mean something different?

Not sure on the customer service one either. The same logic means calling privacy policies a problem because we legally have to follow privacy law?

Warranties are there for consumer protection. Most people know what they're there for. Even if some people didn't understand it, businesses that treat warranty as "something we legally have to do" probably don't consider the confusion about warranty a problem, because clarifying it would make more people exercise their warranty rights, and hence more costs for them.

Honestly, I don't see how any of the examples, except perhaps the software engineering one, are problems experienced by businesses that they wish to solve. Perhaps I'm greatly misunderstanding.

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Edit: I think the OP may mean businesses that wish to advertise their warranty protection better explaining to users what that "end date" means, and what the warranty offers them. Which I think can be done fairly easily: look at what Apple does to advertise their warranty protection, or the warranty stickers on every fridge/washing machine you've ever bought.

Although, Apple tries to upsell AppleCare rather than advertise their legally mandated "Apple Limited Warranty" and consumer law warranties.

Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?

#25

Post by JJseiko » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #10

In Python education: Getting new language learners to a functional local development environment as quickly and painlessly as possible. "Just use Anaconda/pipenv/the-Python-installer/Docker/etc" isn't a great answer, because they probably tried one of those six months ago, got into a weird state and can't remember what it did or where it put things. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/

repl.it not a local environment, but if you're after the shortest path to learners being able to code, that's how I do it with the people I teach. Works well.

Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?

#26

Post by laurentdc » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:08 PM UTC

Software development: creating web CRUD interfaces quickly. Here's the orders table, here's the customers table, here's the products table. Join them, present them with a nice UI that scales down to basic smartphones, make some fields editable, some sortable, some filterable. Now take a subset of the result and make that its own table with a search form, and so on.

Every solution I've tried is either too narrow (e.g. works on one table or kind of data only), too broad (too much boilerplate), hard to plug into existing data without massive ETL (SAP, Oracle APEX..) or cloud-based apps which are fine for a mom and pop store but basically useless for scenarios with millions of entries.

Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?

#27

Post by oauea » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #10

In Python education: Getting new language learners to a functional local development environment as quickly and painlessly as possible. "Just use Anaconda/pipenv/the-Python-installer/Docker/etc" isn't a great answer, because they probably tried one of those six months ago, got into a weird state and can't remember what it did or where it put things. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/

Let their first lesson be that they are responsible for their own machine. If they installed crap without being able to fix it or even remembering what they did, then they'll have to reformat and start over. Suggest they keep notes this time around.

Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?

#28

Post by pinkfoot » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

Accounts receivable.

Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?

#29

Post by pandler » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

ggambetta wrote: post #3

> The length of pi is continually increasing, and there doesn't appear to be an end. Huh? How is this an unsolved problem? It's known that pi is an irrational number, so it doesn't have an "end". We can always compute more digits. Or did you mean something different?

Giving OP the benefit of the doubt here, it seems like a straw man example off the top of their head, just to throw some ideas out there.

Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?

#30

Post by simonw » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

JJseiko wrote: post #25

simonw wrote: post #10

In Python education: Getting new language learners to a functional local development environment as quickly and painlessly as possible. "Just use Anaconda/pipenv/the-Python-installer/Docker/etc" isn't a great answer, because they probably tried one of those six months ago, got into a weird state and can't remember what it did or where it put things. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/

repl.it not a local environment, but if you're after the shortest path to learners being able to code, that's how I do it with the people I teach. Works well.

Yeah that's why I specified "local" - personally I'm keen on https://mybinder.org/ and https://colab.research.google.com/ and https://www.glitch.com/ as remote options.