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

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

#41

Post by oli5679 »

ace32229 wrote: post #20

Credit modelling: How to predict if someone will pay us back or not (probably an unsolvable problem)

I have some experience working on this problem.

These Kaggle kernels contain interesting feature engineering and tuning strategies https://www.kaggle.com/c/home-credit-default-risk.

This is nice if you have a single feature that rank-orders well and you would like to calibrate https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2020/isotonic_python_pack...

As long as you have collected data on outcomes that contains more than 100 defaults, with covariates that would allow an informed expert to distinguish between higher and lower risk transactions, it's often possible to be more accurate than an informed expert on this problem.

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

#42

Post by londons_explore »

laurentdc wrote: post #26

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.…

+1 to this.

Code has been written tens of thousands of times to take data from a webform, put it in a database, and display it on a webpage.

It's about time someone could just put that in a standard, simple, easy to use, yet extensive, library or service.

Simple things like defining a field on the frontend, in the server API, in the data model, and again in the database schema should be a thing of the past.

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

#43

Post by xixixao »

laurentdc wrote: post #26

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.…

I have no personal experience with it but Retool looked nice, and probably covers some of your requirements.

Definitely an interesting problem to solve!

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

#44

Post by fyp »

londons_explore wrote: post #32
pjc50 wrote: post #18

Mathematics is the best field for this because a list of unsolved problems is kept, and many of them are relatively easy to explain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m... Chemistry/materials science: room-temperature superconductivity is probably the big one. There are a whole host of problems in the energy space which would benefit from improvement; while "electricity+CO2+water => fuel" is…

> electricity+CO2+water => fuel Considering fuel => electricity+CO2+water is financially viable today, the reverse can never be financially viable unless the prices of the inputs and outputs shift quite a bit...

Hmm is the argument that you can generate infinite money otherwise? I think the two directions only look superficially the same because externalities and labor isn't taken into account?

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

#45

Post by lidHanteyk »

mpfundstein wrote: post #39
pandler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is OP schizophrenic? Can wr please stop this theirs b llsh t. Write his or her if you want to be PC. Otherse you are right

Lucky 10000: Some 1-2% of the population is neither male nor female. Hope this helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

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

#46

Post by my_username_is_ »

Mechanical Engineering - Navier Stokes equation in 3D. This is the equation that governs fluid flow, so finding a solution in 3 dimensions should allow models & simulations to become far more accurate.

This is our version of P=NP, and similarly, there's a $1M prize for finding a solution.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier–Stokes_existence_and_...

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

#47

Post by mywacaday »

laurentdc wrote: post #26

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.…

Out of interest what did you try and find most acceptable?

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

#48

Post by asdfman123 »

laurentdc wrote: post #26

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.…

Well, the whole field of software development is geared towards solving that problem, isn't it?

You can have something highly customizable (e.g. write a web application in some common language), or you can try to create some out-of-the-box solution that works great for certain apps but quickly becomes a mess when you try to go beyond it.

The core problem is there's a lot of complexity that's not always obvious and it has to be dealt with somehow.

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

#50

Post by graham_paul »

azhenley wrote: post #38

CS Education - Virtually everything is unsolved. How do we teach people how to code? What is the progression? Do we teach them how to "think" algorithmically first or just dive into a specific language? How do we assess their learning? Which skills are transferable?

I find it interesting that out of the massive field that is CS you focused solely on a single area.
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