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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?

#61

Post by asdfman123 »

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?

Is CS education a problem to be solved or is it an art? I think techies get spoiled by how clean mathematics and technical solutions can be. But people are complex and perhaps the only solution is intuition developed over years of experience.

I'm not saying some ways of teaching aren't preferable to others -- obviously, lectures and hands on teaching is better than just throwing high school students a Dennis Ritchie book and telling them to come back in a year. Just that there's no "one size fits all" answer. (Unless I misunderstand what you're asking.)

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

#62

Post by dwohnitmok »

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...

It still depends on how expensive it is to get the fuel. It could be essentially free to go fuel => electricity + CO2 + water but that's no good if getting fuel is expensive.

Unless you include the price of obtaining fuel in that transformation arrow, but then the observation boils down to if extracting fuel is cheaper than synthesizing it then synthesizing it isn't financially viable.

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

#64

Post by azhenley »

asdfman123 wrote: post #61
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?

Is CS education a problem to be solved or is it an art? I think techies get spoiled by how clean mathematics and technical solutions can be. But people are complex and perhaps the only solution is intuition developed over years of experience. I'm not saying some ways of teaching aren't preferable to others -- obviously, lectures and hands on teaching is better than just throwing high school students a Dennis Ritchie…

I would say it is as solvable as most areas of psychology. The goal isn't to unveil a "one size fits all" answer, but rather to understand what works better in what situations and why. The progression of knowledge is generally from a craft to an evidence-based science.

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

#66

Post by Nextgrid »

asdfman123 wrote: post #63
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

Getting non-technical people to pay for software.

There's a solution to that: build something that clearly solves a real problem that they're facing.

Let's take a real example: a friend is reusing the same stupid & insecure password everywhere, tweaks it with random numbers and letters to pass password strength requirements and of course forgets it minutes later, so she has to go through the password recovery flow every single time.

1Password is ~30$ a year, and yet there's no way to convince her of paying for it. This is a person that's employed full time and that otherwise spends unreasonable amounts of money on hoarding clothing she's not even wearing so it's not like money is an issue.

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

#67

Post by rococode »

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

"Their" is defined as a "his or her" singular pronoun in most modern dictionaries, perhaps in part "to be PC" but probably much more because "his or her" is an incredibly clunky phrase to say.

Consider:

They asked their teacher if their homework was due on Friday.

vs.

He or she asked his or her teacher if his or her homework was due on Friday.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/their

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/their

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They#Singular

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

#68

Post by inscionent »

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

Are you ok?

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

#69

Post by jayp »

superhuzza wrote: post #2

User Research - What's the best way to deal with loads of qualitative data? There are different approaches but all of them have problems.

I’ve recently started working on documenting (still very, very early) on “measuring” user feedback at https://datadriventeam.org after having 50+ conversations about it with various startup founders/leaders. It is backed by an open source GitHub repo and I hope people would contribute once I’ve gotten the initial version ironed out.
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