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

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

#131

Post by seph-reed »

vessenes wrote: post #16

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,…

> Trustworthiness of content

I think this is over. Our ability to create has an inherent inverse correlation with the ability to validate authenticity. IMO, the best solution is to accept that nothing can be trusted and operate as though "facts" are in a quantum state. Maybe a thing is true, maybe not, what would be sensible to do in both circumstances?

> obesity

Such a good one. I don't believe humanity is going to work together for anything but if we could all look good, that'd be something. Enjoy the lives we have while we have them. At least there'd be less bickering.

A couple I'd like to add: - Absolutely no form of regulation on creating sentient beings (ie spawning fuck trophies). Don't think there should be anything Orwelian, but some form of incentive needs to stop bad parenting from existing. Pretty much all problems can be improved with overall better parenting.

- Becoming more open to sex and touch. The two are totally separate things, but both approached horribly. Touch is good for people and mammals in general. It's like food/water levels of healthy, but for your brain. Similarly, sex is important, and incredibly poorly taught. "Hey high-schoolers, we'll just look the other way and you can go on ahead and fuck yourselves up emotionally, K?" There's a goldmine of human happiness just beyond this threshold of getting over the whole puritan thing. Working on communication and whatnot. Saying something like "air, water, food, shelter, touch, purpose, affection" when talking about needs.

-Mutual self destruction with super powers. Right now they hold all the cards. It should feel like we both have guns to each-others heads.

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

#132

Post by seph-reed »

saalweachter wrote: post #12

Garbage. How do you take a bag of mixed garbage and perform a fractional distillation of it, pulling out components and recycling and reusing them efficiently, until you are left with a tiny residue, ideally nothing, of true waste? How do you do this in a cost effective manner without relying on absurdly cheap labor and lax health, safety and environmental protection regulations?

We can burn it for power (https://energynews.us/2013/10/17/midwest/is-burning-garbage-...)

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

#133

Post by Down_n_Out »

buboard wrote: post #31

Remote worker stuff. I think with a little more tech, we can make a lot of people happier, having free time, living where they want, spend more time near family and commute less which would reduce emissions. This is short term and the impact could be enormous Also, we need to standardize GDPR and cookie consent forms, so i can use a blocker for them , they are seriously messing my productivity

Definitely the remote work stuff, it's ridiculous how many people sit at the desk in a stuffy or crowded office while they could do the same work at home or wherever. Less cars (and less company cars needed, so potentially better pay), less commuters, less pollution. This is something that could benefit the environment, overall health and happiness of people and so much more. Just wish companies would get on board already, it's improving but a lot of countries and companies are still far behind.

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

#134

Post by thecupisblue »

gHosts wrote: post #130
princesse wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide more details? Are you talking about algorithms like modular decomposition[1]? Any specific challenge you'd like to see addressed in the following years? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_decomposition

Especially automatic refactorings... If you look at real code, often the main reason why this routine was added to this file... was that the programmer worked in this file last. Is that a Good Reason? No it's a bloody awful reason. An automated tool should be able to look at the network of declarations, definitions and references and work out which module each thing should be in.

I'm using a datastructure like that in my sideproject (a new "software" editor aka a list editor) - you got a data point that exists in multiple dimensions - it has representations in backend, frontend, graphql schema, UI, db, mobile client) and different relationships in each of those dimensions. And it can have subdimensions and they can have their subdimensions etc. So when you update the core representation, all get the update in the dimension they care about.

It's a pretty great datastructure for writing code, you get automatic refactor everywhere.

If you're interested to take a look ping me, would love fresh eyes

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

#135

Post by roland35 »

overshard wrote: post #7

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…

I find that myFitnessPal has a lot of good data, but I do figure nothing is exact. Hopefully I don't round down too much!

It is hard to maintain the habit of typing everything in however, over time.

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

#136

Post by somatic »

zelly wrote: post #91
vessenes wrote: post #16

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,…

> * 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. The solution to this is just to train and use only the discriminator used in deepfake GANs. The good guys will inevitably have more com…

If the fake is "pixel-perfect", then how would there be any way to tell? Your fundamental assumption is that the resolution inherent to the transmitted medium is greater than the "resolution" of the faker.

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

#137

Post by somatic »

wait-a-minute wrote: post #40
untog wrote: post #21

I was just thinking the other day that we're in (or are at least entering) a slightly sad era as far as tech is concerned. Not too long ago (it feels, anyway) there was this explosion of possibilities when smartphones arrived on the scene. People were doing genuinely impressive and innovative things at a fair clip. That's kind of dried up now. The latest iterations of smartphones are just minor progressions on previo…

5G will probably bring in another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation. Imagine what can be done when sensors/cameras can transmit 10x the amount of data per second that they can now. I'm especially interested in how this might enable low-cost high-quality telemedicine.

If you model the capabilities of a software/hardware package as intelligence, then it's easy to see that a handheld device is a "node" of intelligence. And then, between (non-airgapped) nodes, there are "pipes" carrying intelligence between the "personal" nodes (e.g., computers, smartphones, etc.) and the "corporate" nodes (e.g., servers, cloud services, etc.).

The question is this: if the bandwidth of the pipe is expanded to infinity, does the intelligence inhered in the personal owned device remain, or does it wither away... into a rented, datamined, and preternaturally infrastructurally fragile "the cloud"?

Thus far the evidence seems to suggest that "another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation" will fully and finally turn personal devices into dumb terminals administered according to the whim of the Great IBM in the Sky.

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

#139

Post by aledalgrande »

peterangular wrote: post #86
vessenes wrote: post #16

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,…

> Anyone with a good solution would help the world immeasurably and have their pick of customers. I don't buy this. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. are all beholden to a constant growth model - just like every other traded company that's responsible to their own board. Even in ecommerce (which is primarily my background) the players that "complain" about bots actually love the hell out of them because they eat up ris…

Note: FB actually has a higher barrier, just not right around signup. If they detect "bot behavior" (rules vary), they freeze the account and ask for a government ID.

Agree with the fact that companies "complaining" about bots, actually benefit from them. And even use them. I was looking at huge proxy servers providers and they have those same companies in their client list too.

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

#140

Post by ridaj »

peterangular wrote: post #86
vessenes wrote: post #16

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,…

> Anyone with a good solution would help the world immeasurably and have their pick of customers. I don't buy this. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. are all beholden to a constant growth model - just like every other traded company that's responsible to their own board. Even in ecommerce (which is primarily my background) the players that "complain" about bots actually love the hell out of them because they eat up ris…

I don't think the boards of Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit have somehow missed the message that content trustworthiness is as existential a threat to their business as their growth numbers. Just in case they hadn't gotten the point from the market, I'm sure dragging some of their CEOs to one congressional hearing after another sends a very clear signal.

In terms of investment, it's also clear that they are putting a lot more resources in both engineering and content reviewer heads towards these problems every year.

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