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Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

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211–220 of 231 posts

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#211
post #19

cancer

Most cancers are probably viral:

We know that cervical cancer is related to the human pappiloma virus, thus the annual "pap smear" for women. Warts and fever blisters are both caused by virii and cause growths, similar to tumors. I can't think of any parasites, bacteria, or fungi which causes similar growths -- and I've tried. (Anyone who knows of something else which causes tumor-like growths, please speak up. This question is of serious interest to me. Cancer runs rampant in my family.) Molluscum contagiosum is a viral infection which causes growths on the skin similar to skin tags. The cause of skin tags is "unknown" (yet it seems logical to me it is some other virus) but they are described as "benign tumors".

Although conventional medicine seems to find viral infections extremely hard to combat, alternative treatment circles I hang out in find viral infections very easily treated and offer a number of different options for doing so. I believe that I and my sons have been killing off whatever virus or virii we carry which eventually could/would turn into a diagnosis of cancer. I get die-off rashes that include skin tags and brown and red spots of the sort which look like pre-cancerous lesions. My oldest son has a very keen sense of smell and has been around several family members who had cancer. He says he can smell it when we have cancer die-off. Given my experiences with him, I believe him.

I generally don't talk about this in public. My personal problem is that people tend to either call me "arrogant and egomaniacal" or "a liar, charlatan, and snake-oil salesman". "Arrogant and egomaniacal" is probably the better thing to be accused of as it suggests people think it can be done, just not by little ole me. "Liar, charlatan, and snake-oil salesman" suggests people think it can't be done at all, by anyone, regardless of the resources at their disposal, much less by little ole me and my limited resources. I don't believe any technology will solve my personal issue of being accused of such things. It's an issue of "the hundredth monkey" or "mindshare" or "groupthink"....something along those lines -- ie: No one else is able to do it, so you can't possibly be telling the truth. To quote an old TV show: "There's always a first."

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#212

Online elections. Think of how many more people would actually vote in the US if it were online . The 2008 election had 63% voter turnout, which is historically high, but is nothing compared to countries like Italy with 90%. Obviously, there are huge security concerns and it would be a logistical nightmare, but that's what someone needs to solve.

Security and logistic aside, "how many people vote" may not be the right metric for problem that needs to be solved.

Elections are just a substitute for real collaboration and daily participation in public life.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#214
post #44

Making Scholar articles open to public access. Google scholar returned references are mainly to journal articles requiring a fee. This is useless. Science should be a collaborative work like wikipedia but with referees (not the narrowed minded one).

As far as I know, academic institutions have a pretty large budget for subscribing to journals. If a member (prof, staffer or student) wants access to a certain journal that isn't available, the librarian can arrange for it. So in terms of accessibility to each other's scholarly articles, scientists in academia or larger industries don't suffer from a lack of collaboration. Since this covers most practicing academics…

You can also visit just about any university and use their resources for free. Most scholarly databases and journals restrict by IP address and many universities don't require people on-campus to authenticate.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#215

Efficient purely functional data storage and the algorithms and best-practices required to effectively use it.

Haven't read it, but there is the book Purely Functional Data Structures http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Oka...

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#216
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I meant #2, inconclusive results. I believe that this research is extremely valuable. Scientific contribution occurs not just by finding a story and some supporting data - another source of great contribution could be saving time of many researchers by saying "this is exactly what i did. this is why i did it. and look, nothing came up." another researcher can look at it and think about improving the methodology.…

I totally agree with supporting (2), it's actually something I'm interested in as a research topic. Like I mentioned, I think part of the difficulty is the non-generality of being able to summarize that sort of material. There are (orders of magnitude) more inconclusive results than telling ones. Now the idea of being able to search a scientific question and somehow find a meta-analytical summary of all the inconclus…

Oh, nice. Is this research in the pipeline or are you incubating the idea for the future? I am also thinking about this as a research topic - independent summer study, to be more specific. I am hoping to give the matter some serious thought - why negative data is not considered valuable, what sorts of conditions would make it valuable, and how the framework of publishing should be, so that others can easily access, understand, and reason about the data. Are you interested in a subset of these? Do you know any resources on where to start thinking? I know there's the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, but I don't know of other efforts or perhaps societies/groups for this cause.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#217

A practical, robust method for separating essential complexity from accidental complexity in software engineering. Trevor Blackwell has written about something like this: http://tlb.org/busywork.html

Thanks for the pointer. Basically, Trevor wants the distraction of low-level tweaking so he can think about the high-level problem. That's the weakest argument for low-level languages I've ever heard. But Python fits the bill: Python for high-level, C libs for performance and low-level tweaking.

I've ended up with that style. The robot software is Python at the high level, C++ for low-level or OS-specific stuff. It runs fast and is easy to hack on

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#218
post #42

A practical, robust method for separating essential complexity from accidental complexity in software engineering. Trevor Blackwell has written about something like this: http://tlb.org/busywork.html

It fascinates me that Trevor Blackwell has AdSense on his essays.

I make like $150 / month from it even though my traffic is small, which I think is pretty cool. Essays about how to build stuff get high-CPC ads for servo motors & robot kits & stuff.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#219
post #21
post #11

Keys. Why, in 2010, do I still have 10 metal keys in my pocket. Why?

Because of legacy hardware. Getting loads of locks re-cored is expensive.

I would happily pay a locksmith to replace locks. But there's no electronic system I've seen that didn't suck.

Re: Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

#220
post #140
post #109

The problem of induction. No one has answered Hume, except Kant and he dodged the question. This is the big question, underlying integration of QM/GR, the nature of time, P=NP?, AI, a stable credit-money system, scientific ethics, chicken or egg?, etc, etc. Once this is resolved, I feel sorry for future generation (not really) because its "only" applications forever after.

ET Jaynes solved it indirectly in his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science(1). As a tl;dr, it turns out that knowledge--as it's defined in the problem of induction--doesn't exist. (1) http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html

I agree Jaynes made some significant, important progress. However, the conclusion that the problem does not exist comes from Kant, its a dodge. The problem is still open because Kant's theory of knowledge is a denial of ALL knowledge.
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