Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?

One strategy that I adopt is to think of industries that are highly manual labor and dream of ways to fix that. I forget the name of the company, but there&#x27;s a startup in the Bay Area that builds drones for farmers. Right now, farmers wake up early in the morning and drive through small sections of their fields and spot check things to decide what needs water or fertilizer or what-have-you. They have to spot check, because some of these farms are so large that it would take a prohibitively long time to check everything. As a result, a small patch of plants that might need more water might get some water, but the nearby plants that are already well-watered might get too much water. With these drones, the farmer can wake up, hit a button on their computer, go make coffee, and by the time their coffee is ready, the drones have uploaded photos of every square foot of the farm onto their computer. Software can analyze it to see what needs watering and fertilizing, what&#x27;s ready for picking or for planting, etc.<p>That&#x27;s the kind of thing that gets me excited about the future of technology. How could we automate or ease the jobs of farmers? How can we automate going to the DMV? How can we streamline flu shots? Can we write software that can organize resistance to Ebola outbreaks or malaria? Is there some software that can get the people of Flint access to clean water -- or can we write software that will prevent a Flint-like crisis from happening again? Can we identify bots that might be trying to affect our political processes? What about making sure kids in schools are well fed, since we know that hungry kids perform worse in schools? Can we solve that somehow?<p>I don&#x27;t have answers to any of those questions. They are what I call &quot;Epic Problems,&quot; and I think about them all the time. Unfortunately, the solutions are several orders of magnitude more involved than a standard CRUD app.<p>One thing to do is pick an Epic Problem, then work in an Agile mindset to tackle it. That&#x27;s what Planet Labs did when it came to satellites. They have hundreds of shoebox-sized satellites in space, putting them up there at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of what it takes to put a traditional satellite in orbit.<p>What else could you do that with?

Make a website that brings transparency to your local political candidates and votes. In many places it&#x27;s very difficult to find any real information on what we&#x27;re voting on and the props themselves are ambiguous or confusing. And the candidates themselves also often have no online presence and no real scrutiny as to whether they&#x27;re full of shit.

Homelessness induced by mental health challenges. I know this isn&#x27;t exactly what you were asking, but this is an area in which creating engineering solutions can go a long way. As suggested - think geographically local. Improvements in the way our society handles these issues, proven to work on a local scale, can be adapted and replicated globally.

I am going to focus on US centric problems. Here are the two areas I think Americans could use the biggest help:<p>1) Personal finance - Americans across the board lack basic financial competency. This effects the US across the board, people take on too much credit card debt, school debt, etc. This problem is across all classes (lower, middle, upper) - Americans do not understand basic things on how to budget, how much debt they can take on, how credit cards should work, how to invest, etc. We need financial education happening at the high school level so that the next generation of Americans don&#x27;t make the same financial mistakes we have (taking on too much school debt, using credit card as loans, not taking advantage of employer 401k, buying houses you can afford, etc)<p>2) Diet &#x2F; Eating - If you look at the list of the most common sources of death for Americans, almost every issue is linked to lifestyle (diet, smoking, alcohol, etc.). Our diets have spun out of control; Americans lack basic knowledge on what is healthy or not. I&#x27;ve had many friends who struggle with weight issues who lack even basic knowledge of how calories work, what their daily needs, what are necessary nutrients, etc.)

Batteries. Batteries are the number one technical problem right now. A battery with energy density approaching crude oil would revolutionize the world beyond even what the Internet did. We really don&#x27;t have an energy <i>generation</i> problem, we have an energy <i>storage</i> problem.

I see two things:<p>1) making data and facts more available and easier usable for everyone. This includes good sources, polished data streams and - the most neglected thing I suppose - good UI for non-techs.<p>2) Decentralize applications, plug in interoperability. OStatus is a good example of this. We need to reduce datasilo hoarding monopolies. This also partly plays into 1)

&quot;I&#x27;m not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app&quot;<p>I think I made the very 1st one of those and I&#x27;m working on an upgrade now. lol.<p>A few areas come to mind that are obvious, like food, shelter, income, energy.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of work being done on growing food for personal and community use with controlled systems but there looks (to me) like there&#x27;s plenty of room for improvement and innovation there still.<p>From what I&#x27;ve read recently inexpensive, durable, and accurate soil moisture sensors are needed. It looks like a &quot;Pick one feature&quot; situation there right now. I&#x27;ve been pondering that a bit lately.<p>I&#x27;ve seen some interesting innovation in how weeds are managed in large scale agriculture that include using organic &quot;grit&quot; to &quot;sandblast&quot; weeds with remote controlled mechanically articulated nozzles using image recognition software to direct the blast. This eliminates the need for herbicides so it attempts to solve a very pressing issue.<p>I recently saw a robotic &quot;weed whacker&quot; on a social funding site that got a lot of attention, but the prototype they showed didn&#x27;t inspire confidence in me that it&#x27;d do much.<p>Pest control is another obvious pressing problem in agriculture, as is efficient use of water.<p>I&#x27;m currently designing a simple experiment to grow salad veggies outdoors in the winter using low hoop row covers and passive solar heating.<p>Growing food closer to where it&#x27;s consumed has the potential to greatly reduce costs, environmental impact, and hunger, and it looks to me like there&#x27;s a lot of headroom there for improvement.

A big difference how? You could work for the NSA and make it easier for the government to know people&#x27;s thoughts, that would sure make a big difference in the world.<p>Or you could build an information sharing and vetting platform which could use proofs from multiple independent sources to certify data as true by tying it to factual evidence, a kind of scientific reddit to combat disinformation. You could use it as a backend to Wikipedia to vet and prove information, or disprove. Extend it using multiple dependent proofs to support another and you might be able to provide a platform on which to fight for political issues based on reams of certified data.<p>Also, jobs. It&#x27;s hard to give some people jobs. People need jobs, and they need to make money, in order to fuel an economy and sustain a society. As an example, in a country with some 6 million felons, it&#x27;s hard for them to get jobs, so they become a strain on the economy (among other things). Make a thing that helps people who have a hard time getting a job to get a job.

When a scientist wants to make progress in some field, the scientist first educates herself on the state of the art, and then does novel research that pushes the frontier.<p>When you have a discussion on facebook&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;HN about your favorite political issue, you just post your gut feeling and what you heard on TV instead of educating yourself on the issue, learning what the foremost experts are currently debating and what arguments are already refuted.<p>Super shitty example fix: Facebook Clippy &quot;It sounds like you&#x27;re having a discussion about abortion - are you aware that the smartest people on this topic are not actually discussing X, but rather have moved on to Y?&quot;<p>Side problem:<p>When we DO make some bump of progress, only a few people benefit (the people reading the thread, at best), and everyone else does not. A million parallel discussions rehash the issue until after a decade, &quot;culture&quot; incrementally improves. How can my facebook discussion, in which I made a good point, prevent that same discussion from ever happening again?

In the software space, I think that the world could use high-integrity reader&#x2F;renderer libraries for common file formats. It&#x27;s embarrassing that e.g. TIFF and font file readers&#x2F;renderers have enabled arbitrary code execution, years after the formats were standardized, for inputs that aren&#x27;t supposed to contain any interactive functionality.<p>Of course it&#x27;s pretty obvious why nobody has done this before: almost nobody wants to pay for high integrity software unless compelled by law.<p>And there&#x27;s obvious problem number two: even if you find a philanthropist to pay you to write this software and give it away under the most liberal license, it&#x27;ll take effort to switch away from existing libraries. You might be able to imitate the structure of e.g. LibTIFF but everyone who was handling TIFF with another library will find it hard to switch.

The one that you understand and have skills, knowledge, abilities, or relationships that you can apply.<p>I know that&#x27;s kind of cliche but there are opportunities and&#x2F;or places to help all over the place. It&#x27;s a matter of finding the ones that you can a) get passionate about and b) be successful at. And this applies to startups, non-profits, or even that internal project.<p>Personally, I work to support Austin Disaster Relief Network - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adrn.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adrn.org&#x2F;</a> - which is a group of ~150 churches in Central Texas that come together to help people during flood, fire, hurricane, and anything else. We are background checked and badged to cross the emergency tape and help the Red Cross, local PD, or whoever else is on the scene. The focus first is helping people immediately.. while their house is still on fire. And then help them get back on their feet.<p>While I have first aid training, my specific role is helping on the technology side. When something happens - like Hurricane Harvey - we can stand up a 25 person call center in under an hour. It&#x27;s powered by Cisco phones plugged into a local Asterisk&#x2F;FreePBX server connected to Twilio. (I&#x27;m a former Twilio employee but they&#x27;re not involved.) In the field, ADRN uses simple web and mobile apps to collect victim info and issue gift cards. It&#x27;s tied into geolocation services and person databases to reduce fraud. There are online&#x2F;offline modes for when you&#x27;re in the field where there is no connectivity. There are a ton of technical roles required!<p>And the underlying aspect of all of this is that we design, build, and deploy technology with the <i>HOPE</i> that it never gets used. If it&#x27;s used, that means something horrible happened.<p>And btw, Harvey isn&#x27;t over for people in the field. All help is appreciated - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adrn.org&#x2F;disaster-relief&#x2F;hurricaneharvey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adrn.org&#x2F;disaster-relief&#x2F;hurricaneharvey&#x2F;</a>

Economics. A problem that has come with increased inequality is that the allocation of capital has gotten further and further disconnected from people (the human capital) who have a more direct link to knowing or exploring ways of developing fundamental value generation. I suspect we are seeing this in metrics like decreasing productivity, decreasing new business generation - it seems like financial capital isn&#x27;t mixing with human capital nearly as efficiently as we might hope. Is there a way to relink the two through an new or modified economic channel that dramatically facilitates this; and maybe even helps rebalance inequality by making invested human capital more consistently yield hands off dividends like invested financial capital.

There are probably huge strides that can be taken in healthcare, food, energy, transportation and finances. The challenge is that most of these industries are heavily regulated so you go in optimistic then get inundated with endless waves of bureaucracy, and end up making a new version of Twitter.<p>I&#x27;m personally fascinated with the transpiration industry. Everything from city bikes, to self driving cars, to hyper loop[1], to super sonic transport[2], to intergalactic transport[3].<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyperloop-one.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyperloop-one.com</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;boomsupersonic.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;boomsupersonic.com</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacex.com&#x2F;mars" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacex.com&#x2F;mars</a>

Journalism!<p>If you haven&#x27;t noticed, the world around us is falling apart. Personally, I consider this malady of discontent just a result of letting every idiot post their comments on the internet. But that doesn&#x27;t change the fact that something needs to be done, and I think it&#x27;s more of a problem of teaching people how the process works, not so much to change the outcomes. Generally, I see people reaching for conspiracy theories or accusations of corruption whenever they don&#x27;t understand the complexity of a problem. I. e. &quot;Why don&#x27;t they just build nuclear power plants? It&#x27;s CO_2 neutral, and Obama&#x27;s solar power mafia is just trying to stop the neutron-emitting pebble-fusor that will be 10x cheaper! Scandalous!&quot;<p>Unfortunately, I haven&#x27;t found the silver bullet to do this. So, second best: somehow help today&#x27;s quality publishers to survive, and hope they have better ideas. There are two tech&#x2F;business ideas I would love to see:<p>a. &quot;The world&#x27;s worst ad-blocker&quot;<p>Currently, all ad blockers are focused on blocking as much as possible. That, and speed, are basically the metrics they show you.<p>I think (hope) there&#x27;s a sizeable fraction of people that wouldn&#x27;t mind unobtrusive, non-spyware advertisement if it helps their favourite writers to make rent. What&#x27;s needed is an ad blocker that constantly evaluates parameters including the page publisher&#x27;s reputation, the ad network, the product&#x2F;company being advertised, the file sizes, ad positioning, movement and&#x2F;or sound, and privacy implications. Then allow. the user (some) leeway to influence it to their liking.<p>b. A netflix-like subscription<p>This is more of a business problem. I guess publishers are afraid of losing their current $200&#x2F;yr subscribers to a service that only pays them $10&#x2F;yr or so, because it divides those $200 among a number of publishers.<p>They may be right. But personally, I have just one subscription, and that&#x27;s the really cheap New Yorker, which I bought just to not be a complete free rider. I have a few hundred $ for whoever wants it, and gets me the NYT&#x2F;Economist&#x2F;WSJ&#x2F;FT&#x2F;etc. as a package deal.

The easiest you can do is probably to look locally.<p>I&#x27;m sure there are a lot of non-profit with horrible websites, architectures, communications, etc. which you can throw a few hours at and help a lot of people.

Make formal methods cheaper and easier to use.

Automatic translation&#x2F;interoperability between programming languages. The fragmentation of software into dozens of major languages hurts software quality, limits language choices, limits adoption of new languages, limits availability of software on new&#x2F;less popular platforms, increases cognitive load for developers and sysadmins...<p>(and JavaScript as the most popular transpiler target today is depressing)

From the variety of answers showing up in this thread, one wonders if there is some tool to help link qualified people with problems they can solve.

Work on LARGE scale, e.g. pick a project from pg&#x27;s frighteningly ambitious startup ideas (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;ambitious.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;ambitious.html</a>). This was from 2012 so a bit dated now but the general thought applies. Disrupt a segment, but one where there aren&#x27;t huge clear antagonists that can squish you immediately, e.g. healthcare.<p>Two examples that are important to me:<p>* Investigate the rising cost of higher education. Start with public data (for state universities), create a nice visualization on where the money is going. Extrapolate to private colleges. Then find ways to attack and change the status quo.<p>* Increase quality of education of poor kids (not just inner city, but that may be easier to start with). For example, can the shuttered grade schools in poor areas be repurposed into startup spaces, providing office to startup at very low cost, but they have to provide tutoring teaching for local students.

A better way to connect funding with research.<p>This applies to many fields, but in general the academic and R&amp;D funding process feels broken. Researchers and scientists spend a disproportionate amount of time writing funding applications, rather than researching or doing science.

Create accessible tech that:<p>1. amplifies people&#x27;s abilities to reasonably assess evidence on topics of significance, analogously to how literacy has amplified collective memory.<p>2. enables online collective environments that cultivate the capacity to use such amplified abilities in interaction between non-like-minded people, along with related attributes such as curiosity and humility.<p>You&#x27;d probably need to be some kind of genius to pull either of these off, though the type of genius required is probably not that of engineering.<p>It&#x27;s what I&#x27;d do if I had the concrete ideas but, unfortunately lacking genius (of any type), I don&#x27;t.

A service uses Russell Conjugation [1] to detect bias in news sources.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edge.org&#x2F;response-detail&#x2F;27181" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edge.org&#x2F;response-detail&#x2F;27181</a>

Anonymous employer review system for US teachers and education administrators.<p>Teachers throughout the US are not treated equally, but because everything about them is open and publicly available, there is no way for them to review their experiences and forewarn other interested candidates until it’s too late.<p>Glassdoor is “fine” except it’s not really oriented towards education, which is quite a world of its own.<p>I tried to work on this concept two years ago, but didn’t get very far. Authenticating teachers anonymously is difficult.<p>Feel free to email me for more info.

Healthcare. The issue with &#x27;important problems&#x27; not only that they are much harder to solve, but also that lots of people will ignore your project.<p>Personal example: I started <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.juvmed.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.juvmed.com</a> (it&#x27;s not ready for Show HN yet). Shared on my facebook, got 4 likes, no comments. My selfies get 50 likes. Demotivating.<p>Btw, any feedback on that project is welcome. Thanks

Autonomous cars. Traffic is bad for the environment, safety, and psychological health of drivers. Let&#x27;s reclaim years of our lives that are spent in traffic.<p>Litter drone. Design a solar powered robotic beach sweeper, to identity and collect the trillions of plastic chips that are covering the beaches. Extend the idea to a fleet seaworthy drones to remove floating micro debris and call in help for large floating debris.<p>Thanks for asking!

It sort of depends on what you bring to the party of course. But it is always a good question to consider and fun on a Friday afternoon.<p>Education would be a big one for me. Part of the issue with today&#x27;s world is that we see the world differently through the lens of how we were educated. If we ever hope to have a planetary wide society we need to start with a common understanding of the world.

The lack of empathy that online communication encourages. Empathy defined as conscious attempts to think and feel what the person you&#x27;re talking to thinks and feels. It&#x27;s quite natural with in-person and even voice communication. An extension of this problem is the lack of empathy online bleeding into offline communication.

Improving existing software stability&#x2F;security. Dive into the OpenBSD project and stay a while.<p>Yep. The totally unsexy answer.

in general abstract terms, important problems have solutions that:<p>- improve security and efficiency (which is also security :P )<p>e.g.: umbrellas prevent you from getting wet, the judicial system (intends..) to enable the public to trust one another, your skin is a firewall against pathogens, sleep cleanses the brain of metabolic byproducts, dreams (ostensibly) make it more likely that your awake mind will succeed more..<p>- address shortcomings of previous attempts, or otherwise explain that the problem was previously underrated (if it isn&#x27;t a solution that just happens to have astonishing luck :P)<p>- punishes gamblers that speculate without paying the price and instead do it at the expense of nonparticipants<p>- even better if the solution to the problem enables mutually-beneficial interactions at the atomic level<p>- and 10x as better if it avoids growing into a benevolent dictatorship

Verifiably true facts on the ground. Like, verifiably true video footage. If we see reporting that something has happened, how do we know it actually happened? This is going to become a much bigger problem - today&#x27;s &quot;fake news&quot; is just the tip of the iceberg.

Reinvent information access (&quot;search&quot;) for the mobile world. The current paradigm google mini-me model, or even glorified chatbots like siri, are nowhere near where they should be. This necessitates a complete rethink of the search&lt;&gt;browse paradigm.

The biggest problem we are currently facing, as a species, is self-destruction. The two problems are:<p>1. How do we stop destroying our climate and planet as quickly as possible?<p>2. How do we look for new planets to colonize?

I would be interesting in knowing a major pure programming problem, not one motivated by the outside world. Like the open problems of pure math.

Making good financial advice and planning accessible to everyone, especially those who need it most.

Optimizing human health through nutrition, robotics, human colonization of space and the planets.

Human population control. We are not on a sustainable population growth track.

Nuclear fusion power.

translate cognitive psychology to code

Whatever interests them the most.

A fair economy.

Hangover free booze.

Improving voter turnout. Enabling food ingredient dissemination. Job and educational opportunities for ex cons and poor disadvantaged people. Doing something modern with all those idle train tracks. 100x roi blood tests (the thing theranos lied about). There are dozens of big problems. Please share what your short list is and please tone down the saas put downs. A lot of good people have put a lot of their life into building honest businesses.