I'm familiar with the rfs page, but I'm curious what HN thinks about trends/opportunities for solving problems. Could be massive problems or just low hanging fruit.<p>Maybe this thread could be a lifting off point for a startup - in which case I'd consider it a success :)
So many — here are a few large scale problems I think about lately.<p>* 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.<p>* fall out from monetary policy in the us and Europe: take your pick, but for example - home prices in urban areas; figuring out how to house families for 1/2 or 1/3 current prices in the United States would have a lasting impact on stability and wealth creation.<p>* the continued effectiveness of state propaganda; related to my first suggestion above.<p>* obesity in the us and soon Western Europe.<p>* data security - fixing large scale data breaches.<p>* what I call long range to short range : problems too big for people to think about or accept abound, like climate change. Finding one and figuring out how to tie to short term incentives creating a positive feedback loop would be a real game changer. Oil does this all the time but usually not with good long term consequences - cf fracking turns North Dakota into a boom zone — creativity around good not pernicious cycles would be a boon for the world.
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.<p>That's kind of dried up now. The latest iterations of smartphones are just minor progressions on previous models. Supposed new frontiers (AR/VR, self driving cars) have largely disappointed. The problems (the <i>real</i> problems) we face today like climate change, growing income inequality, stagnating public transit, aren't really solvable by most of us in tech. In fact, in retrospect I wonder how many problems we were really solving anyway (is Uber just a giant VC investment bubble? Will we look back on it as a distraction from improving public transit?)<p>...so yeah, I dunno. Feels like we're in a fallow year or few. It's not that problems aren't solvable, it's that they will take wide scale activism and a great deal of human work. A new API or tool isn't going to cut it.
Garbage.<p>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?
There are a lot of things I want to do in life that someone tells me I can't do. For example, I can't buy a house for an affordable price because the supply is artificially constrained for less-than-ideal reasons.<p>Similarly, I want to work remotely but can't because of company culture. I am willing to negotiate but they are not. Even if I could work remotely, other countries won't let me stay for more than a month or without me arbitrarily flying out and then flying back in.<p>These are all problems that I'm having in my life <i>right now</i>, and they aren't really tech problems compared to people ones. Influential people need to be the ones to solve these problems, but none of them have taken action.<p>I hope this can be fixed somehow. In the 2010s, I went from not being able to text my international friends on my phone to it being trivial and near-zero in price (thanks Whatsapp!).<p>I hope something big changes in 2020.
Having seen many employees grow their careers quickly by ping-ponging jobs at Microsoft and Amazon (and vice-versa), I’m thinking about a platform for enabling this. Essentially you would put in your level, current company, and genre of jobs you are interested in and the platform would find jobs for you which are the next level up and help you apply. The employer would have no idea you were using the platform. I’ve seen a handful of people boost their salary very quickly this way right out of college.
Modular housing that grows with your life. Biggest problem there is effective expansion joints that would hold the houses together.<p>Affordable container ship that is electric.<p>A personal finance software that solves upper-middle class issues (eg. primary income, side business, rentals, etc.).<p>A product/service that makes CROs obsolete in drug development (CROs = 25% of cost of drugs; admin overhead)<p>Idk, those are some that immediately come to my mind.
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<p>Also, we need to standardize GDPR and cookie consent forms, so i can use a blocker for them , they are seriously messing my productivity
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.<p>Maybe this exists somewhere??? But if someone can make an app to help me keep track of my food intake in an organized, managed (only one big mac when I search big mac and maybe options to add/remove toppings), fashion I would be slightly less insane counting my protein intake.<p>Yes, this is a difficult task with how much food is out there and thus it has great value if someone does it extremely well.
There are a ton of great ideas backed up by a considerable amount of research done by 80,000 hours (<a href="https://80000hours.org/" rel="nofollow">https://80000hours.org/</a>) about problems worth solving (although most I think would take longer than a year). They also have a nifty job board in case you want to work for an existing high impact org rather than start your own
People with different viewpoints can't talk to each other. Or rather, on several important topics, too many people can't or won't talk to people with different views.
My top picks would be:<p>Fake news and media credibility. In the 21st centurty it's become hard to trust content, especially viral content shared on social media like WhatsApp. Hopefully we make progress on this front.<p>Sustainable funding models for the fourth estate in developing nations. The lack of sustainable funding leads to slashing of investigative journalism in developing countries which makes corruption more rampant. Solving this issue will help unearth fraud and keep the government in check.<p>Climate Change discourse and discourse for the masses. It's difficult to convey facts to the masses today in a reliable manner.
Short-haul and medium-haul and long-haul conventional take-off electric aircraft.<p>There's a lot of work on VTOL electric aircraft and hybrid aircraft. There's a lot of capturing low-hanging fruit by trying to electrify existing airframes. On the higher end, there's a lot of work on enabling lithium-air or lithium-sulfur or solid state lithium or metal electrode lithium ion batteries. However, there's not a lot of work on combining extremely high efficiency airframes (i.e. glider-like) with extremely high performance batteries (and high battery mass fraction, i.e. 60%, not 25%). Often one or the other is the focus, but a combination is essential to enable decent range (1000km) with existing batteries and long-haul range (at 4000-10,000km) with advanced chemistries (lithium air).<p>Another issue is low capital cost hydrogen production. There has been a lot of work on reducing the cost-per-watt of solar and wind power and fuel cells, but progress on cost-per-watt on hydrogen production (i.e. electrolysis) has been lacking. That means it's not financially viable to produce hydrogen from excess intermittent renewable energy, in spite of the clear potential (if the cost-per-watt of your electrolysis equipment is much higher than the cost-per-watt of wind or solar, you need to run near constantly to make your capital investment make sense... hydrogen doesn't work as a flexible demand source if the capital cost is so high the plant has to run all the time).<p>Microbiome modification to reduce methane emissions from ruminants (cows and sheep and goats).<p>Liquid hydrogen powered container ships or long-haul aircraft (and a method of dealing with the water emissions so as not to release water vapor at high altitudes).<p>High efficiency deep cryogenic liquefaction of hydrogen.<p>Battery-electric long haul locomotives (perhaps with intermittent charging via catenary).<p>Extremely cheap Level 1 or 2 electric charging outlets. Literally an outdoor outlet with a relay controlled by an app that can be deployed at just ~$30 extra beyond a regular outdoor outlet. Could enable mass deployment of electric car infrastructure at very little cost (possibly even self-funding due to a small fee).<p>Carbonfree (or carbon negative) steel, aluminum, and cement production.
One of the problems that just surfaced in the news ... is the realization that almost all prescription meds are manufactured in China. The risk that poses to the US population and DoD is incalculable. How do we get off China meds?<p>Fake chips have been a problem too, polluting the supply space. All the more reason to protect and verify IP. There's new tech for that. Maybe the next big thing. Hardware verified. Authenticity.<p>See <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594065" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594065</a>
Global wealth inequality and social insecurity.<p>I'm a firm believer in real-time payment systems and its ability to quickly address issues vital issues like the above, and related issues like climate change. Markets operate in real-time, and the current banking infrastructure - which creates an artificial bottleneck via ACH delays - is an old and dying dinosaur. I imagine a world of daily paychecks is just a few years in the future.
How do you create a global and free internet? Speeds aren't as important as just the ability to communicate, i.e. at least a text chat system.<p>You could do something like meshing with HAM or other radios (or combine a lot of messing networks together depending on the hop distance). We can already communicate globally with HAM.<p>The question to me is how do we advance this more for higher reliability, better speeds, and create tools that everyone can use (essentially a zero, or low, knowledge system, like a cellphone). The major factor I see is reliability, so that it is difficult for an oppressive regime to shut it down (would also serve as an extremely reliable method when other systems fail during things like natural disasters. You can probably see more advantages to this backbone network). So we could have an open alternative to the segmenting internet that is currently happening. I honestly believe global communication is one of the fundamental necessities to achieving a more peaceful world.
- voting rights, disenfranchisement, and election security.<p>- climate change.<p>- vigorous enforcement of international law guaranteeing human rights for refugees.<p>- closure of industrial-grade CO2 emission sites like coal power plants.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture...</a><p>This is basically the only problem in the world that matters.
I wonder naively why a country like Australia (lots of sun and land and raw material) doesn’t go all in for solar and batteries. Print a bunch of QE money and invest it in building infrastructure to create store and export energy from solar (ship charged batteries? Under sea electric cables?). It would boom the local economy while creating a long term asset and help the planet. Assuming the panels can be made, constructed and installed without too much environmental impact.
Global warming. I think a good approach would be growing sea weed. Sea weed is much better at consuming CO2 than land based plants. <a href="https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/seaweed-climate-change/" rel="nofollow">https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/seaweed-climate-change/</a>
Election security is ripe to be solved. Trust is key.<p>"16M Americans will vote on hackable paperless machines" <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614148/16-million-americans-will-vote-on-hackable-paperless-voting-machine/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614148/16-million-america...</a><p>See <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20759306" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20759306</a><p>NB: Ben Adida is one person who has been thinking about and working on this problem for years <a href="https://ben.adida.net/" rel="nofollow">https://ben.adida.net/</a>
Integrating control in adaptive systems. We see a big trend where (parts of) systems can adapt their behaviour to particularities of the environment they are deployed in with the biggest technical driver being machine learning.<p>Controlling this adaptivity is usually done in an ad hoc fashion by writing code surrounding the adaptive component, usually a ml model<p>This yields many problems ranging from "artificial stupidity" to problems with safety and degraded power of users.<p>By integrating control into adaptive systems, we might get the best of both worlds: tell the program what (not) to do where you know this upfront and let it figure out how to act by itself elsewhere
I'd like to see a pushback on privacy intrusions and the dark user-interface patterns that trick people into allowing them.<p>I just installed Windows 10 for the first time, and the number of things I had to turn off just to get to a sub-totalitarian level of monitoring my activities was ridiculous. The kicker was that Windows Home edition doesn't have disk encryption, so anyone who steals my laptop can help themselves to my private information too.<p>This probably isn't solvable by technology in and of itself, but consumer education and consumer action against tech companies might make a dent.
Global Warming and the complex graph of externalities that incentivize organizations to continue on status quo or ignore huge signals.<p>Economies need to switch to steady state instead of growth. We need to reduce the total output.
Education - I think if we can drastically improve it, that is our best chance at solving other problems. Glenn Doman in his book How to Teach Your Baby to Read, said every child has the potential for genius. That has kinda stuck in my mind this thought.<p>Plastics - the oceans are filling up with them. Stuff is not getting recycled despite people putting things in blue bins. Some research in material science to make something that breaks down faster would be huge
In no particular order:<p>Overpopulation<p>Climate change<p>War<p>U.S. congress transferring its powers to the executive branch.<p>Global dependence on cheap oil<p>Global food unsecurity<p>Dwindling access to drinkable water and breathable air, or more broadly: pollution
Graph Theory in the presence of modules and dependencies between modules.<p>Every thing in computing is modular and multiple levels of modules and has coupling and dependencies between modules.<p>It's the hottest and hardest problem in real world computing... it's nicely representable in a graph theoretic framework.... but graph theorists aren't looking at it.
Good startups are about making something that people will love. Not something that solves a global crisis.<p>Thinking of the latter instead of the former often results in "playing house" ideas that sound like startup ideas but aren't actually. At least this is what happens to me when I follow the thought process you are laying out.
According to Google Trends, the Josephus Problem recently spiked. I had to look it up > <a href="https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/josephus-problem-set-1-a-on-solution/" rel="nofollow">https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/josephus-problem-set-1-a-on-so...</a>
Reduce plastic bag usage. Everyday shoppers across the world, carry groceries and other items in billions of mostly one-time-use bags that are very destructive to the environment. Perhaps come up with a simple shop-to-home cart that reduces (eliminates) plastic bags.
Rising male virginity and the 'incel' epidemic: <a href="https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120</a>
IDK, mostly thinking about really difficult things that affect a lot of people and are mostly political in nature:<p>* The housing crisis.<p>* Our cities and how they relate to the environment.<p>* The education system in the US (I'm quite stumped by this one).
Hassle-free international retail trade of equities. A middle class Joe sitting in Maldives being able to buy Beyond Meat stocks on the day of it's IPO.<p>Also stock markets getting fully automated to remain open 24x7.
- energy storage as the solution to climate change
- self driving cars
- a cure for a cancer or a heart disease
- improving the effectiveness of remote-only companies
- climate change<p>- loss of topsoil in agricultural areas<p>- loss of biodiversity<p>- reducing dependence on cars in the US/Canada<p>- bringing down cost of infrastructure<p>- anxiety epidemic<p>- loneliness epidemic
Superbugs.<p>Sam Harris’s has a scary podcast recently with the author of the book by that name. Preventing the superbug future would be world changing