Is there a task or activity that regularly causes you grief during your day-to-day (no matter how big or small)?<p>Post it here to potentially motivate someone to work on a solution!<p>Last thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29796099
Lack of reliable service from plumbers, HVAC, appliance repair people. There are many people available but the quality and consistency of service is highly variable and chances of getting ripped off are high if you don't do your due diligence. I wish there was more standardization in these services where I don't have to worry about getting ripped off and can expect a decent quality of service without spending too much time on looking up vendors, reading reviews etc. If I want get a leaky washer fixed I don't want to spend my entire weekend to try to figure out if it can be DIY or not. I should just be able to call a reliable service, pay a reasonable price and get if fixed.
Childcare, housing, climate change, the usual. I'm sort of joking, sort of not. The first two affect 99% of my day to day, the last only when I will run out of water or there's a fire nearby.<p>Edit: in the childcare and education side, something more informative than Greatschools. I know some neighborhood schools that have been gentrified and test scores have gone up, but it's still the same teachers, admin, and available resources. The ratings aren't a great signal. Things like how well resourced the district is for IEPs would be super useful as a parent.<p>Edit 2: tie in something better than Greatschools with a search engine for preschools, after school programs, and the rest, and you would have a compelling product. The service would be to get your kid on the wait-list for the places you want them to attend :)
Problem of unjust societies. My kid will be a multimillionaire in his twenties without a single day of work while his equally capable peers will enface a life of limited opportunity because the best they can do is to work their ass off to pay rent. It is structural and it needs to change.<p>A truly liberal idea could be to reset the "score" when the game is over. Try to be the best you can and earn as much as you can - when you die, most of your wealth flows back into a large pond to the benefit of all.
Poor availability of introductory learning materials for grad-level study. Undergrad level stuff is pretty well covered by whatever MOOC you can imagine. But often for more advanced topics there is a large gap between what you know after an undergrad degree and what existing learning materials (if any exist) assume you know. Sometimes you just have to bang your head against papers until your brain melds with the concepts.<p>It’s understandable why this is. Writing introductory textbooks in your area of study is not prestigious work valued by your peers, takes a huge amount of time, and rarely makes money.<p>Perhaps the learning materials do exist, but there is no easy way to divine their existence. Expert-curated learning tracks might be valuable here. I’ll tell you what is not valuable, though: giant lists of “learning resources” in a github README that have no particular relation or sorting order and that the author/maintainer has never personally read.<p>Perhaps the struggle is necessary for learning. I’ll never forget those times my mind finally makes by itself the leap to understanding, although I constantly forget whatever smoothed-down introductory learning material I have consumed in the past. Perhaps the solution is simply to hire a grad student for 1:1 tutoring at $50-$100/hr.
One thing that bothers me and still hasn't been solved is the ergonomics of everyday computing. I don't care if people have Herman Miller chairs and use ergonomic keyboards, and an expensive mouse. You're still sitting on a chair which will kill your back. I've tried standing desks, but never liked standing.<p>As for phones/tablets; I've only ever used them as consumption devices and no 'deep work' gets done on them like you would with a desktop PC. My strategy is to take regular breaks from the PC and stand up every 8 minutes and walk around to straighten my back, but it doesn't have to be that way. I just want to be plugged in for hours like I could do in my twenties. Solve that!
Improved human <-> animal communications at scale.<p>Given the state of machine learning with unstructured audio data, machine translation, and robotics, I would have hoped for better methods to communicate with wild animals, cattle and our pets by now.
Fix the economy, make it more fair. Make it so that the ones at the far end of the supply chain get the same chance of building a good business as the ones sitting closer to the end customer. Make it so that honest, hard work gets rewarded more than gaming the system.<p>This is more important than apps that make $WHATEVER more convenient by an infinitesimal amount.<p>But, probably not the kind of problem that you wanted to hear about.
Getting scans and tests from hospital. In the UK you can wait weeks just to get a blood test.<p>Looking to the future, I'd like to see a full body scanner that you lie down in and it can diagnose the vast majority of ailments. See it has a combined x-ray/CT scanner. Sounds like science fiction? Would return instant results.
Some easy ones right off the bat: online extremism, public transit, housing, access to healthcare, chronic disease treatment.<p>Online dating is pretty rough. I need a company to get extremely serious about desktop Linux and charge me $100/yr for something that actually works. Yes. It’s okay to charge for copyleft software.
Fair tax. I live in a country where persons must pay high tax. But companies (big) are doing all sorts of "tricks" and pay zero.
I have no problems paying tax myself and have huge benefit from that kind of system (health care).
But it is infuriating to see huge corps paying zero year after year. So somehow it should be easy to spot such companies and then avoid them.
Figuring out how America can go fast[0] again.<p>Solving would be great but I would also settle for a theory of mind as to why we haven't been able to for the last 50 years or so.<p>[0] <a href="https://patrickcollison.com/fast" rel="nofollow">https://patrickcollison.com/fast</a>
I don't like working from home, but my day mostly consists of being on calls/video chats and discussing a lot of information that shouldn't be overheard by others. I want a private office option that doesn't cost a thousand dollars a month and I don't need all the extras of a co-working space like WeWork.
Commuting.<p>It was crazy to see how quickly we "solved" this problem during COVID, if only temporarily. I just wish to see more collective action to solve this on a more permanent basis. I'm partial to WFH plus moving away from car-dependence in North American towns and cities.
Otosclerosis. It causes conductive hearing loss, affects 10% of the population. Its essentially abnormal bone turnover inside the ear (Stapes) that becomes fixated leading to conductive hearing loss and eventually full deafness in some cases.<p>The current solution is to remove the diseased bone and fitting a prosthesis, it has risks and hearing doesn't always return to normal.<p>I always wondered why this can't be fixed using ear drops to administer Biophosphonates in the effected ear for a non invasive solution. In terms of 'lossening' an already fixated Stapes, why not a solution that is found to effectively dissolve the abnormal bone together with Biophosphonates.<p>It could be administered every so often to ensure minimal progression.
Have a open source smalltalk environment running efficiently on mobile phones, so it is possible to develop applications directly on them<p>Have an open source smalltalk environment with working concurrency, in order to efficiently use all the core available
City to city high speed railway transit, so more railways. Last I checked, it would take me 24 hours to travel from Birmingham, Alabama to Chicago. It would route me through the northeast. Bham is almost due south of Chicago.
Cleaning and organizing the house. Decluttering, identifying the right place for all our stuff, keeping it here. Scrubbing, wiping surfaces. Washing, folding, putting away laundry. Sweeping and vacuuming floors. Cleaning and organizing the yard. Pulling weeds, avoiding them in the first place. Pruning and maintaining plants. Planning, building, and maintaining landscape elements. Collecting and disposing yard waste. Cleaning gutters. Cooking. Cleaning the dishes. Deciding what to cook for dinner given what's in the fridge and pantry. Meal planning
How to measure productivity without leading to the generation of a ton of activity for the purpose of seeming productive.<p>I suspect that several years of my life throughout my career will end up fed to a Scrum monster.
Waiting in hotline queues for some support agent to speak to.<p>Sometimes just the plain phone number to call support, instead of jumping multiple hoops of "have you tried XYZ" FAQ answers
Baldness and hair loss!<p>Honestly , I'm surprised that there hasn't been any breakthroughs on a problem that affects half of the world population.<p>We are even tackling aging but no one has bothered to massively invest in researching this and coming up with a potential cure? One could argue that it's not as important as deadly diseases but I would say the ROI could be phenomenal..<p>Admittingly I have no medical or scientific background so perhaps there is a good reason for this that I am not aware of.
Laundry.<p>Fold my laundry with a reasonably sized device and you can take my money.<p>It's been ~60 years since there has been any innovation in household appliances, and I just loathe folding clothes.
Making a truly squirrel proof bird feeder, that also lets slightly larger birds, such as robins, access the food.<p>This is surprisingly difficult to find, and many squirrel proof feeders on Amazon actually get destroyed by squirrels in no time. Those that can resist the squirrel assaults have a cage that's too narrow for robins to get inside.
How could everybody who wants self owned real estate actually get real estate.<p>I guess it's usually an infrastructure problem.
Plots are cheap in locations with bad infrastructure so the solution could also be to get infrastructure wherever you want.
Not having to fill out the same information every time I visit a new healthcare provider. They should just have some sort of centralized profile I can give them access to for my information.
UBI: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income</a>
If people stopped worrying about money, they will have time to create a lot of awesome stuff.
sorry for this guys...<p>A note taking system that works like my thought process does AND lets me very quickly add notes from my phone. (Android)<p>needs search functionality and RTF.
How to chart/track issues/news/topics/mood/reliability around the world.<p>(Think globally)<p>How can we do the same locally - and provide help where we can - or individually where we think it is needed.<p>(Act locally)<p>TLDR
A Craigslist.org that is focused on a specific zip code.