Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

Enterprise software sucks.<p>We don't talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entertainment, etc., etc., etc. and you have tons of stuff. But you don't see it and rarely think about it. Kinda like most of the iceberg being underwater.<p>And all of this needs software. And most of what they have sucks. I mean really sucks. Enterprise software is so bad that there are multi-billion dollar industries devoted to consulting on how to use it, how to share it, and how to store it in data warehouses and harvest it. It's so bad that lots of people have to dump the data out of their enterprise systems and into Microsoft Excel just to get anything done.<p>When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that's where the money is.<p>What banks were in the 1930's, enterprise IT is in the 21st century.

We need to eliminate packaging waste. My laundry detergent ran out, so I had to go get some more. Why am I throwing this big plastic jug back into the recycling loop? Why can't I just take it back to the store and fill it up again? I could use the same jug for years and years and years. How many of those jugs do you think are just going into landfills every day?<p>I saw a link recently to a "bring your own container" type of grocery store that was in NYC. It was so small though, and I've never seen anything like that around where I live. We need something like that but on a massive scale to invoke a fundamental shift in the way every single person does grocery shopping.<p>I don't see it happening any time soon though, unfortunately. I mean, how are plastic bags still legal in so many places? How are people still not using reusable grocery sacs at this point?<p>It's just so frustrating to think about how many perfectly good containers are being thrown away every second of every day. Why are we so damn wasteful?!

As it turns out, humans are really bad at answering questions about what they need. Often if they knew they needed it, we would be competing to provide the best solution for it.<p>This is the difference between inductive and deductive analysis. Deductive would be tasking a student with applying pattern matching to a known domain to find an expected result. Inductive analysis is when you don't actually know if there's an answer to be found. Obviously this is a bigger challenge with a more interesting payoff, but I believe inductive analysis is a skill that can be practiced.<p>Demand Media realized that humans were really bad at coming up with problems to solve, so they started buying bulk search engine results and harvesting queries where people did not find what they were looking for. They then farm out these non-obvious (and often highly specific) needs to videographers to produce low production value clips that nail these never sexy "how do I fix the towel rack in my bathroom?" type questions.<p>They then dominate the search results advertising for the extreme long tail of semantic Q&#38;A on the web. Last I heard they are releasing thousands of videos a day, and making hundreds of millions in revenues.<p>If you want to solve a big problem, apply the same inverse deduction logic to the question of which start-ups are really needed (vs. the ones people keep building over and over) and you will be the next Richard Branson.

I think a problem that bugs me a lot is how I see lots of people wanting to do lots of cool things, but they lack the appropriate guidance. We do that on a day-to-day basis, but what about the other folks out there who don't know about this place?<p>Usually forums, IRC, blogs help in getting immersed with anything, but I have a feeling that a startup with the primary purpose of "Enlightening" its users has yet to come.<p>edit: Basically what I'm shooting for is: how to get rid of the crappy forums and allow a truly easy and fun way to go about learning new things.<p>People go to college to learn about how things should be, but not how they are. Waste of time and money, sometimes.

It depends on how big of a problem you want to tackle. The biggest problem I have every day is that I get tired and have to go to sleep. This time spent sleeping could be better used by doing more productive things. Finding a solution to the "sleep problem" would be a huge win in many ways.

Keys.<p>Note: This same question came up a few months ago. Said the same thing then. I really want to gain some traction here :)

I live in Pittsburgh. We have a huge lack of talent at the moment. There are tons of startups with funding that are looking to hire people, but a huge lack of skilled people around. We've got companies paying $1,000 bonuses to anyone who can get a hire. It's crazy.<p>I'm not sure how to properly attract and keep talent in the city.

I am new in a city, with few friends. I need information on stuff like restaurants, library's, movie theatres, clubs, etc. I live in West Africa.

Censored information can be distributed anonymously in the small, but in practice, in the large, censorship still works to marginalize content to a medium that is not readily accessible, save to a technically savvy few (Tor, freenet, I2C). For 99% of the intended audience, it can still be effectively censored.<p>Is it possible to have anonymity, security <i>and</i> generally-usable accessibility? Not necessarily speed -- latency can be acceptable when the user isn't stuck waiting in real time on a spinning circular icon.

Forum search. It's incredibly frustrating to sieve out the signal from the noise. You need to spend so much time to read though all the conversations to find information you need. The best Google does is a regex like word matching search. It can be better.

I think there is a fundamental problem with the process of getting funding for a new business. I'm not sure there's a simple or even reasonable solution, but there's definitely a problem.<p>I know many smart, capable, enthusiastic people who have a very good business ideas, would be totally capable of launching a new product/service/etc., and would make fine entrepreneurs -- but who have absolutely no way to get their ideas/product/services off the ground.<p>Every time someone approaches me and asks for direction on how to fund the idea, the answer always seems to end up at "find a wealthy friend or family member to invest in you." Some people have those connections. Most do not.<p>We all know that VCs only go for very specific types of high-growth products / services. Places like Y Combinator have a very specific (and great!) niche. Banks are entirely useless in 95% of cases. Even the SBA -- the government's best effort in this area -- is still basically for businesses that have already gotten off the ground.<p>There are a ton of great ideas - great products - great services - that aren't necessarily VC-worthy but do deserve to be given an opportunity to be born.

A couple of things:<p>1. Everyone I know has a few CRT TVs they want to get rid of. I don't know how to solve this, but surely there's a startup idea in here somewhere.<p>2. This thread establishes that there is a problem figuring out what problems need to be solved, otherwise it wouldn't exist (maybe that one was too easy though).

The airport check-in security process.

The industrial automation world (Allen-Bradley, Siemens, Mitsubishi, Fanuc, and so forth) has missed the arrival of the internet. Uniformly, their software is terrible-- ActiveX controls and weak, homegrown webservers, if they even support TCP/IP. Trying to build modern web interfaces that have to talk to hardware feels like inventing time-travel (but it's a one-way trip, 15 years back).

Mechanical CAD software like Solidworks and PCB layout software like PADS is expensive and sold through resellers. I can't compare prices between different vendors without giving them my contact information, which results spam.<p>There are a few semi-exceptions (Sketchup for mechanical CAD and Eagle for PCB layout) but neither is strong competition for the market leaders.

Problem: Businesses require too much working capital. This slows down growth and reduces ROA / ROI.<p>Solution: Create a B2B network that automatically finds and eliminates cycles in the A/R-A/P graph. For example, let's say that company A owes $100 to company B, which owes $80 to company C, which owes $50 to company A. The settlement network could tie into the accounting systems of all 3 companies, identify the debt loop, and instantly apply the appropriate credits and debits. It would need strong controls against fraud and some ability to stand behind transactions that had to be unwound later.

- Work should be value based (productivity or ROI or something) rather than paid by salary or by the house - All people should be able to work from home if they want to<p>Some of this is "company culture" but technology can help it along a lot more than it currently is. There is a lot of software out there that addresses this issue, but it's just not solved because it's NOT THAT WAY at 99.99999% of companies. Great technology should be able to make this seamless.<p>This is not a spec for a software product because I don't know what spec would solve the problem. That's what makes it valuable.

Healthcare is expensive.

These may or may not be super-profitable or particularly solvable via software:<p>Basic math and science literacy for a large percentage of people (in the US at least, but I suspect many other places as well).<p>The pipeline from childhood to the ability to make something people want.<p>Access to the opportunity to gain economically valuable skills for those who happen to be born in poor families, neighborhoods, cities, countries.

Key input on mobile or touchscreen devices still sucks.<p>Lots of progress has been made but something fundamental could really solve this problem.<p>Here's a good idea that almost gets there:<p><a href="http://gizmodo.com/5047798/blindingly-fast-touchscreen-text-entry-system-gets-a-push-by-creator-of-t9" rel="nofollow">http://gizmodo.com/5047798/blindingly-fast-touchscreen-text-...</a>

It's graduation time, so I'm reminded that high school kids are horribly ill-prepared for making the kinds of decisions they have to make and for appreciating the consequences.

I posted this problem on "Intrinsic Motivation Doesn't Exist":<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424520" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424520</a>

How do you configure gzip for certain urls on Akamai? This is a problem I just can't find an answer to.

Problem: most startups fail

We should make it much easier, and more pervasive, and accepted, for people to be able to work from home or otherwise untethered to a central office. We might not want or even be able to achieve this 100%, but the more we can do this, we can reduce so much waste and pollution, and there would be so many less car accidents, gas/oil demand, pavement area, etc. Those of us in the software field are lucky in that many of us already do it, but there are still a lot of software shops that do not, and many other industries where it is still impractical or at least just not accepted and understood yet.<p>Less commute-to-cubicle-on-highways-9-to-5-pollution-lemmings-culture. More home offices, craftsmanship, communal/village/nomad/informal/flexible lifestyles.

Any chronic illness: fatigue, insomnia, pain, tinnitus. Mental disease. Antisemitism, double standards against Israel.

Someone needs to prove that P != NP. Want to understand why that's important? Read this: <a href="http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the-p-versus-np-problem/fulltext" rel="nofollow">http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the...</a>