

YC/HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve. - Mystalic

About six months ago, I put up an HN post asking everyone about a problem they want to see solved.  It sparked a lot of discussion and a lot of great ideas.  So here's edition #2.<p>Name any problem: technology, politics, cooking, world peace - whatever bugs you or pops into your mind.<p>Original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442571
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bkovitz
Here are a few political problems. I want:

* Journalists to be able to make a living doing the hard work of journalism.

* Formal education to be conducted in a way that facilitates learning rather than bureaucratic hoop-jumping.

* Manual laborers to be able to earn a comfortable living.

* More American cities to be beautiful and walkable.

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tdoggette
I'd like to be able to enter a URL and see every place on the internet that
people have talked about it.

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colins_pride
Does showing a large subest of the pages that point to it, default ordered by
something that's roughly equivalent to pagerank, with the ability to then
search within those results capture the essence of what you're getting at?

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tdoggette
No, not really. What I'd really like is to input the URL and get a search
result listing that includes number of posts and date of last post at least.

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yread
I want to be able to travel across europe (or the world if you are really
bored) with my laptop and mobile phone and be able to stay online. I dont want
to have a different data tariff for every country and I always want the
fastest internet I can get - i.e. I don't want to have a different contract
for WiMax, Wifi, 2G, 2.5G, 3G, 4G,... - I want to use the one which is
available.

I think that would be the only product that could be really called Mobile
Internet.

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bkovitz
Some technological problems. I want:

* Sysadmin work out of my way, or at least reasonably simple, and real information available when I run into a problem.

* Ad-heavy, information-poor web sites to stop showing up so high in SERPs.

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asimjalis
I want a programming language which is as effortless as thought.

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edw519
Huh? Programming is easy. Thought is hard.

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asimjalis
I guess what I was trying to say was unclear. Or maybe I am the only one who
has this problem. I find that programming languages get in the way of
thinking. There is all this extra work involved in typing up the program and
making it real. Even a minimalist language like Python seems too much (for
example, it makes me list self as an argument for each method).

~~~
asimjalis
There is a kind of impedance mismatch between computers and humans. Now
languages bridge that to some extent. But it is still there. So my wish is a
language that eliminates it.

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jrandom
I'd like to see all this technology, knowledge, and power put to use to feed,
clothe, and house every person on the planet. There's no non-political reason
we can't do this, but our current cultures won't allow for it.

I'd like to be able to pursue my passions and hobbies without having to waste
the vast majority of my life in a day job just to survive. Life is to
goddamned short for this madness.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If everyone accomplishes your second goal, we will probably no longer be
wealthy enough to achieve your first goal.

Incidentally, if you live in the US, your second goal is achievable. At least
30 million americans do exactly that. The government classifies them as
"poor", although they lack no material goods necessary for survival.

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thunk
You know the information you're searching for is readily available, but you
don't know the unique string to get you there.

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JimmyL
A unified transportation system - encompassing everything (including but not
limited to walking, rental bikes/cars, car pooling, trains, planes). One
machine that I tell my starting and ending points (down to the house number),
and will make me a number of possible schedules and ways to get there using
mixed modes of movement, and lets me pay for it/track it with one card.

A clean and plentiful energy source that is widely distributed.

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ashishk
i want a solution to this country's health problems...specifically: obesity /
bad diet/ lack of desire to exercise

i actually think a real business could be built around this. if the governemnt
paid me X dollars to make Y over-weight people fit, it might be a win-win

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edw519
I want my cell phone to automatically switch between vibrate and ring based
upon my location (vibrate at work, ring at home). I keep forgetting to switch.

I also want a land based bell in my house to ring if my cell phone is within
50 feet of the house (in another room, in the car).

~~~
thwarted
Locale, from two forty four a.m. <http://www.twofortyfouram.com/>

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jlangenauer
I'd like a way to filter cold calls to my business. Companies which have
researched my needs, and have a legitimate product that might fill them get
through; script-based telemarketers, scammers and the like, get dumped.

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27182818284
A better battery.

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dhbradshaw
I want a razor that doesn't grow dull.

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antipaganda
Immortality. With that we can solve lots of other problems. Efficiency, see?

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kloro
i need to change the layout of the physical keyboard (as opposed to the on-
screen keyboard) on my palm centro.

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asciilifeform
I would like a truly programmable computer.

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BearOfNH
I want a search engine that tries to find me what I want, as opposed to
inundating me with thousands of products for sale, that might _remotely_
resemble something I said.

Here is an example. I am looking for an outdoor security camera. So it needs
to be weatherproof. It needs to provide at least 1024 (preferably 1200)
horizontal lines. It must have a 100+ Mbit Ethernet connection for data
transport and it would be nice to support POE (Power Over Ethernet), but in
any event needs to run continuously -- so no battery-powered cams. I don't
care either way about pan / tilt / zoom, but might use hardware motion
detection.

Try asking your favorite search engine and see the plethora of useless results
thrown your way. Lenses. Weatherproof housings. Tons and tons of indoor
cameras with 480 lines of resolution. But nothing that meets my needs,
regardless of how I phrase my search query.

Maybe what I really want is a search engine that I can interact with and say
"I don't like this result because ..." and have the engine filter out all
similar results. Google squared is such an approach but it doesn't work, at
least for this task.

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akaGOMEZ
My first attempt at imagining a solution was to do a very broad search using
"outdoor weatherproof camera 1200 lines resolution" (broad in comparison to
your requirements). I had fantasized that maybe, if I were able to pipe those
results to another query... But "outdoor weatherproof camera 1200 lines
resolution" wasn't an effective search even by itself

(disclaimer: I know little about security cameras)

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rawr
I want a solution to a^3 + b^3 = c^3 where a,b,c are positive integers.

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spectre
Leonhard Euler proved it isn't possible.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_Fermat%27s_Last_Theore...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem_for_specific_exponents)

