
Ask HN: What are problems that enterprising college students could solve? - ups474773
Hi HN, I&#x27;m looking for your help to brainstorm problems that need solutions. I&#x27;m in a program where we create teams and find challenges that the world or community around us is facing; however, many of us struggle to find realistic or &#x27;not too broad&#x27; problems due to a lack of real-world experience. Based on your personal or anecdotal experience, what types of problems would you like to see a solution developed to? Are there places or websites to source ideas from? Thank you.
======
ssivark
Scoping out the right problems is a highly non-trivial skill in itself. For
example, a significant component of a PhD is learning to do this with regards
to research projects (that is part of what it means to be an independent
researcher). Typically, the only way to learn this is by calibrating one's
experience with one's ability, and the scope of problems will evolve with the
increase in both. It really helps to have a mentor to provide guidance along
that path, and to help set/refine goals and to calibrate expectations and
provide feedback. The reason I'm explaining all this is that it is very
difficult to generically suggest "problems" without knowing your
background/interests/orientation. (eg: Coming up with good student projects is
an art unto itself; something that professors are expected to learn along the
way)

So maybe provide some more information about yourself?

Appreciate the initiative; good luck! Maybe we should develop more of a
culture of sharing "problems" openly (formulated constructively) so that
others with a suitable background might take a crack at them! :-)

------
drewbt
Turn to the nearest problem that you see, that you have a strong drive to
solve.

This world needs refining.

Everything in order at home? On your street? In your neighborhood? Your City?
Your State? Your Country?

Here in Africa we have plenty of issues needing attention.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals)

Personally I was introduced to the poor standard of early childhood
development in my city by a friend, and since then we have built 3 schools.
Just in my immediate area, there are around 40 that need attention, and across
the country of South Africa there must be thousands. The cost of a simple
building to handle part of the problem is around $25k. Another problem we face
is high unemployment, so we pay people from the community to help build the
schools.

Lack of access to quality education, skills and funding are the challenges we
face.

A lot of research still needs to be done on extent of the problem. I have been
dreaming of an app that maps all of these ECD centers and rates them on
various metrics, like quality of education, building, and nutrition. An app
that would allow professionals who would like to give their time a list of
options of places that need their help. Like crowd funding, but for skills. An
app to allow the greater community to see, engage and solve the most pressing
problems around us, all over the world.

Also and app like Uber or Airbnb, but for artisans and skilled contractors,
with similar rating systems.

There are many crowd funding sites, but it’s time to go deeper and actively
seek out and solve issues.

[https://www.designindaba.com/tags/joe-slovo-west-
community-p...](https://www.designindaba.com/tags/joe-slovo-west-community-
project)

------
decasteve
I like Bucky Fuller’s advice on figuring out what to do:

“The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be
done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will
conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else
has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that
often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of
behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.” — Buckminster
Fuller, Critical Path

------
PopeDotNinja
Are you in an area with homeless people? In my neighborhood, there's a
homeless guy named Mike. His wheelchair has been stolen 4 times in the last
two months, and he can't walk without it. I was thinking it'd be cool if there
was a municipal registration system for wheelchairs, like there are for bikes,
that would work for homeless people. Just an idea. No clue how practical it'd
be!

~~~
JSeymourATL
Related: Malcolm Gladwell's Homelessness is Solvable

>[https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/solvable/solvable-
podc...](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/solvable/solvable-podcast-
series/homelessness-is-solvable/)

------
Dowwie
Social media is in need of a major upgrade. A team of designers (as in user
experience and information design) and programmers could work on new patterns
for social media. You could use Hacker News as the test subject. Challenges
you may consider:

    
    
        1. excessive influence of amateur opinions ( I'm not a doctor, but let me tell you what I think about treatment for acute renal failure -- this gets upvoted to the top )
        2. astroturfing (are praises within the comments section really just insiders shaping the narrative?)
        3. considerate, alternative points of view are buried at the bottom of the comments section
        4. moderator biases
    

you get the idea!

------
mLuby
Find ways to get college-age students involved in government (local, national,
etc), especially voting.

Young people are a large, yet chronically underrepresented demographic. Just
because it's true now doesn't mean it'll always be.

~~~
dantheman
Only vote if you're actually willing to understand what the policies are and
what is currently being done. Otherwise you end up having people vote based on
superfluous surface level details -- e.g., I'd have a beer with them.

~~~
scottLobster
This. I'd say young people should focus on educating themselves about the
various issues in an academic sense, particularly if they're in college.

Don't just read blogs, read studies and learn the statistics/background so you
actually understand what they mean. Look up primary sources to get
perspectives from people who have lived through whatever issue you're
grappling with. Learn to write and how to think about the issue before jumping
to forming an opinion, and know that the process may take years of work before
you have an opinion worth hearing.

You have your whole life to fix problems if you want, take the time to get
prepared first so you don't just make things worse.

From my own experience it's cringey to remember how easy it was to talk about
"how willing I'd be to pay more in taxes for X" back when I was single and not
paying any taxes. And I considered myself educated on the subject! Climate
change is real after all, how can people not be willing to sacrifice for the
greater good when the coastline is literally shrinking?!! :)

I blame most public school systems. They tend to reward very shallow reasoning
for the first 12 or so years of a person's education, particularly in this age
of standardized testing. So most students arrive in college thinking all
problems are just as shallow.

~~~
pietroglyph
I’d say older people should focus on educating themselves about the various
issues in an academic sense, particularly if they haven’t been exposed to the
many new issues facing younger people that are often ignored by the many
politicians catering to older groups.

Don’t just listen to cable news and partisan radio shows, read studies and
learn the statistics/background so you actually understand what they mean.
Look up primary sources to get perspectives from younger people who may face
very different circumstances than you did at their age.

You have a whole life of experience that can help _and_ hinder; take the time
to understand the changing world instead of clinging to the past so you don’t
just make things worse.

From my own experience it’s disappointing to see older people ignore or stall
on a variety of social issues that no longer affect them because they’re set.
Even worse, some ignore or pooh-pooh serious long-term problems just because
they’ll be dead when the ill-effects kick in.

I’m not sure what to blame for this selfishness and myopia, but it’s important
to remember that “uninformed” is not just an adjective that applies to the
young.

~~~
scottLobster
And? As someone in their early 30s I'd agree.

The discussion was what should college-age people be doing with their time.
I'm simply pointing out that young people entering college typically have
little academic knowledge and little real-world experience. So outliers aside,
how are they fit to solve problems again? Most of them are white belts when it
comes to adult life. That's not bad, just a statement of status.

Given that college provides years of uninterrupted access to scientific
journals, never mind classes and a myriad of other education resources, I'd
recommend that they maximize the opportunities in front of them and maybe work
their way to to at least purple belt before setting out to save the world.

Also, I find it sad how eager you were to pigeon-hole me as some cable-TV-
watching boomer who's refusing to change just because I pointed out there are
economic nuances to the climate change argument. You sound like one of the
victims of our shallow public education system I mentioned in my previous
post.

------
AlexB138
The best help young, inexperienced, energetic folks can be is to follow
someone who is aged, experienced, and lacking bandwidth. Romantic notions
aside, young people are not particularly equipped to lead, and would do better
to watch a leader work for a while instead of trying to dive in themselves.

Go find a group that actually has a mission and help them, rather than
searching for a problem to solve. Plenty of animal shelters, churches, and
soup kitchens would love a group of hands to help.

If your program specifically requires you to lead something, create a program
to coordinate causeless volunteers with organizations that need them.

------
squirrelicus
The best advice I can give us to build something for pain you feel. Maybe it's
edtech integrations or a part of your workflow or life that needs
optimization.

If you build something for other people, you'll need user discovery and
project management skills up the wazoo if you don't have a team with that
expertise. And you're at risk of building Facebook for Cat Owners or something
like that. Start with your own pain until you have more experience
transforming user pain into something they'll pay for.

~~~
maccard
I just want to second this. The most satisfying work I've ever done, and the
work I'm most proud of (that I speak of with interviewers etc) is work that
scratched a real itch that I had.

------
throwawayjava
This sounds like a problem in your community: a large group of people every
year trying, probably often failing, to find concrete ways to actually help
out.

Go out and interview folks running non-profits, research labs, churches,
health clinics, legal clinics, schools, anyone else who fits into your
colleges definition of "community around us".

From those interviews, build a large list of project-sized problem/solution
statments for future groups of students. Include skills needed, points of
contact, possible adoption challenges, etc. Validate those project
descriptions with the people you interview.

Identifying and describing problems that need to be solved and what it means
to solve them is something lots of people build careers around

------
Arete314159
Facebook, which has eaten the world, started in college dorm rooms. I'd love
to see a not-for-profit social media option that emphasized connecting people
to join up in the real world, to solve real problems, rather than encouraging
addictive behavior. You could start with a social network for your college
only or your city only and work from there.

~~~
overcast
The problem is that most people only care about themselves, and are not
interested in solving real problems. That's why Facebook/Instagram/any other
platform prioritizing self promotion are massive.

------
bArray
There are problems everywhere that need solving, from a few lines of code (bug
fix), all the way to completely new solutions unlike anything known in
existence. The real questions back to you are:

1\. What are your resources? (Time, money, people, space, hardware, software,
etc.)

2\. Does the problem need to be profitable or is this philanthropy?

3\. What motivates you to work? (World issues, local issues, tough
mathematical problems, etc.)

Trying to find something that falls within the cross-section of all these
problems, I would suggest working on problems that curve energy usage.
Anything that reduces energy usage is almost guaranteed to be profitable,
reduce carbon emissions and generally make the world a better place. Some
ideas around this theme:

* Passive/intelligent cooling of small/medium sized spaces that can be retroactively applied to human inhabited spaces. Air conditioning boxes are ludicrously inefficient, there should be some very simple methods to greatly increase their effectiveness.

* Software to reduce desktop computer power usage - especially in offices where they effectively get left on all of the time over night. I think a ridiculously large number of office workers could also be working on passively cooled ARM based computers. (Windows did/does support a Raspberry Pi for example, so they've already done the legwork.)

------
mooreds
Heya, great to know that you're interested.

A couple of things:

* Contact your local city or state and see. Colorado has a hackathon: [https://gocode.colorado.gov/](https://gocode.colorado.gov/) See if your local state has something.

* Code for America is another organization with a finger on the pulse of what needs to be done: [https://www.codeforamerica.org/](https://www.codeforamerica.org/)

* If you are focusing on a particular technology, reach out to your local meetups around that technology and post a message like you did here.

* Finally, don't get wrapped up in infrastructure or setup. Use something like Heroku: [https://www.heroku.com/](https://www.heroku.com/), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, or Transposit: [https://www.transposit.com/](https://www.transposit.com/) (full disclosure, I work for them) to make sure you can focus on the business problem, not the intricacies of EC2 or ALB configuration. Seen too many good ideas crater on that bikeshedding.

------
bdcravens
Graduate college without debt. Find ways to disrupt the college culture to
accomplish this.

~~~
nitishvashistha
Do you feel ISAs (income share agreements) are a good way to do that? Or do
you think there should be other better ways?

~~~
maccard
I'm not in the US, but my feeling is no. Either get a scholarship to a
prestigious university, or go to an in-state college and work to minimise the
debt, even if it's flipping burgers. Doing that is the difference between
graduating with 10k in debt and 200k in debt.

------
beamatronic
Politics. Seriously. We don’t need another high tech company or hedge fund. We
need to fix our country. We need organized, voting young people.

~~~
lasagnaphil
... to vote for whom? There are already lots of young people organizing and
wanting to vote, although their preferences might not necessarily align with
the generation above them. Populist movements (both the far-left and far-
right) are taking over Western countries at the moment (as a reaction to the
dire economic circumstances of the current generation), but the traditional
political parties (mid-left/mid-right, but especially the mid-left) and the
old media conglomerates are actively trying to suppress that.

~~~
atmosx
I think he/she means to vote for “the right candidate”, possibly someone that
will start a genocide in Yemen, drop more bombs than any other US president
and go away with a Nobel peace prize, pictures with kids playing around in the
White House and a bunch of emotional speeches?

------
morty_s
If you’re in Berkeley, I can help you directly.. I’m not sure why, but this
sounds familiar. Otherwise, here is a problem:

\- Maintaining good nutrition is a problem for many [People].

\+ Maintaining good nutrition is a problem for many [People]. [your solution
name] solves this problem by [providing a superior solution].

* solution: develop a service predicated on ensuring people meet macro/micro nutrient requirements; I wouldn’t do this directly, I would partner with the fast-food/restaurant industry to develop “paths” towards “nutrition.” Say you get a number 1 or whatever, well instead of “only having x more calories to spare” (restriction) you know what you need to eat next.

Now, this wouldn’t be initially ideal as it’ll probably drive unhealthy habits
(to be exploited I’m sure), but it could help drive better habits over time:
\- menus aren’t well-balanced diets \- customers could seek more balance then
there’d be \- incentive to balance menus \- could shift perceptions of food

Also, it’s hard to solve problems you don’t have. But, since you aren’t
married to any problem, you can be problem-promiscuous. This means you should
start trying to solve problems—more problems will fall out of this process.

Loosen up your pitch process too, have categories (i.e. serious, comical,
satirical, fiction, etc). Rapidly pitch for a few days (don’t evaluate any of
them).

------
arslnjmn
One idea would be to start by looking at technological trends in your country.
If they persist, what problems would lend themselves to easier solutions?
Examples:

1\. Smartphone penetration is increasing. This can help with improving access
to education when there's a dearth of content in your local language on
YouTube, Coursera, edX etc. You can build a platform for teachers to easily
create videos / content in your local language and upload them on YouTube.

2\. Mobile adoption is on the rise. This can help with infrastructure planning
by collaborating with telecom providers and analyzing anonymized data. You can
create a tool for planners / ministries to visualize and analyze these
datasets.

3\. A significant proportion of people use feature phones. You can create a
news delivery service or something similar to bring to them what's easily
available on the web and would be useful.

------
joddystreet
Every category of product is filled with multiple companies offering their own
version of the product. There would be clear market leaders and there would be
the upstarts. the product features though vary, according to the company's
business model.

So the opportunity here is to bridge the feature (or marketplace) gap between
the products, eg- say build a bot for hangouts that is similar to some bot
seen on slack, because slack bot company is not yet thinking about supporting
hangouts. Now you don't need to come up with your own product ideas or think
about the product distribution and you solve the problem for a lot of
customers who are stuck with hangouts (because of whatever reason). If you
build a lot of such micro-features, that ultimately adds up to a good amount
of money.

------
whalesalad
A scheduling application for the gig economy. People who are independent
hairdressers, dog walkers, etc... and need an easy booking/billing/CRM tool.

My wife is using a tool for booking meetings at the moment and it’s not the
right tool for the job. It doesn’t seem like the right tool exists for this
type of person.

------
llarsson
Take your "too broad" problems and break them down suck that at least a part
might be doable within the allotted time frame.

People, especially young women, spend tons of time doing laundry around the
world. Doing laundry in a time consuming and manual way keeps them from
attending school, which makes them unable to rise out of poverty. This is a
big issue.

Will you solve the issue of how time consuming it is for people to wash
clothes by hand? No. But could you design, in a computer, a pedal-driven
washing machine possible to make out of plastic? Yes. Build a prototype?
Perhaps. Make instructions available? Maybe. Roughly estimate costs? Sure.

If done well, this could help fix a problem the world is facing. Or at least
help create good ideas for others to work more on.

Don't limit yourselves.

~~~
oh-moses
Sounds weird, but someone actually did exactly that

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x594yMPSFqk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x594yMPSFqk)

------
inflatableDodo
Papanek's _' Design for the Real World'_ might be good inspiration for you.

Here is the pdf -
[http://playpen.icomtek.csir.co.za/~acdc/education/Dr_Anvind_...](http://playpen.icomtek.csir.co.za/~acdc/education/Dr_Anvind_Gupa/Learners_Library_7_March_2007/Resources/books/designvictor.pdf)
\- however I'd strongly recommend getting yourself a dead-tree copy of it.

As for problems, can you come up with some sort of device to pop zits that
flare up right in the middle of the back? I just nearly dislocated my shoulder
trying to deal with one.

------
yumraj
You should do brainstorming sessions with your team where you _diverge_ and
then _converge_.

What I mean is:

1) get a white board/wall, post-its, and markers.

2) have everyone, independent of each other, write ideas on post-its and put
on the wall. Don't judge ideas, just put them. Lots of them. Don't put your
names on the ideas.

3) when you literally run out of steam, which could be a couple of hours later
or even more, as a team start discarding ideas that don't make sense or work
for your team.

4) you may have to do this a few times so that you get a feel for the process.

In the end you should have some really good ideas that you as a team have
agreed upon.

------
jrumbut
Well you're facing a problem right now.

How do people with technical skills find the right place to apply them?

Or maybe where can someone go to find a problem that can help them learn, pre-
vetted perhaps?

Where can people with small problems go to find help?

------
rchaudhary
One of the problems worth trying to solve is Food Wastage. In the United
States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.
This estimate, based on estimates from USDA's Economic Research Service of 31
percent food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to
approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010.

------
JSeymourATL
BIG PROBLEM: The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world
>[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/29/the-
air-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/29/the-air-
conditioning-trap-how-cold-air-is-heating-the-world)

------
paulbaumgart
I recommend interviewing people in your community. If you’re ok with working
on a non-profit idea: the world is filled with local institutions that could
use better digital technology.

------
edoo
More abstractly speaking I'd say nearly every problem relating to humans is
the general inability to understand exponents. Any constant growth rate is an
exponential one and if the doubling rate is on a short enough time span to
significantly increase resource pressures then you have a problem. That
pattern is the world over. The solution would be a clever way of mass teaching
people the consequences of exponents.

------
gradschool
Desalination is not too big but not too small of a problem to solve. Water
shortages are on course to become critical in the coming decades and the
social implications are staggering. A group of bright college students surely
could devise some sort of method for it even if it's inefficient at first, and
then work steadily toward improving it.

------
detcader
If you're away at college in a college town, you could try getting to know the
local government, businesses, and community. That would help solve the problem
that has persisted to the point of stereotype: college students and
administrators ignoring or looking down on the towns surrounding them.

------
kart23
Ask your friends about their problems and solve those. Do stuff that you know
best, for example, is registering for classes at your school hard and is there
space for a better interface? Or maybe your school is socially dead and
students want a way to connect with students .

------
devwastaken
May not be possible, but a mobile app to scan UPC codes on cleaner products
that then gets the products individual chemicals and their percentage through
it's safety data sheet.

It's probably more of a problem of not being able to automate collection of
the data sheets.

------
jjk166
Build some things which already exist. Inevitably you will run into difficulty
trying to do something that ought to be easy. Those are the best problems to
solve.

------
themacguffinman
I haven't actually tried it but I've seen
[https://socialcoder.org](https://socialcoder.org) mentioned before.

~~~
jddj
There's also the humanitarian toolbox ([http://htbox.org](http://htbox.org)).

But I'm not sure if it's still actively developed.

------
beautifulfreak
The great Pacific garbage patch is still out there. I like this passive
solution
([https://theoceancleanup.com/technology/](https://theoceancleanup.com/technology/)).
Maybe plastic taken from the ocean could be processed and incorporated into
the plastic-removal mechanism to make it more effective. I think everyone
would feel grateful if you even tried to solve that problem.

~~~
centrinoblue
80% of the plastic comes from just 10 rivers (there is a link on here
somewhere) maybe focus on stopping it before it gets to the ocean

~~~
centrinoblue
May not be entirely accurate [https://factcheck.afp.com/widely-cited-study-
did-not-show-95...](https://factcheck.afp.com/widely-cited-study-did-not-
show-95-plastic-oceans-comes-just-10-rivers)

------
theobeers
How about something to facilitate access to mental health services in your
college/university community?

------
angmarsbane
Pepperdine Graziadio Entrepreneurship 661?

------
andys627
Join a non profit working on something you believe in

------
crb002
Dating app with deep NN face generation to get the topology of what someone is
attracted to. Get enough samples to generate a model for them so you can auto-
rate photos.

------
hkmurakami
Campus discourse.

