
Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on? - softwareqrafter
I&#x27;m not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app. Instead I&#x27;m trying to look for pressing problems, where I as an engineer could potentially contribute to. What do you feel is an important problem that, when solved (or at least worked on) could make a big difference in the world.
======
Jemaclus
One strategy that I adopt is to think of industries that are highly manual
labor and dream of ways to fix that. I forget the name of the company, but
there's a startup in the Bay Area that builds drones for farmers. Right now,
farmers wake up early in the morning and drive through small sections of their
fields and spot check things to decide what needs water or fertilizer or what-
have-you. They have to spot check, because some of these farms are so large
that it would take a prohibitively long time to check everything. As a result,
a small patch of plants that might need more water might get some water, but
the nearby plants that are already well-watered might get too much water. With
these drones, the farmer can wake up, hit a button on their computer, go make
coffee, and by the time their coffee is ready, the drones have uploaded photos
of every square foot of the farm onto their computer. Software can analyze it
to see what needs watering and fertilizing, what's ready for picking or for
planting, etc.

That's the kind of thing that gets me excited about the future of technology.
How could we automate or ease the jobs of farmers? How can we automate going
to the DMV? How can we streamline flu shots? Can we write software that can
organize resistance to Ebola outbreaks or malaria? Is there some software that
can get the people of Flint access to clean water -- or can we write software
that will prevent a Flint-like crisis from happening again? Can we identify
bots that might be trying to affect our political processes? What about making
sure kids in schools are well fed, since we know that hungry kids perform
worse in schools? Can we solve that somehow?

I don't have answers to any of those questions. They are what I call "Epic
Problems," and I think about them all the time. Unfortunately, the solutions
are several orders of magnitude more involved than a standard CRUD app.

One thing to do is pick an Epic Problem, then work in an Agile mindset to
tackle it. That's what Planet Labs did when it came to satellites. They have
hundreds of shoebox-sized satellites in space, putting them up there at a
tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of what it takes to put a traditional
satellite in orbit.

What else could you do that with?

~~~
jcater
Expanding on that from the opposite direction, what new industries can be
created that can employee the previous workers disrupted by new technology? He
who figures that out will never be for want.

(This isn't an argument against the parent comment at all, as I agree with
them too. Their comment just got me thinking.)

~~~
Jemaclus
Excellent point.

I sort of got into this discussion a few minutes ago with a friend of mine,
but I think part of solving Epic Problems is revisiting the notion that one
must work in order to survive, and particularly revisit the 40 hour work-week
idea. If we can automate a farmer's job so that he spends 4 hours a day
instead of 8 hours a day, does that change the value he provides to society?
Of course not. His earnings shouldn't be dependent on hours worked, but rather
productivity to society. If that farmer can employ 5 farmhands instead of 10,
do the five that lost their jobs really need new jobs? Can we recognize that
the economy doesn't need them anymore? Or can we cut the hours so that each
farmhand works half-time?

Mind you, we're getting into UBI territory which is outside the scope of this
thread, but... How many jobs can you think of that were created in order to
maintain or grow a budget? How many middle managers aren't really necessary?
Do we really need cashiers at Walmart or Target or the grocery store?

As automation accelerates, we're going to find ourselves more and more in a
position of struggling to find new jobs for displaced workers... and I think
we should challenge that premise from the start.

------
whamlastxmas
Make a website that brings transparency to your local political candidates and
votes. In many places it's very difficult to find any real information on what
we're voting on and the props themselves are ambiguous or confusing. And the
candidates themselves also often have no online presence and no real scrutiny
as to whether they're full of shit.

------
mojomark
Homelessness induced by mental health challenges. I know this isn't exactly
what you were asking, but this is an area in which creating engineering
solutions can go a long way. As suggested - think geographically local.
Improvements in the way our society handles these issues, proven to work on a
local scale, can be adapted and replicated globally.

~~~
david927
That's solved in every industrialized country besides America. It's an issue
of political will. I think it's a great thing to work on, and desperately
needed in the US, but it's not a question of how to implement it but rather
the political change to implement it.

Edit: it's not even, strictly speaking, nation-wide. Idaho for example, does a
great job on this. California had most of its mental health facilities shut
down during the 1960's when Reagan was Governor to save costs.

~~~
mojomark
>>That's solved in every industrialized country besides America.

Whoa. That's an interesting unsubstantiated statistic. A quick (albeit
unnecessary) Google search begs to differ:
[https://homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-
statistics/](https://homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics/)

~~~
david927
It's really not. First, I said _industrialized_. I know that homelessness is
high in some poorer countries. I'm talking about the wealthy countries such as
most EU countries.

Switzerland, for example, doesn't remotely have this problem.

~~~
jbg_
I can only assume you haven't spent a lot of time in the EU... Switzerland
(which is not in the EU) is the only European country I've been to that does
not have a very visible population of homeless people.

~~~
david927
20 years in Europe. I've _never_ _never_ _never_ _never_ tripped over crazy
homeless. It's all I do in Berkeley and SF.

It's not a small, nuanced difference but literally night and day. Have you
_really_ seen tents downtown in any city in Europe?

I'm American but most Europeans I know struggle with living in the Bay Area
because it's such a shock for them.

~~~
jbg_
The parent of my comment was claiming that it is a _solved problem_ everywhere
outside of the US. My claim is simply that it is far from solved, and if
someone thinks homelessness is "solved" in the EU, I can only assume they
haven't been there.

You're saying it's worse in SF/Berkeley, and no doubt it is. But it's not
"solved" in the EU.

~~~
david927
That was me. I said, "Homelessness induced by mental health challenges" was
solved in every other OECD country -- and it's true. In those countries there
are programs to make sure people with significant mental health issues,
especially those which would lead to homelessness, are placed in special care.

I've spent 20 years living in various countries in Europe. I stand by my
statement.

------
throwayit
I am going to focus on US centric problems. Here are the two areas I think
Americans could use the biggest help:

1) Personal finance - Americans across the board lack basic financial
competency. This effects the US across the board, people take on too much
credit card debt, school debt, etc. This problem is across all classes (lower,
middle, upper) - Americans do not understand basic things on how to budget,
how much debt they can take on, how credit cards should work, how to invest,
etc. We need financial education happening at the high school level so that
the next generation of Americans don't make the same financial mistakes we
have (taking on too much school debt, using credit card as loans, not taking
advantage of employer 401k, buying houses you can afford, etc)

2) Diet / Eating - If you look at the list of the most common sources of death
for Americans, almost every issue is linked to lifestyle (diet, smoking,
alcohol, etc.). Our diets have spun out of control; Americans lack basic
knowledge on what is healthy or not. I've had many friends who struggle with
weight issues who lack even basic knowledge of how calories work, what their
daily needs, what are necessary nutrients, etc.)

~~~
marak830
Wouldn't that come under education though?(Australians have the same problem).

I didn't realise how bad it was in Aus until I moved to Japan.

Edit: I was referring to your first point, sorry.

~~~
fluffybunnyfeet
Ideally, I agree it should be taught in school. But frankly, our education
system is so screwed on even teaching basics, I don't think it could handle
something as critical as this.

What about something that would get both parents and their kids involved? This
is a multigenerational problem and it might help to get everyone involved on
both points.

------
aphextron
Batteries. Batteries are the number one technical problem right now. A battery
with energy density approaching crude oil would revolutionize the world beyond
even what the Internet did. We really don't have an energy _generation_
problem, we have an energy _storage_ problem.

~~~
philipkglass
"Batteries" is a pretty good answer, but I'd argue that getting cost down is
more important at this point than raising energy density. Tesla proves that
you can make long-range vehicles with today's battery energy density. The
batteries are just too expensive at present to deliver an under-$20k-USD
vehicle that can sustain 5 hours of freeway driving between charges.

For grid scale storage, which would be needed to get to really high
penetration levels of renewable electricity, energy density is even less
important. A paltry 50 watt-hours/kg would be _perfectly fine_ if the battery
also offers low capacity fade per deep discharge cycle and low costs.

A battery with really high energy density, but per-kWh costs higher (or at
least no lower) than today's batteries, would be revolutionary for aircraft
and an extremely welcome improvement for mobile electronic devices. But I
don't think that it would have the same breathtaking macro-impacts on world
energy systems as making much cheaper batteries could.

~~~
shoo
> For grid scale storage, which would be needed to get to really high
> penetration levels of renewable electricity, energy density is even less
> important. A paltry 50 watt-hours/kg would be perfectly fine if the battery
> also offers low capacity fade per deep discharge cycle and low costs.

For grid scale storage there's also options like pumped hydro storage. Cost /
kwh can be much lower than batteries, depending on site and scale. Might need
to start with a budget of $50m-500m though.

------
grx
I see two things:

1) making data and facts more available and easier usable for everyone. This
includes good sources, polished data streams and - the most neglected thing I
suppose - good UI for non-techs.

2) Decentralize applications, plug in interoperability. OStatus is a good
example of this. We need to reduce datasilo hoarding monopolies. This also
partly plays into 1)

~~~
aklemm
Was going to post about more decentralized fundamentals on the Internet;
identity, file storage, basic data, etc. But I'll piggyback and upvote this.

------
oblib
"I'm not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app"

I think I made the very 1st one of those and I'm working on an upgrade now.
lol.

A few areas come to mind that are obvious, like food, shelter, income, energy.

There's a lot of work being done on growing food for personal and community
use with controlled systems but there looks (to me) like there's plenty of
room for improvement and innovation there still.

From what I've read recently inexpensive, durable, and accurate soil moisture
sensors are needed. It looks like a "Pick one feature" situation there right
now. I've been pondering that a bit lately.

I've seen some interesting innovation in how weeds are managed in large scale
agriculture that include using organic "grit" to "sandblast" weeds with remote
controlled mechanically articulated nozzles using image recognition software
to direct the blast. This eliminates the need for herbicides so it attempts to
solve a very pressing issue.

I recently saw a robotic "weed whacker" on a social funding site that got a
lot of attention, but the prototype they showed didn't inspire confidence in
me that it'd do much.

Pest control is another obvious pressing problem in agriculture, as is
efficient use of water.

I'm currently designing a simple experiment to grow salad veggies outdoors in
the winter using low hoop row covers and passive solar heating.

Growing food closer to where it's consumed has the potential to greatly reduce
costs, environmental impact, and hunger, and it looks to me like there's a lot
of headroom there for improvement.

~~~
nachiketkumar
I couldn't agree more re. growing food for personal and community use. I'm
currently in the very early stages of designing an app for small farmers and
CSAs. Hard to get many farmers to respond to giving me input and share their
knowledge. I see a tremendous scope for improvement in the entire user and
customer experience of finding and signing up for a CSA (from the end customer
side) and then effectively managing and nurturing your customers and reducing
churn (from the small farmer's side).

~~~
troycarlson
Not sure how you're soliciting feedback but you'd probably have pretty good
luck volunteering for them and observing/conversing while getting first hand
experience. Plus you'd make some friends (beta users).

~~~
nachiketkumar
yep- much harder to find the time to go volunteer but you're right on that. I
don't consider myself a good salesman but I need to sell the idea that doing
this would improve their bottom line.

------
peterwwillis
A big difference how? You could work for the NSA and make it easier for the
government to know people's thoughts, that would sure make a big difference in
the world.

Or you could build an information sharing and vetting platform which could use
proofs from multiple independent sources to certify data as true by tying it
to factual evidence, a kind of scientific reddit to combat disinformation. You
could use it as a backend to Wikipedia to vet and prove information, or
disprove. Extend it using multiple dependent proofs to support another and you
might be able to provide a platform on which to fight for political issues
based on reams of certified data.

Also, jobs. It's hard to give some people jobs. People need jobs, and they
need to make money, in order to fuel an economy and sustain a society. As an
example, in a country with some 6 million felons, it's hard for them to get
jobs, so they become a strain on the economy (among other things). Make a
thing that helps people who have a hard time getting a job to get a job.

~~~
jd3
I suppose you're referring to wikitribune?

------
vehementi
When a scientist wants to make progress in some field, the scientist first
educates herself on the state of the art, and then does novel research that
pushes the frontier.

When you have a discussion on facebook/reddit/HN about your favorite political
issue, you just post your gut feeling and what you heard on TV instead of
educating yourself on the issue, learning what the foremost experts are
currently debating and what arguments are already refuted.

Super shitty example fix: Facebook Clippy "It sounds like you're having a
discussion about abortion - are you aware that the smartest people on this
topic are not actually discussing X, but rather have moved on to Y?"

Side problem:

When we DO make some bump of progress, only a few people benefit (the people
reading the thread, at best), and everyone else does not. A million parallel
discussions rehash the issue until after a decade, "culture" incrementally
improves. How can my facebook discussion, in which I made a good point,
prevent that same discussion from ever happening again?

~~~
sjg007
Well education is how you solve this but we chronically underfund it and every
kid is a blank new mind so progress is lost when we don’t teach.

In the West we have two general views on the nature of humans; intrinsically
good or fundamentally bad. The rest of modern politics is shaped from this.

The internet and Facebook helps to find a diversity of thought but also in
general does not promote critical thinking skills (which you’re suppose to
learn in high school)...

since as we’ve seen facebook just degenerates into an echo chamber where
blatant propaganda is unquestioned and in fact promoted. Critics are fake news
and we refuse to critically debate. You see this in Congress where they
blatantly lie about tax cuts, health care etc...

~~~
vehementi
Education doesn't fully solve it. Education remedies the deficiencies.

To use PG's method: in 200 years, do you think that we will have 100M
parallel, entry level discussions about the merits of abortion (or the
political issue du jour)? No, obviously our discussion experience will be
augmented such that we are easily led to the forefront of the debate and build
on top of the pertinent points and progress being made. How do we invent
_that_ future?

~~~
sjg007
I don’t think it will happen that way. The courts already ruled in roe vs wade
and yet people still go back to first principles to argue.

~~~
vehementi
People can disagree with Roe v Wade. There's still a foundation, that I think
you're not noticing - we as a culture have made progress on it, the arguments
are not the same as they would have been 100 years ago. More dramatically, the
arguments about slavery are not the same, we are past it.

~~~
sjg007
There’s a legal foundation but it’s still an active political argument as is
teen birth control. We have made progress but I wouldn’t say anything is
guaranteed.

------
philipkglass
In the software space, I think that the world could use high-integrity
reader/renderer libraries for common file formats. It's embarrassing that e.g.
TIFF and font file readers/renderers have enabled arbitrary code execution,
years after the formats were standardized, for inputs that aren't supposed to
contain any interactive functionality.

Of course it's pretty obvious why nobody has done this before: almost nobody
wants to pay for high integrity software unless compelled by law.

And there's obvious problem number two: even if you find a philanthropist to
pay you to write this software and give it away under the most liberal
license, it'll take effort to switch away from existing libraries. You might
be able to imitate the structure of e.g. LibTIFF but everyone who was handling
TIFF with another library will find it hard to switch.

------
caseysoftware
The one that you understand and have skills, knowledge, abilities, or
relationships that you can apply.

I know that's kind of cliche but there are opportunities and/or places to help
all over the place. It's a matter of finding the ones that you can a) get
passionate about and b) be successful at. And this applies to startups, non-
profits, or even that internal project.

Personally, I work to support Austin Disaster Relief Network -
[https://adrn.org/](https://adrn.org/) \- which is a group of ~150 churches in
Central Texas that come together to help people during flood, fire, hurricane,
and anything else. We are background checked and badged to cross the emergency
tape and help the Red Cross, local PD, or whoever else is on the scene. The
focus first is helping people immediately.. while their house is still on
fire. And then help them get back on their feet.

While I have first aid training, my specific role is helping on the technology
side. When something happens - like Hurricane Harvey - we can stand up a 25
person call center in under an hour. It's powered by Cisco phones plugged into
a local Asterisk/FreePBX server connected to Twilio. (I'm a former Twilio
employee but they're not involved.) In the field, ADRN uses simple web and
mobile apps to collect victim info and issue gift cards. It's tied into
geolocation services and person databases to reduce fraud. There are
online/offline modes for when you're in the field where there is no
connectivity. There are a ton of technical roles required!

And the underlying aspect of all of this is that we design, build, and deploy
technology with the _HOPE_ that it never gets used. If it's used, that means
something horrible happened.

And btw, Harvey isn't over for people in the field. All help is appreciated -
[https://adrn.org/disaster-relief/hurricaneharvey/](https://adrn.org/disaster-
relief/hurricaneharvey/)

------
dv_dt
Economics. A problem that has come with increased inequality is that the
allocation of capital has gotten further and further disconnected from people
(the human capital) who have a more direct link to knowing or exploring ways
of developing fundamental value generation. I suspect we are seeing this in
metrics like decreasing productivity, decreasing new business generation - it
seems like financial capital isn't mixing with human capital nearly as
efficiently as we might hope. Is there a way to relink the two through an new
or modified economic channel that dramatically facilitates this; and maybe
even helps rebalance inequality by making invested human capital more
consistently yield hands off dividends like invested financial capital.

~~~
uoaei
Put ownership of productive goods and services in the hands of those who are
actually creating those goods/performing those services. This would empower
each person to push the investment of capital to what matters most to them--
namely, themselves. When the consensus is formed, a lot more money will be
devoted to maximizing human capital and a lot less toward the overhead
(massive paychecks for a few, crazy cycles of bureaucracy) that are the
hallmarks of today's economic goings-on.

------
joeblau
There are probably huge strides that can be taken in healthcare, food, energy,
transportation and finances. The challenge is that most of these industries
are heavily regulated so you go in optimistic then get inundated with endless
waves of bureaucracy, and end up making a new version of Twitter.

I'm personally fascinated with the transpiration industry. Everything from
city bikes, to self driving cars, to hyper loop[1], to super sonic
transport[2], to intergalactic transport[3].

[1] [http://hyperloop-one.com](http://hyperloop-one.com)

[2] [http://boomsupersonic.com](http://boomsupersonic.com)

[3] [http://www.spacex.com/mars](http://www.spacex.com/mars)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Definitely feels like SpaceX just ate Boom's lunch last night.

~~~
joeblau
Tell me about it! I think it's going to come down to cost. If SpaceX is
anywhere near $2,500 a flight, it's going to be a tough slog for Boom.

------
matt4077
Journalism!

If you haven't noticed, the world around us is falling apart. Personally, I
consider this malady of discontent just a result of letting every idiot post
their comments on the internet. But that doesn't change the fact that
something needs to be done, and I think it's more of a problem of teaching
people how the process works, not so much to change the outcomes. Generally, I
see people reaching for conspiracy theories or accusations of corruption
whenever they don't understand the complexity of a problem. I. e. "Why don't
they just build nuclear power plants? It's CO_2 neutral, and Obama's solar
power mafia is just trying to stop the neutron-emitting pebble-fusor that will
be 10x cheaper! Scandalous!"

Unfortunately, I haven't found the silver bullet to do this. So, second best:
somehow help today's quality publishers to survive, and hope they have better
ideas. There are two tech/business ideas I would love to see:

a. "The world's worst ad-blocker"

Currently, all ad blockers are focused on blocking as much as possible. That,
and speed, are basically the metrics they show you.

I think (hope) there's a sizeable fraction of people that wouldn't mind
unobtrusive, non-spyware advertisement if it helps their favourite writers to
make rent. What's needed is an ad blocker that constantly evaluates parameters
including the page publisher's reputation, the ad network, the product/company
being advertised, the file sizes, ad positioning, movement and/or sound, and
privacy implications. Then allow. the user (some) leeway to influence it to
their liking.

b. A netflix-like subscription

This is more of a business problem. I guess publishers are afraid of losing
their current $200/yr subscribers to a service that only pays them $10/yr or
so, because it divides those $200 among a number of publishers.

They may be right. But personally, I have just one subscription, and that's
the really cheap New Yorker, which I bought just to not be a complete free
rider. I have a few hundred $ for whoever wants it, and gets me the
NYT/Economist/WSJ/FT/etc. as a package deal.

~~~
Myrmornis
Agree, somehow, high quality journalism sources like the main broadsheets need
to move away from the cathedral-website model to a pay-per-article model.
Realistically, people aren't going to spend more than $20-$30 per month on
journalism. And realistically, given the enormous variety of high quality (and
often free) content available, people certainly aren't going to spend that
$20-$30 on a subscription to one or two newspapers. Healthy society needs free
journalism, journalists need to be paid, people nowadays ain't gonna buy
subscriptions to entire websites when they can read, like, the internet.

------
Raphmedia
The easiest you can do is probably to look locally.

I'm sure there are a lot of non-profit with horrible websites, architectures,
communications, etc. which you can throw a few hours at and help a lot of
people.

------
wbl
Make formal methods cheaper and easier to use.

~~~
stcredzero
That's the wrong way to frame that problem. Formal methods generally have a
mindshare problem that underlies their cost problems. Make formal methods more
accessible to the average programmer.

~~~
ScottBurson
It's not clear to me that you're disagreeing. "Cheaper and easier to use" and
"more accessible" could be the same thing.

~~~
stcredzero
In the end, it is. But maybe not on a micro level, which keeps environment
designers from doing the right thing to get more mindshare.

------
lazyjones
Automatic translation/interoperability between programming languages. The
fragmentation of software into dozens of major languages hurts software
quality, limits language choices, limits adoption of new languages, limits
availability of software on new/less popular platforms, increases cognitive
load for developers and sysadmins...

(and JavaScript as the most popular transpiler target today is depressing)

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
From the variety of answers showing up in this thread, one wonders if there is
some tool to help link qualified people with problems they can solve.

------
Jun8
Work on LARGE scale, e.g. pick a project from pg's frighteningly ambitious
startup ideas
([http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)).
This was from 2012 so a bit dated now but the general thought applies. Disrupt
a segment, but one where there aren't huge clear antagonists that can squish
you immediately, e.g. healthcare.

Two examples that are important to me:

* Investigate the rising cost of higher education. Start with public data (for state universities), create a nice visualization on where the money is going. Extrapolate to private colleges. Then find ways to attack and change the status quo.

* Increase quality of education of poor kids (not just inner city, but that may be easier to start with). For example, can the shuttered grade schools in poor areas be repurposed into startup spaces, providing office to startup at very low cost, but they have to provide tutoring teaching for local students.

------
phillc73
A better way to connect funding with research.

This applies to many fields, but in general the academic and R&D funding
process feels broken. Researchers and scientists spend a disproportionate
amount of time writing funding applications, rather than researching or doing
science.

------
crispinb
Create accessible tech that:

1\. amplifies people's abilities to reasonably assess evidence on topics of
significance, analogously to how literacy has amplified collective memory.

2\. enables online collective environments that cultivate the capacity to use
such amplified abilities in interaction between non-like-minded people, along
with related attributes such as curiosity and humility.

You'd probably need to be some kind of genius to pull either of these off,
though the type of genius required is probably not that of engineering.

It's what I'd do if I had the concrete ideas but, unfortunately lacking genius
(of any type), I don't.

------
golemotron
A service uses Russell Conjugation [1] to detect bias in news sources.

[1] [https://www.edge.org/response-
detail/27181](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181)

------
nunez
Anonymous employer review system for US teachers and education administrators.

Teachers throughout the US are not treated equally, but because everything
about them is open and publicly available, there is no way for them to review
their experiences and forewarn other interested candidates until it’s too
late.

Glassdoor is “fine” except it’s not really oriented towards education, which
is quite a world of its own.

I tried to work on this concept two years ago, but didn’t get very far.
Authenticating teachers anonymously is difficult.

Feel free to email me for more info.

------
mariushn
Healthcare. The issue with 'important problems' not only that they are much
harder to solve, but also that lots of people will ignore your project.

Personal example: I started [https://www.juvmed.com](https://www.juvmed.com)
(it's not ready for Show HN yet). Shared on my facebook, got 4 likes, no
comments. My selfies get 50 likes. Demotivating.

Btw, any feedback on that project is welcome. Thanks

------
icameron
Autonomous cars. Traffic is bad for the environment, safety, and psychological
health of drivers. Let's reclaim years of our lives that are spent in traffic.

Litter drone. Design a solar powered robotic beach sweeper, to identity and
collect the trillions of plastic chips that are covering the beaches. Extend
the idea to a fleet seaworthy drones to remove floating micro debris and call
in help for large floating debris.

Thanks for asking!

~~~
nojvek
This is one of my dreams. Helping myself with the udacity nanodegrees

------
ChuckMcM
It sort of depends on what you bring to the party of course. But it is always
a good question to consider and fun on a Friday afternoon.

Education would be a big one for me. Part of the issue with today's world is
that we see the world differently through the lens of how we were educated. If
we ever hope to have a planetary wide society we need to start with a common
understanding of the world.

------
hacking_again
The lack of empathy that online communication encourages. Empathy defined as
conscious attempts to think and feel what the person you're talking to thinks
and feels. It's quite natural with in-person and even voice communication. An
extension of this problem is the lack of empathy online bleeding into offline
communication.

------
busterarm
Improving existing software stability/security. Dive into the OpenBSD project
and stay a while.

Yep. The totally unsexy answer.

------
pizza
in general abstract terms, important problems have solutions that:

\- improve security and efficiency (which is also security :P )

e.g.: umbrellas prevent you from getting wet, the judicial system (intends..)
to enable the public to trust one another, your skin is a firewall against
pathogens, sleep cleanses the brain of metabolic byproducts, dreams
(ostensibly) make it more likely that your awake mind will succeed more..

\- address shortcomings of previous attempts, or otherwise explain that the
problem was previously underrated (if it isn't a solution that just happens to
have astonishing luck :P)

\- punishes gamblers that speculate without paying the price and instead do it
at the expense of nonparticipants

\- even better if the solution to the problem enables mutually-beneficial
interactions at the atomic level

\- and 10x as better if it avoids growing into a benevolent dictatorship

------
tunesmith
Verifiably true facts on the ground. Like, verifiably true video footage. If
we see reporting that something has happened, how do we know it actually
happened? This is going to become a much bigger problem - today's "fake news"
is just the tip of the iceberg.

------
bobosha
Reinvent information access ("search") for the mobile world. The current
paradigm google mini-me model, or even glorified chatbots like siri, are
nowhere near where they should be. This necessitates a complete rethink of the
search<>browse paradigm.

~~~
mariushn
>The current paradigm google mini-me model, or even glorified chatbots like
siri, are nowhere near where they should be

What's your vision on better information access?

------
TYPE_FASTER
The biggest problem we are currently facing, as a species, is self-
destruction. The two problems are:

1\. How do we stop destroying our climate and planet as quickly as possible?

2\. How do we look for new planets to colonize?

~~~
stumpf
It seems like Elon is trying to make impacts in both of these with Tesla and
SpaceX.

------
ASipos
I would be interesting in knowing a major pure programming problem, not one
motivated by the outside world. Like the open problems of pure math.

~~~
PaulHoule
Better tools for the "non-professional programmer"

------
tedmiston
Making good financial advice and planning accessible to everyone, especially
those who need it most.

~~~
PaulHoule
It's not clear what that means. Frequently the "financial planning" drumbeat
seems oriented towards doing what is good for Wall Street.

~~~
tedmiston
You're right, I think it's broad and there are several subproblems. For some
people it might mean: opening their first savings account, teaching them to
grow a safety net, introducing retirement accounts and their benefits, helping
people understand tools like HSAs, helping people understand and take
advantage of credit card rewards, coming up with approaches to pay down debt,
understanding the repayment of student loans in fields that are special cases
like education.

------
marze
Optimizing human health through nutrition, robotics, human colonization of
space and the planets.

------
craftyguy
Human population control. We are not on a sustainable population growth track.

~~~
KanyeBest
Really sad to see this being downvoted.

Overpopulation is the root cause of many other serious issues such as hunger,
lack of access to sanitation/medical treatment/education. We live in a world
with finite resources, so the more of us there are, the less each of us gets.

------
jrmg
Nuclear fusion power.

~~~
jd3
Seriously, I don't understand why EMC2 (the polywell team) still relies on the
pennies they receive from the Navy. We should be investing at least $200
million into polywell research.

------
bra-ket
translate cognitive psychology to code

~~~
CLGrimes
Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying replace therapists with a software
product?

~~~
bra-ket
I'm talking about general AI as an engineering challenge

------
odomojuli
Whatever interests them the most.

------
amelius
A fair economy.

------
s73ver_
Hangover free booze.

~~~
PaulHoule
Already there in the form of partial agonists for the benzodiazepine receptor.
It won't ever get approved.

------
kapauldo
Improving voter turnout. Enabling food ingredient dissemination. Job and
educational opportunities for ex cons and poor disadvantaged people. Doing
something modern with all those idle train tracks. 100x roi blood tests (the
thing theranos lied about). There are dozens of big problems. Please share
what your short list is and please tone down the saas put downs. A lot of good
people have put a lot of their life into building honest businesses.

