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

69 points by derekc ↗ HN
So we've kept on getting threads like "Would this idea be cool?" on HN, and I've always thought that this wasn't the correct approach in creating a startup. The problem should be recognized first. So HN, what are problems that you face everyday that need to be fixed or remedied?

157 comments

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aitoehigie
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.
logicalmind
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.
rokhayakebe
I had a conversation with a friend and asked him if sleeping was a disease. I firmly believe that one day human kind will solve both the need to eat, sleep and death.

Meanwhile you can stop trying to be more productive. It is really overrated. Try taking a Saturday off and do nothing but read, watch good movies you have been putting off, and just relax overall.

dsc
Meditation FTW!
brg
Why would anyone who loves what they do stop trying to be more productive? When I say more productive I mean I want to read more, have more conversations, identify and solve more problems, write more papers. Taking a day to 'relax overall' is the least appealing thing I can think of at this moment.
rokhayakebe
I apologize. I thought you meant productive as in more work (you know more code, more marketing etc..).

Maybe I am abnormal here, but there is nothing in this world I could enjoy doing everyday for most of the day.

spking
I like to get myself away from any and all electronic devices at least one day a week. Last Saturday I took my family to the beach and we all brought books to enjoy. It was awesome, and I felt more relaxed and recharged than I ever do after eight hours of sleep.
mechanical_fish
I'm looking for a solution to a much different sleep problem: How to consistently remind myself that trying to do without sleep is counterproductive and nuts and that I should be doing much more sleeping.

I need the reverse of an alarm clock: A clock that somehow makes me sleep.

Because otherwise not only will my brain function worse, but the additional stress may actually shorten my life, which pretty much screws up the goal of getting more hours out of life!

PidGin128
I don't think you need a reverse, just to reconsider what the alarm you're setting is for.

Try setting the alarm for when you should sleep, instead of wake.

I need to do this myself, and reading your thoughts made it clearer to me. (Doubt I'll actually do it though...)

nlh
Sleep is neither a problem nor a disease, and I really don't think you should see it as an obstacle to your productivity. Trying to fix the "sleep problem" is about on par with trying to fix the "going to the bathroom" problem or the "having to eat" problem. Lose the balance of sleep and you'll burn out faster than you can possibly imagine.
radu_floricica
Uh. If you go that way, I'd dare say the elephant in the room is that I'll grow old and die (probably of cancer) in about 50 years. Honestly, it bothers me a lot more then sleep and it's easier to solve too.
JesseAldridge
Healthcare is expensive.
orangecat
And it will continue to be until we institute severe rationing, or cure aging. I vote for the second.
tjmaxal
"curing aging" would actually INCREASE the cost of healthcare to nearly infinite.
orangecat
Please explain. The average medical expenses of a 30 year old are vastly lower than for an 80 year old, and a successful cure for aging would give you the health of a 30 year old indefinitely.
ErrantX
Over a long enough lifespan the chance of contracting cancer approaches one. So we'd have to fix that too, for starters.
orangecat
Nah. Sure, even if you don't suffer from aging you'd still occasionally get diseases, and eventually one would be fatal, but your medical expenses per year would be far less than they are today.
ErrantX
Ok then, how about this. Obesity is a growing cause of illness. Removing aging is unlikely to affect that, arguably it could compound the problem.
orangecat
Potentially, although I'd expect that a person with the health of an obese 30 year old would still have lower medical expenses than a non-obese 60 year old. At any rate, obesity is a relatively easy problem compared to aging. (Step 1: stop subsidizing corn syrup...)
ErrantX
No it doesn't work like that; it's not the age, it is beig obese for a length of time.

I'm not sure it is as easily fixable as your comment suggests - I'd argue it is as non-trivial as stopping aging.

jeffcoat
Careful, here: this is exactly what the argument would look like if you'd decided in advance what the right answer is, and you kept casting around for reasons why that's so until you find one that seems to stick.
ErrantX
Not at all I'm offering reasons - all pretty solid ones - why fixing aging wouldn't remove the cost of healthcare. The point was to show there are lots of other healthcare costs unrelated to aging.

I'd argue it is the other poster who has become set on a theory. :-)

Robin_Message
Dammit that is a ridiculous statement.

No aging -> people still get sick occasionally -> it costs money to fix them -> it had better cost less than they earn between sicknesses, else they die

Or, at the moment healthcare is O(1), based on a lifespan of N, but if the lifespan is extended radically, it will become O(N). So, if eliminating ageing causes N to tend to infinity, then I suppose healthcare costs will also tend to infinity. But then so will the accommodation costs, food costs, toothbrush costs, internet access... Healthcare looks like capex at the moment; if we lived much longer it'll look more like a variable cost.

tjmaxal
say it costs a dollar per person each year to keep their bodies in perfect condition. without aging there is no death, no death means that the population will always grow or stagnate. $1/person/year Time becomes infinite, population is always positive there for no matter how small the cost they will always become infinite because time is infinite and population is a positive number.
hugh3
Cure aging and you either:

a) Have a quite sudden and very severe overpopulation problem, or

b) Are forced to ration babies.

Both of these are pretty damn dystopic.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to live forever, but not necessarily at the cost of having everyone else live forever too.

orangecat
c) Institute a Logan's Run policy where you get 80 or 100 years of good health and are then painlessly euthanized.

I think we can do better than c, but it's a lower bound: it avoids your concerns and is still a large improvement over the status quo.

I'd like to live forever

Curing aging doesn't let you live forever. There would still be diseases (at a much lower rate), accidents, murder, suicide, natural disasters, etc. All it would do is prevent the deterioration of our bodies and often our minds that generates large medical expenses, prevents us from being productive, and impairs our quality of life. It would also give us the option of living for several centuries longer than we do today, which we could take or not.

hugh3
I think we can do better than c, but it's a lower bound: it avoids your concerns and is still a large improvement over the status quo.

I'm rather unconvinced that's an improvement over the status quo... you've just granted the government the power to euthanize people. And you just know that they're going to find a way to abuse that. They'll start by giving extensions to really valuable people we don't want to lose; great scientists, artists, writers. And then it'll be "gee, I guess politicians are pretty awesome as well, perhaps politicians should get another hundred years too..." Pretty soon it's effective-immortality for political favours. No thanks, I'll take my chances with old age.

The best solution is:

(d) Build starships and expand into space.

But I worry that curing aging might come first.

orangecat
(d) Build starships and expand into space.

We can agree on that at least. Our eggs definitely need more than one basket.

johngalt
Consider how much time/energy humans spend in training/development. Imagine having 30 years to get your PHD without the pressures of having to start a family in the same time frame?

It's truely a very short "maximum productivity time" we have. Possibly as little as 10 years. And in many cases it's that very time where most real progress is made.

Could you imagine if Einstein were still at work today with the mind of a 25 year old? Or Von Neumann with today's technology?

I think that most problems presented in this scenario could be solved.

saukrates
Healthcare (sick care) is expensive in the hospital setting once the problem is out of your control. Preventative Healthcare is very cheap ($1/day vs $10,000/day). How do we keep people healthy rather than treating symptoms in the hospital?
nradov
Or until we find a way to stop widespread overeating, substance abuse, and sedentary lifestyles. If we could manage that (probably impossible) then total healthcare costs would be so low that we wouldn't have to worry how to pay for them.
edw519
Enterprise software sucks.

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.

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.

When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that's where the money is.

What banks were in the 1930's, enterprise IT is in the 21st century.

rokhayakebe
A friend of mine suggested truly distributing companies. His theory is that if you can outsource payroll, then you should be able to outsource everything, everything, that is not core to your business.

In a sense that is what the App Store does. You build the software (your main skill) and you do not even need a website. You could take it further and pay another company x% of revenue and they take care of marketing, another will do your customer service for y% etc...

tjmaxal
Most companies don't do this because it is too expensive to out source everything especially when you are just starting.
rokhayakebe
You could outsource on a revenue sharing model, this way both parties' interests are aligned.
ippisl
The problem with outsourcing everything , is that you gain somethings(speed , access to talent, sometimes cost savings) , but you loose the tighter integration that a single unified company has.

This integration leads to better information sharing on projects, more aligned incentives for people in the project, and at least in some cases can lead to better products.

SingAlong
Oh then if the X company can market it and take a share of the revenue, then that'll be fine for hackers who can build the enterprise software based on different perspective or a better idea.

Can you throw some more light on these marketing companies?

jasonlbaptiste
Another trend I noted after sitting in on a VC pitch: Look where people use Excel as some sort of database/process management system because an existing app isn't there or just sucks. That probably spells out opportunity. The world's most used database isn't Oracle or MySQL, it's Microsoft Excel...
logicalmind
I work in enterprise software, trying to improve it one company at a time, and the biggest niche I see for excel is bypassing existing security mechanisms or procedures. We tend to expose data to users in a secure manner based on roles or authorities. But once users can export the data into excel, all of those security mechanisms are bypassed and they can send the data to other people or take it home.

I've even seen instances where excel exports are used as disaster recovery mechanisms.

joshu
Excel is perhaps the single largest development tool used (mostly by people who don't think they are developing anything.)

I keep wondering what a next-generation replacement might look like?

hernan7
Also, SharePoint "surveys" as quick&dirty data entry forms. Kind of a modern-day Microsoft-centric version of the venerable FormMail script.
spatulon
This is something I've noticed before, and I'm not the only one - it's number 22 on pg's list of "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" from a couple of years back: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
dockd
It seems like another major use for Excel is its ability to allow people type text in tables. That's using a big hammer for a rather small nail.

This fails in Word--it tries to make the table fit onto a printed page--about 6" across. It doesn't work very well in my [old] copy of Dreamweaver.

bdickason
Also look for places where small businesses use paper :) My fiance and I started a salon together and we started out using an appointment book and client rolodex to track their customers because the software all sucks.

Two months later, I built some software for it with some friends and now we're getting close to being able to launch it to the world :) Every day I walk by 2-3 barber shops and salons in NYC without computers or with old Windows 3.1-esque programs.

fjabre
So true. Also don't forget how many people actually major in information sytems in college. The whole industry is self perpetuated by overly complicated software. The more complicated the more they can milk their clients.. Such a waste.. Although I suppose in the current environment it's better to have these guys employed instead of looking for jobs.
jasonlbaptiste
Ha, I've renamed my degree in computer information systems to a degree in: How Not To Build Software.
jcromartie
Every single Information Systems graduate that I've met has made a horrible horrible mess of every piece of code they touch. I hate to stereotype, but when it's all you have to go off of, it's all you can do.
jasonlbaptiste
The capstone project for my class had a teacher that required we used Blackboard as a code repository system instead of me setting up Github or beanstalk. She also asked that we use stored procedures for MySQL, which no one was familiar with and would take way longer. The code was horrible, the design was ugly, and half the class was spent designing by committee. It was all for an app that should have taken a couple of weeks to build (it tracked absences for the school of business).
jcromartie
That's really amazing. What was her title? Was this supposed to be a programming professor? How can anybody who purports to be teaching the practicalities of software construction require you to use the wrong tool? Blackboard has terrible handling of file uploads... as of fairly recently two users couldn't two different files with the same name.
jwhitlark
Heh, I had a CS Professor once refer to the command line as "a legacy technology that's still occasionally useful for testing." I didn't tell her that saying that at a hiring interview at my company would end the interview.
_delirium
I've had more the opposite experience--- one CS professor used only a Unix command line without X installed, and his machine didn't have a mouse. Not sure which is worse.
desigooner
i can relate to that .. not only did my professor use command line only, he required the finals (more like a paper) and the project reports typed up in LaTex + the presentations in .PS/PDF format .. No Word or Powerpoint
Quiark
Isn't that actually a good thing? :)
jodrellblank
In the same way that forcing people to code everything in assembler or C instead of Ruby or Python out of some religious ideology is a good thing.

Word produces acceptably formatted acceptably cross platform documents with low effort and a PDF export option for the last three years too.

[deleted]
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jasonlbaptiste
Ed, do you feel this same principle applies to all business software, not just enterprise software (ie- large companies)?
edw519
Yes. The problems are different, but the source is the same: software that sucks.

(I probably should have entitled grandparent, "Enterprise/SMB software sucks" to be more precise.)

imp
Is the solution better software or smarter managers? I mean, you know that enterprise software sucks, but do the people who pay for it know that it sucks? How would you tackle that problem?
DLarsen
The manager often isn't savvy enough to discern whether the software itself sucks. You may be able to blame a lot of lousy business processes on enterprise software, but a willingness to move forward without fixing major known problems can also be very harmful. Everyone may agree that the process needs improvement, but too often that process gets baked into a new process or software application. When that happens, chances are things will continue to suck for a very long time.
stcredzero
And all of this needs software. And most of what they have sucks. I mean really sucks.

That's because Enterprise Software is actually an arbiter of controlling people through controlling workflow. It's solidified corporate politics!

Entrenched interests within a company don't want to optimize the company's bottom line. They want to optimize to further their own interests.

I once posted about a transatlantic E3 line that was going unused in my former company. The original project that was to use it disappeared. Afterwards, the VPs of different groups fought over it, ensuring no one would get it. The company paid $300k a year to keep that thing open for a long time.

The way to fix this is through highly granular free market economics. Let a company set standards and empower multiple groups to compete to those standards.

yummyfajitas
The way to fix this is through highly granular free market economics. Let a company set standards and empower multiple groups to compete to those standards.

This sounds good to hackers like us who work at small companies, but it's actually fairly dangerous for a big company to do this. One of the groups might risk the company (rather than just themselves) in order to make largish profits.

An extreme example of this: suppose AIG Financial Products is independent of AIG Boat Insurance. Then AIG Financial Products might make really risky bets which, if they go bad, could also take out AIG Boat Insurance and AIG Event Liability Insurance.

stcredzero
Actually, this is what happened with WaMu's financial wizards. They sunk the rest of the firm, including the awesome retail banking part.
joshu
Coase disagrees. Transactions get expensive.
stcredzero
I thought the Japanese achieved more granular capitalism through long term relationships. This lowers transaction costs while maintaining the pressure for suppliers to keep up their performance levels.
mixmax
I can only second edw519's comment, and add a bit to it.

Building enterprise software is not only about building software, it's also about processes. Every company with more than a dozen employess has processes for dealing with just about everything. How information flows from A to B, who controls it, who can edit it, who can view it and who approves it.

This is primarily a strategic decision. Enterprise software has to accomodate processes and play by the rules, powergames and politics set forth by the firm it is used by. This is different than building B2C apps where the goal is more transparent. If you build dropbox the goal of the software is pretty obvious. If you build enterprise software there are a lot of stakeholders with diffferent agendas and priorities, and if you want to sell to them you need to accomodate all of them. So you need to knwo how firms operate behind the lines, and you definitely have to know how to sell to them. How good the software is is only one of many priorities.

nostrademons
This is a large portion of why enterprise software sucks - accommodating all those processes is a huge pain in the ass, it tends to scare off many of the people who think that software should be elegant, and it tends to result in overly-complicated, byzantine software from the rest.

There's a lot of money to be made for those willing to cut through the bullshit, but be aware that there's a lot of bullshit to cut through.

alalonde
Absolutely. I think the hardest part would be defining requirements that nail the most important 90% of functionality. You would need strong mentorship from several experienced enterprise veterans to even stand a chance, though.
j_baker
Actually, you need to think of who's making the decisions to buy enterprise software. Is it the people who use it, or executives? In most cases, it's the latter. Most big enterprise companies are where they are because they've learned how to market to the right people.

So in that sense, most enterprise software is good. It just depends on whose definition of good you're going with.

ronnwer
What your thought on new companies like yammer.com and socialcast.com ?
hooande
Enterprise software sucks because corporations have little incentive to improve it and it's almost impossible for a startup to gain a foothold in terms of sales and adoption. There are so many smart hackers and the problems are so obvious...if they could have been solved with better software, it would have been done long ago.

If you try to make any kind of software that competes even tangentially with SAP, Oracle, etc...you lose. If someone at a big corporation hasn't already heard of your company, the odds of them using your software drop to almost nothing. Because no one has ever been fired for going with IBM. Because big companies are playing strategic games many levels up and don't care about day-to-day employee software usage. Because a startup with a silly name just seems silly, and people willing to fight for adoption from the inside are few and far between.

I'm staring to think that the real game isn't figuring out how to make enterprise software better, but to figuring out how to hack the system itself so that new ideas even have a chance.

runT1ME
And...and... MySql didn't get anywhere competing with Oralce or SAP dammnit!
danielrhodes
Enterprise software does suck, but not in the way that most people think it does.

Companies are willing to pay any price for a piece of software, but only if it meets their needs. As a result, products come out which are made to meet every possible need, which is sort of the opposite of what a good consumer product tries to do. The software sucks as a result.

My opinion is that it's not the software that sucks, insomuch as the process behind it which makes it suck.

JoeAltmaier
The market is small (compared to consumer stuff), margins have to be huge, only the biggest customers can afford to sponsor it, bloated development projects on a schedule end up ... sucking. Similar to development tools, come to think of it!
jasonlbaptiste
The market is small compared to consumer stuff? Not true.
JoeAltmaier
Lets see, 360 million Americans, a good number use Excel spreadsheets. How many businesses in America that can be called Enterprise? Maybe 9000.
hxr
Steve Jobs summed it up in his talk at D8. To approximately quote him from my memory - `Enterprise software is a very different beast; the people who use it don't get to make the decision (of buying/adopting the software) themselves, and the people who make these decisions are _confused_!`
richcollins
The problem is the enterprise not the software.
pramit
I agree totally, completely. The best things about this segment is that the market is already there. The worst thing about this segment is that entreched players and market conditions make it hard to sell from company to company.
radu_floricica
For about 5 years my main activity has been building small/medium dedicated software for a handful of clients. I've done other startupish things, but this is what I've always come back to, mostly because it's a very very safe business. I don't think I've really lost a client yet.

So I've come to believe the solution to the enterprise problem will be bottom-up as much as top-down. One programmer (or a small team) who knows the client and the software can do things which would be science-fiction in a top-down approach, in terms of costs and delivery time.

The model has two problems though. First I have no idea how to find new clients - so far all have been through what can be best described as chance. Second, I'm not very sure what the right pricing is. My personal guess would be that a good software is worth for a company about as much as a small paycheck, and grow in about the same manner. But selling this, especially the growing part, has been difficult so far.

It's worth noting these are marketing problems - as far as the operational part goes, both me and the clients are happy with the arrangement.

peteforde
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.

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.

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.

They then dominate the search results advertising for the extreme long tail of semantic Q&A on the web. Last I heard they are releasing thousands of videos a day, and making hundreds of millions in revenues.

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.

stcredzero
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.

I think today's problem is that people figured out the needs and figured out how to satisfy them while making a profit. What's left are the needs that are hard to fulfill or the ones that we weren't aware of before.

ronnwer
Completely agree with you.
fletchowns
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?

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.

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?

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?!

clistctrl
I agree completely with this! In addition look at beer bottles. Glass bottles are very robust. Most have the potential to last several reuses. Yet recycling them means smashing them, and remaking a bottle. That's never made sense to me.
tjmaxal
it all comes down to cost benefit analysis most of the time.
fletchowns
In other countries they clean and refill beer bottles. When you get a Corona in Mexico you can tell the same bottle has been used many times before. I guess we Americans are just too good to be drinking out of a beer bottle that has been used before?

edit: interesting article related to this stuff http://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/03/11/OldBottles/

pedalpete
I'm surprised to hear that American bottles aren't recycled, though I also didn't realize we are just washing ours (canada) and re-using them. I thought they were broken down, crushed up and re-made.
WarDekar
Same with Coke and other soda bottles in other countries. At least in Central America, anyway, as I've spent a lot of time down there and the Coke bottles are quite obviously several generations in. In fact you'll often see a copyright notice from 10 years ago or whatever.

I didn't realize that didn't also happen in the states, though I guess glass bottles in general are really only used for beer (though I'd imagine if you go to the store and grab a 'Mexican Coke' you'll likely find it to be a recycled bottle, or at a taqueria or whatever).

orblivion
> In other countries they clean and refill beer bottles.

I'm pretty sure I've heard of it in the US as well.

japherwocky
Michigan's deposit system is very effective at getting beverage containers recycled!
hugh3
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.

That sounds less like giving people what they want and more like giving people what you think they ought to have.

Correction: some people want this. Some people want to wear hair shirts of inconvenience in order to impress some narrow circle of like-minded friends with how environmentally-friendly they are. But there's a limited number of hair-shirt people out there, and there's already massive competition for their dollars.

r0s
We need something like that...

I think he's saying there should ideally be more demand, not that supply should be forced.

narrow circle of like-minded friends

There really are informed consumers out there who evaluate products based on all available information, and the people who trust them may take the lazy route and imitate. That can look like wankery if you dismiss informed consumption outright.

r0s
My grocery store has a liquid detergent bulk refill. The down side is only one brand offers this, but it works fine so that's what I use.

I drive about 15 minutes out of my way to go to this place, but it's worth it to me for many reasons. Plan ahead and you can do all your shopping for weeks in one trip.

Another cool thing this place does is put out used boxes by the checkout, so their own waste gets recycled directly. If you forget your re-usable bag you can just grab a box and feel good about it.

byw
I think a major hurdle is that beyond a certain income level, people don't want to be seen as stingy, and refilling/buying bulk is generally associated frugality more than altruism.

In order to reach more people in developed countries you need to make things more upscale. You need high quality, long lasting, "designer" containers.

Also, a trade-in program would help a great deal. Many people don't know they want something until they see it, and they hesitate to buy a new container on the spot if they already have one. If they can simply redeem their old ones for a large portion of credits it would put their minds at ease.

The trade-in stations will need automated cleaning, since you can't guarantee their hygiene. In the end lazy folks will just swap in their dirty containers with clean ones every time they head for the shop, which also alleviates the mental hurdle of cleaning.

Tichy
Yes and no - I've heard that it would actually be possible to build machines that would be very good at recycling garbage. Maybe that would be a more feasible solution?
_delirium
Machines are getting better at separating recyclables from general waste streams, but the actual recycling part is still pretty tricky. Apart from a few "easy" things like aluminum cans, most stuff is hard to recycle in a way that's both economical and a net energy win.
nostrademons
Safeway will give you a discount (yeah, it's only like a nickel or so) if you bring your own bags. I think many other grocery stores will too. It's very poorly advertised (though I'm starting to see flyers up), so most people still don't know about it. I've never seen a cashier complain about bringing your own bags, though.
steveklabnik
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.

I'm not sure how to properly attract and keep talent in the city.

sjs382
Are you hiring? ;)
steveklabnik
I personally am not at the moment, though in a few months, probably. I've got about 4 or 5 people who've been asking me how to hire hackers, though... send me an email, we can talk about it if you'd like.
shimon
1. In Boston, ITA Software pays a referral bonus of $4000.

2. Pittsburgh loses hackers because they prefer to live elsewhere. To fix this make the culture, neighborhoods, or climate more attractive to hackers. (Easy to say, but hard to attempt and perhaps impossible to achieve.)

steveklabnik
I'd imagine Boston is a bit more expensive in general than the 'burgh, no? But still, yeah, I'm sure it's not 4x.

> (Easy to say, but hard to attempt and perhaps impossible to achieve.)

Absolutely. That's the hard part. ;)

nostrademons
$2k-$5k has been a typical referral bonus at places I've worked. I have friends in the financial industry that got up to a $15k referral bonus (and were correspondingly aggressive in trying to recruit me).
georgecmu
1. In Pittsburgh, NREC pays a referral bonus of $5000.

2. And yet, Pittsburgh's has been consistently at the top of various "best places to live" lists for the past 5-10 years.

mkramlich
I have an idea to help address number 2. If every startup/investor in Pittsburgh area would put just 1% of the cash they've raised into a single pool, governed by a special interest group/association, whose sole purpose was to make infrastructural & social investments in their city, make it more attractive, parks, cleaner, help open restaurants, clubs, etc. Arguably some entity like this already exists in Pittsburgh, but if not, create it.
brg
I looked into moving to Pittsburgh, and then I found out there was a city income tax and changed my plans.
steveklabnik
The tax situation is pretty stupid, but then again, lots of people don't actually live in the city proper, and dodge it.
_delirium
I hope you didn't move somewhere like Silicon Valley then, since the taxes there are even higher! (Pittsburgh's top rate, including city and state taxes combined, is 6%, versus California's 10.5%.)
mikeklaas
$1000 (often higher) referral bonuses are quite common in the industry. It's hard to hire talented hackers in general, good times and bad.
steveklabnik
Maybe I'm just not connected to BigCorps around here, but it's pretty unusual in my experience. Maybe that's part of Pittsburgh's problem?
georgecmu
In Pittsburgh, NREC (a division of the Robotics Institute) offers $5000 bonuses for referrals that result in a hire.
steveklabnik
Ouch, why all the massive downvotes to everyone responding here? It's a real problem, and several local founders, VCs, and even the local incubator are all trying to come up with new ways of fostering entrepreneurship around these parts. Pittsburgh is undergoing a bit of a tech renaissance, or at least we'd like to think we are. That's hard to pull of without great developers.
georgecmu
There's been quite a few robotics start-ups coming up in the past few years (a new CMU spin-off was announced literally two days ago). It's amazing that with all the university talent in the area, it's still so hard to find qualified people.
steveklabnik
Lots of the CMU guys just want to go into research. If not, they end up going into a robotics spinoff that only does government contract work.
mkramlich
One idea is to promote remote/distributed workforces. Find ways to hire folks that live in other cities or countries. There are challenges and downsides to a distributed workforce, but advantages too. The chief of which is the ability to draw from a much larger pool of potential talent.
CytokineStorm
Someone needs to prove that P != NP. Want to understand why that's important? Read this: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the...
keefe
it's also extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to prove. This is a problem for researchers, not people looking for ideas for startups.
powrtoch
Talk about a difficult startup to pitch to investors.
larsberg
You could probably make some money on a "proof validation service" where you charge all of the crackpots who think they've solved P!=NP to validate their proof.

Or, if you just happen to find an error, send that back. But the service is free if you don't!

nostrademons
Why would a crackpot pay for this? Their incentive is for people not to find errors in their proofs, not for them to find errors.
larsberg
From talking to the mathy-side CS faculty in my department (UofC), the crackpots all think they've solved it. Genuinely, honestly, and completely.

These faculty complain about getting e-mail spam and sometimes even visits and phone calls out of the blue from people who claim to have solved it and want their proofs checked.

philwelch
OTOH, if you prove that P = NP, you can probably make huge windfalls of money, and some of it may even be legitimate!
geuis
How do you configure gzip for certain urls on Akamai? This is a problem I just can't find an answer to.
seiji
You don't configure it per URL, you configure it per MIME type. text/css, text/html, etc. It's under Last Mile Acceleration in EdgeControl: "Apply to content with Content-type: text/html, application/x-javascript, text/css"

If you're using the XML config it resembles:

  <match:response.header name="Content-Type" value="text/html* application/x-javascript* text/css*" value-case="off" value-wildcard="on">
    <edgeservices:lma.edge-browser>on</edgeservices:lma.edge-browser>
    <edgeservices:lma.incoming>on</edgeservices:lma.incoming>
  </match:response.header>
mechanician
The airport check-in security process.
orangecat
I wish, although it seems fixing that requires convincing several million people that that terrorists are not actually hiding in every shadow. But somewhat related: fix baggage handling. There's no reason you should have to wait half an hour to get your bags after you get off the plane. Take care of that problem and people will be more willing to check their bags, which in turn will make boarding and exiting much smoother. Although airlines would have to get rid of their idiotic baggage fees, the improved efficiency should more than make up for it.
philwelch
On the contrary--if you increase baggage fees, you could reduce the amount of baggage (making it easier to handle) and have more $-per-bag to spend on your fast baggage handling system.
dsc
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?

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.

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.

People go to college to learn about how things should be, but not how they are. Waste of time and money, sometimes.

ronnwer
I agree, but how do you build such a community? Hacker News is a great example. Perhaps this could be redesigned and made available to everyone :)
imp
Would you mind commenting on my website, Curious Reef, which is aiming to help people learn new things? I would love to hear if you think it's a solution to that problem.

http://curiousreef.com/

JoshCole
Cool site, I've been looking for something like that for a while.
dpcan
Keys.

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

mkramlich
Can you elaborate? What about keys? Too many of them? The necessity of having them at all? The fact that they can be stolen/forged, what?
AmberShah
- 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

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.

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.

mainsequence
These may or may not be super-profitable or particularly solvable via software:

Basic math and science literacy for a large percentage of people (in the US at least, but I suspect many other places as well).

The pipeline from childhood to the ability to make something people want.

Access to the opportunity to gain economically valuable skills for those who happen to be born in poor families, neighborhoods, cities, countries.

j_baker
A couple of things:

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.

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).

trafficlight
In my area at least, it costs me money to recycle CRTs as well as a lot of other electronics. I'm just not going to pay $25 to throw something away. If this was free, or even if the cost was built into the front end purchase price, I would absolutely recycle old monitors and parts.
pigbucket
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.
robfitz
Problem: most startups fail
cmars232
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.

Is it possible to have anonymity, security and 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.

pingswept
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.

There are a few semi-exceptions (Sketchup for mechanical CAD and Eagle for PCB layout) but neither is strong competition for the market leaders.

pingswept
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).
adrianwaj
Any chronic illness: fatigue, insomnia, pain, tinnitus. Mental disease. Antisemitism, double standards against Israel.
nradov
Problem: Businesses require too much working capital. This slows down growth and reduces ROA / ROI.

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.

nostrademons
That would be a wonderful way to solve the financial crisis, too. If everybody knew who owed what to everyone else, we wouldn't be in this mess.
liangzan
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.