Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on?
I'm not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app. Instead I'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.
117 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadI'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.
Yep. The totally unsexy answer.
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.
Whoa. That's an interesting unsubstantiated statistic. A quick (albeit unnecessary) Google search begs to differ: https://homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics/
Switzerland, for example, doesn't remotely have this problem.
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.
There's a homeless problem in other cities, but we don't have tents downtown.
The link below lists around 30 US cities with tent cities downtown.
http://tentcity.wikidot.com/list-of-tent-cities
Edit: autocorrect -.-
You're saying it's worse in SF/Berkeley, and no doubt it is. But it's not "solved" in the EU.
I've spent 20 years living in various countries in Europe. I stand by my statement.
- The EU
- San Francisco or Oakland
European countries tend to spend less of their money on military and more on social programs so that it's both harder to become homeless in the first place and, if it happens, there are programs to help you.
Many commenters here are extrapolating on their experiences in SF/Oakland/LA/Seattle/Portland and thinking the rest of the US has a commensurate homeless population. Spoiler: they don't.
There are many parallels between the current migration crisis and the Irish potato famine, though I'm not sure how they compare in scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHr9GRgRw_M
I haven't seen you mention what legislation and support Idaho has for the homeless that California doesn't. Are you saying Boise has more access to mental health facilities than SF?
My general sense is cities in Idaho, like a lot of places that aren't the Bay Area, prosecute the homeless until they move somewhere less visible but haven't improved their situation at all, can you enlighten me?
Theory aside, I think our work as programmers has significantly changed the way society communicates and interacts. For better and worse. Would it not make sense that we continue this work, but more towards solving the issues we perceive, whether self-created or not?
I propose programmers spend more time talking to friends about challenges in their life that might be 'programmed' away, and less time on ads, tracking, manager checklist #321, or anything fundamentally centered around Business, because, let's be fair, on the whole, at least in 'the west', we as programmers have it incredibly good, so we can afford to be ideological.
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?
(This isn't an argument against the parent comment at all, as I agree with them too. Their comment just got me thinking.)
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.
One of the best hiring prcoesses I've experienced (didn't end up working there, though)
- It was transparent - They asked me very good, enjoyable, questions that relate to the actual job - It was very reasonably timed
https://www.lely.com/the-barn/milking/astronaut-a4/
Also in the ag field "technology transfer" is a real thing (not just a euphemism for patent trolling.) Schools like Cornell and UNH are always looking for varieties of crops that can be grown a little further north and for ways to put money in the pockets of farmers large and small.
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?
My thoughts here may lack some formbut one of the paradoxical issues I see are that a brand must be developed, but by way of a keen awareness of the problems of branding. The brand would have to be defended without alienation before market domination. But also, there is not a market for a convention such as knowledge to be automated. The competition is brands which automate opinion validation instead. I think your idea is already stepping ahead of this by automating away the process of deciding on sources.
The result would need to be something like automated research as it is done in a library.
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...
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?
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/ - 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/
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)
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
[2] http://boomsupersonic.com
[3] http://www.spacex.com/mars
[1] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.