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

Something 'simple' and not related to developing nations (or maybe related): Making internet access independent from the telcos

How to make shady areas safer, esp for women and children?

Finding new ways to organise caring for our elders is a big one for me.

- Hunger.

- Access to clean water.

- Homelessness.

- Poverty.

- Access to health care beyond (in the US) access to anyone-who-can-get-rich-can-afford-it access.

- Joblessness; Employability.

- War as it affects people living in a war.

- War as it robs the war waging society of other amenities.

- War as it distorts local and global economies and relations.

- Mutual ignorance and fear of groups, cultures, religions and nations that allow people to be manipulated into supporting bigotry, terrorism and war.

- Access to meaningful post-secondary education in the developed world.

- Access to education in the developing world.

- The gradual and never relinquished erosion of privacy and civil liberties from citizens to the state.

Urban sprawl. Wildlife is being forced into closer proximity with humans because of suburban developments and golf courses. Land developers make a quick buck and wipe out natural habitats.

If you see a bat or raccoon on your property, realize that it doesn't have a choice. There needs to be compassion and awareness.

Now that IPV4 addresses have run out, the conversion to IPV6 will represent a major technological opportunity.

Human suffering. Dwindling biodiversity. Exhaustion of natural resources. The nature of the universe. The meaning of life. The sound of one hand clapping.

It's a good sort of question to ask, but it helps to narrow your domain.

- Simulation games: how to make realistic, educational games interesting without cheesing them up in order to make gameplay tolerable. For example Sim City, Rome Total War, Battlefield 3 and other FPSs, Farmville etc. If you're wasting your life playing a videogame, might as well learn something about the real world.

- Journalism and PR: how to provide objective journalism through new tools like data analysis, computer models, simulators etc. Use historical analysis to put events in context. Get rid of sources of drama, like writers and editors and focus on charts. Those can be read and debunked quicker, various opinions/biases could be compared more clearly. A report about a murder should be a chart that includes the murder rate in nation, city, area, show population growth, poverty etc. A report on political affairs would show money paid to politicians, estimate # of lobbyists involved, size of affected market, etc. Reduce talking heads and drama to minimum.

- Suburban Sprawl: popularize condos instead of individual homes to contain suburbia. Better mortgage rates for condos, advertise urban services, cost of living without car, etc.

- Family planning site: encourage a smaller population. Give coupons to small families. Many governments have such programs, you'd make them easier to use at least.

- Obesity: coupons, money saving for buying proper food instead of processed carbs and fast food.

- Internet addiction: psychoanalyze internet users through traffic stats etc. Figure out how to get them off, maybe through exercise program, nature getaway, new experiences.

Personally I'm suspicious of attempts to solve problems in the developing world that aren't part of some all around solution. Making it easier to grow food, access to water without a simultaneous plan to lower population size seems like a dangerous game. And a lot of charity programs are undermining local economies by handing out free food.

Technology use in government and healthcare administration -- actually any office that uses paper. So many offices are so horribly out of date, think about all the papers you have to fill out for everything -- pen and paper, writing down your same address a million times on a million different papers sent to a million different offices. People reading your address and hand translating it into a million different databases or manually cross-referencing it to other papers.

It's enough to drive you crazy. These people are doing office work as if computers don't even exist.

So called "smart phones" aren't capable of solving this problem. For whatever reason, we lack the software capability of using our technology to really make these mundane tasks of sharing information easier.

I have another idea from a bad experience today. Why is it we are still using the same check routing system from the last century? The routing transit system was created a CENTURY AGO! Does anyone here use a candlestick phone? Do you get your stock quotes off ticker tape? How's the fuel economy on your Model T? There is absolutely no reason it should take days to process a check when I can send a text message anywhere on the planet in a matter of seconds. There are billions of electronic payments made each year and they total several hundred billion. If you can invent a system where payments are made instantaneously, the world will beat a path to your door.

Improving basic research. The pricing of chemicals and supplies can vary 10x with most researchers not having the time to find reasonable providers.

Beyond the practical aspects of the problem is watching people work so hard to raise funds for research knowing that it is 'wasted' in a single purchase.

We can already get a hint from real life, in Asian countries that have an artificially high male/female live birth ratio, in part due to China's One Child policy. This is the opposite of your "solution," in that men are favored for survival, but it has serious social consequences, including unreported pregnancies and increased mother and child mortality at birth due to birthing secretly at home, potentially severe social and mental health problems due to large numbers of men unable to marry, increased kidnapping of women for marriage and prostitution, increased HIV infections, the "4:2:1" problem and other interesting phenomena.

When you poke at something as large and complex as "people," you sometimes get what you want, but you also sometimes get what you didn't expect.

This article is worth the read: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhpr051833#t=article

The 4-2-1 problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#The_.22four-tw...