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HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve

36 points by Mystalic ↗ HN
What's a problem that bothers you intensely? Any problem, as big or as specific as you'd like.

Who knows, maybe one of these ideas will turn into a YC company!

A continuation of a question I asked HN 3 years ago -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442571

92 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] thread
designlatte
Why is it so hard to choose health insurance? And then, once you're in the system, why is it so hard to keep up with all the paperwork, etc. I grew up in Canada and after living in the States for 10 years, it's been so frustrating to navigate the health care system, and I'm a healthy person. I can't imagine how people who are sick have time and energy to put towards getting better when they are consumed with just "getting through" the system.
jasonlotito
On this note, as someone who just moved from Canada with a special-needs child, and let me tell you, the US is light-years ahead of Canada. You mentioned you are healthy, so I can only assume your experience is fairly limited. Myself, and mostly my wife, have experienced both of these systems (coming back to the US just last year), and she absolutely loves the American system. Having seen the results myself, I can't describe the Canadian system as anything better than outright child abuse.
designlatte
Hi there :) I wanted to clarify, I'm not talking about the quality of care. I'm talking about just the act of choosing which health care you should get and then keeping up with all the paperwork once you're sick. I've been outside of Canada for the past 12 years, but when I've gone to the doctor in the states for something as simple as stitches or a bad cold, I've always been amazed at how complicated it is in terms of bills and co-pays etc. I know that everyone things the system is so great, but I agre with you, it's not. It's ugly. People wait months for critical cat scans. Surgery is often cancelled or bumped. And patients regularly abuse the system rather than be proactive about their health. So in summary (sorry this got so long!!) neither system is perfect, but when I came to the states, I felt like I was just totally blind as I was choosing which insurance to get. I'd love to see someone fix the issue of helping people choose the right health care that's best for them, make best use of the FSA system, and manage bills / paperwork in a more efficient way.
jasonlotito
Gotcha. =) I have a knee-jerk reaction when someone starts promoting Canada over US healthcare. I blame Canada for that, not the person.

As for the health care in the US, a lot of that is based on your carrier. Shop around! You aren't stuck with a single health care provider, and you can choose your doctors. My wife was amazed that after she went to one doctor, she was asked if she wanted to continue to see that doctor, or wanted to try someone else.

She's the one that deals with this on a day to day basis, so I trust her in this department. She also mentioned that here, people are so much more willing to help with any paperwork that might arise. And considering all the paperwork she's done to get my son the care he needs, she knows what she's talking about.

That's not to say things couldn't be easier.

> I was just totally blind as I was choosing which insurance to get.

So many choices! Yep. It can be overwhelming. My wife abused the help line of our insurance provider, and our companies rep the first few months. She'd call at least once a week with questions. However, she found that generally, they were more than willing to walk her through everything, and in some cases, did it right over the phone on her behalf.

sdfcom
Solve hatred violence corruption and war.
anthonycerra
Hatred leads to violence and war so if you could make a dent in the first, it might pay off in the long run. What about a an app like chatroulette (text only) that paired up people across the world from each other and translated text into their native language? It might be interesting to get to know someone from Iran and see their perspective on things.

Corruption - An anonymous whistle blower site would be interesting.

squadron
Political concentration camps in North Korea. I'm serious.

Mind you, I do have an idea for this. If anyone is interest (even you Ben), hit me up on email.

chromedude
Well... there's no email to hit you up by on your profile
D_Alex
How to acquire masses of medical data from patients' records for use in medical research without causing concerns over privacy issues.
drowles
I don't know, but it's a brilliant idea.
[dead] anvesh
i dont like the way how kayak & expedia work. Simply putting up certain hotels list and providing information on them/enabling booking etc... it has failed to provide information what user wants exactly than rather give info about what he/she might like.
scheff
Finding users.

I'm constantly brainstorming ideas, and rapidly prototyping them, but without being able to find the early adopters to begin the feedback loop, the ideas die. What's the best way to find early adopters for my ideas? I'm based in Australia, so meetup groups tend to be very lean around specific interests/technology, but geolocation shouldn't be relevant to internet startups.

AGRmenta
http://betabait.com/ sends their newsletter subscribers (early adopters) a daily email with a new beta invite to an internet startup or app. I am a very busy college student but it's the only email I actually skim through every day. I can't speak to the effectiveness completely since I don't have a smartphone and only use the web apps but, it seems to be built around a community of willing participants. Hope that helps.
joannlefebvre
The technology exists, so why aren't more companies manufacturing motors that don't require oil or electricity. Most of the machines we use can run on solar, magnetic, or some form of hydrogen power.
Siliticx
Convince the general population that eSports are 1) an actual careeer and that 2) is a legitimate sport.
the_watcher
When I'm in the grocery store, looking for an obscure item (cheese cloth is the one that made me think of this). Build me a mobile app to search and get info on where in the store the item is.
stdbrouw
Solving a problem is often about finding the right approach / fudging the problem into something you can solve. And there is actually a disruptive solution to this: online shopping. Amazon has cheese cloth.
read_wharf
But they won't deliver it before dinner today.
the_watcher
The problem is that it was a spur of the moment decision to try to make ricotta, needed it then and there. Amazon solves this if you regularly need cheese cloth, but not if you have never heard of it and all of sudden find out you need it that night.
dshanahan
This is a problem we've assessed a bit at http://foodtree.com - there are some efforts in this space but none seem to have the penetration to make it useful at scale. Our approach is to help grocers "spread their great story" as an incentive to start mapping their inventory, both in the "where it's from/who made it and how" perspective and the "what store near me has OBSCUREITEM available right now" perspective, which is your problem but only to store level. Getting to that level right now is tough with food retail chains, but they're moving in the right direction.

So that we don't have to wait for them, we're trying to enable crowd-sourcing as well; "I saw OBSCUREITEM here in case you're looking for it in town".

Again, very aware this is only your problem at the store's front door, but maybe it's nice to know someone's working on it? :)

reddit_clone
How about asking one of the store employees lurking about?

(Your idea is indeed pretty cool. It would be nice if your smartphone walked you up to the item you are looking for. But I don't see a positive cost/benefit factor. It will be needed only on rare occasions.)

I can see this being useful in large libraries too.

Zikes
Some of the positive cost/benefit factors will arise as a result of the data necessary to create such a system.

By knowing where every single item is in a store, you can create efficient routes through that store to make your shopping trip only as long as is necessary.

Also, in some big-box stores an employee may not be familiar with items outside of their assigned area. They may only be able to direct you to the general vicinity, or have to call in some additional help.

Zikes
This is a particularly difficult problem, one that I actually happen to be involved with at the moment.

The short answer is that crowdsourcing is thus far ineffective, as there is as yet no suitable reward for tracking down where every single obscure product is in each store (and it will vary from store to store, even within the same chains). This means it's up to each individual chain to create their own item locator system.

Walmart is currently working on this.

JonLim
Curious: are you involved with Walmart in the creation of the problem?

If so, are you guys using that RFID system that was being used for keeping tabs on stock levels at all times?

Zikes
I'm in the department that handles the layout of the store's major hardware fixtures. Not quite merchandise-level, but some of our projects overlap projects that deal with this from time to time.

I know we've researched the RFID solution extensively, and last I heard it would require installation of high-powered RFID readers throughout all the stores, as well as buy-in from all our suppliers to include RFID in their product packaging, so it wasn't quite viable.

I think currently the plan is to "number" all the aisles (departments other than grocery get letter-number labels) and then have the store employees scan in all the items for each aisle. Last time I was in Store 100 in Bentonville they seemed to be piloting that.

electrichead
Why ate we still ok with resumes and degrees when we can instead have a full-breadth breakdown of skills and accomplishments?
Nikkau
How women's brain works?
the_watcher
A software that successfully generates correct Bluebook citations (for lawyers and law students - law students would pay at least $100 each to avoid doing this, there are software's out there, the problem is they don't give correct citations).
polyfractal
This intrigues me, since it looks like some of the offerings are pretty good (e.g. Citrus looks quite powerful).

Would you be willing to chat over email? Mine is in my profile.

waterlesscloud
Substantially increased battery life. Seems to be one of the major factors holding back energy solutions and a true explosion of mobile device use.
Mystalic
I think wireless power -- rather than more efficient batteries -- is the long-term solution.
trbecker
Graphene seems promising too.
the_watcher
Build on the Sporcle app and make it head to head - Words with Friends for Sporcle.
the_watcher
A mobile app to share resumes, so you don't have to carry paper resumes to jobs fairs (thought of it at the SxSW Tech Career Expo)
mmedal
Powered by NFC. tap here's my resume.
vijayt
How to disrupt enterprise software? Even with all the startups coming up in cloud, enterprise sales is still largely relationship based and takes forver to close... How does one convert the long sales cycles to rapid close?
the_watcher
Anyone with ideas about how to solve the issues I proposed feel free to reach out to me to discuss.
jonthedog
A way to automatically change double byte romaji characters to single byte
someone13
Try this in Python?

    import codecs
    
    fin = codecs.open('input.txt', 'rb', 'shift-jis')
    fout = codecs.open('output.txt', 'wb', 'utf-8')
    
    try:
        fout.write(fin.read())
    except ValueError:
        print "Not encoded using Shift-JIS!"
Not sure if that's what you mean - feel free to clarify, if not.
yjfrench
An alternative to incarceration or a better experience while incarcerated. Something more humane, less costly or better yet, an alternative to the current prison system that has a net positive effect on society and the economy. Apparently, there's a lot of talent locked up - what a waste: http://www.quora.com/Prisons/What-are-some-aspects-of-incarc...
read_wharf
It's astounding to me that the US prison system is such a snake pit. The inmates rule everything but the surface. It should be all but impossible for murder and other major crimes to happen in prison; we already know where the criminals are!
PaperclipTaken
Fluid/continuous education. For the first two weeks of my junior year of high school, I was learning the same version of the scientific method in 3 classes. I learned it again in two different classes my senior year of high school.

I would like to see education that is based on a knowledge map so that a person never needs to learn something that they already know.

aDemoUzer
my opinion on re-learning - there were multiple subjects that I took in college which went over same content that I had learned in High School. I actually enjoyed re-learning them because the content was presented in a different way, so it made more sense to me that it had before. It is one thing to learn something once, but when I learn some concept over and over again, I tend to discover something new about it or related to it. Even small concepts can have greater meaning to it that I did not saw at first.

I have similar experience with movies - Dark Knight - I watched it 4 times and each time I find it more fascinating because I saw new details in the movie.

the_watcher
Make television and entertainment an on demand system - I don't need Lifetime, but want Longhorn Network and can't get it. I should be able to subscribe to channels one by one. Similarly, why doesn't someone with a track record of making quality entertainment (Mike Schur, Dan Harmon, Tina Fey) bypass networks and middlemen, make a show, sell ads on it, and deliver it through the internet
iceron
Free will, longer life span etc... :)

I would like an Android application that delays all notifications by a set amount a time.

So if I want to do an hour of work I could set it to an hour and it wouldn't notify me at all. After the hour is up, all the notifications appear as they normally would.

tobiasu
Search - I'm even going to pay for it. Search for the damn terms I enter into a search field. The "app" may at most have a CSS style sheet, 1993 look. No Javascript, no images. Give me options to limit my search to date ranges, domains, urls, languages, etc.

HTTPS basic auth. No cookies, no tracking, no country detection, no redirect to see what I clicked, no guessing unless I add a flag in the search field.

There was a company once that provided something like this for "free". Then they turned to SHIT.

mmedal
It's not EVERYTHING you want, but I started using http://duckduckgo.com/ about a week ago and it's probably the closest you're going to get to a useful search engine nowadays. Full keyboard usage and zero tracking. Simple and clean. I'm enjoying it thus far.
read_wharf
Love ddg.

As you become accustomed to using their bang codes, you'll find yourself trying/guessing a new bang code because "that's what it should be," and sometimes it works. That's how I discovered my pinboard tags are behind !pb

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drowles
I would like to see our health care costs go down by an open source "health care menu" system being created - where people can enter, for example, "gastroscopy" into a field - tell where they got it, how long it took, how much it cost, and a theory as to WHY...and then an opportunity for other people to input their information on the healthcare costs...create an open market so lower cost providers will steal business from more expensive ones...and so we can actually LOOK at why a 30-minute procedure can POSSIBLY cost $3,000.