HN Explorer

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

23 points by Mystalic ↗ HN
About six months ago, I put up an HN post asking everyone about a problem they want to see solved. It sparked a lot of discussion and a lot of great ideas. So here's edition #2.

Name any problem: technology, politics, cooking, world peace - whatever bugs you or pops into your mind.

Original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442571

35 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 75.8 ms ] thread
tdoggette
I'd like to be able to enter a URL and see every place on the internet that people have talked about it.
Mystalic
There's actually a Firefox extension called AddaTweet that shows all Twitter conversations for any given link. Not everything, but someone's thinking about your problem. It's by Dmitry Shapiro (Veoh).
colins_pride
Does showing a large subest of the pages that point to it, default ordered by something that's roughly equivalent to pagerank, with the ability to then search within those results capture the essence of what you're getting at?
tdoggette
No, not really. What I'd really like is to input the URL and get a search result listing that includes number of posts and date of last post at least.
akaGOMEZ
That sounds like it could work real well with a google finance type interface. A line graph showing a timeline of how much buzz the URL got, with links to the sampled data.

Perfect, lets build it.

asimjalis
I want a programming language which is as effortless as thought.
edw519
Huh? Programming is easy. Thought is hard.
asimjalis
I guess what I was trying to say was unclear. Or maybe I am the only one who has this problem. I find that programming languages get in the way of thinking. There is all this extra work involved in typing up the program and making it real. Even a minimalist language like Python seems too much (for example, it makes me list self as an argument for each method).
asimjalis
There is a kind of impedance mismatch between computers and humans. Now languages bridge that to some extent. But it is still there. So my wish is a language that eliminates it.
bkovitz
I want wisecracks to have less power to derail thoughtful conversation.

Not an easy problem to solve, BTW. There is a good reason why thoughtful conversation is so easy to derail: it asks for a lot of mental bandwidth, and the competition for bandwidth is fierce. A wisecrack gets its message across in almost no bandwidth, takes no effort to appreciate, and satisfies the primal human urge to see someone else humiliated.

kloro
hopefully you are already separating creation of a program from coding it. if you are not making the separation, you will find any programming language a visit to hell. with this separation, use of most programming languages is a pleasant diversion.
edw519
I want my cell phone to automatically switch between vibrate and ring based upon my location (vibrate at work, ring at home). I keep forgetting to switch.

I also want a land based bell in my house to ring if my cell phone is within 50 feet of the house (in another room, in the car).

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yread
I want to be able to travel across europe (or the world if you are really bored) with my laptop and mobile phone and be able to stay online. I dont want to have a different data tariff for every country and I always want the fastest internet I can get - i.e. I don't want to have a different contract for WiMax, Wifi, 2G, 2.5G, 3G, 4G,... - I want to use the one which is available.

I think that would be the only product that could be really called Mobile Internet.

thunk
You know the information you're searching for is readily available, but you don't know the unique string to get you there.
dhbradshaw
I want a razor that doesn't grow dull.
ashishk
i want a solution to this country's health problems...specifically: obesity / bad diet/ lack of desire to exercise

i actually think a real business could be built around this. if the governemnt paid me X dollars to make Y over-weight people fit, it might be a win-win

jrandom
I'd like to see all this technology, knowledge, and power put to use to feed, clothe, and house every person on the planet. There's no non-political reason we can't do this, but our current cultures won't allow for it.

I'd like to be able to pursue my passions and hobbies without having to waste the vast majority of my life in a day job just to survive. Life is to goddamned short for this madness.

yummyfajitas
If everyone accomplishes your second goal, we will probably no longer be wealthy enough to achieve your first goal.

Incidentally, if you live in the US, your second goal is achievable. At least 30 million americans do exactly that. The government classifies them as "poor", although they lack no material goods necessary for survival.

bkovitz
Here are a few political problems. I want:

* Journalists to be able to make a living doing the hard work of journalism.

* Formal education to be conducted in a way that facilitates learning rather than bureaucratic hoop-jumping.

* Manual laborers to be able to earn a comfortable living.

* More American cities to be beautiful and walkable.

bkovitz
Some technological problems. I want:

* Sysadmin work out of my way, or at least reasonably simple, and real information available when I run into a problem.

* Ad-heavy, information-poor web sites to stop showing up so high in SERPs.

jlangenauer
I'd like a way to filter cold calls to my business. Companies which have researched my needs, and have a legitimate product that might fill them get through; script-based telemarketers, scammers and the like, get dumped.
JimmyL
A unified transportation system - encompassing everything (including but not limited to walking, rental bikes/cars, car pooling, trains, planes). One machine that I tell my starting and ending points (down to the house number), and will make me a number of possible schedules and ways to get there using mixed modes of movement, and lets me pay for it/track it with one card.

A clean and plentiful energy source that is widely distributed.

BearOfNH
I want a search engine that tries to find me what I want, as opposed to inundating me with thousands of products for sale, that might remotely resemble something I said.

Here is an example. I am looking for an outdoor security camera. So it needs to be weatherproof. It needs to provide at least 1024 (preferably 1200) horizontal lines. It must have a 100+ Mbit Ethernet connection for data transport and it would be nice to support POE (Power Over Ethernet), but in any event needs to run continuously -- so no battery-powered cams. I don't care either way about pan / tilt / zoom, but might use hardware motion detection.

Try asking your favorite search engine and see the plethora of useless results thrown your way. Lenses. Weatherproof housings. Tons and tons of indoor cameras with 480 lines of resolution. But nothing that meets my needs, regardless of how I phrase my search query.

Maybe what I really want is a search engine that I can interact with and say "I don't like this result because ..." and have the engine filter out all similar results. Google squared is such an approach but it doesn't work, at least for this task.

kloro
has anyone got info on 'piggy backing' on google to create a search engine that shows a subset of the google items, where of course the subset doesn't include irrelevant advertisements, etc? google would try to stop it, i suspect, but might have difficulty getting help from the courts, since such an alternative engine would be basically a provider of pointers to someone else's content, which is of course what google is.
akaGOMEZ
My first attempt at imagining a solution was to do a very broad search using "outdoor weatherproof camera 1200 lines resolution" (broad in comparison to your requirements). I had fantasized that maybe, if I were able to pipe those results to another query... But "outdoor weatherproof camera 1200 lines resolution" wasn't an effective search even by itself

(disclaimer: I know little about security cameras)

kloro
i need to change the layout of the physical keyboard (as opposed to the on-screen keyboard) on my palm centro.
antipaganda
Immortality. With that we can solve lots of other problems. Efficiency, see?