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Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?
74 points by Mystalic on March 12, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 226 comments
Just name it -- something you want to see solved but hasn't been yet. Political, technology, scientific...anything.

I hope to spark a discussion like the original version of this topic - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442571. More importantly, maybe someone will do something about your problem.




Safe liposuction. (Going to be a few self-righteous "just eat less and exercise" replies to this one by metabolically advantaged folks who haven't got the slightest clue how difficult it can be to lose weight when your body doesn't want to cooperate.)

Alternatively, put some rats on Seth Roberts's set-point diet (aka Shangri-La diet) and figure out the path of action, then develop it in pill form for those of us where Seth Roberts's diet didn't work / didn't work well enough.

To make a lot of money, ask yourself where people aren't looking. Often the place they're not looking is a place of moral blindness. Plenty of us would pay just about anything to look normal. The moral blindness part is the people being sanctimonious about fat being a sign of weak willpower and having no concept of the actual science involved.

Another place to look would be fast, accurate molecule recognition array tests for venereal diseases. Get it down to something the size of a vending machine, $20, and thirty minutes (results sent via text message) and you'll get people paying you every night. Again, moral blindness may be a reason why people aren't looking as hard in this direction as they should to create lots of hedons - sex is sinful.

Speaking of not looking where everyone else is looking, would it be too crazy to ask people to do something that actually creates large amounts of value instead of throwing sheep? Even if it involves doing something other than computer programming?


Safe liposuction. (Going to be a few self-righteous "just eat less and exercise" replies to this one by metabolically advantaged folks who haven't got the slightest clue how difficult it can be to lose weight when your body doesn't want to cooperate.)

Metacognition can help with this (at least until safe weight-loss pills are invented).

The following worked for me: I taught myself to enjoy the suffering associated with weight loss/fitness. Basically, I made feeling hunger/muscle soreness my short term goal. When I didn't feel feel hungry/tired, I actively tried to feel it.

Using that strategy, I went from about 300lb to 210lb. (Switching that strategy off once I reached 210lb was also a bit tough. )

In the past year, I've used the same strategy (making muscle soreness my goal) to gain about 15 lb of muscle.

To learn Eskrima (fighting with a short club), I also make bruises a short term goal. This encourages me to fight people far above my level, which teaches you far more than fighting people at your level.


moral blindness may be a reason why people aren't looking as hard in this direction

Working for a medical instrument manufacturer, I think a more likely reason is that a stand-alone machine that processes large volumes of human body fluids with no/little daily maintenance while maintaining precision is either going to be so difficult or expensive that the profitability disappears.

It's a great idea, but would probably have to cost more than about $20/test to be viable largely due to its having to be maintenance free. But if it could be made cheap enough I think you're right. It would be like what the VCR did to the pr0n industry.

If you're in the Twin Cities area and ever decide to do a startup in this area get back to me :-)


If you're going to be putting a lot of R&D into changing people's bodies, why not do it in something cool like regulating myostatin production? Get that one done safely, and we can all be Mr. Olympia.


I've followed this pretty closely and the last serious attempt I am aware of failed in FDA trials.


Making the publishing of negative data as prestigious and scientifically rigorous as positive data.


Make the publishing of anything scientific independent from Journals and freely available to anyone.


Isn't that Arxiv.org?


Do tenure committees and other such parts of the scientific establishment give publication on arxiv.org the same weight they give to publication in traditional scientific journals? They didn't used to -- has this changed?


nope, it definitely hasn't.


Right, although Arxiv.org is so 1995.


This bothered me for a while because I'm not sure what you mean. I can take it three ways.

1. Negative means data that contradicts the popular hypothesis. This is frequently reported very prestigiously, though sometimes care has to be taken depending on just how deeply held the refuted belief is.

2. Negative means data that is highly inconclusive. This data is often non-reported since people continue experiments until they have a story or just drop inquiry. It should still (in some cases) be reported along with the final, telling data but probably isn't.

3. Negative means data that supports already "known" beliefs. Totally "uninteresting" results which just serve to give us the tiniest greater justification to believe what we do. Rarely reported.

I can see (2) but mostly (3) being suitable targets, but you might have a different idea in mind for what negative data is. In the end it sounds like a need to make big advances in meta-analysis in order to have data reported against a more quantified context.

Global, public, and automatic meta-analysis of the state of scientific belief is a hard problem I would love to see solved.


Oh, I meant #2, inconclusive results. I believe that this research is extremely valuable. Scientific contribution occurs not just by finding a story and some supporting data - another source of great contribution could be saving time of many researchers by saying "this is exactly what i did. this is why i did it. and look, nothing came up." another researcher can look at it and think about improving the methodology. if published, this search to get it right becomes a-lot-of-people mission instead of a one-phd-student venture to do all the mistakes that everyone else did, and then start doing things right.

and to echo the above comments - arxiv is not prestigious. you wouldn't write a job market paper or pride yourself in terms of 10 publications in arxiv rather than 2 publications in Nature. i havent thought about the 'how', but i am convinced that the prejudice against negative data has to disappear for this whole thing to work.


I totally agree with supporting (2), it's actually something I'm interested in as a research topic. Like I mentioned, I think part of the difficulty is the non-generality of being able to summarize that sort of material. There are (orders of magnitude) more inconclusive results than telling ones.

Now the idea of being able to search a scientific question and somehow find a meta-analytical summary of all the inconclusive results ever reported would be flat magical. If the summaries were really useful it'd likely generate a large number of telling results almost automatically.

Of course, a resource like that is almost mythical sounding for today.


Oh, nice. Is this research in the pipeline or are you incubating the idea for the future? I am also thinking about this as a research topic - independent summer study, to be more specific. I am hoping to give the matter some serious thought - why negative data is not considered valuable, what sorts of conditions would make it valuable, and how the framework of publishing should be, so that others can easily access, understand, and reason about the data. Are you interested in a subset of these? Do you know any resources on where to start thinking? I know there's the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, but I don't know of other efforts or perhaps societies/groups for this cause.


"De-manufacturing" instead of throwing away things. A company that sells you an item must take it back at the end of its life and break it down into constituent parts to be re-used/recycled. i.e. cars, phones, computers, fridge, house, office fitouts etc. Companies will seek to maximise profits and so make things that are easily re-used/re-sold.

An example of a product like this is the 1981 Jeep CJ-7 I had when I was young. I could swap in pieces from around 4 other models from a range of 15 years of production and they would work... nowadays the door panel from a 2009 BMW 323 won't fit a 2010 323, its ridiculous and leads to a lot of unnecessary waste.


I don't like this idea for several reasons but partly because it implies that no-one but manufacturers can actually "own" anything. In this model you are only renting a product while you use it. This seems fine and dandy to you because it means that you get to duck the responsibility of having to dispose of it properly, and instead you get to put that burden on some "evil", faceless mega-corporation. But if you go down this route you'll end up ceding far more of your rights of use to the manufacturer than you'd like.


Just to clarify my original point, I don't suggest the consumer is forced to return these products - merely that if I want to throw away my first generation iPod then Apple should be the one that can take it back and reuse or recycle it; after all they know exactly how it was made. I feel it's a real waste to throw such a highly engineered piece of technology into landfill.


This is already the rule for lots of things, in lots of countries in Europe. Including computers, bottles (both plastic + glass are reused, rather than broken down + recycled), batteries, etc. All vendors are required to accept them (in the case of bottles, give you the refund), and they are then compensated by the govt.

Which means that when I order a beer delivery online, they come to my door with 3x 6-packs, and then take away the bottles from last time, for free, and I rest easy knowing that A) I didn't have to take out the trash, and B) I'm helping reduce waste.

Yay!


I'd like to see a way to get a non-government based passport for travel, where the organization issuing it does basic checks and certifies you're not a criminal and can take care of yourself. It's a bit of a catch-22, but if you could get enough places to start taking this sort of passport for entry, then soon most places would have to. This would be good for people who like to travel to interesting places that are dangerous to travel with their native country's passport, and for talented people with dysfunctional/oppressive governments.


Dual nationality? Try to get a passport for a neutral country like Ireland (all you need is one Irish grandparent)?

An NGO passport won't work easily. It's much much too easy to set up a NGO. It's much harder to set up a new country.

And if your government is doing things that make it hard for you to travel, then it's up to you to try to fix your government. :P


Corruption.

It is a huge problem in India, I wish it is solved using transparent processes, aided by software tools.

RTI (Right to Information) act helps in bringing out issues to an extent, but those who file RTIs get threatened or can even end up being killed..

http://www.google.co.in/search?q=RTI+activist+killed

Something like anonymous or proxy RTI filings can help and all the results should be cataloged.


I would guess corruption mainly comes about because individuals can be in positions in power. Ie it is not a real democracy and the legal system is defunct? Just guessing, but if that is so, I don't think transparency would help. The bribes would probably never be entered into the computer database either.


The problem with knowing if corruption occurred or not is access to information, which was not possible earlier.

With RTI, officials have to provide requested information within stipulated time frame or face actions - including suspension from service.

But, this is pull model. RTI application needs to be filed to get information.

Instead it should be push.

All Govt. expenses, the authorization details for those expenses (who made it) and the reasons for making those authorizations (details of tenders received and why one was favored over the other), should all be made public. So that it is easier to find foul play.

All this is related to corruption in Govt. expenditure.

Regarding bribes, usually applications/files submitted to Govt. offices do not move if bribes are pending. Now one can file for information on why some particular file has not moved and if that details given are not satisfactory, one can use it to file a complaint.


Do a search on what the Gujarat government has been upto in terms of both fighting corruption and streamlining government services.


A better way to communicate between cars -- honking a horn seems kind of stone age at this point.


Stone age technology is still good technology if it does the job well. In the USA / Canada, people seem to get angered / offended when someone honks at them, and similarly people often honk out of anger.

Having phone numbers on license plates comes to mind... so you can call people and tell them to get out of the way =)

Things work slightly differently in India: most of the time you tap lightly to tell people that you're bigger, faster, and approaching from behind, and that it is safer for them to change lanes and let you pass =)


I noticed this in the Middle East too. The horn is used just to announce your presence so they know to look out for you. It's an interesting cultural quirk. It was also common to flash your lights when you're changing lanes on the highway to pass someone, which is considered rude in the US as well.


I often wish I had a huge LED board on top of my car, so I could send messages to other drivers: * "Your allowed to drive 120km/h here, your doing 95!" * "The right lane is free you know!" (replace with left lane in rhd countries ;) )

etc...


I'd like to have the same for my bicycle, y/telling something like "you're supposed to give me 1 meter, not 30 centimeters".


Here's one:

http://shopledauthority.com/items/automotive-led-displays/li...


I agree. I'm actually doing research right now on creating an ad-hoc network out of all the cars on the road, with the ability to flood in certain directions to notify of impending dangers, such as sudden braking up ahead (possibly a crash). 93% of car accidents are attributed to human error, so I think communication is definitely key.


Waze are doing something similar to that.


This is interesting, what sort of thing did you have in mind?

I think a horn is more about communicating between drivers, not cars, and seems like an good solution for this.. In the "hey, im here!" sense, rather than "hey, fuck you buddy!". It provides an alert and rough location that doesn't require much processing by the driver.


Here are some things that I've wanted to communicate to other drivers:

"You might want to check the air pressure in your right rear tire, it's riding dangerously low"

"Your left turn signal's been on for three miles"

"Your gas cap is off"

"The speed limit in this section of road is 45mph"

"Your coffee mug is on the rear bumper"

etc.


Flashing headlights is a common indicator where I live for alerting someone to any of these problems.


Yeah but then someone flashes their lights at me out of the blue and my thought is 'Oh, s*, what did I do wrong? What is wrong with the car? Is there a speed trap ahead?' etc etc until I can stop and check things out...and it turns out that they just accidentally bumped their brights lever. Kind of the equivalent of grunting instead of talking. Would be nice if there were some standard tone set for different common signals.


That's exactly my problem with the car horn. You can honk at someone for any number of reasons, and it can be very hard to tell why someone is honking at you, or if you're even the person they're honking at to begin with.

But at the same time, any new method can't be too complicated, as it would just be an additional distraction and encourage worse driving.

Then again, people are already operating GPS and talking on cell phones while driving, so if something could be designed to be only marginally more complicated than a car horn, but substantially less complicated than a GPS, I think it would be a fantastic improvement.


Directional speakers could be cool for this purpose. Like the ones used in theme parks where only people in the spotlight can hear. Would be nice to say thanks to a polite driver as if they were next to you. But sadly this could be abused. Examples left up to reader.


Some car manufacturers have released technology which allows a car to see when you are getting too close to a car in front of you, adjusting your speed accordingly.

I imagine that using this technology along with local area networks you could improve on the existing technology to enable coordinated lanes. I think it could be incredibly interesting if you were able to have a lane on highways which only allowed linked cars to enter - they are each communicating to each other; establishing the speed of cars, as a group, instead of individually.

As I understand it, traffic delays frequently occur because of the ripple effect of one driver slowing down. If ther was a way to coordinate all cars accordingly, I presume that speeds could actually be increased significantly.


I read that Simulations show only 20% of cars need to have automated radar speed control to help make freeways free-flowing.

You just need to sprinkle smart cars liberally and everyone benefits.


what about a massive foam finger?


I like it! Something that tells me exactly when it's ok to pull out would remove stress from my day and improve traffic flow.


Enabling abuse probably isn't wise while driving a car.


Yes, although I think enabling subtler degrees of 'body language' should be the goal. Anything more conscious risks distracting the drivers.


i was always in favor of having the thing that squirts liquid on to your windshield inverted out. supersoak rather then honk!


You mean like a CB? Why not make those standard?


1) ubiquitous public transport. 2) Safe bicycling in most cities. 3) Better treatment for chronic pain


It might not be much safer than regular bikes, but electric bicycles are great for expanding the non-car commuting range of the average suburbanite. I ride a scooter-style ebike that has enough cargo room for a few bags of groceries and looks more like a Vespa scooter than a 10-speed. The headlights, tail lights, and turn signals make me feel safer than my mountain bike. Of course, cars don't pay much attention to mopeds or motorcycles either, so it's probably just a psychological safety net.


Digital receipts - I hardly need to carry cash anymore, pretty much everywhere I shop takes chip-n-pin cards so I use my debit card to pay for most things.

However, what you end up with is silly bits of paper that I end up carrying round in my wallet or stuffed into folders at work or at home.

Why can't my payment card contain an identifier that allows the bank to send me a digitally signed receipt - I could get notification by SMS or email that this is in place before I leave the shop.

There is a lot of crypto tech that could be thrown at this problem and it would end up more convenient and better.


YMMV, but here's what I do:

If it's a personal expense (90% of my purchases) I immediately throw the receipt away.

If it's a business expense, I take a picture on my cellphone, tag it in Evernote, and throw the receipt away. This used to take me about 3 minutes (awkward) but now I can do it while I'm walking, so it adds no time burden to my day.

Receipts of any kind are obsolete, IMHO.


I don't fancy facing auditors or the taxman with a picture of a bit of paper.


Actually, thermal receipts fade over time (often as quickly as 18 months) so a picture is much stronger documentary evidence.


Agreed but they should probably focus on fixing this first: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118659 (Chip and Pin is Broken)


A potential stopgap to this would be a standardized barcode on printed receipts, which you can scan with your phone and upload to your bank account, import into Mint, Quicken, etc.


Grocery chains / big box stores could add it as part of their rewards points programs. -> Attach email to safeway card. -> Scan safeway card. -> Receive receipts via email.

But this also means replacing hardware, which is a more expensive proposition.


My bank already knows my email address and phone number(s).

I would expect that the easiest way of doing this would be for the banks to handle it all - when I buy something my bank gets a receipt signed by the shop's bank to say that I did buy item X at time Y at location Z. My bank could perhaps then countersign the receipt to link that strongly to my identity.

It would be particularly good if the format included a standard representation of tax paid (VAT etc.) - would make filling out expense claims so much easier.


Actually, shouldn't this be doable entirely in software?

The POS already scans the reward card, the POS talks to a master computer (for inventory reasons), that data gets back to an office which has internet, from which emails could be sent.


Online elections. Think of how many more people would actually vote in the US if it were online. The 2008 election had 63% voter turnout, which is historically high, but is nothing compared to countries like Italy with 90%.

Obviously, there are huge security concerns and it would be a logistical nightmare, but that's what someone needs to solve.


In Denmark, turnout is consistently 80+%, and we don't have online voting. Clearly, it's not the lack of online voting that's the (sole) problem.

I can see how it's practical, and probably inevitable in the future, but quite frankly, if you can't be bothered to spend an hour every two-three years voting, I really don't need your input on who should be in charge.

Voting should be harder, if anything. Then politicians would have a higher lowest common denominator to speak to.


I don't think low turnouts are the biggest problem with voting as it is done today. No use in having 99% participate if the process remains easily gameable, influenceable and opaque.


If not proper elections at least a whole population simulation before the polls. That way people could express their true preferences without fearing that their vote will not count if it goes to a fringe candidate and would reassure them that they're not as few as regular polls and eventual results usually show.


Surely the issue is voting systems that do not rationally incorporate each voter's preference equally?

Unless you're suggesting iteration as a way to get around Arrow’s paradox? I'm not sure if anyone has tried it - could be interesting? But if not, then ranking candidates get you the same results.


Few voters will express their true preferences and will go instead with 'the lesser evil' when they fear their option will be in a small percentile and discarded. It is not unusual to have systems where 5% is required for a party to get into the parliament, or for a nominee to get into preliminary rounds, etc. So one cannot expect a voting system to incorporate all voter's preferences if they are very small but a warm-up voting would reveal that the fringes that big media avoids covering can become popular.


That way people could express their true preferences without fearing that their vote will not count if it goes to a fringe candidate

Isn't that exactly what instant-runoff voting solves?


By 'online', I assume you mean online from your home/office. There is no way, I can think of, to prevent someone else from watching how you vote in that scenario, which pretty much stops the idea dead in the water.


Canada and Australia at least allow the census to be completed online. There's probably less motivation to rig the census than the election (though there are benefits to both) but it's still an interesting point.


Security and logistic aside, "how many people vote" may not be the right metric for problem that needs to be solved.

Elections are just a substitute for real collaboration and daily participation in public life.


A better way to meet co-founders. Almost like a dating website but instead of going on a date you work on an Open Source project together with someone who would be a good match.


fsav and I built http://www.clusterify.com/ last year to target this very problem.

Unfortunately, neither of us is working on it anymore, and the site is no longer very active. But the code for the site is open-source, so feel free to launch your own clusterify and build a community around it!


You might want to look at http://www.techcofounder.com/


GitHub?


A better, no hassles international payment gateway

(I know Paypal exists, but I am not their fan)


We (Braintree) support over 100 currencies: http://bit.ly/braintree-currencies . We're less hassle than other gateways, but getting merchant accounts for international processing isn't completely hassle free. It's more of an industry problem than a gateway problem, but we're working on it.


Spreedly? Or maybe that's a layer on top of gateways? I don't know much about payment gateways, so feel free to enlighten me on why it's not a solution to this, if it's not.


Spreedly is a layer on top of gateways, so it can only support currencies that the underlying payment gateway supports. Gateways that Spreedly supports: http://spreedly.com/info/payment-gateways/


And please make it implement digital receipts (see my suggestion below).


Amazon payments seems to be fairly non-sleazy.


But also decidedly non-international :(


what about google checkout?


Ugh, that's only for the UK and USA. If you're a Canadian and want to charge Canadian dollars to another Canadian it is 100% impossible.


Job search is very broken. Monster/Dice/Craigslist &c are broken. Not sexy, I know, but I imagine the people who solve that problem will become quite rich.


i had an idea of semi-fixing that, or rather rerouting around the problem by shifting the job-finding and -posting from the HR dept. to the individual employees.

Let's say you're a web programmer living in City A, and commuting to City B, a commute of 2 hours. Unbeknown to you, there's a web programmer in City B, commuting to City A every day. My idea would be to put these two in touch with each other, and eventually facilitate a job switch. You basically swap jobs (assuming you're both of equal proficiency, and the higher-ups agree to it), and don't have to commute any more. Yay/Nay?


You know i really think the idea is really unique. It might be difficult/impractical in reality?

A job is not just a location, but a combination of lot of things like salary compensation, work culture. So it will be difficult for two people to agree on something like this. One would always think, that he's losing out on the deal. It might still work!, but maybe it's just a little too radical.

I was toying with a similar approach, but i think the social angle on job search is still missing. Eg. recommending jobs for your friends, voting on which companies are good to work for etc. There are a lot of small companies that don't get a lot of good talent, just cos they're not Google/Facebook.

I would love to get a chance to discuss, brainstorm with you on this, since i've been seriously thinking of jumping into job search with the hope of doing it right.


Isn't this covered by Indeed/Simplyhired?


The best opportunities aren't the ones being screened by HR. Most job postings look like someone got a description of the job from the manager, looked for the sentence fragments that could be classified as skills or experience, then put those in as the list of requirements.

LinkedIn is probably a closer approximation to what's needed, but as far as I can tell it's hard to get far out of your acquaintances with a basic account.


SimplyHired and Indeed are mostly aggregators of other boards. It's just a slick interface on a broken system.

I'd like to see something that's a little more direct, that gets me to HR/hiring managers with fewer people in the middle.


Keys. Why, in 2010, do I still have 10 metal keys in my pocket. Why?


Because of legacy hardware. Getting loads of locks re-cored is expensive.


There's probably thousands of undeveloped patents preventing innovation too. I have a naive idea of how to get around the legacy locks problem without re-coring but I'm sure patents would stop any development.


Not sure why I was downvoted. A 2 minute search yields just these patents:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7069755.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5701828.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5974367.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5999095.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6325429.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6867685.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6483424.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6609738.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5886644.html


Wow! Patents foster innovation again!

You'll get sued anyway, relevant patent or not. Just give it a shot if you can.


I would happily pay a locksmith to replace locks. But there's no electronic system I've seen that didn't suck.


maybe somebody could make some shape-shifting general purpose key, locked/jailed down to only take the shapes matching the locks in your possession. Would need some very small actuators -- I guess, it's doable.


I am down to two, but some are replaced with bulkier plastic fobs.


A practical, robust method for separating essential complexity from accidental complexity in software engineering.

Trevor Blackwell has written about something like this: http://tlb.org/busywork.html


Thanks for the pointer. Basically, Trevor wants the distraction of low-level tweaking so he can think about the high-level problem. That's the weakest argument for low-level languages I've ever heard. But Python fits the bill: Python for high-level, C libs for performance and low-level tweaking.


The big solution I was thinking of would have to go a bit further than Python/C. Basically you should be able to write a description of the actual essential functionality of a program without going into data structure and algorithm implementation that isn't relevant to the problem domain. Something like Prolog or Haskell here, Python isn't all that declarative compared to them. Then you could write the bits that need tweaking in a lower level language, but you should be able to automatically verify that the low-level implementation matches the high-level description, at least through extensive QuickCheck-style automated testing if a full automatic proof isn't feasible. You don't get anything like this with a Python/C style solution.


I've ended up with that style. The robot software is Python at the high level, C++ for low-level or OS-specific stuff. It runs fast and is easy to hack on


The world is definitely in need of more programming tools in general that reduce cognitive load while keeping details accessible. Personally, I think that's going to come in the form of a programming language that's completely different from everything that's come before, something that's more than just lines of plain text. Perhaps something along the lines of StarLogo TNG, which lets you write games by fitting puzzle pieces together, but much more polished and general-purpose:

http://education.mit.edu/starlogo-tng/


It fascinates me that Trevor Blackwell has AdSense on his essays.


I make like $150 / month from it even though my traffic is small, which I think is pretty cool. Essays about how to build stuff get high-CPC ads for servo motors & robot kits & stuff.


Making Scholar articles open to public access.

Google scholar returned references are mainly to journal articles requiring a fee. This is useless. Science should be a collaborative work like wikipedia but with referees (not the narrowed minded one).


Google does indicate which you can get freely, it's just that for some reason they won't allow you to search for only those. A web site that searched google scholar for you and then returned only the free ones would be really useful...


As far as I know, academic institutions have a pretty large budget for subscribing to journals. If a member (prof, staffer or student) wants access to a certain journal that isn't available, the librarian can arrange for it.

So in terms of accessibility to each other's scholarly articles, scientists in academia or larger industries don't suffer from a lack of collaboration. Since this covers most practicing academics, there is little incentive for the scholarly publishing community to change.

That said, there are many Open Access Journals out there - I guess you're not alone in your sentiments that science should be collaborative.


You can also visit just about any university and use their resources for free. Most scholarly databases and journals restrict by IP address and many universities don't require people on-campus to authenticate.


What if you aren't in a university or if the university is not that rich to have an access to most popular scholar journals ? You are not aware of the luck you have if accessing scholar journals is as simple as that for you.


Something that prevents all this dust from gathering up in my home.


Let me know when you want those locks changed and the keys thrown away :P


Rumba is doing a pretty good job at that.


Something (website) to replace my new car's manual with something that's actually useful: teach me about my new car, common probloems, how to maintain it myself, etc...


IMO it should split up the manual into pieces below the level of a level so one could collect those lesson snips one needs and skip the others. Could apply for any other kind of stuff to be teached too.


Solar powered 3D printers that use the carbon in CO2 to make stuff.


That sounds crazy, but why not actually? Trees do it. CO2->O2+C where the C is used for say nanotube production sounds pretty awesome.


...or, why not some kind of Lego (?) nano bricks that can easily be ordered/reordered?


Greatest would be if the printers could print (replicate) themselves. A new life form :)


There's already a CNC printer that can replicate itself. You just have to buy the raw material. For example, see this

http://blog.reprap.org/2008/06/reprap-achieves-replication.h...


Pretty sure we already have those... they're called "trees"


A good photo management system for Windows that is designed to be useful over 10, 20 years (ie. keeps your photos stored, backedup, organized in a way that's not too proprietary). Picasa is powerful but has a CRAP ui, iPhoto is much better, but Mac only.


Actually, any technology designed to be useful after 10, 20 years is pretty impressive in our times. Which is pretty scary, if you ask me.

I've meant for quite some time to write an article about the fragility of human technological innovation.

Here are some examples that I can think of:

- I think I read about this case in a computer magazine: when the personal computers just started to be available they scanned and recorded in the digital form some ancient holy book so that it will be better preserved in digital form from then on. The year was 1982 maybe, the computer platform was not the one that would become mainstream and the recording media was some kind of digital laserdisc I think. The irony is, some 20 years later they had a really big trouble finding the computer to read the data back. (this is from my memory, can't find the source)

- Web platform once considered cutting edge (Macromedia/Adobe Shockwave), cannot run on modern operating systems (Linux) 15 years later. No replacement or emulation solution in sight; users depending on it are left in the cold.

- Geocities was shut down on short notice, with no exit strategy for its users 10 years after being bought for $3.5 billion

- Belt-clippable, battery-operated mp3 players like iRiver T10 (an achievement of its own, if you ask me) are nowhere to be found 5 years after they appeared (appeared ~2003, obsolete in 2008)


Easy to use tracking of stolen car (I live in Colombia): put small device that costs about 60$ somewhere in your car. If it gets stolen, activate via internet service and it tells you where your car is.


In the US, you can buy a $20 kit that includes a cheap GPS enabled phone and some software that would give you this functionality. Hide the phone deep in your car. When it's stolen, the software will locate it on a map.

http://www.accutracking.com/kit.html


Engaging lay science journalism that doesn't suck.


What about The Economist's science section? Or do you mean something a bit more lowbrow, or with more multimedia?


Where is energy going to come from when the irreversible decline of oil production worldwide begins?


"Deprecate the base of Maslow's pyramid" Inventing cheap and healthy concentrated 'food' that would allow people to eat once a month or even more rarely. Almost all other problems have a root in our needing to eat (work and cars, pollution, corruption, fighting for social status and it's consequences). You'd have the autonomy and time to take long trips without needing to carry much.


There's no science in this unfortunately - if you gave someone a month's worth of food in one meal then they are going to put on a month's worth of food in fat in one day and spend the next 29 days starving hungry, consequently slowing their metabolism and making them fatter.


There are plenty of advances to be made for sure, there's not much science for it 'yet'. That is why I mentioned 'healty'. Not some super-food to get you through a short period of intense physical/mental/emotional effort, but something that does not wreck your metabolism and plays well with your organs' age-old habit to be useful and doing their thing. So it would definitely not be just some bunch of nutrients but nanobots too that get cooperate with and monitor your organism. It's probably very hard, but if solved, it would make most (all?) other problems mentioned in this thread be non-issues :)


What if something was to break down slowly over the period of a month - possibly sitting in the stomach? Providing the correct sustanance on any one given day.


You're right, combining with a hunger inhibitor would be a great start.


This is a little silly. In the developed world food is remarkably cheap. Go into a grocery store and price a 5lb or 25lb bag of flour or rice, we're talking pennies per meal. It's incredibly inexpensive (less than a dollar a day) to feed oneself at a subsistence level, what is interesting is why so few people choose to do so, even when it would make economic sense.


Sigh. It's not only and indeed not primarily about price. What about the effects on the environment of growing and transporting that rice? Also I sure would like to go on a hike in the mountains without needing to carry 25 Kg of food for a week. It is not silly, you are looking at it very conservatively.


On the other hand, eating isn't just about consuming food. On the average day I probably spend more time talking face-to-face with people while I'm eating than I do for the entire rest of the day. And I doubt that that's unusual these days.


That is a consequence of needing to eat, not that of needing to interact with others, and you do that because 'more important things' such as work prevents you from taking the time to talk. You could talk to those people face to face without eating as well. Nobody would prevent anyone from eating, but for those who would rather do something else it would be a very welcome invention.


> 'Nobody would prevent anyone from eating'

That isn't really the point though. Whenever there is progress the majority of people stop doing the 'old' thing in favour of the 'new' thing. Hardly anyone in the first world makes their own clothes these days as our standard of living/price of clothing makes it easy not to, most young people wouldn't even consider making their own furniture, people don't hand-write letters. I'm not saying that these things are necessarily bad, just using them as examples of things 'nobody would prevent anyone from [doing]' which people don't (generally) do.

My team at work tends to go out and get our lunch together then sit in the kitchen and eat together. We probably talk more in that half an hour than we do the entire rest of the day. If we all took our magic food pill in the morning then that just wouldn't happen. No one would be stopping us doing it but we still wouldn't do it; it'd be far too easy to tell yourself that you're too busy to take that half hour break.


Having the tech available would indeed not prevent anyone from using the old ways. I wonder why not answer this to all proposals in this topic as those problems being solved would make people stop doing stuff the old way.

Also you miss a huge point: with such magic pills there would be no team. You would not need cranking out software for industries that would go away entirely if the problem was solved or for niche domains that would also become irrelevant. Most of our problems and solutions we are looking for today are indirectly related to our need to live and thus eat. Name one problem outside the realm of metaphysics, arts, emotions and the like that is not solved if the food problem is solved.


I don't understand what you mean. Even imagining a world where we didn't need any food at all; we'd still have teams of builders building the houses we live in, teams of teachers teaching our children, teams of bankers doing what it is they do with our money, teams of printers printing the newspapers we read, teams of IT workers at ISPs. How would any of those jobs become obsolete because of the fact that we wouldn't need to eat food?


Imagine for a moment that you do not need food, then see how many of the services you currently use you can do without as a consequence. Bankers? Really? What to use money for when nobody is anymore threatened by hunger. Even today you have plenty of people doing volunteer work, any problem in a society where there's no competition for resources would make that the norm. I am very disappointed that the answers to this thread are given without much thought.


There are hundreds of millions of people in the Western world who are not 'threatened by hunger', and yet the vast majority of those people still go to work every day, still use banks, still want to earn more money than they could ever need for food. You seem to imagine that if everyone had enough food then our economy would grind to a halt; that there would be no commerce anymore. I think this is unrealistic because people will still want 'things'. I might want a larger house to live in, I might dream of owning a Ferrari, you might want to learn to fly a helicopter, someone else might want a new refrigerator. The point is that there are luxuries, as well as necessities, which people will want; it's possible that in this magical hunger-free world people will produce these things and give them away for free, but it seems a lot more likely to me that these things will be available to buy, and that if you want to buy them you will have to go and do some work, to earn some money, to pay for them. And so yes, bankers, really. In a world where you have to pay for things, even if those things are not food, people will want a way to maintain the value of their money, at the very least so that when they're old they'll be able to heat their homes, repair their homes, buy new clothes to wear, afford transport and afford medical treatments.

I don't understand your disappointment with this thread, you're taking a line of argument which I find completely fanciful, and which I'm sure at least some others do, where you remove one factor from the world (hunger/the need to eat) and extrapolate to all the ills of the world being cured, with no logic in between.


why would one need a new refrigerator??? Having hunger solved in the western world is vastly different from having it solved globally and even more different from not needing food at all. Not having plenty of food. Not needing food at all. I am disappointed by what seem very shortsighted, almost knee-jerk remarks which illustrate the poster did not think much about the problem. As if the logical next step after realizing you do not need to eat is to go and work some more in that saved time to have more money. Depressing :)


I think we should stop this discussion. You don't seem to have any interest in discussing how this hypothetical society would actually work, only in nit-picking mostly irrelevant points (and in response: given that people would be free to eat if they wished, why should they not want refrigerators).

Thanks.


> 'I wonder why not answer this to all proposals in this topic as those problems being solved would make people stop doing stuff the old way.'

It wouldn't be inappropriate to - it's always worth considering both the positive and negative consequences of progress.


- negation of the UN Human Rights' council obsession with Israel

- Cold Fusion

- medical imaging that can detect emotional patterns and spiritual energy


I'm sorry, what?

- I can't think of any civil words here, so I'll restrict myself to the numbers 1440 and 13

- That would be great, but since everything we know about science makes it impossible (chemical binding energies orders of magnitude below nuclear binding energies), why even ask for it? Why not ask for workable hot fusion?

- We already have these technologies. Well, Paul Ekman did some really good work on facial analysis, as did John Gottman, and they claim to detect emotions from facial expressions. This could be done by machine vision. And a dowsing rod is an excellent for detecting spiritual energy, although you're right, a dowsing CAT scanner would be even better. What's that, the rod only works when a physic is holding it? Damm.


I'd like to see someone solve the problem of (snail) mail. Its the one thing that is really preventing me from living a digital nomad lifestyle. I still have to visit my office at least once a week just to pick up mail, half of which is often junk and half of which im normally too late for.


The Deutsche Post is just about to introduce email that's guaranteed to reach the addressee. https://www.onlinebrief.de/ That would invite everyone to use e-mail rather than snail, except for the (iirc) ¢20 price tag per mail.


The real problem here is why does mail still have to exist?


I think there are or used to be services that open and scan your mail for you and email you the scans.


I want to be able to use the internet without being really worried about installing the operating system, maintaining and updating it. Heck, I don't want to SEE the OS. Just abstract it away from my view. I don't want to see it any more. (The same can be said about web browsers)


That's pretty much the direction Chrome OS is taking.


Sounds like you want a CrunchPad er.. JooJoo ;)


How about improving medical forms. I recently signed up with a new doctor and literally filled out 5 pages, which all asked for the same information. Name, address, social sec. #, insurance, signature etc... I felt like I was back in 1980. SO frustrating!


This should be a very simple iPad app...


No keys, no wallet, no fobs, no cards (unless the internet-device wants to be card sized).


Problem: Status updates and notifications from my bank, facebook, meetup, server crashing etc.. aren't really e-amils but are being sent to to my inbox because there isn't a better place to send just the updates. Also, if I want to say, temporarily turn off status updates from facebook going to my inbox, this involves going into my facebook profile and turning notifications off there and then going back in there in the future and turning it back on.

My membership and communication information for many websites is also burried deep inside my inbox somewhere when that isn't really email either.


Check out notify.io and oovertheair.appspot.com. Would love to hear your feedback.


I'd like to be able to have lunch and chat one-on-one with a dozen or more angels that have mutual interests and experiences as me, without having to move to California or win some startup beauty contest.


An easy to use tool to connect my blog to all my various accounts (twitter, facebook, buzz, bla). that really focuses on letting me post easily. The current crop doesn't really seem to work for me.


As you said, (bad) tools for this do exist. What problems do the current crop of tools have that prevent you from working?


Have you seen Twitter Feed? That has a lot of features and is pretty easy to use (and free).


Senescence. Although death is a good motivation for getting things done.


University Research 2.0. It seems like universities are so lateeee on adopting new technologies. Most of them are still working with printed scientific journals / email / static HTMLs + GIFs from the 90s. They still do a lot of stuff through the mail and the count goes on... If you don't trust me, just take a look at http://arxiv.org/ or MIT's website. I'm pretty sure there's room for amelioration! If anyone wants to brainstorm on the topic, feel free to contact me.


There's some progress, although research, and implementation/execution are two very different concepts.

http://futurity.org/


Mendeley may not be exactly what you have in mind, but perhaps starting to take some steps in the direction of more collaboration / social approach to research (including a personalized recommendation engine): http://www.mendeley.com/


Sounds more like a news aggregator than a social platform for scientific collaboration.


Lowering the barrier to share data and information between my different telecommunication tools (phone, PC @work, PC@home, lap tops, internet caffe, ...).


Speech Recognition. Enough said!


Its actually not to shabby in windows 7. It also gets better the more you use it.


Thought recognition would be much more useful. And a bit scary.


Then, why not push it one step further -- some generalized recognition, independent of field of 'expertise' (well, we're talking about a machine/software here)


The problem of induction. No one has answered Hume, except Kant and he dodged the question. This is the big question, underlying integration of QM/GR, the nature of time, P=NP?, AI, a stable credit-money system, scientific ethics, chicken or egg?, etc, etc. Once this is resolved, I feel sorry for future generation (not really) because its "only" applications forever after.


ET Jaynes solved it indirectly in his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science(1). As a tl;dr, it turns out that knowledge--as it's defined in the problem of induction--doesn't exist.

(1) http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html


I agree Jaynes made some significant, important progress. However, the conclusion that the problem does not exist comes from Kant, its a dodge. The problem is still open because Kant's theory of knowledge is a denial of ALL knowledge.


Establish conventions for academic publications that maximize easily machine-readable content instead of looking good when printed to a paper journal. Build a search engine that can answer advanced queries about existing research based on the citation links, machine-readable datasets and formal description language descriptions of the main contents of the articles.


Balancing the real and significant perils of unfettered free markets with the real and significant perils of meddling with free markets.


Take the concept of a cheap car (like the one they did in India for about 1000$) and expand. No reason cars need to cost 15000$ and up.


How bad are the emissions on that car?


Disclaimer: most of these aren't anything new or earth shattering things that need to be solved.

I dislike having a gazillion different Instant Message accounts with contacts that "only use MSN" or "only use AIM". SMS messaging may be a rip-off but there is one thing it has achieved: uniformity.

Craigslist is great but it caters to the lowest common denominator - which can be frustrating.


Shameless self-promotion disclaimer I have taken baby steps in trying to build a more intelligent classified site at yourgrounds.com

I too feel your pain, and any feedback you have would obviously be incredibly worthwhile - especially if you want to help solve this specific problem.


A better online shopping experience.

One area especially is customer reviews and feedbacks. I don't want to read a review by anyone who buys the products.. that doesn't help me. I want to know if that someone is like me. has the same taste in music, or food or whatever variable that is closest to my interests.

This will help me speed up the decision making on the purchase in question.


Personalized Movies. Based on your past viewing history, it creates a new movie that no one else has seen and you can possibly share with your friends.

So it will notice your love for sci fi but it will notice you like comedy too, but you dont like your comedy mixed with your sci fi. :D Using this info generates a hollywood standard movie


Cheap and thin electronic paper. I'm talking about e-paper as thin as regular paper and bound into notebooks. Then I can buy ~5 notebooks that each have to ability to display any e-book or text based file. I also need the ability to write in these notebooks so that I can store my notes electronically.


easy to setup music system: buy x speakers, just put them where you want them (connect to electricity), decent music quality (varying sizes of speakers), they all play music from one computer somewhere in the house (wifi). About 80$ per average speaker (not 3 or 400$ as the current systems)


A Real Time Strategy video game style interface for managing and coordinating aid.


(this may exist) for teaching to drive a car, a way for the person in the passanger seat to see exactly which pedals the person driving is pushing. Should be cheap (50$) and easy to install/uninstall (10 mins)


Augmented reality of the kind Verner Vinge writes about in Rainbows End.


It's a problem that I can no longer find the 'save' link on HN stories - where is it? That's one of my favorite HN features, even though I use it rarely. I'd like to see someone bring it back.


Rechargeable batteries good enough to power a vehicle would be nice.


I think by definition we already have such. Perhaps you should increase the specificity of your desire.


How about a re-usable electricity storage method with a power density equal to or better than petroleum?


Now we're talking.


cancer


Most cancers are probably viral:

We know that cervical cancer is related to the human pappiloma virus, thus the annual "pap smear" for women. Warts and fever blisters are both caused by virii and cause growths, similar to tumors. I can't think of any parasites, bacteria, or fungi which causes similar growths -- and I've tried. (Anyone who knows of something else which causes tumor-like growths, please speak up. This question is of serious interest to me. Cancer runs rampant in my family.) Molluscum contagiosum is a viral infection which causes growths on the skin similar to skin tags. The cause of skin tags is "unknown" (yet it seems logical to me it is some other virus) but they are described as "benign tumors".

Although conventional medicine seems to find viral infections extremely hard to combat, alternative treatment circles I hang out in find viral infections very easily treated and offer a number of different options for doing so. I believe that I and my sons have been killing off whatever virus or virii we carry which eventually could/would turn into a diagnosis of cancer. I get die-off rashes that include skin tags and brown and red spots of the sort which look like pre-cancerous lesions. My oldest son has a very keen sense of smell and has been around several family members who had cancer. He says he can smell it when we have cancer die-off. Given my experiences with him, I believe him.

I generally don't talk about this in public. My personal problem is that people tend to either call me "arrogant and egomaniacal" or "a liar, charlatan, and snake-oil salesman". "Arrogant and egomaniacal" is probably the better thing to be accused of as it suggests people think it can be done, just not by little ole me. "Liar, charlatan, and snake-oil salesman" suggests people think it can't be done at all, by anyone, regardless of the resources at their disposal, much less by little ole me and my limited resources. I don't believe any technology will solve my personal issue of being accused of such things. It's an issue of "the hundredth monkey" or "mindshare" or "groupthink"....something along those lines -- ie: No one else is able to do it, so you can't possibly be telling the truth. To quote an old TV show: "There's always a first."


We are running out of (cool) domain names. Fix that.


A catalogue of charities giving information about their goals and their financials. Help me to help others most efficiently with my money.


Something like http://www.charitynavigator.org/ ?

Lists charitable organizations, including their mission statements and financials, and rates them within their specific fields. (A financially healthy museum will look very different from a financially healthy feed-the-children program, which is why it rates by category.)


Actually pretty damn close to perfect. I'd wish there was a better overview (multiple comparisons) so that I could begin to get a better understanding for their ratings and charity expense breakdowns, but the information is all there.

Thanks for the plug.


Givewell does research on the effectivness of donations to non-profits , and recommends the best.


a) an open source software repository of all programming languages/operating system software implementations. (Note: http://catb.org/retro/ is a good start, but there needs to be more)

b) improving democracy by reasonable application of at least some of the technological advances of the last decade; why hasn't that happened yet?


Real, free form speech recognition coupled with enough nlp that would allow a dialogue between a computer and a person.


Efficient purely functional data storage and the algorithms and best-practices required to effectively use it.


Haven't read it, but there is the book Purely Functional Data Structures http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Oka...


Have (tried to ;) read it, but this just describes patterns for constructing the smallest building blocks for what I described.


starts with "best practices", ends-up with "six sigmas" and all the Enron and WorldCom of the world ...


Uhm, these would be more like garbage-collection 'best practices'...


Easy incorporated suite to debug and test (with interaction) all popular browser/OS combinations.


Does P = NP?


build and/or packaging systems


Are you referring to:

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c...

?


Tinnitus.


reliability data for consumer products. while the internet brought great transparency for the whole purchasing process, this is really the missing piece for good buying decisions.


Industrial-scale production of real bio (no pesticides etc) food.


HN doesn't notify me when someone replied to one of my comments.


Getting rid of undesirable mails (spam, personal harassment,...)


That problem is pretty much solved for me (Gmail).


I have another idea in mind. Gmail is just filtering. There is a limit to it. Beside, there is no true privacy with Gmail.


figure out how content is stored in brains, so we could skip learning and implement/initialize knowledge directly


The halting problem (in finite time).


Space elevator in my lifetime.


Education for makers.


TechShop is pretty good for that. But you have to move to Silicon Valley or Portland.


my two hour commute :(


seriously though, we need to have term limits in politics - across all levels. i'm tired of career politicians who have completely lost touch with the reality of everyday Americans.


Predefined quantitative metrics of success attached to more (preferably all) legislation, with automatic sunset upon failure.


The broken last-mile solutions in the united states.


Popularize the concept of pundits publicly applying percentage likelihoods to their predictions, so they become testable.




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