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

23 points| Mystalic | 16 years ago | reply

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

33 comments

order
[+] bkovitz|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] tdoggette|16 years ago|reply
I'd like to be able to enter a URL and see every place on the internet that people have talked about it.
[+] colins_pride|16 years ago|reply
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?
[+] Mystalic|16 years ago|reply
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).
[+] akaGOMEZ|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] yread|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] bkovitz|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] asimjalis|16 years ago|reply
I want a programming language which is as effortless as thought.
[+] edw519|16 years ago|reply
Huh? Programming is easy. Thought is hard.
[+] kloro|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] jrandom|16 years ago|reply
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|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] thunk|16 years ago|reply
You know the information you're searching for is readily available, but you don't know the unique string to get you there.
[+] JimmyL|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ashishk|16 years ago|reply
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

[+] edw519|16 years ago|reply
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).

[+] jlangenauer|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] dhbradshaw|16 years ago|reply
I want a razor that doesn't grow dull.
[+] antipaganda|16 years ago|reply
Immortality. With that we can solve lots of other problems. Efficiency, see?
[+] kloro|16 years ago|reply
i need to change the layout of the physical keyboard (as opposed to the on-screen keyboard) on my palm centro.
[+] BearOfNH|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] akaGOMEZ|16 years ago|reply
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|16 years ago|reply
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.