Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored?
13 points by brihati 2 days ago | 22 comments
- cjbarber 6 hours ago1) Designing built environments that maximize the community and enjoyment of the people who live in them
and perhaps even moreso 2) Figuring out how to get them built
It seems we mostly know the answers for 1, we just don't know how to get them built in a sea of development regulations and entrenched interests etc.
- the__alchemist 1 day agoChemistry (Or biology, as an extension of it) simulations. Current tools include Newtonian atom-centered force fields that are fit to a specific situation and lose validity outside it, and quantum computations that are very slow, and don't scale well.
I have a hunch there is something about the underlying physics we are missing, and that we have not hit the endgame of modelling physics at this scale.
[-]- 392 6 hours agoI've been experimenting in this space, where might I find a guide for what to build that would be useful to you? I suspect most existing approaches are an order of magnitude slower and harder to use than they need to be.
- mikewarot 10 hours agoThere's no capabilities based OS ready to be a daily driver. Until this happens we're going to keep seeing stories about hacked systems, and how we all need to rewrite applications in Rust.
- codegladiator 8 hours agoThere is a reasonable argument that your question is at least NP, and plausibly NP-hard or harder depending on how you formalize the verification oracle.
- ManlyBread 2 days agoAnti-cheat systems in multiplayer video games. It seems like every multiplayer game out there eventually gets overrun with cheaters and that cheat developers win every time.
- austin-cheney 1 day agoWhat I want is something like the UI of the web platform but for desktop development exclusively. The differences between this and the current web platform are:
* no certificates
* direct access to a shell, network stack, and file system from api available directly within the viewport
* a permission system allowing custom roles and security policies
* a better mark up format that imposes accessibility criteria by default like type safety in rust
* a buffer based data serialization so that I don’t have to parse/stringify on every transaction
- webglfan 2 days agoI'll give you one: "Do any odd perfect numbers exist?"
You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number#Odd_perfect_num...
You can watch a short documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrv1EDIqHkY
[-]- gnatman 1 day agoWonderful quote in there from James Joseph Sylvester:
>>... a prolonged meditation on the subject has satisfied me that the existence of any one such [odd perfect number] —its escape, so to say, from the complex web of conditions which hem it in on all sides— would be little short of a miracle.
- brihati 2 days agoIs 2+2 still 4 :p
- mghackerlady 1 day agoPerpetual-ish motion machines. While a true perpetual motion machine physically cannot exist, a machine that operates at an efficiency rate to be for all intents and purposes "perpetual" is theoretically possible, if not physical
- runtimepanic 2 days agoObservability that can produce causal explanations rather than just timelines. We have great tooling for logs/metrics/traces, but very little that helps engineers understand why a distributed system behaved the way it did. Automated causal graphs for incidents still feel like an open problem.[-]
- brihati 2 days agoIn distributed systems, at least we have the variables, functions, pods, log traces, spans etc some pre defined structure, and some level of determinism. I would say Causality is still not fully explored territory when it comes to human brain.
When I think of human brain or may be to some extent LLMs, it's difficult to understand what is invisible. For distributed systems we will build tools, there is ongoing research in LLM Observability, but I wonder what about human brain
- l___l 2 days agoThat you know of.
- l___l 2 days agoWhy should I tell you? What's in it for me?[-]
- ipaddr 23 hours agoTeleportation
- moomoo11 21 hours agoUtilizing the smartphone to its full potential. IMO it is an underutilized platform. There’s more than just CRUD gambling or doomscrolling shit possible on it.
There is so much possible with it!!!