Ask HN: Is anybody solving really cool problems anymore? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anybody solving really cool problems anymore?

26 pointsdnsworks52 comments

For the record, Nothing "web 2.0" is cool to me. I'm too old and jaded. Now here's what is cool:

- Domestic Robots (I just spent 3 hours doing 2 weeks worth of laundry. Automation please)

- Flying cars

- Efficient weight loss technology (if we can put a man on the moon and split up twins, why can't we just put a hose in my stomach and make it so that I can buy clothes off the shelf?)

- Accelerated learning

- Augmented reality .. for dating. Wouldn't it be great to walk into a club with a pair of glasses that double as a HUD and tell you a girl's OKCupid profile name, what her favorite band is, and what personality flags are set? Or even better, glasses that double as a HUD and can use AdBlockPro HUD Version in order to block out billboards and

- TV Killer for car stereos. I'd happily buy a keyfob that turns off the stereo of some kid parked below my window with 3x JL Audio 10" speakers wired up to 0 ohms playing the latest souljaboy hit at 160 bass-thumping decibles .. at 3am when I'm trying to sleep.

- Embedded GPS tracking chips so I never have to worry about becoming a stealth commando to get my daughter back after she's been kidnapped by russian slave traders.

- Self-driving cars .. I really, really hate driving, but even in San Francisco, public transportation sucks.

- Video conference that doesn't suck but doesn't require paying $200k to Cisco for the tech?

- 3D, immersive VR (whatever happened to the VR buzzword? I know it's sooo 1998) video games that hide reality for a while and make gaming fun again!

Seriously, someone must be doing something fun? The last two truly exciting technologies I've heard of were Dean Kamen's robotic arms, and FusionIO's storage devices .. And that's about it since Web 2.0 became a buzzword.

1) Maid.

2) They exist, you can go out and buy one now. Might need a pilot license.

3) Gastric bypass surgery.

4) Not quite there yet, but once you get her name you can look her up on Facebook and Twitter.

5) Dunno about that one. Out here on the east coast, our stereos don't have any kind of remote control receivers to zap from your window.

6) Ask Applied Digital Solutions, they made implantable GPS's in 2003.

7) Look at the Darpa Urban Challenge. We have self driving cars, the only reason you can't buy it at your local car lot is that consumers don't trust computers to drive them yet. Toyota's said as much.

8) Look at the front page right now, we've got remote control robots that ride around the office with video of your head as their head.

7) We even have commercial applications of "self driving" cars. I can't believe I am about to use Top Gear as a reference but it really demonstrates how amazing this technology is, and how Mercedes has been the innovator of the majority of technology in your car in the last decade or more.

http://videos.streetfire.net/video/Mercedes-Sclass_162443.ht...

VW seems to have partial self parking on a lot of models - it steers and you move forwards and backwards. It will also tell you as you drive past a parking space if it is big enough or not.

My wife is going to get a car with this system next week - I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

1) A maid is not rosy the robot.. I have a maid, she comes every other week. It's not feasible to have her do things like the laundry at any affordable frequency.

2) I've got the license, I still don't see a street-legal flying plane .. preferably one that is 100% auto-pilot that can let me surf the web while I commute .. if I commuted further than a walk to bart.

3) Gastic Bypass surgery == starving yourself and throwing up if you eat more than 3oz of food in a sitting. No thank you. There should be a pill, or a suction hose. This would be a trillion dollar market.

4) I have hopes for augmented reality dating. It would just be awesome to have that much extra knowledge .. Imagine you're about to hit on some beautiful redhead in a "Science, it works bitches" shirt when you do a facial recognition and find out through OKCupid that she's a strong christian and a member of the jonesboro baptist church, whereas you're looking for a kinky atheist .. Crisis avoided!

5) I spoke with the TV-B-Gone guys about this a while back. They gave it some thought and found that the car-stereo options were just too varied to be feasible .. I guess every souped up car stereo with remotes uses a different tech, often proprietary. Still, it would be nice.. I'd also accept a directional EMP gun.

6) oooh!

7) Definitely neat .. That being said, as a pedestrian, I don't trust my local consumers to drive a car, maybe a computer could do a better job.

8) That's kind of neat.. I have a rather specific application for video chat. My daughter lives in Seattle, and we use Google Video to chat right now .. It's pretty sub-par. 900 miles as the bird flies should be enough for us to have at least 1024x768 chat with minimal latency .. This is actually a startup I'm thinking about pursuing, but one specifically towards making it so divorced dads can chat with their toddlers without their toddlers having the ability to accidentally close the window .. But I digress.

I'd also accept a directional EMP gun

Well there you go, the technology you want! Should be relatively simple to build. They're not available off the shelf, for blindingly obvious reasons.

Apparently your perfect lifestyle would be about the same as people have in Wall.E.

No offence intended, but this whole post reads like you are really dissatisfied with the world.

Well not entirely dissatisfied with the world.

I really, really like cheese, seitan, and my Canon 5d MK2. The rest, however, is leaving a lot to be desired.

I spend far too much time online hoping that something is really going to WOW me and make me go "omgomgomg I'm going to go into debt to buy this/do this/see this/experience this" .. But that moment still hasn't happened .. So maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?

That again sounds like you have trouble defining achievement or satisfaction. Looking at the current state of technology compared to 5, 10, 50 or 500 years ago it is apparent that we are advancing at what could only be labelled as an exponential rate. Moore's law et al.

If he's unhappy with the world in general, is that any reason for us to be offended? The world can be quite sucky, we may as well admit it. No need to go into personal attack mode.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

-- George Bernard Shaw

And he forgot sexbots.

And this answers the question how??

Sorry for the shameless plug, but we like to think we're solving really cool problems: http://www.rethinkdb.com

EDIT: I don't have the time right now to make a list of really cool startups, but I could probably come up with a list of at least ten. Here's one that immediately comes to mind: http://www.directededge.com/

Rethink looks useful, but nothing I'm going to blow a gasket over .. As for directededge? I don't know, I'm looking to be inspired by something inspirational, not just another web startup coming up with new ways to sell me shit. No offense to the directededge guys & gals, I'm sure their work is interesting and they're solving hard problems .. But if it doesn't include a jetpack or a robotic maid, then what's the point?

So, I only took a quick look at the two links. No offense, but do you really think those are what the OP is talking about? He's asking for flying cars and full VR immersion... its unlikely that very efficient database is going to match up.

This is not to say that what you folks are doing isn't completely awesome. But the OP's requests seem very different.

The way to satiate your dissatisfaction is to work on it yourself.

You might want to add http://singularityhub.com/ to your feed reader ;)

Thank you. I am now very, very addicted.

I know academia is considered a dirty word among some people here, but seriously if you want to see cutting edge cool stuff that is the place to go. Pick something off your list, find out which university as at the cutting edge of that field and apply for a PhD position.

Regarding the hose in your stomach, how about some self control? It shouldn't be up to science to come up with solutions for over indulgence in what is essentially a scarce resource.

Limit your intake, exercise and it will take care of itself.

Where do you buy self control?

Because the 2 hours per day of exercise and 1800 calorie diet I'm on clearly states that I'm a glutton? How about this, the next time I'm in the Netherlands to ride with my friends in the Grandfathers, I'll teach you some self control. Jerk.

If you have some kind of medical condition that causes this them I'm really sorry but you did not exactly go out of your way to put that in to your post, so you are taking a chance at being misunderstood.

It looked like you were looking for a mechanical solution to something that in the majority of overweight people is simply caused by consuming too much. If you are not part of that majority then my apologies.

Feel free to threaten me at your convenience while you're anonymous, but be aware that I immediately add the slashdot 'C' to that 'A'.

If you want to talk tough and have it mean something add your username to your profile, at least then it looks like you're not just another bully.

I suggest a need for rapid, engineered weight loss systems that don't involve scam artists or guilt, and what do you do, you try to make me feel guilty?

As for anonymous coward, if you're ever in San Francisco, or I'm ever in the netherlands, I will gladly put your dutch ass in a hospital, douchebag.

I'm impressed with the amount of venom that you can muster for something that I simply did not understand properly, and that you apparently do not seem to want to elaborate on.

Also the fact that you are not prepared to accept an apology and simply clear up the misunderstanding but instead prefer a fight is quite unlike what is usual on HN.

I'm posting here under my own name, my email address is in my profile and all my domains are linked to my business addresses, I couldn't possibly be less anonymous than that.

You on the other hand are 'someone in San Francisco', last I checked there were quite a few people living there so I hope you don't mind my still calling you an AC.

This is not the 'ok corral' and we're not going to shoot it out at noon. Try to be a little bit more reasonable and put your question in to perspective if you want to be understood.

And I'm impressed with the amount of insensitivity and ignorance with which you can make judgements about other people's lifestyles and body images.

A good friend of mine killed himself after losing 250lbs when he realized he couldn't escape a lifetime of emotional damage from people ridiculing him about his weight. Hating people because of their appearance is just another type of bigotry, no different from racism, homophobia, or religious intolerance.

As a fat man I have NEVER hated anybody for any of these reasons, but as a thin man you somehow get a pass to do so against me because it's currently politically correct to blame fat people for the world's ills?

I never said I hated you, in fact looking over your posting history I'd say that we agree on most things most of the time.

As for the rest of this rant, I think you are simply using this to pick a fight, and you are spoiling for one because of a lot of stuff in your life that bothers you.

If you want stuff to be invented or changed then go and invent stuff or change stuff.

But don't blame others for not inventing stuff that would be convenient for you to have and don't blame others for not liking your body, as far as that is the case.

It seems to be a very sensitive point with you, but you have to keep in mind that some part of your body comes under your control and some part of it you are simply born in to and you'll have to make do with that.

For the record, I've had an extremely disfiguring skin condition, it used to make me feel so uncomfortable that I wouldn't leave the house. I literally used to scratch myself to little bits. It took me a good 15 years to get it under control, careful experimenting with diet and trying to avoid situations that were stressful is what finally did it.

Just because I'm 'thin' doesn't mean I didn't get my own taste of that sort of thing. And even now I have to be careful. But I'm more than ever convinced that we really can make a difference in our own lives and in the ones of people around us by working hard at it.

If your problems are glandular, hormonal or some weird combination of things then there might be something you can do, there might not be. But I've seen one guy kick the issue with an iron fist and go from well over 280 pounds to a regular weight, and his problem was definitely medical.

If he could do it, you may be able to do it too.

As for your friend, that's a really really sad thing that that happened.

If I made a post that asks the questions that you ask and left as much unclear as you did then I would be the last to start using that and a bunch of strawmen to pick fights, HN is not a place to vent your frustration in general, much less one where you get to threaten people with bodily harm.

Doing so makes you look juvenile and unbalanced.

My name is Michael T. Halligan. My email address is michael@halligan.org. I am very easy to find, and will happily teach you the consequences for trying to make people feel bad about their bodies.

Have you searched for the nutrition-based threads and comments that have popped up on HN? I got the impression weight problems were more hormonal/metabolic rather than caloric intake/expenditure. You might get some ideas on how to hack the problem more efficiently.

http://www.betterplace.com/

https://squareup.com/

http://www.onlive.com/

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

http://www.firstsolar.com/en/index.php

That is a quick list off the top of my head of companies that are doing new and innovative things that have the potential to seriously disrupt some existing industries.

Of course people are working on a lot of these (and other) interesting technologies. In Tokyo, you can see some models of self driving cars and robots that Toyota has come up with. You'd better believe there are a lot of companies working on furthering 3D technology and immersion - everyone from Sony and Nintendo to Microsoft and Google.

Why don't you hear more about this? Simple, the companies that can afford to spend money on this sort of thing like to keep a lot of the work quiet until they determine whether or not they can commercialize it.

We're designing a new "evaluation-system". It uses a new pure functional, time-unaware, inherently parallel core which works without using monads. The core can be considered as a read-eval-print loop without the "read" and the "print". If it works, we will solve some problems which mostly are not considered to be problems. If it doesn't work, we learned more about programming that i ever could have imagined. In short: Yes, some people do some things they themself consider as really cool :-)

For laundry, why not automate at least a part of it? I'm sure you can build a device above your laundry machine where you can toss your clothes. Once it gets above a certain weight, it can dump your clothes into the machine and trigger something else to add detergent and maybe something to push some buttons to start the thing.

About getting it in the dryer and folding it... I'm not sure, but surely you can come up with something to do part of the work for you.

I think the immersive VR bit is being worked on, but its slow going. I see Avatar as a step in the right direction. One necessary condition for this will be to get proper 3D. Once we can speed up that process, we'll be almost there.

Other stuff... I dunno.

One of the problems with any useful laundry automation schemes I've seen thus far is that they tend to have some real-estate specific requirements (laundry chute, for example) and also tend to require that you own your own home, or at least rent an apartment with a washer/dryer inside, which is not feasible in San Francisco by any means.

An awesome "laundry bot" would:

- Retrieve items from a laundry bin - Scan the fabric to determine color and type for sorting (knowing to have a dry-clean bin, a woolens bin, a whites bin, a color cottons bin, etc) - Transport the dirty garments to the cleaning facility - Perform proper cleaning operations (washing, folding drying) - Return the laundered garment

The act itself might be triggered by scales or pressure sensors in laundry bins.

It just doesn't seem like it should be that hard. I'm surprised that industrious tinkerers haven't already automated the repetitive, thankless tasks in our lives that we tend to hate like laundry, vacuuming, window washing, (lawn maintenance for you suburbanites, etc.

I'd love to have most of the things you mention, and some are on their way such self driving cars but there is lots of interesting work out there How about - pranav mistry's sixth sense project - bio printers creating organs with ink jets - combinatorial genomics - google street view (still blows me away to check out a friend's new place in NZ from my couch in Canada) - photosynth - Self replicating 3d printers - open source UAVs/autonomous helicopters

and that's just off the top of my head. I remember being prett impressed by the last 'what are you working on' thread as well. - combinatorial genomics -

That list makes me think that you just finished reading Cory Doctorow's Makers. If you haven't, you should. It's available online under a CC license.

I'm working (slowly) on the iPhone and Android Augmented Reality kits (open source). We could always use help, check it here

http://github.com/haseman/Android-AR-Kit/

and here

http://github.com/zac/iphonearkit/

6) EMP. Seriously. They make them, you can build them, they work. And they can cause some serious damage, so be ready to get slapped with vandalism charges. Here's another solution: call the police on that guy (for a terrible taste in music, oh God, introduce him to some real hip-hop!).

Heh. I've thought it would be awesome to just bust out some Biggie .. if only I had a directional speaker that would just drown him out .. hrm .. maybe those sound weapons would do it?

As for calling the police? If they wouldn't do anything when I gave them tapes of my neighbor selling heroin out her window at my old apartment, they're probably going to say "shut the fuck up and stop calling us, you entitled upper middle class white nerd" .. in fact .. I think they said that the last time I called.

Fail.

Accelerated learning?

Search for Vera Birkenbihl. She has an audio course which is really amazing. I improved my memory and creativity and helped my kid memorizing foreign language words in school. He really enjoys the playful way we do it and aces at school.

Is that the Learning Strategies one? I'm wary of that company..

Yes it is. I highly recommend their products.

http://www.lifesize.com/ for teleconferencing. Wicked kit, we've got four of them, connecting offices and they're a nice alternative to shelling out 6 figures for HD Skype.

I think the technology for augmented reality dating is almost ready, or might be ready now. Face recognition seems to have become really good lately.

The only real problem is getting all the profile pics out of facebook.

I'm trying to think of a way a website can solve all of these problems for you..

I don't think even Yahoo tries to cram that many unrelated features into a single website :-)

well,

all of the things you are talking about requires hardware + software. which is more expensive, slower and more dangerous than building web 2.0 sites that are easily patchable.

that's actually a very prohibitive point, as most startups we hear about nowadays use software because of its low bootstrap cost and economies of scale

Do you work out?

One mans definition of cool isn't always another's :)

Efficient weight loss technology

Not a technology, but I have lost several dress sizes as a side effect of working on my health issues, which are supposed to be unresolvable. And, yes, I feel I am solving Cool Problems`(or, more accurately, I think I am coming up with Cool Solutions). I have slimmed down without starving myself or even counting calories. Initially, exercise per se wasn't really a part of it either (though I was more active with having a job than I was when I was bedridden -- I used to joke about my 'get out of bed more often fitness plan' -- still, I didn't "work out"). These days, I do a lot of walking because I live without a car but I do not have a gym membership or otherwise workout. Yes, I did slim down more with getting rid of my car, but the primary mover is still diet chemistry, supplements and generally working on getting well.

Some things I have worked on: 1) Body chemistry. The typical American diet is too acid. Excess acidity has a number of negative consequences, including promoting infection. There is (supposedly) research that indicates that the type of microbes you harbor impacts whether or not you end up obese. Which brings me to point 2:

2) I have actively worked on fostering more good flora in the body and extinguishing bad bugs. We are all crawling with millions of microbes and cannot even digest our food without them. But I was, at one time, overrun with multiple antibiotic-resistant infections which were killing me.

3) Lifestyle changes that fit with my attempts to control what types of flora inhabit my body and my attempts to keep my body chemistry in a healthy balance.

Some nifty things I have found out about using chemistry to heal the body better than modern medicine can:

A)I can stop a nosebleed by taking calcium supplements. Calcium is necessary to start the cascade of chemical processes which leads to clotting. I used to suffer routine nosebleeds/blood seepage from my sinuses. I rarely do anymore. If I find I am having an issue with this, I just take some calcium and it goes away.

B) Copper is has antimicrobial properties. Buying a few copper pieces for my home and finding an affordable source for plain old sheet copper in sizes that work for an individual household (as opposed to the quantities that get ordered for industrial purposes) has revolutionized my life in ways I don't know how to begin to explain.

C) Infections that most people think you have to live with for life can be cleared from the system using a few herbs and vitamins.

D) Gray hair can be reversed (at least to some degree) with the right supplements, which depends in part on why your hair went gray. I have less gray hair now than I did in my mid-thirties.

-google goggles - image recognition is what's required for many of the things you mention including robot maid, driving car (the darpa challenge used lidar, which is expensive - purely vision based would be much cheaper).

-the limiting factor to flying cars is actually air traffic control - which is still manually done, but could easily be automated (it's basically a giant constraint satisfaction/optimization problem)

-kiva robots (constraint satisfaction/optimization applied to mobile robots)

-heartland robotics - rodney brooks's startup, uses machine learning to control light robot arms so that heavy expensive limbs used in industrial robots aren't needed (robot arms for a few dollars in parts).

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