Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored?
10 points
23 hours ago
| 9 comments
| HN
Problem with ambiguous boundaries, messy constraints and no linear path to a solution
the__alchemist
8 hours ago
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Chemistry (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.

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austin-cheney
5 hours ago
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What 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

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ManlyBread
21 hours ago
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Anti-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.
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moomoo11
1 hour ago
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Utilizing 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!!!

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mghackerlady
10 hours ago
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Perpetual-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
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webglfan
22 hours ago
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I'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

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gnatman
15 hours ago
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Wonderful 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.

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brihati
19 hours ago
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Is 2+2 still 4 :p
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runtimepanic
21 hours ago
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Observability 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.
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brihati
19 hours ago
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In 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

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l___l
21 hours ago
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That you know of.
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ipaddr
3 hours ago
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Teleportation
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l___l
21 hours ago
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Why should I tell you? What's in it for me?
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ManlyBread
21 hours ago
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Why contribute if you have nothing to say? What even is this reply?
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verzali
13 hours ago
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It could be a hard problem, no?
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rl3
20 hours ago
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>What even is this reply?

I mean if you take a look at GP's username, it's arguably just tastefully subtle satire.

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brihati
18 hours ago
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What you say is what you get
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l___l
15 hours ago
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The problem with ambiguous boundaries, messy constraints and the perception that there is no linear path to transferring meaning in language.
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