Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored?

Posted by brihati 5 days ago

Counter18Comment29OpenOriginal

Problem with ambiguous boundaries, messy constraints and no linear path to a solution

Comments

Comment by gethly 1 day ago

Something trivial as matching people based on interest. We have social networks and various marketplaces but we are still unable to pair/match people based on desired activities, items for sale, services, relationships(online dating), even jobs.

Imagine you have some ancient toaster you are about to throw in the bin because it is old and you have no use for it and it has no value on the market. Yet, on the other side of the planet, there is a guy who is desperately looking for exactly this toaster because of #reasons. Yet, these people will never be able to find each other to trade.

Yes, there is ebay and whatnot, just like there is tinder for dating, facebook for socialising, various platforms for job hunting, but all these platforms are extremely inefficient in actually delivering on the promise of matching people based on the supply and demand.

The search engines all these platforms use are all very primitive and completely unable to provide the desired service. They are essentially all the same, they just cater to different markets. But there is little technical distinction among them.

The toaster example is a completely trivial one. You can easily expand it to a job where you need a person with specific skills and experience. But you will simply never be able to find that person via any of the existing pathways. Except sheer luck and word of mouth.

This can be likely solved via something like brain implants where we can be connected to the internet and immediately provide necessary context or answer some questions to build a better profile as a "supplier" or "buyer" that could allow a better match. But we're infinitely far away from it.

And this is just one of millions of such small problems that are really hard to solve.

The advertising companies all use tracking to try and mitigate this as much as possible so they can offer you the most likely product or a service that you actually might be interested in buying. But again, these are very primitive solutions.

Comment by ManlyBread 5 days ago

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.

Comment by the__alchemist 5 days ago

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.

Comment by 392 4 days ago

I'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.

Comment by cbracketdash 1 day ago

I would reject the premise that the field of molecular/biological simulation is underexplored nor that existing approaches are "slower and harder to use than they need to be". This is a field that has been explored, in fact, by the most brilliant minds and the difficulty arises more in theoretical considerations (that is, devising algorithms to faithfully approximate the developed physics) rather than an obvious no-brainer application of AI.

The field of molecular and biological simulation is far more than simply "Newtonian mechanics". There is indeed a field called molecular dynamics (MD) that relies on "classical mechanics" yet it's defined usually in the Lagrangian formalism. Furthermore, there has been tons of work over the past few decades in developing more accurate numerical approximation algorithms. There is a ton of a theory in this field and if you're interested, the "MD Bible" is "Understanding Molecular Simulation" by Daan Frankel.

Now, MD is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost all chemistry simulations are built entirely from making subtle approximations to quantum mechanics and carefully building up frameworks. For example, Hartree-Fock theory (HF), Density Functional Theory (DFT), Couple Cluster theory (CCSD(T)), etc. Then there is a field known colloquially as semi-empirical methods which are a sort of combination of the above two methods. And that's just on the side of chemical simulations (i.e. I'm excluding physics-specific simulations etc).

And now, more recently there has been effort in building machine-learned interatomic potentials, machine-learned density functionals, equivariant graph neural networks, etc etc.

If you're still interested in these class of problems, consider trying to build a good model for OMol25: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08762

Comment by mikewarot 4 days ago

There'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.

Comment by firefax 5 hours ago

key exchange imo

Comment by moomoo11 4 days ago

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!!!

Comment by austin-cheney 5 days ago

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

Comment by webglfan 5 days ago

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

Comment by gnatman 5 days ago

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.

Comment by brihati 5 days ago

Is 2+2 still 4 :p

Comment by cjbarber 4 days ago

1) 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.

Comment by runtimepanic 5 days ago

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.

Comment by brihati 5 days ago

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

Comment by l___l 5 days ago

That you know of.

Comment by l___l 1 day ago

Downvoting when someone gives information you didn't have makes them not want to give more information.

A word to the unwise is insufficient. https://www.paulgraham.com/word.html

Comment by mghackerlady 5 days ago

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

Comment by l___l 1 day ago

Perpetual-ish motion machines exist if you know where to look.

Comment by codegladiator 4 days ago

There 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.

Comment by ipaddr 5 days ago

Teleportation

Comment by l___l 1 day ago

Solved problem. https://x.com/AshtonForbes

Comment by stephenr 1 day ago

Convincing 80% of developers to consider "alternative" solutions to the cargo cult seems like a pretty intractable task.

Comment by l___l 5 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by ManlyBread 5 days ago

Why contribute if you have nothing to say? What even is this reply?

Comment by verzali 5 days ago

It could be a hard problem, no?

Comment by rl3 5 days ago

>What even is this reply?

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

Comment by brihati 5 days ago

What you say is what you get

Comment by l___l 5 days ago

The problem with ambiguous boundaries, messy constraints and the perception that there is no linear path to transferring meaning in language.

Comment by l___l 1 day ago

What you don't say is what you don't get