Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored?

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

12 points | by brihati 1 day ago

11 comments

  • codegladiator 59 minutes 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.
  • mikewarot 2 hours 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.
  • the__alchemist 20 hours 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.

  • ManlyBread 1 day 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.
  • austin-cheney 17 hours 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

  • webglfan 1 day 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

    • gnatman 1 day 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.

    • brihati 1 day ago
      Is 2+2 still 4 :p
  • mghackerlady 22 hours 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
  • runtimepanic 1 day 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.
    • brihati 1 day 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

    • l___l 1 day ago
      That you know of.
  • l___l 1 day ago
    Why should I tell you? What's in it for me?
    • ManlyBread 1 day ago
      Why contribute if you have nothing to say? What even is this reply?
      • verzali 1 day ago
        It could be a hard problem, no?
      • rl3 1 day ago
        >What even is this reply?

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

    • brihati 1 day ago
      What you say is what you get
      • l___l 1 day ago
        The problem with ambiguous boundaries, messy constraints and the perception that there is no linear path to transferring meaning in language.
  • ipaddr 16 hours ago
    Teleportation
  • moomoo11 13 hours 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!!!