Ask HN: What are "interesting problems"? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are "interesting problems"?

10 pointswait7 comments

I've stumbled across more than a few mentions of "interesting problems" that people work on – especially in job listings. They never mention what an interesting problem is, though.

So I ask you, people of HN, what are these "interesting problems" that you work on? I'm curious about any field, really.

Side question: do people think that anything that's not a little CRUD app is an interesting problem?

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Personally, I work on making sure ships don't run into each other even when traversing routes that cross and have places where two ships can't pass. Further, we need to allocate resources such as pilots, tugs, stevedores, bunkerage, waste disposal and berths.

Scheduling these things is NP-Hard, but there are other considerations.

Not everyone tells you where they are. We need to find targets in noise, track them accurately, and perform signature analysis to decide what kind of vessel they are.

We need to get high-fidelity radar data over cost-effective communication links, and record that data for 6 months without using peta-byte storage. We need to perform image analysis and data compression as well as feature identification and extraction.

We have to encrypt the data on the link to ensure that it can't (easily) be read by evesdroppers, and store it in a manner that ensures it can't be faked or tampered with after the fact.

Then we have to find a way to present this information in an efficient an accurate manner. We need to search and filter it effectively.

All in all, there are some interesting problems to solve.

EDIT: some typos fixed and details added.

Are you hiring?

Currently, no. I will announce it here on HN next time we are.

"Interesting" is a rather subjective term, but when it comes to work, I would sum it up in the following sentence:

Something you might like to work on even if it wasn't for pay.

Every few years I think of a technical question that clearly has a solution, but no one has worked it out yet. Then that problem lodges itself in my mind. I'll dream of equations, and mull it over for months on end. The longest of these "interesting problems" was my PhD thesis, but I have had several others. Then my brain is happy because it always has something to play with.

The interplay between energy and indoor environmental quality makes for a lot of really interesting problems. Think, for example, about something like natural ventilation-- harnessing wind and temperature differences to keep a space thermally comfortable and well-ventilated, without mechanical systems.

Problems in this field tend to be cross-disciplinary, ranging across controls systems, fluid dynamics, human health, and public policy. They tend to affect lots of people (people spend most of their time indoors, and buildings are a large part of total energy consumption). And a small effect, leveraged across many many installations, can become a big win.

"Hackers" in particular can contribute to this field in a number of ways. Simulation modeling, optimization algorithms, and distributed networks are big research areas. And of course the issue of data center efficiency has come to the fore in a lot of people's minds.

There are plenty of interesting little CRUD apps still waiting to be written.

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