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Ask HN: What is still hard to do?

3•lukehandcool•54m ago
AI has made a lot of things a lot easier to do and there is a common perception, especially among non-tech people, that it's quickly solving all our difficult problems (math conjectures, protein folding, material engineering, etc). I wanted to make a list of things that are still genuinely difficult. What sort of academic / research projects are still hard to do?

Comments

rvz•33m ago
If almost everything in software is now easy to do, perhaps software engineers were just working on the wrong problems for years, such as creating hundreds of useless JS frameworks.

The software engineer's laziness to create better software and to disregard optimal solutions is the reason now they have found themselves to have automated their entire role and are now upset that most of them are no longer needed. That's good and it is deserved.

It's now time for them to find something else that is a lot harder to do, like hardware and getting people to pay for their 'free' software that anyone will just build for themselves.

ranger_danger•18m ago
IMO This is actually the most positive way to frame the whole "slippery slope fallacy" of impending technological progress causing cascading "problems" in society. You know, the arguments that went something like:

Wait until the cotton gin arrives, all the hand weavers will become jobless and no one will have experience anymore.

Wait until the printing press arrives, all the scribe monks will become jobless and no one will have experience anymore.

Wait until the computer arrives, people will become obsolete and no one will have experience anymore.

Wait until the steam engine, automobiles, planes, calculators, telephones, etc.

---

But history shows that when such a "slope" appears... regulation steps in, technology evolves to solve the problem, or the culture shifts to reinterpret the tool.

In almost every case, the feared "bottom" of the slope was never reached because humans constantly built ramps or bridges along the way. And that's what progress is.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

allears•7m ago
This is certainly true in the long run. However, there's a lot of dislocation along the way. Disruption may be good for profits, but not so good for the people who get disrupted. Not saying that progress is wrong, but it's not always pleasant to live through.
lucfranken•24m ago
Real world stuff, physical stuff, real services are still complicated.

Moving around papers, data and that kind of jobs becomes automated.

The real math problems etc: I think it will create many more interesting problems and challenges. It's not like something is solved and nothing is left. That's the wrong way to look at it I think.

megaloblasto•20m ago
Figuring out what problem to solve is still hard.

Also bringing a product to market (a non-software product).

Also having good taste and cooking great food come to mind, but they are not really research problems.

Nowhere Air – Get a first class ticket to nowhere

https://nowhereair.com/
1•titusblair•1m ago•0 comments

Free calculators, no tracking client-side

https://getutilary.com
1•acbirja•4m ago•0 comments

Do you remember the Harvard student Eldo Kim?

https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/17/justice/massachusetts-harvard-hoax
1•mashally•7m ago•0 comments

Running a business made me hate capitalism – Go Make Things

https://gomakethings.com/articles/running-a-business-made-me-hate-capitalism/
2•ulrischa•12m ago•0 comments

Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-director-called-ai-s...
1•jonbaer•12m ago•0 comments

OpenDTC – Read ya Diagnostic codes with no ads n that

https://opendtc.net/
2•x0z•14m ago•1 comments

Jev vs. XGBoost and Bert

https://explainx.ai/blog/jev-vs-xgboost-bert-classifiers-2026
2•cagz•15m ago•0 comments

Trump says he will create 'AI Force,' name AI czar

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-create-ai-force-name-ai-czar-2026-09-19/
2•psychanarch•17m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT Rogue-Emailed the FBI

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1wkrr4g/chat_gpt_rogue_emailed_fbi/
1•znpy•19m ago•0 comments

M6 Pro Chip Result on Geekbench Is Likely Fake

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/19/m6-pro-geekbench-result-likely-fake/
2•layer8•19m ago•0 comments

Making a Jumping Cube Stick the Landing [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZonPpxvV6KU
1•hashier•20m ago•0 comments

Ageing Americans may not get results of Alzheimer's study due to Trump cuts

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/17/trump-cuts-alzheimers-disease-study
3•hn_acker•20m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Flyover Country – guide to the window seat with AR

https://flyovercountry.app/
1•headsupernova•20m ago•0 comments

Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip

https://bartosz.fenski.pl/modern-fs-benchmark/
2•farlight•22m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How do you interview devs in a post-AI world?

5•mdwelsh•23m ago•2 comments

I Hijacked a Real Artist's Spotify with AI Music. It Was Disturbingly Easy

https://www.404media.co/spotify-ai-music-scam/
1•beardyw•26m ago•0 comments

New England RetroFest and the Maine Vintage Computer Society

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/new-england-retrofest-and-the-maine
1•rbanffy•27m ago•0 comments

You could have built Jev

https://sgnt.ai/p/jev/
1•baobabKoodaa•33m ago•0 comments

FAA to launch AI tool to help manage air traffic congestion

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/faa-tees-up-875m-ai-tool-to-help-manage-air-traffic-congestion/
1•drknownuffin•34m ago•1 comments

Show HN: 3D map of which newsletters link to the same things

https://reletter.com/graph
2•drpancake•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: SpectralOli: Livecoding with Audio Loops

https://spectral-oli.vercel.app/
2•phantomshelby•40m ago•0 comments

FAQ: Why isn't mutable a subtype of immutable, or vice versa?

https://crumbles.blog/posts/2026-09-17-immutable-mutable.html
1•birdculture•41m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Are there any books or online courses that changed the way you program?

2•learner_yearner•41m ago•2 comments

Show HN: S1Code, a decision-first Rust coding agent with Jev

https://github.com/mertcicekci0/S1Code
1•merthdotxyz•45m ago•0 comments

TypeSafe's Jev Can't See. I Made It Guess What I Drew Anyway

https://mikulskibartosz.name/typesafe-jev-guess-what-i-drew
1•myszon•48m ago•0 comments

Building a conversation engine in Python that shows how LLMs fake memory

https://heymeraki.substack.com/p/aie_21-building-it
1•heyy-meraki•50m ago•0 comments

People who know the most often sound the least certain

https://vrash.substack.com/p/the-people-who-know-the-most-often
21•virde•51m ago•7 comments

Show HN: Pg_chdb, fast imports from object storage to Postgres using COPY

https://clickhouse.com/blog/introducing-chdb-postgres
2•saisrirampur•52m ago•0 comments

Prompts Aren't Real

https://evaluation.club
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Lexend: Open typeface shown to improve reading proficiency

https://lexend.com/
1•farlight•53m ago•0 comments