News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored?.

Re:Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored? by runtimepanic on Thursday December 11, 2025 @03:51AM (#46229078)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored? by l___l on Thursday December 11, 2025 @04:16AM (#46229259)
That you know of.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored? by l___l on Monday December 15, 2025 @04:27PM (#46280942)
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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What hard problems are still underexplored? by brihati on Thursday December 11, 2025 @06:30AM (#46230106)
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

[ Parent | on HN ]