I am very close to donating! This describes exactly how I feel about the Silicon Valley publicized on HN. Surely there are plenty of start-ups solving real problems, hard problems -- what can we do to make sure those make the front-page more often? I guess all of the Instagrams getting acquired for hundreds of millions doesn't help.

A good start would be to name some of them in posts like this -- both those that are being solved and those that should be solved.

Hmm,

Small business gets reamed on store fixtures and any sort of furniture.

Creating a market for piece work (people working at home doing small assembly / sewing / Etc functions) with folks who want to do small production runs.

Fasteners on demand, making the kinds of fasteners you want how you want them right now in reasonable quantities.

Inventory management for one/two person shops.

Phone customer support on demand.

Essential network service (DNS/Email/Web/File/Fax/Media) for small businesses. (I did this once before but its becoming more relevant, could be a 'software only' solution these days)

Not startups, but SIAI and FHI are solving the "make sure we'll be around in 100 years" problem.

Selecting each one of those things and being redirected was killing me.

Here's a shortcut:

problems = document.getElementById('problems'); for(i = 1; i < problems.length; i++) { console.log(problems[i].innerHTML + ': ' + problems[i].value) }

thank you for solving my most pressing 1st world problem.

Or, Right Click > View Page Source

We treated this as a quiz for how familiar we were with various startups. Got a good chunk of them right, too. I may need to spend more time working and less time on Hacker News.

Here's another first world problem solved:

http://getcoldturkey.com/

Just added it, thanks!

The entry for app.net is glorious. I should have known what it was just from the title.

It's a play on http://www.ihave50dollars.com/

Too many smart people spending a whole lot of time, effort & cash solving frivolous problems.

Rich people in the first world will pay a lot of money to have their trivial problems solved well.

All business are solving the problem of "we don't have enough revenue". That's the only metric, here.

'I have $36' - my favorite

Hey guys Firehed and a bunch of us put this together. Feel free to submit a pull request if you want to add something :)

Did you consider just making it a list of links? If you want to hide the link targets you can do that with JS. Dropdown list is kind of unnecessary, I think.

If I recall, I think the over-styled but less-usable drop-down list was a deliberate decision, much like the call to setTimeout.

(I'm a housemate of StuieK and Firehed, and also contributed to the page)

Yeah you're right, that would be a lot better. To be honest we kinda just threw it together in a couple hrs and forgot about it.

Tumblr is in NY!

Ah you're right! Forgot about that, did I miss any others?

Hilarious. Maybe we could add

* Entertain me because I actually have free time -> the movie industry

* Entertain me at home because I'm too tired to go out -> the game industry

* Make me dinner because I'm too lazy to cook -> the food service industry

* Help be get where someplace in comfort -> the auto industry

I think you're missing the joke. Most of these apps are some nth-derivative of those industries. Instead of "make me dinner" it's "an app to aggregate apps that help me find someone to make me dinner, plus social networking." At some point the value-add is so small it's truly a "first-world problem."

I got the joke. I found it funny. I also found it thought provoking to examine how spoiled I am as a first world person. But that also got me thinking that to some level even basics are first world.

Movies: If your starving in some 3rd world country I doubt you care about when the next Hobbit comes out

Games: you'd have to be able to afford a game console before you care about games.

Cars: I lived in a 1st world city for 7 years where most people don't own a car which point out how much they are not really needed

He definitely got the joke. The point is that you could apply this to anything. Most of what we have now went through some kind of value-add process. Isn't that how evolution works? That smallest "value-add" could make room for bigger change later.

You're not seriously comparing the usefulness of automobiles to Instagram, are you?

I am not. It's more like comparing the second iteration of the windshield wiper to Instagram.

Gilette Razor. NOW WITH SIX BLADES.

The Gilette Singularity

    The interesting curve is the hyperbolic one, for two reasons: One, it matches the 
    real-world data. And two, it goes to infinity in 2015. And how are you going to 
    get an asymptotically-accelerating number of blades onto a razor? Why, you’d need 
    godlike super-technology to do that.

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2006/06/the_gi...

Mine is "I can't even be bothered to fill out the sign-up forms for all these web sites you redirect me to".

Launchrock needs to have a premium membership option.

i just went to the site to look for that option...

I vote for this as best 2012 HN post.

Still no solution for ennui?

I would be interested in a third world version of this website.

Soon, I don't think even Instacart will be able to help with my Twinkie cravings, considering Hostess just went bankrupt again, and stopped production.

In my case, they can't solve my problem because they are only in Northern California. :(

The "my high paying job makes it hard to find a girlfriend" one is broken. I think there is a typo in the link: "wwww.sparkology.com".

Fixed. Thanks!

For everything else, there's www.globalgiving.org

I think this should be retitled to "Solve the problems you do not really have using a website that is as useless".

Pretty sure that's what it says.

Don't be surprised, it's classic marketing. The easiest problems to solve are the problems your customer didn't know they had. The marketing pitches for such solutions always begin by introducing you to a problem you didn't know you had.

Hey, I think you forgot to remove Techcrunch's favicon.

Otherwise, I really love the concept. Good going!

the option value for sparkology.com has one too many ws

<option value="http://wwww.sparkology.com>I graduated from a top university but my high paying job makes it hard to find a girlfriend</option>

This is funny.

I love "I have 36 dollars".

Really funny

So this is seriously #1 on HN right now.