[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying t...
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Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
You know, the weird stuff -\\_(tsu)_/-
Author : rxsel
Score : 130 points
Date : 2020-07-04 23:45 UTC (23 hours ago)
| titchard wrote:
| Designing a combat robot for the UK Antweight division, which is
| only 150g max weight. (or 175g for some groups).
|
| Despite this tight weight budget, I intend to build something
| rather interesting, but it is causing me to spend a lot of time
| in Fusion designing the parts along with slicing and reslicing 3D
| printed parts to shave partial grams of components to save a bit
| of weight.
| butz wrote:
| Procrastination. But I'll probably start working on it tomorrow.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| I'm trying to run jobs on a timer when the jobs are on a cluster
| and I don't know which server the job is assigned to.
|
| It's essentially a problem of distributed timers and distributed
| transactions.
|
| (If anyone has any resources on how similar problems have been
| solved in the past, I'd appreciate it.)
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Maybe not what you're asking for, but this should at least give
| you an idea what to look for:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)
| econcon wrote:
| Trying to create Discourse like E-commerce app that will make it
| easy for people to sell anything
|
| It will have all features that WooCommerce have but much stable
| and easily customisable.
| unixhero wrote:
| Who is the typical customer? Gamers?
| thecupisblue wrote:
| We're writing too much code. So I'm making stuff that will help
| us write less code.
|
| Like a vim-like editor that translates your spec into generated
| code while you also see it on the go to fix any issues. Think
| yeoman on generics and steroids.
| canada_dry wrote:
| > editor that translates your spec into generated code
|
| Anyone old enough to be in IT in the late 80's/early 90's will
| remember the "4th GL" phase that swept through Fortune 100
| companies.
|
| I was in banking at the time, and 'Focus 4GL' was brought in to
| replace programmers. Of course, in the end, it turned out to be
| a fools-errand.
|
| My prediction though is that in less than a decade, ML/AI will
| be decent enough at developing solutions via client specs for
| many applications.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| Not really - the generated code isnt some mystic code, it's
| simple templates.
|
| I originally got there by making a complex magic data
| structure that held relations to everything in multiple
| dimensions so I could generate a huge amount of stuff, but
| that turns out to be just like 4GL - a load of slow
| confusion. The reason I am doing it is exactly because of
| ML/AI hope - with enough data and proper structures, I can
| generate a lot.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Like cucumber/gherkin but for production code?
| thecupisblue wrote:
| In a way! More like emacs for trees + cucumber
| closed wrote:
| Working on siuba, a data analysis tool for python. It's a port of
| the R library dplyr, and can produces SQL queries!
|
| I've programmed in python for much longer than R, and really want
| to be able to move at the same speed when using python for data
| analysis :o.
|
| It's a weird problem though because the two languages have
| basically opposite approaches to DataFrames. pandas has a very
| fat DataFrame implementation, R an extremely minimal one. (Pros
| and cons to both approaches).
|
| https://github.com/machow/siuba
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| I want to give everyone a digital identity. In some countries
| (including mine) basically everyone has an e-ID which we use to
| sign in to things like government services, banks, payment
| providers and much more. This is absolutely essential to everyday
| life and many startups are built around it.
|
| Unfortunately, many countries don't have useful e-IDs and the
| ones that do are limited to that one country. I want to create a
| single digital identity which works for everyone, for all
| applications, across borders. The basic features are:
|
| - App based with no special hardware necessary.
|
| - Privacy friendly with the user always fully aware of what data
| they are revealing.
|
| - Simple to integrate for developers. It's a standard SSO flow
| over OAuth/OIDC.
|
| I'm currently calling it Pass: https://getpass.app. If anyone
| wants to have a chat about digital identities you can reach me at
| fabian (at) flapplabs.se
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Privacy friendly
|
| Does this mean that a user can use their identity on two
| separate sites, and those two sites can't collude to build a
| shared profile of the user, without the user's permission?
|
| Does the user have to choose a specific server to be involved
| in all their identity interactions? If the server stops
| working, does the user lose their identity?
|
| Also, is it possible to create an account without a phone (or
| rather without a SIM, since those are often tied to real
| identities)? Does your proposed system assume that people can't
| register multiple identities (using multiple phones) if they
| wanted to?
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| > Does this mean that a user can use their identity on two
| separate sites, and those two sites can't collude to build a
| shared profile of the user, without the user's permission?
|
| That's precisely what it means. User IDs will be unique for
| each site and I'm hoping to anonymize email addresses as
| well, similar to what Apple has done for "Sign in with
| Apple". Some companies might be required by law to collect
| some PII but in that case their needs will be vetted before.
|
| > Does the user have to choose a specific server to be
| involved in all their identity interactions? If the server
| stops working, does the user lose their identity?
|
| I'm currently building this as a centralized product so no,
| there is only a single server maintained by us. I'm mostly
| concerned with building a great product but the prospect of
| decentralized, verified identities is also very interesting.
| I'd love to see what that could look like!
|
| > Also, is it possible to create an account without a phone
| (or rather without a SIM, since those are often tied to real
| identities)? Does your proposed system assume that people
| can't register multiple identities (using multiple phones) if
| they wanted to?
|
| The current product is in the form of an app so you will need
| a phone but you won't need a phone number (or SIM). An email
| address is currently required though.
|
| My current system assumes one identity per person but it's
| fully possible to have multiple devices which acts as that
| identity. This might change depending on regulation though
| and is not set in stone.
|
| If you have any more questions I'd be happy to answer them!
| adamnemecek wrote:
| ECS based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system)
| GPU-first GUI framework.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Name? Does it use skia? Why and when would ECS help for
| building 2D GUIs?
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Unnamed yet and not public yet. No, it does not use skia. ECS
| helps because it stores data in homogenous arrays which is
| really good for GPUs.
| denster wrote:
| Design + Code tooling.
|
| Hard problem:
|
| How do we evolve design tools? Can Sketch/Figma be evolved to
| create full featured software? [1]
|
| Something with no limits, and the freedom to create any feature
| developers create today with React/Angular/Vue.
|
| Is it possible or a pipe dream?
|
| [1] https://mintdata.com
| vekker wrote:
| Dreams.
|
| I've been journaling my dreams for years and I'm working on an
| app that makes it easier to (visually) map them out & find
| patterns: https://oneironotes.com/
|
| I like the idea of accessing other (inner) dimensions during
| sleep, like an explorer (an "oneironaut"). The problems to
| overcome are related to capturing and recollecting experiences
| that only take place in the mind. You asked about the weird
| stuff...
| baxtr wrote:
| Is there a proven way to remember your dreams? I've read that
| we dream every night but I usually can't remember nothing.
| perfmode wrote:
| meditation.
|
| do a 10-day retreat or some other intensive period of
| learning with a teacher
|
| and then from place of proficiency, continue the practice on
| your own.
|
| you're likely to begin having wild/intense/vivid dreams on
| days in which you meditate.
|
| (1-2+ hours per day)
| FailMore wrote:
| Hey, I also did a lot of work on dreams - I have also journaled
| my dreams for years and had therapy at the same time. I got
| super into them, read a bunch about them, even did a psychology
| masters to spend time researching them. I couldn't find theory
| that matched with my experience so I wrote this paper on them:
|
| "A Suggestion for a New Interpretation of Dreams: Dreaming Is
| the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering."
|
| https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz
|
| Also your project is awesome!
| lalo2302 wrote:
| Wow this is amazing. I've experienced myself lucid dreaming
| only once, and it was amazing.
|
| Keep it going. If I had an iPad or something better to write on
| after waking up I'd definitely use it.
| artembugara wrote:
| Over the past few months, I had somewhat as "writing a
| documentation for Google News RSS URL patterns" as my task.
|
| There is no such official documentation.
|
| Python package: https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews
|
| Blog post: https://codarium.substack.com/p/reverse-engineering-
| google-n...
| ChrisHardman29 wrote:
| I'm trying to tackle the problem of information overload by
| providing a service that extracts, summarises and curates the key
| insights from books, articles and research: https://www.sivv.io/
| iforiq wrote:
| Love it, subscribed. Is there a feature where we request
| summaries for particular books?
| comicjk wrote:
| Trying to predict where electrons go in a molecule, but using a
| classical model. This can be done with supervised machine
| learning - you can use quantum mechanics to get lots of labeled
| data - but it's a tough problem, because chemical physicists have
| very high standards for accuracy.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Could hidden variables theories help simulations in some ways?
| E.g performance
| erwinh wrote:
| 1: trying to build tools to give people a more tacit
| understanding of sattelites & space debris: https://space-
| search.io
|
| 2: developing easy-to-use tools for parametric generative design
| to enable hyper-personalisation: https://hyperobjects.design
| midrus wrote:
| Deciding what framework I'm using next.
| baxtr wrote:
| Good luck. I've heard that's impossible
| LolWolf wrote:
| Bounds for the best possible designs for optical devices: well-
| studied [0, 1, 2, 3, 4], yet really hard.
|
| More specifically, whenever you give a designer a design spec, it
| is always worth asking, _how good is the best possible design for
| this spec_? And, of course, can the designer actually _achieve_
| it, or something close to it? This is the question here.
|
| In this scenario, the design spec is the optimization problem (
| _what_ you want to optimize), the designer then gets to choose
| _how_ to best approach this problem. In this case, you want to
| give a number that states, independent of _how_ this problem is
| solved, what is the best any designer (no matter how smart or
| sophisticated, how much computational power they have, etc) can
| hope to do. In many cases giving such a number is actually
| possible! (See below references.)
|
| -----
|
| [0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsphotonics.9b00154 (PDF:
| http://web.stanford.edu/~boyd/papers/pdf/comp_imposs_res.pdf)
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.00521
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.00374
|
| [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05644
|
| [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.11531
| chiefmcloud wrote:
| I'm working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing
| cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming
| down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability
| to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social
| circles.
|
| My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media,
| so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable
| narcissists. At the same time, discussing politics on a semi-
| anonymous forum like Reddit is pointless, who cares if someone on
| the Internet is wrong. But maybe there's a better way of
| communication, something new, that lets you talk with people you
| actually know.
| navd wrote:
| I will say that I'm not really interested in talking with
| people I necessarily know. I want to talk to people who have
| well thought out arguments that are non obvious.
|
| Take what you will from that and good luck.
| chiefmcloud wrote:
| Thanks. Thinking about that problem too, and trying to find a
| way to give people both. "The personal is political" and one
| hypothesis is that at least a starting point for content
| you'd find more interesting is content that people you know
| find more interesting.
| adrury wrote:
| Sounds kind of similar to Yik Yak, except using social circles
| instead of area? Hopefully it ends better than Yik Yak did.
| guygurari wrote:
| I'm rooting for you. Here's a thought about a possible trade
| off between radicalization and engagement. When social media
| platforms optimize for growth, it makes sense for them to make
| it as easy as possible for users to share/retweet. It lowers
| "amplification friction" and allows messages to go viral. The
| most successful platforms have very low amplification friction,
| which suggests that low friction is an important ingredient.
|
| What we are learning is that making it trivially easy to
| amplify anyone's message enables cancel culture and (I believe)
| leads to radicalization.
|
| If this is correct, then increasing amplification friction on
| your platform will lead to less radicalization, at the cost of
| lowering engagement. My guess is that for this to be successful
| requires a careful balance of where you land on the
| higher/lower friction spectrum. Too much friction leads to low
| engagement which leads to failure. Too little friction leads to
| uncontrolled amplification which leads to radicalization. So a
| balance is needed.
|
| Either that, or a totally new idea is needed that turns
| existing platforms on their head.
| cryptoz wrote:
| You're not going to "calm down radicalization" with phrases
| like "killing cancel culture" and suggesting that viewpoints
| you don't agree with on twitter/the platform as a whole as
| "unreasonable narcissists".
| easterncalculus wrote:
| No one mentioned opposing viewpoints except you, and only to
| downplay real-world harassment as a mere difference of
| opinion. The radicalization occurring on Twitter is
| encouraging 'adults' to gang up on others (often children)
| and try to get their lives permanently ruined over ACTUAL
| differences of opinion, or for vastly disproportionate acts.
| So yes, we _should_ use the word 'kill' when describing a
| force that destroys reasonable, well-meaning, and good
| people's lives every single day.
|
| The "unreasonable" part is the the disproportionate and
| permanent effect of internet hatred in regards to
| _comparatively_ non-permanent acts (that are still often
| harmful, but more often than not nowhere near to the same
| extent). The "narcissist" part is the need to do so for
| beneficial social points among those that do. Those that have
| the online support to keep the basic needs in life that they
| want to deprive others of. So yes, these people meet the
| definition on both counts.
|
| You can express your opinion on Twitter without personal
| attacks and threats of harassment and violence. This should
| not be a fringe opinion.
| chiefmcloud wrote:
| "Killing" was a poorly chosen term. I think cancel culture is
| very dangerous in the way that it discourages reasonable
| discussion by picking on people whose opinions are deemed to
| be out of line and punishing them with mob justice. Maybe
| this interaction illustrated my point though. If I was
| talking to you in a pub and you said the same thing I'd
| respond in the same way. But if I'd posted about my great
| idea on twitter and you responded like this I can picture my
| ego urging me to say something more defensive and
| inflammatory.
|
| I don't mean perspectives I disagree with are narcissistic, I
| was honestly making an observation based on my limited
| understand of psychology. Some personality types like to hear
| themselves talk more than others, and I honk it's clear that
| they are more attracted to Twitter.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| This is a great idea. I would love to use a service like this.
|
| One of the downsides of anonymity that many people raise
| (fallaciously) as an argument against it is that too many of
| the anonymous people are just trolls, therefore it is a
| negative quality. Having it be people that are known to the
| person brings about an assumption of character that can solve
| this issue, so long as the user associates with people that
| they tolerate (which is a mostly fair assumption, considering
| how private groups and similar functions operate on the
| established platforms).
|
| One problem that I could see is that someone could be found out
| simply by virtue of being the only person that would say
| something like them. I guess this could be alleviated by
| filtering in public posts from others, but this could cause
| other problems while not solving what it's supposed to.
|
| The other issue for this is the Gab problem, which cannot be
| easily solved: that if you're using this service, you're a bad
| person who needs to be blocked/fired/etc. Unfortunately the
| mobs you're working against work to destroy with little rhyme
| and no reason, and they work for free (often literally
| unemployed). This problem is hard to get around, but I think
| could be mitigated with marketing it as a platform first and a
| solution second.
|
| Nonetheless, I wish you the best. This is a very interesting
| concept and could really do a lot of good in the world.
| aiven wrote:
| Are you trying to reinvent 4chan?
| vladoh wrote:
| Self driving cars. More specifically, localization.
| jakeogh wrote:
| The hardest problems to solve are deliberate problems. Where
| solving it results is large financial loss for the people that
| profit from the problem. For example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDSDdwN2Xcg
|
| Getting discussions about these issues to include financial
| incentives is a weird and hard problem. People are too sure the
| players (on their team) are alturistic.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I'm developing a web-based system which supports every browser in
| existence.
|
| So far, I have full baseline feature support for everything back
| to Mosaic, including Lynx, IE3, Netscape3, Opera3, and many
| others.
|
| At the same time, still including advanced features like client-
| side PGP for browsers which will support it.
|
| Every browser presents its own challenges, and it is not always
| the oldest ones which have the dumbest behaviors.
|
| My intent is to promote interoperability and offer something as
| an alternative to today's near-monoculture.
| insomniacity wrote:
| There are/were browsers with client-side PGP?
| spiritplumber wrote:
| I need to come up with a way to remotely shut up Jesus in case
| the "Left Behind" books are right and He plans to slaughter
| millions of people with His voice.
|
| I'm learning a lot about audio engineering and wave mechanics.
|
| ( I also co-wrote a story about what happens if I fail, which you
| can read at
| https://emlia.org/pmwiki/pub/web/LeftBeyond.TalesFromTheBeyo... )
| aerovistae wrote:
| Telling where the output of an individual stdout print statement
| ends and the next one begins, so that I could color code my
| terminal with alternating colors to more easily tell apart
| individual log messages from a running process by visual
| differentiation. Turns out this is impossible! Aside from time
| passing in between outputs, there's no way to tell. It's just a
| continuous byte stream with no terminating character or pattern.
| Layvier wrote:
| Online learning, particularly personalised learning aimed for
| self education and continuous learning. I'm trying to model the
| knowledge space as a graph, index learning material (free online
| resources right now then user generated content) on this graph
| and then provide different ways to navigate this space. I'm
| trying to address the "best way" for someone to learn a specific
| concept, and to help people identify the knowledge they miss/are
| looking for. The project would be open, collaborative and a non
| profit btw.
| chewzerita wrote:
| You might want to check out what's going on with Anki[0] and
| other spaced repetition software[1], hope this helps :)
|
| [0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Writing a no-code drag-and-drop tools for transforming data
| (join, filter, reformat, reorder etc). The hardest bit is
| handling cascading changes to the column structure (e.g. removing
| and reordering columns) intuitively - particularly if they change
| the input file to one with less columns or differently ordered
| columns.
| hermitdev wrote:
| There's already IBM's DataStage. I currently use this for ETL
| work at my job, although we're working on moving our ETL work
| to Python and an in-house framework due to licensing costs.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I know there are various Extract Transform Load tools aimed
| at professional data scientists. My product is aimed at
| numerate professionals who aren't programmers or data
| scientists and have never heard of 'ETL'. The idea is that
| they can install Easy Data Transform, transform their data
| and output it in a few clicks, without programming. It is
| also very cheap compared to many commercial ETL tools.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Representing musical and audio (sample) time in ways that
| maximises reversible conversion between the two of them. Musical
| time is typically spoken of (in western culture) in terms of
| "bars" (or "measures") and "beats". The relationship to audio
| (sample) time is defined by a "tempo map" which defines the
| number of beats per minute and the number of beats per bar.
|
| The mapping between the two is monotonic, non-linear, and can be
| stationary. If the tempo map is allowed to contain ramps
| (accelerando and ritardando in music speak), there are implicitly
| exponential sections in the function that maps between them.
|
| Using floating point arithmetic leads to errors that have
| immediate effects. A musical time that should be considered to be
| at sample N is instead considered to be at sample N-1 or N+1.
|
| It's surprisingly hard to do it correctly.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| spiritplumber wrote:
| I'm doing the hardware part of a CB packet radio infrastructure
| that can be deployed quickly after a disaster, and allows basic
| BBS functionality in addition to passing messages, and works with
| existing cell phones.
|
| It's inspired by the CellSol network in the "Left Behind" novels.
|
| Schems and code are at https://www.aaronswartzday.org/lora/ and
| we could use help.
| cryo wrote:
| Private file access between computers. Even in 2020 it appears
| that building a connection between machines (macOS, Linux and
| Windows) requires a miracle if you don't like to share everything
| with cloud providers.
|
| cryo file mangager is an attempt to get rid of the hassle:
| https://cryonet.io
| dcow wrote:
| Check out https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
| which is basically just a tool to help people do password
| authenticated key exchange when establishing ephemeral
| connections.
| betimsl wrote:
| Don't forget to check https://upspin.io/ out :)
| cryo wrote:
| Indeed I'd like to add https://onionshare.org which also
| provides a non cloud solution to share files privatly.
| isaacimagine wrote:
| There's also syncthing: https://syncthing.net/.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Let's solve Harmony!
|
| The first scientific experiment was conducted by 5th century BC
| Pythagoreans. They wanted to show that the basis for musical
| consonance was math. From that, they inferred that harmony in
| math accounted for the harmony of the cosmos. This integration of
| math+physics was very forward thinking.
|
| But, if we fast forward to the present, we still don't have a
| complete scientific explanation for the basis of consonance and
| dissonance. Really! To make my own contribution, I've been
| running psychophysical experiments to investigate why consonant
| chords that are mathematically _slightly_ dissonant actually
| sound much better than chords with perfect mathematical
| consonance. I 've been gathering data with sounds but also with
| haptic vibrations and with visual flicker frequencies. This
| multisensory approach is fun because it produces visible rhythmic
| entrainment in the brain, as seen with EEG. My goal is to
| contribute to a general theory of neural resonance and harmony in
| human experience.
|
| Why does this matter? Happiness is great, but I'd argue that what
| we really want is personal and global harmony. Note that harmony
| isn't sameness, it is unity in variety -- the resolution of
| conflict and dissonance into an integrated wholeness. We want
| inner harmony with our selves, harmony in our relationships with
| others, harmony in society, harmony with technology and harmony
| with nature. Happiness is individualistic but harmony involves
| the pleasure of virtue. I hypothesize that harmony can help set a
| better objective function for the future of humanity.
|
| Harmony was also the objective function for the first deep
| learning neural network, Paul Smolensky's Harmonium.
|
| Finally, harmony is also a central theme in classical philosophy.
| The concept had a massive influence in the Italian Renaissance
| and in the English Scientific Revolution.
|
| I recently put together a reader for understanding Plato's views
| on Harmony. Comments are welcome:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lqXpXgWI5YMBCz1O0gCmrEwz...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| > Harmony was also the objective function for the first deep
| learning neural network, Paul Smolensky's Harmonium.
|
| Here is the 1986 work in _Parallel Distributed Processing_ ,
| along with G. Hinton and Rummelhart. Don Norman wrote a
| chapter, too!
|
| http://93.174.95.29/main/3C9F2A7AEF5BE7461DECE4AE766F94B1
| ShamelessC wrote:
| I got a little lost when you tried to compare musical harmony
| to societal harmony.
|
| With regards to musical harmony, is it possible that it's more
| or less random? I know multiple cultures have different
| definitions of musical harmony. I suspect the evolution of
| hearing also contains random elements. Similar to language,
| it's not so much about an inherent universality, just a
| universality we can all learn and agree on.
|
| Thoughts?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Check out your voice on a spectrogram app. See all the
| harmonics? Our voices evolved this way, probably due to
| sexual selection.
|
| It's not so different between cultures, in fact.
| sova wrote:
| The human ear has an intimate relationship with the octave
| 2:1 and its ratios, so its very hard to believe the
| convergence of appreciation globally to be random. More
| dramatically, visualizing the harmonious ratios on objects
| such as Chladni plates (a field called Cymatics) reveals that
| there is something deeper to consonance and harmony than
| meets the number line.
| marzell wrote:
| "visualizing the harmonious ratios on objects such as
| Chladni plates (a field called Cymatics) reveals that there
| is something deeper to consonance and harmony than meets
| the number line"
|
| Ok I'll bite. What does it reveal? There's nothing
| inherently meaningful here. We know that 'consonant' sounds
| (those that create interference patterns) create wavelets
| that are smaller and with less contrast than the more
| 'coherent' patterns from ratios that are closer to whole
| numbers.
|
| But in what way is this meaningful or useful?
| megameter wrote:
| It means we find consonance pleasurable and see a
| distinct "signal" in it. At least, that's the
| information-theoretical way of looking at it.
|
| When dealing with cosmology one often seeks to make a big
| deal out of a simple concept like a duality, a cycle, or
| a ratio. These are concepts recurring through the world,
| and looking for them in more places sometimes reveals
| knowledge.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I worry from this brief description that you may be ignoring
| cultural aspects to our perception of consonance and
| dissonance.
|
| Also, harmony itself is a distinctly western concept whose
| musical role expanded dramatically with the advent of
| polyphony. Many (most!) musical cultures around the world don't
| give harmony much, if any role, and place higher importance on
| melodic structure.
|
| Also, music harmony and the other kinds of harmony you mention
| seem to me to be related only by the language used for this
| particular metaphor. There seems to me to be no likelihood of
| there being any interesting relationship between musical
| consonsance and "harmony with technology and harmony with
| nature".
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I agree that the central scientific question is whether
| harmony is a metaphor or mechanism, e.g., for psychological
| constructs like Cognitive Dissonance. My guess is that
| harmony is so pervasive that it ceases to have original
| meaning -- like in the manner that every atom is a harmonic
| oscillator or how brainwaves are based on an "octave"
| structure (e.g., Beta is double Alpha, Gamma is double Beta,
| etc). However, this question of metaphor or mechanism should
| be resolvable with science, eh?
|
| However, I disagree that harmony is primarily a western
| phenomena. It is a central feature to Confucianism and
| Daoism. It also plays a major role in Native American
| philosophy.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I was talking specifically about harmony in a musical
| context as being very western.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Well, the point still applies. The small integer ratios
| of harmony apply even to the _rhythms_ of gamelan. And,
| of course, octaves are more-or-less universal across
| cultures.
| etherio wrote:
| Knowledge.
|
| Working on building a self-hosted app that would alow you to
| save, organise and search your knowledge in one center.
|
| It would contain information like notes, bookmarks (it would
| download the links contents) and in general provide a
| programmable, opensource interface to preserve the info you'll
| find useful and even sync with external apis to save your online
| presence locally (think reddit posts, hn links, etc...)
| unixhero wrote:
| So something like what Bookstack is doing
| https://www.bookstackapp.com/
| waihtis wrote:
| Detection of cybersecurity threats at close to 100% accuracy. Do
| this by purposefully opening weakness simulations into company
| infrastructure.
|
| Avesnetsec.com
| SergeAx wrote:
| Training neural network to distinct Pepe the Frog from Kermit the
| Frog.
| geoah wrote:
| Trying to figure out what the next version of the internet would
| look like and start building it :p ps. Structured data and no
| blockchain :)
| fl0under wrote:
| What about the (still in development) SAFE network?
| geoah wrote:
| Safe is interesting but it's still pretty much still a
| ledger. I am not sure this will work at current-internet-
| scale, let alone in a couple of decades worth of data. In
| addition to that they still pretty much keep building on top
| of the web, which is really not accessible to machines.
|
| Think more in terms or ipfs/ipld.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| An open source search index shared and updated over the
| bittorrent protocol.
| waihtis wrote:
| Detection of cybersecurity threats at close to 100% accuracy. Do
| this by purposefully opening weakness simulations into company
| infrastructure.
|
| https://avesnetsec.com
| enginoor wrote:
| I'm trying to design a vibratory bowl feeder that I can 3D print.
| Designing features to align or reject parts is a bit of a dark
| art and it's requiring a few more iterations than expected.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowl_feeder
| janee wrote:
| Collaborative spreadsheets on your desktop using browser based
| native file system API.
|
| Basically google spreadsheets but not google and not spreadsheets
| in a webapp.
|
| Haven't done any coding on it, but have been mulling the design
| for several months now.
| techstrategist wrote:
| I'm building a platform to host my book club online due to covid,
| and I think that I can generalize my solution to reinvent MOOC's
| and possibly further areas of communication.
| cameronbrown wrote:
| Information overload.
|
| My current side project is https://feedsub.com. Right now, - it's
| not great - I started by building an simple tool for getting
| regular updates from RSS feeds, but longer-term I want to turn
| this into a system which can absorb all the data streams you're
| interested in (news, stocks, weather, social, communities) and
| give you dials (filters, curation, signals, etc..) to surface a
| healthy amount wherever you want (SMS, email, web, RSS, chatbots,
| etc..).
|
| The crux of the problem is endless scrolling feeds we're sucked
| into 24/7, which is why I based my MVP on email.
|
| My current solution is trivial on a technical level. Honestly, my
| biggest problem is thinking about the problem on a non-technical
| level, balancing this with working life and branding, since my
| software and vision are very far apart right now.
|
| (TBH, this isn't nearly as hard a problem as some of the others
| here - but I enjoy the ideas/feedback I get from communities like
| HN)
| jawns wrote:
| I hope this counts as weird enough ...
|
| PROBLEM:
|
| If time travelers from the future were to visit you, it would be
| difficult for them to quickly prove their authenticity.
|
| SOLUTION:
|
| Temporal passwords. At the start of each year, you devise a new
| password. You commit the password to memory, but you never write
| it down or divulge it to anyone until Dec. 31, when you submit it
| to the Temporal Password Registry, which publishes it and
| promotes its dissemination.
|
| RESULT:
|
| Prior to their visit, time travelers from the future can look up
| your temporal password in the registry for the year in which they
| plan to visit you. Their ability to communicate a password that
| you have not yet shared with anyone provides evidence that they
| are actually from the future.
|
| PROMO:
|
| https://temporal-password.pressbin.com/index.html
| majidmir wrote:
| How do you know they are not just good mind readers instead of
| time travelers?
| fgdorais wrote:
| What if the visitors are from November of this year?
| mrfusion wrote:
| Couldn't they just tell you tomorrow's stock prices? Or a
| future sports score.
| injb wrote:
| That would probably break the rules. With the password
| solution, they're not telling you anything you didn't already
| know.
| wes-k wrote:
| What rules? They're telling you time travel is possible and
| happens. That'll be news for me.
| jawns wrote:
| As the PROBLEM statement says:
|
| > it would be difficult for them to quickly prove their
| authenticity
|
| Yes, you could tell them something that happens tomorrow or
| the next day. But if time is of the essence and you can't
| wait until tomorrow, then the Temporal Password helps you
| _immediately_ demonstrate your authenticity.
| winstonewert wrote:
| They have a time machine. How can time be of the essence?
| muzani wrote:
| I'm trying to find a way to generate stories using tropes as the
| building blocks.
|
| There's a sample at https://random-character-generator.com/
|
| There's an unreleased version, which focuses more on how to
| portray characters, rather than just what they are. For example,
| instead of saying "energetic", they'll be pacing about a bit.
|
| I might just pivot it into a story/plot tracker for writers, and
| use it to fill out the blanks rather than generating full
| characters from scratch. Where the community can add in their own
| templates and tropes. An author can decide that they have a
| character who is stoic, cynical, and sarcastic, and the tool will
| generate a background story, how to portray the character, what
| conflicts they get into with other characters.
| pvillano wrote:
| you'd be interested in dwarf fortress
| muzani wrote:
| I donate to DF, lol. While there are plenty of epic moments
| in there, I think it takes a while to build up, and it comes
| in between a lot of mundane moments as well. And I think a
| lot of stories are built with a romance element in mind and
| there hasn't been a lot of procedurally generated games that
| do that well.
| Gurten wrote:
| I've been tinkering in the reverse-engineering space. My problem
| amounts to reusing compiled binaries by combining them in novel
| ways. That is, I would like to take algorithm/subsystem X from
| software Y, combine it with something else. The goal is to have a
| library of components which I may be able to combine. It has lead
| me to investigate a few technologies I have been meaning to
| invest time into, like llvm, qemu. There are a few projects which
| combine these as well as related technologies like DECAF,
| radare2, DynamoRio, mcsema. The hard problem which I am facing,
| but by no means have an effective solution is of having to
| extract semantically the essence of the program in spite of ISA,
| and to find a balance between emulation and readapt-ability (i.e
| abstract out the code that is dependent upon some base-address
| assumption. The value on the surface seems counter intuitive to
| the investment, especially from my roots in SWE where one can
| have a hard enough time trying to accomplish that with source-
| code available. Although the application is broad, I've focussed
| intermittently on video games. I believe this is where some value
| lies, as a finely-tuned subsystem can be the heart of a
| franchise.
| crb002 wrote:
| JHipster style templating for SAAS onboarding design patterns.
|
| UX description language for forms that respects high level
| constraints. Compiles to desktop browser, phone browser, and
| Alexa layouts.
|
| Solving the complexity of matrix matrix multiplication by brute
| forcing the lower bound with semigroup combinatorics.
|
| DSL for linear logic.
|
| Ending Iowa's criminalization of "annoying" speech. (Iowa Code
| 708.7)
|
| Exposing Polk County Iowa Sheriff Kevin Schneider torturing
| inmates with denial of basic medical care.
|
| Exposing pure nepotism corruption between Iowa Attorney General
| Chief of Staff Eric Tabor and his sister Iowa Court of Appeals
| Judge Mary Tabor (mom of @ollie).
|
| Exposing that the prosecutor on Tracy Richter's murder trial had
| relations and ended up marrying the daughter of his star witness
| Mary Higgins - and that the blood spatter expert Englert is a
| known fraud who wrongfully convicted David Camm and Julie Ray
| Harper.
| minkzilla wrote:
| With the last three how are you going about that?
| sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote:
| My short term thing is this mathematical programming puzzel
| https://projecteuler.net/problem=160 from Project Euler where you
| need to calculate a very large factorial.
|
| My live goal is to bring back more programming and design
| techniques that we as a society used to make the best ps1 and
| gameboy games and old school animations to the way we are
| currently developing games. (Any tips and advice how i could help
| improve the game development industry is welcome. Next year I
| will be doing my masters so i'm also still looking for a subject
| for that. The last couple of months I have been experimenting
| with water color effects in openGL, so I'm looking for something
| like that)
| SenHeng wrote:
| Since I live in Tokyo, it's about a 3 - 4 hour drive to various
| ski resorts. I want to snowboard _every_ weekend. So I'm trying
| to find the best* ski resort I can head to next weekend.
|
| Best is a mix of
|
| - the ones I enjoy most
|
| - but not one that I just visited last weekend
|
| - where there has been recent snowfall / is predicted to snow
|
| - that I have may have a season pass for
|
| - where costs of highway tolls, petrol, hotels can be optimised
|
| - driving time
|
| - whether I'm going alone or with friends
|
| - don't have anything important at work on Monday
|
| Eventually, I'd like to turn it into a kind of friend finder /
| social network thingy but for snowboarding.
| soared wrote:
| Such a crazy difference with the amount of resorts in japan. In
| Colorado there are <10 resorts within 3-4 hours, and your pass
| only works at a couple of them. Our problem is optimizing the
| time you leave to reduce traffic time and maximize skiing time.
| ctack wrote:
| The resort finding part seems representable as a table where
| worst to best overlap(including dynamic weather forecast part)
| is displayed in a color spectrum, sort of like a many circled
| ven diagram. Send an email for firetool at protonmail dot com
| if you're interested and have the info you've described(minus
| the weather api) tabulated. I'd be happy to cook demo up a form
| and grid.
| unixhero wrote:
| Well. It's not the answer you want, but the Shinkansen and an
| expensive taxi ride or maybe a ridesharing with some local
| dudes might be a feasible, but not cheap answer.
|
| Stay safe in those woods! I nearly perished, by getting lost.
| jeremylevy wrote:
| Automating cloud architecture creation.
|
| I'm building a "catalog" of architectures that you could use to
| create a complete cloud architecture on your AWS, GCP or Azure
| account in less than one minute.
|
| So, for example, you could create a docker-based architecture
| with CI/CD, auto-scaling, zero downtime deployment, SSL, load-
| balancing, high availability and MongoDB in less than one minute
| in your own AWS account.
|
| It's like Terraform with the user-friendliness of Heroku.
|
| It's very hard because every providers have different APIs and
| concepts so you have to start from scratch for each.
|
| I love working on it because cloud-computing may have so much
| impact in some organizations like biotech startups or NGOs.
| mattjoyce wrote:
| That does sound challenging. APIs and service change too. I
| can't imagine how complex that can get if something stops
| working.
|
| Still when you succeed perhaps the next goal is to simply
| specify what sort of compute function, the scale and risk
| tolerances, and let the patterns be assembled accordingly.
| jonwalch wrote:
| Any thoughts about maintenance? My personal journey with
| learning AWS is/was very painful, but now that I understand
| everything that I need at a high level, it is quite a bit more
| manageable. I can't imagine having to make minor tweaks to my
| infra if I had no idea what it was doing.
| ahnberg wrote:
| Do you have something published yet? Code, articles or
| anything? Sounds very interesting!
| busted wrote:
| I've thought about this in the past. There's a modern way to
| build architecture, and cloud providers are in general only
| providing the building blocks and requiring you to put them
| together. It's unscalable to expect every company to hire
| someone smart enough to construct a good architecture (let
| alone the time) but at the same time, people who have been
| working on infrastructure long enough know that there's really
| only a handful of useful architectures that solve 90% of
| problems. I thought of it as CTO-as-a-service or CTO-in-a-box.
|
| Service meshes like istio.io start to solve a portion of this.
|
| Almost certainly there is endless complexity but I bet you can
| come up with something useful. Good luck!
| tlrobinson wrote:
| > It's like Terraform with the user-friendliness of Heroku.
|
| > It's very hard because every providers have different APIs
| and concepts so you have to start from scratch for each.
|
| Why not build it as a layer on top of Terraform?
| threentaway wrote:
| This was my first thought. Terraform modules can accomplish
| all of this.
| hashamali wrote:
| Have you considered something like Pulumi for the glue?
|
| Love this idea, the ease of Heroku + the flexibility of
| Kubernetes would be amazing.
| Erazal wrote:
| I'm working on a an easy way to store and retrieve any ephemeral
| information stream that goes through your computer's ram (videos,
| a website you're browsing, etc).
|
| For now, my team and I are focusing on video-conferences, but the
| end goal is much larger :)
|
| Now that I think of it, this problem is a lot easier than what
| others post here.
| hazeii wrote:
| How to measure pedal (and/or crank) angle on a moving bicycle to
| 0.05 degree. Anyone?
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Gyroscope or mems accelerometer. Otherwise convert rotational
| crank movement to push-pull linear slider (see piston,
| flywheel, linear actuator, etc) and measure linear change in
| resistance between contact points (like a cheap caliper does,
| you can even use a chinesium one off eBay as they have a pin
| out under the battery tab, if your resulting linear motion is
| within that scale). You don't need to drive anything besides
| the read head, so it should have extremely low losses.
| hazeii wrote:
| Thanks for reply, and do you already work for us? :)
|
| We've burnt through a pile of MEMS devices, currently working
| with CRM100 gyro's. As far as I've got is we definitely need
| a non-contact solution, either optical or MEMS with a once-
| per-rev index pulse (which obv. needs to be within the same
| 0.05 degree requirement).
| zamadatix wrote:
| https://www.mouser.com/Electromechanical/Encoders/_/N-39xfc?...
| ?
| hazeii wrote:
| Thanks, looked at them. Can't get the resolution we need for
| any vaguely feasible price though.
| Animats wrote:
| Why do you need 0.05 degree precision?
|
| You can use Hall effect sensors to sense chainwheel teeth. Two
| sensors and you can get quadrature and direction. I've done
| that on a mobile robot. With analog-output Hall effect sensors
| and some processing, you can get sub-degree precision, although
| 0.05 degree is asking a lot.
| hazeii wrote:
| We're trying to measure aerodynamic drag, thing is there are
| huge vertical forces (weight of rider pressing down on pedal)
| and relatively small horizontal forces (due to drag). So if
| we don't know the angle accurately, we can't separate out the
| components - make sense?
| shezi wrote:
| Grey code with 13 bits and as many light sensors, maybe?
| hazeii wrote:
| Good to get your attention :) but still got to print the gray
| code to 1 part in 8192 and fit it all on a bike.
|
| Along the lines of your idea, we've looked at using the CCD
| array out of desktop scanners with a spiral pattern printed
| on the crank. But bike bottom brackets are a hostile
| environment, plus (ideally) we'd actually be measuring the
| angle against local vertical (i.e. the direction in which
| gravity sucks).
|
| Our test bike currently runs 4 Pi zeros, 4 Cortex M0s
| (nRF52), a fistful of 24-bit ADCS, 2 high precision gyros,
| air pressure/air speed sensors and a 2.4GHz network, all in
| order to measure realtime CdA. Still unable to crack the
| angle problem though.
| erezsh wrote:
| I'm trying to replace SQL by building a language that compiles to
| SQL. It has first-class functions, nicer syntax, better type-
| system, introspection, and other things you would expect from a
| modern language. But in the end, you still get SQL's performance,
| and the ability to use it with dozens of database engines.
| adamsea wrote:
| I don't know if it's exactly what you describe but Hasura
| compiles GraphQL queries and mutations to SQL (for Postgrs).
| slifin wrote:
| Is there a Clojure datalog to SQL compiler out there?
| jugg1es wrote:
| How is this different than a heavy-weight ORM like entity
| framework?
| default-kramer wrote:
| Me too. I'm interested in what you've done. Please share a link
| if you have anything published.
|
| My project is here: https://docs.racket-
| lang.org/plisqin/index.html I'm days away from a Show HN at
| this point. If I can pick only one idea that everyone should
| copy, it's that joins are values, not language constructs.
| eitland wrote:
| You mean you work on LINQ?
|
| Only half joking here.
| erezsh wrote:
| LINQ did a tiny step in the right direction. I'm aiming a lot
| further.
| closed wrote:
| Have you seen the R library dplyr? It is a weirdly powerful
| data analysis tool, that can also produce SQL queries!
| erezsh wrote:
| I heard about it but didn't know it can produce SQL. Thanks
| for the tip!
| manish_gill wrote:
| If this can allow me to write complex SQL (lots of JOINs,
| Multiple CTEs building on top of each other, Analytic functions
| etc), then I'm definitely interested. I've created an SQL
| generation engine in the past and can definitely appreciate how
| hard the problem is.
| yanovskishai wrote:
| As someone who spent handreds of hours writing (and cursing)
| SQL queries -it definitely sounds compelling.
| erezsh wrote:
| Just a tiny teaser, you could write something like
| Person { country => name }
|
| And it will output the following SQL: --
| target: postgres SELECT country, array_agg(name) AS
| name FROM Person GROUP BY country
| tromp wrote:
| Trying to find the next entry in this list of functional Busy
| Beaver numbers
|
| https://oeis.org/A333479
| ta17711771 wrote:
| Keeping a working Wireguard configuration with 4 peers, for both
| VPN-through-house, and remote LAN access.
| unixhero wrote:
| I need to get to setting up wireguard as well. Honest to god
| 'homelabbing.
| dewey wrote:
| I'm working on a website that helps me to keep track of the
| podcasts that I'm listening to across platforms (Think Last.fm /
| Trakt.tv but for podcasts) by automatically importing the
| listening data from various podcast apps.
| tumidpandora wrote:
| I am working on making it really easy to create a no code,
| 1-click personal chatbot profile - presbot.com
| eivarv wrote:
| Human-computer context switching.
|
| Which is why I started making Cleave: An application that lets
| users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open
| applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so
| on.
|
| Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited
| resources.
|
| Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working,
| reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing
| all states or consuming all resources.
|
| Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and
| delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...
|
| https://cleave.app
| a3camero wrote:
| Making a search engine for government websites. Not using someone
| else's index. A full search engine, writing all of the
| components.
| jezze wrote:
| I am trying to reinvent the web.
|
| Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly
| simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML
| you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their
| behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead
| of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This
| allows it to be streamed.
|
| A big difference is that the language itself doesn't allow
| styling (like CSS), the downside being you get less flexibility
| but the upside being it will render correctly on any display with
| any resolution.
|
| For this I have also written a new type of web browser called
| NAVI which takes ALFI code and produces (somewhat) beautiful
| widgets and renders them using OpenGL.
|
| Source for both ALFI and NAVI: https://github.com/jezze/alfi
|
| My own ALFI website: http://www.blunder.se/
|
| You need NAVI to actually browse blunder.se properly. otherwise
| you will just see ALFI code. Also this is still very early so all
| features are not done yet.
| 6510 wrote:
| get rid of the white background
| rsify wrote:
| Mind posting some screenshots?
| jezze wrote:
| Sure! Just ignore my dwm desktop row on the top.
|
| http://www.blunder.se/screenshots/s1.png
| http://www.blunder.se/screenshots/s2.png
| http://www.blunder.se/screenshots/s3.png
| Jaxkr wrote:
| Are widgets stateful in any way? Could this be used to create
| more efficient (and constrained) client side apps without
| JavaScript?
| shezi wrote:
| Soil simulation
|
| This is just one part of one of the sillier things I'm working
| on/thinking about. How can I make a real-time interactive soil
| simulation work, essentially a big realistic virtual sandbox.
|
| Since this is a side project, it'll go as far as all side
| projects go. =)
| vidanay wrote:
| Mechanics or chemistry?
| jakeogh wrote:
| This video series about soil is really interesting:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I wrote a bit about using stylometry to identify the author of a
| tweet. I'm coming up with additional features to add to this
| model and testing it with identifying attributes about the author
| (political affiliation or gender).
|
| https://medium.com/@patriarch_39868/donald-trump-detector-ec...
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| I am building a tiny "replay" script that when run with a code
| file will print the code by line/block with a customized amount
| of delay OR keypress. The motivation is to be able to slowly read
| large source code files without having the whole file on the
| screen.
| eitland wrote:
| Getting time to do anything in between kids, work and whatever
| else is expected from me is the actual hard part for me.
|
| The technical aspect is mostly fun in my case :-)
| baxtr wrote:
| If you ever find out, let me know. The only solution I've found
| is: late at night!
| dvt wrote:
| One-click API data ingestion.
|
| Just about every company these days has their data spread out all
| over the cloud: marketing data on Facebook and Google, social
| media data on Twitter and Snapchat, customer data on Salesforce,
| sales data on Shopify and Amazon, and so on. Most companies will
| either (a) hire a team of data engineers to collect and exploit
| this data or; (b) hire an expensive consulting firm to build an
| ETL pipeline, or; (c) let this data rot in the cloud. For the
| past 6 years, I've worked as a data engineer (where I became
| intimately familiar with Facebook and Salesforce APIs), and I'm
| confident that I can automate around 80% of my job.
|
| It's clear that the value prop is astronomical: just _one_ data
| engineer will run you at least 150k /yr and most of the work will
| involve maintaining API data pipelines. Having a "one-click"
| solution where one simply provides an API key and what data
| they'd like to warehouse (e.g. marketing data, social media data,
| customer data) and where (FTP, S3, Redshift, DynamoDB) would be
| invaluable to companies that want to make sure they exploit this
| treasure trove.
|
| Some hard/interesting problems:
|
| - API specs constantly change (Facebook, for example, has a
| quarterly update schedule)
|
| - Inferring JSON schemas is hard
|
| - Data integrity is hard (data types sometimes change willy-
| nilly)
|
| - API rate limiting is tricky
|
| - Resilience is hard
|
| - Recovering old data (especially for certain services) might be
| impossible
|
| Everyone is starting to become keenly aware that letting the data
| rot is starting to have a higher and higher opportunity cost. Not
| warehousing your own data is simply not a tenable option any
| more: the world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but
| data[1].
|
| [1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-
| most...
| foxgrover wrote:
| Sounds like Fivetran or Stitch Data. AWS released a new
| service, AppFlow, with a similar vision though focused on AWS
| ecosystem as destinations for the data.
| willnewby wrote:
| I'm actually in the middle of building something really
| similar, but targeted at manufacturing/distribution companies
| (i.e. they have an ERP/inventory system, how does that data get
| onto the eCommerce website?)
|
| Would you be interested in talking with me about how you're
| building your system? Email in my profile.
|
| Good Luck!!
| ahP7Deew wrote:
| Fully offline, fully searchable copies of personal data (email,
| tweets, calendar, etc.), English Wikipedia, IMDb, OpenStreetMap
| (tiles, routing, points of interest), geocoding. Fully offline
| and state of the art speech recognition. Fully offline voice
| assistant with almost complete coverage of the most common usage.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Yes please. I live this idea.
| closeparen wrote:
| How do I satisfy the needs of non-technical middle managers in
| engineering to appear as if they understand and control their
| shops, while minimizing damage to those shops?
| danielovichdk wrote:
| It's an impossible task. Without direct access to their brains
| and being able to alter those, you are at a lost cause.
|
| Middle Manager Syndrome would be great for machine learning to
| cure. I hope you come out with your nerves intact
| Havoc wrote:
| Send them on a blockchain side quest?
| kappuchino wrote:
| Making leaking safe(er).
|
| After the twitter account of DDOSecrets got shut down (due
| Blueleaks), this got me thinking: How would you leak / provide
| data but are not directly attributable. (At least like a retweet
| - not your tweet, just amplified.).
|
| And how to add some resilience and protection to the
| distribution, since there were indicators that the torrent and
| download of leaked data was being attacked.
|
| So far, I have come up with an encryption matryoshka: you
| distribute leaks without telling whats in and enable gradually a
| few to look inside until they are public.
|
| All thats missing is a better document describing it and a
| command line tool to help to walk through the multi level
| encryption ... so there is 90% still to do -\\_(tsu)_/-.
| dewey wrote:
| Not really sure what this is trying to solve. If it's some
| legitimate leak of public interest then the organizations
| active in this space often have a tip line / encrypted drop
| where you can put it.
|
| If it's something that's not of interest to many but you want
| to put out there for some reason then what's stopping you from
| uploading it to some random one click hoster and posting the
| link in random places on the internet?
| wiseleo wrote:
| Education.
|
| Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons. You
| must attend daily under penalty of law.
|
| Many teachers are plain awful.
|
| They rely on students being additionally taught by their parents.
| That forces parents to go to school with their children, which
| perpetuates the vicious cycle. The teacher recalibrates the class
| to the students who either understood everything the first time
| or had supplemental education and the rest languish.
|
| Schools assign homework that is not easy to do when the student
| hasn't fully grasped the concept. That burns time they could use
| to get better.
|
| So... I am implementing Math common core in software. The first
| part is an automatic homework solver for math. Once we solved the
| student's homework, we can teach them how to do it with generate
| problems. Crucially, there will be multiple perspectives and an
| ontology of topics do the student can backtrack to where they got
| lost in class weeks ago.
|
| After we are good with math, we'll do the same with English. It
| will probably not go too deep, but it will let students obtain
| the missing foundation of knowledge.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Anywhere I can sign up to be notified when you have something
| we can try?
| adamsea wrote:
| I certainly agree that so much about school is problematic and
| could be improved, but ...
|
| > Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons.
|
| A prison by definition cannot be part-time ; ). Plus, it's a
| totally unfair comparison. Schools are intended for everyone.
| Prisons are intended for a specific subset of people deemed to
| have broken a law.
|
| Schools are for children. Prisons are for adults.
|
| And so on.
| icebraining wrote:
| > A prison by definition cannot be part-time
|
| Sure it can. Check out "weekenders" and "work release"
| programs, for example.
| David_R wrote:
| Retired teacher here...glad to see fresh thinking on this
| problem. The mega-publishers that serve school districts are
| stuck in a 1980s model. A project related to yours is
| ASSiSTments at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The market is
| big, with space for several innovative projects.
| bb123 wrote:
| Do you expect that students will utilise the backtracking
| aspect of the software? I think 12 year old me would just use
| the solver and then log off.
| wiseleo wrote:
| I am optimistic :)
|
| The entire curriculum is extremely easy when properly
| explained at correct pace.
| mattjoyce wrote:
| As a father with a 12 year old struggling with math, to say
| something is extremely easy makes me think you have a
| better understanding of math than people.
| koeng wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out how to ship DNA effectively. It's really
| inefficient right now, so I'm genetically engineering bacterial
| spores to make it a lot better. Not sure if people will adopt,
| but at least it'll be 10x better than what is currently
| available!
| nabaraz wrote:
| I am trying to build a humanoid with bunch of servos. Back in
| 2017, I bought 205 servos from a closeout sale.
|
| Currently, I am trying to hook them together and come up with
| basic APIs to control them. Next is printing a 3D model.
| mrfusion wrote:
| This sounds so interesting! Do you have a blog I could follow
| the project?
|
| On that same concept I was recently thinking pvc pipes might be
| a cheap way to build robots. It's cheap, somewhat light, and
| seems strong enough for many tasks.
|
| Any thoughts on how to connect pvc pipes up to servos?
|
| Also will your robot need feet?
| kd5bjo wrote:
| I'm trying to map relational algebra onto Rust's type system. If
| I'm successful, I'll have a bunch of collection types with
| different performance characteristics that are all drop-in
| replacements for each other.
| tekknolagi wrote:
| You and mamcx should chat:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23741945
| j88439h84 wrote:
| Got a link?
| kd5bjo wrote:
| Not right now; I haven't set up a repository for it yet; I'll
| certainly post it here when it's ready to show.
|
| I'm working from the bottom up and am _almost_ ready to start
| working on collections-- I started with newtypes to represent
| columns and then tried to get them to combine together
| properly.
|
| As of today, I've got what looks like a good scheme to treat
| arbitrary objects as records, and can do joins, projections,
| and column renames with the type system keeping track of
| which objects have which columns.
|
| The plan for tables/collections is to implement a sequential-
| scan interface backed by something simple, and then add
| wrapper write-through index objects to speed up particular
| query types.
| mamcx wrote:
| I'm in the same boat: https://github.com/Tablam/TablaM, only
| that also building a lang (wish to revive the spirit of the
| dbase/fox family langs).
|
| I have experimented with varied stuff, including columnar, so I
| think we can help each other!
| contingencies wrote:
| Given the earth's population trajectory and the reduction in
| fertile arable unpolluted lands, there is a coming crisis in the
| distribution of food. How do we distribute food to high density
| Asian urban populations efficiently, minimizing needless motor
| vehicle trips, packaging and spoilage, when convenience
| purchasing is on the rise and average household sizes are
| shrinking? Our answer is a network of robotic service locations
| with automated stock-keeping and a shared, wholly owned logistics
| network plus personalized direct from fresh ingredient
| preparation.
| algo_trader wrote:
| Related:
|
| an eco-recovery robot
|
| Inspired by
|
| https://interestingengineering.com/jadav-payeng-the-man-who-...
|
| https://relieved.co/couple-plants-2-million-trees-in-20-year...
|
| EDIT: i am trying to find a similar story about a professor who
| worked in similar techniques in African farms - increasing
| plants/animal/water-retention using tradition techniques
| danielovichdk wrote:
| This is an impossible thing to solve unless you own and control
| the whole chain - from crops to shipping to storage to sales.
| shostack wrote:
| Not sure if this is weird so much as an area of business that not
| a lot of people think actively about, but get bit by.
|
| _THE PROBLEM_
|
| How do you automate and aggregate context across business
| departments for various forms of activity, and then map that to
| marketing analytics in a way that gives relevant and sufficient
| insights beyond just channel or user data? How do you more fully
| answer the question of "what happened when [$thing happened]?"
|
| _THE VALUE OPPORTUNITY_
|
| Countless people hours and marketing dollars are wasted going
| down fruitless rabbit holes looking for what caused some change,
| or thinking they found the cause in a change in performance and
| pursuing that when it reality it was something else. In many of
| these cases, this could have been easily avoided if only there
| were sufficient data on the business activities (internal and
| external) logged and aggregated with marketing data in a way that
| was then automatically surfaced in an appropriate manner. As the
| scale of the company increases, so does the impact of this.
|
| _WHY IT IS WEIRD /HARD_
|
| It's weird in the sense that only a small subset of people are
| immersed in analytics enough are aware they should care about it,
| and probably fewer geek out enough about marketing analytics and
| process to care about trying to solve it. It is hard because it
| is just as much a people challenge as a technical one. The
| technical side is somewhat straightforward in terms of
| aggregating as many data inputs as you can--it's basically a ton
| of data plumbing and monitoring for changes with that. Whether
| that's bid management platforms and DSPs or SSPs, email
| platforms, site analytics, etc. But then also project management
| tools and properly categorizing the meta data for relevant
| updates to be surfaced. You have challenges around walled data
| gardens and comparing apples to oranges around things like
| attribution measurement, but that is something that can be
| handled. Surfacing it in timely and sufficiently useful ways is
| an interesting design and UX challenge though, from annotations
| and "pull" data, to modals and callouts that are more "push" in
| how they inform people of context before it bites them.
|
| The people side however, is constantly in flux in a way that the
| data side is not. Some aspects of this absolutely rely on
| consistent adherence to process to capture key data that is hard
| to slurp up through an API. Some of it is quite ephemeral. I've
| encountered team situations where people object (or struggle to
| due to limited training) to filling out a couple fields in a
| Google Sheet, or need to be hounded to fill out a given form,
| etc. Some companies can enforce this to levels others cannot.
| Things also get really interesting at large companies (think
| FAANG). You're dealing with many teams, many overlapping or
| conflicting processes such a solution would need to be embedded
| into, localization, internal/external vendors of varying levels
| of visibility needs, and also personalities who may want more
| control over their orgs' processes and need persuading.
|
| At the end, this all needs to be balanced against how much
| utility you get out of the insights because it is easy to over-
| index on investing in building this tech and process out only to
| not get insights out of it. Unfortunately you often only learn
| that _after the fact_ when you 've been bitten by it.
|
| If there's any companies trying to solve for this, please do
| reach out (see profile). I love chatting about it and want to
| help build the tools and processes that solve for this at scale
| and have ~15yrs experience in the space, a good chunk of which
| have been spent trying to solve for variations of this.
| smabie wrote:
| Have you looked at the kind of systems Bridgewater has? Ray
| Dalio and his firm doing what you're describing and more.
| shostack wrote:
| I may not be understanding what they do here that is specific
| to what I'm describing. I'm talking about tools/process that
| practically any company could benefit from that does
| marketing.
| abj wrote:
| I've experienced this problem in small companies/side projects
| I've started. This a great perspective and great take on the
| problem. I'd love to help out in development/anything you'd
| need help with, email is in my profile.
| zinglersen wrote:
| I've had the same experience in larger corporations,
| especially the global ones. I'm interested in helping as well
| so if there's a need for concept development and ux let me
| know :)
| unixhero wrote:
| Salesforce solves this.
|
| They do need worthy competitors, so go for it!
| tixocloud wrote:
| I'd love to have a chat further. I have some familiarity with
| what you're talking about and can see the value of it.
| shostack wrote:
| Great, you can find my email in my profile.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Not tried yet but I'd love to make a JS front end library to
| "bring your own storage" so that if I provide you with an app
| online (think SPA) it can then save the data to where he used
| wants (s3, Dropbox, local disk using extension, etc.)
|
| Another similar idea is a very simple rest protocol so that you
| can save to server and then make it easy to self host it.
|
| I like the idea of people building apps as web pages without
| needing to worry about the server and the user owning their data
| but having the convenience of a cloud like solution where you
| just visit the site, log in and work.
| shezi wrote:
| Something like https://remotestorage.io/ ?
| httpsterio wrote:
| I've been mulling over an idea that is essentially a combination
| of personal ID, secure digital authentication and online
| communications all baked into one.
|
| There's a EU directive instructing on how citizens should be able
| to identify online with eIDAS. In my country, you can use eIDAS
| to authenticate in basically any governmental agency portal, but
| you can't get any eIDAS enabled auth method as a citizen. The
| current way of authenticating is done via bank accounts or a paid
| extra mobile service that requires a non-prepaid mobile contract.
|
| This is a relatively huge issue. First off, the Finnish
| government pays the banks for each auth any user does when they
| for example want to log into their medical records etc. It's a
| few million euros a year just for verifying the users.
|
| There's also obviously issues with whom the banks serve, there
| has been some cases with them not taking foreigners or people
| with bad credit as customers, making it impossible for them to
| authenticate themselves.
|
| The current EU directives also indirectly require that the banks
| should provide a bank customer the possibility to authenticate
| without needing to have a banking account (which costs money),
| but to my knowledge this still isn't possible. I pay around 20
| euros a month just for the luxury of having an account, not
| everyone can afford that on top of other bills.
|
| Auth services are not accessible for impaired users.
|
| It's also basically impossible to manage who has essentially the
| power of attorney and over which matters, for how long etc.
| Either you have to give them your login info (good luck resetting
| your SSN) or try to use the services over the phone and somehow
| convince the other side that you have permission to manage things
| for another person.
|
| There's no ways of authenticating who is using your accounts
| online and actually verify the users.
|
| Basically, my idea is combining biometrics, PGP and having the
| government running the identity management themselves. This would
| have added benefits of basically enabling hashed throwaway
| addresses and info for use online while providing a free and
| accessible way of authenticating strongly online.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| > authenticating is done via bank accounts
|
| It occurred to me the USA might do something similar in the
| future and let the banks authenticate and verify identities.
| (The $1200 CARES Act stimulus payments were automatically wired
| to those who previously authorized the IRS to post their tax
| refunds to their banks.)
|
| > actually verify the users
|
| Maybe you can harness existing Public Notaries instead of using
| online banking? The USA has over four million Public Notaries
| who can "witness" and verify identities. For example, a user
| can pay for a Public Notary to come to his house. The Public
| Notary reviews the user's government provided identification
| and issue them an official E-ID and a encryption USB key like
| Google Titan Security key. The Public Notary can record this
| transaction in a government database so that there is a trail
| of who received the Titan key and who provided it.
| amelius wrote:
| > throwaway addresses
|
| Unrelated but speaking of throwaway addresses, it would be cool
| to be able to create a throwaway postal address (which is then
| translated by the postal service), so online shops don't get
| your personal address information.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| isn't that a po box
| amelius wrote:
| No because for example if you order from the same shop
| multiple times using the same PO Box, then they can link
| the information from each order.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| So you're thinking like a virtual mailing address as a
| service. You receive and forward people's mail. Seems
| interesting. Also kind of high risk for the service
| provider. People will use something like this to buy guns
| and drugs and other stuff on the black markets. But I
| guess they do that anyway. You would have to be prepared
| to deal with a lot of subpoenas to unmask the real
| mailing addresses. Could be a useful service though. Be
| sure to charge a lot for it.
| amelius wrote:
| Well, I would be ok with it if the regular postal service
| does the translation, and I wouldn't want to support any
| criminal activity.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Isn't this essentially a URL shortener for post? The post
| operator generates an ID for your address, sender uses it
| to post stuff, the post office maps it back to the
| address. One additional challenge I see is that if the
| fees vary by distance, the sender would still get some
| sort of an idea as to how far away you are, but that is
| probably acceptable.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I'm very interested in doing this as well, and have been trying
| to get the Login.gov folks (US centric) onboard (with Estonia's
| electronic ID system as the model). We should chat!
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| Hi! I'm also working on something similar to this. If you
| want to chat, please reach out! fabian (at) flapplabs.se
| magahacka wrote:
| In my european country we can use the Personal identity card
| with the use of a USB to ID card converter?, to log in to
| governmental resources. although people mostly use the SmartID
| because its on the phone and free, unlike the SIM card
| authentication which is a bit more cumbersome.
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| Hi! I'm working on a similar thing aiming at bringing a digital
| identity to everyone. I'd love to hear more about what you're
| working on. You can reach me at fabian (at) flapplabs.se
| justanothersys wrote:
| I've been coming up with a new pedagogy for the fundamentals of
| interactive and computer art, and trying it out with kids on
| TikTok. Maybe you saw the software I put out a few weeks ago on
| HN called No Paint: https://nopaint.art. However, most of the
| time I'm using pen and paper for this work.
| tixocloud wrote:
| Working on building a monitoring and log trace stack for machine
| learning. What's weird/hard is that we're looking to deduce the
| performance of models that do not necessarily have ground truth
| readily available so it's tricky to figure out if the model is
| working or not.
| mamcx wrote:
| Building a relational lang (https://github.com/Tablam/TablaM) I
| allow myself to get derailed in how provide a nicer
| "linq/iterator" protocol that work inside rust and outside in the
| lang (so, how I write them in rust is close to what the user
| could write in the lang).
|
| The regular iterator protocol, as today in rust, make hard to do
| stuff like JOINS, GROUP BY and other fancy stuff (because you
| need to decompose the computation in a partial state machine.
| This is hard even for a developer, impossible to ask for a
| regular data user). Also, you need to duplicate all that for
| async (with streams) and other abstractions...
|
| I'm now trying to understand transducers
| (https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gqiyej/potentials_adv...)
| and stumble upon effects:
|
| http://mikeinnes.github.io/2020/06/12/transducers.html
|
| that look to my the clean way I wish to use.
|
| But what look easy in python/f#/etc in rust is HARD to do. So I'm
| in a kind of limbo :)
| tekknolagi wrote:
| You and kd5bjo should chat:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23741932
| dsteinman wrote:
| I am attempting to bring 100% client-side speech recognition to
| the web:
|
| https://github.com/jaxcore/bumblebee
|
| Although the first release is not officially out yet, the NodeJS
| code is working and you can install the development version of
| the app server and try out the hello world app locally.
|
| The solution involves running Mozilla DeepSpeech inside an
| Electron desktop application with a websocket server and client
| API that NodeJS scripts can interact with, to receive speech
| recognition results, utilize "alexa" style hotword commands, and
| text-to-speech. The electron app handles all the heavy stuff, and
| you just use a simple API.
|
| A web browser extension can also make use of this API to bring
| these capabilities to web sites, but that part isn't finished
| yet.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's not really "the web" if you have to use Electron and Node
| surely? Wouldn't it make more sense to do it with web workers
| and wasm?
| dsteinman wrote:
| The web browser extension would communicate with the electron
| app server, NodeJS would not be needed in that scenario (the
| electron app includes the nodejs server code). You can write
| your web voice app with static client-side JavaScript which
| communicates with the Electron server through the browser
| extension.
|
| Web Page <-> Bumblebee JS API <-> Bumblebee Extension <->
| Bumblebee Electron App (DeepSpeech)
|
| DeepSpeech with the pretrained english model is enormous
| (1.4GB) it's not feasible to load it into a web worker. It
| can run in a server, but then every website would have to run
| its own server side speech recognition servers which is
| difficult and expensive to scale.
| solresol wrote:
| Dentistry: can we replace dental x-rays with infrared? Can we
| build optical panographs just using the reflections from a dental
| mirror? How can we monitor patients' oral health over the long
| term more often than just an annual visit to the dentist, and
| does that improve oral health outcomes?
|
| Machine learning: what happens when we replace Euclidean metrics
| with p-adic ones? Distance is fundamental to so many algorithms
| (least squares regression; nearest neighbours; anything involving
| gradient descent). How do those algorithms behave over completely
| foreign metric spaces?
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > Dentistry: can we replace dental x-rays with infrared?
|
| There's a US company that has an ultrasonic "x-ray". Signal
| processing is used to find cracks and cavities. It's not well-
| known yet even to Bay Area specialists.
| j88439h84 wrote:
| What's it called?
| nilshauk wrote:
| I'm trying to evaluate ethical licensing so that we can have a
| flourishing Commons of code projects to build on.
|
| https://ethicalsource.dev/
|
| The hard problem is multifaceted:
|
| I would argue that open source as we know fails to balance the
| market. We now have monopolistic tech incumbents in the "GAFAM"
| companies, that thrive on open source while paying little tax and
| outcompeting actual tax paying businesses. I see maintainers
| either burning out or selling out to venture capitalists.
|
| I want to believe in free and open source, but I also see that it
| fully enables surveillance capitalism, casino capitalism and tax
| avoiding monoliths.
|
| So, I realize that I need to move past classic licensing and
| consider ethical licensing that try to remedy society's
| inequalities and injustices.
|
| Call me a cyber hippie, but if I want to build cool stuff in my
| spare time to share I want to maximize its chances of doing
| something good in the world. To that end I'm evaluating some
| ethical licenses.
|
| There are many ethical licenses out there which are evolving.
| Presently, I'm evaluating this one: The (Cooperative) Non-Violent
| Public License: https://thufie.lain.haus/NPL.html
|
| After the weekend I'll try to get in touch with a Lawyer to
| review the license implications. It's arguably not open source in
| definition, but maybe more so in spirit.
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