Built the head tracker for the Amazon Fire phone.
Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
11–20 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#12Designing a usable static type system for Forth-like (concatenative) programming languages.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#13Performance tweaking when I used to build Blackberry apps back in 2009. It sucked so much that it turned me off of Blackberry phones entirely, as a consumer and as a developer. Remember these were the days where Blackberry was -the- phone to use. BBPin was red-hot and the iphone was too expensive for 99% of people.
Tweak -> Compile -> build deployable package -> push to phone -> wait 6 minutes -> test on phone -> repeat....
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#14When I was in initial years of programming my first hardest problem was implementing backpropagation in VB 6.0 http://paraschopra.com/tutorials/nn/ (2003)
Then the next hardest problem I found was implementing Genetic Programming in Python (year 2005) http://paraschopra.com/sourcecode/GP/index.php
It was fun but extremely hard for me (at that age!).
After that in 2008, I think the trickiest part for me was to write initial visual editor for Visual Website Optimizer. It involved reverse proxy and inserting JavaScript code into that reverse proxied page, letting the user visually edit the page contents.
Fun days. These days I hardly get to code, though last year I gifted my wife a website (http://wowsig.com) which was super fun.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#15I have been programming for a bit more than three years. Making a half decent app in Cordova for some classes was the hardest I have worked at problem solving stuff in programs. Looking back on it now the code is really, really bad.
Wow, Is cordova that bad ?
Cordova is not bad, trying to program a mobile app in HTML5 is. (1) You have to build most of the UX interactions yourself (2) Performance is a bitch. You can spend months trying to optimize your code and it still sucks (3) Different versions of android have different levels of support for HTML5 api. In the end, you get to use the lowest common denominator. (4) Windows phone reloads your Javascript / HTML code every time someone starts the app giving an obvious "reload flicker".
Basically it is one of those unfortunate cases where the first weeks makes everything look really promising (single codebase and all) and it is only after hard work of several months that you realize that there is no way you are going to win this battle.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#16Running OpenGL on mobile (OpenGL ES) devices. From inside an x86 emulator.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#17Implementing a real-time GPU-based fluid simulation.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#18[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#19Implementing all-pairs similarity search on a few hundred million records. Naively approached, the complexity of this is O(N^2), so had to come up with novel ways to make it finish in a reasonable amount of time and with limited resources.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#20This is exceptionally hard to answer because for every problem I solve I tend to end up looking at my solution and thinking "That wasn't so hard. Why did it take me so long? Am I bad at this stuff?"
To answer the question though, I think probably writing a robust web scraper to search events listings and turn them in to a sharable calendar. It'd be trivial these days but I did it in 1999 in Perl with regexs.