How does reality work?
How could it be changed in a substantial, positive, intentional way, ideally in a surprisingly short time frame?
Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
101–110 of 633 posts
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#102Professionally, I'm working on the frontend of a radio frequency propagation simulator for 3D "digital twins" of cities/regions. This uses ImGui under the hood, but is wrapped by Python. It's a bit of a pain, but I came up with a class that allows the UI to be composed in a manner more akin to React Components.
For fun, I just implemented a finite-state machine for a videogame I'm working on in Rust. It's used to swap out sprite animations depending on the state of its parent entity. I'm glad to be solving problems I'd never come across in my normal line of work.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#103Flipping back between ~2:
- A tool for resolving external executables and sourceables in Shell scripts to absolute paths (and erroring when they aren't found). This is mainly to make it possible to package Shell with Nix in a way that they don't depend on all of their dependencies being in the environment.
The top level of this is ~easy enough, but identifying executables in the arguments to other commands is significantly harder. So, much of the focus is on triaging executables to flag those most likely to exec, coming up with human/automated processes for triaging the source of those executables to confirm, finding a good way to express complex nonstandard CLI syntax for parsing (in a way that's humane enough to be maintainable and ~contributable), etc.
- A toolchain for single-sourcing documentation in order to generate idiomatic markup for multiple output languages with different whitespace semantics. Because it's really hard to get good idiomatic format conversions out of largely presentational source such as markdown, this includes a flexible language with DIY semantics.
The entire toolchain does something a bit like what you'd try to accomplish with j2cli, some yaml, some jinja templates (and probably some python plugins, if you're trying to do anything complex) with more precise whitespace control. Still very rough/early, but glad I finally bit the bullet and started on it.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#104I'm working on applying game theory to the design of social media algorithms in order to help curb the spread of misinformation. https://deliberati.io/give-truth-the-advantage/
That's a really cool project, best of luck!
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#105I'm going back to basics and learning to write a compiler in the dumbest way possible. I'm starting with a basic assignment (a = 3) and reverse engineering what it would take to turn that into a working executable. Then I'll add more features, lather, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping to eventually turn it into a series of blog posts so everyone can see just how little I remember from college.
I like it so much, reading your comment make exited to reading your blogpost. In moments like this I wish there was sth in hacker news that would allow tracking progress of e.g. your project. In twitter you can just follow people, reddit has remindme thing.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#106As always working on search.marginalia.nu. Search itself is a fractal of interesting problems. Haven't had much time to write about it lately, but I've pretty much doubled the size of the index and re-written a lot of the query logic to make it much better, faster, and more accurate. Will do a write-up eventually, since it may be relatively explainable without getting too into the weeds that the audience dwindles ent…
How big is your index and how many sites do you cover?
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#107I'm currently working on tools for better latent space exploration in generative models. The latent space of Stable Diffusion for example, is incredibly rich, and the traditional txt2img and img2img pipelines for accessing it are only scratching the surface of what's possible. We're talking about billions of images compressed (lossily) into 4 GB — yet we're still using very basic interfaces for interacting with this neurally compressed data structure. I'm working on creating other ways to explore latent spaces like this. My current project is just to dip my toes in the water, and it's an animated music video generator built with Stable Diffusion. I hope to show it off here on HN in the near future.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#108I heard few song lines from a new artist I've discovered. It has me thinking on a problem I want solved. Although, I'm not actively working on it. Why aren't there more employee-owned companies? And I don't mean solely shareholder programs, I mean actually owned by every employee and they are paid dividends of profit after all planned R&D costs. Similar to the Alaska oil pipeline bonus. Even interns. All studies show…
Look into coops.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#109A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…
> so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip.
Any resources and books you'd recommend?
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#110Working on (actually just got my v1 up last night) a price monitoring tool for a bunch of local stores. Trying to prove they are price fixing.