Trying to figure out how to scale and secure Twitter. From a dozen people in a room to 2800 when I left, it was a challenge every day.
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Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
101–110 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Hi, just wondering if you've looked at Intel Crosswalk? It's intended to help with issue 3.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#103This is a pathetic answer, but for me its probably an NLP web endpoint I built. The task was to take a query and categorize it into one of several categories provided when the server was started. So, for example, if a user submitted the query "barbie doll", the endpoint would return the three most likely categories: "toys", "clothes" and let's say "office supplies".
The way I did this was by using NLTK to compare the hypernym paths of the words in the query against the hypernym paths of the category names. I wrapped it in a tiny flask app and it was surprisingly fast enough for an MVP.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#104To sum up: dealing with other people's non-open-source code. Various COM APIs for example.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#105While I've had some weird technical problems (I've worn a number of hats across Network/System Admin, to both front and back end web Development) the hardest is always the non-technical issues. A few years ago I was contracting for a company that had a Native American Casino as a client. They wanted to build a gamified app/site to engage their customers more. The single hardest problem was trying to look at the situa…
How did it pan out in the end? Did you talk to the people the app was targeted at?
They ran a small user session with some 'rewards club' players, to get feedback on the MVP that we built.
It did go live eventually but I don't think it's taken off as they hoped.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#106We had a dependency limitation where an SDK we relied on only had an x86 release while our software ran (necessarily) as x64. I was quite proud of myself when I wrote (in a relatively short period of time) an IPC-based (memory mapped files) solution to communicate between the two seamlessly (performance mattered, as we were doing real-time imaging). It felt like a problem that some of my co-workers would have just given up on and said "it's not possible". Might not have been the "toughest", but in terms of time/difficulty trade-off, it ranks up there. Perhaps it would be trivial for others.
Of course, the real solution would be to press the dependency provider to release an x64 version, but we were not a priority of theirs.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#107This is a pathetic answer, but for me its probably an NLP web endpoint I built. The task was to take a query and categorize it into one of several categories provided when the server was started. So, for example, if a user submitted the query "barbie doll", the endpoint would return the three most likely categories: "toys", "clothes" and let's say "office supplies". The way I did this was by using NLTK to compare the…
what became of this project? It sounds interesting.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#108Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#109Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#110I am part of a team created a system that took the complexity of the human metabolism and reduced it down to a few vital statistics that are then used to create a individualized formula that tells people how to sustainably improve their metabolism and lose weight and gain muscle. The amazing part is that it works for everyone because it is custom tailored to them. The hard part here was 30 years of testing, thankfull…
For habit forming, look to beeminder - its interface is clunky and its termonolgy too geeky, but it is also the best way to make "some day" to day (some day I want to lose weight) and keep it up that I have found.
Thanks. That's one avenue we've looked at already. I have also looked at traditional gamification techniques and found them initially motivating for users, but then engagement falls off a cliff. This has less to do with the techniques I suspect and more to do with the fact that people eventually hit a goal weight and think they are suddenly "fixed" and can go back to what they were doing before. We actively work to encourage the better mindset of making a permanent change in lifestyle where our system then moves from educational and informative to simply a tool to continue to plan and keep on track.