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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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141–150 of 633 posts

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#141
post #113

I’m working on making body doubling a more main stream approach to accomplishing everyday tasks. Body doubling is known within the ADHD community and entails performing a task in the presence of another. More details here: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/body-double-adhd It helps to engage motivation by using another person as the proxy. I wrote a bit about how I think it works here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog…

I don't know if I have ADHD or not, and I don't think so because I'm sometimes able to focus for hours if it's really an end-of-the-world type of situation, but just having someone passively working next to me is 100% useless.

My girlfriend is always working next to me, and that doesn't prevent me from getting distracted every few minutes.

The only thing it helps is for stuff like cleaning the house where the problem is not focus but motivation, and we will be doing the same thing together.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#143
A postgres foreign data wrapper for PACS so you can send and receive medical images with SQL. DICOM, the medical imaging standard, is from the 80's and you need a bit of domain knowledge to integrate e.g. AI with hospitals. This makes it a lot easier. And with Supabase on top you have a very cool backend for building medical imaging products in my humble opinion. We started out solving the problem of anonymizing medical images and now we want to make it easier for our customers to exchange data with hospitals, both for deployment and for extracting large amounts of data for research.

We are also getting ISO 27001 and we are going to open source the entire bundle of policies and the "information security management system" itself on GitHub, so I am also working on that.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#144
I got deep into color contrast algorithms. Human vision is a rabbit hole indeed.

You would think that this is a well established field. But then I found claims in online discussions (including at the W3C) that were obviously wrong on a mathematical level. The more I looked, the more the arguments fell apart. So instead of reading online discussions I concentrated on reading the actual formulas as well as research on the topic. I now belive that the reasons people cite for choosing one algorithm over another are often completely bogus.

I tried to bring this up at the W3C, but the response was anything but friendly. Not sure what I did wrong. I still think that I have something valuable to contribute, but I am not sure how.

If you are interested in more details: http://tobib.spline.de/xi/posts/2022-09-10-contrast-algorith...

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#145
Trying to teach myself linear algebra and deep learning so I can apply it to some interesting ideas I have about making current chess AI much stronger. I don't want to reveal too much since I don't want some Stockfish dev to steal my idea but I'm interested in tips and resources on linear algebra. I always hated matrices...

Interspersed with that I have a huge amount of stuff to implement for my project still(search methods and the like), so I'm working on that as well. It's a lot of code to write and I'm just one guy so progress is slow.

What I'm doing at work would bore you to death so I'll leave it out.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#146

The most prevalent type of security vulnerability in all of software is XSS. (If you count CVEs, which is admittedly a bit problematic). I’m collaborating on an attempt to shift the responsibility for XSS from the developers and towards the browser. The current stage focuses on getting the use case "insert HTML but without any scripts" right. There’s a public specification and prototype implementations in Firefox and…

What is your opinion of Content Security Policies? Last time I looked it was praised as an XSS killer.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#148
post #113

I’m working on making body doubling a more main stream approach to accomplishing everyday tasks. Body doubling is known within the ADHD community and entails performing a task in the presence of another. More details here: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/body-double-adhd It helps to engage motivation by using another person as the proxy. I wrote a bit about how I think it works here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog…

I am so happy to finally have a term for this phenomenon! I find it really hard to explain to friends and co-workers why I prefer to work in pairs, up until now I've been describing it as something along the lines of a motivational feedback loop, but your description of it being a proxy for your own motivation is quite good and I'm going to have to steal that going forward! Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#149

The most prevalent type of security vulnerability in all of software is XSS. (If you count CVEs, which is admittedly a bit problematic). I’m collaborating on an attempt to shift the responsibility for XSS from the developers and towards the browser. The current stage focuses on getting the use case "insert HTML but without any scripts" right. There’s a public specification and prototype implementations in Firefox and…

This is fantastic work! One thing I've been trying to accomplish on my own site is embedding others' HTML fragments along with CSS and/or fonts. I reckon there would be sanitization concerns for those technologies as well? I understand that might be outside the scope of your project, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#150
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with opening your own practice? Investors can only invest in scalable, replicable businesses. Veterinary practices are intensely personal, often specialize in different species and breeds, and can develop unique experimental treatments. The cost of labor is ridiculously cheap (people become Vet Tech's for love, not money), and buildings need not be in commercial centers, so capital costs are minimal. Hon…

> The cost of labor is ridiculously cheap (people become Vet Tech's for love, not money), and buildings need not be in commercial centers, so capital costs are minimal. This is absolutely not true and it's a big issue in the field currently (my wife is a Veterinarian). This kind of thinking is also what is causing a lot of mental health issues in the field.

I'll echo that. Also being married to a vet it's insane how little very qualified and experienced techs are being paid.
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