Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 709 posts

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

#171

Post by jcims »

coderholic wrote: post #88

Creating the worlds best IP address and domain name APIs and data sets, at https://ipinfo.io and https://host.io . We've solved scaling and reliability (we handle 20 billion API requests a month), and we're now focusing almost all our efforts on our data quality, and new data products (like VPN detection). We're bootstrapped, profitable, and we've got some big customers (like apple, and t-mobile), and despite being a…

Is there a way to correct location data for an IP address? I have a static from my ISP and it’s almost never close to correct.

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

#172

Post by charliemil4 »

learn_more wrote: post #144
DantesKite wrote: post #103

Trying to figure out why learning how to cook is so tedious in a software world.

I'd like to know of a good book for the science of cooking. I hate blindly following recipes. Like a poor man's version of this book by Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-Cooking...

https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering-ebook/dp...

!

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

#174

Post by sathishvj »

I'm making YouTube content to help people learn Google Cloud and also prepare for the GCP certifications: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIGDDqu5DzlaaC4XzXj_4-A

There is an unlisted sample video in there that I've put out for feedback, and I'm making changes based on that. Will also be putting together related content around GCP.

p.s. do subscribe to the channel.

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

#175

Post by dhruvkar »

i_haz_rabies wrote: post #95

Alerting people when proposals are put before municipal councils to develop natural land. I found out too late that a huge, beautiful forest where I live is going to be ripped up and turned into investment condos. So in the interest of giving natural land a fighting chance, I'm setting up a system that will notify users when an address they've submitted is being rezoned. The challenge is obviously scaling, since ever…

That's a big challenge, kudos!

In my one county alone there are 90+ municipalities, each with it's own Planning and Zoning Commission, and most with their own (varying level of) website. I'd say 5-10% don't have a website either.

In your situation, how are you getting data for when land is up for sale/zoning etc.?

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

#176

Post by abhgh »

I am working on something I am calling "compact models" (as part of a PhD): techniques to pack more information into Machine Learning models when their size is constrained in some way. I have put up some of our work here [1] - it has been interesting so far, and the results are promising. I would like to release a Python library soon, well, ...in a few months - my PhD is part-time, I have a full time day job and time management is a pain.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01520

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

#177

Post by tylerrobinson »

makeee wrote: post #139

I'm building a tool that helps people scaffold React apps really quickly (everything from auth flow, payments, DB, form handling, etc, to an actual nice looking UI). It's at least interesting to me because I think a ton of time is wasted on all this and I'd like to help more people get their idea out there rather than reinvent the wheel. If you're interested in taking a look and giving feedback it's https://divjoy.co…

I really like this idea and the execution. Great job.

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

#178

Post by davidkellis »

samatman wrote: post #141
davidkellis wrote: post #94

I'm trying to build a programming language that might best be characterized as rust - ownership + GC + goroutines (coroutines with an automatic yield semantic). My rationale for starting this project was that I like specific features or facilities of many individual languages, but I dislike those languages for a host of other reasons. Furthermore, I dislike those languages enough that I don't want to use them to buil…

Neat! I spend a lot of time working with and on parsers and parser generators. Did you use Sérgio Medeiros' algorithm for left recursion, perchance?

No. I was pretty naive in my initial attempts. I tried for many months to make Laurence Tratt's Algorithm 2 (see https://tratt.net/laurie/research/pubs/html/tratt__direct_le... ) work, but ultimately I failed. I recall running into some problem with my implementation of Tratt's idea that led me to conclude that his Algorithm 2 doesn't work as stated. My reasoning is buried in a git commit message from many months ago - I'd have to go look it up.

My takeaway from Tratt's explanation was that the general technique of growing the seed bottom-up style when in left-recursion - I think I've also seen that idea termed "recursive ascent" somewhere else but I can't place it offhand - seemed reasonable, so that's what I kept working on until I figured out something that seemed to work.

Later on, I ran across https://github.com/PhilippeSigaud/Pegged/wiki/Left-Recursion, which describes Sergio Medeiros' technique at a high level. One of the nice things I used from the Pegged project was the unit test suite. I re-implemented some of the unit tests from Pegged in my own PEG implementation and discovered that it failed at those unit tests.

It took me another number of months to figure out why my implementation failed the unit tests. I re-jiggered my implementation to make it handle the scenarios captured by those unit tests, and then naively thought "hey, it works!"...

All was well until I ran across another set of unit tests in the Autumn PEG parser (see https://github.com/norswap/autumn). My implementation failed some of those as well. After another number of months, I had a fix for those too.

Long long long story short, this process continued until I couldn't find any more unit tests that my implementation would fail, so once again I'm at the point where I think "well, I think it works".

There have been a number of occasions where I've thought "if this doesn't work, I'm just going to re-implement Pegged in Crystal!". Perhaps that's what I should've done. Ha ha! In a few months, when I find another test case that breaks my implementation, I may just do that. We'll see. I hope it doesn't come to that. Fingers crossed. :-)

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

#179

Post by zaphodX »

i_haz_rabies wrote: post #95

Alerting people when proposals are put before municipal councils to develop natural land. I found out too late that a huge, beautiful forest where I live is going to be ripped up and turned into investment condos. So in the interest of giving natural land a fighting chance, I'm setting up a system that will notify users when an address they've submitted is being rezoned. The challenge is obviously scaling, since ever…

Sounds challenging..and agree that adapting this to each municipal area would suck big time of effort.

I tried something similar but mostly to figure where the land is being purchased recently in a region. But then land/parcels/addresses system is all over the place and, even that info is not consistent across cities.

have you looked at data providers who may have this data?

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

#180

Post by tylerrobinson »

surfertas wrote: post #48

Problem: The hassle of splitting proceeds from a service/event/product sale after the fact related to sending/collecting your % share, timing and details of wiring the proceeds. Solution: Pre-set allocations and create a customized checkout so that splits happen on a per-payment basis. Members dont have to wait to get their share. https://www.korabo.io Idea kind of came about after watching my wife, who is a yoga ins…

Is this using Stripe Connect behind the scenes? They are trying to solve a similar problem. I tried to register on Korabo but after I signed up and went to login I got an error saying I needed to confirm my email. Haven’t gotten the email confirmation though, so something may be broken into your onboarding flow.
Post reply on HN