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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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

#211
1. A tiny script for getting top N posts of past week from a subreddit into a telegram channel. This can be extended in so many ways and I couldn't find an existing solution.

2. An all-encompassing personal knowledge management solution that is effortless and universal.

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

#212
post #200

I'm tackling the issue of managing Reddit saves. Across all platforms (not just Reddit), people including myself like to save/bookmark interesting content in the hopes of getting some use out of it later. The problem arises when you start accumulating too much content and forget to ever check that stuff out. I'm working on a solution to help resurface Redditors' saved things using personalized newsletters. I'm callin…

Just a heads up: on mobile (Android Q) clicking on 'Get started using Reddit' gives me an 'No apps can perform this action' error from the OS. I have the reddit app installed, so most likely the link tries to open the app (instead of opening the link within the browser) and fails.

Thanks for the heads up, will debug and push a fix tomorrow.

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

#213

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

Do you have a link to the 1984 paper?

How can I help?

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

#214
I'm reworking the (already pretty old) concept of literate programming, basing my research on the implementation written originally by Dr Ross Williams in 70's called funnelweb. Given new hardware of modern times all the ugly hacks and compromises of the C implementation (including ugly delimiters, unnecessary terse syntax, not using a recursive descent parser but relying on byte values while parsing text) a new take on the subject might bring it to today's tool chain.

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

#215

I'm tackling the issue of managing Reddit saves. Across all platforms (not just Reddit), people including myself like to save/bookmark interesting content in the hopes of getting some use out of it later. The problem arises when you start accumulating too much content and forget to ever check that stuff out. I'm working on a solution to help resurface Redditors' saved things using personalized newsletters. I'm callin…

Playing devils advocate, I'd really prefer this kind of functionality as a separate browser add-on - i.e. unlinked to my reddit signon. For privacy you needn't require the reddit ID of your users. Simply that they want to save something from reddit to their tryunearth.com account.

I appreciate you raising this concern, I honestly never thought about that.

> Simply that they want to save something from reddit to their tryunearth.com account

When you say that, I envision the extension overriding or extending Reddit's save button functionality by making an API call to the unearth backend. Is that kinda what you had in mind?

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

#216

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

Do you have a link to the 1984 paper? How can I help?

The link to the 1984 paper (from their website): https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6517343

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

#217
post #137

1.) A solver for the unstructured Euler equations. ...I was intending to volunteer time for an local university project investigating parallels between Holographic light with orbital angular momentum and hydrodynamics (in this case the Euler/Madelung equations). Not sure what happened as... volunteers get lost in the shuffle? Anyway, the solver is fun. 2.) Porting my Python code for nonlinear gradient driven optimiza…

I'm interested about your project #2. As you mentioned B-splines do you deal with trimmed surfaces? Would you have any reading recommendations for someone learning about surface optimisation?

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

#218
Creating a [traffic simulation](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/#ab-street) that's both realistic enough to generate results meaningful in the real world, but easy enough to use that anybody living in a city could use it to experiment with some change to cycling or transit infrastructure. Some of the problems hiding in there:

- Getting a representation of a city that cleanly divides paved areas into distinct roads and intersections, and understands the weird multi-part intersections that Seattle has plenty of. [This](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cF7qFtjAzkXL_r62CjxB...) and [this](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/art...) have some details about how I'm attempting this so far.

- Inferring reasonable data when it doesn't exist. How are traffic signals currently timed? No public dataset exists, so I have heuristics that generate a plan. If I can make the [UI](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dabreegster/abstreet/maste...) for editing signals fluid enough, would it be worth trying to collect this data through crowd-sourcing?

- Figuring out what to even measure to demonstrate some change "helps a bus run faster." Should people try to minimize the 99%ile time for all buses of a certain route to make one complete loop over the whole day? Or to reduce the worst-case trip time of any agent using that bus by some amount? Or to minimize the average delay only during peak times between any pair of adjacent stops?

- Less technical: How to evangelize this project, get the city of Seattle and advocacy groups here using it, and find contributors?

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

#219

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

I've actually been thinking about the issue of energy storage a lot recently -- I've read a ton about how lithium-ion battery production is exploding (usually not literally), but it seems unreasonable to store enormous amounts of renewable energy in a device that itself has to be replaced after a certain number of cycles. The device used for pumped energy storage -- a tank (to simplify greatly) -- basically never needs to be replaced.

It's really cool to see a feasible alternative to batteries. I think climate change is the single most important problem anyone can be working on right now -- amazing that you've found such a massive lever to pull on this issue.

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

#220

I'm trying to create a program that can procedurally generate regular plane tilings, in a way that allows them to blend into each other over space and/or time. It makes sense in my head, but I think it won't end up working quite as well as I hope.

Check this out https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse
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