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Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

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Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#271

Post by SenHeng »

unixhero wrote: post #88
SenHeng wrote: post #6

Since I live in Tokyo, it’s about a 3 - 4 hour drive to various ski resorts. I want to snowboard every weekend. So I’m trying to find the best* ski resort I can head to next weekend. Best is a mix of - the ones I enjoy most - but not one that I just visited last weekend - where there has been recent snowfall / is predicted to snow - that I have may have a season pass for - where costs of highway tolls, petrol, hotels…

Well. It's not the answer you want, but the Shinkansen and an expensive taxi ride or maybe a ridesharing with some local dudes might be a feasible, but not cheap answer. Stay safe in those woods! I nearly perished, by getting lost.

I nearly fell into the river at Kagura on New Year's day! It was new snow that hadn't settled yet so every step I took the snow beneath me crumbled. I was on a ledge and trying very hard to climb up, luckily a few Chinese passed by and pulled me up. Then it was a long 2 hour hike back to the lifts.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#272

Post by wes-k »

baxtr wrote: post #126
vekker wrote: post #31

Dreams. I've been journaling my dreams for years and I'm working on an app that makes it easier to (visually) map them out & find patterns: https://oneironotes.com/ I like the idea of accessing other (inner) dimensions during sleep, like an explorer (an "oneironaut"). The problems to overcome are related to capturing and recollecting experiences that only take place in the mind. You asked about the weird stuff...

Is there a proven way to remember your dreams? I’ve read that we dream every night but I usually can’t remember nothing.

1. Set your intention as you are falling asleep by repeating “tonight I’m going to remember my dreams”.

2. When you wake up, don’t move! Stay in bed for 5-10 minutes and try to remember. Once you remember one thing try to ask yourself what happened before or after.

3. Dream journal.

I practiced the above back i. High school. Went from occasionally remembering a dream to remembering about 4-5 a night. Some small snippets and others longer. Was really incredible and I plan to try it again.

Dedicate 30-40 days and see what happens!

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#273

Post by lambdatronics »

comicjk wrote: post #113

Trying to predict where electrons go in a molecule, but using a classical model. This can be done with supervised machine learning - you can use quantum mechanics to get lots of labeled data - but it's a tough problem, because chemical physicists have very high standards for accuracy.

What's the difference between your approach and density-functional theory?

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#274

Post by HiroshiSan »

Simply put, earning a living. I didn't travel the conventional path of high school > university > job, and so I'm struggling to get my shit together, the concept of earning a living (outside of making minimum wage) is so foreign to me that I really don't know how I'm going to do it in a reasonable (< 5 years) amount of time.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#276

Post by closeparen »

a1369209993 wrote: post #225
danielovichdk wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an impossible task. Without direct access to their brains and being able to alter those, you are at a lost cause. Middle Manager Syndrome would be great for machine learning to cure. I hope you come out with your nerves intact

Actually, what they said was: > to appear as if they understand and control their shops [emphasis added] Ideally, the manager would provide coordination and clerical support, and insulation from the rest of the bureaucracy (ie actually managing) without necessarily needing to understand or control the details. But if that's how they appear , upper management will classify them as overpaid secretaries, and gut their a…

Spot on. I know for a fact that it's a need to appear so because the issue was brought on by a change in upper management. The same middle managers had previously just smiled warmly and told me I was doing important work, never asked to see (let alone influence) architecture diagrams.

And I'd like to say I'm surprised and encouraged by the number of people empathizing with this problem; at work it is a lonely predicament. It somewhat dashes my hopes of escaping it by jumping to another firm, but at least I know I'm not the only one.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#277

Post by thundergolfer »

ahP7Deew wrote: post #15

Fully offline, fully searchable copies of personal data (email, tweets, calendar, etc.), English Wikipedia, IMDb, OpenStreetMap (tiles, routing, points of interest), geocoding. Fully offline and state of the art speech recognition. Fully offline voice assistant with almost complete coverage of the most common usage.

I’m working on this as well, but with a different set of content types. I want my personal search to primarily support second-brain functionality for creative work, so focusing on indexing:

- podcasts

- self-authored internet comments (Reddit, Hackernews)

- books

- articles

- code

- music

- lectures

Started it at http://rememex.org

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#278

Post by occamrazor »

fabianlindfors wrote: post #23

I want to give everyone a digital identity. In some countries (including mine) basically everyone has an e-ID which we use to sign in to things like government services, banks, payment providers and much more. This is absolutely essential to everyday life and many startups are built around it. Unfortunately, many countries don't have useful e-IDs and the ones that do are limited to that one country. I want to create…

The eIDAS system in theory should work across countries, but AFAIK it is not compulsory and this functionality hasn’t been implemented by aby country.

Moreover it requires a smart card for the highest level of authentication.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#279

Post by patwillson22 »

I'm working on an fully open source Physical Vapor Deposition System which is capable of producing thin flim solar cells, Ex(CIGS,CDTE) at efficiencies in the range of 15- 20%. The system is designed to produce one 10 watt cell for every 45 minutes. I could go into further depth here but for obvious reasons It would take me a while to explain everything.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#280

Post by thundergolfer »

etherio wrote: post #38

Knowledge. Working on building a self-hosted app that would alow you to save, organise and search your knowledge in one center. It would contain information like notes, bookmarks (it would download the links contents) and in general provide a programmable, opensource interface to preserve the info you'll find useful and even sync with external apis to save your online presence locally (think reddit posts, hn links, e…

Seems like multiple people in this thread are working on this or similar.

Maybe we should start a subreddit for people building this stuff.

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