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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?

#31

Post by throwawayacc2 »

volkk wrote: post #20
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #2

One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…

this is absolutely bonkers, but one of the more unique things i've read on here. i'm sure there are a ton of tax loopholes that exist, but how do you find these? just reading the IRS website?

IRS equivalent of the jurisdictions I fall under, talking to friends, talking to people who are into this, forums. I’m lucky to have a very good account who often gives me suggestions and who is happy to validate or invalidate my crazier ideas. The same way you get into any hobby I guess.

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

#32

Post by durkie »

koeng wrote: post #6

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…

this sounds so cool! i wish you the best luck with it.

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

#33

Post by omeysalvi »

qsort wrote: post #17

I'm on a (currently very experimental) project where we're trying to answer natural-language queries using data from an arbitrary database (given hypotheses on the schema). The natural-language plaintext is fed into a language model that annotates it. That output is converted into an intermediate representation based on relational algebra, which we manipulate and finally compile to SQL. It's probably not scientifical…

Are you working on the Yale Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Challenge? Are you already on the leaderboard? The topic has always fascinated me and got me learning natural language processing to understand how it works.

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

#34

Post by qsort »

solardev wrote: post #21
qsort wrote: post #17

I'm on a (currently very experimental) project where we're trying to answer natural-language queries using data from an arbitrary database (given hypotheses on the schema). The natural-language plaintext is fed into a language model that annotates it. That output is converted into an intermediate representation based on relational algebra, which we manipulate and finally compile to SQL. It's probably not scientifical…

Kinda like Wolfram Alpha?

Sort of a Wolfram Alpha that hooks up to your own SQL DB, yeah.

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

#35

Post by smcn »

High level: finding the next big meme stocks (which morphed into finding any stock that could increase a lot)

I was pretty late to GME, despite having been on Reddit for a good few years. I started researching what had happened, and where the conversations were taking place just trying to understand where to place myself to be a part of the next one. I ended up checking out the typical r/WallStreeBets and the other big trading subreddits but I always felt that I'd need to devote 100% of my time to Reddit in order to capitalise on any of the information. So I built a scraper to do the heavy lifting for me. That worked well. Then I started trying to find ways to identify the good stocks from the bad. That worked even better. So I turned it loose onto many different social media platforms where people discuss trading.

It worked well enough that I ended up quitting my job to develop it and trade full time. There are still improvements that I'm working on but I think that'll always be the case.

A great proof of concept of this is BBBY last month. Out of nowhere it went from ~$5 to $30. There was no real business reason for this, just rumour and speculation. It won't be the last.

I don't know if links are allowed but if you want to follow along, it's https://feetr.io (unfortunately not accepting any more beta users currently, but all data is posted to Twitter until we launch). There's also a leaderboard at https://feetr.io/leaderboard if you're only interested in the big numbers.

The tech stack is 100% lisp. I use CCL locally, SBCL on AWS. Also, hunchentoot will power the backend when it launches. I mention that because a lot of people have this fear that hunchentoot is slow or something but in my case it's pretty rapid. Of course, make sure you're writing fast code, but it's not the bottleneck that I think people think it is.

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

#36

Post by tiniuclx »

Deploying wireless networks within legacy building automation systems. Most of these systems communicate through twisted wire pairs routed through the walls - tearing the walls down and upgrading this technology is very expensive and inconvenient. However, wireless Thread-based IPv6 networks can be installed fairly easily and take advantage of the internet technology that's already there, and also interoperate with the existing kit through e.g. a gateway device.

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

#37

Post by sandreas »

I'm currently working on a file indexer for my pet project tonehub[1] (an audio API like navidrome or audiobookshelf). I thought this is gonna be an easy task, but after running into a lot of problems it turned out that this is indeed an interesting problem to solve. Just to name a few problems I ran into:

- Performance: How to scan files as fast as possible?

- Tag-Storage: How to store audio tags as generic as possible?

- File-Watchers: How to prevent fully indexing the filesystem over and over again and only react to changes?

- File-Sources: How to manage multiple file scanners as efficient as possible?

- Cancellation: How to cancel running tasks, when File-Sources are removed?

- Moved files: How to not lose all customized information (rating, playlists, playcount, etc.) when a file gets moved to another place?

- and many more :-)

[1] https://github.com/sandreas/tonehub

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

#38

Post by hk__2 »

I’ve been learning Italian for a few years and one thing that’s frustating is searching for words I don’t know. Italy has a lot of local languages/dialects that influence regional variants of Italian; it’s common to see dialectal words enter the mainstream Italian language. The largest dictionary, Treccani, is very good but often misses words that are either too recent / vulgar / dialectal.

There are various other big dictionaries and websites specific to different dialects, but I don’t want to have to search on each of them by hand.

I’m currently working on a meta-dictionary, which is a fancy name for unique search engine for all the dictionaries I can find out there. It’s not finished but so far it works great; I use it almost daily.

I started with Phoenix (Elixir framework) and Svelte to learn them but I ditched Phoenix because it was a hell to work with how implicit things are there (no import; just assume that variable is defined "somewhere") and went back to a very basic Python Flask app that serves an API for Svelte.

Nothing very fancy on the tech side but it’s interesting to deep dive in the languages of Italy and learn a lot of things about both Italy and linguistics at the same time.

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

#39

Post by mirror_neuron »

dbingham wrote: post #14

Academic and Scientific publishing. It's the primary source material of human knowledge. It should be completely open and accessible to everyone with no barriers to access the literature or to add to the literature. The structure it currently takes - academic journals - made perfect sense in the 1600s when that structure was developed, and it continued to work reasonably well for distributing academic results up into…

If you haven’t heard of it, you may be interested in openreview.net

They operate mostly in the computer science academic community, last time I checked.

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

#40

Post by throwawayacc2 »

solardev wrote: post #18
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a bit actually ( for me at least ) seeing as there’s progressive taxation. I’d reckon at least 30k per year. Probably more. I take out only 11k or so per year from the company as personal income. That’s the tax free bracket. The rest I use is just expenses. And I pay myself minimum wage as well. Also tax free, but qualifies me for national insurance :D I love the tax system!

So you make enough and just don't really want to pay taxes, so it's a fun side hobby? Heh, that's such a foreign mentality to me, but to each their own. Do you think the tax money serves any societal good at all? Is it worth paying any tax or would you rather avoid all of it if you could?

I will answer your questions but first I want to show you something. It’s the link at the bottom.

In the UK there’s something called IR35. Without getting into to much detail, the client will decide if you fall inside or outside. If you are inside or outside you will pay different amounts of tax.

Not that long ago I was offered £1000 per day inside. That seemed like a really good rate to me. Or so I thought. In a month, 21 working days, that’s £21k per month, how much can taxes be right? Let’s call it £17k - I mean c’mon, £4k per month in taxes is already ludicrous. I couldn’t possibly be more. Right?

Please go to the link and plug in £1000 per day. Look at what it says you get cash in hand at the end of the month and tell me, does that seem ok? Is that tax worth paying?

https://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/insideir35contractorc...

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