I’m trying to solve the hard problem of finding a new job since COVID-19. It’s not going very well :-D
What’s your experience, location, etc?
Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
301–310 of 831 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#302I'm trying to find a way to generate stories using tropes as the building blocks. There's a sample at https://random-character-generator.com/ There's an unreleased version, which focuses more on how to portray characters, rather than just what they are. For example, instead of saying "energetic", they'll be pacing about a bit. I might just pivot it into a story/plot tracker for writers, and use it to fill out the bla…
You might be able to leverage GPT-3 in your work, it'll take the generative writing to the next level:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23722635
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#303I hope this counts as weird enough ... PROBLEM: If time travelers from the future were to visit you, it would be difficult for them to quickly prove their authenticity. SOLUTION: Temporal passwords. At the start of each year, you devise a new password. You commit the password to memory, but you never write it down or divulge it to anyone until Dec. 31, when you submit it to the Temporal Password Registry, which publi…
This has a big flaw. If the future visitors copy all passwords to a usb stick and take it with them then anyone in the present time that gets a copy can pretend to be from the future. Worse still, everyone would believe the phoney future visitors without question.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not going to "calm down radicalization" with phrases like "killing cancel culture" and suggesting that viewpoints you don't agree with on twitter/the platform as a whole as "unreasonable narcissists".
No one mentioned opposing viewpoints except you, and only to downplay real-world harassment as a mere difference of opinion. The radicalization occurring on Twitter is encouraging 'adults' to gang up on others (often children) and try to get their lives permanently ruined over ACTUAL differences of opinion, or for vastly disproportionate acts. So yes, we should use the word 'kill' when describing a force that destroy…
I'd like to maybe add onto that with a personal anecdote regarding twitter:
I've never used it and had an account created from about a decade ago. The only people I had followed when I first created the account were a few random celebrities and public figures. I pretty much never logged in despite many emails from Twitter to remind me of my account. A few months ago I opened it up to look, and I was really shocked and appalled at what I saw. My reaction to it was quite visceral. The best way I can describe the content I saw is just "hate", not the general term hate-speech that people throw around, but rather just people tweeting hateful things and exhibiting what appeared to me to be their hatred over something or someone.
Sure in between all of that there were a few wholesome tweets of course. But for the most part, it was just hate. I didn't really stick around too much other than to maybe add some additional public personas I do follow (I guess in support of them). The whole experience left me with the impression that Twitter and perhaps social-media entirely, are really bad/toxic/divisive to our society, at least in their current form.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got a little lost when you tried to compare musical harmony to societal harmony. With regards to musical harmony, is it possible that it's more or less random? I know multiple cultures have different definitions of musical harmony. I suspect the evolution of hearing also contains random elements. Similar to language, it's not so much about an inherent universality, just a universality we can all learn and agree on.…
The human ear has an intimate relationship with the octave 2:1 and its ratios, so its very hard to believe the convergence of appreciation globally to be random. More dramatically, visualizing the harmonious ratios on objects such as Chladni plates (a field called Cymatics) reveals that there is something deeper to consonance and harmony than meets the number line.
There is some evidence that ratio/octave recognition and preferences for consonant sound are culturally contingent
http://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/papers/McDermott_etal_2016_conso...
http://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/papers/Jacoby_etal_2019_Bolivia_...
Preferences vary individually as well: modern music may feature or favor dissonance (e.g., some forms of metal, electronic)
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#306Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#307Solving climate change of course!
I am partly obsessed with and researching / writing about how you could make carbon-free heating cheaper than fossil fuel based heating. If you can make geothermal systems cheaper than a natural gas furnace, then homeowners would have the same economic incentives as drivers, where operating an EVs is far cheaper and cleaner than ICEVs.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. > something new, that lets you talk with people you actually know. Anonymous Facebook? The problem with that is this: > so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists That's also a problem among the people you know and have added on Facebook, many of them are unreasonable narcissists and the…
You’re not wrong when you say it’s hard. I have been struggling with the problems you’ve brought up for awhile. Re:anonymous fb, I’m not going for exactly that but let’s imagine I was and consider the problem for a second of the homophobic/racist/etc Uncle. The simplest solution for not getting that content is to remove them from your list of contacts. But I also have a theory that this is where there could be a glob…
how will you remove the racist uncle if his content is anonymous?
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#309I am working on my own on a system that creates long lasting human relationships. It is a solution to loneliness. I used to run match.com's research division. I left to pursue this project.
What's the role of cyberspace vs meatspace in your solution?
99% cyberspace. It is not designed to create romantic relationships.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do use Terraform. Terraform is very good to create the building blocks of your architecture but not so much for the user-friendliness part. Let's take an example: You have an architecture with a CI/CD. Great. You add your CodePipeline and CodeBuild ressources to your plan. Perfect. For the CI part, you want your build to start on every commit on every non-master branch. Bad news: CodePipeline doesn't have support f…
I’m suggesting your tool could generate Terraform code and run the Terraform command “under the hood” so you don’t have to reimplement everything Terraform already does. Users wouldn’t need to know about Terraform (unless they wanted to. It might be nice to have a way to export the Terraform code)
Sorry! My answer was certainly not very clear.
I use Terraform “under the hood” for this project.
What I was trying to explain is that the "hard part" is not the creation of the architecture components but the user-friendly features.