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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?

#321

Post by aahhahahaaa »

chiefmcloud wrote: post #153

I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…

I think a problem with this is that if you're at all familiar with how someone speaks or writes you can figure out who they are rather easily.

So there's another weird problem (probably not so hard though): translating conversation within the same language in a way that doesn't lose meaning but obscures identifying patterns.

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

#322

Post by NicoJuicy »

cameronbrown wrote: post #89

Information overload. My current side project is https://feedsub.com . Right now, - it's not great - I started by building an simple tool for getting regular updates from RSS feeds, but longer-term I want to turn this into a system which can absorb all the data streams you're interested in (news, stocks, weather, social, communities) and give you dials (filters, curation, signals, etc..) to surface a healthy amount w…

Something like https://handlr.sapico.me ? ( Dogfooding)

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

#323

Post by adammunich »

martythemaniak wrote: post #307

Solving 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.

A lot of people still use gas for hot water heating in the northern USA. Electric hot water heaters often use too much power for them to be replaced. Some sort of battery-powered heater might help here.

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

#324

Post by easterncalculus »

zo1 wrote: post #304
easterncalculus wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I think Twitter is especially bad in comparison to other sites because it incentivizes people to post their real names, photos of themselves, etc. Even worse for this issue is the ability to retweet, and the trending page of Twitter. Instagram for comparison doesn't have this problem to the same extent because it's about sharing photos and not about following every new trend. This design gives those that live their lives as online reactionaries a 24/7 outrage factory. The trending page is a constant line of pitchforks and threads to bring them to. Regardless of the benefits of the service I think it's hard to deny how the site's design contributes to the problem, at least to some degree.

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

#325

Post by dzink »

jawns wrote: post #170

I 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…

Time travelers would need to be time and space travelers as earth and solar system move perpetually and their location would be different between time spots in space.

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

#326

Post by httgp »

vmurthy wrote: post #296

(It's a germ of an idea but I hope to work on this!) Problem: Public schools in India don't do justice to students. Private schools in India charge a bomb but most of the money ends up in the hands of the "owners" and not enough to teachers (For reference, an average primary school teacher earns lesser than what an Uber driver earns) . The solution : A network of "not-for-profit" schools where the fee structure is re…

Man we need something like this so much. I sincerely wish you the best.

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

#327

Post by jliptzin »

dave_sid wrote: post #303
jawns wrote: post #170

I 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.

It would be good enough to know that there is at least one person somewhere who is actually from the future.

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

#328

Post by chiefmcloud »

cerved wrote: post #308
chiefmcloud wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That’s the interesting tech challenge. Keeping things anonymous, even if a db dump leaks, but still allowing moderation and users being able to block specific people. I’m still digging into the solution but believe I have a simple solution. The key is that not everything is anonymous, you know who you’re associated with. You just don’t know the association between a specific user and the content they authored.

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

#329

Post by lapnitnelav »

jeremylevy wrote: post #91

Automating cloud architecture creation. I'm building a "catalog" of architectures that you could use to create a complete cloud architecture on your AWS, GCP or Azure account in less than one minute. So, for example, you could create a docker-based architecture with CI/CD, auto-scaling, zero downtime deployment, SSL, load-balancing, high availability and MongoDB in less than one minute in your own AWS account. It's l…

This so much.

One of the main reason the big players dominate the Web (in the marketing space) so much is because SaaS is easier to handle (for most people) than having to deploy and maintain your infra.

if you streamline the process so that your regular SMB can build their digital infrastructure and maintain their private data clouds, it would go a long way to help us all with privacy.

A suite of open-source / on premise license one stop shop.

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

#330

Post by marchdown »

guygurari wrote: post #213
chiefmcloud wrote: post #153

I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…

I’m rooting for you. Here’s a thought about a possible trade off between radicalization and engagement. When social media platforms optimize for growth, it makes sense for them to make it as easy as possible for users to share/retweet. It lowers “amplification friction” and allows messages to go viral. The most successful platforms have very low amplification friction, which suggests that low friction is an important…

Unethical Thought Experiments: what if Twitter shrank the retweet button or hid it under the fold to but the brakes on the viral spread?

Put amplification behind a trivial inconvenience that would make knee-jerk retweets less frequent and allow the whole chain reaction to cool down.

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