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Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

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Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#331

Post by wizzwizz4 »

lonk11 wrote: post #121
jordwest wrote: post #88

I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory. Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded. Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are o…

I am building a project ( https://linklonk.com ) that does information discovery in a way that respects your attention. In short, when you upvote content you connect to other people upvoted that content and to feeds that posted that content. So to get your attention other users need to prove to be a good curator of content for you. I'm planning to do a "Show HN" post next week for it and would appreciate any feedback…

When and how are you planning to change your Terms of Use / Privacy Policy? That kind of information should be in the documents. Your privacy policy is currently insufficient.

> We only collect your information for the purpose of providing this service.

Okay, but what information do you collect? “Your information” is too broad; if you're collecting my retinal scans or matching me to a behavioural analytics profile, you need to justify it. If you're not (which you're not), say so!

> You can delete your account and all your data at any time (see Profile).

But can I take all my data out? Currently, no; that's not a GDPR violation, so long as you provide it on request, but it's certainly a feature I like to have!

The 30-day deletion threshold for anonymous accounts is (IANALaTINLA) GDPR-compliant, since you have to delete personal information (on request) within 30 days, and that happens even if you can't figure out whose account details you should be deleting. Good job.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#332

Post by fartingflamingo »

kodablah wrote: post #198
jordwest wrote: post #88

I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory. Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded. Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are o…

I have spent a good bit of time thinking here too, on two primary parts. First, in my mind the difference between reddit, FB, twitter, HN, forums, etc is really just configuration. Abstracting just a tad bit higher, you can include Slack and other realtime options. I just want a curated gRPC API that implements it with pluggable auth and let others figure out discoverability and network (not activity api and not with…

> First, in my mind the difference between reddit, FB, twitter, HN, forums, etc is really just configuration.

The big boys are dopamine reinforced network effects incorporated by means of software tech. So forget about aiming for Homer Simpson.

You'll have to be happy with a small, but productive minority. Enough valuable people would rather die than use FB for niche purpose X. Start by convincing them...

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#333

Post by minhmeoke »

the-dude wrote: post #6

We are working on a totally new way to do cold fusion, our only problem is getting enough new fuel into the reactor without disturbing the running process. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Could you use tiny pellets fed in by a linear actuator and gravity, rotary loader, or some kind of a conveyor belt? If you want an off-the-shelf solution that's easy to reload, perhaps you could repurpose the loading mechanism of a machine gun to dispense the pellets.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#334

Post by [deleted] »

kodablah wrote: post #198
jordwest wrote: post #88

I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory. Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded. Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are o…

I have spent a good bit of time thinking here too, on two primary parts. First, in my mind the difference between reddit, FB, twitter, HN, forums, etc is really just configuration. Abstracting just a tad bit higher, you can include Slack and other realtime options. I just want a curated gRPC API that implements it with pluggable auth and let others figure out discoverability and network (not activity api and not with…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#335

Post by wizzwizz4 »

gpa wrote: post #327

The problem - correct string matching at scale. I am aware of fuzzy string matching. The problem is that the two strings can be > 90% similar even if the difference is, for example, one digit in the year of manufacturing. My current solution is to represent the 2 strings as similar as I can based on the available information by transforming (wrangling) the data to match the data as close as possible and then applying…

I'd just slap a GUI / audit logs on top. Show the intermediate data (the “wrangling”), show the computed similarities, show the conclusion (this met that threshold, and the other was equal, so it's category seven).

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#337

Post by wizzwizz4 »

6510 wrote: post #120
jordwest wrote: post #88

I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory. Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded. Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are o…

I see a great blog one time where the author was writing a book in the first post. All following postings were dressed up change logs with many interesting and useful comments. You don't want the notification factory but if its a single post that gets updated you don't get any feed updates at all. Reading the same book again and again looking for the updated sections is also not much fun. Dropping a comment in the lo…

I'm writing a crappy book, and was thinking of using Pijul (https://pijul.org/) to do exactly this! I'd like a better solution, though.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#338

Post by dehrmann »

spiralganglion wrote: post #130
davehcker wrote: post #48

I have posted this here before- hexafarms.com. I am trying to use ML to discover optimal phenotype for growing plants in vertical indoor farms to a. have the higest quality produce b. to lower the cost of producing leafy green/med plants, etc. within cities itself. Basically, every leafy green (and herbs, and even mushrooms), can grow in a range of climatic condition (phenotype, roughly) ie temperature, humidity, wat…

Reminder to focus on nutritive content, flavour, and crop diversity, not just yield. The past 100 years of industrial scale agriculture, with the singular goal of maximizing yields, has done incredible harm. (This has come up on HN repeatedly, so I trust you've seen it, but it's worth championing)

> incredible harm

I agree that micronutrient content has decreased in the past century. Some might be because of scale, some might be that yield gains are mostly driven by macronutrients and water, not micronutrients, it could be selecting varieties that taste better, or it could be depleting the soil.

That said, the US has an obesity epidemic, so there's no shortage of macronutrients. Macronutrient shortages also seem rare. Scurvy and rickets aren't exactly problems.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#339

Post by dehrmann »

pgroves wrote: post #218

How to make png encoding much faster? I'm working with large medical images and after a bit of work we can do all the needed processing in under a second (numpy/scipy methods). But then the encoding to png is taking 9-15secs. As a result we have to pre-render all possible configurations and put them on S3 b/c we can't do the processing on demand in a web request. Is there a way to use multiple threads or GPU to encod…

Since this is Python, which encoder are you using? I'd make sure it's in C, not Python. You might also be spending a lot of time converting numpy arrays to Python arrays.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#340

Post by AdrianB1 »

k1rcher wrote: post #2

We are having atrocious READ/WRITE latency with our PG database (api layer is django rest framework). The table that is the issue consists of multiple JSON BLOB fields, with quite a bit of data— I am convinced these need to be abstracted to their own relational tables. Is this a sound solution? I believe it is the deserialization in these fields of large nested JSON BLOBS that is causing latency. Note: this database…

Large blobs are not the use case of relational databases - this is the starting point for any such discussion. I have 2 current projects where I am convincing the app builders (external companies, industry-wide used apps) to change this, keep relational data in the database and take out the blobs, so far is going better than expected.
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