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Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

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Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#381

Post by minhmeoke »

slotrans wrote: post #254

I am looking to collect databases from real businesses and business-like entities, including those that have failed or otherwise become "past-tense". Read on if you or someone you know might have access to such things. Background: I'm a data engineer with about 16 years in the industry under my belt. Something that's always frustrated me about the way that we design and build systems, is the way that knowledge fails…

An interesting, untapped source of data might be past legal cases where databases were made public in the process of discovery.

For example, during the electronic discovery (e-Discovery) process, the litigants may provide csv files which it might be useful to process into a more structured format. For example, the Enron email dataset: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/

If you can somehow negotiate rights to make these databases publicly available, it might be a good idea to donate/upload the data to the Internet Archive or some universities for posterity: https://archive.org/

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#382

Post by minhmeoke »

kkarpkkarp wrote: post #47

I have an idea to replace posting on Facebook/Twitter where you sell your and your readers privacy with posting on your own blog. To achieve this, blogging platforms (I am aiming to WordPress right now) must remove the obstacles in user experience: people stopped blogging and switched to Facebook because posting on FB has more profits: it is easier (just visit front page of FB instead of logging to wp-admin and doing…

One consideration is that if you remove all barriers to entry, your ecosystem might quickly become overrun with bots and spam.

If you're interested in a less commercialized, blogging-oriented niche of the Internet, you might also want to look into Gemini which is a new, simpler internet protocol that is incompatible with HTTP by design, and primarily designed for sharing textual data rather than rich media content. So it's like a modern effort to create a niche in the Internet similar to the Usenet/BBS systems and Web 1.0 era of the past.

Browse through a proxy like: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/

It's kind of neat in that it results in a small, self-selecting, geeky community with some weird, quirky stuff that you don't see elsewhere on the modern web, for example, discussion of the week about topics like broccoli, or 5 questions of the month among total strangers: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~bjorn/posts/2021-... https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/soviet.circumlunar.space/whole... https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/geminispace.info/search%3Fbroc...

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#383

Post by tdekken »

narcraft wrote: post #354
tdekken wrote: post #164

I am a former principal software engineer at a MAMAA company turned independent educational researcher. My primary interest is in deliberate practice and how to use spaced repetition (i.e., Anki) to develop expertise. I have three primary areas that I am working on and would love to find serious collaborators: 1) I am building high-quality content for math, English language arts, chess, etc. (see [0] for a good expla…

Have you already written about the challenges alluded to in item 2 of your post somewhere? I would love for these resources to exist and I'm curious about the obstacles you're facing.

No, not yet. In brief, some of the key challenges seem to be:

1) Each person's internal representation of knowledge differs (see [0]). Therefore it is difficult to take someone else's questions and answers and expect them to make much sense, be at the appropriate difficulty, or even be relevant.

2) The current unit of collaboration is an entire deck. This is far too coarse grained and impedes finding and adapting relevant material. In addition, it is a pain to later sync if there are updates.

3) The current unit of work is a single card. This has some advantages, but also makes it harder to make changes, see the forest for the trees, and think holistically about knowledge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#385

Post by kstenerud »

goodpoint wrote: post #210
kstenerud wrote: post #44

Ad-hoc data formats like JSON and XML are too insecure for the modern world, so I'm developing a new format to remedy this [1]. It's a twin format, one binary and one text, so that you can input / edit the data in text, and then it passes from machine to machine in binary only (or convert back to text if a human needs to inspect it). The binary format is designed for simplicity and speed, and the text format is desig…

Does it support IDL and zero-copy access? That's a must for safe and fast parsing and general ease of use.

Zero-copy access is supported for primitive and array types (int & float arrays, string types) provided the array was sent as a single chunk (multi-chunk is an exceptional case). "structs" cannot be zero-copy in an ad-hoc format (if you need that, something like protobufs is a better choice).

IDL would be a level higher than the encoding layer, so yes you could use this as the encoding layer for an IDL construct.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#386

Post by minhmeoke »

lnsru wrote: post #243

I want to finish a Time Of Flight camera. My initial application was robotics, but this domain is very crowded. The start is here: https://github.com/lnsru/melexis_VGA_ToF_camera Hardware is not complete, current software is raspiraw with corresponding modified camera header file. Tweaked raspiraw can receive test pattern from sensor chip. I want to offer low cost camera commercially at the end, but have no problem o…

I'm not an expert in this area, but wow, that's quite impressive. Thanks for sharing and good luck with your project!

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#387

Post by sagarsodah »

desku wrote: post #341
sagarsodah wrote: post #112

I’m building tools to augment the lives of visually impaired people. Ping if you’re interested.

I’ve been interested in making an open source version of the Seeing AI app ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/seeing-ai ) with a more limited scope. Contact me if this sounds inline with your ideas.

Not sure if that’s a good idea. Would love to chat and understand better. Happy to disagree but curious to understand!

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#388

Post by doctor_eval »

RivieraKid wrote: post #338
doctor_eval wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross generalisations like “the people there lack humanity” make me very sad. I don’t know anything about the DRC and have never even visited Africa, but I bet the majority of people there care mostly about having good shelter, safety, enough food to eat, and looking after their kids the best they can. Like everyone else in the world.

Well he's just describing his experiences. And I believe they are mostly truthful and that they generalize to some extent , in other words, the stark difference from other countries he's visited is not a statistical anomaly. He has hitchhiked across Africa (from south to north), the Americas and Asia so he has a lot of countries to compare. Are you saying that people are equally friendly, hospitable, kind and ethical…

Yes.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#389

Post by kstenerud »

minhmeoke wrote: post #353
kstenerud wrote: post #44

Ad-hoc data formats like JSON and XML are too insecure for the modern world, so I'm developing a new format to remedy this [1]. It's a twin format, one binary and one text, so that you can input / edit the data in text, and then it passes from machine to machine in binary only (or convert back to text if a human needs to inspect it). The binary format is designed for simplicity and speed, and the text format is desig…

An alternative approach might be to use an existing popular serialization format such as Protocol Buffers, Apache Thrift, or Cap'N'Proto and create or improve tools that convert to/from human-readable text formats to the serialized binary format. For example: - Protocol buffers have a text format mode: https://medium.com/@nathantnorth/protocol-buffers-text-forma... - Thrift has readable-thrift which is a human-friend…

Yes, I had a look at these formats before embarking on my venture. I listed the things I found important in the comparison matrix: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding#-compared-to-o...

To your points:

- Protobufs is not an ad-hoc format, which is a big reason why low-friction formats like JSON are popular. There are many use cases where formats like protobufs are clearly the superior choice, but CE doesn't target those. This is a fundamental trade-off so you can't have both.

- readable-thrift is a diagnostic tool. You wouldn't want to be inputting data like that. I want the text format to be fully usable by non-technical people, like JSON is.

- the capn proto tool page doesn't seem to document how the text format works (or at least I couldn't find any examples). It looks more like a diagnostic tool, not a first-class citizen.

I felt that there were enough pain points, missing types, and missing security features (for example versioning) to warrant a fresh start.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#390

Post by iev6 »

caseyslaught wrote: post #12

I work for a national park in the Democratic Republic on the Congo as a tech lead. Some of the things we are doing: LoRaWAN for tracking and emergency response, ML to identify gorillas by their unique nose prints, and long-range drones for mapping and surveillance, and a management web app. If you’re interested in conservation / sustainable development and associated technologies let me know! Always looking to collab…

This is a great usecase for ML!

Where can I read more about this part of your work?

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