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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?

#431

Post by stef25 »

jlevers wrote: post #262
beatthatflight wrote: post #58

Flight search. I hunt deals for Aussie travellers ( https://www.beatthatflight.com.au ), but an inordinate amount of my searching for deals is manual. - initially, all manual - secondly, timers - I know when some airlines do deals, so I go look - thirdly, I found other sites indexing unusually cheap flights, but they're not always the same price on my site - fourth, built a script to search my own site for a route, b…

As some of the other responses mention, this is an insanely complex problem...as evidenced by the large number of businesses in this space. In your eyes, what are the best flight search engines at the moment? Aside from https://www.beatthatflight.com.au of course ;)

Kayak?

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

#432

Post by [deleted] »

troquerre wrote: post #124

We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate Authorities with a distributed root of trust. DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for…

[deleted]

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

#433

Post by fabianlindfors »

Trying to make it easier to prove your identity online. Essentially by creating an ID for use on the web.

When signing up for services that require real identities (banking, insurance, etc.) the standard currently is to require a picture of a passport, a video of yourself, or copies of some paperwork. These methods are all high-friction and provide dubious security and privacy. This is already a solved problem in some countries and I'm working on the equivalent on a larger scale, without the geographical restrictions.

If there is anybody else here working in this space then feel free to reach out!

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

#434

Post by iends »

tmamic wrote: post #336
iends wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in the United States? If so, how do you get past the regulatory hurdles that is each state’s dental board comprised entirely of dentists? EDIT: Sorry, I missed the reviews part. Do you mean easily getting a second opinion based on diagnostic imaging?

I call it "verified diagnosis". We use game theory to extract the truth. Think prisoner's dilemma for dentists. Edit: Not in US, but building planning to launch there. You can't practice dentistry in US if you haven't got US diploma. However, diagnostic dental work (at least in some states) is exception to this.

Too bad there is no safe or easy way to get X-rays just by sending a home kit to customers.

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

#436

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

brenden2 wrote: post #32
buzzert wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like something everybody wants but I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. What are some of the (assumingly non-technical) challenges in such an enterprise?

The biggest problem I'm facing right now is credit card processing costs. The restaurant business is a high revenue, low margin industry. The fees are higher for online transactions (no card present) vs. in person transactions (card present), on the order of 1-2%. I think this is the biggest reason it hasn't happened yet. However, I have a workaround which I think will work.

If they're in the restaurant, why isn't the card present?

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

#437

Post by jr394u »

fabianlindfors wrote: post #433

Trying to make it easier to prove your identity online. Essentially by creating an ID for use on the web. When signing up for services that require real identities (banking, insurance, etc.) the standard currently is to require a picture of a passport, a video of yourself, or copies of some paperwork. These methods are all high-friction and provide dubious security and privacy. This is already a solved problem in som…

Would you mind sharing some of the implementations of how this is solved already, i.e. protocols or related specifications which dictate how this is achieved?

This is a great problem and I'd love to know more.

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

#438

Post by stef25 »

hef19898 wrote: post #349

My current longshot is the development of dropship fulfillment solution as a service. Kind of a managed dropship network for every single dropship vendor and every single dropship retailer out there. The solution should basically take the pain of daily logistics management of the retailers back. Kind of what Amazon does for their own Dropshippers. As a retailer you get full tracking and cost transparency, as a dropsh…

Amazon.de has a dropship network?

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

#439

Post by joshgachnang »

A meal planning app for weight loss. I lost 50 pounds using calorie counting a few years ago. The thing that frustrated me most was trying to come up with meal plans every week. It's quite tedious to constantly find new recipes if you get bored with eating the same meals over and over. The weeks I planned ahead of time, I lost weight quickly. When I didn't plan I would stop losing weight, sometimes for months. So I'm trying to build an app that automatically builds a meal plan for you that you can then tweak.

There's a ton of problems when you're dealing with food though. Calculating calories of a recipe you find online can be tough. On one side, it's a natural language problem to extract the ingredient, the amount, the unit, and the prep/notes. On the other side, it's a data/data matching problem, where you need good data on a ton of ingredients, and then need to pick a reasonable one for "1 cup of milk".

And of course everyone eats and prepares food so differently that suggesting meals they'll actually enjoy is hard without asking them a bunch of questions first.

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

#440

Post by yetihehe »

Prototype for new kind of stirling engine, it's different from others like two-stroke to four-stroke gas engine. That would make solar thermal efficient even for low temperature difference (sub 100°C) or allow for storage of energy by using liquid nitrogen tanks for low-temperature side. I'm currently aquiring better home with garage to develop this idea.

Professionally - change IoT into one big robot, make platform to connect ALL devices with one system, essentially what Bruce Schneier warns us about[0].

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/the_internet_...

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