How do I satisfy the needs of non-technical middle managers in engineering to appear as if they understand and control their shops, while minimizing damage to those shops?
Why not remove them?
Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
441–450 of 831 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#442Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#443Private file access between computers. Even in 2020 it appears that building a connection between machines (macOS, Linux and Windows) requires a miracle if you don't like to share everything with cloud providers. cryo file mangager is an attempt to get rid of the hassle: https://cryonet.io
In addition to the other suggestions, you can run Nextcloud on any machine you control and sync to computers, mobile devices, etc.
This is a well-solved problem.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well if you're waiting for an invitation, it sounds very interesting!
Alright here it goes. What we're basically doing is using thermal evaporation to lay down thin films of metal on top of each other in a high vacuum environment. We're then patterning the cell with a fiber laser to produce the cell traces and patterns needed to cell size. Here's an example of system that does what i've just described in the context of creating CDTE cells. Note that it doesn't use a laser to create the…
This sounds cool! Building Scientific Apparatus is a truly excellent resource.
Two questions: (1) Could you get away with an inert atmosphere? I'm not familiar with the pros and cons with respect to PVD. (2) It sounds like your vacuum setup will have a long cycle time from vent to pumpdown to operation. A load lock with a (turbomolecular?) pump adds quite a bit of expense. What's your approach to achieving high throughput?
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why have you chosen to express this point in such a trollish way? We've already received complaints about it. It sounds like you're trying to say something about the danger of such systems being abused by the state in holocaust-like situations, but the wording is so odd that it's unclear what your real intent is.
FWIW, I didn't read that comment as trollish at all. It's quite awkwardly written, and it could do with scare quotes around "undesirables" to make it clear that it refers to the view of authorities in their scenario rather than the view of the comment author, but which part of it is trollish? My understanding of the comment was expressing a concern that some kind of universal identity system would undoubtedly become…
I actually specifically omitted the scare quotes since, in such a situation, from the perspective of the identity system creator, the victims would in fact be undesirables.
It's hard to give a reader a example of someone who they actually believe is a Evil Mutant(TM) who clearly (to that same reader) is a innocent victim, and I didn't bother to try in favor of "well obviouly a non-negligible portion of 1930s Germans agreed with the Nazis".
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#446Hard problem: AGI. But with my own rules: not OpenAI/Deepmind style put-more-computation-into-it solutions.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#447Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#448Problem: A lot of professional jobs spend a shitload of time in front of the computer doing nothing else than googling or research on websites, taking notes (or transforming that knowledge to another medium or file) and repeating that all over the next day until they come up with a conclusion.
Idea: A web browser for self-automation that learns semantics and sentiment of content on the web, whilst trying to respect references or articles’ sources to recorrect the ground truth.
Solution: Still far away from it, but am implementing a peer to peer Web Browser that can share its information (or states) with trusted peers. Trying to implement a recordable, editable and repeatable GUI for everything, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth
All kind of feedback appreciated!
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#449I 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…
Somehow all time travellers seem to guess that my codephrase is password[current year].
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#450I 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.
The space-time continuum stays the same. So the time travelling device (if it’s a decent one) should automatically compensate for this.