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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#481

Post by lonk11 »

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…

The "Show HN" post is up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643

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

#482

Post by le-hu »

huksley wrote: post #52

How visually implement process in the app? I.e. how to guide users over complex process they need to do in the app to achieve success? The process might span different medium (write email, do something in the app, check twitter, etc) and different activities multiple days. How to make sure they know what they should do next? Checklist? Emails? Slack? Wizard?

we use little floating checklist from userpilot.com

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

#484

Post by talolard »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #423

I'm not sure I'm close to solving it, but I have an approach that I'd like some feedback on. I have a corpus of text in many Indian languages, which i'd like to index and search. The twist is that I'd like to support searches in English. The problem is that there are many phonetic transliterations of the same word (e.g the Hindi word for law can either be written as "qanoon" or "kanun"), and traditional spelling corr…

A non ml way to approach this is to use phonetic distance, e.g. qanoon and kanun sound the same so they are close.

There is an algorithm called Soundex with python implementations you can try.

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

#485

Post by spurgu »

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…

A bit late to the party but I've been thinking about this too.

One of the main problems with platforms like FB and Reddit is that the posts/discussions are shortlived. They bubble up to the top in the feed when they're fresh and active but then die off and are replaced by the next thing that craves your attention.

Forum posts are sorted in chronological order, grouped into categories. Browsing through the feed you can see what topics are being actively discussed, or you can search for past discussions on a topic you like, and resurrect and old thread if you find a good one, and it gets a new life. I like this model.

One concept I've thought about is something like Reddit, where anyone can create and manage subs, but which wouldn't have the same kind of karma whoring and short attention span issues, i.e. posts/threads would live forever and not get locked after 6 months or whatever Reddit does, and posts would be sorted by activity rather than ADD points. I've found so many good X years old Reddit threads with super interesting discussions which I would've liked to jump in and resurrect but can't.

Of course an immediate problem that comes to mind is spam. If posts with new comments are lifted to the top it invites spam bumps and thus moderation. And/or it could be combined with some sort of karma system (reputation, account age etc).

And, since this wouldn't be a specialized forum you'd need to make sure you could cater to various different kinds of communities, i.e. have good multimedia sharing capabilities (for those communities only wanting to share images/videos/memes), code formatting and syntax highlighting, maybe LaTex etc...

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

#486

Post by sriram_malhar »

talolard wrote: post #484
sriram_malhar wrote: post #423

I'm not sure I'm close to solving it, but I have an approach that I'd like some feedback on. I have a corpus of text in many Indian languages, which i'd like to index and search. The twist is that I'd like to support searches in English. The problem is that there are many phonetic transliterations of the same word (e.g the Hindi word for law can either be written as "qanoon" or "kanun"), and traditional spelling corr…

A non ml way to approach this is to use phonetic distance, e.g. qanoon and kanun sound the same so they are close. There is an algorithm called Soundex with python implementations you can try.

Refer what I said about edit distance. Traditional methods don't work well at all.

The fundamental difference between my problem and traditional spelling correction algos is that in the latter, there is a canonical correct spelling to be used as a reference. In my problem, there isn't. There are different approximate ways of spelling out most hindi words ... there is no one correct way. There are common patterns, sure, but it is too tedious to encode all the variations.

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