Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

news.ycombinator.com

491–500 of 709 posts

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

#491
post #43

Dental treatments, besides being very expensive, are often (up to 28%) unnecessary. This happens because no-one keeps dentists in check. I am trying to make dental treatment and diagnosis reviews easy, cheap, reliable and fast.

I seriously hope you're able to succeed.

Thank you!

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

#492

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…

This is an almost* solved problem, depending on how low-friction solution you consider solved. Just use X509 PKI. Have your real world identity issuing agency (whatever that is in a specific country) become a CA, issue personal cert and store it in crypto-hardware. Smart-card interface is rarely present (generally requires specific hardware), USB requires drivers. Heck, the key can even live inside your SIM card if y…

From a technical aspect I agree that it's definitely solved! I'm building my service on top of PKI for this reason.

The problem lies with the issuing and trust. Many countries do not issue e-IDs and it's not easy for a business to support all the ones that do. Take for example my country, Sweden. Basically every single citizen has an e-ID and it's used for everything. Yet I can't use it if I want to sign up for a non-Swedish service such as Revolut, N26, Transferwise etc.

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

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of treatments make that 28% "unnecessary?" Regular cleanings too frequently?

This is anecdotal, but I remember reading an article about a dentist who was convicted of doing expensive and completely unnecessary surgeries on many of his patients, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient in some cases. I can't find the article, unfortunately.

I believe Atlantic had such an article recently. Good starting read is "How dentists rip us off" from Readers Digest.

However, it's a bell curve. There are extremely moral and extremely immoral people. Some of them are dentists.

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

#494

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

Pumping water up a mountain to store energy has been used around the world with much success, in my opinion it seems to be the most realistic way to store energy efficiently. If you can remove the mountain you could scale this out to every one in the world and single handedly solve this problem. There will be other problems to overcome but someone will figure it out why not you? I wish you all the best in this very i…

That's about 90%+ efficiency pumping it up, and generating it down (electrical conversion). So maybe 85% total storage efficiency. How's that compare to battery or other storage systems? Lithium is 98% by some sources.

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

#495
post #487

I am working on an underwater recording studio. We are building a "3D Telescope" underwater to listen to the ocean. 28 hydrophones mounted on five 5 meter beams connected like a starfish. It will then compress the data and telemeter it home real time. https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/whoi-awarded-1-... Additionally I just won a grant at work to begin designing and building an open source underwater glider…

Does the surface buoy generate power? How is it powered?

I thought of doing something similar but based on a single vertical line, it probably needs to be flat to account for flows and thermal gradients refracting sound.

What cpus does it use? Is there a local backup of the sound field on the buoy? Is the full sound field sent up, or does it have to be "pointed at" something?

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

#496

Why I can’t get through a day without anxiety. Many years of research, consulting with experts, running experiments and correlating data. It’s a hard problem.

Have you tried a non-verbal approach? I.e. 'authentic movement', guided dreamlike meditation, ecstatic dance? In a sense reversing the Moravec's Paradox (1) and letting the older, bigger, more complex brain take care of things.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds challenging..and agree that adapting this to each municipal area would suck big time of effort. I tried something similar but mostly to figure where the land is being purchased recently in a region. But then land/parcels/addresses system is all over the place and, even that info is not consistent across cities. have you looked at data providers who may have this data?

Agreed, the differences between municipalities makes this really hard to scale. If data providers like the ones you mention don't exist, the two ideas that immediately come to mind are a) becoming that data provider (obviously), or b) building a platform for municipalities to store their land ownership data on. Both sound like interesting problems, and it would be awesome if municipal-level land data was available at…

Exactly —- while the alert system is interesting and does have value, if they are putting in the tough, long, and grindingly harsh effort to compile these disparate data sources, that itself is the moat and becomes the product. Definitely worth doing!

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

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually been thinking about the issue of energy storage a lot recently -- I've read a ton about how lithium-ion battery production is exploding (usually not literally), but it seems unreasonable to store enormous amounts of renewable energy in a device that itself has to be replaced after a certain number of cycles. The device used for pumped energy storage -- a tank (to simplify greatly) -- basically never nee…

Thanks! Yes, and our research agrees that the short-life of Li-ion is a problem, and it's one of the reasons why we believe our solution has so much more promise than Li-ion for grid scale storage. The pump/turbine technology we use is the same that's been used for a hundred plus years for traditional pumped hydro dams, and the maintenance cost is very low. The life of a project is 40+ years. And in reality it can be…

Hydro has more loss, which is worrisome. Maybe 5X the loss per cycle than battery?

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

#499
I'm working on strong AI using natural selection and reinforcement learning to develop an intelligence not necessarily modeled to ours.

What I can't figure out is what to use as inputs, similarly to the human senses, so that it doesn't become too specific, i.e. weak, but instead remains general and able to understand the binary language computers use.

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

#500
post #43

Dental treatments, besides being very expensive, are often (up to 28%) unnecessary. This happens because no-one keeps dentists in check. I am trying to make dental treatment and diagnosis reviews easy, cheap, reliable and fast.

I suppose it won't save me, but <3 for working on this. I need work done, but I don't have dental insurance, will have to pay out of pocket, and have yet to overcome the analysis-paralysis problem of finding someone who'll charge a fair price, do good work, and won't add any more holes than I need.

One of the reasons I keep working on this project is that I am in a similar situation. When I started researching this topic, I did a test. I made x-rays, and my friend dentist took dental photographs of me. Then I had sent these over email to 7 independent dentists. Recommendations I got where as diverse as the ones from "How dentists rip us off" article by Readers Digest. I haven't done any of recommendations except for 2 fillings that even I was able to recognise on the images. For the rest, I am going to use my app to find the best solution.
Post reply on HN