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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?

#511

Post by tmamic »

isaacyes wrote: post #504
tmamic wrote: 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.

the joys of a fee for service model! What approach are you taking? As a payer, is capitation better? Outcomes based payments?

We are not aiming to change the way you purchase dental services. Rather, we focus on ensuring you don't buy unnecessary dental services.

Let's say you are Delta Dental, these 28% are basically an insurance fraud. If you could get rid of it, you would save billions. You could offer lower premiums and full coverage without any copays.

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

#512

Post by randomlabrat »

escot wrote: post #111

Using constraint programming to schedule generic experiments in an automated lab. Experiments are complex and fragile so we expose a dsl for describing the constraints and objectives of each task so that the biology/chemistry doesn't go awry. One of the hardest parts of this isn't the optimization but the upfront work of defining what is/isn't necessary to be able to encode about an experiment. You want the api to pr…

I wish you all the best working on this problem, very challenging and worthwhile in my opinion. I've worked for 6 years in (mostly unautomated) chemistry and biology labs, and know how finicky experiments can be (in expected and unexpected ways...)

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

#513

Post by tmamic »

tyjen wrote: post #125
tmamic wrote: 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.

May you succeed with this endeavor. An ex-dentist attempted to strong arm me into a receiving an occlusal adjustment because my TMJ popped during a single visit. I knew this permanent procedure is rarely the best solution for the scenario. The dentist subsequently became irate and told me, "You'll lose all your teeth and look like an AIDs patient!" You can probably guess what era he's from. I wanted to file a complai…

Our philosophy has to key rules: 1. Diagnostician shouldn't treat. 2. No-one should review themselves.

This eliminates so much fraud and mistakes.

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

#514

Post by yeutterg »

TACIXAT wrote: post #326
yeutterg wrote: post #20

Working on the problem of "blue" light affecting circadian rhythms and sleep. We launched our MVP, Bedtime Bulb [0], in 2018, and it's now the most popular product in the category. We're expanding out of North America to Europe in the next couple weeks. We've had a ton of great feedback from customers, and we are working on several new sleep technologies that we plan to release this year. It's also been interesting t…

I have had sleep issues my entire life. I've cut out sugar, caffeine (both for other reasons), and used blue light filtering applications on my devices. None made a significant difference. I think another issue worth looking at is people not getting a daytime light signal. I've purchased and ultra bright light that I saw in this post [1] and it seems to have helped more than anything I have tried before. 1. https://w…

Yep, reducing blue light at night is an important part of the problem, but it's not a panacea. We realize that everyone has different sleep needs, and much of our focus this year will be helping people understand what inputs have an effect on their sleep.

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

#515

Post by snarf21 »

joshgachnang wrote: post #439

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…

Not to discourage you but this seems like a tough sell. Most people gain weight because they don't want to plan out or make nutricious meals. The strategy I've always used is to figure out some small number of meals and then just pick one of them. It removes any mental load for shopping and cooking and you only have to figure it out once. It would be useful to suggest very very quick meals that are Y calories or less.

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

#517

Post by rozularen »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #247

I'm helping to build a scalable system for delivering high value and life saving medical supplies to hard to reach places via autonomous aircraft. The system is currently operating in Rwanda and Ghana, and aggressively expanding over the next couple years. Specifically, I spend a lot of time thinking about and writing embedded software. The aircraft is fully autonomous and needs to be able to fly home safely even aft…

It's crazy the kind of jobs there are in the USA that are very interesting and in the vanguard of the technology while me (Spain) get to work on banking. Here we don't have anything close to Toyota, Google or SpaceX. The career path for someone that has a passion for its craft can't be compared between the USA and many other countries. Such a shame...

I wouldn't say I am qualified for a job related to embedded programming (even though I know how to code and it's my job) but even if I was there wouldn't be any opportunity for me to bounce between companies like those in a million years.

PS: Sorry for the spelling, not native.

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

#518

Post by dillonmckay »

Sil_E_Goose wrote: post #147
dillonmckay wrote: post #7

Helping car salespeople sell more vehicles. Lots of webscraping.

I'm helping dealerships better communicate with customers during service. The automotive world is a wacky one.

That seems a bit more ‘wholesome’ than me.

Maybe we can compare notes?

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

#519

Post by jlevers »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #498
syllable_studio wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Interesting, I didn't know that. Are there practical ways to decrease the amount of loss? Do you know what the actual loss percentages are for each?

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

#520

Post by DoctorOetker »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #494
dangerface wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the UPHS seems like a durable system that could store and deliver many more cycles than a battery?
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