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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?

#541

Post by jlevers »

cedricium wrote: post #142

I'm tackling the issue of managing Reddit saves. Across all platforms (not just Reddit), people including myself like to save/bookmark interesting content in the hopes of getting some use out of it later. The problem arises when you start accumulating too much content and forget to ever check that stuff out. I'm working on a solution to help resurface Redditors' saved things using personalized newsletters. I'm callin…

This is a great idea. Rediscoverability is a big problem, especially with the growing popularity of personal knowledge systems (Notion, Roam, etc), which have been discussed a lot on HN.

I take a ton of notes on Notion, but I worry that I'll never see most of them again. Maybe part of the value is just in writing the notes in the first place...?

Kudos for solving out this problem for Reddit!

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

#542

Post by jlevers »

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…

I'm guessing you already know about them, but you might be able to get some useful ideas from Eat This Much[0], who I think is the biggest competitor in this space. It's a very complex challenge -- good luck!

[0]https://www.eatthismuch.com/

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

#543

Post by jlevers »

tmamic wrote: post #537
jlevers wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are extremely moral and extremely immoral people. Some of them are dentists. Absolutely true. However, it seems that other areas of medecine have better systems in place to prevent abuse, and dentristry would do well to follow suit.

Yes, dentistry is in many ways different from the rest of medicine. It's kind of separated from it. However, that is not the source of the problem. It's the fact that average person uses dental care more often than any other medical care, and dental treatments are in vast majority medical operations rather than drugs. Let's focus on the second part of that statement. It means that majority of cost of dental care goes…

That's enlightening, thank you. I was unaware that the type of medical care (within a specialty) can change the financial incentives of the doctor. As someone who was just told to get my wisdom teeth removed, this makes me want to seek another opinion.

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

#544

Post by tobmlt »

peterwoerner wrote: post #531
tobmlt wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both in the python version and so far in c++, I am using my own forward mode implementation in Numpy and Eigen, respectively. (Why? Well, it was easy, I wanted to learn, it’s been fast enough, and most critically, allowed me to extend it by using interval valued numbers underneath the AD variables) Here’s where I do something kind of funny In the AD implementation: Basically just write a class that overloads all the…

Thanks! I am pretty sure nobody does direct optimization on the mesh quality because it is hefty. I did come across a PhD thesis which was doing it for fluid structures interactions and his conclusion was it was inferior to other techniques. I have a few tricks which will hopefully make the problem more tractable. I use FEMAP at my day job have found Laplacian smoothing and FEMAPs other built in tools have been wanti…

Huh, machine learning for high quality meshing sounds like a great idea! (RL sounds like turning this idea up to 11 — exciting stuff and best of luck!)

FEMAP Seems a hot topic these days. Some folks at my work are building an interface to it for meshing purposes.

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

#545

Post by tobmlt »

jlevers wrote: post #540
tobmlt wrote: post #137

1.) A solver for the unstructured Euler equations. ...I was intending to volunteer time for an local university project investigating parallels between Holographic light with orbital angular momentum and hydrodynamics (in this case the Euler/Madelung equations). Not sure what happened as... volunteers get lost in the shuffle? Anyway, the solver is fun. 2.) Porting my Python code for nonlinear gradient driven optimiza…

Would you be willing to explain what the applications of (2) are? I'll admit that I only undersetand a fraction of what you said in that section, but I'm curious what you're using it for.

Sure: the automated design-by-optimization of ship hull form geometry which meets constraints and is smooth according to some energy measures.

Build a functional to describe your ship problem, minimize it: if the solver is happy, you have a boat.... uh, or if you haven’t solved the entire problem, you have some geometry which can be stitched together with more optimization to make a boat.

More broadly, “why a boat?” Answer: because boats have a lot of constraints, and a lot of shape ( Gaussian curvature, non rectangular topology, a need to be cheaply produced, etc etc)

So it’s a good problem to tax your generative design or design space search/optimization capability.

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

#546

Post by invonto »

Our software development company is working on an ongoing issue. In our experience, we find that virtual reality and augmented reality advancements are not happening within our state, New Jersey. Late last year, we set up the Virtual Reality Roadshow. It was our goal to help general consumers and small businesses become more familiar with the benefits of virtual reality technology. We shared our experience and our thoughts on VR in 2020 in a recent post: https://www.invonto.com/insights/virtual-reality-trends-2020...

In 2020, we plan to continue the VR Roadshow and brainstorm new ideas to bring more awareness to virtual reality tech.

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

#547

Post by jlevers »

johnmorrison wrote: post #313

A while back, I posted a list of my long term focus problems here [1] Short list: * Pollution and the climate * Privation * Avoidable death * Interplanetary settlement * Liberty and communication * Transportation My primary focus is developing and commercializing reliable clean energy, because I believe that is the most effective way to further progress in the majority of the above problems. To that extent, I've come…

I'd love to chat -- we have a lot of common interests. My email's in my bio if you're interested.

I particularly like your idea of keeping your entire net worth invested in the problems you're focused on, and I'm curious to hear more about it.

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

#548

Post by JoeAltmaier »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #520
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah total cost of ownership would tend to even things out.

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

#549

Post by BrandiATMuhkuh »

lovetocode wrote: post #381
BrandiATMuhkuh wrote: post #372

I'm helping build a mathematics tutoring system. Compared to classic math learning, we are trying to mimic the strength of a real tutor. Which is, identifying the lack of math skills and teaching those. From our experience the biggest issue students have is, they can't solve an issue because they didn't understand a concept they have already "learned" in the past. It's simple, yet powerful.

I would love to learn more about this product.

Sure. Here is our demo page. https://demo.amy.app We usually white label our product and try to work with bigger companies like publishers to get our products into the hands of students.

But, we are still a very small start-up.

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

#550

Post by pepper_sauce »

davidkellis wrote: post #94

I'm trying to build a programming language that might best be characterized as rust - ownership + GC + goroutines (coroutines with an automatic yield semantic). My rationale for starting this project was that I like specific features or facilities of many individual languages, but I dislike those languages for a host of other reasons. Furthermore, I dislike those languages enough that I don't want to use them to buil…

Sounds like a dialect of ML!
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