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Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

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Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#551

Post by nadavlidor »

jawns wrote: post #170

I 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…

Why commit passwords to memory and build Temporal Password Registries if we can throw parties which no one attends?

https://vinepair.com/articles/stephen-hawking-time-travel-pa...

Didn't we conclude time travel is unlikely?

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#552

Post by tsimionescu »

j4pe wrote: post #550

Why don't gig workers just work for themselves? Gig apps are basically trivial to engineer in 2020 until they get scaling problems, largely due to the contributions of the open source community. It would be nice if there were also open source tools for people's gig businesses, so they didn't have to sell their labor through a company extracting such a heavy rent.

The whole idea of the so-called gig economy is that you have a huge platform that connects gig workers to clients. How could you replace that with one app for each worker? Would you install 200 taxi apps and start trying each of them when you want a cab? Or would you order an Uber?

And if you are envisioning an open-source platform, who will run it? Who will vet workers on it, even to the basic level that Uber does (e.g. Make sure they are real people, have a driver's license, and a functioning car)?

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#553

Post by oscargrouch »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #63

Not tried yet but I’d love to make a JS front end library to “bring your own storage” so that if I provide you with an app online (think SPA) it can then save the data to where he used wants (s3, Dropbox, local disk using extension, etc.) Another similar idea is a very simple rest protocol so that you can save to server and then make it easy to self host it. I like the idea of people building apps as web pages withou…

Im almost finishing something that can do this, and my hope is that it can be a "browser dissident".

The storage can be shared through bittorrent with applications and data(files and key-value database) already layed out on top of a userspace filesystem layer (the key-value goes through a sqlite btree).

All the data blocks can be shared thought bit-torrent, and everything, including the ui apps and the service application are also shared the same way.

When the dev application is launched, there's a middle-man that works like a server instance (the developers have total control into what is handled via RPC and the RPC api layout), and will launch rpc services, where the embedded application will consume by opening a url served/routed through the central host process (that centrally manages applications, processes, ipc, rpc, data, etc)

I've made this starting from a Chrome codebase, so its multi-process, with a web engine embedded (that will only be used by the ui application) but that you can control much better through your application api, aka the UI process.

The first language that have access to this is swift.. so the devs will deploy in their shared storages code/binaries for the rpc handlers (the app instance or service process) and the ui applications that happen to have full access through an api to the web layer/renderer.

It was hard to get where i am right now, but im almost finished, and even now, it looks pretty cool already.

I think that with a little more work, it can even serve to create not just p2p applications, but also distributed with pools of servers working through RPC with a help from the p2p layer.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#554

Post by [deleted] »

tobr wrote: post #466
LordDragonfang wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A big difference is that the language itself doesn't allow styling (like CSS), the downside being you get less flexibility but the upside being it will render correctly on any display with any resolution. HTML without styling will render correctly on any display with any resolution. The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketin…

> The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketing says so. Wait, what? Are we on different webs? The facts of the history of the web tell us that some of the most popular services for publishing are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, etc - places that allow for very limited custom styling. I think you misunderstand what OP is t…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#555

Post by elric »

crabl wrote: post #513

Existing mediums for note-taking (Evernote, Notion, Roam Research) are not sufficient for doing knowledge work over long periods of time. The functions these incumbents serve are primarily as “stores of knowledge” that we save because it’s interesting in the moment but never read through or “scratchpads” that we use once and never get rid of, which end up cluttering our information space like a junk drawer full of sh…

Sounds interesting, though it seems similar to Zettelkasten in its outset. Does this mean you're working on something concrete?

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#556

Post by prerok »

Jommi wrote: post #439
wiseleo wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal experience with multiple countries. Studied in both USSR and USA. Witnessed many students struggling in USA. You are right though, many parents can’t teach. That’s the problem I am trying to solve - parents shouldn’t have to go to school with their children.

I didn't mention parents not being able to teach. I just asked where your assumption for that is coming from. Just wondering as I haven't heard of this at all in my home country. Homework is usually quite clear, and the basics to get through it are made clear in the classroom. We had separate times for learning maths, and doing exercises. Have you thought maybe your assumption is based on very very old anecdotal data…

That sounds good and maybe the country you are from does not have this problem (anymore).

The parents I know from my home country are telling me that their kids are often struggling and are overwhelmed by the homework assignments. While this is already recognised also by the board that created the curriculum the changes are slow and half-hearted.

In my opinion, however, that is not even the problem, nor is it the problem that they are trying to solve. We usually forget that teaching is not "transfer" of knowledge. Each person actually recreates the knowledge in their own head and tries to fit it in with the rest of the world they know.

I believe that the best solution to education is to be able to personalize the new content in a way that naturally extends the student's knowledge. As already stated this may mean backtracking a little to be able to put the new knowledge onto a good foundation.

Normally, teachers cannot do that for each student individually so getting a program that could do that customization would be a great win.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#557

Post by elric »

alexyz12 wrote: post #392

I am building a database for human movement. Right now each exercise or pose or movement is indexed by its name - Downward dog, squat, handstand, etc. But this gets confusing when multiple names apply to the same movement. The true identifier is the motion of your limbs in space. I want to encode that motion/position so that if you try and upload L-sit handstand and also L-sit, it tells you that you are try to upload…

In case you weren't aware, exrx.net has a huge database of exercises and which muscles/joints they affect.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#558

Post by c3534l »

crabl wrote: post #513

Existing mediums for note-taking (Evernote, Notion, Roam Research) are not sufficient for doing knowledge work over long periods of time. The functions these incumbents serve are primarily as “stores of knowledge” that we save because it’s interesting in the moment but never read through or “scratchpads” that we use once and never get rid of, which end up cluttering our information space like a junk drawer full of sh…

You've very eloquently put to words my disappointing experiences with that. I hope that someone who understands the problem that well that they can state the problem so unambiguosly, will be able to deliver a novel solution.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#559

Post by joe-collins »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #515
joe-collins wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to feel that a crucial feature missing from online discourse is the influence of third parties to the conversation. If you have a conversation in meatspace, sufficiently nearby third parties send signals, because they cannot help but hear you (setting aside headphones or the like). Without entering the conversation, they can communicate by means like a change in stance, a muffled laugh, a roll of the eyes.…

Up/downvotes on Reddit/HN/etc. are, I think, supposed to be this. Even if Reddit users stuck to the guidance that the downvote button is to hide disruption rather than to disagree, saying nutty stuff "loudly" would count as disruption.

The flaw in HN/reddit votes, Twitter faves, FB likes, etc is that not all persons who see a submission will use them. Every silent observer contributes to that illusion of assent that helps entrench deviant behavior.

Timelines are great tools for skimming content, but while we can aggregate content easily enough ("scan the room"), we have no tech solution for returning the social feedback that meatspace society relies on ("the room fell silent"). You could force that feedback by turning the timeline into merely a historical lookup, and delivering new posts to the user individually and not letting them return to the rest of the app without interacting with it in some way. Also, block unregistered users entirely, unless they can be locked into the same use pattern by some means that escapes me at the moment.

(If we split off into sci-fi dystopia land, measure the user's emotional state as they scan each post and accumulate those scores back to the author. This is terrible, please no one ever implement it.)

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#560

Post by meheleventyone »

dropofwill wrote: post #478
marchdown wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unethical Thought Experiments: what if Twitter shrank the retweet button or hid it under the fold to but the brakes on the viral spread? Put amplification behind a trivial inconvenience that would make knee-jerk retweets less frequent and allow the whole chain reaction to cool down.

Instagram doesn’t have a share/repost feature, but people still do it a lot, either manually or through 3rd part integrations. This leads to other problems like blocking someone, but still seeing their content because it gets reposted a lot.

Twitter didn’t either in the beginning.
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