I'm researching ways to scale deliberation and qualtiative decision making in the number of participants. I think this is the base for making politics work and tackling big wicked problems like climate change. It's slow, since my time is limited. But talking with lots of interesting people about ideas and approaches is promising. If you're interested to talk, please contact me.
Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
631–640 of 709 posts
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#632I recently took a few days apart to implement my own SAT solver. The idea is to describe the solution space of each clause by a dnf. Then intersect the solution spaces (dnf1 and dnf2).to_dnf() in a way such that the intermediate solution space representations are small. In the end it is solving ALLSAT, by converting cnf to dnf.
I'm happy that it works well for many small sized problems.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kinda surprised to hear that date, as the UK has a pumped hydro plant[1] which started construction in 1974 and opened in 1984; Tom Scott has a YouTube video about it[2]. It's not all underground, but the machinery is built into a hill and it pumps from a reservoir at the bottom up to the top when electricity is cheap, and is used as a fast-startup generator when demand is higher. Is it really more feasible to build…
The whole problem is there are entire countries that don’t have hills suitable for pumped hydro reservoirs - the Netherlands for example, which has a high energy demand per capita
So the plan is to build an underground reservoir, then dig deeper and build the lower reservoir? At that point, wouldn't it be easier to use the ocean as the upper reservoir, and dig down to build the lower reservoir, and pump seawater around?
How much water do you have to move to power a house, anyway? It must be a lot - a truck pulling a tank of water goes up a hill as part of a journey without worrying about running out of gas, and they could be carrying 40,000 litres or 40 tons of water. Presumably there is no way you could move enough water at home to make a hydro plant - pump it up at night with cheap electricity and run it down at peak time to save money?
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#634Symbolic AI with common sense and explanation built on top of NNs. Here’s a talk I gave last year though I’m no longer with that company and am working on the tech elsewhere. https://youtu.be/thmkaYOayCM
Hey! I saw your talk at EE380, mind getting in touch over email?
Sure, send me a note.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great idea. My suggestion: why not use the Gmail-style johndoe+spotify@ suffix? Just because people would be more used to it. That way johndoe@ also would work.
Thanks thewarpaint. Good point. Having read the below counterpoints though, I'm not quite sure now! I'll look into it.
On second thought they have a point, I have never had an email address with a dot being rejected, but I've seen it for the plus alias several times.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't know I wanted this until now, and now I really want it. I often open a ton of related applications, and then avoid restarting my computer because it's incovenient to reopen everything. I'm on Linux, so I won't be able to use your app, but great idea and good luck!
You can explore running everything in a Linux Container, LXD. Then freeze the LXD if you wish to shutdown, and unfreeze when you're ready to restart, it's how container workloads can be moved from one system to another.
Interesting, I'll look into LXDs. Thanks for the pointer!
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#637I'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…
Maybe check out the https://vlang.io . It might be similar to what you are doing and personally I admire the ideas and decisions the author made so far.
I saw vlang.io a few months ago. Every time I come back to the site, my jaw hits the ground again. I am utterly impressed by Alexander's productivity - it blows me away every time I consider it.
I think V is an impressive language, but it isn't quite geared toward my vision of what a language ought to be.
I am more a Rubyist than a C, Rust, or Go developer, and so my preference is for a higher level language that's a little more pleasant to use and doesn't make me think about some details that I consider "irrelevant". I'm firmly in the "sufficiently smart compiler" camp, and think that I shouldn't have to think about those low level details that only matter for the sake of performance - the compiler ought to handle that for me.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#638I'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…
Are you working on Zipline [1] ? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c
That's what I thought of as well. Great video explanation for anyone interested in learning more.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't really thought this out and I don't have aMac to test on but why not just use separate user accounts? Doesn't OSX already reopen every thing?
Separate user accounts is kind of the naive (and not quite complete) solution to the same problem. Not really a smooth experience in my opinion, doesn't map quite as well to the concept of "working context" as I think of it. Also, you'd have to maintain your list of users, and manually sync any settings, etc. - whereas with Cleave, I'm planning on implementing white- or blacklisting of applications on a context-basis…
I love the idea of what you're building - signed up to be notified for the beta!
> Separate user accounts is kind of the naive (and not quite complete) solution to the same problem.
I too have attempted to solve this problem with user accounts; and yeah it doesn't work well. Files are a pain to share, the log-out-log-back-in process takes forever, and a bunch of preferences don't sync across user accounts.
I particularly like the idea of having a super-low-energy mode where it's just for writing or reading, and saved states for my countless research sessions. Also, being able to freeze my dev workspace and resume it any point sounds amazing.
Excited to try it out!
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
interesting - thanks! Would you let me know what browser/OS as well, just so I can have a look?
For sure. Win 10 Pro x64, 4K screen at 150%. Just tested on Firefox Developer 73.0b6 (64-bit), Chrome 79.0.3945.130 (64-bit), Edge 44.18362.449.0, IE 11.592.18362, all with the same issue [0][1] I think it's just that with the background image being 1880×1253, it isn't wide enough with background-size: auto. I just changed it in FF devtools to background-size: contain, and it looks fine. [0] https://www.dropbox.com/s…
I see this too - see https://imgur.com/a/029OQCn if the parent's screenshots are not enough.