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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?

#691

Post by kirso »

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…

That's awesome! Where I can learn more? I am building a job marketplace and curator for cool "unknown" companies that people can explore and would love to feature this! A plus point for the impact part of it!

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

#692

Post by kirso »

rozularen wrote: post #517
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 progra…

I feel you, unfortunately, your location matters in terms of your network/opportunities and even a spouse. Frankly, because I realized this I started searching for cool companies to work for that nobody knows and made a side project around this!

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

#693

Post by kirso »

I started my job search recently and realized its a trade-off between earning a good income and being terrible bored of a company mission. I can't believe in 2020 it's hard to find something awesome and exciting to work on whilst being financially secure. Obviously it's not only about company product but also values, culture & people but I realized the major driving force for making career decision was always intellectual curiosity.

Hence I started a website to curate cool & impact projects that people are building that nobody knows because they are small or unknown (yet). So kind of discover amazing companies / make impact kinda thing. Hoping to launch this month.

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

#694

Post by sgtnoodle »

jmorgancusick wrote: post #689
sgtnoodle wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, or just ask them here if you think they would be of general interest.

Going to piggyback on this comment, sorry I am a few days late. Where did you get your masters? I have an EE & CS B.S. from RPI plus 3 years of application development experience in the Fin Tech industry. I am strongly considering swapping industries to Embedded Control--that is what I enjoyed most in college--but I am unsure how to break into the industry. Do you recommend a masters or just sending some apps out? I…

I got my bachelors and masters from University of Michigan. It was really just an excuse to stick around for a couple more semesters and do another solar car race. After a few years of experience, the masters doesn't really matter beyond what you personally gained out of the education.

There are tons of embedded software projects that lack software engineering rigor. If you're good at unit testing and mocking, for example, there's no reason why you can't unit test embedded code. Applying general software engineering practices to embedded code (effectively) is a good way to differentiate yourself.

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

#695

Post by fabianlindfors »

jr394u wrote: post #437
fabianlindfors wrote: post #433

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…

Would you mind sharing some of the implementations of how this is solved already, i.e. protocols or related specifications which dictate how this is achieved? This is a great problem and I'd love to know more.

Hi! Sorry about the late reply, your comment was marked as dead before.

I'm from Sweden where basically every single person has an app on their phone which functions as a digital ID, used by the government and a ton of companies. Every time we sign in to (or sign up for) services that handle taxes, banking, insurance, benefits, payments, utilities, etc. we use our mobile ID. There are a few other countries that I know have similar solutions, for example Finland and Estonia but many still don't. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_signature

The big problem is that these solutions are all different and it's close to impossible to integrate them all. This is the reason why many global startups that require identity verification fall back to less convenient and secure methods, e.g. Revolut, Monzo and N26, to name a few. I believe that for truly convenient identity online there needs to be a single digital ID which works for everyone. This is what I'm currently working to achieve.

If you have any thoughts I'd love to discuss it further!

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

#696

Post by fabianlindfors »

slx26 wrote: post #448
fabianlindfors wrote: post #433

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…

With online fingerprinting, big companies seem to have the problem of "identity", bots and spam prevention decently solved, but at the cost of users privacy. There are many opportunities that could really use a good mechanism to uniquely identify users, know for sure they are real people. This is pretty hard to do (or outright impossible) without the collaboration of governments. But governments will f*ck it up in a…

I think you really hit the nail on the head, thanks for sharing!

Privacy is definitely at the center of what I'm building. My approach is to put full control of their own data in the users hands. Data is only shared with a service when a user explicitly allows it and the user is always aware of what that data is. Your idea of being able to share nothing at all is also something I've been thinking a lot about. Being able to verify an identity without leaking any PII is one of my main goals.

I also agree with you on the issue of governments. There are very few who have managed to introduce a digital ID locally. A large amount of countries coming together and building a common solution seems very far-fetched currently. Where I'm from, Sweden, we have a well functioning digital ID used by everybody. Funny thing is that it was created by the private banks and only later adopted by the government.

It's definitely a hard problem but judging by the evidence it's solvable, just hope I'm on the right path. If you have any more thoughts I'd love to hear them!

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

#698

Post by Amarok »

jlevers wrote: post #262
beatthatflight wrote: post #58

Flight search. I hunt deals for Aussie travellers ( https://www.beatthatflight.com.au ), but an inordinate amount of my searching for deals is manual. - initially, all manual - secondly, timers - I know when some airlines do deals, so I go look - thirdly, I found other sites indexing unusually cheap flights, but they're not always the same price on my site - fourth, built a script to search my own site for a route, b…

As some of the other responses mention, this is an insanely complex problem...as evidenced by the large number of businesses in this space. In your eyes, what are the best flight search engines at the moment? Aside from https://www.beatthatflight.com.au of course ;)

azair.eu for Europe and Asia

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

#699

Post by troquerre »

chinmays wrote: post #685
troquerre wrote: post #124

We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate Authorities with a distributed root of trust. DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for…

This is super exciting and definitely one of the problem in foundations of internet. Happy to help in any possible way!

@chinmays awesome can you join our discord? Let's discuss there we just launched today!! https://discord.gg/9r9wUrq

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

#700

Post by beatthatflight »

ThisMark wrote: post #626
beatthatflight wrote: post #609

Earlier 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…

champion, thanks!
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