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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?

#701

Post by koeng »

webmaven wrote: post #383
koeng wrote: post #61

I’m trying to figure out how to ship DNA effectively. It’s really inefficient right now, so I’m genetically engineering bacterial spores to make it a lot better. Not sure if people will adopt, but at least it’ll be 10x better than what is currently available!

Hopefully the spores are non-viable in some way (sterile, require an exotic growth medium, terminator genes, etc.)?

They won’t be. I definitely thought deeply about that aspect, but am choosing to not make them non-viable for the following reasons:

1. Payloads are in domesticated strains, which are less efficient than wild strains, which are already global

2. Exotic growth media requirements make the cells only for wealthy organizations, which is status quo and aren’t target audience

Of course, if good reason comes to change that, I would.

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

#702

Post by vekker »

FailMore wrote: post #216
vekker wrote: post #31

Dreams. I've been journaling my dreams for years and I'm working on an app that makes it easier to (visually) map them out & find patterns: https://oneironotes.com/ I like the idea of accessing other (inner) dimensions during sleep, like an explorer (an "oneironaut"). The problems to overcome are related to capturing and recollecting experiences that only take place in the mind. You asked about the weird stuff...

Hey, I also did a lot of work on dreams - I have also journaled my dreams for years and had therapy at the same time. I got super into them, read a bunch about them, even did a psychology masters to spend time researching them. I couldn't find theory that matched with my experience so I wrote this paper on them: "A Suggestion for a New Interpretation of Dreams: Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering." http…

Hey Joshua, thanks for your kind comment! Very interesting thesis in your paper.

Do you think that besides as a framework for anxiety diagnosis, this could suggest lucid dreaming as part of the therapeutic treatment? Consciously inducing lucidity and choosing confrontation of the dream scenario rather than defaulting to avoidant behavior?

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

#703

Post by dredmorbius »

dave_sid wrote: post #303
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…

This has a big flaw. If the future visitors copy all passwords to a usb stick and take it with them then anyone in the present time that gets a copy can pretend to be from the future. Worse still, everyone would believe the phoney future visitors without question.

Time travel and democratic governance are mutually incompatible.

Also lotteries.

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

#705

Post by anilgulecha »

akrymski wrote: post #662

A new Web. Today's web is a collection of applications that largely provide a frontend for browsing data. The applications and data they contain are silos: there is no easy way to separate the data from functions and compute across datasets. Every application must (re)invent its own UI for querying and displaying data. But if the web is actually a collection of datasets, why don't we have a web browser for consuming…

Completely agree on this. Have sent you an email to discuss more.

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

#706

Post by dredmorbius »

sameerds wrote: post #679
dave_sid wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but on that case the earlier suggestion of just asking them for a stock market prediction would be good enough without implementing the password system.

But then you have to wait for the stock market prediction to come true. Instead, since you already know your temporal password for the year, the proof would be immediately available.

Tomorrow's close should be good enough. Preferably for a mix of stocks or indices.

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

#707

Post by dredmorbius »

drusepth wrote: post #424
ransom1538 wrote: post #421

[deleted]

I worked on this problem for about a month straight a couple years ago (but didn't have any significant success). It's extremely draining on you; don't forget to take breaks. <3

What was your problem? (OP has deleted their comment.)

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

#708

Post by kristopolous »

john4534243 wrote: post #664
kristopolous wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with someone in 2013 who I'm still convinced solved this problem. But he was an absolute terror to work with. A petty authoritarian who would look over every website I'd go to and have screen monitoring and key logging software. I kid you not. I left after 6 weeks. I snuck out the work with me (I wasn't "allowed" to bring it home.) If you're interested I'd be more than happy to share the code. I think it was…

Who's TBL ?

Try Sir TBL

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

#709

Post by manx »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #244
easterncalculus wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great idea. I would love to use a service like this. One of the downsides of anonymity that many people raise (fallaciously) as an argument against it is that too many of the anonymous people are just trolls, therefore it is a negative quality. Having it be people that are known to the person brings about an assumption of character that can solve this issue, so long as the user associates with people that t…

I've been thinking about the gab problem a lot and have a solution: moderation and votes should be user centric rather than wisdom of the crowd based. Explained further here: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...

Great to see more people in this space! Your idea seems very related to: https://cblgh.org/articles/trustnet.html

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

#710

Post by dredmorbius »

ChrisHardman29 wrote: post #112

I'm trying to tackle the problem of information overload by providing a service that extracts, summarises and curates the key insights from books, articles and research: https://www.sivv.io/

I'm more convinced the solution exists in information rejection.

Though a good Otletian content metadata store would likely be useful.

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