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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?

#751

Post by jezze »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #219
jezze wrote: post #21

I am trying to reinvent the web. Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This allows it to be streamed. A big difference is that the language itself…

>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…

I have moved the problem of styling to the browsers, like NAVI in my case. The browser is the only part that understands the limitation of the device and knows how to best render each widget so it makes sense for it to handle all the styling instead of having styling intertwined with the data itself like HTML does. CSS doesnt solve the problem of mixed data and styling either, it just hides it better.

The lack of styling I do understand can make it feel as if your site lacks personality when all sites look kinda the same so I see your point here. I might later allow some minor themeing, like say allowing you to select a color scheme, with the understanding that this might be ignored by the user. I will have to think about this more. What you will never get to decide are things lika margins and paddings and things like that.

I don't think you can compare Markdown with ALFI like that exactly. Markdown will generate HTML in the end and it is the resulting HTML that you need to compare with because that is what the browsers understands. Also, Markdown only solves the trivial cases and that is why it can be kept simple and readable but how do you for instance create a three column layout in Markdown with an image in the middle column? I don't know, maybe there are extensions for that these days too.

It would be interesting to have a Markdown to ALFI generator, but I suspect that when you are used to reading ALFI code you might find it to be a bit overkill because even though I am a bit biased of course I do think ALFI is pretty readable.

Also, there is no intentional OOP or funcional aspects, I did not quite understand what you wanted to convey there.

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

#752

Post by binrec »

Decomposition of glyph sequences in phonetic transcription alphabets (e.g. IPA representations of phonemes) into phonological feature sets.

Existing attempts to solve this problem are hackish and difficult to customize: they typically treat each glyph as a set of features and handle diacritics and digraphs by naive composition and awkward special-casing. They also aren't written with an eye to customization in either alphabet or featural model: they typically map an ad-hoc extension of IPA to an ad-hoc featural model.

I think a natural improvement would be to develop a specification language in which each individual glyph (base character or diacritic) is a function from a feature set to a feature set, with Haskell-style pattern-matching to allow graceful handling of digraphs and context-sensitive diacritics - although syntactic sugar for digraphs would in practice be required for usability. Ideally it would also be possible to map feature sets to feature sets, in order to preserve a human-readable intermediate form (e.g. "unvoiced dental plosive") which is later mapped to the more customary binary features.

In addition to the utility for phonological databases and the like, this would also enable more rigorous testing of crosslinguistic feature sets: every feature set is implicitly a set of proposed linguistic universals and existence claims. If two segments have the same featuralization, they should never contrast in a given language; if they do, the featuralization is unsound. And if a featuralization proposes the existence of many contrasts that aren't attested anywhere, it could probably stand to be optimized.

But most of my interest in this comes from my work on a phonological database. The database needs some method of handling featuralization to facilitate feature-based search, and I just haven't seen a good way to do that yet.

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

#753

Post by jezze »

Jaxkr wrote: post #35
jezze wrote: post #21

I am trying to reinvent the web. Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This allows it to be streamed. A big difference is that the language itself…

Are widgets stateful in any way? Could this be used to create more efficient (and constrained) client side apps without JavaScript?

One thing does not exclude the other. The sites are stateless like Lorddragonfang already said. This doesn't mean you can't make nice client side apps and you surely don't need to use javascript to do it.

What js does is that it allows you to dynamically update the contents of your website like changing an image when you hover over it for example. This is something you can actually do with ALFI by itself without having to depend on a second language like js. I'm glad you asked this question.

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

#754

Post by _theory_ »

navd wrote: post #165
chiefmcloud wrote: post #153

I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…

I will say that I’m not really interested in talking with people I necessarily know. I want to talk to people who have well thought out arguments that are non obvious. Take what you will from that and good luck.

I'd say HN is the right place to be.

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

#755

Post by imoverclocked »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #211
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking specifically about harmony in a musical context as being very western.

Well, the point still applies. The small integer ratios of harmony apply even to the rhythms of gamelan. And, of course, octaves are more-or-less universal across cultures.

That may be, but they are still learned according to https://www.quantamagazine.org/perceptions-of-musical-octave...

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

#756

Post by _theory_ »

chiefmcloud wrote: post #153

I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…

Maybe the easiest way to lift the standard of conversation is to start with a community of vetted members, much like a scholarly journal doesn't allow just anyone to publish.

I'm not saying its an exciting way to go about it, but it would likely work.

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

#757

Post by Gabriel_Martin »

patwillson22 wrote: post #386
Gabriel_Martin wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you're waiting for an invitation, it sounds very interesting!

Alright here it goes. What we're basically doing is using thermal evaporation to lay down thin films of metal on top of each other in a high vacuum environment. We're then patterning the cell with a fiber laser to produce the cell traces and patterns needed to cell size. Here's an example of system that does what i've just described in the context of creating CDTE cells. Note that it doesn't use a laser to create the…

Thank you for taking the time to expand!

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

#758

Post by [deleted] »

uhhyeahdude wrote: post #646
kristopolous wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all scripted. Google books and archive.org have been great resources. There's also a couple torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles. I've made my own sqlite databases from the meta information and ran ocr over them to make things searchable. I'll be putting more of these tools in the repo and eventually put the search systems online for the general public. Google's navigation of annualised volumes is a joke so…

I'll just reiterate that I find it quite impressive. The above just reinforces that. I mentioned that I listen to a lot of podcasts; have been, in fact since ~2006. I've watched the evolution of the medium over the years, have seen many pods come and go, and have witnessed many content creators experiment with different methods of attaining/maintaining/interacting with listeners. Later on, as the form started to matu…

[deleted]

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

#759

Post by vmurthy »

kcsomisetty wrote: post #420
vmurthy wrote: post #296

(It's a germ of an idea but I hope to work on this!) Problem: Public schools in India don't do justice to students. Private schools in India charge a bomb but most of the money ends up in the hands of the "owners" and not enough to teachers (For reference, an average primary school teacher earns lesser than what an Uber driver earns) . The solution : A network of "not-for-profit" schools where the fee structure is re…

I was thinking about something very similar. like, the teachers will get a lions share of the fee. this will instantly motivate teachers to better themselves, and move the school away from for-profit model. but there are some real problems to solve. like, 1. how to get such school started ? who will provide initial capital ? 2. even if such a school is started, how to stop it from becoming for-profit again ? 3. is th…

1. Who pays for it? There are philanthropic trusts like the Azim Premji trust which focus on this. 2. I think that self interest is a good motivator to keep the system in place :-). 3. I honestly dont know the balance yet but I know for sure that the current one just wont cut it

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

#760

Post by _theory_ »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #290

Writing a computer program is often the best way to convince yourself that you really understand a problem. And an already-written computer program is often a good way to document the behavior of a complex system because you can play with it to see what happens in all the edge cases. So I'm writing curricula that use computer programs as the primary teaching tool. One is for computer science, where the idea is that a…

This is a great idea. I've personally benefited from using Python as a way to experiment with other disciplines and wish there were more such resources out there.
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