Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 831 posts

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

#771

Post by wiseleo »

tmaly wrote: post #744
wiseleo wrote: post #29

Education. Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons. You must attend daily under penalty of law. Many teachers are plain awful. They rely on students being additionally taught by their parents. That forces parents to go to school with their children, which perpetuates the vicious cycle. The teacher recalibrates the class to the students who either understood everything the first time or had supple…

My wife and I have taught our daughter materials sometimes 2 grade levels above where she is. I think every child has the potential for genius. It is really how you present the material. I taught a few classes last year on how to program in Scratch to grades 1-5. The 4th and 5th graders really loved it and they went off on their own to learn more. It was not a large sample, but I think presenting the right material i…

Right. As much as I love Khan, there’s lots of room for improvement. It needs to be interesting. Watch Shadiversity and you’ll love history. :)

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

#772

Post by icebraining »

cameronbrown wrote: post #89

Information overload. My current side project is https://feedsub.com . Right now, - it's not great - I started by building an simple tool for getting regular updates from RSS feeds, but longer-term I want to turn this into a system which can absorb all the data streams you're interested in (news, stocks, weather, social, communities) and give you dials (filters, curation, signals, etc..) to surface a healthy amount w…

This is not completely related, but it reminded me of when I used Sup (a console email client that took a lot of inspiration from Gmail - labels, fast FTS, etc) and the author had an inspiration to create a client/server version, which could handle "Email, RSS feeds, notes, jabber and IRC logs" and more.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120810005232/http://masanjin.n...

Unfortunately, I don't think he even finished splitting Sup into the server+client (called Heliotrope and Turnsole), let alone get them to handle other stuff beyond email. Felt like a lost opportunity.

--

For your project, seems like the direct competition is IFTTT and similar. What do you think differentiates your project from those? Could be useful to push more in that direction.

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

#773

Post by killjoywashere »

_AzMoo wrote: post #343
killjoywashere wrote: post #336

Teaching machines to diagnose cancer, because without that, there's no way we are going to solve cancer generally. There just aren't enough pathologists. Harder that going to Mars, probably easier than world peace. Definitely involves an enormous amount of data. Like, a non-trivial fraction of world-wide storage.

Why don't we train more pathologists?

See Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine for an in depth discussion.

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

#774

Post by killjoywashere »

pugworthy wrote: post #340
killjoywashere wrote: post #336

Teaching machines to diagnose cancer, because without that, there's no way we are going to solve cancer generally. There just aren't enough pathologists. Harder that going to Mars, probably easier than world peace. Definitely involves an enormous amount of data. Like, a non-trivial fraction of world-wide storage.

That is treating the symptom by learning to recognize it. What about discovering the cause?

There is no one cause of cancer. While there are a number of well-recognized precipitants (HPV, trichloroethylene, UV radiation, etc), cancer is fundamentally a disease of disorder in the genetic code. As entropy invariably increases, the integrity of each of the trillions of individual somatic genomes per human start to degrade, they rarely degrade into a positive feedback loop of replication, and we have not invested enough of our evolution to prevent it. For example: mice don't normally get much cancer because they die before they have time for it. Elephants don't get much cancer because they accumulated enough copies of p53 over their evolution that they don't have as many cancers per N cells.

Humans have 1 copy of p53 from each parent and have extended their lifespan so many ways that their one copy of p53 is no longer enough. Lifelong accumulation of genetic entropy is inevitable. The game is to catch the offending cells and kill them.

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

#775

Post by ipiz0618 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #510
ipiz0618 wrote: post #419

A piece of music playing software that can react to the lead of an instrument. I'm picturing the software will be able to play a concerto (or simply a duet) with a real instrumentalist and react to dynamic and tempo changes in real time, like an orchestra under a conductor. The same principle can also be used to create a real-time software harmonizer [1] for live performances, but this problem already has a reliable…

Are you familiar with Magenta? [0] It's not real-time, but definitely an important area of research. Also check out Dan Tepfer [1] who is doing amazing work with an algorithmic approach to reactive live performances, with great call and response tactics. I myself am slowly prototyping a fully artificial AI band which can be orchestrated using very high-level musical ideas and a big helping of intelligent randomizatio…

Thanks for your resource. Never heard of Dan Tepfer or Extempore - such a great way of imagining music!

What I was planning was something simpler - much like generating sounds from a written score, but like live classical performances, the generated sound reacts to the cues of the player.

I'm not exactly familiar with Magenta, but the thing I'm currently trying to implement (at a very early stage) is Deepmind's Wave2Midi2Wave which is part of the dataset released with Magenta [1]. I'm not aware if they'd released any code as well.

[1] - https://magenta.tensorflow.org/maestro-wave2midi2wave

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

#776

Post by sitkack »

kristopolous wrote: post #492
sitkack wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome. It like a super deep niche version of James Burke's Connections.

Yeah, I'm trying to target the general (curious) public. Like Carl Sagan Cosmos level (or soul of a new machine, accidental empires, masters of doom, etc). I'm still finding my element. Hopefully it will be generally enjoyable by all and genuinely 80-90% new information per episode to people who aren't scholars or academics. Check out my play from last week for an example of what I mean, http://comphistpod.com/1-4-th…

This reminds me of the cool shit that was on the internet in the 90s. Thank you!

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

#777

Post by _-___________-_ »

dang wrote: post #474
_-___________-_ wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I didn't read that comment as trollish at all. It's quite awkwardly written, and it could do with scare quotes around "undesirables" to make it clear that it refers to the view of authorities in their scenario rather than the view of the comment author, but which part of it is trollish? My understanding of the comment was expressing a concern that some kind of universal identity system would undoubtedly become…

You didn't read as trollish but others did, and unfortunately there's a problem with comments sometimes being written deliberately to straddle the line. That's why I wrote my reply as a question.

Thanks for the perspective, I hadn't thought about it that way.

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

#778

Post by crabl »

aurbano wrote: post #583
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…

Have you already done anything towards this goal? This is something I’ve been thinking about for several years and I’m about to tackle as a side project so would love to chat with you if you want. My contact info is on my profile

Hey! I'd love to compare notes if you have some time! Couldn't find an e-mail for you though... mine is in my bio now if you want to reach out

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

#779

Post by crabl »

mattio wrote: post #598
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…

I am also trying to tackle this problem in a side project! Dm me if you want to compare notes. <3

Yeah man, my e-mail is in my bio now!

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

#780

Post by cameronbrown »

icebraining wrote: post #772
cameronbrown wrote: post #89

Information overload. My current side project is https://feedsub.com . Right now, - it's not great - I started by building an simple tool for getting regular updates from RSS feeds, but longer-term I want to turn this into a system which can absorb all the data streams you're interested in (news, stocks, weather, social, communities) and give you dials (filters, curation, signals, etc..) to surface a healthy amount w…

This is not completely related, but it reminded me of when I used Sup (a console email client that took a lot of inspiration from Gmail - labels, fast FTS, etc) and the author had an inspiration to create a client/server version, which could handle "Email, RSS feeds, notes, jabber and IRC logs" and more. https://web.archive.org/web/20120810005232/http://masanjin.n... Unfortunately, I don't think he even finished spli…

I reckon you could pull my project off with IFTTT. The big differentiator would ideally be the fact that this would be a product geared towards content consumption and that lifecycle (ingest, filter, consume), rather than just general purpose stuff that IFTTT does. I have a bunch of ideas in this regard, but it's very exploratory and not a short-term thing.
Post reply on HN