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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?

#791

Post by ricg »

biztos wrote: post #762
ricg wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started working on the app way before Zettelkasten became a thing. My goal is to not force a specific workflow. If you would like to use it as Zettelkasten, it'll work. If you prefer a different system, you can have the app adapt to your needs. It's all just files & folders underneath, only the representation varies. I'm curious about your folder hierarchy. What kind of files do you keep there to get to tens of gig…

Text, images, videos up to and including the occasional rare film, lots of PDFs (usually small), sometimes a PowerPoint or an Excel spreadsheet, used to also do source code and builds and stuff before GitHub... and if I had faith in them being more useful, as opposed to just backed up, I'd probably dump a whole bunch more in my semi-organized DropBox folder. So for my use-case the Organizer App would have to be able…

Re: semi-organized DropBox folder: this came up here recently and might be of help to organize your files: https://johnnydecimal.com

The app I'm working is more focused on capturing knowledge as structured notes. It sounds like a good full text search could already be of help in your case. That maybe combined with slowly categorizing your content with a system like Johhny.Decimal or something similar.

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

#792

Post by collyw »

silveroriole wrote: post #655
collyw wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically you are in favour of censorship over free speech. History has shown that top be a poor choice.

It’s not exactly censorship when you can start your own blog or platform with the exact opposite form of ‘censorship’, is it? Give me a break - someone saying “you can’t post things I think are racist on my website” is not a violation of your human rights, any more than the host of a party saying “you need to leave after what you just said” is dire political censorship akin to burning books. Bigots of all stripes lik…

Looks like censorship to me whatever way you justify it.

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

#793

Post by collyw »

drallison wrote: post #504
collyw wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let nature do its thing.The fittest will survive.

Looking at the current state of things, I think you are guilty of wishful thinking. Survival of the fittest depends upon reproductive success over multiple generations. The time change need to adapt is not commensurate with the time scale leading to extinction.

Its only wishful thinking if you assume that humans are expected to survive. Will that happen? No idea? But even if humans survive then evolutionary pressure will eventually push them towards being a different species.

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

#794

Post by aerovistae »

dredmorbius wrote: post #726
aerovistae wrote: post #119

Telling where the output of an individual stdout print statement ends and the next one begins, so that I could color code my terminal with alternating colors to more easily tell apart individual log messages from a running process by visual differentiation. Turns out this is impossible! Aside from time passing in between outputs, there's no way to tell. It's just a continuous byte stream with no terminating character…

Terminal driver + clock + colour-coding? Strace w/ individual write() instructions identified? DTrace?

Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying these tools could be used to wrap a running process in such a way that you could tell apart individual print statements during runtime? (I haven't used the tools you suggest.)

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

#795

Post by mackie_roy »

alexyz12 wrote: post #392

I am building a database for human movement. Right now each exercise or pose or movement is indexed by its name - Downward dog, squat, handstand, etc. But this gets confusing when multiple names apply to the same movement. The true identifier is the motion of your limbs in space. I want to encode that motion/position so that if you try and upload L-sit handstand and also L-sit, it tells you that you are try to upload…

Is there a way to get updates with your project's progress?

Human movement notation is also a hard problem for dance and choreography that needs solving. My partner has been talking about it for years, and there would definitely be interest from the dance world.

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

#796

Post by web007 »

lapaz17 wrote: post #633
web007 wrote: post #486

How can we document "human society" in 1000 pages or less? I've been casually researching for a while, and will eventually write a guide on going from zero to the moon. Step one is survival, basics of hunting, first aid and farming sort of stuff. That volume would end around homesteading and self-sufficient living. Volume two would be establishing society in larger groups than a family unit. Things like job specializ…

which resources are you planning to grap the info from?

Anywhere I can, as long as I can confirm the info is useful and correct.

Survival is sourcing primarily from stuff like the Boy Scout Handbook, the SAS Survival Guide, a few other online resources and a farmsteading book from the 60s-70s that I can't recall right now. That will be the v0.1 draft, and I'd like to practice some of the techniques as well to provide hands-on feedback on what's easier or harder.

Volume 2 is a vague outline, and probably needs to be combined with vol 3 and fleshed out before splitting in two (or more) pieces to research and write.

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

#797

Post by dredmorbius »

aerovistae wrote: post #794
dredmorbius wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terminal driver + clock + colour-coding? Strace w/ individual write() instructions identified? DTrace?

Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying these tools could be used to wrap a running process in such a way that you could tell apart individual print statements during runtime? (I haven't used the tools you suggest.)

Yes, basically.

The strace option should be doable. Terminal & timer a bit more work.

So long as the print statements come between other blocks of code, though, I'd look at strace (or dtrace, gdb, etc.).

Assuming Linux/Unix OS.

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

#798

Post by collyw »

jwarden wrote: post #765
TimJRobinson wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a chamber that you decide vs one the group decides. If you want to only surround yourself with people that are exactly like you that's up to you. If you want to be an intelligent thinker and surround yourself with believable truthful people who expand your worldview that's also possible. It puts the power back in your hands instead of the site operator or group consensus.

One of the reasons people use social media is to get a feel for the generally environment of opinion, even if we disagree with it. We want to know what "people are saying" and understand the rapidly-changing boundaries of what is socially acceptable. That's why I follow people on Twitter and Facebook that I don't trust at all. I would not want to use a decentralized trust system to consign myself to an echo-chamber,…

That sounds like a step backwards to me.

The problem we seem to be seeing just now is lots of echo chambers have formed without input from "the other side of teh argument" on Facebook, Twitter, whatever social media you choose.

What you are suggesting is rather than group level echo chambers which will validate maybe 80% of your views and go against maybe 20%, you are now going to have a fully customized echo chamber that echos your views 100%. I think that will make things worse.

Personally I try to get views from both sides, but I think I am in a minority for doing this.

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

#799

Post by hazeii »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #728
hazeii wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, but I think we're run out of space. Sort of related, we've been considering how we can gut an optical mouse and use the sensor from them. The idea is broadly similar, basically learn the pattern around one revolution and work out where we are in it.

Do you need the data in real time, or can you complete a biking session then process the data?

Real-time, in fact we're acquiring data at quite a high rate and boiling it down with a view to presenting the results to the rider a few times a second. You can see more at https://bodyrocket.cc if you're interested!

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

#800

Post by john4534243 »

Addono wrote: post #696
john4534243 wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently, users (or attackers) can easily manipulate the location provided to an app This is respecting users privacy and its a feature.

Hmm, I see your concern. I'm pretty big on privacy myself, so I feel I should be able to answer this in a satisfying way. Most importantly, this always requires the user's concent. On Android you still need the same location permissions as for normal GPS location positioning. Hence, as a user you're always free to reject location permissions same as before. I have to admit, this tech can also be used for evil purpose…

If i want my device to lie about my location for whatever reason it should do that, the device should not control me.
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