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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?

#821

Post by drallison »

sputr wrote: post #643
drallison wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are begging the question. Market regulation and a more economically pragmatic green political movement, and a fettered profit-seeking motive won't respond quickly enough to save the day. We have a crisis here and have not much of anything which makes a difference. For example, when huge fires burn, dumping significant CO2 into the atmosphere, it would be to everyone's best interest to put them out. But we…

Why do you presume it won't respond quickly enough? I think that if the EU made any carbon fuel that was created from the atmospheric CO2 free of any and all tax ... we would see it on the market in a few years at max with plants cropping up very quickly. When that industry matures in a few years just force anyone polluting with CO2 to buy and sequester this carbon fuel. Besides that's only half of the solution. The…

Simple enough--there is not enough time. Even if we were to stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere today, the global temperature change will exceed acceptable limits. If we continue with business as usual, substantial parts of the earth will become uninhabitable. Nothing on a global scale can be done in the twenty or thirty years. Collaborative global problem solving does not seem to work.

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

#822

Post by caviv »

I will be honest. I really don't get it. How come I am working harder, and more hours, and studying more but I don't earn more ? - It should have been a direct correlation. Shouldn't technology and automation and all of this good stuff make us work less but earn more ?

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

#823

Post by jeffreyrogers »

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…

I believe this was the goal of some French Enlightenment philosophers like Denis Diderot[0] and others who worked on the Encyclopédie[1]. Definitely a worthwhile project. One problem you will have to find a solution to is how to adequately explain things that require tacit-knowledge (e.g. it's not enough just to know chemistry, you also have to know how to do it, which requires physical practice, not just book learning).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die

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

#824

Post by myfriendslinky »

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…

Can you give us the framework you use on how you presented the material?

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

#826

Post by yughurt »

kristopolous wrote: post #641
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 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…

Are you going to share it?

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

#827

Post by jamesrcole »

lambdatronics wrote: post #819
jamesrcole wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're in need of an information-theoretic definition of computation or information processing Could you elaborate? It's not clear to me what you mean by that. > It's clear that there is a relationship between computation and information via Landauer's principle. Information, in the sense I'm concerned with, is an inherent part of computation. You can't have the latter without the former. > Semantics: in short, 'mea…

Shannon's theory of information doesn't offer a way to tell whether a channel is doing computation or merely transmitting the information -- the mutual information merely characterizes how much information goes across a channel, but is insensitive to any changes to the representation. OTOH, the algorithmic complexity theory (a la Kolmogorov) doesn't really have the same generality as Shannon's theory. Flops is not a…

> Shannon's theory of information doesn't offer a way to tell whether a channel is doing computation or merely transmitting the information -- the mutual information merely characterizes how much information goes across a channel, but is insensitive to any changes to the representation.

In my view, it is more than a change of representation. The computation is using information that might true of something, to produce new information that might be true of something else. I don't see how anything like Shannon's theory could explain how it is able to do this.

> I got inspired by the "integrated information theory" folks -- they have this notion that combining information streams in a nontrivial way is necessary and sufficient for consciousness. I disagree that it's sufficient for consciousness, but it might be sufficient for a definition of information processing or generalized computation.

Ok. I share the same view, that it isn't sufficient for consciousness.

> I don't know what you mean by "the system's conception of meaning" -- which system, and what is a conception of meaning?

The computational system. Consider the case of the human brain, which may be computational. People can understand that some information is about X (say, a particular tree, or the notion of Justice). But it's not just that they know what the information is about, but they understand something of the character of that thing -- of the tree, or of what Justice is like. If the brain is computational, then that would mean that such an understanding was computational (or computational plus bodily interactions with the environment, etc). But that doesn't tell us how it is that computation is able to "embody" an understanding of the character of something. That needs to be explained.

> Here's a link to the paper

Thank you.

Is that the same paper? I notice it has a different title to the one you mentioned above.

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

#828

Post by _theory_ »

caviv wrote: post #822

I will be honest. I really don't get it. How come I am working harder, and more hours, and studying more but I don't earn more ? - It should have been a direct correlation. Shouldn't technology and automation and all of this good stuff make us work less but earn more ?

This has been a philosophical concern as well as an economic one for a while now. John Maynard Keynes had some notable thoughts on the future of work leading to a utopia of less work and the same/more reward (and he was incorrect).

But rather than get into the political/economic/philosophical argument, there might be an individual solution: people don't pay for what takes the most work, they pay for what is in the most demand. These are often not the same thing, and you can leverage that.

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

#829

Post by candiodari »

nadavlidor wrote: post #551
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…

Why commit passwords to memory and build Temporal Password Registries if we can throw parties which no one attends? https://vinepair.com/articles/stephen-hawking-time-travel-pa... Didn't we conclude time travel is unlikely?

Exactly. Luckily a solution has long been found. Simply take a log of the stock market back and then pay me a billion dollars to convince me.

(also you could predict variations in the rotation rate of galactic pulsars. That would be pretty convincing for scientists. But who cares about those guys ?)

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

#830

Post by DoctorOetker »

kristopolous wrote: post #519
uhhyeahdude wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an ambitious and important project! I love the concept, and that it is meant to be a "long, slow project." It probably should be paced slowly due to the scope and complexity of material. I think a slower pace should also help "smooth" the exponential change rate of technological progress into a narrative listeners can follow, without sacrificing too much detail for the sake of listenability.* I'm going to sub ri…

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…

>It's all scripted. Google books and archive.org have been great resources.

Do you use any off-browser tools to navigate archive.org / google books? if so which? or the web sites always sufficed?

>There's also a couple torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles.

Could you expand a bit on this? This sounds very interesting for a project of mine! Where did you find torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles? It sounds like the copyrights on these would have expired, did you find human curated database of this era journal articles? how comprehensive is it, all journals of this time span?

(one of the things I would like to do is map out the transition from alchemy to chemistry, for example WP states Lavoisier convinced the scientific community that sulphur was an element and not a compound, which sounds utterly bizarre for essentially all of us who were exposed to chemistry as a deductive system without the abductive reasoning that led to it)

>I've made my own sqlite databases from the meta information and ran ocr over them to make things searchable.

That is pretty amazing work!

> 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'm going to do better.

Where is this repo you mention?

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