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Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#91
Poltergeist Room problem.

Back in the CRT monitor days, I was working for a computer repair company. There was this particular client (in the defence industry) who had monitors that started flickering and having a greenish hue at its sides after a week.

Every week, we had to go to his office to swap the monitors and bring the faulty ones back to recalibrate (it was costly, but hey, its a Defence contract and those pay big bucks)

It didn't matter whether the monitor was brand new or recalibrate ones, it just started flickering and had greenish hue after a week, and it only happened in that room. Other monitors outside that room and in other levels were fine, thus the room was dubbed the Poltergeist Room (as they blamed spirits for messing with it).

One day after the monitor exchange, I returned to the office and my supervisor queried me as to why I didn't reply to his multiple pages (we were using pagers back then). I realised I was in the Poltergeist Room when the pages were sent and therefore did not receive any page. It then dawned on me, "Could it be some electro magnetic interference from another level directly above or below that was playing havoc".

I went back to the client the next day to tell him what I thought and he (being electronics trained) realised that above him was a defence lab carrying out EMF experiments, which could have caused the monitor problems. He got to work to build a simple Faraday cage to prevent EMF from getting to the monitor. Since then, the monitors worked perfectly.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#92

I am part of a team created a system that took the complexity of the human metabolism and reduced it down to a few vital statistics that are then used to create a individualized formula that tells people how to sustainably improve their metabolism and lose weight and gain muscle. The amazing part is that it works for everyone because it is custom tailored to them. The hard part here was 30 years of testing, thankfull…

For habit forming, look to beeminder - its interface is clunky and its termonolgy too geeky, but it is also the best way to make "some day" to day (some day I want to lose weight) and keep it up that I have found.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#93
post #59
post #52

One of my first professional challenges was porting a CAD viewer to flash. The hardest part was figuring out how to convert ellipse sections and AutoCAD bulge arcs (line + bulge factor) to quadratic bezier curves. That one took three weeks of figuring out the math (starting from near zero because i hadn't paid much attention during school). I only completed the task through sheer stubbornness, because there were whol…

Genuinly curious: I thought you can't represent ellipses with bezier curves, at least accurately... What did you do?

Cut it into sections smaller than pi/2, then approximated. Looked close enough to the naked eye that nobody complained.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#94
post #64

I was part of a team that designed and implemented a P2P UDP based video streaming protocol, that receives chunks of a stream simultaneously from up to hundreds of peers. It wasn't a "big problem" per se - I worked on seemingly harder problems before and since - but this one was really hard to get right, it was a very non deterministic beast that was extremely hard to test. I remember lots of times that I secretly fe…

Out of interest, did you use skiplists to reassemble the streams in order?

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#95
post #46
post #24

Turning myself from a data driven nerd into an emphatic person who understands social interactions. Finally, I bring home girls :)

You can be emphatic and remain empirical. It's the difference between thinking nobody is wrong vs knowing someone is wrong but it not mattering under certain contexts.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#96
post #57
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be emphatic and remain empirical. It's the difference between thinking nobody is wrong vs knowing someone is wrong but it not mattering under certain contexts.

Yes, that is part of it. I pretty much abandoned the thought of someone being wrong and someone being right. We all have this bias, that we are more intelligent then others. While on average, we are just average.

>I pretty much abandoned the thought of someone being wrong and someone being right.

Frankly, this sounds like taking a good idea too far. People around you will make assertions about objective reality that are beyond any reasonable doubt incorrect, sometimes dangerously so. Considering them wrong can be important to prevent harm to yourself, your family and your job or business. Beyond that, calling out people you care about on their being wrong can prevent harm to them and their respective families and jobs even if at first they hate you for it.

Empathizing with people who are wrong for understandable reasons but still being keenly aware that they are wrong seems to me like a much better long-term strategy.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#97
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be emphatic and remain empirical. It's the difference between thinking nobody is wrong vs knowing someone is wrong but it not mattering under certain contexts.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

It's probably best if you point out that "empathic" and "emphatic" are different.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#99

While I've had some weird technical problems (I've worn a number of hats across Network/System Admin, to both front and back end web Development) the hardest is always the non-technical issues. A few years ago I was contracting for a company that had a Native American Casino as a client. They wanted to build a gamified app/site to engage their customers more. The single hardest problem was trying to look at the situa…

How did it pan out in the end? Did you talk to the people the app was targeted at?

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#100
post #63

Hardest technical problem would have to be my PhD. I worked out how to apply alias analysis to PHP (previously people had figured out how to do it for the easy subset of PHP - I extended it to the entire language of PHP 5.3 or so). [1] Along the way I'm pretty sure I also figured out how to build SSA form such that you have your alias analysis results available to be used at SSA construction and therefore redundant c…

Interesting read! Thanks!
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