Very interesting question because once you solve it, it doesn't seem hard anymore.
Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
21–30 of 441 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#22Automatically summarising a 550 word article into 2 to 3 lines using machine learning.
Tried many libraries and eve saas solutions like monkeylearn, etx but couldn't do it to what was required.
Had to switched to a mechanical turk like solution in the end :/
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#23My company is building a device which collects data from a car while you drive. We wanted to group those in "trips" on a very simple logic. If the device sends any data for the first time, start a trip and if there's none for more than 5 minutes, close the last trip. Problem was that the source of the time is coming from the device which had a lot of bugs (e.g. time was in future, time is from year 1970, time is not…
> At the end I was able to convince the management that some bugs were too serious and required fixing
This was the hard problem you solved, right? How did you go about it?
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#24For my thesis project back in 2011, I wanted to create an interactive installation, the kind you see at museums. Since multitouch tables were insanely expensive to buy or rent, I decided to build one myself. Learned the basics of woodworking over a semester, and built a table after two failed attempts. Then I bought an LCD TV, took it apart, connected it to a playstation camera with a modified infrared lens and developed an Adobe Air application. The thing was so unresponsive to touches, I decided to ditch the whole multitouch table idea. Started from scratch again ... learned objective-c (iOS 5 or was it 6), and created an iPad app for my thesis. Don't think I've ever worked so hard in my life.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#25Multiplayer engine for an open-world RPG that doesn't require developer to run a dedicated server. Think Skyrim, GTA or Kingdom Come, but with a much smaller budget for content - aside from very fast movement and physics-based mechanics of GTA, this engine could've been used for any of these games. Previous developers did the single-player logic first, and then added very ad-hoc multiplayer sync, hoping that everything will be fine - but if you played long enough, you inadvertently ran into desyncs.
So, I had to write first the network engine itself (which was used both for networking and load/save), and then rewrite the whole game logic to take advantage of this mechanism. Now, if you want to write any game mechanic, you have to define it in proper MVC terms (although, due to amount of legacy code, I didn't separate the view and controller as well as I should have). Dozens and hundreds of small scripts for all the unique quest content and game mechanics working on top of a unified platform, relying on it to sync their data, one-off events (think "play sound" command that doesn't change any data but has to be replicated) and not even knowing on which one of connected clients is it run with authority, while all others run this particular object in "slave" mode.
I honestly tried to research if any other game developer have used a similar solution, but found nothing - it seems as if all open-world games that have multiplayer rely on dedicated authoritative servers, operated by developer, to run. Here's the project itself, although this update is not yet released: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526160/The_Wild_Eight/
Too bad that at the end of this project I got the worst case of burn out in my career, spiraled into the worst depression episode that I've ever experienced, and now quit the company while struggling to put my life back together. I have no idea if I'll be able to publish anything on this tech, but I still feel that it's been worth it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#26I was working on a calendaring system. We supported recurring events, and each event could also have a piece of equipment associated with it (one or more). Events could also be changed, either the current event or this and every event. Event start/stop times were stored in UTC, but the event was displayed in the users timezone, and could cross daylight savings time boundaries. This was done with a mix of javascript o…
My first big project was working with a back-end developer on a custom implementation of a calendaring system.
It was one massive several-month nightmare. Totally relate...
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#27Develop a tool to boost the productivity of a software engineering team and convince all members to adopt it. Software engineers (myself included) can be very resistant to changes (especially when it comes to their tooling) and an in-house tool with a single developer behind it didn't contribute to the ease of adoption, but it was adopted regardless. I guess that the tool was indeed very good, or maybe I'm a sweet talker :)
Note: the team was very specialized, so there really were no competing tools around for that specific task.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#28I built an olap cube for manipulating time series of financial models, and made an API to serve it through a query language that I created just for this.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#29For my thesis project back in 2011, I wanted to create an interactive installation, the kind you see at museums. Since multitouch tables were insanely expensive to buy or rent, I decided to build one myself. Learned the basics of woodworking over a semester, and built a table after two failed attempts. Then I bought an LCD TV, took it apart, connected it to a playstation camera with a modified infrared lens and devel…
The hardest part was definitely creating a sturdy wooden frame. Glad I'm a designer/developer.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#30Proving there was a bug in a vendor's device driver on an ARM touchscreen by stripping down X-Win to intercept system calls around glitches.
Using a mock libc to intercept everything since there was no strace.
Porting Ruby to the IBM Blue Gene/L.
Updating a DAG stored in a SQL table.