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

Digging myself the fuck out of multiple compound interest debt traps, multiple times, while generally managing to subsist and have what I'm reluctant to refer to as "A Life."

You could just post the links here, instead of collecting user email addresses..

I know, but I debugged a lot of use cases, tried to narrow the scope of the bug, thought really hard about the execution in my head, and then fixed it all using an explicit semicolon....

Asking an experienced dev this question is like asking someone what was the hardest food they had to eat and how did they manage to swallow it. What is the interviewer hoping to learn by that?

The biggest thing I've learned with sales is that the logic of an engineering mindset doesn't apply. With sales, you have to understand people. This sounds sort of basic and I wish I could communicate it better but it's true. Sales are all about social proof, making your customer feel special, and dealing with people problems.

For capital, I've self-funded from working in the software industry in San Francisco.

For CBD sourcing, initially, I was buying CBD to create products. This was a good idea to test products but a bad way to grow a business. Since realizing this, I've moved everything to Southern Oregon and partnered with a hemp farm. The combination of my understanding of the internet plus his high quality CBD rich hemp has allowed me to expand into other products while dropping my prices by 50%.

I don't know if it's the hardest, but very recently I had a problem that drove me nuts: I was doing some consulting for a company that designs chips, and they assigned me a project to take a nearly completed design and augment it with additional wires to route extra power to some parts of the chip that were running on the hairy edge of not having enough current. So I had to read in the design spec, search it for available space, and generate new wire geometries for the power grid. This sounds straightforward, but there were two things that made is incredibly hard. First, the design that I was reading in was the output of a routing tool that was provided by a third-party vendor, and it was producing some really crazy shit. Not even the senior design engineers could understand some of the things that the router was doing. And second, there are hundreds of design rules that the new geometries had to conform to. Most of them are not relevant, but about a dozen or so are, and some of them involve incredibly complicated interactions of multiple geometries, occasionally across multiple metal layers. Trying to keep track of all that and make it all run in a reasonable amount of time was quite challenging, to say the least. But the worst part was that the development cycle involved a manual step where the output of my code had to fed into yet another third-party tool to see if I had violated any of the design rules, and the output of that tool was graphical. And I was not able to use the tool because of licensing restrictions! So I had to take my output, give it to someone else, have them run the tool, look at the results, and send me a report of how many rule violations there were, where they were, and what rules were being violated. That took several hours, sometimes multiple days.