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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?

#281

Post by cimmanom »

smadge wrote: post #232
IloveHN84 wrote: post #218

Recognizing face expressions of babies born before the expected date and put in incubators with oxygen masks. The problem is really hard and the collection of video material available prevents the usage of machine learning techniques, so old school algorithms perform much much better.

Can you elaborate more as to why you possibly would want to automate the facial recognition of prematurely born babies?

Some guesses: to alert nursing staff in a preemie ward immediately (instead of waiting for a scheduled round of checks) when a baby is in pain or hungry or needs a diaper change, etc.

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

#282

Post by tokyodude »

umichguy wrote: post #236
herodotus wrote: post #197

When I was a CS prof, many, many years ago, our undergraduate lab had Macs with floppy disks. I asked the University to pay for installing 10MB Hard Drives in the Macs. I was asked to present my case to the deans council. At the meeting, I said that the students used the floppy to load their development environment. I said that, with a hard drive, it took 10 secs to load and be ready. With the floppy, I said it took…

I have to steal that idea next time someone talks about time delays and says "it's not a big deal!" Awesome!

This is 50ms. This is 200ms. doesn't quite work as well. Depending on the situation there has to be some theshhold of diminishing returns.

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

#283

Post by Sharlin »

Piecing together my polyamorous orientation and getting over my poor self-esteem when it comes to romantic or sexual relationships. The journey from being confused, lonely and depressed to understanding that there actually are people that could be interested in me and desire similar things from a relationship.

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

#284

Post by brianpgordon »

yholio wrote: post #261
yesenadam wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rejected ethical behaviour 'on principle', you even seem proud of that. Have you kept doing that in life? Do you feel like an impostor, presumably with your degree that you didn't think you could acquire without cheating, or couldn't be bothered? A surprising number of the replies to your comment also seem to think cheating like that at university is perfectly fine.

Ethics is not something that gets decided by the Dean and laid down in a code of academic ethics. The University is just a part of society and it has it's own perverse and quite unethical practices; for example, the tendency to grab one's money and time and not provide any substantial education in return. Furthermore, the university might be perfectly aware that it provides crap services and that fraud is rampant, ye…

If you sign a code of ethics swearing you won't cheat and you do anyway, that's unethical. Even without an actual signature, the social contract is implicit. The fact that the university exploits athletes and postdocs is unrelated. You can break out the "I did what I had to do to survive" argument but then you're just conceding the point that you abandoned ethics out of necessity or simple mercenary desire for a better position.

I don't think it's a huge deal and wouldn't personally let it negatively affect a hiring decision provided you made the right noises about how it was dumb in retrospect and you were young, etc, but your comment here is pretty much the opposite of that. Who could possibly employ someone with your attitude? Even a gas station wouldn't want to hire a cashier who steals money from the register when they can get away with it just because the petroleum industry is destroying the environment, or whatever.

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

#285

Post by umichguy »

tokyodude wrote: post #282
umichguy wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to steal that idea next time someone talks about time delays and says "it's not a big deal!" Awesome!

This is 50ms. This is 200ms. doesn't quite work as well. Depending on the situation there has to be some theshhold of diminishing returns.

Fair enough. Unless you're talking about lags for automated trading systems/ algos where even that single "I really can't measure this" sec difference counts.

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

#286

Post by singularity2001 »

Derived the Riemann Tensor[0] on a whiteboard being a tutor. Obviously I wasn't the first person to 'solve' it, but being relatively unprepared in class I was shocked and very proud about my personal achievement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_curvature_tensor

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

#287

Post by triviatise »

Dont know if this is the hardest, but it is one of the most impactful. During the 2010 recession I had a client that had about 700K in receivables past due and we were doing about 120K/month in additional work. I started reading their 10Q and 10K and decided that they were at risk for bankruptcy as their cash position was not great.

I told my sales guy that we had to collect our money somehow. He was like they are a big public company, there is no way they will go bankrupt. I insisted.

I told him we needed to start working their procurement and AP hard. We bought gifts, took them out to golf, bars, lunch, dinner, and told a ton of sob stories about how we needed the money. We managed to get our AR down to about 120K which we decided was acceptable losses.

They went into bankruptcy and I was contacted by a receivables purchase company who offered to buy our 120K for 40K, so I sold them immediately.

Many of the small companies that we worked with there went out of business as none of us could take such a huge receivables loss.

To this day I try to get my finance team to send gifts to the AP team of our clients.

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

#288

Post by sanjamia »

The hardest thing I’ve ever solved is finding 30 years of motivation. I co-founded a family business, or it co-founded me, because I was only 14. From inception to exit, it was an interesting intellectual and emotional challenge to keep 50-100 people motivated at any one time, including me. Coding was fun but talking to an angry customer was less so. Eventually, survival instincts kicked in and taught me that creativity and learning was the solution. Everything happened for a reason, and that reason was usually hidden under multiple layers—for staff, customers, or me. I found I became motivated by avoiding reaction, and instead seeing that there was already a motivation behind every interaction, like boredom, anger, and ambivalence. Understanding these individual motivations provided clarity as to what needed to change to maximize team motivation. This made hard problems palatable (and motivating) for an old-school techie, like me.

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

#289

Post by phkahler »

sanjamia wrote: post #288

The hardest thing I’ve ever solved is finding 30 years of motivation. I co-founded a family business, or it co-founded me, because I was only 14. From inception to exit, it was an interesting intellectual and emotional challenge to keep 50-100 people motivated at any one time, including me. Coding was fun but talking to an angry customer was less so. Eventually, survival instincts kicked in and taught me that creativ…

>> Everything happened for a reason, and that reason was usually hidden under multiple layers—for staff, customers, or me. I found I became motivated by avoiding reaction, and instead seeing that there was already a motivation behind every interaction, like boredom, anger, and ambivalence. Understanding these individual motivations provided clarity as to what needed to change to maximize team motivation.

At the risk of over generalizing it sounds like you learned to empathize. Sounds like you found that to be a key to success!

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

#290

Post by sanjamia »

phkahler wrote: post #289
sanjamia wrote: post #288

The hardest thing I’ve ever solved is finding 30 years of motivation. I co-founded a family business, or it co-founded me, because I was only 14. From inception to exit, it was an interesting intellectual and emotional challenge to keep 50-100 people motivated at any one time, including me. Coding was fun but talking to an angry customer was less so. Eventually, survival instincts kicked in and taught me that creativ…

>> Everything happened for a reason, and that reason was usually hidden under multiple layers—for staff, customers, or me. I found I became motivated by avoiding reaction, and instead seeing that there was already a motivation behind every interaction, like boredom, anger, and ambivalence. Understanding these individual motivations provided clarity as to what needed to change to maximize team motivation. At the risk…

That’s insightful.
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