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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#31

Post by tuesday20 »

_myles wrote: post #21

The past several years I've been trying to find some tangible philosophical ground to stand on. This (desperate) search is and has been the produce of mental illness I've dealt with since my adolescence (I'm 32 now). Quite a long story short, I managed to get the mental illness under control; something I thought I'd be living with the rest of my life. My research has included mostly standing/walking meditation, and r…

Could you please elaborate on meditation? How has it helped you, how much time do you spend, what is walking meditation etc?

Thank you

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#32

Post by brenden2 »

buzzert wrote: post #27
brenden2 wrote: post #13

Working on a new company, one which (I hope) will turn the restaurant industry on its head. I want to make in-restaurant ordering, payment, and service pure joy. I'm mostly heads down coding every day, building an MVP. Also trying to find some investor interest where possible, however fundraising has never been something I'm good at.

This seems like something everybody wants but I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. What are some of the (assumingly non-technical) challenges in such an enterprise?

The biggest problem I'm facing right now is credit card processing costs. The restaurant business is a high revenue, low margin industry. The fees are higher for online transactions (no card present) vs. in person transactions (card present), on the order of 1-2%. I think this is the biggest reason it hasn't happened yet. However, I have a workaround which I think will work.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#34

Post by mrpoptart »

Building a personal budgeting system that reduces the complexity of the process to paying attention to 1 number and about 5 minutes per week to be sure you're on budget all the time. I came up with a solution to this problem about 5 years ago and have been testing iterations with friends and family. In process of building an app to manage it for me.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#35

Post by _myles »

tuesday20 wrote: post #31
_myles wrote: post #21

The past several years I've been trying to find some tangible philosophical ground to stand on. This (desperate) search is and has been the produce of mental illness I've dealt with since my adolescence (I'm 32 now). Quite a long story short, I managed to get the mental illness under control; something I thought I'd be living with the rest of my life. My research has included mostly standing/walking meditation, and r…

Could you please elaborate on meditation? How has it helped you, how much time do you spend, what is walking meditation etc? Thank you

When I meditate all I'm trying to do is keep my attention in the present moment; if my mind starts to wander I bring it back, and so on.

I've always loved going on walks, and they've just turned out to be a good way to work through mental/emotional stuff. Walking helps you stay in the moment as well, and when you're focusing your attention on the moment there's always new things to sense.

Let me know if that's not clear enough.

EDIT:

Another important part of meditation is the analysis of your thoughts and emotions. Whatever comes up, try to understand why it did as well as you can.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#36

Post by hanniabu »

tuesday20 wrote: post #31
_myles wrote: post #21

The past several years I've been trying to find some tangible philosophical ground to stand on. This (desperate) search is and has been the produce of mental illness I've dealt with since my adolescence (I'm 32 now). Quite a long story short, I managed to get the mental illness under control; something I thought I'd be living with the rest of my life. My research has included mostly standing/walking meditation, and r…

Could you please elaborate on meditation? How has it helped you, how much time do you spend, what is walking meditation etc? Thank you

> walking meditation

Walking while meditating. There's a common misconception that you need to be sitting or lying down to meditate *or even need to be in a dark candle lite room lol). Meditating is a state of mind.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#37

Post by nikij »

This problem will only apply to very few people. But over the past 2.5 years I've been tracking everything and deriving insights on my activities. This produced some astounding results. e.g. Chewing gum makes me more comfortable in a conversation. Recently I've found a community of robot-like people on reddit who also do this. So I decided to build a platform. It's still in its early stages but feel free to check it out: simplelifedata.com

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#38

Post by addisonl »

pragmaticpirate wrote: post #22

I am working on a solution for people to defeat procrastination. Here's how it works, you select a time slot for work, and we assign you an accountability assistant who will get on a call with you and keep in touch as often as necessary to keep you from procrastinating by holding you accountable for the task at hand.

Sounds expensive

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#39

Post by mcraealex16 »

yeutterg wrote: post #20

Working on the problem of "blue" light affecting circadian rhythms and sleep. We launched our MVP, Bedtime Bulb [0], in 2018, and it's now the most popular product in the category. We're expanding out of North America to Europe in the next couple weeks. We've had a ton of great feedback from customers, and we are working on several new sleep technologies that we plan to release this year. It's also been interesting t…

The issue I have with this is there isn't a consensus about what and if any of these products work. The IES (illumination engineering society) has released a couple articles about why consumers should be weary of products that claim to control the rythms and after attending a talk from the IES on the subject I'm not convinced any of it works (at least to the degree marketing says it does)

https://www.ies.org/fires/circadian-lighting-an-engineers-pe...

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#40

Post by rikkipitt »

I'm working on pacing emails to a more manageable, calmer schedule. I'm doing it with essentially a UI-less system which is a rather fun way to produce an app. It simply requires a user to update their email of the website that emails them too frequently with a paced.email alias. E.g.

  johndoe.shopify@daily.paced.email
  johndoe.stripe@weekly.paced.email
  johndoe.github@monthly.paced.email
At the end of each period, a single email is sent to the real email address containing all of the messages the alias received over that timeframe.

https://www.paced.email

I'd love to hear how you'd use it.

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