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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?

#61

Post by choward »

eivarv wrote: post #3

Persisting your OS state as a "context" - saving and loading your open applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so on. Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited resources. Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates. https://cleave.app

I haven't really thought this out and I don't have aMac to test on but why not just use separate user accounts? Doesn't OSX already reopen every thing?

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

#63

Post by choward »

brenden2 wrote: post #32
buzzert wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh no. Not another crypto currency or other virtual currency I hope.

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

#65

Post by peter303 »

mrpoptart wrote: post #34

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.

I got budgeting down to two numbers: Total take-home pay past 12 months vs total expenditures past two months. Try to avoid the latter going over 85%.

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

#67

Post by baroomba »

eivarv wrote: post #3

Persisting your OS state as a "context" - saving and loading your open applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so on. Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited resources. Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates. https://cleave.app

Nice. I’ve thought for a few years now that this is the next big thing I want out of an OS and software ecosystem—suspend work session, resume book research session and personal communication session, suspend research session leaving comm session active, open Christmas shopping session, suspend, suspend all open sessions and load gaming session, and so on. Huge bonus if the sessions can be moved from one device to another.

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

#68

Post by nwsm »

beatthatflight wrote: post #58

Flight search. I hunt deals for Aussie travellers ( https://www.beatthatflight.com.au ), but an inordinate amount of my searching for deals is manual. - initially, all manual - secondly, timers - I know when some airlines do deals, so I go look - thirdly, I found other sites indexing unusually cheap flights, but they're not always the same price on my site - fourth, built a script to search my own site for a route, b…

That really is a hard problem. Here is a very good slide deck [0] detailing the complexity of flight search. It's written by an employee of ITA Software, who built QPX, the system that was bought by Google and now powers Google Flights. [1]

[0] http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

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

#70

Post by mrfusion »

tezzer wrote: post #12

Characterizing the effect of near-surface humidity and wave action on Ka/Ku band satellite transmissions from a surfboard-sized autonomous swimming vessel. I have a little sensor platform, and customers that want it to do a whole lot more. Bandwidth can be hard to come by 6000 miles from the nearest human. Also, working on how to integrate a small team of hackers into a big team of production oriented engineers. Maki…

I’m surprised there’s so much demand for that.

Also I bet you’re excited for starlink.

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