Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by justinweiss » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:46 AM UTC

For hobby development, I'm trying to speed up the unofficial PlayStation emulator on the Nintendo 3DS. There are all kinds of interesting problems there, like SD reads being so slow that it tanks the framerate any time the emulator hits the disk (so I might be writing a read thread + precache?), and some apparent room for hardware-specific optimization in the lighting and blending routines.

It's been fun to work around the constraints on an underpowered device. It's also an excuse to learn ARM assembly, and a nice break from all the JavaScript I've been spending my time in lately!

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

#72

Post by unexaminedlife » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:47 AM UTC

tmamic wrote: post #43

Dental treatments, besides being very expensive, are often (up to 28%) unnecessary. This happens because no-one keeps dentists in check. I am trying to make dental treatment and diagnosis reviews easy, cheap, reliable and fast.

I've been wanting to disrupt orthodontistry for quite a long time. With the state of 3d scanners, 3d printers, 3d software modeling, why hasn't the market price of orthodontist treatments dropped to cost-of-materials yet? As soon as at least one satisfactory / integrated open-source stack exists I think it's only a matter of time before it does...

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

#73

Post by mrfusion » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:47 AM UTC

bovermyer wrote: post #66

Procedural fictional world generation.

Explain? Can you make it for vr?

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

#74

Post by Zaskoda » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:48 AM UTC

I've been learning how to design game play mechanics for the Ethereum EVM by building a game dapp with features I haven't seen before.

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

#75

Post by invalidOrTaken » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:48 AM UTC

Symbolic math for students. More generally, UI principles for tree manipulation.

Why am I still using pen and paper for math homework? Why do I have to rewrite the whole friggin thing every step?

And there's a hope that whatever I learn might be useful for lisps, too.

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

#76

Post by mrfusion » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:48 AM UTC

nikij wrote: post #37

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…

Can you point us to the community?

Any other insights you’ve discovered? I tracked my data for a year and discovered strawberries were a potent mood enhancer.

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

#77

Post by mrfusion » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

skwb wrote: post #5

I'm working on automating the acquisition of cardiac MRIs using deep learning!

Where does deep learning come in?

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

#78

Post by mrfusion » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

Irene wrote: post #10

Community medicine; precision medicine - all self-funded.

Sounds interesting. Can you explain more?

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

#79

Post by beatthatflight » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:52 AM UTC

nwsm wrote: post #68

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

Haha, I very nearly quoted that deck in my summary, I've read it a few times. When people ask "why can't you just show the cheapest flights" I usually pull out their Chicago example. The computational complexity is just enormous.

I've found, however that for one way routes I can do fairly well, and for return journeys I have to just sample the space and hope that I'm hitting some good dates in there, currently.

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

#80

Post by acwan93 » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 1:53 AM UTC

Pivoting my parents' homegrown ERP business from the traditional software sales model (one-time sale with annual support contracts) to a SaaS model with MRR to grow and scale the company. This also comes with changing the organization’s mindset and tools used.

I have to say that the technical challenges of bringing in modern web technologies to interface with legacy systems has been an interesting (and frustrating at times!) experience. After working as a software dev for a number of years before taking this on, I’ve been jumping between sales, marketing, devops, management, and actual software development all in a day.