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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
121–130 of 709 posts
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#122I'm working on figuring out four different ways for somebody with a light background in electronics (basic soldering really) and has a Technician or General class ham radio license to get on the air, from scratch, for $100. No added expenses. It's possible, and a fun challenge. Its research for some writing I'm doing.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#123Interesting to me, your mileage may vary. Working in my spare time on a command line terminal UI application that searches over source code and ranks the results. It came about from watching a work college constantly opening VSCode when trying to find things in a codebase. I mentioned he should use ripgrep/silver searcher which he tried, but said he preferred to get more context and wanted ranked results. The context…
Looks useful. Would it be fast in huge codebases?
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#124We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate Authorities with a distributed root of trust.
DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for your traffic to be compromised.
We're building on top of a new protocol (https://handshake.org, launching in 7 days!!) to create an alternate root zone that's distributed. Developers can register their own TLDs and truly own them by controlling their private keys. In addition, they can pin TLSA certs to their TLD so that CAs aren't needed anymore.
I wrote a more in-depth blog post here: https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d...
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#125Dental 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.
May you succeed with this endeavor.
An ex-dentist attempted to strong arm me into a receiving an occlusal adjustment because my TMJ popped during a single visit. I knew this permanent procedure is rarely the best solution for the scenario. The dentist subsequently became irate and told me, "You'll lose all your teeth and look like an AIDs patient!" You can probably guess what era he's from.
I wanted to file a complaint, but it would've been my word against his, his assistant, and his hygienist. Absolutely ridiculous situation. It also provided a snapshot into how medical professionals exploit patient ignorance for revenue.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#126We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate Authorities with a distributed root of trust. DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for…
This is really interesting. Are you using concepts from self-sovereign identity¹²? Do you think there is a relevant intersection?
¹ http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-sov... ² https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-primer/
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#127Still thinking pretty loosely about the trust space, but a few conclusions on my end: LinkedIn is frustrating because people connect even though they don't know each other very well. I spend a lot of time meeting up with strangers (Craigslist, meetups, dating) and generally hoping that the world is good (though it pretty much always turns out to be). Phone number seems to be something that people only exchange when they have a fairly meaningful interaction - could that be used as a way to show you know someone/vouch for them? I feel like there's something in that space that would resonate with a lot of people.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#128A truly anonymous anti-social network and an anonymous but verifiable identity to go along with it.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#129I'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 si…
Great idea. My suggestion: why not use the Gmail-style johndoe+spotify@ suffix? Just because people would be more used to it. That way johndoe@ also would work.
An irritatingly large portion of websites don't let you put + in email addresses.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#130A minecraft server.