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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?

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Distance running gave me the space to let stressors bubble up, acknowledge them and move on. Once all of those thoughts pass it becomes easy to focus on breathing and be present in the moment. Over time it also becomes easier to recognize this pattern and expect and accept it.

Yup, this has been the case for me too, along with any repetitive task such as rowing, turning a garden, chopping wood, etc.

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

#152
I am creating a couple of open source tools for data governance. The first one is a data catalog (1) with tags for PII data. The second one is a data lineage application (2). The goal is to keep these as simple as possible to install and use.

IMO the current options are too complicated or expensive and appropriate for the largest companies. I cannot hack a simple application for data discovery or usage statistics. So I am building a dead simple data catalog that I can reuse. The data lineage app is the first app on it.

(1) https://github.com/tokern/piicatcher (2) https://github.com/tokern/lineage

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

#153
There is plenty of data lost in Google Search Console due to the limit of max 1000 records for any time period. The real value is in the long tails and they are lost.

I am working on creating a solution that gathers the data normally not seen in console dashboard and discovering actionables that help the user.

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

#154

I'm tackling the issue of managing Reddit saves. Across all platforms (not just Reddit), people including myself like to save/bookmark interesting content in the hopes of getting some use out of it later. The problem arises when you start accumulating too much content and forget to ever check that stuff out. I'm working on a solution to help resurface Redditors' saved things using personalized newsletters. I'm callin…

Wow, that's really neat! I sometimes hesitate to save something because I think "when would I really come back to this?" But this would probably get me to save more things that I find interesting.

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

#155

We'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/

Yes! It's funny you mention that I just bought The Sovereign Individual — haven't read it yet but from cursory glance I think there is a lot of intersection. Would love to discuss more — we have a discord I can invite you to if you're interested, just ping me at the email in my profile.

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

#156

I'm tackling the issue of managing Reddit saves. Across all platforms (not just Reddit), people including myself like to save/bookmark interesting content in the hopes of getting some use out of it later. The problem arises when you start accumulating too much content and forget to ever check that stuff out. I'm working on a solution to help resurface Redditors' saved things using personalized newsletters. I'm callin…

Signed up, and I love how fast it was to create an account. Literally two clicks and 5 seconds as my password is saved in google crome and you sign up through reddit. I think you're on to something with that onboarding process.

Kinda different, kind of the same but i'd love to use an app with much better search than the 'direct search' currently in most aggrogrator/ note apps. If i searched 'quotes' it would rip out and return all the things in italized, in quotes, or things that the algorithm deems as quotes based on it's scrape of the internet; Kinda like google but 'personal search' based on my notes, articles, all my different emails (work, and my 37 different gmail accounts) and websites I frequent (like reddit, hacker news comments, etc.) There was an HN article the other day that got me thinking about this problem, but i can't seem to find it. However, it approached it from a much deeper technical level, utilizing emacs and searching through his code. If you could bring that into an easy to use, consumer facing GUI I think it'd have potential to be pretty game changing.

'Personalized Search, and we don't have to steal your data because you willingly give it to us' - Google

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

#157

I'm tackling the issue of managing Reddit saves. Across all platforms (not just Reddit), people including myself like to save/bookmark interesting content in the hopes of getting some use out of it later. The problem arises when you start accumulating too much content and forget to ever check that stuff out. I'm working on a solution to help resurface Redditors' saved things using personalized newsletters. I'm callin…

Wow, that's really neat! I sometimes hesitate to save something because I think "when would I really come back to this?" But this would probably get me to save more things that I find interesting.

Thanks! I've been hesitant to show it off thinking not many people would find it useful but you've given me hope :)

Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions.

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

#158
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks useful. Would it be fast in huge codebases?

Yes and no. The interactive version appears to be because it displays results as it goes. However for pure command line, it will be fast but not comparable to ripgrep/grep/silver server or others. I want it fast, but absolute performance is not a goal as its a trade off with any ranking algorithm. Not really the same sort of tool. Anyway here is a search over my projects directory which is about 5.7 GB of content htt…

This is super cool! Could see myself using this when I'm feeling foggy-brained and want to bash keys until something useful comes up. But I also just love how it looks; nice interactive TUI apps are always a pleasure to use. Good luck getting it stable!

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

#159

I'm trying to figure out the appropriate discount rate and methodology that governments should use when doing cost-benefit analysis of big expenditure projects (e.g. infrastructure). It would seem that economists have been arguing about this for many decades now with no end in sight. There are some interesting value-judgements that have to be made here (e.g. do we value the consumption of future generations more/less…

Interesting. For my data mining class I took NYC Open data - merging temporal Crime Data and Capital Expenditure data by geographic district/precinct, to see if there was evidence that spending money in a region had a positive impact on crime reduction. Then to see if I could use that model to see if I could predict how much crime would be reduced given a specified funding injection into the region. We assumed there was some lag (e.g. 6 mos. or 1 year) between funded project completion and community impact (reduced crime).

The model was only a little over 70% accurate, but the data was sloppy because we had to get creative mapping precincts to districts since their boundaries don't overlap exactly. However, I think this could be significantly improved since crime data is geo-tagged, so you can get much more specific about where crimes occur with respect to funded projects.

I think that model can be made to help inform where funding could be most beneficial from a social perspective. I realize there are other factors in infrastructure investments than crime - I was focussed on community improvement projects (e.g. blight removal, green space development, school construction/repair, etc.)

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

#160

I work on software that's used by NASA (and other organizations) to model spacecraft missions. This project spans the gambit of interesting problems in computer science: numerical methods, high-fidelity orbit modeling, orbit determination (using Kalman filters to estimate spacecraft state), complex 3D visualization, language parsing, IDE design, and many more topics. It's definitely one of the most interesting projec…

Which project is that ? I'm also looking for something of this sort ..
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