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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?

#231

Post by nekopa »

loa_in_ wrote: post #214

I'm reworking the (already pretty old) concept of literate programming, basing my research on the implementation written originally by Dr Ross Williams in 70's called funnelweb. Given new hardware of modern times all the ugly hacks and compromises of the C implementation (including ugly delimiters, unnecessary terse syntax, not using a recursive descent parser but relying on byte values while parsing text) a new take…

Do you have anything available for public consumption? I'm a fan of funnelweb and would love to see it updated.

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

#232

Post by jlevers »

DanielGeisler wrote: post #227

Writing Mathematica software with Stephen Wolfram's support to extend the hyperoperators beyond exponentiation - tetration, pentation and so on, from the natural numbers to complex numbers and even matrices. I do this by extending the iteration of any smooth function to real and complex iterates. http://iteratedfunctions.com/ and http://tetration.org/ . Physics has two mathematical methods for it's representation, pa…

I won't pretend to fully understand this, although I do understand the basic theory of higher-order hyperoperators. I'm curious, though -- where/what are the applications for this?

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

#233

Post by arkadiyt »

I'm building a service that fetches the audit logs from all your SaaS tools (think GSuite, Okta, Dropbox, Zendesk, Salesforce, Github, etc) and pushes them into whatever logging pipeline you use.

I built a similar tool internally at my last company and we used it to alert on things like employees making google drive files public to the internet, okta configuration changes, github ssh deploy keys getting added, employees logging in from foreign countries, etc.

If anyone wants to check it out you can reach me at arkadiy{at}logsnitch.com (or just sign up at the same domain).

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

#234

Post by WD-42 »

kvz wrote: post #230

Downloading has been resumable since HTTP/1.1 but people uploading content have a less reliable experience. Worse: typically upstream bandwidth is much lower so they are exposed longer to unreliable connections. Trying to fix uploading through tus.io (low level protocol) and uppy.io (user interface). Both open source and free to add to any project.

I’ve been using uppy with Transloadit on a recent project and it’s completely changed how I think about file uploading from the web. It’s no longer a huge undertaking. Love the service, amazing work. Now if the video/concat robot was fixed I could use it 100%.

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

#235

Post by oddnearfuture »

cedricium wrote: post #142

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…

Awesome, this but for twitter likes + retweets (I don't use reddit enough)

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

#236

Post by crossroads091 »

ahi wrote: post #173

Parsing enumeration and chronology data for serials. E.g. "v.1" is obviously volume:1. But throw in years, parts, editions, copies, supplements, numbers, page ranges, etc, shit gets weird.

You might find some parallels to the field of citation field extraction - where citation/bibliography strings are parsed into author, affiliation, conference name, page/volume of a journal the article appeared in, etc. It is a well-studied problem in NLP and CRF-based taggers have known to yield the best results.

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

#237

Post by DanielGeisler »

jlevers wrote: post #232
DanielGeisler wrote: post #227

Writing Mathematica software with Stephen Wolfram's support to extend the hyperoperators beyond exponentiation - tetration, pentation and so on, from the natural numbers to complex numbers and even matrices. I do this by extending the iteration of any smooth function to real and complex iterates. http://iteratedfunctions.com/ and http://tetration.org/ . Physics has two mathematical methods for it's representation, pa…

I won't pretend to fully understand this, although I do understand the basic theory of higher-order hyperoperators. I'm curious, though -- where/what are the applications for this?

The Universe is a hierarchy of orders; quarks and gluons, atoms, molecules, cells, multi-cellular and on. So hyperoperators form a natural hierarchy to model multilevel systems. Feynman's Path Integral with the integral removed is just tetration. So I believe the higher operators through self organization/renormalization are directly associated with specific levels of reality, but except for QFT I have no suspicion as to which hyperoperators might be associated with levels of physics. Here is how it might work. Hexation might model chemistry while heptation could model simple biological systems. Thanks for asking. This is fun stuff to work on.

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

#238

Post by PopeDotNinja »

MCompeau wrote: post #84

Alleviating homelessness using technology and data. I recently learned that homelessness is not just about the people you see on the street every day, but that homelessness is in fact a funnel that people fall deeper into as their situation becomes increasingly desperate. At the bottom of the funnel are the aforementioned group known as the "chronically homeless". The top of the funnel however, looks a lot different,…

Honest question. What essential services are available to a mid 30s white guy in San Francisco? That was me 10 years ago.

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

#239

Post by jlevers »

zaphodX wrote: post #179
i_haz_rabies wrote: post #95

Alerting people when proposals are put before municipal councils to develop natural land. I found out too late that a huge, beautiful forest where I live is going to be ripped up and turned into investment condos. So in the interest of giving natural land a fighting chance, I'm setting up a system that will notify users when an address they've submitted is being rezoned. The challenge is obviously scaling, since ever…

Sounds challenging..and agree that adapting this to each municipal area would suck big time of effort. I tried something similar but mostly to figure where the land is being purchased recently in a region. But then land/parcels/addresses system is all over the place and, even that info is not consistent across cities. have you looked at data providers who may have this data?

Agreed, the differences between municipalities makes this really hard to scale. If data providers like the ones you mention don't exist, the two ideas that immediately come to mind are a) becoming that data provider (obviously), or b) building a platform for municipalities to store their land ownership data on.

Both sound like interesting problems, and it would be awesome if municipal-level land data was available at scale.

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

#240

Post by jlevers »

i_haz_rabies wrote: post #95

Alerting people when proposals are put before municipal councils to develop natural land. I found out too late that a huge, beautiful forest where I live is going to be ripped up and turned into investment condos. So in the interest of giving natural land a fighting chance, I'm setting up a system that will notify users when an address they've submitted is being rezoned. The challenge is obviously scaling, since ever…

That's a really worthwhile problem to be working on. Kudos to you. I'd be gutted if something like that happened in my area, although I'm lucky enough to live in an area that's mostly trees.
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