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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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241–250 of 709 posts

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

#241

I'm leading a startup nonprofit exploring policy solutions for America's 100 largest cities. Of course, there are plenty of national and state-level policy organizations; some even dip their toes in the municipal policy scene. But in the cities, most gropus are self-interested or focused on a single issue. We're trying to fill the gap with original research and projects that operationalize the research of others -- t…

What is it called?

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

#243
post #137

1.) A solver for the unstructured Euler equations. ...I was intending to volunteer time for an local university project investigating parallels between Holographic light with orbital angular momentum and hydrodynamics (in this case the Euler/Madelung equations). Not sure what happened as... volunteers get lost in the shuffle? Anyway, the solver is fun. 2.) Porting my Python code for nonlinear gradient driven optimiza…

Why don't you use Julia for #2?

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

#244
post #205
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds awesome! Are these things you're doing for work, or on your own (or both)? I'm not much of a gamer, and I don't know what the market looks like for Nintendo systems...what are the applications for custom ROMs on DSs and other handheld systems? Some excellent free reverse engineering courses for Windows[0] and Linux[1] were posted in another HN thread recently, and a couple other HNers and I started a stud…

> what are the applications for custom ROMs on DSs and other handheld systems? Having played around a bit with a jailbroken Switch, the primary reason is to be able to either run mods for games (e.g. there's a surprisingly viable set of tools for converting/bundling Skyrim mods for PC for use on the Switch version) or to run homebrew apps, the common ones being emulators. Previously, I had played around with GBA emul…

Fascinating. I'm going to have to do some reading about this -- it's a whole world I didn't know existed. Thanks for explaining.

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

#245

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 ..

FreeFlyer: https://ai-solutions.com/freeflyer/

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

That explanation was surprisingly accessible, thank you! It also blew my mind. I'd never thought of the building blocks of the universe as forming a hierarchy before, although in retrospect, it feels obvious.

Were you being literal when you gave the examples of chemistry as hexation and biology as heptation? If so, why are they those levels specifically? Or were you just using those as examples because they're roughly one "step" apart on the hierarchy (i.e., molecules -> cells)? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

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

#247
I'm helping to build a scalable system for delivering high value and life saving medical supplies to hard to reach places via autonomous aircraft. The system is currently operating in Rwanda and Ghana, and aggressively expanding over the next couple years.

Specifically, I spend a lot of time thinking about and writing embedded software. The aircraft is fully autonomous and needs to be able to fly home safely even after suffering major component failures. I split my time between improving core architectural components, implementing new features, designing abstractions, and adding testing and tooling to make our ever-growing team work more efficiently.

I did FIRST robotics in high school where I mainly focused on controller firmware. I studied computer science in college while building the embedded electronics for solar powered race cars, and also worked part time on research projects at Toyota. After graduating with a Master's degree, I stumbled into a job at SpaceX where I worked a lot on the software for cargo Dragon, then built out a platform for microcontroller firmware development. I decided to leave SpaceX while happy, and spent a couple years working on the self driving car prototype (the one that looked like a koala) at Google. Coming up on my third year, I was itching for something less comfortable and decided to join a scrappy small startup with a heart of gold. Now it's in the hundreds of employees and getting crazier and crazier.

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

#248
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...

I don't know if this is what you mean but in Japan many dentists have machines to make tooth crowns. Not sure how common that is in the west. I went to a dentist in SF, they did something and then I had to come back in 2 weeks after they made the crown. Been to several dentists in Japan where they could make the crown while you wait 20-30 mins

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

#249
not as interesting or as world-changing as many of the other problems here, but it scratches that 'language itch' for me: I'm building an interop bridge between Elixir and Zig that makes calling Zig from Elixir safe, elegant, easy, and comprehensible:

https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler/

On my plate currently: Figure out how to make a long-running zig function run in an OS thread alongside the BEAM so that it doesn't have to be dirty-scheduled.

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

#250
I'm working on a personal project that allows you to add notes to youtube videos, and be able to skip quickly to specific sections.

I started this because I'm learning guitar mostly from YouTube, and I find myself constantly seeking videos to specific sections.

I'll probably launch the site on ShowHN soon. Feel free to DM me if you can think of other uses for this, or if you're interested to know when this launches.

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