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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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341–350 of 709 posts

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

#342
I'm trying to improve people's abilities to predict the future.

Predictions are a critical part of decision-making, and it's possible to improve – see, for example, Philip Tetlock's work. But that requires the right tools, which we are building: https://www.empiricast.com

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

#343
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.

Hey this is cool. One of my good friends worked (is working?) on this problem for over a year. he’s a long-time dentist practitioner/owner and really keen on this topic. Maybe you two should talk? If interested, email me at bw2016 @ protonmail.com .

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

#345
post #297

Company alignment. I am working on a systematic framework ("way to think about," "a way of doing things") to establish company value alignment. Most companies at one point are internally not aligned, marketing fighting product fighting development fighting design fighting sales. All are wanting to contribute value, all hindering each other in the process of doing so. The goal is one framework where a) an initiative c…

This sounds really interesting and as a marketer, I am constantly butting heads with other departments simply trying to my job. I'd love to hear more when you've developed the framework!

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

#346
post #226

Symbolic AI with common sense and explanation built on top of NNs. Here’s a talk I gave last year though I’m no longer with that company and am working on the tech elsewhere. https://youtu.be/thmkaYOayCM

Hey! I saw your talk at EE380, mind getting in touch over email?

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

#347

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

> affordable

affordable, but efficiency is so-so. 70-80% according to Wikipedia [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

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

#348

Creating a [traffic simulation]( https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/#ab-street ) that's both realistic enough to generate results meaningful in the real world, but easy enough to use that anybody living in a city could use it to experiment with some change to cycling or transit infrastructure. Some of the problems hiding in there: - Getting a representation of a city that cleanly divides paved areas into distinc…

Cool, do you have real world data that supports your simulations ?

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

#349
My current longshot is the development of dropship fulfillment solution as a service. Kind of a managed dropship network for every single dropship vendor and every single dropship retailer out there. The solution should basically take the pain of daily logistics management of the retailers back. Kind of what Amazon does for their own Dropshippers. As a retailer you get full tracking and cost transparency, as a dropship vendor you get a platform that directly integrates with your ERP-system, gives you shipping labels and so forth...

Funny thing is, the basic software more or less exists already. At least on the fulfillment and logistics side of things. The tricky thing now is to create the physical network (also companies like DHL ship for everyone, even next day) and come up with the processes to match n retailers with m dropshippers (some of them shared between retailers) and a basically infinite amount of consumers.

I said long shot. First step is to get my 4PL company of the ground. A 4PL is a nice first step, I tke care of daily logistic operations for clients. Which also includes pretty early on a Dropship component. So once the 4PL is earning some money, the next step will be to define processes for a scaleable Dropship solution, identify software gaps and then create the platform. Talking about longshots...

How I got the idea? I worked for Amazon running, among other things the Amazon.de dropship network. After that I worked for a producer of solar modules. That company sld some of the modules through a webshop and had some dropshipping. Totally inefficient, intransparent and expensive. So I told myself, that can be done better. Took me three years to take the leap into startup world.

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