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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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391–400 of 709 posts

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

#391

Building a modern headless commerce platform with the focus of developers, and making it fast, and easy to get started. It might not be as impressive as some of the comments, but it does seem like something the market is needing.

What does “headless commerce” mean?

Presumably it's the backend side of an ecommerce setup, where you provide an API around which others can implement a UI.

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

#392
post #388

I’m working on Newsy. https://www.newsy.co I have quite a few domain names that I have purchased over the years that I am not doing anything with at the moment. I wanted minimal amount of work to make a good use out of these domains. So I built Newsy. It turns your idle domain into a news aggregator. I’m nearly there. You can sign up and I’ll invite you to check it out!

Nice try with the: "You are currently {random} in the queue."

Did it work? :)

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

#393
post #371

We're (team of 2) rewriting an old enterprise ERP system made of ~1M of C89 non-portable loc, tens of thousands of handwritten PLSQL loc, thousands of business rules carefully abstracted in sql data, tens of complex screen designed and scripted on a no-name RAD software that was the current fad back in the days, and some companion pieces in VB6 because, you known, 'C89, not anybody can do it'. That's fun . The new sy…

I'm also in the planning stages of re-writing ~1M lines of C doing hardware control for a telecoms system. It's going to be replaced with Elixir (basically Erlang) because it's the perfect fit (which is unsurprising given its a telecom system). My prediction is that it will be 10-20k lines of code when I'm done because there's so much obsolete cruft to remove. Plus ~1k of C as a shim layer to allow an incremental tra…

Nice, glad to know there's other brave souls that choose the Big Rewrite path, despite the latent idea in our industry that every one of those projects are meant to fail.

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

#394
Working on XAI for complex computer vision tasks. We’ve built a toolkit which provides the following:

1. Heatmaps based on all popular gradient based explainable AI techniques (plus our own) for classification, regression and semantic segmentation tasks.

2. Uncertainty modeling for classification, segmentation and regression tasks.

3. Concept Discovery/ Pattern Discovery (and dependence) for patterns learned within a deep neural network. (Loosely based on TCAV)

4. Using network internals for optimal pruning and model compression.

Send us an email at sales@untangle.ai if you’re interested in trying out our toolkit. We offer 30 day free trial period.

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

#396

I’m working on Newsy. https://www.newsy.co I have quite a few domain names that I have purchased over the years that I am not doing anything with at the moment. I wanted minimal amount of work to make a good use out of these domains. So I built Newsy. It turns your idle domain into a news aggregator. I’m nearly there. You can sign up and I’ll invite you to check it out!

Interesting idea though I didn't see any examples of what that looks like on your website or links to live sites doing this. Hard to think about it just in my mind with no visuals.

Here's an example for one of my idle domains.

https://www.heystartup.com/#/

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

#397
In the Caribbean, because of scamming and fraud, opening an account at any financial institution or like place requires several documents and oft making a visit to an authority figure (Justice of the Peace) to verify address and for character reference. On average you will need your TRN (Tax Registration Number (SSN basically), some form of photo identification, address verification, references, proof of income) and the list can go on depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

We're basically trying to make an opt in service that can make procuring these relatively painless by grouping all relevant parties and then keeping these on record. A glorified KYC of sorts and then looking to use these as means of authenticating (I should be able to use my profile to sign up anywhere or transfer to my data (or parts thereof) to another party. Lots more to flush out but we have a good grasp of where we're going and what we want to achieve. Our government has tried to do this in the past but failed at getting it past the courts due to privacy concerns and are set to try again. I skimped on some details but the idea should be clear.

As well as new data protection laws introduced/proposed with more amendments to come, it's a simple but interesting problem at this point in time in navigating everything including how we do our own verification, security and eventual licensing to achieve the desired outcome.

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

#398
NIR spectrometer for assessing ripeness of wine grapes. It is palm sized device that you take to the vineyard and by scanning many bunches you get numbers you need: brix, pH, acids.

There are many research papers talking about it for many years, but till recently there was not cheap enough hardware available so it just get stuck in university laboratories.

It is still tough project to pull out as it combine hardware, cloud software, machine learning and there is quite some laboratory work required as well. Doing all of this as a single person and bootstraping is extra challenge but I guess I don't know better.

I've got into it 5 years ago, when I decided to quit technology, bought small farm and build winery. At first I wanted to analyze the wine itself, basically to make traditional method obsolete, but performance of this kind of instruments are not good enough for liquid that complex. It turned out grape analysis is much easier target to tackle.

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

#399
On a OSS sideproject, I'm working on a DI container for TypeScript that can autowire interfaces, Array of types and generics.

Since the type information is erased at compile time, it uses the compiler API to extract the data needed and generates TS code for the interface and constructor mappings.

The library is on GH, but not really much to show. I've posted on /r/node and it got some positive reactions, but it didn't got that much attention.

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

#400
Building a library to deduplicate data at scale in Apache Spark, where there is no unique record identifier (i.e. fuzzy/probabilistic matching).

https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/sparklink

It's currently in alpha testing, but the goal is for it to:

- Work at much greater scale than current open source implementations (the ambition is to work at 100 million records plus)

- Get results much faster than current open source implementations - ideally runtimes of less than an hour.

- Have a highly transparent methodology, so the match scores can be easily explained both graphically and in words (it isn't a 'black box')

- Have accuracy similar to the best products on the marketplace.

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