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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?

#421

Post by eivarv »

abrichr wrote: post #25
eivarv wrote: post #3

Persisting your OS state as a "context" - saving and loading your open applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so on. Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited resources. Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates. https://cleave.app

This looks great! I've often wished that something like this existed. How long have you been working on it?

Thanks!

The basic idea, on and off for close to five years. Started out experimenting with shell session persistence (solved[0], but not quite), then prototyping a browser-concept and playing with browser-extensions, then settling on the OS-level...

[0]: https://github.com/EivindArvesen/prm

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

#422

Post by Aweorih »

Currently working on 2 projects which would solve problems for me:

- a jdbc driver for interacting with google sheets

- a cross OS application which lets you share easily data

The first one is almost done and requires mostly documentation and some clean-up. It supports at the moment simple SQL queries like select * from, insert into foo() Values () and an update where I currently not remember the syntax. It also has already a Datagrip integration.

The second project shall work wireless and with minimal setup. The original idea was that devices search each other in the local network (via broadcast) and connect then. Further ideas which rised while development where:

- play sound on another device (which I initially thought would be super easy but seems like it is not)

- provide a possibility to define outside applications (like you provide a configuration file how I communicate with your application and this lets you show information on other devices)

- Not just device-to-device but also something like groups

- messaging with other devices

- more communication possibilites, ie via (outside) IP or Wi-Fi direct

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

#423

Post by eivarv »

choward wrote: post #61
eivarv wrote: post #3

Persisting your OS state as a "context" - saving and loading your open applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so on. Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited resources. Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates. https://cleave.app

I haven't really thought this out and I don't have aMac to test on but why not just use separate user accounts? Doesn't OSX already reopen every thing?

Separate user accounts is kind of the naive (and not quite complete) solution to the same problem.

Not really a smooth experience in my opinion, doesn't map quite as well to the concept of "working context" as I think of it. Also, you'd have to maintain your list of users, and manually sync any settings, etc. - whereas with Cleave, I'm planning on implementing white- or blacklisting of applications on a context-basis (and system settings etc. are implicitly shared).

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

#424

Post by stef25 »

davehcker wrote: post #329

I'm growing the freshest lettuce, iron-rich kale, and a lot of other leafy greens! While in college (CS & Math), I got heavily interested in growing food in the most efficient and healthiest way possible. I was a dreamer when I started so I thought more of how to grow 'earthly' produce on Mars, but then I realized that my own planet Earth is so massively underserved. It's basically like this- I mastered growing leafy…

> THE FINAL PRODUCE IS THE ULTIMATE MANIFESTATION OF THEIR PLATONIC IDEAL FORMS

How's the taste?

Not denying it's possible to grow food very efficiently indoors but a vastly oversimplified opinion is that plants need sunlight to be tasty. Is this wrong?

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

#425

Post by davedx »

jlevers wrote: post #219
syllable_studio wrote: post #203

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…

I've actually been thinking about the issue of energy storage a lot recently -- I've read a ton about how lithium-ion battery production is exploding (usually not literally), but it seems unreasonable to store enormous amounts of renewable energy in a device that itself has to be replaced after a certain number of cycles. The device used for pumped energy storage -- a tank (to simplify greatly) -- basically never nee…

> it seems unreasonable to store enormous amounts of renewable energy in a device that itself has to be replaced after a certain number of cycles. The device used for pumped energy storage -- a tank (to simplify greatly) -- basically never needs to be replaced.

It's a fair point but I think that you oversimplify the pumped hydro case. Pumped hydro also has quite some electronic components (turbines/motors), electronics, and other moving parts (valves, overflows). I can imagine some of these components require semi-regular maintenance (hence the maintenance shaft in the diagram on the website of OP).

You'd really have to run the numbers to see which costs more to maintain in the long term.

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

#426

Post by yoshyosh »

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…

Curious if you've thought about this as a browser extension where it injects what you've saved into the main reddit feed. For example, one saved item per refresh. So you naturally rediscover and engage with items you've saved in the past, with a decent algorithm to help prevent any fatigue from seeing the same item too many times.

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

#427

Post by exdsq »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #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 aft…

You have basically had, in my opinion, the perfect career so far. Well done! :)

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

#428

Post by beaconstudios »

2 projects at the moment:

- a graph-based task manager that incorporates dependencies between tasks and infinitely-nested subtasks - IE maps to how we actually think about tasks being related and broken down. Aiming to get this one shared with the world in early Feb.

- a visual programming environment that represents how we model software in our heads, not how it runs on the computer/s. This is my longer-term, much more experimental project.

Drop me an email (in my bio) if you're interested in either! I'll be commercialising the former quite soon and I'm putting a lot of effort into pleasant to use.

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

#430

Post by varjag »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #419
varjag wrote: post #415

An acoustic system for poor-visibility tunnel evacuation assistance using psychoacoustic effects. Massively distributed, self calibrating, microsecond scale synchronized system with a bunch of interesting problems in software, electronics, acoustics and mechanical engineering.

Could you go into detail? Or explain what that means? It sounds interesting, but none of the words seem connected.

We use sound effects to evacuate people from fires in tunnels when they can't see any direction in the smoke. Which involves detecting the fire in the first place, and establishing binaural effects that are directional and suggestive of the direction you should take.

Explaining the implementation would take a wall of text, just listed the aspects that make it interesting.

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