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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?

#451
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 didn't know I wanted this until now, and now I really want it. I often open a ton of related applications, and then avoid restarting my computer because it's incovenient to reopen everything. I'm on Linux, so I won't be able to use your app, but great idea and good luck!

I think taking this sort of context snapshot may be very difficult. If you assume no direct application integration. It would almost be like you would need a mechanism to operate in a partition of RAM where it could not interact with the current running context but stream all of the RAM in use to disk.

Also it'd would be a data integrity nightmare because if one context shared the apps from another. How would you manage memory corruption, and allocation and saving in this sort of scenario.

Anyway, sounds awesome.

Good luck

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

#452
post #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.

to be honest, just an off-brand youtube mobile app would do it, so I have control rather that goog.

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

#454
I’m working on making email SaaS providers behave reliably as a side project. I’ve written a piece of software which is self-hosted that does failover, retries, queuing, logging, and monitoring for sending mail via SMTP so that people don’t have to spend time implementing all of that plumbing themselves.

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

#455

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,…

Where are you based? Here in dublin (ireland) there is a housing/homeless crisis that needs some resolution, that the feckless gov is unlikely to provide..

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

#456
post #51

Interesting to me, your mileage may vary. Working in my spare time on a command line terminal UI application that searches over source code and ranks the results. It came about from watching a work college constantly opening VSCode when trying to find things in a codebase. I mentioned he should use ripgrep/silver searcher which he tried, but said he preferred to get more context and wanted ranked results. The context…

Hey! Looks cool, I tried compiling it on Windows (at work ATM, hehe) but so far it does not seem to find any files. If I start it in a folder, the search always says 0 in 0 files.

Is windows a supported platform?

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

#458
I'm a diplomat working on international norms for cyber and information warfare. I'm trying to get countries to agree on how to use and not use their capabilities, the influence on global democracy, the connection to armed conflict and the future of interstate relations. In practice, this means meeting a lot of people and spending a lot of time negotiating with other countries in scrappy conference rooms in the UN and elsewhere, sometimes in weird anonymous locations.

On the side, I'm an advisor to an impact investment foundation that is expanding their operations to East Africa. They're setting up an investment fund and accelerator programs to help companies tackle development challenges.

I'm also involved in a startup that is working to develop a new fintech app to create more data and access to credit for small-scale businesses in East Africa. It's a basic PWA app, not released yet, which has some real potential of scaling up and addressing some pretty substantial development challenges. (If anyone is really good with writing a bare-bones PWA based on Gatsby optimised for speed and low-bandwidth environments, please give me a shout).

I've had a weird career. Started out as a programmer in the late 90's, did my own startup in the mid 00's which was a half-baked success, moved to Africa for a few years and worked for the UN, moved back home and had kids, moved back to Africa and worked as a diplomat covering lots of conflicts in the Great Lakes region, moved back home again, worked for the impact foundation for a year and then rejoined diplomacy to do cyber work.

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

#459

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…

I've been to your airfield in Rwanda! It's such a great company.
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