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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?

#581

Post by joshgachnang »

snarf21 wrote: post #515
joshgachnang wrote: post #439

A meal planning app for weight loss. I lost 50 pounds using calorie counting a few years ago. The thing that frustrated me most was trying to come up with meal plans every week. It's quite tedious to constantly find new recipes if you get bored with eating the same meals over and over. The weeks I planned ahead of time, I lost weight quickly. When I didn't plan I would stop losing weight, sometimes for months. So I'm…

Not to discourage you but this seems like a tough sell. Most people gain weight because they don't want to plan out or make nutricious meals. The strategy I've always used is to figure out some small number of meals and then just pick one of them. It removes any mental load for shopping and cooking and you only have to figure it out once. It would be useful to suggest very very quick meals that are Y calories or less…

It's definitely not for everyone! But I know there are some people who just want to be told "go to the store, buy this stuff, you're going to be cooking these things these days if you want to lose weight". The same as a lot of people don't want to put in the work to do calorie counting through MyFitnessPal/others, but some people (including me!) swear by it.

Worst case, I developed an app I like using more than MyFitnessPal just for me and I'll still be quite happy.

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

#582

Post by auiya »

davedx wrote: post #425
jlevers wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), electroni…

There IS the cost of maintaining pumps systems too, which isn't terrible, but it's not zero either.

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

#583

Post by mrpoptart »

peter303 wrote: post #65
mrpoptart wrote: post #34

Building a personal budgeting system that reduces the complexity of the process to paying attention to 1 number and about 5 minutes per week to be sure you're on budget all the time. I came up with a solution to this problem about 5 years ago and have been testing iterations with friends and family. In process of building an app to manage it for me.

I got budgeting down to two numbers: Total take-home pay past 12 months vs total expenditures past two months. Try to avoid the latter going over 85%.

It's awesome that you have a budget, and a process for doing it. Would you find it useful to know whether or not you can afford something you're about to buy, be it a taco, a couch or a car? Your budget works well in as a reflection process, my budget gives you the constant knowledge of how you're doing right now and how you'll probably be doing in the future.

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

#584

Post by tmaly »

I am building a Scratch programming course for kids.

But its more than just that. I want to take the material and make it more entertaining as well as educational.

I am observing that more and more kids are learning things on their own by just going online and searching for videos on how to do X. We are on the cusp of online learning overtaking traditional in classroom learning in terms of quality and presentation.

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

#585

Post by tmaly »

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…

This is a great idea. I need this for HN also.

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

#586

Post by tmaly »

thewarpaint wrote: post #89
rikkipitt wrote: post #40

I'm working on pacing emails to a more manageable, calmer schedule. I'm doing it with essentially a UI-less system which is a rather fun way to produce an app. It simply requires a user to update their email of the website that emails them too frequently with a paced.email alias. E.g. johndoe.shopify@daily.paced.email johndoe.stripe@weekly.paced.email johndoe.github@monthly.paced.email At the end of each period, a si…

Great idea. My suggestion: why not use the Gmail-style johndoe+spotify@ suffix? Just because people would be more used to it. That way johndoe@ also would work.

I ran into an issue where using the + notation required me to create a whole new account on airbnb because I had forgotten that I used + in my original email.

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

#587

Post by ryanmercer »

davehcker wrote: post #568
ryanmercer wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out "The Real Martian" https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd8t8Dq8oZeAjGDx_87azBw/abo... and Beanstalk (a YC company) https://www.beanstalk.farm/

Funny story: I was rejected by YC last batch. But I get it- I thought they look for traction and what not, so I rather made the pitch video on a very specific aspect of Hexafarms- which is monitoring, since some people were willing to check it out. No doubt YC would reject it. On the other hand, Thiel Foundation reached out to me, but they had some drop out thing and what not which I was not able to fullfil (and afte…

The Real Martian is great. Go back and watch the Hab 1 videos, it was truly sad to see snow collapse it. he's now quit his full time job and joined some startup and they're about to go full steam ahead into Hab 2 after months of modelling and other stuff. Ultimately they're looking at creating a commercial product where a family, or a couple of families, can erect a habitat and grow a decent amount of their food.

Hab 1 had aquaponics and fish, not sure where Hab 2 is going to look like as they haven't shared much but he's just started churning videos out again the past month or two.

It's a really neat project, I just hope he continues to show as much as he did with Hab 1 now that he's part of a startup.

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

#588

Post by tmaly »

joshgachnang wrote: post #439

A meal planning app for weight loss. I lost 50 pounds using calorie counting a few years ago. The thing that frustrated me most was trying to come up with meal plans every week. It's quite tedious to constantly find new recipes if you get bored with eating the same meals over and over. The weeks I planned ahead of time, I lost weight quickly. When I didn't plan I would stop losing weight, sometimes for months. So I'm…

I love this idea! I need a version that would also incorporate batch cooking so that I save time on cooking and make it easier to reach.

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

#590

Post by boyter »

galacticdessert wrote: post #456
boyter wrote: 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?

Yes it is, or should be. I’d need more details to really work it out for your case. I will have a look at potential issues in the next few hours.

EDIT I tried and no issues on Windows. I would need more details to investigate. Please raise the issue on github and I will investigate.

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