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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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681–690 of 709 posts

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

#681

Alerting people when proposals are put before municipal councils to develop natural land. I found out too late that a huge, beautiful forest where I live is going to be ripped up and turned into investment condos. So in the interest of giving natural land a fighting chance, I'm setting up a system that will notify users when an address they've submitted is being rezoned. The challenge is obviously scaling, since ever…

I can't wait to use nimbyism as a service

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

#682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing this is different from a DAW? Also, cloud-based music making applications is an area I'm generally interested in, and I find it somewhat crazy that a lot of mainstream music software companies haven't stuck a foot in. I'm aware of some, like Cubase having cloud collaboration, but it's mostly blue ocean.

I'm the lead author of Ardour, a cross-platform open source DAW. Just last night, I was helping out a user who was having issues (eventually traced to their AMD graphics stack). Their session wasn't particularly large - about 1 hour of recorded spoken word and some backing music. The whole data set came to 6.5GB ... non-trivial for "cloud-based" anything, even today. Yes, there are ways to be clever about this stuff,…

Agreed, data volumes are definitely the biggest hurdle in this scenario. Any of the cloud DAWs I've seen mostly offer basic features, and a handful of recording tracks at best.

Just checked out Ardour, looks great! Being able to work with videos and (I presume) work on additional audio and eventually mix the two audio sources back into the video is a fantastic feature.

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

#683

Working on the problem of "blue" light affecting circadian rhythms and sleep. We launched our MVP, Bedtime Bulb [0], in 2018, and it's now the most popular product in the category. We're expanding out of North America to Europe in the next couple weeks. We've had a ton of great feedback from customers, and we are working on several new sleep technologies that we plan to release this year. It's also been interesting t…

I have had sleep issues my entire life. I've cut out sugar, caffeine (both for other reasons), and used blue light filtering applications on my devices. None made a significant difference. I think another issue worth looking at is people not getting a daytime light signal. I've purchased and ultra bright light that I saw in this post [1] and it seems to have helped more than anything I have tried before. 1. https://w…

Have you tried a cold shower/bath followed by warm bed, or a hot bath followed by a cold fan?

Big core temperature changes usually make me feel sleepy.

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

#684
We are working in my company on trying to combine and solve route-optimization problem with scheduling and transportation problem for the Electric Vehicle drivers https://www.makemydayapp.com Think of an EV driver. Where and when should we charge the car ? why not to charge the vehicle according to your schedule and go to your meeting while your car is charging ? and of course. Pre booking your charging station.

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

#685

We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate Authorities with a distributed root of trust. DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for…

This is super exciting and definitely one of the problem in foundations of internet. Happy to help in any possible way!

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

#686
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…

Looks promising and definitely that can have a huge commercial value. I'm curious about how you establish context for code-search? Also, how do you decide on how to rank the result based on a single string?

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

#687
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.

Definitely interested and would love to be a beta-user.

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

#688

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 an…

I’ve spent a long career in tech (20+ years and one day hope to fuse that with public service (both elected and foreign such as yours). Would you mind if I were to get in touch to inquire more based on your experiences?

sure thing, send me a dm!

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

#689
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind if I contact you and ask you questions about this? I’m interested.

Sure, or just ask them here if you think they would be of general interest.

Going to piggyback on this comment, sorry I am a few days late.

Where did you get your masters? I have an EE & CS B.S. from RPI plus 3 years of application development experience in the Fin Tech industry. I am strongly considering swapping industries to Embedded Control--that is what I enjoyed most in college--but I am unsure how to break into the industry. Do you recommend a masters or just sending some apps out? I have a good deal of C++ and micro-controller experience, but none commercial.

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

#690
post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your timeline like?

I am not sure I understand your question. Could you be more specific?

Where are you on the march from nothing to a usable app (even if that's a beta) in months, seasons, years, or any other form that makes sense? :)
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