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Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

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61–70 of 831 posts

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#61
I’m trying to figure out how to ship DNA effectively. It’s really inefficient right now, so I’m genetically engineering bacterial spores to make it a lot better. Not sure if people will adopt, but at least it’ll be 10x better than what is currently available!

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#63
Not tried yet but I’d love to make a JS front end library to “bring your own storage” so that if I provide you with an app online (think SPA) it can then save the data to where he used wants (s3, Dropbox, local disk using extension, etc.)

Another similar idea is a very simple rest protocol so that you can save to server and then make it easy to self host it.

I like the idea of people building apps as web pages without needing to worry about the server and the user owning their data but having the convenience of a cloud like solution where you just visit the site, log in and work.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#64
Working on building a monitoring and log trace stack for machine learning. What’s weird/hard is that we’re looking to deduce the performance of models that do not necessarily have ground truth readily available so it’s tricky to figure out if the model is working or not.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#65
Building a relational lang (https://github.com/Tablam/TablaM) I allow myself to get derailed in how provide a nicer "linq/iterator" protocol that work inside rust and outside in the lang (so, how I write them in rust is close to what the user could write in the lang).

The regular iterator protocol, as today in rust, make hard to do stuff like JOINS, GROUP BY and other fancy stuff (because you need to decompose the computation in a partial state machine. This is hard even for a developer, impossible to ask for a regular data user). Also, you need to duplicate all that for async (with streams) and other abstractions...

I'm now trying to understand transducers (https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gqiyej/potentials_adv...) and stumble upon effects:

http://mikeinnes.github.io/2020/06/12/transducers.html

that look to my the clean way I wish to use.

But what look easy in python/f#/etc in rust is HARD to do. So I'm in a kind of limbo :)

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#66
I am attempting to bring 100% client-side speech recognition to the web:

https://github.com/jaxcore/bumblebee

Although the first release is not officially out yet, the NodeJS code is working and you can install the development version of the app server and try out the hello world app locally.

The solution involves running Mozilla DeepSpeech inside an Electron desktop application with a websocket server and client API that NodeJS scripts can interact with, to receive speech recognition results, utilize "alexa" style hotword commands, and text-to-speech. The electron app handles all the heavy stuff, and you just use a simple API.

A web browser extension can also make use of this API to bring these capabilities to web sites, but that part isn't finished yet.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#68
post #65

Building a relational lang ( https://github.com/Tablam/TablaM ) I allow myself to get derailed in how provide a nicer "linq/iterator" protocol that work inside rust and outside in the lang (so, how I write them in rust is close to what the user could write in the lang). The regular iterator protocol, as today in rust, make hard to do stuff like JOINS, GROUP BY and other fancy stuff (because you need to decompose the…

You and kd5bjo should chat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23741932

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#69
post #62

I’m trying to map relational algebra onto Rust’s type system. If I’m successful, I’ll have a bunch of collection types with different performance characteristics that are all drop-in replacements for each other.

You and mamcx should chat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23741945

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#70
post #62

I’m trying to map relational algebra onto Rust’s type system. If I’m successful, I’ll have a bunch of collection types with different performance characteristics that are all drop-in replacements for each other.

Got a link?
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