Writing a no-code drag-and-drop tools for transforming data (join, filter, reformat, reorder etc). The hardest bit is handling cascading changes to the column structure (e.g. removing and reordering columns) intuitively - particularly if they change the input file to one with less columns or differently ordered columns.
Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
81–90 of 831 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#82Fully offline, fully searchable copies of personal data (email, tweets, calendar, etc.), English Wikipedia, IMDb, OpenStreetMap (tiles, routing, points of interest), geocoding. Fully offline and state of the art speech recognition. Fully offline voice assistant with almost complete coverage of the most common usage.
Yes please. I live this idea.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#83[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#84Not sure if this is weird so much as an area of business that not a lot of people think actively about, but get bit by. THE PROBLEM How do you automate and aggregate context across business departments for various forms of activity, and then map that to marketing analytics in a way that gives relevant and sufficient insights beyond just channel or user data? How do you more fully answer the question of "what happened…
I’d love to have a chat further. I have some familiarity with what you’re talking about and can see the value of it.
Great, you can find my email in my profile.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#85Soil simulation This is just one part of one of the sillier things I'm working on/thinking about. How can I make a real-time interactive soil simulation work, essentially a big realistic virtual sandbox. Since this is a side project, it'll go as far as all side projects go. =)
This video series about soil is really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#86An open source search index shared and updated over the bittorrent protocol.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#87I'm trying to design a vibratory bowl feeder that I can 3D print. Designing features to align or reject parts is a bit of a dark art and it's requiring a few more iterations than expected.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#88Since I live in Tokyo, it’s about a 3 - 4 hour drive to various ski resorts. I want to snowboard every weekend. So I’m trying to find the best* ski resort I can head to next weekend. Best is a mix of - the ones I enjoy most - but not one that I just visited last weekend - where there has been recent snowfall / is predicted to snow - that I have may have a season pass for - where costs of highway tolls, petrol, hotels…
Well. It's not the answer you want, but the Shinkansen and an expensive taxi ride or maybe a ridesharing with some local dudes might be a feasible, but not cheap answer.
Stay safe in those woods! I nearly perished, by getting lost.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#89Information overload.
My current side project is https://feedsub.com. Right now, - it's not great - I started by building an simple tool for getting regular updates from RSS feeds, but longer-term I want to turn this into a system which can absorb all the data streams you're interested in (news, stocks, weather, social, communities) and give you dials (filters, curation, signals, etc..) to surface a healthy amount wherever you want (SMS, email, web, RSS, chatbots, etc..).
The crux of the problem is endless scrolling feeds we're sucked into 24/7, which is why I based my MVP on email.
My current solution is trivial on a technical level. Honestly, my biggest problem is thinking about the problem on a non-technical level, balancing this with working life and branding, since my software and vision are very far apart right now.
(TBH, this isn't nearly as hard a problem as some of the others here - but I enjoy the ideas/feedback I get from communities like HN)
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#90Knowledge. Working on building a self-hosted app that would alow you to save, organise and search your knowledge in one center. It would contain information like notes, bookmarks (it would download the links contents) and in general provide a programmable, opensource interface to preserve the info you'll find useful and even sync with external apis to save your online presence locally (think reddit posts, hn links, e…
So something like what Bookstack is doing https://www.bookstackapp.com/