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

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

#141

Post by dsteinman »

IshKebab wrote: post #101
dsteinman wrote: post #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…

It's not really "the web" if you have to use Electron and Node surely? Wouldn't it make more sense to do it with web workers and wasm?

The web browser extension would communicate with the electron app server, NodeJS would not be needed in that scenario (the electron app includes the nodejs server code). You can write your web voice app with static client-side JavaScript which communicates with the Electron server through the browser extension.

Web Page Bumblebee JS API Bumblebee Extension Bumblebee Electron App (DeepSpeech)

DeepSpeech with the pretrained english model is enormous (1.4GB) it's not feasible to load it into a web worker. It can run in a server, but then every website would have to run its own server side speech recognition servers which is difficult and expensive to scale.

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

#143

Post by ketanmaheshwari »

I am building a tiny "replay" script that when run with a code file will print the code by line/block with a customized amount of delay OR keypress. The motivation is to be able to slowly read large source code files without having the whole file on the screen.

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

#144

Post by hazeii »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #115
hazeii wrote: post #94

How to measure pedal (and/or crank) angle on a moving bicycle to 0.05 degree. Anyone?

Gyroscope or mems accelerometer. Otherwise convert rotational crank movement to push-pull linear slider (see piston, flywheel, linear actuator, etc) and measure linear change in resistance between contact points (like a cheap caliper does, you can even use a chinesium one off eBay as they have a pin out under the battery tab, if your resulting linear motion is within that scale). You don’t need to drive anything besi…

Thanks for reply, and do you already work for us? :)

We've burnt through a pile of MEMS devices, currently working with CRM100 gyro's. As far as I've got is we definitely need a non-contact solution, either optical or MEMS with a once-per-rev index pulse (which obv. needs to be within the same 0.05 degree requirement).

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

#145

Post by tlrobinson »

jeremylevy wrote: post #91

Automating cloud architecture creation. I'm building a "catalog" of architectures that you could use to create a complete cloud architecture on your AWS, GCP or Azure account in less than one minute. So, for example, you could create a docker-based architecture with CI/CD, auto-scaling, zero downtime deployment, SSL, load-balancing, high availability and MongoDB in less than one minute in your own AWS account. It's l…

> It's like Terraform with the user-friendliness of Heroku.

> It's very hard because every providers have different APIs and concepts so you have to start from scratch for each.

Why not build it as a layer on top of Terraform?

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

#146

Post by manish_gill »

erezsh wrote: post #95

I'm trying to replace SQL by building a language that compiles to SQL. It has first-class functions, nicer syntax, better type-system, introspection, and other things you would expect from a modern language. But in the end, you still get SQL's performance, and the ability to use it with dozens of database engines.

If this can allow me to write complex SQL (lots of JOINs, Multiple CTEs building on top of each other, Analytic functions etc), then I'm definitely interested. I've created an SQL generation engine in the past and can definitely appreciate how hard the problem is.

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

#147

Post by hermitcrab »

hermitdev wrote: post #133
hermitcrab wrote: post #81

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.

There's already IBM's DataStage. I currently use this for ETL work at my job, although we're working on moving our ETL work to Python and an in-house framework due to licensing costs.

I know there are various Extract Transform Load tools aimed at professional data scientists. My product is aimed at numerate professionals who aren't programmers or data scientists and have never heard of 'ETL'. The idea is that they can install Easy Data Transform, transform their data and output it in a few clicks, without programming. It is also very cheap compared to many commercial ETL tools.

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

#148

Post by titchard »

Designing a combat robot for the UK Antweight division, which is only 150g max weight. (or 175g for some groups).

Despite this tight weight budget, I intend to build something rather interesting, but it is causing me to spend a lot of time in Fusion designing the parts along with slicing and reslicing 3D printed parts to shave partial grams of components to save a bit of weight.

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

#149

Post by hazeii »

zamadatix wrote: post #117
hazeii wrote: post #94

How to measure pedal (and/or crank) angle on a moving bicycle to 0.05 degree. Anyone?

https://www.mouser.com/Electromechanical/Encoders/_/N-39xfc?... ?

Thanks, looked at them. Can't get the resolution we need for any vaguely feasible price though.

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

#150

Post by algo_trader »

contingencies wrote: post #9

Given the earth's population trajectory and the reduction in fertile arable unpolluted lands, there is a coming crisis in the distribution of food. How do we distribute food to high density Asian urban populations efficiently, minimizing needless motor vehicle trips, packaging and spoilage, when convenience purchasing is on the rise and average household sizes are shrinking? Our answer is a network of robotic service…

Related:

an eco-recovery robot

Inspired by

https://interestingengineering.com/jadav-payeng-the-man-who-...

https://relieved.co/couple-plants-2-million-trees-in-20-year...

EDIT: i am trying to find a similar story about a professor who worked in similar techniques in African farms - increasing plants/animal/water-retention using tradition techniques

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