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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?

#151

Post by rawgabbit »

httpsterio wrote: post #11

I've been mulling over an idea that is essentially a combination of personal ID, secure digital authentication and online communications all baked into one. There's a EU directive instructing on how citizens should be able to identify online with eIDAS. In my country, you can use eIDAS to authenticate in basically any governmental agency portal, but you can't get any eIDAS enabled auth method as a citizen. The curren…

> authenticating is done via bank accounts

It occurred to me the USA might do something similar in the future and let the banks authenticate and verify identities. (The $1200 CARES Act stimulus payments were automatically wired to those who previously authorized the IRS to post their tax refunds to their banks.)

> actually verify the users

Maybe you can harness existing Public Notaries instead of using online banking? The USA has over four million Public Notaries who can "witness" and verify identities. For example, a user can pay for a Public Notary to come to his house. The Public Notary reviews the user's government provided identification and issue them an official E-ID and a encryption USB key like Google Titan Security key. The Public Notary can record this transaction in a government database so that there is a trail of who received the Titan key and who provided it.

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

#152

Post by dr_dshiv »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #124

Let's solve Harmony! The first scientific experiment was conducted by 5th century BC Pythagoreans. They wanted to show that the basis for musical consonance was math. From that, they inferred that harmony in math accounted for the harmony of the cosmos. This integration of math+physics was very forward thinking. But, if we fast forward to the present, we still don't have a complete scientific explanation for the basi…

> Harmony was also the objective function for the first deep learning neural network, Paul Smolensky's Harmonium.

Here is the 1986 work in Parallel Distributed Processing, along with G. Hinton and Rummelhart. Don Norman wrote a chapter, too!

http://93.174.95.29/main/3C9F2A7AEF5BE7461DECE4AE766F94B1

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

#153

Post by chiefmcloud »

I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles.

My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discussing politics on a semi-anonymous forum like Reddit is pointless, who cares if someone on the Internet is wrong. But maybe there’s a better way of communication, something new, that lets you talk with people you actually know.

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

#155

Post by 6510 »

jezze wrote: post #21

I am trying to reinvent the web. Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This allows it to be streamed. A big difference is that the language itself…

get rid of the white background

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

#156

Post by spiritplumber »

I need to come up with a way to remotely shut up Jesus in case the "Left Behind" books are right and He plans to slaughter millions of people with His voice.

I'm learning a lot about audio engineering and wave mechanics.

( I also co-wrote a story about what happens if I fail, which you can read at https://emlia.org/pmwiki/pub/web/LeftBeyond.TalesFromTheBeyo... )

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

#157

Post by mattjoyce »

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…

That does sound challenging. APIs and service change too. I can't imagine how complex that can get if something stops working.

Still when you succeed perhaps the next goal is to simply specify what sort of compute function, the scale and risk tolerances, and let the patterns be assembled accordingly.

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

#158

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Representing musical and audio (sample) time in ways that maximises reversible conversion between the two of them. Musical time is typically spoken of (in western culture) in terms of "bars" (or "measures") and "beats". The relationship to audio (sample) time is defined by a "tempo map" which defines the number of beats per minute and the number of beats per bar.

The mapping between the two is monotonic, non-linear, and can be stationary. If the tempo map is allowed to contain ramps (accelerando and ritardando in music speak), there are implicitly exponential sections in the function that maps between them.

Using floating point arithmetic leads to errors that have immediate effects. A musical time that should be considered to be at sample N is instead considered to be at sample N-1 or N+1.

It's surprisingly hard to do it correctly.

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

#159

Post by adamsea »

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.

I don't know if it's exactly what you describe but Hasura compiles GraphQL queries and mutations to SQL (for Postgrs).

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

#160

Post by spiritplumber »

I'm doing the hardware part of a CB packet radio infrastructure that can be deployed quickly after a disaster, and allows basic BBS functionality in addition to passing messages, and works with existing cell phones.

It's inspired by the CellSol network in the "Left Behind" novels.

Schems and code are at https://www.aaronswartzday.org/lora/ and we could use help.

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