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

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291–300 of 831 posts

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

#291

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…

Check out gruntwork.io

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

#292
post #29

Education. Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons. You must attend daily under penalty of law. Many teachers are plain awful. They rely on students being additionally taught by their parents. That forces parents to go to school with their children, which perpetuates the vicious cycle. The teacher recalibrates the class to the students who either understood everything the first time or had supple…

I would love to understand where you are from and what education systems you have seen. Where does your assumption of students relying on being taught by parents ceme from?

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

#293
post #2

I'm trying to find a way to generate stories using tropes as the building blocks. There's a sample at https://random-character-generator.com/ There's an unreleased version, which focuses more on how to portray characters, rather than just what they are. For example, instead of saying "energetic", they'll be pacing about a bit. I might just pivot it into a story/plot tracker for writers, and use it to fill out the bla…

If you've not read Into the Woods by John Yorke, I'd suggest it highly for this type of enterprise.

https://www.amazon.com/Into-Woods-Five-Act-Journey-Story/dp/...

It's more for screenwriters, but his theses on plot, pacing, characters, and world are good and easy to read. It's a very good book.

The ideas for the pivot are great. Read the book, it's seriously good.

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

#294
post #266

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, discu…

> Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. > something new, that lets you talk with people you actually know. Anonymous Facebook? The problem with that is this: > so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists That's also a problem among the people you know and have added on Facebook, many of them are unreasonable narcissists and the…

You’re not wrong when you say it’s hard. I have been struggling with the problems you’ve brought up for awhile.

Re:anonymous fb, I’m not going for exactly that but let’s imagine I was and consider the problem for a second of the homophobic/racist/etc Uncle. The simplest solution for not getting that content is to remove them from your list of contacts. But I also have a theory that this is where there could be a global improvement in communication. I believe some people are trolls not because they’re anonymous but because they’re not. Their identity is basically a troll - think the guy who wore a MAGA hat to a recent BLM protest. If that person was allowed to, maybe they would want to change their opinion.

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

#295
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who spent handreds of hours writing (and cursing) SQL queries -it definitely sounds compelling.

Just a tiny teaser, you could write something like Person { country => name } And it will output the following SQL: -- target: postgres SELECT country, array_agg(name) AS name FROM Person GROUP BY country

Is this not the same as graphql?

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

#296
(It's a germ of an idea but I hope to work on this!)

Problem: Public schools in India don't do justice to students. Private schools in India charge a bomb but most of the money ends up in the hands of the "owners" and not enough to teachers (For reference, an average primary school teacher earns lesser than what an Uber driver earns) .

The solution : A network of "not-for-profit" schools where the fee structure is reasonable ( can't be free ), but the profits are shared amongst the people who make the schools run. Think "community banks" but for schools. I can't solve the problem for everyone but hope to set a good example by attracting the cream of teachers. It's time the teachers got their due.

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

#297
post #209
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.

Is there a Clojure datalog to SQL compiler out there?

There was a ClojuRU 2019 talk about such a thing: https://youtu.be/Hf57HbRvYhM

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

#298

I want to give everyone a digital identity. In some countries (including mine) basically everyone has an e-ID which we use to sign in to things like government services, banks, payment providers and much more. This is absolutely essential to everyday life and many startups are built around it. Unfortunately, many countries don't have useful e-IDs and the ones that do are limited to that one country. I want to create…

The eIDAS system in theory should work across countries, but AFAIK it is not compulsory and this functionality hasn’t been implemented by aby country. Moreover it requires a smart card for the highest level of authentication.

eIDAS is a great initiative but unfortunately I think it’s going to take a while before it becomes useful outside government. As you said, many countries don’t have well established e-IDs and that is what I’m trying to remedy. My main target is not government. Ht

Smart cards don’t work very well today where the average person uses most services through their phone. With the HSMs in modern phones, security in a e-ID app will get very close to that of a smart card though which is really exciting!

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

#300

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…

I've often found myself wanting something like this, a bootstrap to spin something relatively complex up quickly and then start customizing it. I think it would be nice if there was a way to export to the format native to whatever cloud you're targeting, e.g. CloudFoundry. This is something I've found missing in tools like Serverless Framework.
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