PROBLEM:
I want to be told what book to read next.
SOLUTION:
A reddit like site but for books only and the order is based on votes and reviews.
How am I doing? https://AudioBookReviews.com
Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
371–380 of 831 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#372Trying to predict where electrons go in a molecule, but using a classical model. This can be done with supervised machine learning - you can use quantum mechanics to get lots of labeled data - but it's a tough problem, because chemical physicists have very high standards for accuracy.
What's the difference between your approach and density-functional theory?
Density functional theory is still quantum mechanics, but operating on the expected electron density itself, rather than the many-body problem of all the electrons. It's pretty good, but not fast - around a CPU-minute for a medium-sized molecule.
I'm working on approximating the electron density using just the nuclei positions and some neural networks. The throughput is tens of thousands of times higher than for DFT. But since the model itself contains little or no physics, the training data has to be very clean and complete.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#373I’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…
I really like this. At the start of this podcast [1] they talk about the dark forest theory of the Internet. It's that when you go into a dark forest at night you don't see many animals because they know if they move or make noise they become prey. Similarly many intelligent people stay silent on Twitter and only speak up in private circles for similar reasons. [1]: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/podcasts/2019/11/2…
Have you read the Three Body Problem trilogy, by any chance? It talks about the dark forest theory, except in terms of alien civilizations.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#374I'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.
How is this different than a heavy-weight ORM like entity framework?
What I understood is that this like what TypeScript is to JavaScript (or to be more accurate Haxe to the few languages it transpiles to). It's a new language that will transpile to different SQL syntaxes instead of the method chaining approach of your typical ORM (that'll likely also include model abstractions over your tables and maybe also migration managing).
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#375I'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…
You should take a look at SingPass[1], which is the Singapore government’s version of this. Most people[2] with a valid Singaporean ID card can register for it, and we use it for all kinds of stuff - signing in to government websites, opening bank accounts, checking in for covid contact tracing, etc.
1. https://www.singpass.gov.sg/
2. As far as I know, people on migrant worker visas aren’t allowed to use SingPass.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#376Document software design 10x better. The foundation is flowcharts, with support for individual layers distinguishing levels of abstraction, and scenarios for exploring use-cases. From there: - Live data. We look at metrics on dashboards but it doesn't put into perspective how they relate to each other. Imagine seeing on your flowchart of servers, that one worker has an anomalous CPU reading, and you can click into th…
Have you ever used Labview? It started out great but hasn't evolved well and can't handle complex stuff. It's still used in lab environments.
Every time I share this, someone shares some tool I haven't heard of, and I've researched and tried a lot. It lines up with my experience working at software companies where every 3 weeks or so there's a thread asking for diagramming tool recommendation, and every time it's dozens of mixed responses of "I've used X but caveat A,B,C".
Thanks for sharing! I'll check it out.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#377Improving the performance of fountain codes and applying them securely to peer 2 peer file sharing. A fountain code is an almost magical algorithm that can split a file of size n up into a (practically) infinite stream of blocks of size b, such that collecting any n/b blocks out of the stream can reconstruct the file. Applied to p2p file sharing it effectively can eliminate rare pieces as well as the need to communic…
Similar to this?
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#378Problem statement : learning Front end web development frameworks is hard
Solution : Abstract the problems and automatically generate framework code.
Demo project : https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#379Document software design 10x better. The foundation is flowcharts, with support for individual layers distinguishing levels of abstraction, and scenarios for exploring use-cases. From there: - Live data. We look at metrics on dashboards but it doesn't put into perspective how they relate to each other. Imagine seeing on your flowchart of servers, that one worker has an anomalous CPU reading, and you can click into th…
This has a lot of potential, usually enjoy flow charting things on draw.io. One thing though, the export to PPT is a big feature because most people will present through that but it is losing the navigation between each frame. Also I suggest to not only market to Software engineers but people who work with data like drop-shippers, digital marketing agency, etc.
It loses the on-demand navigation, but my reasoning for deciding to support PPT is that when you're presenting, you'd want to present it sequentially anyway, instead of jumping around. The PDF versions are linked nicely, as an alternative.
I actually started this marketing it as "diagramming tool for systems". Talk about trying to be as generic as possible. I want to focus on one segment first, but totally, a side effect is that flowcharts enriched with data acting as a dashboard would be really beneficial to non-technical people to understand e.g. analytics funnel.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#380Document software design 10x better. The foundation is flowcharts, with support for individual layers distinguishing levels of abstraction, and scenarios for exploring use-cases. From there: - Live data. We look at metrics on dashboards but it doesn't put into perspective how they relate to each other. Imagine seeing on your flowchart of servers, that one worker has an anomalous CPU reading, and you can click into th…
Sounds like a good idea.
(And just FYI, the pricing section isn't rendering properly on Firefox 77)