[deleted]
Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
421–430 of 831 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#422Education. 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…
Retired teacher here...glad to see fresh thinking on this problem. The mega-publishers that serve school districts are stuck in a 1980s model. A project related to yours is ASSiSTments at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The market is big, with space for several innovative projects.
Will look at it, thank you.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#423Education. 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…
Anywhere I can sign up to be notified when you have something we can try?
Not yet, but I’ll revisit this thread eventually.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#424[deleted]
I worked on this problem for about a month straight a couple years ago (but didn't have any significant success). It's extremely draining on you; don't forget to take breaks. <3
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#425Education. 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?
Personal experience with multiple countries. Studied in both USSR and USA. Witnessed many students struggling in USA.
You are right though, many parents can’t teach. That’s the problem I am trying to solve - parents shouldn’t have to go to school with their children.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#426I'm building cad software for designing atomically precise objects. I don't expect atomically precise manufacturing (at least in the form of molecular nanotechnology) to show up for at least a decade or two. But the software to design things that can be built using nanotech can be written before the technology to synthesize them exists.
Will it simulate the thermal expansion when machining?
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds kind of similar to Yik Yak, except using social circles instead of area? Hopefully it ends better than Yik Yak did.
Thanks for the pointer, I hadn’t heard about YikYak but will check them out.
The general issue with localized anonymity is it becomes a bulletin board rather than a discussion. In time this draws in drug dealers, prostitution, horny teenagers, and various sexual deviants (see also: whisper, craigslist and backpage forums). Gotta find a way to keep engagement up with the reduced volume of users.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ef…
Fair enough, I missed out the scenarios when I first try it since I just click on the link to download the PPT. It make sense now when I use it side by side with what I have created.
Interactive flow charts should be the main selling point, as for usage, it is up to the user.
Also the pricing model, restriction on frames and layers would chase free individual away but they are those who plays a main roles in making something mainstream. I would recommend removing the usage restriction but adding collaborative restriction. A good example for this is how Google Sheet works.
Good luck, hoping to see it being used everywhere someday.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#429I am building a database for human movement. Right now each exercise or pose or movement is indexed by its name - Downward dog, squat, handstand, etc. But this gets confusing when multiple names apply to the same movement. The true identifier is the motion of your limbs in space. I want to encode that motion/position so that if you try and upload L-sit handstand and also L-sit, it tells you that you are try to upload…
Aka… Laban notation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laban_notation_symbols
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#430Let'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…
> why consonant chords that are mathematically slightly dissonant actually sound much better than chords with perfect mathematical consonance.
Probably because we're used to hearing music in equal temperament, so we associate it with "correct" harmony, whereas something like just intonation sounds a little weird and off (but I ultimately find myself preferring it? Wtf?)