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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?

#471

Post by self_awareness »

Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #338
dave_sid wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has a big flaw. If the future visitors copy all passwords to a usb stick and take it with them then anyone in the present time that gets a copy can pretend to be from the future. Worse still, everyone would believe the phoney future visitors without question.

Do you think they'd still be using USB drives and bothering to keep track of antique passwords in the future?

If it can happen, it will happen, all you need is a sample (in this case: number of people who know about the time traveler) large enough.

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

#472

Post by [deleted] »

vmurthy wrote: post #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 re…

[deleted]

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

#473

Post by Brajeshwar »

## Problem

Half of the Indian farmers do not have access to institutional/formal credit. They end of borrowing from local loan sharks at extremely high interest rates. The vicious cycle continues as they do have access to markets favoring their produce's selling price, and end up being exploited.

Most banks, despite their mandated percentage of loan for agriculture, are not too keen (and unable) to work closely with farmers.

## Solution

By leveraging technology, and international connections, we help farmers by giving them access to credit at a favorable interest rate. We work with international community, such as the Japanese, to lend their capital on our platform, thus helping the underserved farmers. In turn, the Japanese investors get returns much higher their national savings interest rates.

Banks too can benefit from our ability to deploy their cash.

## Why Us, Why Now

I have struggled to articulate the philosophy/motto on how to help the farmers, as they are the most exploited populace. I'm zeroing in on -- "BE KIND".

If you want to hear more, contact me and I will send you our Executive Summary and/or Pitch Deck. We are fund-raising.

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

#474

Post by dang »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #410
dang wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have you chosen to express this point in such a trollish way? We've already received complaints about it. It sounds like you're trying to say something about the danger of such systems being abused by the state in holocaust-like situations, but the wording is so odd that it's unclear what your real intent is.

FWIW, I didn't read that comment as trollish at all. It's quite awkwardly written, and it could do with scare quotes around "undesirables" to make it clear that it refers to the view of authorities in their scenario rather than the view of the comment author, but which part of it is trollish? My understanding of the comment was expressing a concern that some kind of universal identity system would undoubtedly become…

You didn't read as trollish but others did, and unfortunately there's a problem with comments sometimes being written deliberately to straddle the line. That's why I wrote my reply as a question.

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

#475

Post by satyrnein »

chiefmcloud wrote: post #208
cryptoz wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not going to "calm down radicalization" with phrases like "killing cancel culture" and suggesting that viewpoints you don't agree with on twitter/the platform as a whole as "unreasonable narcissists".

“Killing” was a poorly chosen term. I think cancel culture is very dangerous in the way that it discourages reasonable discussion by picking on people whose opinions are deemed to be out of line and punishing them with mob justice. Maybe this interaction illustrated my point though. If I was talking to you in a pub and you said the same thing I’d respond in the same way. But if I’d posted about my great idea on twitt…

For me, it's not about the word choice of "killing"; it's the seeming implication that "current radicalization" is caused by lack of "understanding" and then leads to "cancel culture" as the true problem. Your mission statement sounds kind of like "I want to win the argument with my current set of beliefs" rather than "I hope through honest and open minded discussion we can discover our own blind spots and reach common ground to move forward" or whatever.

Look at the supportive and critical comments you received; it looks split down the line based on political leaning. It may be worth considering that if you want to avoid creating just another echo chamber.

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

#476

Post by kristopolous »

I'm trying to do a historiographical quality history of computers, the kind of scholarship you might see with say the French Revolution or the Roman Empire.

What more, my history efforts ENDS around 1937; it's the BC part of computing that set the stage. The build up to computing.

Episode 0 lays it all out (http://comphistpod.com/introducing-the-computer-history-podc...)

I'm doing it in podcast form because it's 2020. This is going to be multiple years and I'm totally fine with that.

I divide the history up into multiple facets each with separate timelines.

Currently I'm going all the way through "electric communications" from the electric spark up through relay networks talking about switching, encoding, error correcting, signalling, all the important developments along the way.

In 2021 I'll close that out and do the same for storage (music boxes, looms, etc) and computation, starting with clocks, pascal's mechanical calculator and going forward from there, mechanical registers, overflow, adders, etc...

Each one is going to take at least a year or so.

I'm already about 2 months in to recording, about 6 months into the project. This week will be du fay, boze, desaguliers, watson, and the electric wire. Next week will be leyden jars, this is a long, slow project, and AFAIK it has never been done before.

I'm doing the odd episodes as a timeline and the even episodes as diversions and discussions to keep things entertaining and light.

This is the first time I'm talking about it publicly. It's at http://comphistpod.com

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

#477

Post by tristan1977 »

Local solutions to stop humans from destroying their environment.

We've implemented recycling maximally and created programs for reuse, repair, toxic waste, general waste reduction, battery disposal, returnables, etc. But it isn't really making a significant impact.

People still spend most of their disposable income buying things they don't need that can't be easily repaired, or that they can't bother repairing, or that they discard due to fashion, or because they are mostly packaging, etc.

We can't get them to stop buying useless stuff that they don't need. We can't stop them from buying new cars every few years.

We can't get them to spend money on quality infrastructure, like insulation, that would reduce their energy needs by about 80%.

We can't get them to stop going to restaurants or getting food delivery or take-out, which expends a multiple of the energy and greenhouse gases of cooking your own locally-sourced food.

We can't get them to understand that we're all going to die in fairly short order unless we bring the environmental disaster under control.

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

#478

Post by dropofwill »

marchdown wrote: post #330
guygurari wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m rooting for you. Here’s a thought about a possible trade off between radicalization and engagement. When social media platforms optimize for growth, it makes sense for them to make it as easy as possible for users to share/retweet. It lowers “amplification friction” and allows messages to go viral. The most successful platforms have very low amplification friction, which suggests that low friction is an important…

Unethical Thought Experiments: what if Twitter shrank the retweet button or hid it under the fold to but the brakes on the viral spread? Put amplification behind a trivial inconvenience that would make knee-jerk retweets less frequent and allow the whole chain reaction to cool down.

Instagram doesn’t have a share/repost feature, but people still do it a lot, either manually or through 3rd part integrations.

This leads to other problems like blocking someone, but still seeing their content because it gets reposted a lot.

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

#479

Post by soulofmischief »

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…

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/NICR%202013-05%20US%20Na...

This is a report by the NIC from 2013 which outlines exactly how we expect these shortages to occur, on what timeframes, in which geographical locations, and what consequences are expected.

Thought you might find it useful when planning how and where to be most efficient and to stay ahead of the clock.

I'm happy to discuss these issues more over email if you'd like to swap ideas.

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

#480

Post by [deleted] »

jawns wrote: post #170

I hope this counts as weird enough ... PROBLEM: If time travelers from the future were to visit you, it would be difficult for them to quickly prove their authenticity. SOLUTION: Temporal passwords. At the start of each year, you devise a new password. You commit the password to memory, but you never write it down or divulge it to anyone until Dec. 31, when you submit it to the Temporal Password Registry, which publi…

[deleted]
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