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

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481–490 of 831 posts

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

#481

Let’s say you have multiple people who want to share their location with each other, but to different degrees of precision. Some people might be willing to share their street address, while others only want to share the city that they live in. Some only want to say “Northern New Jersey”, or “Southern France”. Some might want to just share their timezone. How do you store this information in a database, in a geographi…

Sounds like you should be applying for a research position under Google/Apple.

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

#482

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…

I think a problem with this is that if you're at all familiar with how someone speaks or writes you can figure out who they are rather easily. So there's another weird problem (probably not so hard though): translating conversation within the same language in a way that doesn't lose meaning but obscures identifying patterns.

This was a problem that I briefly worked on it undergrad. Turns out authorship attribution is an active sub field in comp ling. So you’re not just trying to obscure identity from human readers, but the neural nets looking through all your public writing as well.

For the interested some paper keywords would be adversarial stylometry and authorship attribution.

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

#483

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 20…

This is awesome. It like a super deep niche version of James Burke's Connections.

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

#484
post #71
post #56

Soil simulation This is just one part of one of the sillier things I'm working on/thinking about. How can I make a real-time interactive soil simulation work, essentially a big realistic virtual sandbox. Since this is a side project, it'll go as far as all side projects go. =)

Mechanics or chemistry?

Mechanics. The virtual building aspect is in the foreground.

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

#486
How can we document "human society" in 1000 pages or less? I've been casually researching for a while, and will eventually write a guide on going from zero to the moon.

Step one is survival, basics of hunting, first aid and farming sort of stuff. That volume would end around homesteading and self-sufficient living.

Volume two would be establishing society in larger groups than a family unit. Things like job specialization (N roles for N people instead of 1/N of each role for each person), establishing trade (currency, weights & measures, supply chain), government (mostly what not to do, what to protect, how to adjudicate disagreement), public works ("roads are a good idea") and their ilk. Also medicine beyond first aid and basic care.

Volume three would be advanced STEM topics, getting from a functioning society to... more. Not even the sky's the limit. It should include blueprints for things we take for granted like refrigeration, telecommunication and birth control. It will include all the basics of physics, chemistry and biology required for smart people to fill in the gaps and launch a human to the moon and back.

I want to super-nerd-out about this, and publish it on Tyvek or something exotic so it'll last through decades of wear and tear (and water-logging and more), and include a ruler on the spine and it's own weight documented for reference.

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

#487
post #457
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like https://remotestorage.io/ ?

It feels a bit like hard work to use. They seem to have support for Dropbox but just as an afterthought and not the main thing. The main thing means running your own server, but it doesn't look easy to set up. I want to think of an approach that is really easy to use so it becomes popular for that reason.

Hmm, I have never tried to run a server. At least the integration seems to be fairly easy.

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

#488
Can a programming language based on Willard's Self-Verifying Theories [0] self-interpret in the limited sense established by Brown and Palsberg [1]?

Which is to say, what is the relation between a sub-Peano logical system that can prove itself consistent, and is complete, thus bypassing the 2nd Incompleteness Theorems, and self-referential decision problems posed in the programming language that corresponds to that logical system?

My suspicion is that such a language could provide very strong guarantees on the auditability of self-modifying code.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-verifying_theories

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Breaking-through-the-n...

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

#490

I 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…

Are you aware of HASC?

http://hasc.jp/

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