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

Post by buixuanquy » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 7:10 AM UTC

web007 wrote: post #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 specializ…

Post by jmiskovic » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 7:14 AM UTC

crabl wrote: post #513

Existing mediums for note-taking (Evernote, Notion, Roam Research) are not sufficient for doing knowledge work over long periods of time. The functions these incumbents serve are primarily as “stores of knowledge” that we save because it’s interesting in the moment but never read through or “scratchpads” that we use once and never get rid of, which end up cluttering our information space like a junk drawer full of sh…

Post by numpad0 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 7:18 AM UTC

easterncalculus wrote: post #181

chiefmcloud wrote: post #153

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…

This is a great idea. I would love to use a service like this. One of the downsides of anonymity that many people raise (fallaciously) as an argument against it is that too many of the anonymous people are just trolls, therefore it is a negative quality. Having it be people that are known to the person brings about an assumption of character that can solve this issue, so long as the user associates with people that t…

Post by phatbyte » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 7:23 AM UTC

dave_sid wrote: post #303

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…

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.

Post by sean2 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

mmazing wrote: post #533

asfgjubiu wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on the same problem and came up with the same solution. My password was "Teapot Dome" from 2016-2018, and it's been "Cottage Cheese" since then. I have just come up with a new password, which I obviously won't share. This solution doesn't actually work. Maybe the people are mind readers rather than time travelers. Maybe they beat the password out of you and then wiped your memory. Maybe they are time trav…

Also, let's presume that some dinosaurs in the past were really smart, and evolved some thinking skills before the asteroid wiped them all out. They just so happened to evolve the same scheme. How do you prove to them that you're from the future?