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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?

#611

Post by towaway »

ddog78 wrote: post #536
wiseleo wrote: post #29

Education. 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…

Maybe a relevant personal anecdote might help you - My grandfather used to sit with me for an hour every morning and used to teach me maths. He would focus on basics first. He would make sure I had the basics drilled in to me. Not just understood them, but mastered them. Then we would move on to the next topic. It was a bit slow at first. But after a while, once the basics were done, I finished the whole year's math…

I've seen this with my youngest son too.

Lockdown has really shown up how my 7 year old struggles with his maths work set by school. I've gone back to basics with him and have been drilling him on simple numeracy until he can do it effortlessly using some flash cards I bought and some iPad apps (DoodleMaths, DoodleTables - can't recommend them enough).

Since then he has sailed through all of the new parts we're learning. I really expected it to be much harder than this, but it seems like not fully understanding some basic concepts and having confidence with basic numbers makes all the difference for really understanding the why of all the concepts that are build on top.

In about 6 weeks of me spending around 30 mins to an hour each weekday he has gone from refusing to look at a maths problem to being confident with it.

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

#612

Post by dave_sid »

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?

You may need to get an old usb stick from eBay. The good news is that they probably would be selling for quite cheap.

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

#613

Post by TimJRobinson »

collyw wrote: post #596
TimJRobinson wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about the gab problem a lot and have a solution: moderation and votes should be user centric rather than wisdom of the crowd based. Explained further here: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...

Won't that just turn echo chambers into even bigger echo chambers?

It's a chamber that you decide vs one the group decides.

If you want to only surround yourself with people that are exactly like you that's up to you. If you want to be an intelligent thinker and surround yourself with believable truthful people who expand your worldview that's also possible.

It puts the power back in your hands instead of the site operator or group consensus.

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

#614

Post by collyw »

silveroriole wrote: post #608
collyw wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's just people who want to hear alternative opinions that have been banned from the other heavily moderated platforms.

Opinions like what? The only opinions people get banned for are ones which seem openly racist, homophobic, etc. Nobody gets banned for having or encouraging alternative opinions about, like, which Java framework is the best. Not even for more controversial arguments like whether God exists (at least as far as I’m aware.) Therefore the only ‘rational debate’ that will take place is between what most people would call…

"There are two genders" would be one - a position that I guess that the majority of the public also believe. That's ground for banning in plenty of places. We aren't allowed to discuss on many platforms. Of course I will be labelled transphobic for that opinion.

> Nobody else is going to want to post in or even look at such an environment, so it rapidly turns into a completely worthless bigoted echo chamber where everyone’s patting themselves on the back for having such enlightened alternative opinions.

Pure speculation on your part. How does it end up any more of an echo chamber than somewhere where certain opinions are removed?

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

#615

Post by TimJRobinson »

satvikpendem wrote: post #373
TimJRobinson wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just relistened and that's exactly where Yancey in the podcast originally got the idea from.

The conversation starts at 13:00 and also realized he wrote an essay about it here: https://onezero.medium.com/amp/p/7dc3e68a7cb1

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

#616

Post by jeremylevy »

jonwalch wrote: post #129
jeremylevy wrote: post #91

Automating cloud architecture creation. I'm building a "catalog" of architectures that you could use to create a complete cloud architecture on your AWS, GCP or Azure account in less than one minute. So, for example, you could create a docker-based architecture with CI/CD, auto-scaling, zero downtime deployment, SSL, load-balancing, high availability and MongoDB in less than one minute in your own AWS account. It's l…

Any thoughts about maintenance? My personal journey with learning AWS is/was very painful, but now that I understand everything that I need at a high level, it is quite a bit more manageable. I can't imagine having to make minor tweaks to my infra if I had no idea what it was doing.

It's something I've been thinking about for a while.

I think it will depend on the people that will use it.

Some architecture require more maintenance than other.

For example, the first architecture that I've created is a serverless architecture based on Docker. Under the hood it only uses managed services like Fargate, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, Aurora...

Given that you'll have a catalog of different architectures, people that don't have any experience with AWS may need to choose architectures like that.

Also, each architecture contains a detailed Readme that explain the basic operations (updating ELB HealthCheck, increasing the amount of RAM that could be used by a Fargate task and so on...).

It's a complex subject, by the way, so I am entirely open to any comments, ideas or suggestions.

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

#617

Post by manish_gill »

erezsh wrote: post #522
manish_gill wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this can allow me to write complex SQL (lots of JOINs, Multiple CTEs building on top of each other, Analytic functions etc), then I'm definitely interested. I've created an SQL generation engine in the past and can definitely appreciate how hard the problem is.

It already can. I'm a few weeks away from releasing a private alpha, so if you're interested I'll be happy to let you try it in exchange for feedback.

I'd love to. Hit me at me@manishgill.com :)

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

#618

Post by comicjk »

c1ccccc1 wrote: post #506
comicjk wrote: post #113

Trying 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.

Sounds very cool! I'd be interested in looking at the code if you're up for sharing it. Are you computing the labels using DFT, or with a more exact method?

I work at Schrodinger Inc, collaborating with the people who make TorchANI (https://aiqm.github.io/torchani/). This currently predicts only molecular energies in the public codebase, but I expect they will add electron density using the same framework.

Currently I am using hybrid DFT (wB97X-D) with plans to move up to wB97M-V and possibly Quantum Monte Carlo. The TorchANI group likes wB97X and up-training with DLPNO-CCSD(T).

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

#619

Post by 41a4e1 »

raffraffraff wrote: post #569
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…

I have a theory that, individually, people fundamentally disagree less than they think they do. And in real face to face meetings, they are willing to disagree about a topic without killing each other. They talk around points of disagreement. Eg: me, when I'm talking to my grandmother. The problem is that online people tend to polarize into factions during complex discussions. The more heated the discussion, the more…

In your opinion, what is it that distinguishes your grandma from people in online discussions? I've been thinking about it a lot lately - that the facelessness of it makes it more difficult to employ empathy? That there are too many people online and connections with them are too ephemeral to form emotions necessary for kind discussions? That the anonymity makes some people lose inhibitions? What else?

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

#620

Post by TimJRobinson »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #256
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…

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…

Upon relistening to that podcast I realized Yancey wrote it as an article originally: “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” by Yancey Strickler https://link.medium.com/0MeIwL0ET7

The podcast is amazing and worth listening to regardless.

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