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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?

#631

Post by 19870213 »

nadavlidor wrote: post #551
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…

Why commit passwords to memory and build Temporal Password Registries if we can throw parties which no one attends? https://vinepair.com/articles/stephen-hawking-time-travel-pa... Didn't we conclude time travel is unlikely?

With the knowledge of the current pandemic situation, perhaps the concept of 'party' and/or 'invite' is a wholly alien concept to the people of the future with access to time-machines. And assuming a similar reaction to current archeology for things they can't explain better than 'artifact was used during religious or reproductive practises' and didn't consider attending.

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

#632

Post by collyw »

silveroriole wrote: post #622
collyw wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 eve…

So, let’s assume that everyone who got banned for saying there are two genders (and presumably strongly believes it, because they cared enough to be banned for it) is attracted to this platform. People who disagree won’t be attracted to it; they can already post their opinion on, say, Twitter without being banned, and they hold the opposite opinion anyway. Now Twitter is an echo chamber of one side of the debate, and…

The difference being that you can actually post / see both sides of the debate on one platform. And that isn't the one with censorship policies. You seem to be in agreement that the lack of moderation actually gets us closer to the form of debate that we are after.

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

#633

Post by lapaz17 »

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…

which resources are you planning to grap the info from?

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

#634

Post by tobr »

filleduchaos wrote: post #628
tobr wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I read you right, you’re saying that I’m the one misunderstanding OP? It’s honestly not clear to me what the difference between “user” and “creator” would be in the context of this discussion. Could you elaborate? Since a “creator” is also a user of the web, I guess you mean “user” as in someone who only consumes content? I’m confused by that since nothing in the discussion seems to be about user stylesheets.

I...am a bit confused as to whether you're actually reading the same conversation. The project creator explicitly said that their creation cannot be styled, at all . It renders the exact same "standard" way on all devices. The retort was that the vast majority of people (with a clear callout to companies that would obviously like their own branding) do not want a web where every site looks the exact same, which is wh…

I’m very sorry, but I don’t understand where you’re coming from.

The original proposal seems to be this: You publish a document. The platform takes care of presenting it.

One criticism was: No, people want to control the styling of what they publish.

My counter argument is: There are many successful platforms that don’t allow people to style the content they publish, and people seem to be fine with that.

Again, assuming you’re talking about readers when you say “end-user”, I never even mentioned them.

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

#635

Post by jeremylevy »

busted wrote: post #183
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…

I've thought about this in the past. There's a modern way to build architecture, and cloud providers are in general only providing the building blocks and requiring you to put them together. It's unscalable to expect every company to hire someone smart enough to construct a good architecture (let alone the time) but at the same time, people who have been working on infrastructure long enough know that there's really…

Thanks!

> people who have been working on infrastructure long enough know that there's really only a handful of useful architectures that solve 90% of problems

I totally agree with you on that point.

Also, given that architectures are created on your own cloud provider account you could easily add the missing parts.

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

#636

Post by jeremylevy »

Addono wrote: post #544
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…

Reminds me a bit of https://juju.is/ . Haven't looked at it much, but it seems super powerfull and tries to solve at least some of the issues you mentioned.

Thanks!

I didn't know Juju, I'll try it out!

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

#637

Post by andratwiro »

erikig wrote: post #570
andratwiro wrote: post #539

Government – Citizen interaction. Specifically, I'm working with a local pro-refugee organization in a densely immigrant populated region in Spain. There's a complex chain of steps that you have to go through in order to acquire citizenship. Only people with access to good lawyers are able to deal with all the bureaucracy of the process, without mentioning other problems (missing obscure expiry dates that reset your…

I’m curious, how much of the process is digital and how much of it requires physical presence by a specialist? Also how has this been affected by the COVID crisis?

The most important processes require physical presence. The ones that are digitalized aren't a good solution either, as these people might not speak Spanish very well, or they don't have the required digital literacy to access & go through a government website (which is a problem for locals as well). The solution right now is to offer personalized support from volunteer organizations on an individual basis.

COVID has affected quite a lot. Most of the processes have stopped as the government shut down the in-person offices, and now they are slowly reopening... and the situation was already crowded before the pandemic. On the positive side, extradition orders have been temporarily paused.

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

#638

Post by kristopolous »

benwills wrote: post #574

1: How to download the internet. 2: How to parse html in a way that gives it consistent structure and meaningful interpretations. 3: Comvine 1 and 2 and make it searchable. I’m about 12 years into it and expect I have a couple/few more to go. Hopefully people still use HTML by then.

Anything to look at?

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

#639

Post by filleduchaos »

tobr wrote: post #634
filleduchaos wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I...am a bit confused as to whether you're actually reading the same conversation. The project creator explicitly said that their creation cannot be styled, at all . It renders the exact same "standard" way on all devices. The retort was that the vast majority of people (with a clear callout to companies that would obviously like their own branding) do not want a web where every site looks the exact same, which is wh…

I’m very sorry, but I don’t understand where you’re coming from. The original proposal seems to be this: You publish a document. The platform takes care of presenting it. One criticism was: No, people want to control the styling of what they publish. My counter argument is: There are many successful platforms that don’t allow people to style the content they publish, and people seem to be fine with that. Again, assum…

> The original proposal seems to be this: You publish a document. The platform takes care of presenting it.

And with a language that explicitly does not allow styling, how exactly is "the platform" that takes care of presenting it going to render anything but a single, default style for all content without...reinventing styling?

> One criticism was: No, people want to control the styling of what they publish.

No, one criticism was rather obviously that people don't want to go on the web and see the exact same thing everywhere they navigate to, which is what you get when styling is not possible. However, you seem to be looking at the entire conversation through some strange lens.

> Again, assuming you’re talking about readers when you say “end-user”, I never even mentioned them.

The creators of a web service/platform wanting to be able to brand their creation and the users of that service simply going with their chosen brand's aesthetics when publishing content are two concepts that can simultaneously exist - in fact, can even be linked.

I am not sure how it has to be explained that people being okay with publishing content on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium without much custom styling is the furthest thing from an indicator that people want Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium and every other website to look exactly the same.

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

#640

Post by mrfusion »

nabaraz wrote: post #229
mrfusion wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds so interesting! Do you have a blog I could follow the project? On that same concept I was recently thinking pvc pipes might be a cheap way to build robots. It’s cheap, somewhat light, and seems strong enough for many tasks. Any thoughts on how to connect pvc pipes up to servos? Also will your robot need feet?

Thanks. I will PM you when I start writing about it. Yes, it will have torso and limbs. My plan is to do something similar to this. https://i.imgur.com/8QDENyu.png

Great! My email is in my profile.
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