Understanding people. They keep surprising me!
Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
661–670 of 831 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#662A new Web.
Today's web is a collection of applications that largely provide a frontend for browsing data. The applications and data they contain are silos: there is no easy way to separate the data from functions and compute across datasets. Every application must (re)invent its own UI for querying and displaying data.
But if the web is actually a collection of datasets, why don't we have a web browser for consuming and interacting with arbitrary structured datasets?
We can model most popular sites (HN, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon etc) as a collection of hyperlinked JSON records. Let users adjust how these records are displayed. Provide a universal way to query and navigate any dataset and invoke associated functions (eg the upvote function for an HN post).
Full separation of data and functions instead of application silos is necessary to achieve general AI compute in the future.
Example: can you email Mark a summary of the top 5 most popular HN articles 3 days before our meeting?
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#663Existing 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…
You've very eloquently put to words my disappointing experiences with that. I hope that someone who understands the problem that well that they can state the problem so unambiguosly, will be able to deliver a novel solution.
Me too amazed at the clarity and completeness of the op's post.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#664Existing 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…
I worked with someone in 2013 who I'm still convinced solved this problem. But he was an absolute terror to work with. A petty authoritarian who would look over every website I'd go to and have screen monitoring and key logging software. I kid you not. I left after 6 weeks. I snuck out the work with me (I wasn't "allowed" to bring it home.) If you're interested I'd be more than happy to share the code. I think it was…
Who's TBL ?
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#665Existing 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…
Just in case if you are not aware of emacs org-roam mode and emacs pdf-mode which are quite useful.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I suppose you have to get along with grandma. You have a shared family group. Imaging taking to your mom, and saying "I've cancelled grandma because she thinks that Napoleon was no better than Genghis Khan, so no more family meet ups. If you don't cut ties with her, you're blocked and cancelled too."
There's also the fact that you've known grandma your whole life, and you think that she's 90% adorable, 10% a product of her generation. So you're willing to change the subject, or maybe just roll your eyes, when it comes Napoleon.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#667I am trying to reinvent the web. Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This allows it to be streamed. A big difference is that the language itself…
get rid of the white background
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
This starts to get silly. "Small integer ratios" apply to huge numbers of natural phenomena, because "small integers" and "ratios" are properties of the world we live in. Pointing out that "harmony is another example of small-integer ratios" seems fairly devoid of content to me, especially when the primary user of musical harmony has long abandoned those pure integer ratios to allow modulation and other desired compo…
Silly indeed. The fact that integer relations are mathematical relations that bear so heavily on physical phenomena is precisely the point. That's what the ancients got so damned excited about. You may not find meaning in it, but it certainly drove the development of science and philosophy from Plato to Galileo to Kepler to Descartes to Newton, etc. Now, in recognizing that integer relationships are, in fact, an impe…
1) "Do not mistake your models for reality" (Lord Kelvin, sometime in the late 1800s) ... many of things that we describe with "small integers and ratios" are not in fact small integers and the ratios are rooted in our observations and thinking. The natural world is more fractal than integral, but the notion of "oh! that thing is a lot like two times that other thing" was a notion more accessible to natural philosophers and early philosopers.
2) No, I see absolutely no reason to "expect what is pervasive in physics to apply to psychology, culture and economics".
3) I don't have a citation for you on the Byzantine stuff, but have been discussing it a lot recently with a musician who grew up on it and continues to perform it, and he was explaining to me how they have no notion of octave equivalency and that because of their tuning and scale systems, when you go up or down the number of steps that "should" correspond to an octave, you end up somewhere other than 2*freq or freq/2. Remember, this is in part why equal tempered tuning was developed: if you stick to "pure" just intonation (precise integer ratios), you can't construct intervals that fit nicely into the octave (e.g. pick a note, go up some number of intervals. Pick the ending note, go down the same intervals, you don't end up back where you started). This stuff is all covered in basic music theory. My understanding from this Byzantine musician is that their musical tradition basically just said "we don't care", and went with a tuning/scale system where you don't just (as in our western system) go up or down N (12 in our case) and end up an octave from where you started.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#669A new Web. Today's web is a collection of applications that largely provide a frontend for browsing data. The applications and data they contain are silos: there is no easy way to separate the data from functions and compute across datasets. Every application must (re)invent its own UI for querying and displaying data. But if the web is actually a collection of datasets, why don't we have a web browser for consuming…
Sounds like you want website to embrace the semantic web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#670Existing 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…
I'm solving exactly this too! https://histre.com/
You've described the problem really eloquently. You've obviously put a lot of thought into this. I don't see contact info for you. My email is in my profile. I'd love to chat if you're interested.