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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?

#761

Post by einpoklum »

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 think you're confusing radicalism with extremism or aggressiveness.

* Radicalism - from the Latin "radix" - means focusing on (what you consider to be) the root of an issue, striving for fundamental change of the way things are.

Also - I couldn't agree more about "who cares if someone on the Internet is wrong" - but I think the conclusion is that you care when it's in physical real life. On the other hand, talking to people you don't know is how you get to know new people, so that part might need some more nuance.

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

#762

Post by biztos »

ricg wrote: post #722
biztos wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much like the idea of the hierarchy and the content just being the file system. I’m less excited about the connection to Zettelkasten because that smells of fad. If there were an app that would make useful sense out of a few tens of gigabytes of stuff kept in a plain folder hierarchy, I’d be a potential customer. In a way Dropbox tries to do this, and it’s better than nothing (for me) but I still wish for some…

I started working on the app way before Zettelkasten became a thing. My goal is to not force a specific workflow. If you would like to use it as Zettelkasten, it'll work. If you prefer a different system, you can have the app adapt to your needs. It's all just files & folders underneath, only the representation varies. I'm curious about your folder hierarchy. What kind of files do you keep there to get to tens of gig…

Text, images, videos up to and including the occasional rare film, lots of PDFs (usually small), sometimes a PowerPoint or an Excel spreadsheet, used to also do source code and builds and stuff before GitHub... and if I had faith in them being more useful, as opposed to just backed up, I'd probably dump a whole bunch more in my semi-organized DropBox folder.

So for my use-case the Organizer App would have to be able to deal with lots and lots of data of various types, occasionally including multi-gig files like the rough cut of a film, and also know when I "mv this ~/Organizer/that/" -- a tall order, I know. But with storage so cheap these days, I still dream of that.

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

#763

Post by jwarden »

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 love this idea. I have been working on something similar and would love to discuss this with you some more.

Anonymity is important but tricky. Many researchers believe that anonymity can be key to countering groupthink, where people say what they think is socially acceptable, and not what they actually believe, for fear of denunciation and retaliation (some great books on this subject: Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann "the Spiral of Silence" and Timur Kuran "Preference Falsification.") Anonymous polling, for example, is probably critical to the functioning of a democracy.

In social media I think anonymity is more tricky. One idea I have is that posts always have an author, but likes and other indicators of support and popularity are anonymous.

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

#764

Post by webmaven »

koeng wrote: post #701
webmaven wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully the spores are non-viable in some way (sterile, require an exotic growth medium, terminator genes, etc.)?

They won’t be. I definitely thought deeply about that aspect, but am choosing to not make them non-viable for the following reasons: 1. Payloads are in domesticated strains, which are less efficient than wild strains, which are already global 2. Exotic growth media requirements make the cells only for wealthy organizations, which is status quo and aren’t target audience Of course, if good reason comes to change that,…

Exotic in this case just means uncommon or rare in the wild, not expensive. Something like requiring both salt and aspartame would help prevent gene transfer in the wild (to related or unrelated strains) as well as making it unlikely to grow on its own.

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

#765

Post by jwarden »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #613
collyw wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the reasons people use social media is to get a feel for the generally environment of opinion, even if we disagree with it. We want to know what "people are saying" and understand the rapidly-changing boundaries of what is socially acceptable. That's why I follow people on Twitter and Facebook that I don't trust at all. I would not want to use a decentralized trust system to consign myself to an echo-chamber, even if it is full of believable truthful people.

But the system TimJRobinson describes is flexible: you don't have to simply filter out the less trustworthy posts. You could simply flag them somehow as low-trust.

Right now the major social sites are designed to amplify the voices of users that produce content that drives engagement, even though the most engaging content tends to be offensive or inaccurate. That's why the people I least trust on Facebook always show up on the top of my feed: I sometimes engage with them by telling them I think their posts are inaccurate.

So I can see your system being used not just as a filter for what the users sees in their feed, but as a feedback mechanism for people's posts.

I think a more responsible social site would optimize for positive outcomes, and not just engagement: employing algorithms and techniques to optimize for accuracy, quality, and civility. I think decentralized moderation could be one of those techniques.

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

#766

Post by LordDragonfang »

tobr wrote: post #466
LordDragonfang wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A big difference is that the language itself doesn't allow styling (like CSS), the downside being you get less flexibility but the upside being it will render correctly on any display with any resolution. HTML without styling will render correctly on any display with any resolution. The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketin…

> The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketing says so. Wait, what? Are we on different webs? The facts of the history of the web tell us that some of the most popular services for publishing are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, etc - places that allow for very limited custom styling. I think you misunderstand what OP is t…

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium all have custom styling specific to that platform. The person you're arguing with has interpreted me exactly correctly, you're the one misinterpreting. Please don't engage in pointless flame wars based on poor reading comprehension.

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

#767

Post by LordDragonfang »

tobr wrote: post #579
filleduchaos wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's very, very obvious that "custom styling" here is referring creator styling, not user styling, so I'm not sure that you're in a position to be criticising the person you're responding to for "misunderstanding".

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.

>you’re saying that I’m the one misunderstanding OP

Yes, you are.

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

#768

Post by crabl »

notetakingBudha wrote: post #594
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…

Couldn't you just say "I'm working on this specific thing for this specific purpose that works this specific way" ? Sigh. Sorry for the negativity, but this post is the perfect example of the wishy-washy rhetoric that people interested in this domain always use. For examples of what I'm talking about, browse this tedious litany [1] (roam-whitepaper), see if you manage to get pass the first paragraph [2]. BTW, the pri…

You know, the trouble is, you're absolutely right. I _could_ have just said "I'm working on a note-taking app", but nothing about that seems particularly weird or hard.

To address the poetic waxing more directly, it's important to remember that we still don't have very good language to talk about the "primitives of knowledge work", which is why I phrased my statement the way I did. We know it almost certainly doesn't involve the concept of "notes" (at least in the way we think about right now) and calling them simply "ideas" is altogether too vague.

As far as the #roamcult is concerned, we are overwhelmingly in agreement :)

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

#769

Post by icebraining »

httpsterio wrote: post #11

I've been mulling over an idea that is essentially a combination of personal ID, secure digital authentication and online communications all baked into one. There's a EU directive instructing on how citizens should be able to identify online with eIDAS. In my country, you can use eIDAS to authenticate in basically any governmental agency portal, but you can't get any eIDAS enabled auth method as a citizen. The curren…

It's interesting that Finland took that approach. In Portugal the government just created its own ID provider (https://www.autenticacao.gov.pt/), which lets you login with your ID card (which is a PGP smartcard) or a two-factor PIN + mobile phone token.

The relationship is actually opposite: banks will let you login on their sites using the government's ID provider. It's not mandatory, though.

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

#770

Post by benwills »

kristopolous wrote: post #638
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?

Not particlarly. I will in a few months, though.
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