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Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

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Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#131

Post by smallerfish »

stavros wrote: post #100

I built a community that aims to keep FOSS projects alive. It's meant to solve the kitchen and egg problem by having as many people and projects sign up, and then any developer who was interested could just automatically get commit permissions to any project. It's called Code Shelter: https://www.codeshelter.co/ It's stalled for a while, so I don't know how viable it is, but I'd appreciate any help.

One thing you could try to solve is coordinated revival of abandoned projects - i.e. extending your model to support unsolicited takeover of projects, in the case of a maintainer's having walked away.

For example, I use a javascript library that's best in class for what it does, and yet hasn't had any real commits from its maintainer since 2016. There are 50 pull requests open, some of which fix significant bugs, or add good new features. There are literally 2000 forks of the library, some of which are published on npm but are themselves unmaintained, and almost none of which link back to the actual fork's code from npm. It's a mess, and I bet it's a situation repeated hundreds of times over.

If you were to figure out a workflow by which a maintenance team could form on your platform, and then a) the existing maintainer is pinged to request that they add the team, falling back to b) making it easy for the new team to fork and adopt existing pull requests while supporting them through initial team-forming by laying out a workflow for assigning needed-roles, then I think you'd have a valuable platform.

The key thing is ensuring there's a large enough team to start, so that yet another fork doesn't die on the vine, so maybe think about a(n old) reddit link type interface where people can link to, vote on, and volunteer for projects, with no work needed until there's critical mass and the platform moves the project forward.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#133

Post by tmilard »

mkl wrote: post #117
tmilard wrote: post #16

https://free-visit.net : Like Matterport but with an FPS game engine. I am looking for my first client: Ideally someone in charge of a Museum/gallery or other grandiose indoor space.

Looks pretty slick. I am not a gamer, and the controls feel very backwards to me. You need to hold the mouse button to look in different directions, which makes it feel like you're dragging, but the direction you move it isn't the direction you're dragging the view. I don't think mouse capture is a good idea in the browser, and if you're aiming at museums and galleries, maybe reversing the mouse direction to make it…

Thanks for the usefull and very professional feebback.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#134

Post by stavros »

smallerfish wrote: post #131
stavros wrote: post #100

I built a community that aims to keep FOSS projects alive. It's meant to solve the kitchen and egg problem by having as many people and projects sign up, and then any developer who was interested could just automatically get commit permissions to any project. It's called Code Shelter: https://www.codeshelter.co/ It's stalled for a while, so I don't know how viable it is, but I'd appreciate any help.

One thing you could try to solve is coordinated revival of abandoned projects - i.e. extending your model to support unsolicited takeover of projects, in the case of a maintainer's having walked away. For example, I use a javascript library that's best in class for what it does, and yet hasn't had any real commits from its maintainer since 2016. There are 50 pull requests open, some of which fix significant bugs, or…

Hmm, that's an interesting idea, thanks. Given that finding one maintainer is already hard, though, I think finding a team would be almost impossible...

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#135

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

chubot wrote: post #119

These are statistics/math problems that 2 medical professionals I'm seeing are working on, not my own work. But they got me curious. FWIW I worked in "data science" as a software engineer for many years, and did some machine learning, so I have some adjacent experience, but I could use help conceptualizing the problems. Does anyone know of any books or surveys about statistics and medicine, or specifically mechanics…

I can't help you conceptualize these specific problems but having worked on similar problems in the past I'd advise you to look into ordinary differential equations applied to those systems. They're used a lot for modelling in medical science and even if you're not interested in the dynamics of it they might lead you to the relevant literature for your problems and will address the parameters you're interested in and how they relate to each others.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#136

Post by michaelbuckbee »

thegginthesky wrote: post #113
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #97

I could use some help with some heuristics for Machine Learning, like how much data do I need to make a workable model, what framework/approach makes more sense given my ultimate goals. Here's an example: there's a lot of ML tutorials on doing image identification. Like you have a series of images: picture one might have an apple and a pear in it, picture 2 might have an apple, orange, and a banana in it. Where I'm s…

Hey, I'm a ML practitioner for over 6 years and I'm glad to help. 1k distinct labels with a long tail distributions which is what you are describing, is definitely a challenging problem. It's called a imbalanced classification problem. I'd focus first test how well your model will be able to predict these classes doing a stratified cross validation (stratification controlled by the label class), and measure the F-sco…

This was very helpful, thank you so much!

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#137

Post by smallerfish »

stavros wrote: post #134
smallerfish wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing you could try to solve is coordinated revival of abandoned projects - i.e. extending your model to support unsolicited takeover of projects, in the case of a maintainer's having walked away. For example, I use a javascript library that's best in class for what it does, and yet hasn't had any real commits from its maintainer since 2016. There are 50 pull requests open, some of which fix significant bugs, or…

Hmm, that's an interesting idea, thanks. Given that finding one maintainer is already hard, though, I think finding a team would be almost impossible...

With the voting mechanism, you wouldn't necessarily need to form a team all at once. Maybe it takes 6 months for enough people to click the "I'd participate" button on a popular project. Granted, half of them might drop out when the project graduates...but if you can try to stake the ground of "the place to suggest and coordinate forks" then at least people who were interested might find it over time.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#139

Post by 101008 »

jordwest wrote: post #88

I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory. Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded. Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are o…

Is this a software problem? There are a lot of open sources (with their differences) platforms. From old forums, to more modern, etc. I think the problem is that people don't want or don't know how to use a forum.

This is based in my experience:

- Old people: They started to use internet recently so they are used to social networks (Facebook, Instagram), and newspapers websites.

- Young people: Hard to make them use the browser, if there isn't an app (Instagram, TikTok), you are lost. If they want to discuss a topic, mostly Twitter through hashtags, YouTubers or Discord.

- Adult people: This is where some of them may use a forum, but you have to be lucky enough to find adult people who use internet many years ago, and they know what is a forum. If you find a 30 or 40 years old who started to use internet 5 years ago (which happens), you are lost.

And on top of that, you need to compete against Reddit and their own subreddits.

(Edited to format)

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#140

Post by tyingq »

pollomarzo wrote: post #85

I'm looking for a way to integrate a React app with an existing Vue... thing. Don't really need any communication between the two, just displaying it would be fine. My issue is: the Vue code just throws in tags in the html and expects global variables (location instead of window.location), while the React code uses ES6 imports. The only partly working way I found is including tags with a useEffect, but that doesn't p…

>just displaying it would be fine

Iframes with postmessage() where needed (like dynamic window size changes) isn't pretty, but it's easy to do.

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