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

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141–150 of 486 posts

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

#141

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…

If you have not at least skimmed through fast.ai, you should definitely do that, as the course itself addresses some of this and the people on their forums are among the most helpful I have ever seen!

Second, this could be more than enough! Especially if you are doing transfer learning.

Third, you can "inflate" the amount of images you have now with "Image Data Augmentation"

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

#142

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…

Did you try Diaspora?

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

#143
post #122

https://share.securrr.app A secure client side encrypted document (Passport / Id) sharing service Needs a DSVGO lawyer as part of the team.

I like this. I dont know if it is your goal, but I'd like to see you (or an alterantive) to succeed and be used by big companies, a la Stripe. Need to share a document? No need to reupload, it's already part of Securr. Share with the company for a limited period of time, Securr make it hard to copy and to store (and illegal), etc.

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

#144

I am a bit ashamed to ask about such a trivial topic on HN, but I am not really sure how AJAX in Wordpress plugins works. I have a plugin that exports some WooCommerce orders into XLS. I would like to add a progress bar via AJAX, because the export may take very long for thousands of orders. But I am not really sure how to use AJAX in context of Wordpress specifically. I would love to see a minimal functional example…

In my experience, accurately reflecting the progress of and AJAX request, so I’ve seen a lot of people (myself included) take the lazy way out and just show an indeterminate spinner or bar just to show that stuff is happening.

The idea entered my mind, but I am not happy with such cop-out, especially on my own site ... I would at the very last like to see iteration progress, which, while not 1:1 with time, is at least informative.

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

#145
post #2

We are having atrocious READ/WRITE latency with our PG database (api layer is django rest framework). The table that is the issue consists of multiple JSON BLOB fields, with quite a bit of data— I am convinced these need to be abstracted to their own relational tables. Is this a sound solution? I believe it is the deserialization in these fields of large nested JSON BLOBS that is causing latency. Note: this database…

I had to move a MongoDB to PG database on my new job (old contractor created MVP, I was hired to be the "CTO" of this new startup) and I had some problems at first, but after I created the related models and added indexes, everything worked fine.

As someone said, indexes are the best to do lookups. Remember your DB engine do lookups internally even if you are not aware (joins, for example), so add indexes to join fields.

Another thing that worked me for me (and I dont know if it's your case), was to add trigram text indexes, which make it faster to do a full text search. Remember, anyway, that adding a index makes search faster, but insert slower, so be careful if you are inserting a lot of data.

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

#146

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…

From your summary I'm not sure I understand what exactly your project sets out to do. People are still able to run their own independent blogs, after all. Are you thinking of blogging federation of some sort?

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

#147
Stateful, exaclty once, event processing without the operational capacity to run a proper Flink cluster. This thing needs to be dead simple, pragmatic and cheap/simple to operate and update. The only stateful part in our infra at the moment is a PG database.

We are going to start work on this in a weeks, so I'm looking for some insights/shortcuts/existing projects that will make our lives easier.

The goals is to process events from students during exams (max 2500studnets/exam = ~100k-150k events) and generate notifications for teachers. No fancy ML/AI, just logic. Latency of max 1 min.

Our current plan is to let a worker pool lock onto exams (PG lock) and pull new event every few seconds for those exams where (time > last pull & time This solution is mean to be simple, be implemented in really short timeframe and be a case study for a more "proper & large scale" architecture later on.

Any tips, tricks or past experiences are much appreciated. Also, if you think our current plan sucks, please let me know.

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

#148
post #38

I try to find an agile project management tool that works for us. We run on what many would call Scrum (it’s not actually Scrum). We are on JIRA now, and it’s … JIRA. We tried basically any other tool, including Excel (yes, that is somewhat possible). My problem generally is that tools are slow, planning is cumbersome, visibility is limited and reporting for clients is often even more limited. Heck, I’d even write my…

Asana works really good for us. Really good UI/UX and fast, which I think it's the best feature they have :)

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh hmm, I see how you mean, that's interesting... I'll think about that, thanks!

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

#150

This isn't a technical question, but it's a problem I'm going to have to solve soon! I just accepted an EM role at a FAANG. This is a career "boomerang" for me - I was an engineer in the past, but then moved into technical support management. I'm coming back to engineering, but this is the first time I will have done it at a large company. All of my engineering experience has been at small scrappy startups where we j…

I've been an EM at a startup and an F500. Don't be scared to have less meetings than your peers. I basically only do one 1-hour sprint meeting each sprint to review the last sprint and to plan for the next one. It may help to have standups daily at first but you can often make them less frequent over time.

Also, always avoid meetings to ideate. These are some of the most common and they are a huge waste of time compared to listing out ideas in a doc and having people review that asynchronously. And yet these meetings have a tendency to get called all the time. For example "there was a fire, let's get all the leads/EMs/directors together for 1 hour to figure out how to avoid this next time".

Your two most important duties are 1) making sure your developers are given space to implement what's important and 2) building relationships throughout the company to better anticipate future needs that helps you do #1.

Happy to chat anytime as well, email in profile.

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