LOL Plenty of problems - none of them technical - all people problems!
I think these can be discussed as well. In the end thats the ones we suffer the most from. (edit: typo)
Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
201–210 of 486 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#202https://share.securrr.app A secure client side encrypted document (Passport / Id) sharing service Needs a DSVGO lawyer as part of the team.
I love that idea, you should submit that on frontpage.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#203I’m working on OCR to recognize the scores on pinball machines. I have about a quarter million photos encompassing every model of pinball machine in the world but I just don’t have the know-how to accommodate all the font styles.
Have you tried an off-the-shelf solution like Tesseract? It works quite well if you do the recommended preprocessing.
The preprocessing suggestions I see are to crop out everything except for the numbers and I don’t know how to do that programmatically. There’s many kinds of displays: rollers, 7-segment, dot matrix, and LCD.
The preprocessing to increase DPI to 300 did not help when I tried Tesseract, unfortunately. It’s hard to achieve a good contrast between the numbers and the backdrop
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#204I 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 value of a forum is not to get everyone. It is actually in limiting a community to the most mature voices and thoughtful people.
There's little upside to having teenagers in a forum, for example, unless you're looking to monetize.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#205https://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.
I reiterate the sibling comment about mouse control, either use the actual mouse locking APIs of browsers, or make drag feel like drag.
Additionally, I think it would be best if by default you were stuck to standing head height, then you can either provide buttons to actually move up or down, or lean more into the game aspect and allow the user to jump. Right now it feels like you are floating around with a little drone or something.
In the vein of controls, please please please support WASD too. I understand if you instruct with arrow keys, since for non-gamer users it might be more obvious, but support WASD (or equivalent of what WASD is in QWERTY keyboards) anyways, for 2 reasons: it is much more ergonomic for people who use a mouse on their right hand (I myself am left-handed but use the right hand for mouse anyways), and is more ergonomic for some laptop users, since many laptops have half-size vertical arrow keys which are uncomfortable to press all but momentarily.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#206[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#207I 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…
One idea is to use some more obscure/techie protocol like Gemini [1] to create a self-selecting group of bloggers that are drawn to and choose to participate in the community, and at the same time keep spammers, commercial interests, and other unwanted influences out.
[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ Earlier discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#208I’m facing an issue where I store small binary data blobs within a Postgres column in order to benefit from delete cascades. I’m considering moving the binary data into S3 and then doing the sync layer on the server (which means the front end requests the data from the backend and is given it back as a JSON object with base64 values). Doing this manually via code isn’t impossible, just API intensive, so I’m wondering…
It's hard to give any advice on this until you detail the problem you're trying to solve. For example:
Where/why is your current system failing/inadequate/cumbersome?
Why do you want to move the data to s3?
Why are delete cascades important?
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking forward to see where you go. I used forums primarily for my automotive hobbies, but they all seemed to have died around 2013-2015 as Facebook groups took over. Still, forums are often the best place to find good information. I worry about the day that Facebook solves the search and weekly "repeat topic" problems that are the only thing holding it back. It's a shame phpbb, vbullettin and other big players in t…
> It's a shame phpbb, vbullettin and other big players in the space were too slow to adapt to mobile. Was that a problem? My memory is that everything used 'Tapatalk' for mobile, perhaps before the first iPhone even (I recall using it on an iPod Touch).
I used to volunteer my time to a very major forum software. Tapatalk at the time had a very strange business model of having a plug-in/add-on that was free to the forum owner but charged for the app that the end user used. This was, even at the time, traditionally backwards from the current user interaction model: path of least resistance to engagement. It was unpopular among forum admins as they would rather buy a license for it like you would with vBulletin, Xenforo, Invision Power Board - including the people who ran open source ones like phpBB, SMF, et al.
While I understand Tapatalk have changed their business model since then, the damage was already done as the Facebook started to wholesale eat forums’ lunch as far as userbase. The biggest problem is that we never turned forum interactions into a protocol like we did with at the application level (smtp/pop, http, irc, xmpp) or on top of http like RSS, podcasts, or just plain, standardized REST APIs. This could have enabled multiple clients (like browsers) to appear and may have prevented facebooks swift dominance with online communities.
Everyone wanted to own their forum’s experience, but this stubbornness caused the fiction for users to sign up to be greater and greater. Platforms like Disqus attempted to solve this by creating an embeddable service to just drop comments in a context like a blog post, but this ultimately gave users almost no value it they were just in a shouting match against bots with generic messages laden with spam.
Facebook unified the experience for users, where the user could, with an account+app that they already had, browse and join groups and engage in discussions and become apart of communities in a way that forums could not possibly compete with.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#210How do we scale social accountability and knowing? This is expected to enable us to solve distributed coordination problems. Also, it should facilitate richer more meaningful relationships between people. Expected outcomes include increased thriving and economic productivity. [edit: consider the limit on how many people you can know and the relationship between how deeply you come into relationship with that populati…
The question is too far up in fuzzy space. Narrow down to several use cases and specific problems within those and search field will be more manageable. Examples: Social workers want to be able to handle more cases appropriately. How many cases can they handle without diminishing quality scores. Politicians want to appear caring to the needs of as many constituents as possible. How do they group needs into buckets to find what is most relevant. Find the overlap and dig into it with more cases and then questions.