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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?

#311

I have a graph with weighted edges. I want to remove edges to make the graph colorable with N colors (e.g. N=40) such that the total weight of removed edges is minimized. If I'm able to solve this problem, that will complete a project I've been working on for years now to make a working keyboard for a person I know that has cerebral palsy.

Will the graph ever change? Is this a one-time computation?

One time.

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

#312

I have a graph with weighted edges. I want to remove edges to make the graph colorable with N colors (e.g. N=40) such that the total weight of removed edges is minimized. If I'm able to solve this problem, that will complete a project I've been working on for years now to make a working keyboard for a person I know that has cerebral palsy.

What are the needs in time?

Can take as long as needed as it only needs to be colored one time. About 10,000 nodes, reasonably dense (about half the nodes will have 1,000+ edges).

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this sounds very ambitious! Perhaps you could somehow attach the piezoelectric component or bars to a micrometer [1] which is designed for accurate and repeatable measurement? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrometer

Yes, I could. I believe the most straight forward design would be 3 micrometers directly supporting the piezoelectric component, with no levers. Yet, they are a bit expensive. I'm still not willing to budget all that, but I'm starting to consider it.

Digital micrometers are expensive, but you can get analog ones on AliExpress [1] or other places for around $10. Of course, the precision may not be as good as name-brand (eg: Mitutoyo) tools.

[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...

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

#314
post #287

I'm working on a different type of compression (for all file types). I am able to to get in the 10-20% range, but the speed to compress is to slow many times, or the compression doesnt complete at other times (I've been working on this for years). My personal website: http://danclark.org I'm also working on a conversational search engine (using NLP) at http://supersmart.ai

Have you looked into Middle Out compression?

Funny, I've actually had a lot of fun working on this compression software. It's a weird mix of needing it to be fast and hitting a compression threshold of it being useful. One of the best projects I've embarked on

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

#315

I'm trying to make social media moderation more democratic and using that to decide fuzzy questions like "should this post be censored", or "is this misleading" [0]. While the crowd's answer won't be perfect it will help sort through a lot of the noise and feel better than the decision of whatever mod happened to create the subreddit. The problem: how can I make decisions based on a sample with a binary question. I t…

I worked on a similar idea last year. What I did was take urls to content, scrape the content, and pipe it through a machine learning a evaluator to apply various labels and warnings to content. Lastly, add some nice embeddable UI to surface the report.

I got it to a decent state, but didn’t know how to propagate it or inject it into social communities. I wanted people to be able to tag it on Facebook, and it would reply with an informational card with the analysis and summary.

https://github.com/dino-dna/informed-citizen

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

#316
post #195

I want to improve parts of online professional networking, specifically to be more about self-mentoring/shared learning, as opposed to sales connections. This is ever more important with the onset of remote hiring, remote work, and the isolation/depersonalization it brings to newcomers to the industry. There's also an "evil" momentum in remote hiring -- some companies _need_ asynchronous interviews to support their s…

This is a nice idea, to talk about and get thinking about these "soft" questions that people often struggle with.

One feedback about the homepage: show a few examples of how people have answered questions, below the prompt. That's more helpful to get us thinking about our own answers, compared to a blank field. (Also, it's not clear what the percentages are meant to represent there. And I'm guessing the number next to the edit icon shows how many people have answered the question already? May need some UI tweaks on these.)

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

#317

I have a graph with weighted edges. I want to remove edges to make the graph colorable with N colors (e.g. N=40) such that the total weight of removed edges is minimized. If I'm able to solve this problem, that will complete a project I've been working on for years now to make a working keyboard for a person I know that has cerebral palsy.

Similar to what another commenter said about time, have you tried a backtracking approach by: (1) coloring the whole graph (let's say you end with 42 colors) (2) start with the highest colored nodes (e.g. N=42, which exceeds your threshold of 40) and (3) greedily remove the lowest-weight edges (or maybe, edges to other high-colored nodes) until you are either all colored with 40 colors or we reach an invalid state (i…

That's what I'm doing now, but the results aren't great. If there's a way to estimate a lower bound on the number of edges to remove, I can figure out if the results aren't great because of the approximation, or because of the nature of the graph...

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

#319

I have a pile of mp3s and want to splice them together with a single ffmpeg operation. Essentially injecting multiple small audio files into a large one using time codes. I know there's got to be a way to do it, but I have yet to find a way to do it in a single operation instead of multiple passes.

ffmpeg -f concat -i mylist.txt -c copy output.mp3

https://superuser.com/questions/587511/concatenate-multiple-...

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

#320
post #280

Web site building complexity, for now I started with a simple static site generator https://mkws.sh/ . Right now, I'm not using any package manager, no config files, only one language for templates (sh), and obviously HTML, CSS, Js. I eventually plan to develop a simple CMS based on the same ideas. Ideas and code are welcome!

> (sh), and obviously HTML, CSS, Js Cut out the sh dependency and just use the "obvious" tech; make the site capable of generating itself, without reliance on any other tools.

What do you suggest for templating?
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