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Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
321–330 of 486 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was moderating forums when I was twelve. While I experience the usual “I was so embarrassing back then” when thinking back to those times, I do think my contributions were positive and well-received.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#323this more like a tool suggestion request, because I haven't been able to find a solution in Google. I'm looking for a more advanced duplicate files finder in Linux, specially one that can handle folders. Most tool just return a list of duplicate files, but what I need is to also know is if whole folders are duplicate, or subset of others and have it presented in an elegant way t o resolve conflict. ofc everything is…
https://meldmerge.org/ might be what you are looking for. But if there are tools which can find duplicated files and directories which are named differently, I'd be interested in learning more about these as well.
meld can compare two directory if they have the same structure and name for files but can't really tell if I inside my foot folder, I have a folder root/X which is also present as root/category/b/X. (except all the file in it have been prepended by "foo" somehow)
For tools which can find differently names files you have for examples: fslint (gui) or fdupes (cli)
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Yes! Thanks a lot.
Looks like the exact thing I need are micrometer heads, and some even come with nice threaded mounts.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#325I 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…
The people I want to talk to are on facebook groups (my hobbies seem to be "old people" hobbies). I think you're suffering from network effects.
Sooooo..... StackOverflow solved it by starting with a vertical the founders had a lot of social juice in, and spreading in to other verticals. Possibly also by focusing very tightly on "questions and answers".
So my suggestion is "overfocus". If the big platforms have a weakness, it's that they're generic one-size-fits-all solutions. Solve one problem (Q&A, show off my project, discussion, news aggregator) for one vertical really well, then expand. An example off the top of my head might be collaborative note-taking for a class. 6510's "write a book in public" platform is also a fantastic idea at first glance.
(But skip the distributed bit - customers don't care about your architecture, and whatever USP a distributed platform has can be emulated by a centralised platform. Centralised always wins).
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#326I 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…
I think Discord is then modern form of this. It’s really a great product.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#327The problem - correct string matching at scale. I am aware of fuzzy string matching. The problem is that the two strings can be > 90% similar even if the difference is, for example, one digit in the year of manufacturing. My current solution is to represent the 2 strings as similar as I can based on the available information by transforming (wrangling) the data to match the data as close as possible and then applying constraints based on make, model and year (they should be the same). It works pretty well, but I am looking for a more interactive (human-in-the-loop) solution.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you just doing primary key lookups? If so, a new index won’t do much as Postgres already has you covered there. If you have any foreign key columns, add indexes on them. And if you’re doing any joins, make sure the criteria have indexes. Similarly, if you’re filtering on any of the nested JSON fields, index them directly. This alone may be sufficient for your perf problems. If it isn’t, then here’s some tips for…
Doesn't postgress have a way to index JSONB if needed?
You can index on fields in JSONB, but I don’t believe that’s what the op is solving for here.
In either scenario, I’d still generally encourage avoiding storing JSON(B) unless there isn’t a better alternative. There are a lot of maintenance, size, I/O, and validation disadvantages to using JSON in the DB.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#329I 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…
I worked in forums for 4 years. It is the worst most unprofitable business you can get into. The best you can do is show low quality ads or use crappy affiliate programs. The more ads used the less the users like the forum. Forum users love being anonymous. So you provide no value to advertisers that want age,sex,location. Advertisers also HATE forums due to their ad being shown on user generated content. Drama: There are always personal attacks on moderators, posting of illegal material, threats, police involvement and constant human curation. If you build centralized forum software every forum owner works day and night to use something cheaper and get away from your control. Don't even bother offering host your own software (non centralized). "OH i know React I can build a vBulletin clone." No. No you cannot. vBulletin has been working on this software for 20 years and they offer it for $300.
Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
#330I‘m trying to re-/sell cheap bulk object storage, by renting cheap dedicated servers (e.g. Hetzner), connect them using 10GbE and putting them into a big Ceph cluster. My problem is how to bill people for consuming object storage properly. Do you do it retrospectively and take the fraud risk? Are there any pre-existing platforms that do Ceph billing?
Can you explain how the economics of what you are doing would be competitive with something like S3 or B2? I feel like there could be a market/margin here but there are a lot of numbers involved to figure out the specifics.
Just take a look at the egress pricing of B2 (10USD/TB) S3 (92 USD/TB) and then look at Hetzner's 1 EUR / TB. There is quite a margin there - same thing with the storage costs (23,5,1.5).