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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?

#351

Post by sosodev »

red0point wrote: post #194

I‘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?

This is what DigitalOcean did to create their block/object storage. If you're interested in doing this type of thing in a career capacity the storage team is hiring a lot of people right now. Feel free to reach out to me as I'm on that team. :)

https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/why-we-chose-ceph-to-build...

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

#352

Post by minhmeoke »

staz wrote: post #323
minhmeoke wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's true, meld is designed for comparing directories which already have similar structures.

It seems like what we're looking for is content-addressable storage [1]. The theory behind it appears to be based on Merkle trees and cryptographic signatures [2].

IPFS already has an implementation [3] of this, and there are other implementations (borgbackup, restic, zpaq) listed in that link and in the content-addressable storage article. Disclaimer: I haven't used any of these yet, just found them a few minutes ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage

[2] https://gist.github.com/mafintosh/464bb8f1451f22c9e5c5

[3] https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/ipfs-and-file-deduplication/4674

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

#353

Post by minhmeoke »

marcosdumay wrote: post #324
minhmeoke wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Excellent, glad that you found this to be helpful. Good luck with your project!

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

#354

Post by gpa »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #335
gpa wrote: post #327

The 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…

I'd just slap a GUI / audit logs on top. Show the intermediate data (the “wrangling”), show the computed similarities, show the conclusion (this met that threshold, and the other was equal, so it's category seven).

Can you elaborate on the technical details: which language, library or framework would you use?

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

#355

Post by flir »

3pt14159 wrote: post #300
davehcker wrote: post #48

I have posted this here before- hexafarms.com. I am trying to use ML to discover optimal phenotype for growing plants in vertical indoor farms to a. have the higest quality produce b. to lower the cost of producing leafy green/med plants, etc. within cities itself. Basically, every leafy green (and herbs, and even mushrooms), can grow in a range of climatic condition (phenotype, roughly) ie temperature, humidity, wat…

I know this isn't going to sound as sexy as AlphaGo for plants, but I really think this is a classic multilinear optimization problem once you've properly labeled the data and defined the dynamics between the plants / other organisms (e.g., aquaponics). You're looking to optimize multiple variables across a set of known constraints and I think if you properly defined these constraints you could save a lot of headache…

Yeah, the description made me think "simulated annealing" not "AI". I mean, even genetic algorithms might be overkill here.

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

#356

Post by Const-me »

How to create a good app.store for a smartphone OS?

Users should be able to install whatever software they want. Similar for developers, they should be free to publish whatever software they made.

Apple/Google approach is suboptimal because centralized point of failure. And they do censorship on their stores, both political and arbitrary.

Linux approach is suboptimal because users don’t have keyboards to create these sources.list text files. Even if they had qwerty keyboards, I don’t like the UX, too hard to use.

Traditional P2P like bit torrent + DHT is suboptimal because smartphones, would use too much electricity + bandwidth to be practical.

So far, I’m thinking about developers-hosted binary packages, and existing code-signing infrastructure for authenticity and integrity (Verisign, Comodo, Digicert, these guys, up to developers to choose one). The configuration issue from Linux should be solvable with QR codes scanned by camera, plus a custom URI handler for the web browser on the phone.

The main thing I don’t like about that approach — a store app on the device is a good UX from end users’ perspective. Yet it seems impossible to make one with that approach.

I’m very far from being blocked on that yet, but I will face that problem eventually.

P.S. I’m not going to solve security at that level. As Android store shows us, it’s borderline impossible even with Google’s resources. Modern mobile SOCs have enough juice to solve that properly, on the lower levels of the stack. Most of them support hardware-assisted virtualization. All of them are fast enough to run proper multi-user Linux, with security permissions and SELinux kernel module.

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

#357

Post by palmtree3000 »

Json diffing.

I haven't found any implementations I'd consider good. The problem as I see it is that there are tree based algorithms like https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~swier004/publications/2019-i... and array based algorithms like, well, text diffing, but nothing good that does both. The tree based approach struggles because there's no obvious way to choose the "good" tree encoding of an array.

I've currently settled on flattening into an array, containing things like String(...) or ArrayStart, and using an array based diffing algorithm on those, but it seems like one could do better.

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

#358

Post by marcosdumay »

marcosdumay wrote: post #254

Yeah, this week I've restarted my scanning tunnel microscope that I'm failing to make work for years... The current one is a standard pair of long metal bars with the piezoelectric component on one end, with 2 screws, and a 3rd screw on the other end. My problem is that it doesn't matter how I design the thing, either the screws offer too little precision so I can't help but to crush the tip into the sample every tim…

Adding another step (not a problem, just maybe a solution), a quick estimate says that if I place a few kHz signal at the sample, it will induce enough current at the tip to be detected by the preamp when the distance reaches the micrometers. That's the same range you want to stop the approximation, so it may be a nice proximity signal.

I've got to try this on my next attempt.

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

#359

Post by david_allison »

graphcolorer wrote: post #219

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.

Could you put the graph up in a gist/pastebin?

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

#360

Post by cxr »

adriangrigore wrote: post #320
cxr wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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?

ES6 backtick strings.
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