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

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401–410 of 486 posts

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

#401

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.

One more idea, there exist worm drive micrometers which allow you to step down the linear movement per revolution even more:

https://www.global-optosigma.com/en_jp/Catalogs/pno/?from=pa...

If you have machining/fabrication skills, it might also be possible to buy a few worm gear sets and modify your micrometer to move really slowly but precisely.

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

#402

I find it hard to find communities for my ever-changing niche interests. I’m working on community discussion boards which exist at the intersection of interests. Eg. Mountain Biking/New Zealand, Propulsion/Submarine, Machine Learning/Aquaponics/Tomato, etc. The search terms for interests are supplied from Wikipedia articles which avoids duplicate interests and allows for any level of granularity. I find that key word…

this kind of sounds like reddit to be honest, is reddit lacking something you wish would be there?

Reddit is great for finding general topics - science, news, hobbies, etc.

And the goal of this isn’t to replicate those more sweeping discussion boards because they’re great!

My issue is that once things get more niche, the subreddits are tough to find - they could have obscure names, and even just learning about them often involves another user recommending. Plus creating a subreddit for every niche intersection isn’t ideal.

With this I could zone in on exactly what I’m after, without sifting through all the unrelated stuff. With the Aquaponics/AI/Tomatoes, I’d be dealing with only that intersection point. Not the peripheral stuff.

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

#403

How to make png encoding much faster? I'm working with large medical images and after a bit of work we can do all the needed processing in under a second (numpy/scipy methods). But then the encoding to png is taking 9-15secs. As a result we have to pre-render all possible configurations and put them on S3 b/c we can't do the processing on demand in a web request. Is there a way to use multiple threads or GPU to encod…

also check the FPGA cards (ask the Xilinx; Altera/Intel, ...)

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

#404
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "obvious" way. (The same runtime that you're planning to use for the JS you mentioned in your original comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28349504 >)

And do the generation on the client side?

If by "client side" you mean in the web browser of you, the author of a new piece of content, then yes—a site that is "capable of generating itself". (If you mean templates that are evaluated in the browser of every site visitor every time they refresh the page, then no.)

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

#405
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A combination of "all categories are fuzzy" and "all models are wrong but some are useful"? I too doubt the effectiveness of a symbolic AI approach. Although I studied that and other approaches in the field, you may note that my background is in biologically plausible methods for pursuing artificial intelligence. I think the direct human input method is given too much focus although it and related interactions have t…

I find your comment quite confusing. >> A combination of "all categories are fuzzy" and "all models are wrong but some are useful"? Are you talking about my first paragraph or symbolic AI? >> The fallible sensors directly reporting readings from reality already has sufficient noise related issues. I assume here you are trying to say that human input is not reliable. I don't understand what's your approach with AI her…

I apologize for the unintended confusion. I don't find all expression safe in this context and have avoided some of it as well as the amount of work I could put into describing what amounts to a ~36 year life obsession for me.

> Are you talking about my first paragraph or symbolic AI?

In the link you provided and the second paragraph of your first reply you seem, to my reading, to suggest using a system to facilitate discovering agreement on specific actions, knowledge, and tactical choices. Stated differently agreement within groups, perhaps large groups. You discussed in both comments the challenge of being specific and static, which is the downfall, in my opinion, to many symbolic systems - the presumption that our ability to discretely describe reality is sufficient. To me fuzzy categories and useful broken models comment about that finding. The systems you are describing sound useful but seem to solve a different problem than I mean to target.

> I assume here you are trying to say that human input is not reliable.

Yes, I find human output to be unreliable and I believe it is well understood to be so. An example of a system that has elements of scaling social knowing is Facebook. I believe it is well understood that people often (and statically speaking prevalently) present a facsimile of themselves there when they are presenting anything actually more than superficially adjacent to themselves at all. This introduces varying amounts of noise in to the signal and displaces participation in life, perhaps in exchange for reduced communication overhead. Humans additionally make errors on the regular, whether through "fat fingers", an unexamined self, "bias", or whatever. See also "Nosedive" [0].

> I don't understand what's your approach with AI here

I haven't really described it - the ask was literally for the problem, not for solutions. There is a certain level of vaporware in my latest notion for exactly how to solve it. As stated obliquely however, there are aspects of the solution that I don't really want to be dragged through a discussion on here on HN.

> an AI that can't explain itself

I haven't specified unexplainable AI. I actually see evidence based explainability as a key feature of my current best formulation of a concrete solution. That, in context presents quite a few nuts to crack.

> Finally, I'm very familiar with meditations on moloch

I only meant to link the fish story but the link in MoM was broken and I failed to find a backup on archive.org, not putting a whole ton of effort into looking.

Consider how the described "games" change if those willing to cooperate and achieve the maximal outcomes could preselect to only play with those who are inclined to act similarly? If you grouped the defectors and cooperators to play within their chosen strategies based on prior action? Iterated games have different solutions and I find those indicative of life, except that social accountability doesn't scale. In real life such specificity is impossible and no guarantees exist. Yet, I believe that the rights systemic support structures could solve a number of problems, including a small movement of the needle towards greater game theoretic affinity and thereby a shift in the local maxima to which we have access.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

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

#406
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And do the generation on the client side?

If by "client side" you mean in the web browser of you, the author of a new piece of content, then yes—a site that is "capable of generating itself". (If you mean templates that are evaluated in the browser of every site visitor every time they refresh the page, then no.)

Ah, yeah, finally got your "capable of generating itself" idea. Pretty cool, interesting to experiment on it. I guess it would be something like a site that downloads itself also.

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

#408

Short version: I'm close to figuring out how to encourage more prototyping of software by making tests super easy to write during the prototyping process, and so de-risking rewrites. But one problem I've been stymied by is how to represent expectations of screens when they contain graphics. Long version: My Mu project ( https://github.com/akkartik/mu ) is building a computing stack up from machine code. The goal is p…

Your project is quite impressive. And welcome to the world of computer graphics!

I'd consider taking inspiration from the following sources:

1. GUI toolkits like QT QML [1] or Android [2]. These typically build a hierarchical tree of different components (eg: start with a root window, which contains panes, which in turn contain text and buttons). Each component may contain different properties (eg: font, color), and properties may be inherited from the parent component.

Advantages:

+ preserves semantics of component properties and how they are linked to each other (eg: the caption is below the image)

Disadvantages:

- complexity: building a layout/constraint engine can be difficult, or alternatively you can use absolute positioning with relative offsets which can be tedious to use (in this case the layer-based approach below might make more sense).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML

[2] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/declaring-layo...

2. Graphical editor programs like Gimp or Photoshop, or Adobe Flash.

These build up a screen as a collection of vertically stacked layers or assets (eg: graphics, text, etc) with attached properties and optionally bounding boxes. Higher layers/assets occlude the content of the layers below them, so you would need to implement some kind of visibility logic.

Advantages:

+ simplicity

+ you can use identifiers for assets, and therefore don't need to perform pixel-by-pixel comparisons.

Disadvantages:

- may lose some information about how different components are related to each other

Also, rather than a raster pixel-based representation, it might make sense to use a vector representation internally [3]. The most popular vector representation is SVG. The full spec is very verbose, so you probably only want to implement a small subset of it. This would permit you to specify properties like line thickness, color, striped/dotted patterns. At render time, you could convert the (proportional) fonts to vectors as well for consistency, and then rasterize the entire scene when rendering to a display surface. But for testing, it would be better to use the scene graph / vector format which is easier for users to reason about.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

[4] http://blog.leahhanson.us/post/recursecenter2016/haiku_icons...

But perhaps this is over-complicating things.

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

#409
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "client side" you mean in the web browser of you, the author of a new piece of content, then yes—a site that is "capable of generating itself". (If you mean templates that are evaluated in the browser of every site visitor every time they refresh the page, then no.)

Ah, yeah, finally got your "capable of generating itself" idea. Pretty cool, interesting to experiment on it. I guess it would be something like a site that downloads itself also.

[deleted]

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

#410

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 sett…

At the risk of not being helpful: I have some json files that are updated weekly that I keep under source control in git. The week-to-week updates are often fairly simple, but git was showing some crazy diffs that I knew were way more complicated than the update. I soon realized that the data provider was not consistently sorting the json arrays; when I began sorting the json arrays by rowid everytime before writing it, the diff's were as straightforward as expected. I think I don't understand the problem you're encountering, because this solution seems too obvious.
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