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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#41

Post by konradh »

travisjungroth wrote: post #10

I’m working on the expert elicitation of priors. We’re making web UIs to better capture human judgement, especially for forecasting. I work at a data driven company, sometimes I think a bit too data driven. I want to capture more intuition for our systems in a rigorous way. It’s incredibly interesting and very niche. There are a handful of academic papers out there. I think it will be a big deal in the next 10 years.

What angle are you tackling this from? People submitting maximally informative priors and you do some model selection on the effectiveness of the prior?

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#42

Post by dbingham »

mirror_neuron wrote: post #39
dbingham wrote: post #14

Academic and Scientific publishing. It's the primary source material of human knowledge. It should be completely open and accessible to everyone with no barriers to access the literature or to add to the literature. The structure it currently takes - academic journals - made perfect sense in the 1600s when that structure was developed, and it continued to work reasonably well for distributing academic results up into…

If you haven’t heard of it, you may be interested in openreview.net They operate mostly in the computer science academic community, last time I checked.

Yep! I came across them. There are a ton of different projects and platforms out there trying to tackle this problem. But so far every alternative I've come across can only handle some of the various services the journals are providing (or are trying to side step and redesign the whole process from the ground up, which is an even bigger hill to climb).

For example, there are several attempts to overlay review on pre-prints and open repositories (like Zenodo), but they aren't identifying qualified reviewers and matching them to papers in any way. There are the repositories and pre-prints themselves, but they aren't providing review. There are attempts to build open journals, but they're still taking the journal form, which means they still have lots of manual overhead.

Most of them have varying amounts of traction, but few seem to actually be on a course to replace the whole system.

...it remains to be seen whether peer-review.io will fare any better. I think it has a chance because it does provide an alternative system for each of the services the journals provide. Well -- except one, which is the moderator role the editor sometimes plays. That may prove fatal, but only time will tell.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#43

Post by aklemm »

smcn wrote: post #35

High level: finding the next big meme stocks (which morphed into finding any stock that could increase a lot) I was pretty late to GME, despite having been on Reddit for a good few years. I started researching what had happened, and where the conversations were taking place just trying to understand where to place myself to be a part of the next one. I ended up checking out the typical r/WallStreeBets and the other b…

Why does this feel like a good use of skills and time to you? I ask because to my mind it feels like a value scraper rather than a value maker, so I'm genuinely curious.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#44

Post by neodypsis »

koeng wrote: post #6

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…

Pretty cool. May I ask, what is your background? And, what resources are you using to learn about analog IC chip design?

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#45

Post by smcn »

aklemm wrote: post #43
smcn wrote: post #35

High level: finding the next big meme stocks (which morphed into finding any stock that could increase a lot) I was pretty late to GME, despite having been on Reddit for a good few years. I started researching what had happened, and where the conversations were taking place just trying to understand where to place myself to be a part of the next one. I ended up checking out the typical r/WallStreeBets and the other b…

Why does this feel like a good use of skills and time to you? I ask because to my mind it feels like a value scraper rather than a value maker, so I'm genuinely curious.

It was earning me a lot more money than a salaried position.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#46

Post by neodypsis »

natch wrote: post #28
koeng wrote: post #6

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…

Sounds fascinating, what could possibly go wrong? “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park).

What's your point? The technology already exists and is being used.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#47

Post by andrewallbright »

Writing automated tests for video games. Why is it interesting to me?

I started to teach myself unity in December 2021. I've personally experienced benefits to writing automated tests and using CICD; therefore, I thought it would be fun to learn about writing tests for a 3D based software. It will be different from the web/CLI based stuff I usually write.

So, it turns out that the video game community (or at least the online circles I frequent) are extremely against the idea of writing automated testing for various reasons. This translates into there effectively being a non-existent pedagogy around teaching how to write tests for 3D based software. Content is scarce, and the content you do find is produced by people who obviously don't write automated tests. So, for me I've hit the books to arbitrage & translate techniques and philosophies into this "untapped" domain.

It's interesting because I've figured out tips & tricks that I'd consider low hanging fruit... For example, if you place a "test" camera in the test case, you can actually see what's going on in the test when it's executed. Or how important it is to clean up every created game object in your test after each test; if done right, you can keep your SUT at origin (0,0,0). Or the importance of "test prefabs" who are effectively mocks of other "real" prefabs...

One innovation that I would like to use/build that I truly consider (((revolutionary))) is this: I want the test cases I write to also automatically (or when tagged with a certain C# attribute) generate the same game objects in a "exploratory(manual) test scene." I think this innovation is the "killer app" that will completely and totally sell the value proposition of automated tests to those opposed. If you decide to build this, please also publish it on openupm and reach out to me.

I have plenty of other thoughts and ideas on this space. I love talking about automated testing; it feels like a very futuristic programmer practice. I hope this post demonstrates why this work and space is so interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#48

Post by travisjungroth »

konradh wrote: post #41
travisjungroth wrote: post #10

I’m working on the expert elicitation of priors. We’re making web UIs to better capture human judgement, especially for forecasting. I work at a data driven company, sometimes I think a bit too data driven. I want to capture more intuition for our systems in a rigorous way. It’s incredibly interesting and very niche. There are a handful of academic papers out there. I think it will be a big deal in the next 10 years.

What angle are you tackling this from? People submitting maximally informative priors and you do some model selection on the effectiveness of the prior?

Right now I’m working on the elicitation process. To see an example, it’s similar to SHELF[1]. They’ve been very helpful by the way.

We already have so many places internally to put in forecasts. Cash flow projections for example. But, all you get is a text box. I’m working on making that easier and more representative before anything else. Making a web app (when all you have is a hammer…) to start. From there, there will be lots more to do but beyond what I’d like to share publicly for now.

[1] https://shelf.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#49

Post by StickyThink »

natch wrote: post #28
koeng wrote: post #6

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…

Sounds fascinating, what could possibly go wrong? “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park).

That's an excellent question. Another of my faves is "what are the worst consequences and how do we reduce the risk of a negative outcome? Is it possible to entirely eliminate issues responsibly?"

The former tends to stop all progress, while the latter considers that negative outcomes are real, but that we can productively reduce risk.

Kind of like how OpenAI removed racist, sexist, and other troubling images from their AI training pool and then released it in pieces (to a small group of subjects) to remove as many issues as possible. With that said, they definitely still made mistakes.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#50

Post by elil17 »

solardev wrote: post #15
zschuessler wrote: post #5

I heard few song lines from a new artist I've discovered. It has me thinking on a problem I want solved. Although, I'm not actively working on it. Why aren't there more employee-owned companies? And I don't mean solely shareholder programs, I mean actually owned by every employee and they are paid dividends of profit after all planned R&D costs. Similar to the Alaska oil pipeline bonus. Even interns. All studies show…

There are some employee owned cooperatives, including a few in tech I've seen, but I think they're a lot harder to raise capital for (and thus a lot harder to grow) than either public companies or member owned cooperatives. How do you fundraise outside of the small pool of employee-owners?

The US Small Business Administration actually offers small business loans to groups of employees trying to get a controlling share of their companies. However, the program is pretty hard to use (like every other government program). https://www.sba.gov/brand/assets/sba/sba-lenders/ESOP_Borrow...

There's actually a bill in congress right now that would, among other things, provide technical assistance and outreach for employees who might be able to use the program: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4141...

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