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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?

#161

Post by doix »

smcn wrote: post #130
doix wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you finding communities to track? Are you crawling and flowing links to shitty subteddits? Creating honeypot accounts to try and get spammed invites to telegram/discord groups? Are you following the different *Chan's? IRC? I had a friend that did something for crypto. He would try to map pump and dump efforts to crypto projects. Gave them codenames and followed which ones had the most successful pump and dump…

Good question! It's a manual process of discovery. As in, I actually go out and hunt down groups talking about stocks and if it looks interesting, I'll add it into the algorithm. I'll then analyse the data over a period of a week or two and determine whether it's worth continuing. If it is, I move it to production and it'll perform as the rest do. If a community is not publicly visible (discord, telegram, etc) I'll a…

Wait, I thought the whole point was to find pump and dumps early.

I'm not sure what you're trying to do now. The most interesting (for me anyway) would be to figure out what is going to be on Reddit before it appears by analyzing spam/pump and dump groups etc. If you're analyzing Reddit after the fact, isn't that kinda late?

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

#162

Post by MattGaiser »

w10-1 wrote: post #134
zciwor wrote: post #54

My sister works as a veterinarian and is experiencing some serious burnout from her current practice (a subsidiary of a larger corporation). I guess it's pretty common practice for corporations or private equity to snatch up smaller independent practices and then run them like a sweat shop. Her current CEO's resume is a list of Starbucks, Walmart, and a few other corporate roles that are totally unrelated to the medi…

What's wrong with opening your own practice? Investors can only invest in scalable, replicable businesses. Veterinary practices are intensely personal, often specialize in different species and breeds, and can develop unique experimental treatments. The cost of labor is ridiculously cheap (people become Vet Tech's for love, not money), and buildings need not be in commercial centers, so capital costs are minimal. Hon…

> The cost of labor is ridiculously cheap (people become Vet Tech's for love, not money)

I guess the question is then whether labour is abundant/available. Even if there are people willing to work for little, are there anywhere near enough?

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

#163

Post by veqq »

hk__2 wrote: post #38

I’ve been learning Italian for a few years and one thing that’s frustating is searching for words I don’t know. Italy has a lot of local languages/dialects that influence regional variants of Italian; it’s common to see dialectal words enter the mainstream Italian language. The largest dictionary, Treccani, is very good but often misses words that are either too recent / vulgar / dialectal. There are various other bi…

wiktionary

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

#164

Post by ducktective »

justicz wrote: post #128

Robots that build large-scale solar farms! My friend and I started working on this last year and ended up starting a company. We moved to the bay area and did YC last summer. We've been spending a lot of time on solar construction sites and did our first demo (part of the material handling system) on a site in March. Now we're working on a robotic factory + our team is up to 5 folks.

How hard is it to found a robotic HW startup? What are the roles of your team? (Mech eng, Embedded eng, etc)

Do you have a PhD? Would you advise getting one (in robotics)?

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

#165

Post by fdsffaef334 »

StickyThink wrote: post #49
natch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

No post body was provided.

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

#167

Post by raphlinus »

A ton of stuff, arguably too many things. Right at the moment, my main focus is redoing fundamental 2D vector graphics geometry operations (stroking, path intersection) to make them more robust and higher quality. Some of this will also run in the GPU as compute shaders, which adds some interesting constraints and ups the difficulty level.

I'm also building a new, high performance, high quality 2D rendering engine that runs primarily on the GPU.

And I'm also exploring new approaches to building GUI, primarily in Rust. A new focus is to integrate that more tightly with the renderer mentioned above. A benefit I expect is that I'll be able to do the CPU side of the rendering work in multiple threads, where existing architectures make it very difficult to break out of a single thread.

How did I end up working on this? It's a natural evolution of what I've been working on for a long time, in Ghostscript, on Google Fonts, working on the text stack on Android, and now fortunate enough to have a research position back on Google Fonts where I am able to focus on this and have great support from the rest of the team.

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

#168

Post by philip1209 »

I'm working to reinvent personal websites. My goal is to replace social media with personal sites + newsletters, which are more distributed, privacy-friendly, and calm.

https://postcard.page

The product seems simple, but there are so many opportunities for optimization. There's caching, CDNs, custom domain support, dynamically-generated open graph images, image optimizations, email sending, email reputations, analytics, and more.

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

#169

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

O__________O wrote: post #157
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #145

Trying to teach myself linear algebra and deep learning so I can apply it to some interesting ideas I have about making current chess AI much stronger. I don't want to reveal too much since I don't want some Stockfish dev to steal my idea but I'm interested in tips and resources on linear algebra. I always hated matrices... Interspersed with that I have a huge amount of stuff to implement for my project still(search…

Assuming you have looked at MuZero, since it’s able to not only beat Stockfish, but also not specifically for chess: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero https://github.com/werner-duvaud/muzero-general https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L0A86LmH7Yw

I am aware of MuZero, but I'm not convinced it's able to beat the latest Stockfish. Stockfish continues to dominate TCEC even after the advent of more advanced MCTS searchers.

But MCTS is on my map as something to look into more deeply.

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

#170

Post by pwpw »

memset wrote: post #133

Revenue recognition accounting. (Is that not interesting to you? It's super interesting to me!) There's this whole world of rules that accountants follow to properly record revenue. These rules are different for physical products, subscriptions, contracts, and even rules for what to do when you bundle these things together. And yet, the only two options for companies to crunch all this data is to use an Oracle produc…

Hey I’m a CPA (former big 4 accountant) that’s taught myself how to code. Interested in learning more if you want to share: contact+hn@winstoncooke.com
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