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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?

#201

Post by samsquire »

sandreas wrote: post #37

I'm currently working on a file indexer for my pet project tonehub[1] (an audio API like navidrome or audiobookshelf). I thought this is gonna be an easy task, but after running into a lot of problems it turned out that this is indeed an interesting problem to solve. Just to name a few problems I ran into: - Performance: How to scan files as fast as possible? - Tag-Storage: How to store audio tags as generic as possi…

You might find the idea of "cancellation trees" useful. Create a hierarchy of loop data structure of loop iterating variable and loop limit then cancelling any part of the tree cancels its children.

If you have a worker thread that has a hot loop that checks a pthread structure as its limit. You can then send a virtual interrupt to it, or preempt it from running further by setting the loop to its limit.

You can see my C, Java and Rust code of this in this repository: https://github.com/samsquire/preemptible-thread

It can be used to create extremely responsive software without slowing down the system with cancellation checks.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#120-cancellation-trees https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#99-register-loop

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

#202

Post by v8xi »

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…

I'm actually in a similar boat learning these things to apply to chess but rather than making a stronger AI, trying to learn and catalog strategies to make learning chess more intuitive. Would be interested in talking more if you are! Can message me on lichess.org/@/v8xi if you play there

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

#203

Post by flutas »

JohnCurran wrote: post #192
flutas wrote: post #110

Working on (actually just got my v1 up last night) a price monitoring tool for a bunch of local stores. Trying to prove they are price fixing.

Please please please publish the results of what you find!

I'm hopeful that I can turn it into a public facing dashboard that others can see. It covers the entire state I live in, monitoring 32 stores and about 8k products right now. Already seeing some weird stuff in the data, like a product that changes price every 30 minutes, $30->$50->$30 repeat.

It's a niche type of store (dispensary) and essentially a state blessed monopoly since they limited it to 40 store licenses total. But I'm hopeful being able to show people the data will help with some of it... or maybe I get my door kicked in.

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

#204

Post by mynameisash »

I've been slowly learning SAT/SMT, but the materials I've found are very academic. Being almost 20 years out of my CS degree and this being a rather niche field, it's tough to learn, so I want to continue teaching myself and help others by creating useful "SAT/SMT for newbies".

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

#205

Post by zachkatz »

Building a platform that accelerates the construction of protected bike lanes and car-free streets worldwide by connecting citizens, advocacy groups, cities, and urban planners: https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/15705341894974832...

(Backstory: Started a Twitter account in July (twitter.com/@betterstreetsai) posting DALL-E-generated street transformations, it immediately took off, got lots of press, etc. and made me realize how huge the demand for this stuff is.)

Feel free to send me a DM on Twitter if you're interested in helping!

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

#206

Post by O__________O »

waylandsmithers wrote: post #189

Maybe not exactly what you were asking for, but getting to 20 or 30 users for my latest project. It's not meant to be a start up or anything, it was more just "I wish this thing existed and think it would be fun" So this time around I'm slowly asking people I know to try it out. Honestly it takes a little courage and has given me a newfound respect for people who do sales (though it's a little different, as the whole…

Might be worth providing way for people to know what the project is and how to use it.

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

#207

Post by once_inc »

philip1209 wrote: post #168

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, analyti…

Please move away from email to something more decentralized and powerful. Email is the source of so many lost productivity hours and is now wholly controlled by large entities like Microsoft and Google.

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

#208

Post by Daegalus »

I am still slowly working on reverse engineering an MMO. I have client source, but no server source (it was lost to time), so I am building a new server.

My current problem is I have concurrency working, but there is a aspect to movement that I have little information on, and the client isn't informative enough to help. So I am kinda stuck. I plan to do some manual testing of just fiddling with a value and see what happens. Its fun, but very demoralizing at the same time to see multiple people logged in, but their characters jumping around and not properly being moved around on other people's screens.

I also don't want to make any changes to client code, because that's our only source of truth to work with.

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

#209

Post by philip1209 »

once_inc wrote: post #207
philip1209 wrote: post #168

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, analyti…

Please move away from email to something more decentralized and powerful. Email is the source of so many lost productivity hours and is now wholly controlled by large entities like Microsoft and Google.

RSS feature coming soon! JSON API to follow.

Any suggestions of what to offer instead of email? For instance, it's definitely more decentralized than push notifications.

Every post that gets sent through email also has a permalink on the site. So, you can write it once - then share it across any channels (including social media). For instance, I'm generating opengraph images automatically now to make Postcard more friendly with sites like Twitter and LinkedIn: https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1570770548988465152

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

#210

Post by michalf6 »

wheybags wrote: post #65
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #2

One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…

Don't you ever feel bad for not contributing to society? Living like that seems morally reprehensible to me.

He probably still pays more than an average person in absolute terms, and almost certainly more than he uses in public services. I bet society is better off with him being around than otherwise.
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