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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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231–240 of 633 posts

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

#231

It’s early days, but I’m looking into more precise and domain specific object recognition in photos. Apple or Google will generally tell me if a photo contains a chair; I would like to know what kind of chair (is it a Herman Miller Aeron or a Herman Miller Embody). There are a few domains I am interested to apply this to, but at this stage I’m still learning the limitations of the tech (and any leads / insights would…

Before you embark further on this, see what the competition has first. If for anything, but inspiration for good ideas, as well as seeing what works well and what doesn't. You mentioned Apple and Google with their photo apps, but have you checked Google Lens?

This one is very realtime and gets in quite a detail. I don't know whether it recognizes different models of Herman Miller chairs yet, but I can open the app, point my camera at a flower or a plant, and it will (attempt to) tell me which exact specie it is.

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

#232
I'm building an open source security lake platform (https://github.com/matanolabs/matano). Basically, some of the core problems we solve are:

- Traditional SIEM tools are not a good fit for large amounts of data — they're either too expensive or come with a high ops burden. - Your data is locked into vendor specific formats.

We solve this by ingesting and storing all your data in Apache Iceberg tables on S3, (allowing for low cost queries directly on S3 data + an open table format) and building everything using only serverless technologies(Lambda, SQS, S3, Athena, etc.).

We also let you write realtime Python detections as code and are written in Rust, which makes for some interesting technical challenges.

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

#233
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ownership implies both risk and reward. Those who own anything (a private company or stock in a public company) are entitled to their share of the profits but also must take on the risk of the value going down. How do you convince all the employees of any company ('even the interns') to take on the risks accompanying ownership?

Maybe take a hybrid approach? The leadership members contribute some investment funding and in turn own portions of the company's profit relative to their investment. You also have hourly/contracted workers who do not have a stake in the company, but have well defined job specs. My fear in that situation would be 'lazy investors' who donate some money but do no work to grow or manage the company.

> 'lazy investors' who donate some money but do no work to grow or manage the company.

so regular investors then xD

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

#234
post #104
post #29

I'm working on applying game theory to the design of social media algorithms in order to help curb the spread of misinformation. https://deliberati.io/give-truth-the-advantage/

That's a really cool project, best of luck!

Agreed, I’m excited to see where this may go.

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

#235
post #113

I’m working on making body doubling a more main stream approach to accomplishing everyday tasks. Body doubling is known within the ADHD community and entails performing a task in the presence of another. More details here: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/body-double-adhd It helps to engage motivation by using another person as the proxy. I wrote a bit about how I think it works here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog…

Isn't that a bit like rubber duck debugging ?

I also find pair work to be very special on many levels (intellectually, emotionally,. logistically). I wish there was more theory on this

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

#236
Hi everyone,

We are building a cybersecurity marketplace for professionals looking for remote assignments. Currently it is in beta version and we are looking for test users to check functionality. We will provide gift credits for our testers when we are live so that they can be featured sellers on the main page. Just let me know if you are interested :)

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

#237
To reduce the adverse effects of fake evidence (eventually called deepfake), off and on since 2004, and especially since ten years ago, I've been thinking up, NOT DETECTION methods, but prospective, pro-active methods to instrument a data stream, to increase the odds that video, audio, or other time-series data (including e.g. scientific experimental data) eventually can be proven to have been created from real life (and not faked) at the time & place claimed.

This is not just "proof of existence" by inserting hashes of content into a Merkle tree, like Haber & Stornetta implemented in 1990 and like we talked about on the Cypherpunks email list in the early 1990s, although of course that would be part of a complete system.

Nor is it relying on just the metadata that e.g. TruePic uses. I have been developing additional methods to asymptotically approach provability that the content depicted actually happened in real life. Think undetectable watermarks by multiple observers (courts want to see multiple witnesses) but it goes beyond that.

Relevant to this are efforts by CAI, C2PA, and companies like TruePic. I am hoping my methods are different enough, with little enough overlap, that we can realize them without licensing their IP. My goal is a more decentralized system that protects the privacy of witnesses.

My contact info is in my profile. I'd love to discuss this with anyone. I'd even be relieved if someone would explain that my ideas are not useful, or already have been done, or even would have unintended negative consequences for society. (It's hard to stay current in the relevant literature on signal processing, steganography, cryptography, and zero-knowledge proof, plus politics and game theory.)

I would even considering simply donating my trade secrets (such as they are) to some person or organization who impresses me as sincere and likely to move them forward, to avoid having to sit on them hands-off (again) during my tenure at (yet another) company that is about to offer me a full-time job today to work on something unrelated. While some of my ideas "toward authenticatability" may have been ahead of their time when I first wrote them up ten years ago, they probably aren't anymore, so the window is (at best) closing now.

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

#238
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…

> so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. Any resources and books you'd recommend?

This is not at all an area I know anything about, but a podcast I was listening to (Moore's Lobby) recently mentioned on chip design broadly:

https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com

And also:

https://www.udemy.com/user/anagha/

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

#239

I have been thinking of reconstructing history from books and all kinds of material. So if someone wants to know what a newspaper on 3rd Jan 1403 looked like, they can.

That'd be some feat, considering the first printing press wasn't perfected until about 1450! LOL

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

#240

A new platform to play Magic: The Gathering digitally. Been working on it since the pandemic started. It's almost done. It's a multiplayer sandbox (no rules enforcement) that just allows you to play by providing all the different zones the game involves (play area, hand, lib, gy, ex) and letting you free-drag between them. It has features for every mechanic the game involves - tapping, turning face-down, switching ca…

What a cool idea! Not sure if you’ve done it already, but it’d be cool to embed video calls (maybe with WebRTC?) in your UI so you can have that more visceral sensation of playing against another person.
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