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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?

#271

Post by sfpotter »

Test0129 wrote: post #115
nautilius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not tiring at all, when it's not a trope. This forum contains a surprising number of posts of sometimes ridiculously blind US-praising that is rooted in simple ignorance of how things run elsewhere and in the US. Concerning taxes though, I'll have to (quasi) side with you. 1040EZ is as easy as it gets. One could of course argue that in that case, in which the IRS has the numbers already, why do you have to be forced…

> Not tiring at all, when it's not a trope. The greatest fallacy of the pseudo-intelligent is comparing different first world countries to each other without considering demographics. It's a fallacy you have committed, along with everyone else who says "America is backwards lol". That is why it is a trope. It has nothing to do with American exceptionalism and everything to do with a relatively poor understanding of h…

Clearly you think that the government should stay out of your business. I think the opposite. I am also an American citizen. There are a large number of Americans who believe that America is backwards in many ways. The fact that you live in America means that you have to deal with this reality to some extent. You're of course free to leave high-handed comments anonymously on an internet forum, but you should recognize that that's all you're doing. Being more strident will not increase the validity of your position, nor will it reduce the number of people who disagree with you. Probably the opposite, if anything.

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

#273

Post by aerovistae »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #240
aerovistae wrote: post #214

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.

I have considered adding an audio channel to a match, yes, not video though. I figure people who use it to play with friends are already going to be using discord, and people playing against strangers are very unlikely to want to make video calls. I could be wrong?

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

#274

Post by intrasight »

provability wrote: post #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…

I too have been contemplating architectural solutions to this problem for about a year. I've probably posted about it on HN at some point. I'll email you - or try to ;)

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

#275

Post by dbingham »

imnotreallynew wrote: post #268
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…

I’ve been interested in building a similar platform for quite some time. I actually bought the scholar.io domain for that purpose, but never got around to it.

I'm working open source and would welcome contributions! (https://github.com/danielbingham/peerreview)

(Although, the first contribution would probably need to be getting the local working again in a new context... I've been going fast and taking on some techdebt that will need to be paid down soon.)

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

#276

Post by germinalphrase »

I ended my career in June, and I am attempting to entirely reinvent my professional life at 36. It's interesting going through this sort of open ocean search having a little bit of savings and stability, but the stakes feel higher (emotionally) even though, rationally, I am in a better position to take on risk than when I was young and completely broke.

The hardest part of it is actually deciding what do I want from the time I spend working. Many of the folks I know who do interesting work are either woefully underpaid or chronically overworked.

I'm hoping I can thread the needle on that one.

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

#278

Post by sankha93 »

PainfullyNormal wrote: post #79

I'm going back to basics and learning to write a compiler in the dumbest way possible. I'm starting with a basic assignment (a = 3) and reverse engineering what it would take to turn that into a working executable. Then I'll add more features, lather, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping to eventually turn it into a series of blog posts so everyone can see just how little I remember from college.

This is exactly how Compilers are taught at the University of Maryland. The class CMSC430 (https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2021/cmsc430/) actually starts off with a Scheme (limited subset of Racket) and gradually grows the language to include more features. The first class compiles just numbers to x86 code, followed by arithmetic operations for numbers, building up to higher level features like function calls, pattern matching, and so on. See the notes at: https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2021/cmsc430/Notes.html

This style of building compilers is called the Nanopass style (https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano-jfp.pdf), making it much easier to teach.

Source: I was a TA for the earlier iteration of the class.

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

#279

Post by fuzzythinker »

I'm building an origami application where folds are described in a simple English-like structured language. The editor will be realtime where you can see how the folds are animated.

How I ended up working on this? There were a few ideas I wanted to work on. Most of them are much simpler and have easier path to monetization. But this kept coming back to the top of my thoughts stack, so I gave up fighting it. It ended up much harder than I even thought it was.

Niche tech? Explored F# Fable and ReScript. Both are really still too young so they added too much typing complexity to overcome, so it's just mainly JS and some typescript.

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

#280

Post by throwawaymaths »

jpm_sd wrote: post #249
throwaway0asd wrote: post #23

Decentralization and bidirectional real-time communications. I don't mean blockchain. I mean no servers with end-to-end encryption, no third parties of any kind.

How do endpoints find each other?

If you can tolerate transient centralization, webrtc might be a good choice and it's very likely if you are skilled at it and thought hard about the trust model you could figure out how to multihome webrtc, which would re-decentralize it.
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