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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?

#281

Post by sgt »

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.

This is just creating FUD about e-mail.

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

#282

Post by O__________O »

makk wrote: post #245
mistermann wrote: post #101

How does reality work? How could it be changed in a substantial, positive, intentional way, ideally in a surprisingly short time frame?

Im genuinely interested in this. Which aspect of reality? And when you say “positive”, from whose perspective or within which frame are you defining it?

OP’s HN comments likely have examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mistermann

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

#284

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

aerovistae wrote: post #273
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t know :)

When I was 10 years old and first getting into MtG, I was often playing against kids in the school playground that I didn’t know. It became a great way to make new friends.

Also as far as I’m aware, Chatroulette and Omegle are still going strong, and those are all about video chat with random strangers. I suspect that a MtG server would net fewer instances of indecent exposure than the aforementioned two also.

Probably not critical, but perhaps a worthwhile product experiment?

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

#285

Post by Ilasky »

agumonkey wrote: post #235
Ilasky wrote: 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

Exactly! Pair programming is definitely within the realm of tasks we have in mind for Double.

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

#286

Post by tdekken »

ultra_nick wrote: post #51

We're trying to automate tutoring. As a college student, I spent a lot of time trying to fill knowledge gaps with textbooks, Google, or other students. Now, we're trying to provide a streamlined and customized AI Tutor service to help everyone learn faster. It's a lot more technically challenging than we thought. For example, what's the best way to statistically guage a student's knowledge level? How do we recognize…

Hi ultra_nick,

>> trying to automate tutoring.

>> what's the best way to statistically guage a student's knowledge level?

As you have probably already discovered, there is quite a bit of research in this area :). If anyone else is interested, you can search Google Scholar for "deep knowledge tracing", "bayesian knowledge tracing", "performance factor analysis", "knowledge space theory", "intelligent tutoring systems", and "item response theory". Some intelligent tutoring systems include ALEKS, Squirrel Ai, and Riiid.

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

#287

Post by LelouBil »

I recently looked up shape matching with OpenCV for a game I'm making.

Basically, you draw black and white images by spawning meatballs, then the drawing is rendered to a image and checked against a reference using openCV.

I found gesture algorithm online's but they always take into account individual strokes, and the drawing system is not using strokes.

I also have requirements to match the *whole* image but not *exactly*.

So what I'm doing is :

1. Resizing and cropping the input image to size of the reference image.

2. Matching each shape in the source image to the closest shape in the reference image (if any shape is below a certain threshold, the drawing is failed).

3. Blur the whole image a bit, and count the percentage of overlapping pixels (if over a certain value, this makes sure the different elements of the drawing are approximately in the right position).

This took me like 4 days to figure out, but it was really interesting having to prototype it using python and translate it to C# afterwards. (Though I sadly ended up buying a 80€ Unity OpenCV library since nothing else was working for me)

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

#288

Post by flutas »

grepLeigh wrote: post #264

I'm having a blast working on https://printnanny.ai/ - the embedded computer vision system is cool, plus there are many meaty unsolved problems in the 3D printing universe. To name a few... - Rolled a Linux distribution (PrintNanny OS) designed for mixing/matching controller software across a manufacturing "fleet". - Created an atomic upgrade/rollback system. - Built a WebRTC stack for live camera streaming. - Lots o…

That's an awesome one.

I recently had wondered why the only one I knew of was spaghetti detective.

Just a heads up. Trying to preorder gives a stripe error (below) from the orders endpoint.

Copy also says 50% off then shows a $199.99 original price and $149.99 discounted price (25% not 50%).

> Request req_JF7zd2A0rO1rXY: One or more provided prices do not have a `tax_behavior` set which is required for automatic tax computation. Please visit https://stripe.com/docs/tax/products-prices-tax-categories-t... for more information.

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

#289

Post by [deleted] »

PontifexMinimus wrote: post #73
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…

How will you prevent people from using this technology to create DIY pathogens? If the answer is "I won't" or "it'll be open source, I won't be able to", consider doing something less harmful instead.

[deleted]

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

#290

Post by FeistySkink »

germinalphrase wrote: post #276

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…

Care to share more details? I'm in a similar situation. Thanks.
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