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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?

#301

Post by didgetmaster »

rileyphone wrote: post #186
didgetmaster wrote: post #66

A new kind of Key/Value store. In this architecture, keys and values are stored within two separate 'data objects' which are linked together. One holds all the unique values along with their reference counts, the other contains all the keys and links to their mapped values. The architecture allows any value to be mapped to one or more keys and any key to be mapped to one or more values (unless an attribute on the dat…

Sounds kinda like tuplespaces/Linda (which I think are very good, largely unpursued ideas).

It might have some things in common. In my case, the objects are persistent and can be read to and written from disk with ease. The relationship between keys and values can be 1:1, 1:many, many:1, or many:many.

If the KV store is a 'state' column in a DB table of US customer addresses for example, the number of unique values is limited to 50 (if you ignore D.C., Puerto Rico, etc.). The table might have 100M customers, each mapped to at least one state. Each state (except less populated ones like Wyoming) might have millions of rows mapped to it. Many customers might have addresses in more than one state.

The system has to do things like: "Find every key mapped to a state that starts with the letter 'M'" or "Find every value that is mapped to this set of keys". These are the kinds of things a normal SQL query has to do.

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

#302

Post by eloisius »

Automatic camera calibration refinement/healing. SfM is a well developed area, and there are well understood methods for gathering correspondences like SIFT in order to calibrate cameras. However, it usually requires a separate calibration phase prior to doing whatever you want to do with that calibration. In my case, we’re using it to triangulate 3D objects from 2D object detections done in each of our calibrated camera.

Over a long time period, some perturbance befalls those cameras: gravity pulling them down, things knocking them, etc. That causes our accuracy to degrade over time, so we started looking at ways to continually heal that calibration without needing to do another stop-the-world calibration phase.

Turns out you can use the 3D objects themselves (actually the 2D constituent detections that you use to compute a 3D point) as correspondences instead of doing SIFT matching. The hard part is that you have to preserve the original coordinate frame after doing a bundle adjustment.

Computer vision is a ton of fun, and I highly recommend you give it a try if you’ve enjoyed data science stuff, but the incomprehensible “try it and see” engineering of working on deep neural nets turns you off.

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

#303

Post by 8note »

didgetmaster wrote: post #69
zschuessler wrote: post #5

I heard few song lines from a new artist I've discovered. It has me thinking on a problem I want solved. Although, I'm not actively working on it. Why aren't there more employee-owned companies? And I don't mean solely shareholder programs, I mean actually owned by every employee and they are paid dividends of profit after all planned R&D costs. Similar to the Alaska oil pipeline bonus. Even interns. All studies show…

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?

They already do - when the value goes down today, they are laid off, or the bosses do more wage theft than usual

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

#304

Post by philip1209 »

cxr wrote: post #257
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…

I've always thought that plans where custom-domain-or-not is a differentiator between free and paid are unethical. In this case, antithetical, too. (If a sufficient number of people abandon Twitter as part of the your-own-personal-homepage bandwagon, but they make the unfortunate mistake of letting their dart land on Postcard and signing up for a free plan, then you really haven't achieved the stated goal. You've rec…

In this case, it's just cost-based pricing. I'm using Render.com to host, and they charge $1.25/mo per custom domain. I can't afford to give away domains for free.

I'm open to some kind of free trial, too.

I don't offer domain name purchasing - so people own their domain, independent of Postcard.

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

#305

Post by russellbeattie »

Might as well drop my project in here as well.

I spent the last year or so exploring and validating solutions to the "voice cliff" problem found in multimodal voice-controlled devices such as smart displays and TVs. That's when you are controlling some UI with your voice and suddenly you can't, because that particular screen hasn't been designed for voice. Think of Echo Show settings or literally all of Nest Hub's UI. As a result, I came up with a "big idea". So now I want to file some preliminary patent applications for some of the bits that might actually be new inventions. The chances of actually getting a patent are slim - most of the ideas I thought were brilliant were already thought up, patented, published in research papers or even productized, sometimes a decade ago or more! There are a lot of forward thinking researchers out there. And this doesn't even take into account patents which are pending. Apple could have a tranche of patents announced tomorrow which were submitted years ago. Or some startup could come out of stealth and you learn that a well funded group of people way smarter than you has been working on similar problems for years.

Anyways, actual new ideas are rare, but I seem to have a few.

Distilling a big idea into smaller pieces that can be explained in detail is a good exercise, regardless of the eventual success of any patents. So I'm churning through 100+ pages of notes, twice as many patent and paper references, and a bit of code and trying to get it into a state to share with the world. I've never been an academic, but I used to work at Nokia Research Center, so I've worked with quite a few and now I know how hard their job was.

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

#306

Post by cultofmetatron »

hcks wrote: post #250
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…

I don't understand why, if it really worked, the org holding the patent didn't do anything of it.

kodak invented digital photography

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

#307

Post by danielvaughn »

I've been working on a programming language for UI designers.

To put it simply, I think the trend towards no-code/low-code is misguided. The assumption behind these products is that code is slow, difficult, and expensive. I disagree - I think that "code" is merely a formalized written expression of what you want. It's actually the most efficient, easiest, and cheapest means to solving digital problems.

I believe anyone can write code if it's specific enough to a domain that they understand, so what I'm trying to do is create a hyper-domain-specific language around designing UI components. The goal is to have a platform agnostic base syntax, with "dialects" that can extend the language for any current or future platforms.

The idea is that designers could write in this language, and developers could build tools that will transpile this code into a consumable format for whatever system they're building for.

I have a very rudimentary demo site that's like halfway built: https://matry.design

edit - here is a simple example of what a component might look like in this language:

  component Button
    variants
      color bg: #007BFF
      text label: Click Me
      
    elements
      shape ButtonContainer
        text ButtonLabel

    style ButtonContainer
      fill: $bg
      padding: 10px

    style ButtonLabel
      content: $label
      font-size: 16px

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

#308

Post by bo1024 »

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…

Quick suggestion from a researcher: people will only want to submit if there’s an editorial team with high trust and reputation for their specific area.

Automated reviewer matching won’t be good enough to find decent reviewers.

I would suggest partnering with people in very specific disciplines who want to break away and establish open access journals, but want to focus on the editor and review process rather than the logistics (which you provide).

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

#309

Post by idreyn »

travisjungroth wrote: post #10

I’m working on the expert elicitation of priors. We’re making web UIs to better capture human judgement, especially for forecasting. I work at a data driven company, sometimes I think a bit too data driven. I want to capture more intuition for our systems in a rigorous way. It’s incredibly interesting and very niche. There are a handful of academic papers out there. I think it will be a big deal in the next 10 years.

You might be interested in the S-process: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWivz6KidkI

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

#310

Post by otsaloma »

chaibiker wrote: post #198

Working on a better solution to sedentary health and sitting caused back pain at work. No one posture is the answer, so there is probably an optimal amount of regular postural variation during deskwork that wouldn't interrupt focus. That is what a chair should do for you to protect your health, so making a smart dynamic chair for standing desks. Had a cycling accident years ago, became much more sitting intolerant af…

Really interesting. I too had a bicycle accident four years ago and have been really sensitive to bad ergonomics and spending too long in one position since. Just understanding what makes things worse and what better has been a big challenge. Coincidentally, just today I ordered a Håg Capisco chair, which serves the same purpose of allowing a variety of different positions with a standing desk and also makes it practically impossible to slouch. I'm hoping it'll help.
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