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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?

#363
Pretty pedestrian given the others, but I'm trying to build a file server setup that makes it easy to roll back from a ransomware (encryption) attack. I starting to think that going with hourly syncs from the home directory with some versioning should do it. The hard part is to make it easy for someone to rollback when I'm not here. People are a bit scared given that its happened to a couple of other small colleges. We already do tapes and we are talking files saved to the servers (most folks aren't allowed to save locally), so it should be within a budget. Like I said, pretty pedestrian. [edit: FreeBSD & ZFS]

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

#364
I'm contributing to a data streaming processor called Benthos: https://www.benthos.dev/ It's written in Go and I really love the project since it's so simple and, unlike most Apache projects, it's just one single static binary which does the heavy lifting and it's stateless.

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

#365
post #213

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…

Hm, have you talked with the bike lane uprising folk? I think you'll find that these problems are way, way more political than they seem. Good luck, though.

I've run large bike lane/car-free streets campaigns before [1] and have talked with a bunch of activists from groups all over the country, so I have a good deal of experience here.

You're right that these problems are political—in fact, they're entirely political!—but the reason they're so political is because there's no existing platform for capturing latent + kinetic demand, so electeds (even the ones who want better streets—we've heard from many of them on Twitter) have absolutely no idea how much political support they have—and they need that support to take bold action. We're solving that problem!

[1] https://bikeportland.org/2020/04/24/grassroots-push-emerges-..., https://bikeportland.org/2020/05/20/its-official-pbot-consid..., https://bikeportland.org/2021/02/02/support-builds-for-bike-...

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

#366

Writing automated tests for video games. Why is it interesting to me? I started to teach myself unity in December 2021. I've personally experienced benefits to writing automated tests and using CICD; therefore, I thought it would be fun to learn about writing tests for a 3D based software. It will be different from the web/CLI based stuff I usually write. So, it turns out that the video game community (or at least th…

I worked at an MMO game company and the only testing we had was manual QA for functional testing and bot clients for server stress testing. Not a great environment for building quality software. (Our max server uptime was about 24 hours.)

The client had a secret level with all game objects for testing and debugging. But reading your post makes me see that we didn’t think ahead far enough: the secret level could have been the foundation for automated unit testing game objects and battling characters.

I haven’t watched them yet, but I added these relevant videos to my YouTube backlog just this week:

* Automated Testing of Gameplay Features in 'Sea of Thieves' (GDC 2019): https://youtu.be/X673tOi8pU8

* Taking CI and automated testing seriously (2018): https://youtu.be/YGIvWT-NBHk

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

#367
I’ve recently gotten deep into thinking about “precision medicine.” Folks here may remember or know the story of Matt Might; I have a less sad but similarly perplexing story around both my wife (for whom diagnosis was hard) and my best friend (who remains undiagnosed), and started thinking about how to apply “whole systems” thinking and treat the body as a system that’s prone to vulnerability, trying to find ways to discover where a “patch” may be necessary by ingesting lots of data that is otherwise overlooked or seems unrelated.

As a security guy previously, particularly on the offensive side, this has been a fascinating endeavor thus far.

I’m particularly interested in: the application of PRP injection to various ailments in the body (where else are there oceans of stem cells we can activate to help the body heal itself), and the application of ML to surfacing data about ailments for populations that are woefully understudied (trans patients undergoing GAHT, for example).

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

#368
I'm learning more about the challenges and rewards of taking extended breaks away from work - sabbaticals.

This involves talking with people about their experiences and writing about what I've learned from them and observed from my own sabbatical.

If anyone is curious, I have some posts up at https://www.albertwavering.com/tags/sabbatical/ and would love to chat with anyone who is thinking about or currently taking a break.

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

#369
I always felt that I get investment information too late and waste to much time on reading articles that have no context ("why did x happen yesterday" - only to realize that that happened a while ago and is not relevant anymore)

Also, most investment sites are deeply textual while investment information is more effective visually.

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

#370

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…

NotJustBikes channel on youtube would love this stuff

He's definitely seen the account, we made one of his hometown ("Fake London," Ontario) and he retweeted it: https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/15541736198734520...
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