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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?

#431

Post by quickthrower2 »

gumby wrote: post #394

I am working on climate repair, specifically the removal of methane from the atmosphere. Although the excess methane is only about 1.3 ppm, it's responsible for about a third of the temperature rise. We're not building a huge machine to try to suck the atmosphere through a straw; we're doing chemistry in the open atmosphere. Plan to have a pilot running within the next year and within five years be removing up to 100…

Wow. I really want your group to succeed! Also that was a clear succinct writeup of what you do.

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

#432

Post by mensetmanusman »

justicz wrote: post #128

Robots that build large-scale solar farms! My friend and I started working on this last year and ended up starting a company. We moved to the bay area and did YC last summer. We've been spending a lot of time on solar construction sites and did our first demo (part of the material handling system) on a site in March. Now we're working on a robotic factory + our team is up to 5 folks.

Would this be easier if you were building solar into the ground directly to use the earth as a heat sink? Or is it cheaper to have floating panels?

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

#433

Post by aussiegreenie »

I am building a "sausage machine" to commercialise Australian univerity technology and create American companies. It is a one-stop-shop for Aussie companies to enter the USA market.

I have a Tech Center in Maryland (http://www.autechcenter.com) which offers lots of free services to Australian startups and we ticket clip any capital to make money.

Current projects are:

* NASA award winning Wound Healding tech https://rapair.com.au/

* AI for drug discovery https://www.polygenrx.com/

* 3D printing bone implants https://globalsurgicalinnovations.com.au/

* Water filtration - https://www.starwater.com.au/

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

#434

Post by TJSomething »

eezurr wrote: post #374
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'd just like to echo (verbally "vote") my concern. Every great step forward comes with the potential for an order of magnitude steps backward, i.e. destruction. The amount of man hours to e.g. blow up a building is far fewer than the amount needed to build it. Will the output of your product add a suicide timer to a cell? Will the output of your product prevent the cells from procreating/multiplying? Will the output…

I'm not an expert, but if it's a chip that just synthesizes DNA from a sequence of base pairs, isn't what you're asking similar to making a computer that can't be used to perform evil? I suspect that computing if a given sequence is usable in a pathogen is equivalent to the halting problem. And practically, it seems that a lot of computational resources are required to figure out what a protein does, even for common cases.

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

#436

Post by quickthrower2 »

roperzh wrote: post #414
danielvaughn wrote: post #307

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 anyo…

Having worked a bit in a conceptually similar product, in my opinion the real problem is how you define the layout of your UI, not the individual components.

There is a sweetspot for nocode where you don’t try to be too general purpose. Concrete examples would be Excel, IFTTT, Airtable, and many of the startups that convert those into apps.

The sour spot is things like Bubble, which while being a fine product suffer from “ok now am really coding but with a clunky UI instead of a text editor” which is a problem inherent in making universal nocode solutions.

With this in mind I think layouts and connected components should be provided to non coding users as templates. E.g. a site where you log in and can show notifications etc. is a single template. You then extend and style that.

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

#437

Post by koeng »

waiquoo wrote: post #135
O__________O wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone interested, found following blog post on OP’s website, which is linked to from their HN profile: _____ How to make DNA synthesis affordable https://keonigandall.com/posts/affordable_dna_2.html

Having worked at the largest synthetic DNA manufacturer (at least they were, I think they still are)... a lot of his information is just wrong. There is a huge incentive to lowering the cost of producing oligos and synthetic genes. This is actually a very interesting time in the space (shoutout AnsaBio). I encourage him to continue explore new ways of making DNA, but understanding the market is very different from bu…

I’ve spoken to the CEO of Ansa bio about this topic and they aren’t focused on lowering prices, but increasing what can be built.

I would like to know what specifically you think I am wrong about, though. Always happy to improve my thinking.

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

#438

Post by dchuk »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #141
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…

I don't know if I have ADHD or not, and I don't think so because I'm sometimes able to focus for hours if it's really an end-of-the-world type of situation, but just having someone passively working next to me is 100% useless. My girlfriend is always working next to me, and that doesn't prevent me from getting distracted every few minutes. The only thing it helps is for stuff like cleaning the house where the problem…

One of the main symptoms of ADHD is nearly self destructive procrastination often leading to hyperfocus at the last minute because of that looming deadline you avoided that whole time.

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

#439

Post by pphysch »

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…

What's the practical value of (quickly) knowing which keys share the same value?

"pet":"cat" and "program":"cat" have different semantics.

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