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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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541–550 of 633 posts

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

#541
post #163
post #38

I’ve been learning Italian for a few years and one thing that’s frustating is searching for words I don’t know. Italy has a lot of local languages/dialects that influence regional variants of Italian; it’s common to see dialectal words enter the mainstream Italian language. The largest dictionary, Treccani, is very good but often misses words that are either too recent / vulgar / dialectal. There are various other bi…

wiktionary

On the commandline using sdcv[0] with a generate stardict from wiktionary[1] is a great combo.

https://github.com/Dushistov/sdcv https://github.com/BoboTiG/ebook-reader-dict

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

#542
post #445

Javascript and ORMs have a (fairly well-known) interesting set of problems: * There aren't many * Those that you can find, don't support Typescript, so it's all guesswork. * Don't have much (if any) support for related data queries So I've been working on a ORM for PostgreSQL and Typescript for a few months now in my spare time [0]. It's been probably one of the biggest, challenging, and interesting problems I have e…

Prisma and TypeORM both are made for TypeScript. The first works wonderfully well

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

#543
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 have no discipline of the superego variety— but when I realize I will let someone else down, I become motivated and focused. I’m learning Linear Algebra now by working with a self-described ADHD colleague. We are 150 pages in and actually doing the homework. I wrote about an approach called “Bold Boast” in my book on coping with my particular mentality (which led me to quit high school, but also led, a few years la…

> I have no discipline of the superego variety— but when I realize I will let someone else down, I become motivated

I think that's superegoic, you're doing something because you should, and you'll beat yourself up morally if you don't. Rather than egoic, doing it because you want to for your own gratification.

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

#544

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…

It sounds interesting. People would then own their data. The social part will then be done by signing up to a newsletter on that friends page? Finding friends will be hard like that. A opt-in registry service could improve search and connecting between friends.

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

#545
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not pump and dumps. Just stocks that a large amount of people are about to buy into. A pump and dump is a coordinated effort, whereas I'm looking for something more organic. It might be late in that you might make less money than you would if you were in those groups but I can't say that I'm unhappy with what the algorithm is currently finding. It's primarily built for day trading, so you're in and out of trades…

What do you mean when you say 3.5648% profit over 340 stocks? Is it weekly/monthly/yearly? Are you tracking buy-sell for each stock daily? Are you taking into consideration loss potential? One loss could wipe multiple days gain.

> Note that these are perfect values, using the open price and the highest price of the day, they're unachievable consistently, I use them to understand how much potential for profit we could've had.

The stocks increase by that daily. You will not reach that value consistently, I urge everyone to take a conservative approach when investing, and to take profit whenever they can.

We don't (currently) invest peoples money for them, so we need a benchmark to understand how well the algorithm performed, and that was deemed the fairest.

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

#546

I have been developing a teleportation device. I've managed to move 20 micrograms of matter over a distance of ~30mm and now it is simply about scaling up.

Apologies for my incredible disbelief, but you cannot just leave someone hanging by saying this and not expanding further.

Details please.

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

#547

I have been thinking of reconstructing history from books and all kinds of material. So if someone wants to know what a newspaper on 3rd Jan 1403 looked like, they can.

That'd be some feat, considering the first printing press wasn't perfected until about 1450! LOL

So basically assign a date to all news articles and then the context and well - create a template for newspaper and accordingly assign importance

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

#548
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would call it something more specific than peer review.

Name suggestions welcome! I suck at naming - Peer Review was a working title intended to be somewhat tongue in cheek (similar to StackOverflow). But... because I suck at naming, it is, of course, a little on the nose. So far I haven't come up with anything better.

Unless 'peer review' elicits negative feelings in the target audience it seems like a pretty good name. It relates to the core concept, it's respectable and easily memorable. Seems like good branding but I'm no expert, nor am I the target audience.

To toss a few names in the hat, off the top of my head: - openresearch - colab - openjournal - stud.io

Probably collect a few ideas and run a small survey for the initial audience

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

#549
post #230

I have been thinking of reconstructing history from books and all kinds of material. So if someone wants to know what a newspaper on 3rd Jan 1403 looked like, they can.

Oh that would be fun!

Can be done as an extension to wikipedia itself - who knows

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

#550
post #194

Working on a prototype for a thermoelectric generator. While the core generation module is a seebeck effect based solid-state off-the-shelf components, my focus is on optimizing the thermal gradient for voltage and current control and continuous operation (night and day). A few experiments planned around - design of heat absorbers and heat sinks - night and day operation using radiative cooling/paints & coatings

Mind putting some back of the envelope calculation on the minimum power that can easily be draw for a given area/volume without too much optimization? (I understand that if the designed is refined it will significantly improve)

For a basic calculation on the number of modules, voltage and amps relationship, see: https://thermal.ferrotec.com/technology/thermoelectric-refer...

There is a worked example in 3.3 and Fig. 13-3 in the referenced article has the chart for various temperature differentials.

The TEG modules are 30mm x 30mm and arranged in a grid in series-parallel configuration (the referenced article also has this concept illustrated). The area question can be addressed after determining the number of modules, exact series-parallell configuration and spacing between the modules.

The volume question is a function of the heat sink geometry.

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