Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by samsquire » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

sandreas wrote: post #569

samsquire wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find the idea of "cancellation trees" useful. Create a hierarchy of loop data structure of loop iterating variable and loop limit then cancelling any part of the tree cancels its children. If you have a worker thread that has a hot loop that checks a pthread structure as its limit. You can then send a virtual interrupt to it, or preempt it from running further by setting the loop to its limit. You can see m…

Thank you. This is indeed interesting... Currently, I use the `CancellationTokenSource` / `Task` concept of C# and I'm pretty happy with it, but this is definitely worth reading.

Would you like to talk more about the things you're working on? I am interested in performance, the architecture of software and solving problems.

One problem I have with computer systems is data liveness and synchronization. You want to react to change in many situations but don't want to do things inefficiently such as polling regularly.

You kind of want to react to change given an event, when that event happens. So you don't need to poll and compare.

You also have the problem of identity, how you map data to other data and keep it in synchronization.

If you can capture events at source, then you could do the right behaviour. But it's very hard to capture events at source in modern computing systems as not every API has a callback or event log mechanism.

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

#582

Post by fuzzfactor » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #122

Right now I'm thinking about how to silence my squat rack so it doesn't bother my neighbors when I'm using my punching bag.

Things like they have on this page might be helpful:

https://www.raptorsupplies.com/p/mason/pad-anti-vibration

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

#583

Post by fuzzfactor » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 6:42 PM UTC

throwawayacc2 wrote: post #25

Test0129 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why artistic productions? Well, because it’s the most liberal business code for expenses. > As a software company, I can expense travel for some things, the most useful for me being conferences. But that means I need to buy the conference ticket even if I’m not interested and can only expense accommodations for the duration of the conference. That’s good but a bit restrictive. > Now, as a artistic production compan…

It doesn’t. I’m in the EU. There seems to be a false idea that only the USA has tax loop holes. I assure you. It’s not the case. And tax heavens are also way easier to use as a EU citizen because there’s no global income declaration required.

>tax heavens are also way easier to use as a EU citizen

I suppose it's also correspondingly easier to avoid tax Hell . . .

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

#584

Post by solarmist » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #376

solarmist wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of this, but I just learned about xstate.js. It was a eureka moment for me. Why was UI design such a mess? It’s because the UI vocabulary came from publishing and graphic design, but UIs are not static and describing them in that way will always fall short. I’m convinced that any UI language needs to incorporate a visual state diagram editor to really make a dent in the space. UIs are not fixed object…

One of the premises behind the language is parametric rendering. So nothing described with Matry is static. The difference, however, between Matry and something like xstate is that the actual state is intended to be left to developers, because I’m trying to create an interface that allows designers to just focus on what they need to focus on. So take something like dark mode. A designer might allow for a Boolean para…

Designers absolutely need to focus on dynamic issues and state issues. Not all state is exclusively the developer’s domain.

There’s language, locale, time of day (which you mention), accessibility, screen resolution and those are just things off the top of my head that are implicitly exist as state in a designers head.

Then there’s the whole idea of transitions which are explicitly about state and in designers domains.

You can’t tell me designers don’t care about transitions. It’s developers who usually don’t care about that state.

And that last bit is my point. Let designers handle the state they care about. UIs will get better as a whole with it.

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

#585

Post by origin_path » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

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…

"The ultimate decider of policy in a democracy is the average citizen. The people who decide our government policy don't have access to the primary source material of science."

Often they do - quite a lot of stuff is open access. The biggest issue with getting people to read scientific papers is the demonization of those who actually do it. A lot of papers are terribly misleading so the moment outsiders start engaging with the literature they conclude a lot of science is junk, and when they act on that they're immediately attacked as "science deniers" ... by the sort of people who don't read papers, because they are convinced they don't need to.

Getting more stuff as open access will only accelerate the decline in trust in science, by allowing more people to see what's going on behind the curtain. That is not necessarily an issue, but just so you're aware of that - it isn't going to lead to lots of people suddenly basing policy on scientific papers. It's going to lead to a lot of scientists getting defunded.

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

#586

Post by sandreas » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 7:16 PM UTC

samsquire wrote: post #581

sandreas wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. This is indeed interesting... Currently, I use the `CancellationTokenSource` / `Task` concept of C# and I'm pretty happy with it, but this is definitely worth reading.

Would you like to talk more about the things you're working on? I am interested in performance, the architecture of software and solving problems. One problem I have with computer systems is data liveness and synchronization. You want to react to change in many situations but don't want to do things inefficiently such as polling regularly. You kind of want to react to change given an event, when that event happens. S…

Sure, why not... so my pet project is basically for managing my audio files. There already is navidrome[1] and audiobookshelf[2]. They work great so far, but some minor details are kind of annoying...

The first milestone will be providing a basic API for my files - the main components of this will be the database (postgres), the API (C# + swashbuckle + JsonApiDotNet + Websockets) and the file indexer (C# HostedService). All parts except the file indexer are pretty much done, but it is a critical component, because it has to be as fast and correct as possible.

There are multiple approaches to index files... A best case scenario would be an "import" / "move" of files into a library or repository. That way you would be always up to date and always perfectly sorted. Unfortunately, an import would also be a big amount of work, because analysing the files and getting metadata from online sources is... lets say a huge project. And NOT getting metadata would mean, that I cannot move the files while another app manages the metadata. So I took another path - scanning an existing and well tagged library (that I manage with beets[3] for music and m4b-tool[4] / tone[5] for audio books).

My current Idea is to have a file indexer that:

- can run on multiple sources

- runs one full index scan after starting the app

- registers a filesystem watcher for every file source and reacts to events

- To ensure, no filesource is blocking others, each source is processed by a fixed batch size and then move on the the next file source

- If sources are modified (added, changed, deleted), there is a decision, what to do with already running indexers and registered file watchers (added just go to the queue, changed and deleted cancel already running tasks only for this source)

- All files are hashed (content only) to ensure, a change of metadata or tags will not change the hash, and if a file is moved, it will recognize this and update instead of delete and insert

The database will contain Tag-Values for every possible value. E.g.

  File.Location music/album/AC_DC/Back in Black/01 - Hells Bells.mp3
  FileTag.Type  Artist
  Tag.Value     AC/DC

That way I can add a fulltext index on the Tags.Value field containing a searchable value while maintaining the FileTag.Type for recommendations.

Let's say I search for `AC/DC`, it will provide an auto-complete for all FileTags.Type values, that show a match + a generic one for searching ALL values:

  Artist: AC/DC
  FullText: AC/DC

Searching for 2010 will show:

  Released: 2010
  Title: 2010
  FullText: 2010

because it contains matches in Releasedate and title.

There may be a lot to optimize, but I think my current plan goes pretty well. Let me know what you think about this approach :-)

[1]: https://www.navidrome.org/ [2]: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/ [3]: https://beets.io/ [4]: https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool/ [5]: https://github.com/sandreas/tone/

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

#587

Post by provability » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 7:17 PM UTC

O__________O wrote: post #475

provability wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like your statement reduces to "people are not affected by evidence." There is a category of people for whom that is true, but is there not also a category of people whose beliefs and actions are affected by evidence? That may be the case now, or maybe it only was in the past? What will we do when ALL true evidence is indistinguishable from fake evidence? (By the way, I think you mean "provenance," and as I've…

Understand and disagree, nothing I say will likely change your mind. If it matters, had multiple similar exchanges in past with people who happened to get lucky, have their systems used by 10s of millions people and my objections still hold true. Being recorded 24/7 is not healthy and in my opinion a net negative for any meaningful future; yes, it has the potential for good, but way more potential for abuse. Please s…

I understand your objections and in fact I mostly agree. So I should qualify some of my prior statements. They should be understood in the context (my context when I began this line of thought) of anarcho-capitalist values as expressed in David D. Friedman's book /The Machinery of Freedom/. (By the way, to anyone who read this 1973 book, Uber and Lyft were inevitable; the book was prescient enough that it may still contain gems worth mining.) My goal was to make professional law enforcement less important.

I am not quite still an anarcho-capitalist, as after 2004 I began to see a lot of truth in Marx and other anti-capitalist writers. So I'm in a healthy tension that enables me to embrace paradoxes and even hypocrisy. (Anyone not a hypocrite, I suspect either has less than an admirable set of values or is in prison or dead or swiftly heading toward one of those states.)

Bottom line, my hunch and hope is that some of us will see that if our goal is safety, we need not always give up freedom for it. There are other ways to achieve some of the goals we've entrusted to the State.

Yes, I am aware that with alarmingly increasing frequency the State can compel us to divulge our encrypted evidence and the keys to it. Perhaps there would be more pushback against this if such evidence were to play a greater role. Right now, people tend to say "I have nothing to hide." If everyone had a lot to hide, already recorded and encrypted by default, then I think most of them would push back against 4th amendment violations (in the US; and equivalent protections in other jurisdictions).

I am aware that the stupid and the evil will mess things up. I don't know what to do about that. I suspect they'll always be with us. The latter we might reduce in number through greater accountability, through more evidence. The former, I have no idea; our society doesn't really quite have natural selection.

I should walk back "24/7" or whatever I said. I was a bit hyperbolic. I think certain types of situations known for being contentious should be recorded routinely by both parties, by default, maybe. That should be normalized, maybe. For instance, in any situation wherein at least one party is required to carry liability insurance, the insurers could compel recording -- maybe.

Also, and I am VERY FAR FROM CERTAIN about this, but POSSIBLY even in some instances of sexual encounters, at least where there is not a fully executed (signed, maybe notarized) written agreement, i.e. enthusiastic consent -- possibly, if the tech were sound enough (which should be our goal) these too should be recorded, as a matter of course -- MAYBE.

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

#588

Post by Ilasky » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 9:09 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #397

Ilasky wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all amazing points. In my opinion, they all fall under the category of a body doubling effect. Your second and third points strike a particular chord for me as well. I wrote a bit about why my cofounder and I are creating Double rather than doing it alone. In essence, we are cofounding because seeing the other person also trying their best and going through the rough parts with me drives me to keep going. (…

Amazing. Have you ever considered the effect at large ? In education or workplace ? I see so much misery that could be replaced by joy, insight, friendship..

Absolutely - one of the most common forms of body doubling that a lot of people have experienced has been studying with others. An emerging trend has also been, as others in the thread have linked, "study with me" videos.

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

#589

Post by hk__2 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

veqq wrote: post #163

hk__2 wrote: 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

Yes, but it’s not sufficient. It has ~50k words in Italian, which is half of what’s in Treccani (~115k) or De Mauro (~120k). Also, definitions are often of much better quality in the Treccani dictionary.

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

#590

Post by samsquire » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

sandreas wrote: post #586

samsquire wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you like to talk more about the things you're working on? I am interested in performance, the architecture of software and solving problems. One problem I have with computer systems is data liveness and synchronization. You want to react to change in many situations but don't want to do things inefficiently such as polling regularly. You kind of want to react to change given an event, when that event happens. S…

Sure, why not... so my pet project is basically for managing my audio files. There already is navidrome[1] and audiobookshelf[2]. They work great so far, but some minor details are kind of annoying... The first milestone will be providing a basic API for my files - the main components of this will be the database (postgres), the API (C# + swashbuckle + JsonApiDotNet + Websockets) and the file indexer (C# HostedServic…

Do file watchers registered in the main thread get called and then enqueue a message to a worker thread for processing?

I am guessing you want to keep the code that handles file events on the watcher and on startup the same code used in two places.

Guessing you scan multiple source directories of files recursively.

Does C# have a thread safe queue object? You could create a pool of worker threads and the file watcher can enqueue events

You could have threads that scan file sources (one per source) which enqueue file names to worker threads which do the work. You could have a queue per source thread and worker thread.

The problem with the file watcher code is that I don't know what context that event runs in, so you would either have to enqueue events from the main thread context to one of the worker thread queues.