On Unicode TR39 https://unicode.org/reports/tr39/ (secure identifiers).
https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident/
Also on perfect hashes: https://github.com/rurban/nbperf, also gperf and cmph improvements.
Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
611–620 of 633 posts
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#612I am working on fusing classical control with reinforcement-learning based control in drones. The good thing about RL is that it is adaptive and proactive - it tunes control from data as it streams and it learns to act with delayed feedback in mind. The bad thing is that it can be sample inefficient. It needs lots and lots of data. That is not good in a time-critical case such as when faults occur. I've come to enjoy…
I bet the folks at Skydio would want to talk to you.
Thank you for the suggestion! I will look them up.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#613I 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…
I'm also thinking quite a lot about this.
TL;DR There are many pieces to our culture and capitalist economy that make this difficult, but somewhat surprisingly to me, also many legal hurdles to formalized democratic corporate structures.
I've taken a few steps to talk to lawyers and contact advocacy/support groups for worker-owned co-ops and things, and there are a number of surprising hurdles for this type of formalized corporate structure.
In particular, whether a member is considered an "employee", an "investor", an "owner", or some combination of the three differs in jurisdictions, often at the _county_ level, not just the state and country level (experience primarily in the US).
US law gives a massive number of very specific rights to investors, making it difficult to pull someone's ownership shares if they leave the organization in some jurisdictions. Additionally, the tax implications for individuals can be extremely complicated.
Talking to a lawyer, they said one of their clients had been working for ~10 years to hire someone across state lines and hasn't managed to do it yet because of the legal complexity (some kind of employee-owned construction company in Northern California that wants workers from Oregon I think).
For the time being, my own structure is on hold, but I'm thinking of simply formalizing the structure in the equivalent of an employee handbook and putting legal ownership into some kind of blind trust then paying members at a rate tied to net income without formally specifying that it's a dividend, but I have no idea how many laws that might be inadvertently breaking.
In any case, Mondragon is an interesting case study, as they are (to my knowledge) the largest worker-owned cooperative in existence at the moment, but workers outside of their home country (France, I believe?) are not able to participate in ownership and profit sharing for legal reasons.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is great! I have ADHD and find this helps a lot. A YouTuber I follow has a two hour video called "Work with me" of just him working at his desk with music playing. When I first saw it, I laughed. But then one day I was having trouble staying focused, remembered the video and put it on my TV and I found it to be surprisingly effective! Unreasonably so! So good luck with your project! You're on to something. https…
Fellow ADHD here. A while back I downloaded a bunch of "Day in the Life" videos off YouTube of people accomplishing the type of productive stuff I need to do everyday then I used iMovie to splice together the best relevant parts starting with getting out of bed, going through the day and ending at night with getting back into bed. Now when I hit a rough patch where I can't accomplish anything I just start the video a…
Can you share to see what you mean by the edits?
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#615I’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…
I've been burned by this in the past (also for Italian, but also Japanese).
Do you find this issue persists even if you attempt to search the Italian internet for definitions/usage examples in Italian?
Or is this problem specific to finding information in English about Italian terms?
The difference here is between an n problem and an n^2 problem (if the site expands and wants to accumulate definitions from each language/dialect to ~several supported major languages, for example).
Anecdotally, I've found that once I got to the point where I could read Italian well enough to use Italian dictionaries when I don't understand the word, finding the information on the Italian internet has been much easier. Of course, certainly there have been dialect words and slang I haven't found (which I attribute to some of the words being in a dialect mostly spoken by older Italians who don't use the internet).
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#616I’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…
I've been burned by this in the past (also for Italian, but also Japanese). Do you find this issue persists even if you attempt to search the Italian internet for definitions/usage examples in Italian? Or is this problem specific to finding information in English about Italian terms? The difference here is between an n problem and an n^2 problem (if the site expands and wants to accumulate definitions from each langu…
I do search for definitions/usage examples in Italian. Thinking more about it, I think most of the frustration comes from the Treccani iOS app, which is very helpful because you have all of Treccani offline, but it hasn’t been updated in years and so it’s missing a lot of what you get on their website.
> The difference here is between an n problem and an n^2 problem (if the site expands and wants to accumulate definitions from each language/dialect to ~several supported major languages, for example).
Yeah; here it’s not an issue because I only search for Italian dictionaries, I voluntarily exclude any sort of ItalianFrench/English/etc dictionary because I learn a lot more when I stay in one language instead of translating.
> (which I attribute to some of the words being in a dialect mostly spoken by older Italians who don't use the internet)
Yes. Even in the case of Neapolitan, which is still very active, it seems that all the studies of the language were done before the Web, and so you find a lot of good paper dictionaries in Naples, but pretty much nothing online. Most of the content is found on some random blog where someone listed 300 verbs in Neapolitan or an AltaVista page where someone wrote the meaning of a couple hundred words.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The effect (see "antithetical") is the same, even if you're just passing on the costs that someone else is imposing on you, instead of capturing it all for yourself. That's one oversight in this response/rationalization. There's at least one other oversight (or possibly dishonesty) at play here.
That Postcard is merely passing on the cost of custom domains doesn't actually explain Postcard's pricing wrt this issue. If someone wants to use Postcard without having to use a postcard.page domain, they have to pay $8 a month, not $1.25 a month.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#618I 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…
Worker Co-Ops aren't a new concept but I think in the USA it's taboo because it gets in the general vicinity of "Communism" so people are wary. I always thought it was disturbing that Americans can simultaneously preach about their love of Freedom, shouting Freedom this Freedom that and yet subject themselves to an essentially Authoritarian/Dictatorial workplace for 8+ hours a day with no qualms. Apparently Democracy only goes as far as the front door of your office and is dropped off there until you clock out. Quite strange.
As poster above mentioned fundraising is a major challenge. Seems like debt is your only option if you want to keep the thing 100% employee owned. Bootstrapped businesses are of course a thing and can scale to Unicorn level but at a much slower pace than a VC backed startup.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#619Building 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…
Volts podcast had the dude who did bike lanes in east bay area on. It was an interesting interview, directly relevant to this space
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#620I 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…
I'm also thinking quite a lot about this. TL;DR There are many pieces to our culture and capitalist economy that make this difficult, but somewhat surprisingly to me, also many legal hurdles to formalized democratic corporate structures. I've taken a few steps to talk to lawyers and contact advocacy/support groups for worker-owned co-ops and things, and there are a number of surprising hurdles for this type of formal…
This is fascinating. If this ever becomes a more serious endeavor, reach out - email in my profile.
Another user posted about Teamshares (https://www.teamshares.com/). It appears to operate similarly: investors buy up companies and give them to the employees. I'm assuming some level of fee is given to Teamshares to continue operating.
Oddly enough.. one of the backers of Teamshares is Collab Fund, where my second quote is pulled from on one of their most recent posts. Small world.