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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?

#131
post #43

Dental treatments, besides being very expensive, are often (up to 28%) unnecessary. This happens because no-one keeps dentists in check. I am trying to make dental treatment and diagnosis reviews easy, cheap, reliable and fast.

What kind of treatments make that 28% "unnecessary?" Regular cleanings too frequently?

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

#132

Somewhat of a departure from the rest of the current comments. I'm a dataminer/rom hacker mainly working on Nintendo handheld systems from the DS onward and I've recently resigned myself to learning the sort of ASM code needed to reverse engineer compiled assets (since obviously I have no way of getting a pre-compiled version of those assets). I've been looking into the legality of reverse engineering and I've always…

| All because I can't get a 3DS game to load modified videos

You were trying to load VR porn on there, huh?

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

#133
I am building an encrypted file system that runs inside application (https://github.com/zboxfs/zbox). It focus on security, privacy and reliability. The interesting part is it can utilize different storage, such as memory, OS file system, RDBMS and object store. I learned a lot and enjoyed working on this project.

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

#134
post #51

Interesting to me, your mileage may vary. Working in my spare time on a command line terminal UI application that searches over source code and ranks the results. It came about from watching a work college constantly opening VSCode when trying to find things in a codebase. I mentioned he should use ripgrep/silver searcher which he tried, but said he preferred to get more context and wanted ranked results. The context…

Looks useful. Would it be fast in huge codebases?

Yes and no. The interactive version appears to be because it displays results as it goes. However for pure command line, it will be fast but not comparable to ripgrep/grep/silver server or others.

I want it fast, but absolute performance is not a goal as its a trade off with any ranking algorithm. Not really the same sort of tool.

Anyway here is a search over my projects directory which is about 5.7 GB of content https://github.com/boyter/cs/blob/master/large-search.gif

Feel free to try it out if you are able to build from source. It certainly has some bugs in there over large codebases in the UI which I am aware of but does work generally.

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

#136
post #37

This problem will only apply to very few people. But over the past 2.5 years I've been tracking everything and deriving insights on my activities. This produced some astounding results. e.g. Chewing gum makes me more comfortable in a conversation. Recently I've found a community of robot-like people on reddit who also do this. So I decided to build a platform. It's still in its early stages but feel free to check it…

Nice! This scratches a bit of an itch I've had for wanting to track some simple datapoints / personal log.

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

#137
1.) A solver for the unstructured Euler equations. ...I was intending to volunteer time for an local university project investigating parallels between Holographic light with orbital angular momentum and hydrodynamics (in this case the Euler/Madelung equations). Not sure what happened as... volunteers get lost in the shuffle? Anyway, the solver is fun.

2.) Porting my Python code for nonlinear gradient driven optimization of parametric surfaces to C++. Includes a constraint (propagation) solver based on Minikanren extended with interval arithmetic for continuous data (interval branch and contract). This piece is a pre-processor, narrowing the design space to only feasible hyper-boxes before feeding design parameter sets (points in design space) to the (real valued) solver. Also it does automatic differentiation of control points (i.e. B-spline control points) so I can write an energy functional for a smooth surface, with Lagrange multipliers for constraints (B-spline properties). Then I get the gradient and Hessian without extra programming. This makes for plug and play shape control. I am looking to extend this to subdivision surfaces and/or to work it towards mesh deformation with discrete differential geometry so I've been baking with those things in separate mini-projects.

3.) Starting the Coursera discrete optimization course. This should help with, e.g. knapsack problems on Leetcode, some structural optimization things at work, and also it seems the job market for optimization is focused on discrete/integer/combinatorial stuff presently so this may help in ways I do not foresee.

4.) C++ expression template to CUDA for physical simulation: I am periodically whittling away at this.

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

#138
post #37

This problem will only apply to very few people. But over the past 2.5 years I've been tracking everything and deriving insights on my activities. This produced some astounding results. e.g. Chewing gum makes me more comfortable in a conversation. Recently I've found a community of robot-like people on reddit who also do this. So I decided to build a platform. It's still in its early stages but feel free to check it…

I really liked the idea, just wish there could be a demo, or even a preview without the need to sign up. It would make a better onboard :)

I like the sign up flow that simply uses a Google login, personally. And its going to need some way to keep track of a user so they can update on mobile and PC, etc.

Mostly I agree on hating things requiring a login but I'm okay with it in this case.

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

#139
I'm building a tool that helps people scaffold React apps really quickly (everything from auth flow, payments, DB, form handling, etc, to an actual nice looking UI). It's at least interesting to me because I think a ton of time is wasted on all this and I'd like to help more people get their idea out there rather than reinvent the wheel. If you're interested in taking a look and giving feedback it's https://divjoy.com
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