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Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

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Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#131

Post by dane-pgp »

fabianlindfors wrote: post #23

I want to give everyone a digital identity. In some countries (including mine) basically everyone has an e-ID which we use to sign in to things like government services, banks, payment providers and much more. This is absolutely essential to everyday life and many startups are built around it. Unfortunately, many countries don't have useful e-IDs and the ones that do are limited to that one country. I want to create…

> Privacy friendly

Does this mean that a user can use their identity on two separate sites, and those two sites can't collude to build a shared profile of the user, without the user's permission?

Does the user have to choose a specific server to be involved in all their identity interactions? If the server stops working, does the user lose their identity?

Also, is it possible to create an account without a phone (or rather without a SIM, since those are often tied to real identities)? Does your proposed system assume that people can't register multiple identities (using multiple phones) if they wanted to?

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#132

Post by chewzerita »

Layvier wrote: post #120

Online learning, particularly personalised learning aimed for self education and continuous learning. I'm trying to model the knowledge space as a graph, index learning material (free online resources right now then user generated content) on this graph and then provide different ways to navigate this space. I'm trying to address the "best way" for someone to learn a specific concept, and to help people identify the…

You might want to check out what's going on with Anki[0] and other spaced repetition software[1], hope this helps :)

[0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#133

Post by hermitdev »

hermitcrab wrote: post #81

Writing a no-code drag-and-drop tools for transforming data (join, filter, reformat, reorder etc). The hardest bit is handling cascading changes to the column structure (e.g. removing and reordering columns) intuitively - particularly if they change the input file to one with less columns or differently ordered columns.

There's already IBM's DataStage. I currently use this for ETL work at my job, although we're working on moving our ETL work to Python and an in-house framework due to licensing costs.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#134

Post by Gurten »

I've been tinkering in the reverse-engineering space. My problem amounts to reusing compiled binaries by combining them in novel ways. That is, I would like to take algorithm/subsystem X from software Y, combine it with something else. The goal is to have a library of components which I may be able to combine. It has lead me to investigate a few technologies I have been meaning to invest time into, like llvm, qemu. There are a few projects which combine these as well as related technologies like DECAF, radare2, DynamoRio, mcsema. The hard problem which I am facing, but by no means have an effective solution is of having to extract semantically the essence of the program in spite of ISA, and to find a balance between emulation and readapt-ability (i.e abstract out the code that is dependent upon some base-address assumption. The value on the surface seems counter intuitive to the investment, especially from my roots in SWE where one can have a hard enough time trying to accomplish that with source-code available. Although the application is broad, I've focussed intermittently on video games. I believe this is where some value lies, as a finely-tuned subsystem can be the heart of a franchise.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#136

Post by baxtr »

eitland wrote: post #103

Getting time to do anything in between kids, work and whatever else is expected from me is the actual hard part for me. The technical aspect is mostly fun in my case :-)

If you ever find out, let me know. The only solution I’ve found is: late at night!

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#137

Post by hazeii »

shezi wrote: post #107
hazeii wrote: post #94

How to measure pedal (and/or crank) angle on a moving bicycle to 0.05 degree. Anyone?

Grey code with 13 bits and as many light sensors, maybe?

Good to get your attention :) but still got to print the gray code to 1 part in 8192 and fit it all on a bike.

Along the lines of your idea, we've looked at using the CCD array out of desktop scanners with a spiral pattern printed on the crank. But bike bottom brackets are a hostile environment, plus (ideally) we'd actually be measuring the angle against local vertical (i.e. the direction in which gravity sucks).

Our test bike currently runs 4 Pi zeros, 4 Cortex M0s (nRF52), a fistful of 24-bit ADCS, 2 high precision gyros, air pressure/air speed sensors and a 2.4GHz network, all in order to measure realtime CdA. Still unable to crack the angle problem though.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#138

Post by default-kramer »

erezsh wrote: post #95

I'm trying to replace SQL by building a language that compiles to SQL. It has first-class functions, nicer syntax, better type-system, introspection, and other things you would expect from a modern language. But in the end, you still get SQL's performance, and the ability to use it with dozens of database engines.

Me too. I'm interested in what you've done. Please share a link if you have anything published.

My project is here: https://docs.racket-lang.org/plisqin/index.html I'm days away from a Show HN at this point. If I can pick only one idea that everyone should copy, it's that joins are values, not language constructs.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#139

Post by cryo »

betimsl wrote: post #130
cryo wrote: post #123

Private file access between computers. Even in 2020 it appears that building a connection between machines (macOS, Linux and Windows) requires a miracle if you don't like to share everything with cloud providers. cryo file mangager is an attempt to get rid of the hassle: https://cryonet.io

Don't forget to check https://upspin.io/ out :)

Indeed I'd like to add https://onionshare.org which also provides a non cloud solution to share files privatly.

Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

#140

Post by isaacimagine »

cryo wrote: post #123

Private file access between computers. Even in 2020 it appears that building a connection between machines (macOS, Linux and Windows) requires a miracle if you don't like to share everything with cloud providers. cryo file mangager is an attempt to get rid of the hassle: https://cryonet.io

There's also syncthing: https://syncthing.net/.
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