Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 633 posts

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

#181

Post by renewiltord »

PontifexMinimus wrote: post #73
koeng wrote: post #6

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…

How will you prevent people from using this technology to create DIY pathogens? If the answer is "I won't" or "it'll be open source, I won't be able to", consider doing something less harmful instead.

This specific attitude is something that I have capitalized on in many ways in my life to do well: ad tech, location data, trading. There is massive alpha in not being like this. And if this DNA synthesis thing had some value to me I would gladly do it and may the terrorists breed superbugs from it if they will. Even if you convince him, you won't convince me. I will become even more convinced that I should build the building blocks for extinction weapons. Every time you make this argument, I will move closer to doing it.

One day, I will do it just because I can and because you argued I shouldn't. Then your actions will be a proximate cause of the existence of the thing.

Ideally, I would not be so controllable but a deep part of me loves the transgressive nature of fighting a puritan.

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

#182

Post by amelius »

zciwor wrote: post #54

My sister works as a veterinarian and is experiencing some serious burnout from her current practice (a subsidiary of a larger corporation). I guess it's pretty common practice for corporations or private equity to snatch up smaller independent practices and then run them like a sweat shop. Her current CEO's resume is a list of Starbucks, Walmart, and a few other corporate roles that are totally unrelated to the medi…

Vets have crazy high margins, and thus salaries, so from an outsider perspective perhaps the market is ready for some more competition.

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

#183

Post by O__________O »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #169
O__________O wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you have looked at MuZero, since it’s able to not only beat Stockfish, but also not specifically for chess: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero https://github.com/werner-duvaud/muzero-general https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L0A86LmH7Yw

I am aware of MuZero, but I'm not convinced it's able to beat the latest Stockfish. Stockfish continues to dominate TCEC even after the advent of more advanced MCTS searchers. But MCTS is on my map as something to look into more deeply.

For others, in cases it’s unclear:

- MuZero uses MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search)

- TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) is a computer chess tournament organized and maintained by Chessdom.

___

My understanding is MuZero doesn't compete in TCEC, but might be wrong. Given Stockfish is open source and open source versions of MuZero exist, it would be easy enough to test the current version of Stockfish again; honestly surprised if it’s not already done, that it is not, given MuZero already beat it.

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

#184

Post by codegeek »

ximm wrote: post #146
bugmen0t wrote: post #139

The most prevalent type of security vulnerability in all of software is XSS. (If you count CVEs, which is admittedly a bit problematic). I’m collaborating on an attempt to shift the responsibility for XSS from the developers and towards the browser. The current stage focuses on getting the use case "insert HTML but without any scripts" right. There’s a public specification and prototype implementations in Firefox and…

What is your opinion of Content Security Policies? Last time I looked it was praised as an XSS killer.

They are hard to configure and get right. If you overdo it, it can cause lot of issues with real users.

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

#185

Post by samsquire »

I'm working on parallel multithreaded systems. I wrote a M:N kernel-thread to lightweight thread userspace scheduler which multiplexes multiple lightweight threads onto kernel threads. I also wrote part of my own libuv.

I also wrote a multithreaded actor implementation in Java. I am currently working on solving the expression problem and thinking of how entity component systems (ECS) can be used for parallelism and solving the problem of deciding how to map data to operations efficiently.

I am also thinking of how to patch running systems without downtime.

See my repository multiversion-concurrency-control for my parallel work https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro... and the userspace scheduler in preemptible-thread https://github.com/samsquire/preemptible-thread

See my profile for links to my journal/blog where I write of my progress everyday, specifically ideas4.

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

#186

Post by rileyphone »

didgetmaster wrote: post #66

A new kind of Key/Value store. In this architecture, keys and values are stored within two separate 'data objects' which are linked together. One holds all the unique values along with their reference counts, the other contains all the keys and links to their mapped values. The architecture allows any value to be mapped to one or more keys and any key to be mapped to one or more values (unless an attribute on the dat…

Sounds kinda like tuplespaces/Linda (which I think are very good, largely unpursued ideas).

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

#187

Post by neodypsis »

natch wrote: post #158
algoatecorn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, actually your first sentence's logic doesn't hold up as it isn't a fair comparison at all. You can already order custom oligos and synthesized genes for relatively cheap. The chip idea would just reduce the cost more.

Digging into personal information on people can be done for relatively cheap. I’m not sure it’s a good thing to make it cheaper.

But, in the concrete case in question (gene synthesising technology), what are those potencial dangers?

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

#189

Post by waylandsmithers »

Maybe not exactly what you were asking for, but getting to 20 or 30 users for my latest project. It's not meant to be a start up or anything, it was more just "I wish this thing existed and think it would be fun"

So this time around I'm slowly asking people I know to try it out. Honestly it takes a little courage and has given me a newfound respect for people who do sales (though it's a little different, as the whole thing was my idea). There does seem to be a big difference between an explicit ask to sign up vs. hey check this out. Oftentimes people will say that's so great but not sign up (which I try not to take personally).

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

#190

Post by snowwrestler »

natch wrote: post #28
koeng wrote: post #6

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…

Sounds fascinating, what could possibly go wrong? “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park).

“Possibly” is the crux of that question, as it requires knowledge and expertise to answer in any kind of real way.

It’s very easy to come up with answers to that question if you don’t know what is actually possible. Not very useful answers, though.

Post reply on HN