I am working on getting this project to compile. It's interesting in the sense that nobody in the documented history of the internet has ever ran into these specific errors. So I guess I'm going where nobody's ever gone before.
Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
211–220 of 633 posts
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#212An open p2p protocol/engine (builds on libp2p) for decentralized storage that incentivizes data durability. It’s not Filecoin or any other existing platform, and there’s not a public testnet yet, but the project is well underway!
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#213Building 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…
Hm, have you talked with the bike lane uprising folk? I think you'll find that these problems are way, way more political than they seem. Good luck, though.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#214A new platform to play Magic: The Gathering digitally. Been working on it since the pandemic started. It's almost done.
It's a multiplayer sandbox (no rules enforcement) that just allows you to play by providing all the different zones the game involves (play area, hand, lib, gy, ex) and letting you free-drag between them. It has features for every mechanic the game involves - tapping, turning face-down, switching card control to another player, etc - and it looks good and is smooth and easy to use.
There's nothing like it. Existing options have various constraints/drawbacks or else are so old-fashioned and clumsy as to be nigh-unusable.
I don't know how people will react when I announce. I don't know how Wizards of the Coast will react. I'm a bit nervous about it. I know it's the best of its class, because I play magic, and I have no idea what other people will make of it. It fits their fair-use policy (product must be free, but can be ad-supported or take patreon-revenue) but even so I'm nervous.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not pump and dumps. Just stocks that a large amount of people are about to buy into. A pump and dump is a coordinated effort, whereas I'm looking for something more organic. It might be late in that you might make less money than you would if you were in those groups but I can't say that I'm unhappy with what the algorithm is currently finding. It's primarily built for day trading, so you're in and out of trades…
> No, not pump and dumps. Just stocks that a large amount of people are about to buy into. A pump and dump is a coordinated effort, whereas I'm looking for something more organic. I guess what you call "organic", I call the very end of the tail of a "pump". I believe that Reddit sentiment is largely manipulated. When GME was going crazy, there was definitely a coordinated effort to pump AMC, BB and some other garbage…
> Using PRAW to get counts of ticker mentions in some subreddits isn't super interesting, at least in my eyes.
Just to clarify, this isn't what is happening. And I agree that's not interesting. It's measuring the response to mentions and that's the score we save (we call them impressions). It's like that saying "if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a noise?", if a post goes unseen, will people still buy the stock?
We also don't just release the top X number of stocks that we recorded per day, we're looking for patterns in the data and this becomes the interesting stocks of each day, which then go on to be validated.
> that suddenly a group of people will all randomly pick the same tickers to start hyping up
Of course not, like you said: it's memetic. Sure it can start off coordinated but when it goes viral its self-perpetuating. Those are the kinds of patterns I mention in the last paragraph. You can see these upticks, the strength of them, and try to gauge how sustainable they are.
Here's me semi freaking out about BBBY just before it really ran:
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#216According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 35% of U.S. fourth graders in 2019 could read proficiently [0]. The pandemic has only made this worse [1] [2]. Once students start to fall behind in reading, they fall further and further behind their peers each year. What is, perhaps, most criminal is that there is a mountain of research [3][4][5][6][7] about what works, and yet these approaches aren’t employed nor even well-known.
I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG/MAMAA/etc. [8] company turned independent educational researcher, and I believe I have developed a novel edtech approach to address this learning gap. I am collaborating with a few data scientists and educators, but am searching for UX designers, curriculum designers, writers, and marketers who can help make this a reality.
In brief, one of the core challenges in edtech is how to build an engaging app that actually results in learning (many apps resort to psychological tricks [9] and gamification hacks [10] that are long-term detrimental.) Although I have a high-level direction for how to achieve this, my skill set is mostly in backend development and public speaking.
If you are interested, please reach out to (my HN username) @ (Microsoft's not cold email domain acquired in 1997).
[0] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/
[2] https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20Workin...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project)
[4] https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/project-follow-through
[5] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell-Gersten/publica...
[6] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED472569.pdf
[7] http://arthurreadingworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/...
[8] MANGA, GAMMA, NAAAM, M2A3, Big Tech, Big 4, Big 5, or really whatever you would like to call them.
[9] Skinner boxes, daily rewards, resource decay, loss aversion, etc.
[10] Leaderboards, points, badges, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 su…
MuZero doesn't, but from what I know MuZero was only on par with AlphaZero, and while AlphaZero beat Stockfish initially, Stockfish has since caught up and continues to beat LeelaZero, an OSS implementation of AlphaZero in TCEC.
My understanding is that MuZero beats AlphaZero, but not by a significant amount. Even if Stockfish is better, to me at this point feels needless, given it’s highly unlikely a human over significant volume of matches would have any hope of beating any of them. It is possible that new approaches for masters might be found, but for average player, guessing it’s highly unlikely that anything new might be uncovered. Am I missing something?
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#218I’m working on making body doubling a more main stream approach to accomplishing everyday tasks. Body doubling is known within the ADHD community and entails performing a task in the presence of another. More details here: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/body-double-adhd It helps to engage motivation by using another person as the proxy. I wrote a bit about how I think it works here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog…
What makes this different from Focusmate.com?
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
How far down this road do you go? Someone engaged in bioweapons manufacturing probably uses laptops and chairs too.
The difference is that those already exist. I think concern about the development of new technology is valid. Suppose nuclear weapons did not exist and someone was concerned about the Manhattan project — would you say that chairs enable people to build regular bombs, so we shouldn't worry about nuclear bombs?
The technology already exist. The OP stated, patents are over, and that is why (s)he is working on it. Even if it not exist, security by obscurity is no security... if anybody can do the tech, the bad guys are going to be as fast, or faster than the good guys... So I hope the good guys do the tech for everybody...
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#220It’s early days, but I’m looking into more precise and domain specific object recognition in photos. Apple or Google will generally tell me if a photo contains a chair; I would like to know what kind of chair (is it a Herman Miller Aeron or a Herman Miller Embody). There are a few domains I am interested to apply this to, but at this stage I’m still learning the limitations of the tech (and any leads / insights would be appreciated!)