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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?

#251

Post by LordDragonfang »

Jaxkr wrote: post #35
jezze wrote: post #21

I am trying to reinvent the web. Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This allows it to be streamed. A big difference is that the language itself…

Are widgets stateful in any way? Could this be used to create more efficient (and constrained) client side apps without JavaScript?

>ALFI is stateless so a typical use-case would be to have a regular web server serving ALFI queries as responses from regular HTTP requests (like GET, POST, etc).

So, no

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

#252

Post by ohnope »

denster wrote: post #74

Design + Code tooling. Hard problem: How do we evolve design tools? Can Sketch/Figma be evolved to create full featured software? [1] Something with no limits, and the freedom to create any feature developers create today with React/Angular/Vue. Is it possible or a pipe dream? [1] https://mintdata.com

You can imagine a version of the world where designers structure their designs in a way that can easily export to e.g. a vue component, and along with the base structural layout they define different UI states it can be in, with animation timelines. Designers should be able to specify every aesthetic variable, and developers just program the business logic to fill content tags and toggle designer-defined states.

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

#253

Post by the_decider »

I’m working on a formula that factors ML model run-time cost (speed / memory-usage) into its performance evaluation. I generated a very simple scoring function from economic first principles. Now, I’m trying to test performance on cumbersome transformer models published by Google / FB / Microsoft etc in order to prove that many of these models are not “state-of-the-art” if run-time cost is taken into account.

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

#254

Post by genuinebyte »

ketanmaheshwari wrote: post #143

I am building a tiny "replay" script that when run with a code file will print the code by line/block with a customized amount of delay OR keypress. The motivation is to be able to slowly read large source code files without having the whole file on the screen.

This is an interesting idea. I find reading code isn't always linear, so I'm interested to see what you come up with.

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

#256

Post by TimJRobinson »

chiefmcloud wrote: post #153

I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…

I really like this. At the start of this podcast [1] they talk about the dark forest theory of the Internet. It's that when you go into a dark forest at night you don't see many animals because they know if they move or make noise they become prey. Similarly many intelligent people stay silent on Twitter and only speak up in private circles for similar reasons.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/podcasts/2019/11/21/2097616...

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

#257

Post by lambdatronics »

netrunner-x86 wrote: post #223

I am working on my own on a system that creates long lasting human relationships. It is a solution to loneliness. I used to run match.com's research division. I left to pursue this project.

What's the role of cyberspace vs meatspace in your solution?

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

#258

Post by chiefmcloud »

guygurari wrote: post #213
chiefmcloud wrote: post #153

I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…

I’m rooting for you. Here’s a thought about a possible trade off between radicalization and engagement. When social media platforms optimize for growth, it makes sense for them to make it as easy as possible for users to share/retweet. It lowers “amplification friction” and allows messages to go viral. The most successful platforms have very low amplification friction, which suggests that low friction is an important…

Thanks. I think another key part is that social networks get huge. They get thousands of employees, billions in investment, etc. This makes them fragile, and forces them down certain paths. If I stay small then I’m not handicapped by forced expectation of user engagement or growth.

I agree with you about the danger of low friction amplification of messages. My hope is that if users can amplify messages but they get no social credit for it, it will dampen down this behavior.

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

#259

Post by chiefmcloud »

adrury wrote: post #168
chiefmcloud wrote: post #153

I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…

Sounds kind of similar to Yik Yak, except using social circles instead of area? Hopefully it ends better than Yik Yak did.

Thanks for the pointer, I hadn’t heard about YikYak but will check them out.

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

#260

Post by httpsterio »

amelius wrote: post #46
httpsterio wrote: post #11

I've been mulling over an idea that is essentially a combination of personal ID, secure digital authentication and online communications all baked into one. There's a EU directive instructing on how citizens should be able to identify online with eIDAS. In my country, you can use eIDAS to authenticate in basically any governmental agency portal, but you can't get any eIDAS enabled auth method as a citizen. The curren…

> throwaway addresses Unrelated but speaking of throwaway addresses, it would be cool to be able to create a throwaway postal address (which is then translated by the postal service), so online shops don't get your personal address information.

Yeah exactly, this was one of the usecases I wanted to deal with.

Several brick and mortar retailers here require your address and personal info even when buying and picking up physically at their store and several have had their databases hacked and leaked.

Why do I need to give those when they're not shipping anything to me and I pay in cash?

We have an agency called Maistraatti which is our nation wide registry office which will have all of my postal information, family relations etc.,basicslly anything related to me as part of our society. Why can't I just provide online and physical retailers some ID that the registry can then translate into my actual info when it's actually needed, for example for shipping or if they want to check my credit etc. They could just save that ID for that purchase and temporarily check the necessary info through an API.

Hashed info would be one solution, the retailers would only get the hashes I provide and the registry office could then match those hashes to my info. In essence, I could basically create single use throwaway information for each retailer if I'd wanted to and they would be none the wiser.

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