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

Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 486 posts

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#261

Post by bogwog »

motyar wrote: post #46

Problem: Create image with text. Solution: https://img.bruzu.com?a.t=Text You can help by trying the API and giving honest feedback. https://bruzu.com

Seems like it would be a lot easier and a lot more powerful to use SVG instead of a giant string of URL parameters.

Your service could provide pre-made templates and an editor, and expose textfields, images, fonts, etc options via URL parameters. Then your service just has to render the SVG and return it as an image with the requested dimensions/format.

Example:

`https://img.bruzu.com?s= ID>&title=Hello&font=arial&width=800&height=480&fmt=png`

You could also pass the raw SVG source as a parameter as well, maybe with base 64 encoding or something like that.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#262

Post by slx26 »

erikerikson wrote: post #106

How do we scale social accountability and knowing? This is expected to enable us to solve distributed coordination problems. Also, it should facilitate richer more meaningful relationships between people. Expected outcomes include increased thriving and economic productivity. [edit: consider the limit on how many people you can know and the relationship between how deeply you come into relationship with that populati…

I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about coordination in general. Indeed, knowledge is a vital part of it. The problem that I see is that knowledge is too vague and lossy and changing and incomplete [as I mentioned in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203718].

An hypothetical solution would be a system that talked a language similar to plain english, but that was determinist. You let people write their problems and views to the system, and the system determines which are the widest consensus available within a given scope and what are the highest priority problems (perceived by people). This has a lot of problems, but it's a good way to think about the topic. Even with such a system, would you really be solving the problems you want to solve?

If it does, then this is basically symbolic AI. You can try to relax requirements... but you kinda need an "automatic coordinator". If you go with a manual coordinator instead, then I doubt you will be able to scale anything that's not extremely rigid and hierarchical, at which point you are re-introducing many of the same problems you were trying to fight in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#263

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

koheripbal wrote: post #204
101008 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a software problem? There are a lot of open sources (with their differences) platforms. From old forums, to more modern, etc. I think the problem is that people don't want or don't know how to use a forum. This is based in my experience: - Old people: They started to use internet recently so they are used to social networks (Facebook, Instagram), and newspapers websites. - Young people: Hard to make them use…

The value of a forum is not to get everyone. It is actually in limiting a community to the most mature voices and thoughtful people. There's little upside to having teenagers in a forum, for example, unless you're looking to monetize.

Younger people can help evolve topics by providing a set of fresh eyes. It's also important to pass knowledge on, otherwise it just ends up dying with you.

For example: Virtual reality headsets were fairly stagnant until a young guy in his early 20s tried something new.

Old people often become stuck in their ways and it requires someone new to show up and ask how the sausage is made.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#264

Post by bastawhiz »

I have a pile of mp3s and want to splice them together with a single ffmpeg operation. Essentially injecting multiple small audio files into a large one using time codes. I know there's got to be a way to do it, but I have yet to find a way to do it in a single operation instead of multiple passes.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#265

Post by udev »

I am blocked on finding a good (defined below) way to determine whether a product description A and product description B refer to the same product.

Imagine that a product description is a n-dimensional vector like:

  ( manufacturerName, modelName, width, height, length, color, ...)
Now imagine you have a file with m such vectors (where m is in millions), and that not all fields in the vectors are reliable info (typos, missing info, plain wrong, etc).

What is a good way to determine which product descriptions refer to the same product.

Is this even a good approach? What is state of the art? Are there simpler ways?

Here is what I mean by good:

  - robust to typos, missing info, wrong info
  - efficient since both m and n are large
  - updateable (e.g. if classification was done, and 10k new descriptins are added, how to efficiently update and avoid full recomputation)

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#266

Post by bjornlouser »

pgroves wrote: post #218

How to make png encoding much faster? I'm working with large medical images and after a bit of work we can do all the needed processing in under a second (numpy/scipy methods). But then the encoding to png is taking 9-15secs. As a result we have to pre-render all possible configurations and put them on S3 b/c we can't do the processing on demand in a web request. Is there a way to use multiple threads or GPU to encod…

> Is there a way to use multiple threads or GPU

Maybe you could write the png without compression, compress chunks of the image in parallel using 7z, then reconstitute and decompress on the client side.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#267

Post by adriangrigore »

chabad360 wrote: post #240
adriangrigore wrote: post #232

Web site building complexity, for now I started with a simple static site generator https://mkws.sh/ . Right now, I'm not using any package manager, no config files, only one language for templates (sh), and obviously HTML, CSS, Js. I eventually plan to develop a simple CMS based on the same ideas. Ideas and code are welcome!

Have a look at stuff like Netlify CMS, or any of the already existing website builders like WIX or Weebly or squarespace Etc.

Any headless CMS would work well my `mkws`, my idea is to build a smaller, simpler Wordpress that also comes with a tiny webserver, 0 config, no database, content stored as plain text files, just download and run. https://getkirby.com/ is closer in concept, but without the PHP dependency.

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#268

Post by dehrmann »

bastawhiz wrote: post #264

I have a pile of mp3s and want to splice them together with a single ffmpeg operation. Essentially injecting multiple small audio files into a large one using time codes. I know there's got to be a way to do it, but I have yet to find a way to do it in a single operation instead of multiple passes.

Are they sequential, or are you splicing at arbitrary times?

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#269

Post by jpindar »

kroltan wrote: post #234

Economically sustainable and ethical monetization of user-generated-content games. The closest most known example of this kind of game nowadays is Roblox, but I'm thinking of things more like Mario Maker or the older-generation Atmosphir/GameGlobe-likes. Unlike "modding platforms" or simulators/sandboxes/platforms such as Flight Simulator, VRChat or ARMA, these games' content are created by regular players with no te…

I'm surprised you didn't mention Core.

https://www.coregames.com/

Re: Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

#270

Post by alex989898 »

udev wrote: post #265

I am blocked on finding a good (defined below) way to determine whether a product description A and product description B refer to the same product. Imagine that a product description is a n-dimensional vector like: ( manufacturerName, modelName, width, height, length, color, ...) Now imagine you have a file with m such vectors (where m is in millions), and that not all fields in the vectors are reliable info (typos,…

You could generate word embeddings for all natural language text fields and then do cosine similarity?
Post reply on HN