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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?

#281

Post by TimJRobinson »

eivarv wrote: post #179

Human-computer context switching. Which is why I started making Cleave: An application that lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so on. Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited resources. Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manual…

I love this idea! I've never found a good solution to this problem, used to try different logins etc but the save and restore of state doesn't work very well.

Could combine this with site/app blocking tools to ensure when you load the studying state you don't get distracted too.

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

#282

Post by chiefmcloud »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #256
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/2019/11/2…

Thanks for the thoughtful and interesting responses, looking forward to listening to the podcast. I loved the Cixin trilogy, but hadn’t heard of the dark forest theory applied to online conversations before. I’m not sure I agree with such a strong suggestion, maybe more that the people that are most verbal in a group are rarely the people with the most interesting thoughts. It is sadly becoming increasingly true though that anything you say is now a permanent liability.

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

#283

Post by celticninja »

winstonewert wrote: post #217
jawns wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the PROBLEM statement says: > it would be difficult for them to quickly prove their authenticity Yes, you could tell them something that happens tomorrow or the next day. But if time is of the essence and you can't wait until tomorrow, then the Temporal Password helps you _immediately_ demonstrate your authenticity.

They have a time machine. How can time be of the essence?

No more Pym particles.

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

#284

Post by gen220 »

wiseleo wrote: post #270
a1369209993 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they never said it was easy to figure out how to properly explain it, nor that the right pace was necessarily as fast as anyone involved would like.

Yeah, I feel there are a few potential PhDs in that statement. Coding the solver and the problem generator is the easy part, figuring out how to explain something and from multiple perspectives will be tough. The multiple perspectives is key. I hope I can build a community of people willing to explain and a community of moderators to vet the explanation.

Sounds like some hybrid of khan academy, Wikipedia, and stack overflow! I would have loved this as a kid :)

I totally agree that getting a high quality corpus of information is the hardest part.

I like the idea of explaining “themes/metaphors”, with version-controlled iterative improvements.

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

#286

Post by a1369209993 »

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…

How do you plan to insure that your digital identity system can be used for illegal/criminal purposes, such as aiding Jews and other undesirables in evading lawfully authorized detention and relocation (or by said undesirables for said evasion)?

(I don't mean to single you out specifically; this is something that any digital identity system needs to deal with. And most of them enthusiastically don't.)

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

#287

Post by Kinrany »

wiseleo wrote: post #37
bb123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you expect that students will utilise the backtracking aspect of the software? I think 12 year old me would just use the solver and then log off.

I am optimistic :) The entire curriculum is extremely easy when properly explained at correct pace.

You could use automatic homework as a reward. Basically replacing broken curriculum with your own until they catch up. (Or even beyond that: homework takes time even when you know everything.)

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

#288

Post by tlrobinson »

jeremylevy wrote: post #262
tlrobinson wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like Terraform with the user-friendliness of Heroku. > It's very hard because every providers have different APIs and concepts so you have to start from scratch for each. Why not build it as a layer on top of Terraform?

I do use Terraform. Terraform is very good to create the building blocks of your architecture but not so much for the user-friendliness part. Let's take an example: You have an architecture with a CI/CD. Great. You add your CodePipeline and CodeBuild ressources to your plan. Perfect. For the CI part, you want your build to start on every commit on every non-master branch. Bad news: CodePipeline doesn't have support f…

I’m suggesting your tool could generate Terraform code and run the Terraform command “under the hood” so you don’t have to reimplement everything Terraform already does.

Users wouldn’t need to know about Terraform (unless they wanted to. It might be nice to have a way to export the Terraform code)

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

#289

Post by gen220 »

wiseleo wrote: post #264
mattjoyce wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a father with a 12 year old struggling with math, to say something is extremely easy makes me think you have a better understanding of math than people.

Take your child back to first grade and systematically re-test his knowledge. Identify where he got lost, catch up, and then today's assignments will not be as difficult. The child is likely stuck on something that wasn't thoroughly understood in the past. I did this for a child recently. He was in the special needs program. I looked at his homework and re-tested his math understanding. It turns out he had no solid u…

I totally agree that missing foundation is a huge, compounding issue, and that it can be solved with “surgical education”. I used to do this as a tutor. You dig deeper down the stack of fundamentals until you find something that’s missing, and then you build the stack back up.

That being said, surgery is hard and can be traumatizing if taken on haphazardly. One of the harder problems, in my experience, is if an adolescent has been behind for years, it takes a long time to get to “normal”, and that can be really depressing for both the tutor and the pupil.

Another huge compounding problem is literacy skills. There are people in high school who can barely read, and it dramatically impacts their ability to catch up in every other subject. You can write a perfect explanation, but it might be totally disorienting to these students.

Education is really hard. I wish you the best of luck, it’s inspirational to read your ideas here!

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

#290

Post by mnemonicsloth »

Writing a computer program is often the best way to convince yourself that you really understand a problem. And an already-written computer program is often a good way to document the behavior of a complex system because you can play with it to see what happens in all the edge cases.

So I'm writing curricula that use computer programs as the primary teaching tool. One is for computer science, where the idea is that anyone who can read some python can pick up all the important ideas from a formal CS education without sitting through a year or more of preliminaries. Over time I'm planning to add smaller sections on more advanced topics.

The other curriculum is theoretical physics. There's already a good book that does classical mechanics [1] in scheme. I've hired some postdocs to learn scheme and code lessons in general relativity, statistical mechanics and so on. I do the lessons, solve the problems, and then we talk about what worked and what didn't. I work on this about ten hours a week. After a couple of years I should have knowledge roughly equivalent to an ABD physics grad student, plus teaching material that can take anyone else to the same level from modest beginnings.

I'm looking for collaborators on this project so don't be a stranger. Twitter/email is in my profile

[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/bo...

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