Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

I use a similar but far less fancy approach with email filters: I have everything put into its own filtered folders then only check them on a schedule.

Your approach is good because the schedule is right there in the email address.

Short list:

* Pollution and the climate

* Privation

* Avoidable death

* Interplanetary settlement

* Liberty and communication

* Transportation

My primary focus is developing and commercializing reliable clean energy, because I believe that is the most effective way to further progress in the majority of the above problems.

To that extent, I've come to terms with an inability to spread my focus across all of them simultaneously and drive great results so instead I've taken an approach of working on a few of them full time myself and investing in efforts that work on others. My intent is to keep ~100% of my net worth invested in these main problems (either in my own or somebody else's projects) in perpetuity.

In my personal life, I've also recently been spending a lot of time thinking about health and purpose: how to build discipline, how people can/should decide what to do with their life, how to stay healthy and built fitness, etc.

Side project: in my free time over the last few weeks I've also been thinking more about how to create lasting models for information and media, and so I'm building a markup language / static site generator in that pursuit [2]

[1]: https://jwmza.com/long

[2]: https://jwmza.com/polymath

I arrived at this idea from two directions. The first direction is that I sometimes try to code review some of the questions over at CodeReview SE, and the whole thing feels unergonomic. I dislike scrolling up and down to check the code and constantly losing track of the things I'm reviewing. This is where I think inline commenting would help. Also, there is not a lot of room for discussion. You only get those comments below the review, where you only have a few characters to argue your point. The second direction is that I produce code snippets (programming homework, short snippets at work, etc.) which I would like to submit for review. I don't always want to submit it to the entire internet for review. I just want to get a private link to the code review, which I can share with my colleagues so they can review it. Kind of like a reviewable PasteBin.

Some of the features I would like to add: importing files from GitHub for reviewing and users could import their unanswered CodeReview SE questions for another review.

One reason I'm targeting parsers in particular is because I've been finding a lot of modern programming language books are a bit anti-parsing these days. EOPL avoids parsing altogether by using a parser generator, effectively saying that it's a hard problem. PLAI outright calls parsing a "distraction". SICP (not strictly a compiler book, I know) and Lisp in Small Pieces just use the triviality of parsing () languages, which I feel doesn't generalize well.

I emailed the author of PLAI (Shriram Krishnamurthi) about this. His response was effectively that modern books come off anti-parsing as a reaction to old books, which were parser heavy, and tools like YACC -- "Yet Another Compiler Constructor" -- even though it's just a parser generator, not a compiler constructor! He went further to say that, given parsing is roughly trivial in () languages, it sort of seems parsing is only incidentally a compiler/interpreter problem, and users of () languages view non-trivial parsing as signalling a design flaw. I found this to be an interesting take, but in my day job I generally don't have much say in the design of "languages" of semi-structured text that gets thrown my way.

Anyway, I know the Dragon Book covers parsing in some detail but for some reason it's been kind of impenetrable for me -- it feels a bit more abstract than I like. I can follow it, but while reading it I can't help but wonder -- "is this actually going to help me in practice?"

I recently have been reading Niklaus Wirth's stuff though, like the last chapter in his algorithms book and his Compiler Construction book, and those have been absolutely fantastic.

I also asked a question on SE about a particular parser I'm working on -- if anyone has some thoughts I'd love to hear them :)

https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/236222/recurs...

I really dislike CodeReview SE for many reasons though, I don't think this Q&A format is suitable for doing CRs