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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#311

Post by bo1024 »

bo1024 wrote: post #308
dbingham wrote: post #14

Academic and Scientific publishing. It's the primary source material of human knowledge. It should be completely open and accessible to everyone with no barriers to access the literature or to add to the literature. The structure it currently takes - academic journals - made perfect sense in the 1600s when that structure was developed, and it continued to work reasonably well for distributing academic results up into…

Quick suggestion from a researcher: people will only want to submit if there’s an editorial team with high trust and reputation for their specific area. Automated reviewer matching won’t be good enough to find decent reviewers. I would suggest partnering with people in very specific disciplines who want to break away and establish open access journals, but want to focus on the editor and review process rather than th…

I would call it something more specific than peer review.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#312

Post by justicz »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #172
justicz wrote: post #128

Robots that build large-scale solar farms! My friend and I started working on this last year and ended up starting a company. We moved to the bay area and did YC last summer. We've been spending a lot of time on solar construction sites and did our first demo (part of the material handling system) on a site in March. Now we're working on a robotic factory + our team is up to 5 folks.

Awesome, think I saw your launch post and sounds like an awesome project. How has the experience been with permitting and regulatory issues (not technical)? Is there a valid strategy in building at the border of hard to build states and selling electricity back to them (e.g. building a massive facility in Nevada and selling the energy to CA when they inevitably suffer another crisis to the grid)?

Hey, thanks! We haven't had too much trouble with regulatory barriers. There are some other companies operating in the robotic construction space (e.g. Built Robotics) that have served as good examples for us on the regulatory front.

As for your idea, you do hear about hacks like that in this industry all the time. We're operating a little bit downstream of those decisions, working with construction companies after the site has already been chosen.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#313

Post by epolanski »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #145

Trying to teach myself linear algebra and deep learning so I can apply it to some interesting ideas I have about making current chess AI much stronger. I don't want to reveal too much since I don't want some Stockfish dev to steal my idea but I'm interested in tips and resources on linear algebra. I always hated matrices... Interspersed with that I have a huge amount of stuff to implement for my project still(search…

I think you're naive if you think decades of chess engines development are going to be disrupted by you picking up linear algebra.

I also applaud and envy the craziness.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#314

Post by smcn »

uoaei wrote: post #299
smcn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand the criticism that it's not adding value to the world. However, the same could be said of the stock market in general. If they shut that down, I'll happily close Feetr. In the meantime, someone will be making money from the stock market. Why shouldn't it be you? Or me? Or anyone reading this?

The exact same thing could be said by the people running toxic mining operations with clearly safer alternatives, monopolistic healthcare firms who regularly deny basic access, lobbying operations to eliminate laws that keep kids from getting addicted to nicotine, and plenty else. These are all things your investments are surely contributing to. Ethics is hard because there's no enforcement like there is in the legal…

Sure, I guess. However, the market will not die due to my lack of participation.

It would be amazing if we lived in a world where morality would win out but we don't. My concern is "how do I help the most amount of people?", and that's why Feetr is public and cheap.

You can live the life that makes you happiest but how are you helping people deal with the current economic downturn? There's a food bank near me and the line is much longer than I'd care to describe. It's not even cold yet. And it's going to get much worse.

You can either pretend to help by avoiding the big bad, or you can work within the current framework to try to do as much good as you can.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#315

Post by bo1024 »

I’m working on a proof of concept for replacing passwords with public/private key authentication. Inspired by how ssh and got repo access are both more secure AND easier to use than password login.

The interesting parts are convenience features like sharing an account across multiple devices, allowing temporary access to a device, etc.

The goal is to implement everything user side - it would act a bit like single sign on but with no need for any trusted third party. I’m starting with a browser plug-in.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#316

Post by O__________O »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #252
O__________O wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're not missing something. I just wanna see how far we can take this thing, you know? 4000 ELO seems within reach now. What about 5000, 6000 etc? Computer chess is essentially a sport unto itself at this point, beating humans is sort of uninteresting, though I'm sure grandmasters will always find uses for ever stronger engines. They're mainly used to study openings, and since analysing from the start of the game i…

Fair enough.

As you likely know, ELO has no maximum upper limit and chess has 10^120 possible matches — so in theory maximum ELO for chess has a long way to go, assuming there is even one engine that keeps improving over time to beat its prior version. Huge aspect of performance is tied to availability of compute; as such, my understanding is that if quantum computers ever became mainstream, even a “dumb” algorithm using true quantum computer would beat non-quantum algorithm over significant number of matches and the “ELO race” would then only be define by progress by the non-quantum algorithms against themselves. Basically, at this point, it’s a race that’s already theoretically over; might be wrong though.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#318

Post by agumonkey »

Ilasky wrote: post #285
agumonkey wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a bit like rubber duck debugging ? I also find pair work to be very special on many levels (intellectually, emotionally,. logistically). I wish there was more theory on this

Exactly! Pair programming is definitely within the realm of tasks we have in mind for Double.

I didn't know about body doubling so in the mean time let me ask you some things:

- do you consider the friendly competition aspect (seeing someone do a task revives inspiration, desire, confidence, motivation to do it, when the other is tired you feel happy to fill the role)

- the emotional bond from sharing: sharing any task is often a strong bond (even just carrying a load), pain and success

- the intellectual benefits: a bit like the first point but searching for solutions gets much much cheaper with a peer. You can validate point of view / theories, feel less emotional pain from doubts it the other doesn't know too

I had more topics but I forgot

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#319

Post by cjwebb »

zh3 wrote: post #132

Volumetric displays. The perfect mix of personal challenges - insane data rates, complex realtime software, weird mechanical setups and warped graphics.

Like, this kind of thing? https://voxon.co/

I had to Google it, but since I've recently been diving into volumetric video, the words made me curious.

How's it going? Any particular area you're working on?

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#320

Post by elil17 »

didgetmaster wrote: post #69
zschuessler wrote: post #5

I heard few song lines from a new artist I've discovered. It has me thinking on a problem I want solved. Although, I'm not actively working on it. Why aren't there more employee-owned companies? And I don't mean solely shareholder programs, I mean actually owned by every employee and they are paid dividends of profit after all planned R&D costs. Similar to the Alaska oil pipeline bonus. Even interns. All studies show…

Ownership implies both risk and reward. Those who own anything (a private company or stock in a public company) are entitled to their share of the profits but also must take on the risk of the value going down. How do you convince all the employees of any company ('even the interns') to take on the risks accompanying ownership?

In ESOPs part of your pay is in the form of company shares. Your risk and reward increases as you build up company shares and pays out when you retire.
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