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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?

#341

Post by dbingham »

bo1024 wrote: post #311
bo1024 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Name suggestions welcome!

I suck at naming - Peer Review was a working title intended to be somewhat tongue in cheek (similar to StackOverflow). But... because I suck at naming, it is, of course, a little on the nose. So far I haven't come up with anything better.

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

#342

Post by germinalphrase »

FeistySkink wrote: post #290
germinalphrase wrote: post #276

I ended my career in June, and I am attempting to entirely reinvent my professional life at 36. It's interesting going through this sort of open ocean search having a little bit of savings and stability, but the stakes feel higher (emotionally) even though, rationally, I am in a better position to take on risk than when I was young and completely broke. The hardest part of it is actually deciding what do I want from…

Care to share more details? I'm in a similar situation. Thanks.

Of course. I grew up the son of two professional artists. While they are beautiful people, they are not particularly career minded/knowledgeable - so my direction in life has been dependent on my own designs and devotions.

I spent about five years working on feature films, commercials, music videos, etc. as a Local 600 Loader and Second Assistant Cameraman. I loved the work, but the travel and lifestyle wasn't a sustainable fit for a healthy life (for me).

Before film work, I studied comparative literature in a strong undergraduate program and made a shift into teaching high school English. I taught in rural, urban, and suburban school districts in the upper midwest until June of this year. The work was Good, and I was good at it. I didn't burn bridges or burn out; I just had a belly full and want to open a new door.

I know a handful of people that work in tech sales, PM, infrastructure that have been willing to talk about their work and employers (for which I am very grateful). An important part of these conversations has been noting which paths are inaccessible/poor fit/rough culture.

I'm in talks to accept a position at a small local tech consultancy in a role that is a mix between Customer Success/Training/Project Management - but it's more of an entry point and stepping stone than final target.

All that said - if anyone works in product management, experience strategy, or simply would be open for a chat, please send me an email. I would love to schedule a short phone call.

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

#343

Post by dbingham »

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…

This is on the roadmap. The plan is to create a "Journal" entity on the site. Editors can create a Journal on the site and then create teams of reviewers which they tag with fields. Authors submitting papers can then submit those papers to community review, or one or more journals, or both. Reviews coming from journal's teams will be highlighted. At any point during the review process, once the journal's team is satisfied, they can mark the paper with their badge of approval. Papers can collect badges from multiple journals.

If the authors disagree with the journals team, or just get tired of waiting, they can still publish at any time just like with community review. For authors who choose both, the journal's team and community reviewers can interact with each other just as in normal community review.

I think it's a way to provide a stepping stone for people from the existing system towards full community review and would provide logistics to those organizing open journals with teams of high quality reviewers.

The plan is to implement it during the closed beta period. I would welcome feedback on this concept as well :)

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

#344

Post by kaspermarstal »

gurjeet wrote: post #322
kaspermarstal wrote: post #143

A postgres foreign data wrapper for PACS so you can send and receive medical images with SQL. DICOM, the medical imaging standard, is from the 80's and you need a bit of domain knowledge to integrate e.g. AI with hospitals. This makes it a lot easier. And with Supabase on top you have a very cool backend for building medical imaging products in my humble opinion. We started out solving the problem of anonymizing medi…

Is there a Git repo, mailing list, newsletter, or website that I can follow the progress on this, perhaps even contribute?!

Sure! There is tealengine.com and you can follow github.com/tealmedical to get notified when we put it up. What are you interested in? The foreign data wrapper or the iso?

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

#345

Post by qsort »

feoren wrote: post #243
qsort wrote: post #17

I'm on a (currently very experimental) project where we're trying to answer natural-language queries using data from an arbitrary database (given hypotheses on the schema). The natural-language plaintext is fed into a language model that annotates it. That output is converted into an intermediate representation based on relational algebra, which we manipulate and finally compile to SQL. It's probably not scientifical…

So you're making big assumptions that the database's table names map to important concepts in the user's vocabulary, and that a thorough understanding of the data model can be ascertained from the schema alone? To be brutally honest: that's a silly assumption and likely a dead-end. (One thing I want to emphasize here is how abysmally, unbelievably, depressingly god-awful the vast majority of database schemas are.) Yo…

I haven't explained this very well.

By "hypotheses on the schema" I mean we are assuming the schema is already in a very normalized form. I fully agree most database schemas are awful, this is a deliberate choice to avoid getting us into that kind of trouble.

The "intermediate layer" role is played by the IR I was talking about in my previous comment. The user would never be able to see anything not provided by the IR because it's not even representable.

Our scope is much narrower, really.

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

#346

Post by grepLeigh »

m00x wrote: post #270
grepLeigh wrote: post #264

I'm having a blast working on https://printnanny.ai/ - the embedded computer vision system is cool, plus there are many meaty unsolved problems in the 3D printing universe. To name a few... - Rolled a Linux distribution (PrintNanny OS) designed for mixing/matching controller software across a manufacturing "fleet". - Created an atomic upgrade/rollback system. - Built a WebRTC stack for live camera streaming. - Lots o…

Pretty interesting. Have you worked with existing manufacturers that do this like BambuLab?

I haven't done any OEM deals, but I think that's an interesting angle! BambuLab added lidar defect detection to their lineup. Prusa recently launched "Prusa Connect" for remote file management.

One insight that I have is that 3D printing ("additive manufacturing") is just one process among dozens used by small manufacturing shops. The hardware vendors launching software clouds/products are missing the bigger picture, which is that manufacturers need ERP and production schedule management way more than a "file cloud" per hardware vendors.

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

#347

Post by germinalphrase »

tdekken wrote: post #336
germinalphrase wrote: post #276

I ended my career in June, and I am attempting to entirely reinvent my professional life at 36. It's interesting going through this sort of open ocean search having a little bit of savings and stability, but the stakes feel higher (emotionally) even though, rationally, I am in a better position to take on risk than when I was young and completely broke. The hardest part of it is actually deciding what do I want from…

I can so relate :). I left my position as a principal engineer at a FAANG/MAAMA/etc. company in 2020 with a general direction to try to make a difference in the education space. It has been maddening trying to live up to my own expectations. Good luck! p.s. In the off chance that you are interested in the education space, you might find my post in this thread of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32870101

Thank you for the comment, and I commend your mission. Do you have a website or more detailed information about your intended approach? My email is in profile if you would prefer to share privately.

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

#348

Post by Ilasky »

agumonkey wrote: post #318
Ilasky wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ben…

These are all amazing points.

In my opinion, they all fall under the category of a body doubling effect. Your second and third points strike a particular chord for me as well. I wrote a bit about why my cofounder and I are creating Double rather than doing it alone. In essence, we are cofounding because seeing the other person also trying their best and going through the rough parts with me drives me to keep going. (It's a quick read here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/dont-sleep-in-the-mud ).

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

#349

Post by germinalphrase »

rikroots wrote: post #333
germinalphrase wrote: post #276

I ended my career in June, and I am attempting to entirely reinvent my professional life at 36. It's interesting going through this sort of open ocean search having a little bit of savings and stability, but the stakes feel higher (emotionally) even though, rationally, I am in a better position to take on risk than when I was young and completely broke. The hardest part of it is actually deciding what do I want from…

I wish you great luck on your journey! I did this when I was 42 - studied for a degree part-time, wrote some books, ran out of money and did some minimum wage jobs, etc - and it was a scary-yet-exhilarating adventure which, thankfully, ended well when I finally landed a full-time job developing websites.

Hope sustains me, but if it all falls apart I might just have to commit to punching out that solarpunk AR novel I've been taking notes about for ten years.

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

#350

Post by cpeterso »

Daegalus wrote: post #229
mattw2121 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to know which MMO?

Blackmoon Chronicles: Winds of War from like 2000/2001. It never left beta as Vircom closed down their game division and cancelled all projects. It was my first MMO and what got me into MMOs

That’s an interesting problem!

Since you have the client source code, have you been able to fully reverse engineer and document the client/server protocol? Do you have a black box server whose responses you can record and analyze?

Have you been writing your server top-down (building an idealized set of game objects and then wiring them up to the protocol) or bottom-up (layering the minimum game code on top of the protocol needed to make the server respond appropriately)?

How do you obtain the client source code? Will you legally be able to open source it or at least distribute binaries you build?

Is https://blackmoonchronicles.com/ your project? Looks like it’s a different project because they’re writing a cleanroom implementation of a client.

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