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

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

#361

Post by wintermutestwin »

birbs wrote: post #326
jordwest wrote: post #88

I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory. Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded. Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are o…

I think Discord is then modern form of this. It’s really a great product.

Isn't Discord just chat (aka IRC)? Every time I try to get on Discord, it seems chaotic and confusing. Like chat, I guess it depends on who the users are at the moment you happen to use it. Forums are a much better approach to information sharing IMO.

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

#362

Post by MAMAMassakali »

I have a custom tlv encoding standard. It has 1 or 2 byte of header depending on type with the required info in the header. I have written an encoder and decoder for it, but now want to do it via ASN.1. But, I am not able to understand how to define header bytes and what rule each bit denotes in the header. Do I need to use ECN?

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

#363

Post by minhmeoke »

znpy wrote: post #80
adammunich wrote: post #43

I am working on two problems: 1. I want to create way to generate electrical power without pollution. Basically, a closed cycle process that releases no pollutants, or electronic waste. 2. I want to do everything I can to eliminate gender bias in the world.

Regarding 1, if you can accept some pollution at the beginning, hydro-electrical can be a solution, albeit probably not for a global scale. We have a small hydro-electrical plant una River near my house and really it's no big deal, it fits very nicely in the surrounding environment and it produces clean energy. It's also educational because since the river is near the city small children classes can visit it and lear…

Rather than generating electricity directly, it might be more practical to reduce electricity consumption using other approaches:

Geothermal can be a solution for generating electricity directly, but if you'd like to minimize electronic waste perhaps it would be easier to use it to replace alternative energy sources for HVAC purposes.

Biofuels (eg: plant bamboo, grow it, then burn it) can also technically be closed cycle energy sources.

Solar water heaters can also reduce electrical or fossil-fuel-based energy consumed for generating hot water.

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

#364

Post by Kinrany »

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…

A different but similar in topic problem is running and playing tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons.

The solution is a general-purpose distributed computing platform designed for end-user development.

The closest three things that exist are Google Sheets, replit.com and dndbeyond.com. Replit is too low level, dndbeyond is not powerful enough, sheets are stuck with grid and too clunky for everything else.

Here's a few things the user should be able to do:

1. Design a tabletop roleplaying game system from scratch and automate all the math

2. Write content designed to be used with a system

3. Use systems and content designed by other people, without copy-pasting

4. Modify the system and the content designed by other people for your own purposes

5. Share access to the content in a granular way

Tabletop roleplaying games are unique: they thrive on content that must be created and shared quickly, but includes simple but fully general programming capabilities. Seems like a great place to start making programming as commonplace as literacy.

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

#365

Post by desertraven »

I find it hard to find communities for my ever-changing niche interests.

I’m working on community discussion boards which exist at the intersection of interests.

Eg. Mountain Biking/New Zealand, Propulsion/Submarine, Machine Learning/Aquaponics/Tomato, etc.

The search terms for interests are supplied from Wikipedia articles which avoids duplicate interests and allows for any level of granularity.

I find that key word functionality in search engines has degraded to the point that finding good content for niche interests is difficult. I’m hoping with this system I can view historical (and current) discussions around my many niche interest combos.

I’ve got the foundation done, I just need some feedback/advice on whether I’m reinventing the wheel here, or if others share this problem?

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

#366

Post by adriangrigore »

cxr wrote: post #360
adriangrigore wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest for templating?

ES6 backtick strings.

I believe you misunderstand, I'd rather distance myself from the NodeJs ecosystem and use standard UNIX tools for developing web sites. I believe sh is great as a templating language.

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

#367

Post by oebboe »

red0point wrote: post #194

I‘m trying to re-/sell cheap bulk object storage, by renting cheap dedicated servers (e.g. Hetzner), connect them using 10GbE and putting them into a big Ceph cluster. My problem is how to bill people for consuming object storage properly. Do you do it retrospectively and take the fraud risk? Are there any pre-existing platforms that do Ceph billing?

I'm currently thinking about starting a very similar project, would you like to talk about it and exchange some learnings?

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

#369

Post by mikewarot »

marcosdumay wrote: post #254

Yeah, this week I've restarted my scanning tunnel microscope that I'm failing to make work for years... The current one is a standard pair of long metal bars with the piezoelectric component on one end, with 2 screws, and a 3rd screw on the other end. My problem is that it doesn't matter how I design the thing, either the screws offer too little precision so I can't help but to crush the tip into the sample every tim…

It sounds like you need to add a "stage" to help position your sample. Flexures are systems that bend to perform motion, and can do surprising things that you can't do with joined together machined pieces.

Here's an open source stage project using flexures that will likely help

https://openflexure.org/projects/blockstage/

Also, see Dan Gelbart's 18 video series about building prototypes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMP_AfiNlX4

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