Let’s say you have multiple people who want to share their location with each other, but to different degrees of precision. Some people might be willing to share their street address, while others only want to share the city that they live in. Some only want to say “Northern New Jersey”, or “Southern France”. Some might want to just share their timezone. How do you store this information in a database, in a geographi…
Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
391–400 of 831 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#392I am building a database for human movement. Right now each exercise or pose or movement is indexed by its name - Downward dog, squat, handstand, etc. But this gets confusing when multiple names apply to the same movement. The true identifier is the motion of your limbs in space. I want to encode that motion/position so that if you try and upload L-sit handstand and also L-sit, it tells you that you are try to upload a duplicate (except for the arms). Furthermore, hopefully each movement can be uniquely encoded into an ID that could be used at a webURL. If you did this you could also compute the similarity between two movements to indicate that one is a progression step to train the other.
I don't have a computer science background so encoding an compression are new to me, but Im a good hacker and I can quickly get things like open pose working. Im trying to complete this in the next 3 months. Wish me luck.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#393I'm trying to find other forms of the Dirac Equation, but that also satisfy the original definition of the equation.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#394How to lure back the gods
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#395I am trying to reinvent the web. Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This allows it to be streamed. A big difference is that the language itself…
You should join the future of coding community. It's full of like-minded people working on similar projects.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#396I'm writing a book about ADHD: https://adhdpro.xyz/ Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of infantilizing in and around the ADHD sphere. Either we're treated like helpless children or we are encouraged to lower our expectations/goals. It's hard to explain unless you've been open about having ADHD, or have been part of the community. The zeitgeist revolves around accepting and maintaining a status quo. The problem I'…
Hey this is cool. Would totally use this. Just got diagnosed at 28 and trying to implement meditation, yoga and better work habits so I can get the most out of the medication and maintain the lowest possible dosage
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#397I'm writing a book about ADHD: https://adhdpro.xyz/ Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of infantilizing in and around the ADHD sphere. Either we're treated like helpless children or we are encouraged to lower our expectations/goals. It's hard to explain unless you've been open about having ADHD, or have been part of the community. The zeitgeist revolves around accepting and maintaining a status quo. The problem I'…
This sounds really interesting. I'm curious who you interviewed and their diversity of experience and careers.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#398I hope this counts as weird enough ... PROBLEM: If time travelers from the future were to visit you, it would be difficult for them to quickly prove their authenticity. SOLUTION: Temporal passwords. At the start of each year, you devise a new password. You commit the password to memory, but you never write it down or divulge it to anyone until Dec. 31, when you submit it to the Temporal Password Registry, which publi…
The technology used to time travel would be present in any situation, right? Seems like that's your clear and instant evidence.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#399Problem: my team is decided in two: Corona A and Corona B, each working alternate days (m w f and t t). How many extra hours should I make Corona A work in exchange for them getting FOUR DAY WEEKENDS for the last two months!
Why are they not switching off every week?
Different taskings. One group has to do something on monday that only they can do. They B teams uses A's product for something.
Re: Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the same boat: https://github.com/Tablam/TablaM , only that also building a lang (wish to revive the spirit of the dbase/fox family langs). I have experimented with varied stuff, including columnar, so I think we can help each other!
Our two projects actually look like they have very different goals and approaches: I’m aiming for a rigorous solution for small design problems, like needing to add an index to a datastructure that wasn’t designed for one— nothing really to do with databases proper. I need the overhead for these simple cases to be low, so I’m trying to do as much as I can at compile-time inside the type system. You’re doing everythin…
> Our two projects actually look like they have very different goals and approaches
Surely! but learning that is pretty interesting and could help, also, I think that combining ideas/crates is what give more power to the rust ecosystem...
More to the point, I'm still thinking how/which data-structures to use, and how deal with the ability to provide SELECT/WHERE/etc across them (like a file)
> nothing really to do with databases proper
This is a big misunderstanding with the relational model: That is only for (r)dbms and storage.
I'm looking to apply it to regular programming. Is similar to apply OO or Array or Functional paradigm as your base for a lang.