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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?

#421

Post by akkartik »

minhmeoke wrote: post #408
akkartik wrote: post #105

Short version: I'm close to figuring out how to encourage more prototyping of software by making tests super easy to write during the prototyping process, and so de-risking rewrites. But one problem I've been stymied by is how to represent expectations of screens when they contain graphics. Long version: My Mu project ( https://github.com/akkartik/mu ) is building a computing stack up from machine code. The goal is p…

Your project is quite impressive. And welcome to the world of computer graphics! I'd consider taking inspiration from the following sources: 1. GUI toolkits like QT QML [1] or Android [2]. These typically build a hierarchical tree of different components (eg: start with a root window, which contains panes, which in turn contain text and buttons). Each component may contain different properties (eg: font, color), and…

Thank you for those suggestions! Do you know if any of those tools following either approach has any automated tests? My immediate problem is how to manage the complexity of implementing a layout engine or editor. Somewhere I need something checking that a given asset identifier results in specific pixels. And I'd like the tests for _that_ to be nice to read. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem..

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

#423

Post by sriram_malhar »

I'm not sure I'm close to solving it, but I have an approach that I'd like some feedback on.

I have a corpus of text in many Indian languages, which i'd like to index and search. The twist is that I'd like to support searches in English. The problem is that there are many phonetic transliterations of the same word (e.g the Hindi word for law can either be written as "qanoon" or "kanun"), and traditional spelling correction methods don't work because of excessive edit distance.

My approach is this: Use some sequence to sequence ML technique (LSTM, GRU, ..., attention) to a query in English to the most probable translation and then use that to look it up using a standard document indexing toolkit like Lucene. (I can put together a training dataset of english transliterations of sentences to their original text)

The problem is that I'd like the corpus, the index and the model to be all on a mobile. I have a suspicion that the above method won't straightforwardly fit on a mobile (for a few Gig of corpus text), and that the inference time may be long. Is this assumption wrong?

How would you solve the problem? Would TinyML be a better approach for the inferencing part?

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

#424

Post by nzmsv »

newbamboo wrote: post #182
nzmsv wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benadryl, no. But melatonin, sometimes, yes. My rule is to have a hard cutoff time after which it's better to take melatonin than to continue the cycle of whining, sleep deprivation, and next-day misery. The cutoff is late enough to have plenty of time to try all the other things involving wind-down rituals. It is not an every day thing. I found that having the consistency actually helps establish the rituals too. Al…

Look into the research behind melatonin use. I’m not a doctor and certainly long term use of diphenhydramine is associated with neurological problems in old age, but I’m not sure melatonin should be used as a simple hypnotic as you are suggesting. It’s natural but so is testosterone. Hormones may not be good to tinker with. I say that as a long time user of melatonin. At the very least you may want to stick with lowe…

Kids versions don't come in anything higher than 1mg and one can make it a half-dose quite easily. It's really more of a last resort thing, and definitely not for every night's bedtime. How last resort? Maybe once or twice a month. Now that my kids are a bit older and bedtime rituals are established it's even more rare.

I realize that some parents reach for it every night and this is not something I'm suggesting.

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

#425

Post by slx26 »

erikerikson wrote: post #405
slx26 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your comment quite confusing. >> A combination of "all categories are fuzzy" and "all models are wrong but some are useful"? Are you talking about my first paragraph or symbolic AI? >> The fallible sensors directly reporting readings from reality already has sufficient noise related issues. I assume here you are trying to say that human input is not reliable. I don't understand what's your approach with AI her…

I apologize for the unintended confusion. I don't find all expression safe in this context and have avoided some of it as well as the amount of work I could put into describing what amounts to a ~36 year life obsession for me. > Are you talking about my first paragraph or symbolic AI? In the link you provided and the second paragraph of your first reply you seem, to my reading, to suggest using a system to facilitate…

Thanks, that was much clearer. Well, there are indeed many options and paths we could take in the space, so good luck with whatever you end up trying. Only one final note: I'm a very secretive person myself, and even beyond that I understand your reticence to share more details about some of your specific ideas... but I think that sharing more openly would align better with that shift in the local maxima you aspire to achieve. For example, I'm sure at least some of us would be interested in reading a submission or blog post about many of these ideas.

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

#426

Post by sgk284 »

geitir wrote: post #309
sgk284 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just doing primary key lookups? If so, a new index won’t do much as Postgres already has you covered there. If you have any foreign key columns, add indexes on them. And if you’re doing any joins, make sure the criteria have indexes. Similarly, if you’re filtering on any of the nested JSON fields, index them directly. This alone may be sufficient for your perf problems. If it isn’t, then here’s some tips for…

Unrelated to post, but as you seem well informed in the field, would you agree that if a schema is not likely to change and is controlled as you put it, there is no reason to attempt to store that data as denormalized document? Or at least as you suggest if required for performance the data would still be stored denormalized and where needed materialized / document-ized? At my current company, there seems to be a bel…

> would you agree that if a schema is not likely to change and is controlled as you put it, there is no reason to attempt to store that data as denormalized document

As a general rule of thumb, yes. Starting with denormalization often opens you up to all sorts of data consistency issues and data anomalies.

I like how the first sentence of the Wikipedia page on denormalization frames it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormalization):

> Denormalization is a strategy used on a previously-normalized database to increase performance.

The nice thing about starting with a normalized schema and then materializing denormalized views from it is that you always have a reliable source of truth to fall back on (and you'll appreciate that, on a long enough timeline).

You also tend to get better data validation, reference consistency, type checking, and data compactness with a lot less effort. That is, it comes built into the DB rather than introducing some additional framework or serialization library into your application layer.

I guess it's worth noting that denormalized data and document-oriented data aren't strictly the same, but they tend to be used in similar contexts with similar patterns and trade-offs (you could, however, have normalized data stored as documents).

Typically I suggest you start by caching your API responses. Possibly breaking up one API response into multiple cache entries, along what would be document boundaries. Denormalized documents are, in a certain lens, basically cache entries with an infinite TTL... so it's good to just start by thinking of it as a cache. And if you give them a TTL, then at least when you get inconsistencies, or need to make a massive migration, you just have to wait a little bit and the data corrects itself for "free".

Also, there are really great horizontally scalable caching solutions out there and they have very simple interfaces.

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

#427

Post by berkeshire »

Context: Not from the investment banking or trading background. Have been an investor / trader with modest gains.

How does one solve for risk in the markets? As in, mathematically. How does one do short term predictions of prices, with a day or two as the prediction range, with a probability > 0.5.

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

#428

Post by red0point »

oebboe wrote: post #367
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?

Sure, how can I reach you?

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

#429

Post by peripitea »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #423

I'm not sure I'm close to solving it, but I have an approach that I'd like some feedback on. I have a corpus of text in many Indian languages, which i'd like to index and search. The twist is that I'd like to support searches in English. The problem is that there are many phonetic transliterations of the same word (e.g the Hindi word for law can either be written as "qanoon" or "kanun"), and traditional spelling corr…

I'm not sure I understand the problem specification. You want to be able to search "law", and find documents containing "qanoon" or "kanun", right? How does your proposed solution handle that? It seems like the approach with ML TL -> Lucene would still only find one of the two, unless your model is written to return a set of possible transliterations. Or are you saying your approach doesn't currently solve this part of the problem, and that's one of the things you'd like input on?

Is the corpus the only data you have, i.e. do you need to use it for training and validation as well?

In terms of the size of the data, if you want to store the corpus on the phone anyway, won't the index and model be relatively small in comparison?

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

#430

Post by jordwest »

flir wrote: post #325
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…

The people I want to talk to are on facebook groups (my hobbies seem to be "old people" hobbies). I think you're suffering from network effects. Sooooo..... StackOverflow solved it by starting with a vertical the founders had a lot of social juice in, and spreading in to other verticals. Possibly also by focusing very tightly on "questions and answers". So my suggestion is "overfocus". If the big platforms have a wea…

Great point about starting with a specific vertical. Creator communities (youtubers etc) is an area I had been thinking to focus on, though this space is mostly dominated by Discord at the moment.

> Centralised always wins

My dream isn’t necessarily to win in a financial/monopolistic sense, but rather to build a compelling enough alternative to the centralised systems that have lost their way thanks to incentives that aren’t aligned with the community.

Facebook, reddit, disqus all started out with good intentions to connect people, but have been slowly eroded by incentives to suck user attention.

So it may not the best business strategy, but I think such software should live or die on whether the community enjoys using it and is willing to (financially) support the continued existence, rather than how much attention can be siphoned into ads.

In other words, small niche communities where a few members don’t mind contributing financially rather than huge communities that rely on network effects and centralisation.

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