Distributed Proof of Personhood (proof of humanity)
Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
501–510 of 633 posts
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#502I 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
Just jumping on this thread to say that I'm an elementary school teacher by profession and geek by nature. I would love to connect with folks who are starting projects in this space and could use teacher input.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#503In working on a text/code generation system, similar to OpenAI gpt/codex it's a bit different in that it researches links via crawling and understands any linked images. Also different in that it has reasonable pricing and a free teir.
https://text-generator.io/blog/text-generator-now-researches...
It also does embeddings for text/images and code. The problem i suppose is general agi where you have unstructured input and unstructured output and you need to do a lot of research in the process of producing the output which one day may include training, using other web services/information retrieval etc.
Looking to expand the system to understand more and more unstructured inputs and be able to output more and more advanced outputs like images, audio, video, datasets etc.
I was using OpenAI a lot and realised it's going to be dang expensive which is why I started https://text-generator.io so more people can use it
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#504I'm working on taking the best tools from social networks, contacts app, and crms[0] to help you make the most of your relationships[1] all while protecting your privacy.
It's something a lot of folks struggle with yet it is a trait that is eminently learnable[2]!
[0]https://clay.earth [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/ [2]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616721663784...
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#505I started working on a WYSIWYG CMS Editor for Web-Applications and Websites. Based on my experiences, I think there is something missing in the market for content creators / editors for WebApps (with landing pages etc.) and websites. There are many headless CMSs available but many are lacking a simple editing experience. I want to make it easy for the developer to integrate it into a project (using React for example)…
Doesn't these content creators, by nature, collaborate on cloud application? I know native app can do that too, but I still feel people use web based app more in this area.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#506How to get over my mid-life crisis.
In the past 7 years from my 25, I figured out that there always be crisis .. at any age.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cart is way before the horse. Also grad students doing this type of work are absolutely not taking great care in thinking about these problems.
I fail to see how considering the impacts of a tool before building a tool is putting the cart before the horse. How is that not a necessary step in building a thing?
I hereby vote for the establishment of a Regulatory and Executive Committee to Understand and Reconsider Special Impacts On Nature.
Err, wait, ummm, it looks like we first need a R.E.C.U.R.S.I.O.N. to establish the R.E.C.U.R.S.I.O.N.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#508I’m working on making body doubling a more main stream approach to accomplishing everyday tasks. Body doubling is known within the ADHD community and entails performing a task in the presence of another. More details here: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/body-double-adhd It helps to engage motivation by using another person as the proxy. I wrote a bit about how I think it works here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog…
Wow that's nifty! Some ADHD friends of mine joke that it'd be awesome to have a ADHDer house cleaning or chores "swap" service. We suck at cleaning our own places but will spend hours cleaning a friends house.
I've never had luck actually doing a "lets get together and do X chore" event though. Well aside from homework and study sessions in university. It'd be awesome if this app helps with actually doing that for everyday life tasks.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#509Javascript and ORMs have a (fairly well-known) interesting set of problems: * There aren't many * Those that you can find, don't support Typescript, so it's all guesswork. * Don't have much (if any) support for related data queries So I've been working on a ORM for PostgreSQL and Typescript for a few months now in my spare time [0]. It's been probably one of the biggest, challenging, and interesting problems I have e…
I’m interested to hear what those PostgreSQL limitations are more specifically.
Postgres still doesn't support SQL:2011, and the temporal_table extension doesn't support the proper syntax, and is a bit jank to boot.
If you have any kind of complex DW or SCD needs Postgres is pretty much immediately out the window. I think MSSQL probably has the best support for that, unfortunately.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#510An amateur space telescope, I started it as a COVID lockdown hobby project. It’s like a much nerdier “build my own car” sort of project at this point. I’m trying to get it ready for when reusable launch vehicles lower the cost of launching to orbit to a suitable level it won’t bankrupt me. Surprisingly the most difficult thing is communicating to the ground. Not batteries, not imaging, not structural engineering… communication!
It’s an absolute nightmare of paperwork and massively expensive fees and hardware. Communication systems and related fees may end up being more than 50% of the entire cost, it used to be over 75% but I gave up and decided to just make the entire thing bigger and more expensive because of how ludicrous it seemed to build a $10k cubesat and spend $135k just to get a permit to communicate with it!
It’s been a fascinating and rewarding endeavour but don’t get me started on how much I hate radio regulations and export control (ITAR) … I’ve had multiple business ideas along the way from all this learning but have done nothing about them because I quickly realised that I’m in the rare realm of needing a legal-expertise cofounder due to how insane these regulations are. I’ve honestly been told by some companies that telling me how much something costs to buy is both a trade secret requiring an NDA and that I’ll need to submit appropriate ITAR paperwork before they can even send me the NDA because if other people knew how much it cost that would be materially aiding efforts to reverse engineer such devices in circumvention of export controls… this is the insane world of aerospace engineering outside of academic projects and big defence subcontractors.
Still working on it though… it’s not like I’m in a rush, launch costs won’t come down for a while, likely 5 years once a couple more fully reusable launchers are competing with SpaceX’s Starship. Plenty of time to find solutions to these kinds of problems, like how I have to use software defined radio to build my own GPS unit since all commercial GPS units have speed and altitude lock outs to prevent use in guided missiles and military jets.