Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by dennis_jeeves1 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 4:06 AM UTC

vivegi wrote: post #194

Working on a prototype for a thermoelectric generator. While the core generation module is a seebeck effect based solid-state off-the-shelf components, my focus is on optimizing the thermal gradient for voltage and current control and continuous operation (night and day). A few experiments planned around - design of heat absorbers and heat sinks - night and day operation using radiative cooling/paints & coatings

Mind putting some back of the envelope calculation on the minimum power that can easily be draw for a given area/volume without too much optimization?

(I understand that if the designed is refined it will significantly improve)

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

#522

Post by koeng » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 4:22 AM UTC

PontifexMinimus wrote: post #73

koeng wrote: post #6

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…

How will you prevent people from using this technology to create DIY pathogens? If the answer is "I won't" or "it'll be open source, I won't be able to", consider doing something less harmful instead.

How about “oligo pool synthesis chips” != “dna synthesis machines”

“Harmful” can also be seen the other way. From my view within the industry, it is harmful that the tech does not exist, and the idea of harmfulness is, largely, propaganda perpetuated by elites to maintain the status quo.

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

#523

Post by arionhardison » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 4:26 AM UTC

I am building a public health and wellness infrastructure for black men. Launching Nov 8.

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

#524

Post by koeng » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 4:29 AM UTC

natch wrote: post #28

koeng wrote: post #6

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…

Sounds fascinating, what could possibly go wrong? “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park).

Kind of an uncharitable quote, considering I have essays and presentations going back 8 years (and more recently) where I question potential harmfulness to the environment. I also previously worked for 3yr at a nonprofit specifically aimed at improving the world/society with biotech, where we considered these questions carefully and deeply.

In any case, blatant sarcasm is also out of the spirit of hackernew’s “ Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation”

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

#525

Post by evanlivingston » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 4:32 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #471

evanlivingston wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 saw someone posted a reactive database just now on HN. I can't believe they didn't think about what child pornographers might do with that. There is literally no discussion of it on their web site. How could it not be a necessary step in building such a thing. Perhaps part of the disconnect here is not realising how vast the applications are for synthesizing DNA oligos are. It's a very basic thing, and anybody can…

I mean, at what point do stop and ask yourself if the thing you're making is going to cause bad things to happen? Do we only consider that when the thing is really obviously a weapon and ignore all the other creations?

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

#526

Post by patmcc » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

aaronax wrote: post #383

makeworld wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look into coops.

Tessitura and NISC are two great examples of technology-centric co-ops. Technically a co-op is usually "member-owned" whereas they were talking about employee owned. A substantial difference in some ways but not in others.

Worker cooperatives/co-op is the most commonly used term for this type of structure, I think.

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

#527

Post by michaelbarton » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 4:44 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #483

michaelbarton wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds interesting. How do plan to fund that? 100mt a year of sequestration sounds like there would be a fair amount of costs and labour involved.

For the past year I've been paying the bills (this is hardly my first startup) but we're just starting to talk to investors to bring some more staff on and start scaling up. We only need a few million for this stage. There are people who pay for GHG removal and we have plans on how to expand that. We think it can be self-sustaining.

Sounds great! Glad you’re able to bootstrap it. I ask because I’ve looked into this myself.

The issue I see with carbon sequestration is how the unit economics add up. Whether the cost of raw materials, labour, facilities, and scaling R&D all add up. My sense is that the he price of carbon credits is still too low for this. Would be interested in hearing more about your ideas.

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

#528

Post by seb1204 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 4:52 AM UTC

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

Just yesterday I listened to a podcast about the Hacker School in Hamburg. Essentially introducing hacking to school kids to scho what it is all about. https://hacker-school.de/kurse/international/

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

#529

Post by mkaic » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 5:01 AM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #493

mkaic wrote: post #107

I'm currently working on tools for better latent space exploration in generative models. The latent space of Stable Diffusion for example, is incredibly rich, and the traditional txt2img and img2img pipelines for accessing it are only scratching the surface of what's possible. We're talking about billions of images compressed (lossily) into 4 GB — yet we're still using very basic interfaces for interacting with this…

Love this! How? Are there any exciting concepts or possibilities for supporting latent space exploration?

I'm no expert, but this paper[0] has piqued my interest recently. From what I can kind of piece together, it discusses treating the latent space as a manifold from differential geometry, and creates a Riemannian metric for measuring distance between points on that manifold in such a way that the "curvature" of the manifold represents the semantic density of the latent space. This makes traversing between two points in a smooth/logical fashion easy by following the geodesics of the manifold. I think. Maybe. I understand maybe about 10% of what I just said to be honest, and still have lots to learn, which is part of why I find it so exciting.

[0] https://openreview.net/pdf?id=SJzRZ-WCZ

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

#530

Post by largeluke » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 5:13 AM UTC

O__________O wrote: post #316

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not missing something. I just wanna see how far we can take this thing, you know? 4000 ELO seems within reach now. What about 5000, 6000 etc? Computer chess is essentially a sport unto itself at this point, beating humans is sort of uninteresting, though I'm sure grandmasters will always find uses for ever stronger engines. They're mainly used to study openings, and since analysing from the start of the game i…

Fair enough. As you likely know, ELO has no maximum upper limit and chess has 10^120 possible matches — so in theory maximum ELO for chess has a long way to go, assuming there is even one engine that keeps improving over time to beat its prior version. Huge aspect of performance is tied to availability of compute; as such, my understanding is that if quantum computers ever became mainstream, even a “dumb” algorithm u…

Actually Elo does hit a maximum, because a perfect player doesn't beat an imperfect player 100% of the time: sometimes an imperfect player gets lucky and plays a perfect game.

A number of people have made conjectures on the Elo of perfect chess play, using extrapolations from data how chess programs scale. I'm not sure what the latest analysis is (things may have changed with the strength of neural network chess), but iirc they usually estimate something like 1000 Elo over current programs.