Implement some existing c++ with gdnative.
Generate a planar graph, preferably without a Delaunay triangulation.
Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
71–80 of 633 posts
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#72Interactive extensible low level programming languages
no one is trying to do this, forth exists but its one of the only attempts that is successful and still its ugly as hell.
Sure you can use lisp to do everything but its horribly clunky when it comes to low level programming.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#73A 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.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
What's your point? The technology already exists and is being used.
Your name, password, and the names and addresses and phone numbers and emails of all your family members already exist and are being used. So, by your logic, you have no reason to share them to everyone?
The logic doesn’t hold up.
You can make the same argument for anything. It makes sense to think about the dangers, not pretend that bad logic is an excuse to do anything you want.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will answer your questions but first I want to show you something. It’s the link at the bottom. In the UK there’s something called IR35. Without getting into to much detail, the client will decide if you fall inside or outside. If you are inside or outside you will pay different amounts of tax. Not that long ago I was offered £1000 per day inside. That seemed like a really good rate to me. Or so I thought. In a mon…
I am not sure how the UK tax code works, or what I'm looking at here (the "inside" vs "outside" part is confusing). At a glance, it looks like it wants to tax you 46% of revenue (52% of profit) at £220,000/year if you're a contractor, which (it says) is the same as earning £180,100 as a regular employee. Those numbers don't seem particularly significant either way to me, coming from the US. Our tax brackets cap out a…
So, the reason I sent you that link is if you look at the numbers, that 21k per month pre tax turns into 8k cash in hand per month after tax.
That is nothing short of insane to me. That is almost 3 quarters of your money taken by the government. Maybe you can live with that. I can’t. It’s insane to me. I simply refuse to participate in that.
As for taxes, I get your point. Sounds good in theory. Until you realise people like me are not that uncommon. That 25% I still have a say on is going to go to my charity. A social change sort of charity. A charity aimed at offering educational alternatives to promising young leaders. The sort that will grow up to question the justice of your tax regime and advocate for it’s dismantling. And with a bit of luck and push from other rich people, give it a few decades and it will go away.
But to answer you:
1. 1% flat tax, applied to income for people and profit for businesses.
€1000 goes into your business -> you’re left with €990 -> you take them all out as dividends, you’re left with €980.1
This will provide an annual bulk income.
2. Flat transaction fee. Every time money changes hands, the government skims 0.1€ from it.
This will provide a steady income stream.
You buy a laptop, you pay €1000 for it, the vendor only gets €999.9 - This is not something operators worry about, this is done automatically by the banks.
But this won’t be enough to . Well, tough luck. Better start prioritising. Start by cutting foreign aid. Start by cutting aid to ngos shipping migrants from africa, start by cutting welfare to illegals, get rid of the useless government bureaucracy like “period dignity officers”, plenty of stuff to cut.
Make do with less, that’s what I would tell the government.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#76One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…
Don't you ever feel bad for not contributing to society? Living like that seems morally reprehensible to me.
Not even a moment.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#77I'm not as smart as the other folks in this thread, but I've been lucky enough to work on a few fun, if small, web projects...
One was an indoor web map built on an entirely open-source stack (QGIS and OpenLayers): https://map.fieldmuseum.org/ It was an interesting challenge because the open-source web mapping libraries (and many/most of the commercial ones too) were designed for outdoor use and didn't really account for indoor idiosyncrasies. Take rooms and doors, for example... while you can import vector SVGs geoJSONs to these mapping libraries, you can't easily indicate "this shape is solid except for these two doors" -- whether for visuals or for an eventual turn-by-turn routing/navigation layer. Another challenge was the concept of "floors", overlapped groups of geometry (walls, balconies, whatever) and points of interest that are mutually exclusive. We ended up having to trace floors against each other in QGIS (map editing software) and then adding state at the Javascript level to store each floor as a separate object to render or hide. Then there were a bunch of UX/UI tweaks we had to do, like how to draw arrows for Covid one-way flows, how zooming should work (we categorize POIs according to level of importance, then show/hide them at different zooms, and also dynamically scale fonts to ensure readability), which geometries to make clickable (a sidebar opens with pics and more details), how to hide easter eggs.
The whole thing was written as a vanilla JS single-page app tied to a headless CMS (Contentful at first, eventually DatoCMS) so that editors could easily change copy, graphics, etc. But editing geometries (the shapes and positions of things) still required QGIS knowledge or at least the ability to manually edit geoJSON files.
We launched this as a MVP with the intent of rapidly following up with additional features (blue-dot positioning, turn-by-turn routing, audio directions, a better codebase, etc.) At the end of the project we ended up open-sourcing it (after much begging and pleading with The Powers That Be), but then soon thereafter abandoned it altogether :( Just as well, really, because the code was really terrible -- I can say that with confidence because I wrote it, lol. But it's still an interesting problem space. As far as I know, there isn't a ready-built solution for this sort of stuff... especially not an open-source/source-available one. Some commercial solutions have limited indoor support, but as of our last evaluation (early 2021), none of them were especially powerful, elegant, or user-friendly. Hope that keeps evolving!
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Fast-forward to my current job, and we're now working on a similarly graphical frontend app. I now work for a solar company, and we're designing a map-like tool to help installers plot out the PV modules (the technical term for a single "solar panel") on their customers' roofs, which then enables historical monitoring of various metrics like power output, temperature, etc.
Aside from the graphical challenges (rendering React states to Canvas shapes), there were also some interesting frontend engineering challenges, like how to plot tens of thousands of points in a chart while allowing real-time scrubbing in a timeline, but where no two datapoints were ever at the same time, because the devices we were working with all communicated in a one-at-a-time queue.
Anyway, I won't get too much into the details here... nothing that exciting, just a lot of nuance. What we're building is like a super-simplified version of https://www.opensolar.com/3ddesign (which is awesome! check it out).
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But overall, I just love that I get to work on these sorts of fun apps instead of bog-standard blog pages or ecommerce sites. Even a few years ago, things like this would've been complex desktop apps with difficult lifecycles to manage... now they can be web apps that are updated multiple times a week and evergreen everywhere, to all our customers. Pretty cool stuff!
I feel very lucky to be in my line of work -- web dev for nonprofits and small/medium businesses in interesting spaces, who have challenges unique to their industries, not just "how do we optimize this database" or the such (though there is that too). It was easy enough to pick up these technologies and frameworks in just a few months or years. I'm very grateful that is a career option for people now... I'm a high school dropout who eventually went to a natural resources school, but couldn't find a job in that industry so picked this up instead. It's all entirely self-teachable (with tutorials and Stack, of course).
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
That's an excellent question. Another of my faves is "what are the worst consequences and how do we reduce the risk of a negative outcome? Is it possible to entirely eliminate issues responsibly?" The former tends to stop all progress, while the latter considers that negative outcomes are real, but that we can productively reduce risk. Kind of like how OpenAI removed racist, sexist, and other troubling images from th…
I like the motto “safety is our number three priority” but I also think that people sharing info about their danger-spraying project should take a moment to say a line or two about how they think about the issues. Instead of just ignoring them.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#79I'm going back to basics and learning to write a compiler in the dumbest way possible. I'm starting with a basic assignment (a = 3) and reverse engineering what it would take to turn that into a working executable. Then I'll add more features, lather, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping to eventually turn it into a series of blog posts so everyone can see just how little I remember from college.
Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
#80One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…
"A person after my own heart," I originally thought. I, too, enjoy reading HMRC technical guidance, although I haven't actually taken it to such extremes, instead focusing on genuine deductions few people tell you about (like annual medicals). Your post was entertaining, but there might be a fly in the ointment! Are you actually carrying on a trade? Your consulting work is trade, but there are rules around businesses…
Haha I must say, HMRC has got to be the most well documented jurisdiction I dealt with. I think you are right with HMRC. But I incorporated in one of the tax friendly countries in Eastern Europe. The way I understood the rule is, I only need to try to make an income. And I do. I have a paypall button. But, there’s no rule on the cost/income. I’m just spending money to try to make money, which is what every body does. I just happen to do it with less success.