84 ms·

Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

• pillefitz 4y ago
  A small webapp to allow for collaborative estimation of quantities and their distribution. It's the vehicle I use to learn serverless development, but also intend to replace the Excel Sheet I use to provide PMs with times estimates with.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  How to spend less time on Hacker News :-D
• danap 4y ago
  perpetual motion machine implemented with gravity and magnets
  • vfistri2 4y ago
    thats interresting I had some thoughts about ferrofluids and magnets as a way to build perpetual motion.
• throwawayacc2 4y ago
  One 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 added artistic production as a business code. Why artistic productions? Well, because it’s the most liberal business code for expenses. As a software company, I can expense travel for some things, the most useful for me being conferences. But that means I need to buy the conference ticket even if I’m not interested and can only expense accommodations for the duration of the conference. That’s good but a bit restrictive. Now, as a artistic production company, I’m not limited by that. As long as I can prove I traveled in order to produce, well, just about anything that can be construed as being art, I can expense travel and I can expense accommodations for as long as I need. You can’t rush art, you know how it is. So, obviously, first thing I did, I whipped up a blog, posted some random pictures every day and called it good. I’m not using company money to travel the world you see, I’m using company money in order to produce art. Haven’t paid a euro of my own money on accommodation or travel for close to a year now. And the best part, I get to deduce this from my profit. I love the tax system. I really do. But, doing this, I got curious. I thought, hey, why not make it better. So I thought let’s see what all the rage is with dalle and stable diffusion and all that. So, what I’m doing now is, I’m changing my approach. My art will no longer be just pictures taken quickly with my iphone. No no. I’m getting the picture and I’m sending it to an API I built. The API runs some computer vision, labelling what it sees, some classification, some stuff with the pic metadata, tries to put it all together and turns it into a description of the picture. The description of the picture I took is used as a prompt for stable diffusion. And that result ends up being the art. I’d like to thank of my art as a modern commentary on the age old “is art imitating life or is life imitating art?” - At least that’s what I told my accountant and he concerned, it would stand up in the case of an audit! So, yeah, tldr, I’m working on image to text and text to image to expense my nomad lifestyle on the company.
  • solardev 4y ago
    How much do you end up saving this way, through all that effort, rather than just paying the taxes?
    • throwawayacc2 4y ago
      Quite a bit actually ( for me at least ) seeing as there’s progressive taxation. I’d reckon at least 30k per year. Probably more. I take out only 11k or so per year from the company as personal income. That’s the tax free bracket. The rest I use is just expenses. And I pay myself minimum wage as well. Also tax free, but qualifies me for national insurance :D I love the tax system!
      • solardev 4y ago
        So you make enough and just don't really want to pay taxes, so it's a fun side hobby? Heh, that's such a foreign mentality to me, but to each their own. Do you think the tax money serves any societal good at all? Is it worth paying any tax or would you rather avoid all of it if you could?
        • throwawayacc2 4y ago
          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 month, 21 working days, that’s £21k per month, how much can taxes be right? Let’s call it £17k - I mean c’mon, £4k per month in taxes is already ludicrous. I couldn’t possibly be more. Right? Please go to the link and plug in £1000 per day. Look at what it says you get cash in hand at the end of the month and tell me, does that seem ok? Is that tax worth paying? https://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/insideir35contractorcalculator.aspx https://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/insideir35contractorc...
• zschuessler 4y ago
  I heard few song lines from a new artist I've discovered. It has me thinking on a problem I want solved. Although, I'm not actively working on it. Why aren't there more employee-owned companies? And I don't mean solely shareholder programs, I mean actually owned by every employee and they are paid dividends of profit after all planned R&D costs. Similar to the Alaska oil pipeline bonus. Even interns. All studies show that the companies structured this way that do exist (they seem few) have much higher output, quality, and happiness among staff. After more research I found that this exists: https://esca.us/ https://esca.us/ - Wawa is a member, pretty cool. Talking more to others about the idea I've heard interesting stories. Some machine tooling shops have an actual employee-owned setup. All employees are incentivized to make every product output great and keep profits high, because they all share the profits. Anyway, I'm not actively working on this. But wanting to shape this idea more in the future. It feels like it could help the current state of America. But perhaps I'm too hopeful and naive :-) --- Hobo Johnson - My Therapist: "The idea's about equity, it's about wealth Most think that it's dumb, you should think for yourself If I buy a pizza place that makes a definite profit Yeah, let's say yearly, the owners make $100,000 off it And if I buy this pizza place for, let's say, $300k And when the workers recoup in three years, I'll sign it over that day And wouldn't everybody not see They should buy their pies from me? You'd rather have a boss When you can work democratically?" --- "Incentives are the strongest force in the world. They explain why good people do awful things, why smart people do stupid things, and why ordinary people do amazing things." - Quote I have pinned from @morganhousel
  • solardev 4y ago
    There are some employee owned cooperatives, including a few in tech I've seen, but I think they're a lot harder to raise capital for (and thus a lot harder to grow) than either public companies or member owned cooperatives. How do you fundraise outside of the small pool of employee-owners?
    • elil17 4y ago
      The US Small Business Administration actually offers small business loans to groups of employees trying to get a controlling share of their companies. However, the program is pretty hard to use (like every other government program). https://www.sba.gov/brand/assets/sba/sba-lenders/ESOP_Borrower_Fact_Sheet.pdf https://www.sba.gov/brand/assets/sba/sba-lenders/ESOP_Borrow... There's actually a bill in congress right now that would, among other things, provide technical assistance and outreach for employees who might be able to use the program: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4141/text?r=2&s=1 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4141...
• koeng 4y ago
  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 than $1000 and enable anyone to be able to do so. While I’m handling the other bits elsewhere, DNA synthesis is a key technology primed for open source disruption.
  • iron2disulfide 4y ago
    (Digital) chip designer here: this is super cool. What tech node are you targeting? Have you checked out any of the free open-source tools and PDK from Skywater, Google, eFabless and co?
    • koeng 4y ago
      I'm planning on using the chip ignite program! They can build the chip I need - the harder bit is figuring out the coatings needed (sputter coating post-processing is needed to be compatible with the chemistry). I am pretty new to chip design but know the DNA space quite well - I would love to do a call, if possible, because I have lots of noob questions about chip design and chip design tools. Happy to share anything about the biological side in exchange!
  • peteradio 4y ago
  • LunarCamper 4y ago
    Is there a page, blog, twitter account, newsletter, Github repo or anything to follow this? I have no knowledge in this space so I'm of no help, but I'm very interested in the prospect of this stuff becoming more accessible!
    • dialdial 4y ago
      Likewise, piggybacking!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• travisjungroth 4y ago
  I’m working on the expert elicitation of priors. We’re making web UIs to better capture human judgement, especially for forecasting. I work at a data driven company, sometimes I think a bit too data driven. I want to capture more intuition for our systems in a rigorous way. It’s incredibly interesting and very niche. There are a handful of academic papers out there. I think it will be a big deal in the next 10 years.
  • idreyn 4y ago
    You might be interested in the S-process: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWivz6KidkI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWivz6KidkI
    • travisjungroth 4y ago
      That is very interesting, thank you!
  • solardev 4y ago
    What is an expert elicitation of priors? Sounds like something the FBI would do when interrogating an old timey train robber or something.
    • travisjungroth 4y ago
      “Priors” in the “Bayesian priors” sense. Beliefs represented as probabilities. “Expert” is that you’re asking people who should know what they’re talking about, not random laypeople. “Elicitation” is that there’s a whole process to it. You don’t just ask “What are the odds this movie will do $100 million in domestic box office in its first month?”. You ask lots of smaller questions and use visuals to build up an answer. I also like how “expert elicitation” sounds like we should be doing a good job eliciting!
  • konradh 4y ago
    What angle are you tackling this from? People submitting maximally informative priors and you do some model selection on the effectiveness of the prior?
• tmilard 4y ago
  Working on Distance-immersion Example: click here (twice) https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01 https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01 Ps : I knew today's Standard technology was 360°photos. But I was convinced this was not an immersive enough technology. Immersion, for me, should feel more like a video game FPS. So I gave it a try: - A No-Coding Editor, just photos as input, plus 20 minutes of clicks and you have your immersion. Solo project
• dbingham 4y ago
  Academic and Scientific publishing. It's the primary source material of human knowledge. It should be completely open and accessible to everyone with no barriers to access the literature or to add to the literature. The structure it currently takes - academic journals - made perfect sense in the 1600s when that structure was developed, and it continued to work reasonably well for distributing academic results up into the early 1900s. But then it got privatized. Now there are tens of thousands of academic journals, 80% of them charge a fee for access, and most of the remainder charge a fee to publish. Often thousands of dollars. Given that science works in the aggregate and you can't know if you have the real answer to your question until you've accessed all of the literature on the topic, this structure is now making it impossible for people not in the institution to even figure out what we know on a topic. And hard even for people in the institution. The ultimate decider of policy in a democracy is the average citizen. The people who decide our government policy don't have access to the primary source material of science. In the US, a lot of really important policy is set at the municipal level (city, county), and in that case the people actually writing and implementing the policy also don't have access. If we can develop a web platform that does all the journals do (match papers to qualified reviewers, maintain literature integrity by filtering out bad work, and dole out reputation), then I think it's possible we could draw publishing out of the journals and into the open where it belongs. I've got an idea for a platform that does all that by crowdsourcing it (the journals are already crowdsourcing it - just manually using an editor). It's basically Github+StackExchange for academic publishing. It works by tying the reputation system to academic fields, so papers are tagged with fields and then reputation is gained and lost in those fields. I'm building it now, I'm month or two out from beginning a closed beta. (Aiming for end of October, beginning of November.) I wrote up a detailed description here: https://blog.peer-review.io/we-might-have-a-way-to-fix-scientific-publishing https://blog.peer-review.io/we-might-have-a-way-to-fix-scien...
  • solardev 4y ago
    Important work! Thanks for trying to do something about it.
  • mirror_neuron 4y ago
    If you haven’t heard of it, you may be interested in openreview.net They operate mostly in the computer science academic community, last time I checked.
• qsort 4y ago
  I'm on a (currently very experimental) project where we're trying to answer natural-language queries using data from an arbitrary database (given hypotheses on the schema). The natural-language plaintext is fed into a language model that annotates it. That output is converted into an intermediate representation based on relational algebra, which we manipulate and finally compile to SQL. It's probably not scientifically groundbreaking, but there are a lot of interesting technical bits along the way, at least for me.
  • solardev 4y ago
    Kinda like Wolfram Alpha?
    • qsort 4y ago
      Sort of a Wolfram Alpha that hooks up to your own SQL DB, yeah.
  • omeysalvi 4y ago
    Are you working on the Yale Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Challenge? Are you already on the leaderboard? The topic has always fascinated me and got me learning natural language processing to understand how it works.
    • qsort 4y ago
      We are going for a narrower scope than that. We are working with stricter restrictions on the database schema, where you are only allowed to join on synthetic keys and there is an enforced distinction between measures and dimension attributes. On the other hand we are aiming for reasonable response times on large scale datasets.
  • feoren 4y ago
    So you're making big assumptions that the database's table names map to important concepts in the user's vocabulary, and that a thorough understanding of the data model can be ascertained from the schema alone? To be brutally honest: that's a silly assumption and likely a dead-end. (One thing I want to emphasize here is how abysmally, unbelievably, depressingly god-awful the vast majority of database schemas are.) You wouldn't expect any user-friendly feature to be automatically stamped on top of a database without the involvement of a programmer, and this is no different. You need some sort of descriptive layer between the database and the query engine (or beside it, helping out) that programmers are involved in building. AI is not going to magically solve this problem for you. Figure out what you need described to you and turn that into a meta language that application developers can write to help your engine out. Frankly I'm wary of any direct link between the user and the database. How do you deal with constraints like "users should only be able to see data associated with their organization in tables X, Y, and Z" if the programmer doesn't tell you? How could you possibly prevent exploits and security problems? Another reason to focus on querying an intermediate layer or relying on a programmer-provided description of what's available. (Or am I assuming way too much, and "hypotheses on the schema" is already this meta-language?)
• acdw 4y ago
  I'm writing an ed clone in scheme. I hope to have autoindentation since that's about the only thing I miss with ed.
• nmaleki 4y ago
  I'm working on the incompleteness theorems, human-centered artificial intelligence, infinite spatial systems, and more https://recursion.is https://recursion.is https://notes.recursion.is https://notes.recursion.is https://recursion.is/youtube https://recursion.is/youtube
• throwaway0asd 4y ago
  Decentralization and bidirectional real-time communications. I don't mean blockchain. I mean no servers with end-to-end encryption, no third parties of any kind.
  • jpm_sd 4y ago
    How do endpoints find each other?
    • throwawaymaths 4y ago
      If you can tolerate transient centralization, webrtc might be a good choice and it's very likely if you are skilled at it and thought hard about the trust model you could figure out how to multihome webrtc, which would re-decentralize it.
    • throwaway0asd 4y ago
      That is a different but very real problem. Without consideration for mobile where IPs rapidly change currently it’s based upon IP swapping and I recently added a convention to auto-update addresses when a node makes a connection to other trusted nodes. Later I envision an optional opt-in service that resolves node identity to IP address. Something like DNS but for hashes instead of domains. Currently I am focused on updating a bunch of test automation and then I want to turn my attention to adding a command shell to the application GUI, which would solve for SSH into remote personal devices in your node list.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    I noticed that jitsi supports peer to peer for one on one video conversations. I liked the idea of that. Probably a very small stepping stone towards your goal.
• jwarden 4y ago
  I'm working on applying game theory to the design of social media algorithms in order to help curb the spread of misinformation. https://deliberati.io/give-truth-the-advantage/ https://deliberati.io/give-truth-the-advantage/
  • jfim 4y ago
    That's a really cool project, best of luck!
    • makk 4y ago
      Agreed, I’m excited to see where this may go.
  • mistermann 4y ago
    You seem rather clever!
• smcn 4y ago
  High level: finding the next big meme stocks (which morphed into finding any stock that could increase a lot) I was pretty late to GME, despite having been on Reddit for a good few years. I started researching what had happened, and where the conversations were taking place just trying to understand where to place myself to be a part of the next one. I ended up checking out the typical r/WallStreeBets and the other big trading subreddits but I always felt that I'd need to devote 100% of my time to Reddit in order to capitalise on any of the information. So I built a scraper to do the heavy lifting for me. That worked well. Then I started trying to find ways to identify the good stocks from the bad. That worked even better. So I turned it loose onto many different social media platforms where people discuss trading. It worked well enough that I ended up quitting my job to develop it and trade full time. There are still improvements that I'm working on but I think that'll always be the case. A great proof of concept of this is BBBY last month. Out of nowhere it went from ~$5 to $30. There was no real business reason for this, just rumour and speculation. It won't be the last. I don't know if links are allowed but if you want to follow along, it's https://feetr.io https://feetr.io (unfortunately not accepting any more beta users currently, but all data is posted to Twitter until we launch). There's also a leaderboard at https://feetr.io/leaderboard https://feetr.io/leaderboard if you're only interested in the big numbers. The tech stack is 100% lisp. I use CCL locally, SBCL on AWS. Also, hunchentoot will power the backend when it launches. I mention that because a lot of people have this fear that hunchentoot is slow or something but in my case it's pretty rapid. Of course, make sure you're writing fast code, but it's not the bottleneck that I think people think it is.
  • aklemm 4y ago
    Why does this feel like a good use of skills and time to you? I ask because to my mind it feels like a value scraper rather than a value maker, so I'm genuinely curious.
    • smcn 4y ago
      It was earning me a lot more money than a salaried position.
      • deleted 4y ago
• tiniuclx 4y ago
  Deploying wireless networks within legacy building automation systems. Most of these systems communicate through twisted wire pairs routed through the walls - tearing the walls down and upgrading this technology is very expensive and inconvenient. However, wireless Thread-based IPv6 networks can be installed fairly easily and take advantage of the internet technology that's already there, and also interoperate with the existing kit through e.g. a gateway device.
• sandreas 4y ago
  I'm currently working on a file indexer for my pet project tonehub[1] (an audio API like navidrome or audiobookshelf). I thought this is gonna be an easy task, but after running into a lot of problems it turned out that this is indeed an interesting problem to solve. Just to name a few problems I ran into: - Performance: How to scan files as fast as possible? - Tag-Storage: How to store audio tags as generic as possible? - File-Watchers: How to prevent fully indexing the filesystem over and over again and only react to changes? - File-Sources: How to manage multiple file scanners as efficient as possible? - Cancellation: How to cancel running tasks, when File-Sources are removed? - Moved files: How to not lose all customized information (rating, playlists, playcount, etc.) when a file gets moved to another place? - and many more :-) [1] https://github.com/sandreas/tonehub https://github.com/sandreas/tonehub
  • samsquire 4y ago
    You might find the idea of "cancellation trees" useful. Create a hierarchy of loop data structure of loop iterating variable and loop limit then cancelling any part of the tree cancels its children. If you have a worker thread that has a hot loop that checks a pthread structure as its limit. You can then send a virtual interrupt to it, or preempt it from running further by setting the loop to its limit. You can see my C, Java and Rust code of this in this repository: https://github.com/samsquire/preemptible-thread https://github.com/samsquire/preemptible-thread It can be used to create extremely responsive software without slowing down the system with cancellation checks. https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#120-cancellation-trees https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#120-cancellation-trees https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#99-register-loop https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#99-register-loop
    • sandreas 4y ago
      Thank you. This is indeed interesting... Currently, I use the `CancellationTokenSource` / `Task` concept of C# and I'm pretty happy with it, but this is definitely worth reading.
      • samsquire 4y ago
• hk__2 4y ago
  I’ve been learning Italian for a few years and one thing that’s frustating is searching for words I don’t know. Italy has a lot of local languages/dialects that influence regional variants of Italian; it’s common to see dialectal words enter the mainstream Italian language. The largest dictionary, Treccani, is very good but often misses words that are either too recent / vulgar / dialectal. There are various other big dictionaries and websites specific to different dialects, but I don’t want to have to search on each of them by hand. I’m currently working on a meta-dictionary, which is a fancy name for unique search engine for all the dictionaries I can find out there. It’s not finished but so far it works great; I use it almost daily. I started with Phoenix (Elixir framework) and Svelte to learn them but I ditched Phoenix because it was a hell to work with how implicit things are there (no import; just assume that variable is defined "somewhere") and went back to a very basic Python Flask app that serves an API for Svelte. Nothing very fancy on the tech side but it’s interesting to deep dive in the languages of Italy and learn a lot of things about both Italy and linguistics at the same time.
  • veqq 4y ago
    wiktionary
    • Sugimot0 4y ago
      On the commandline using sdcv[0] with a generate stardict from wiktionary[1] is a great combo. https://github.com/Dushistov/sdcv https://github.com/Dushistov/sdcv https://github.com/BoboTiG/ebook-reader-dict https://github.com/BoboTiG/ebook-reader-dict
    • hk__2 4y ago
      Yes, but it’s not sufficient. It has ~50k words in Italian, which is half of what’s in Treccani (~115k) or De Mauro (~120k). Also, definitions are often of much better quality in the Treccani dictionary.
  • riizade 4y ago
    I've been burned by this in the past (also for Italian, but also Japanese). Do you find this issue persists even if you attempt to search the Italian internet for definitions/usage examples in Italian? Or is this problem specific to finding information in English about Italian terms? The difference here is between an n problem and an n^2 problem (if the site expands and wants to accumulate definitions from each language/dialect to ~several supported major languages, for example). Anecdotally, I've found that once I got to the point where I could read Italian well enough to use Italian dictionaries when I don't understand the word, finding the information on the Italian internet has been much easier. Of course, certainly there have been dialect words and slang I haven't found (which I attribute to some of the words being in a dialect mostly spoken by older Italians who don't use the internet).
• andrewallbright 4y ago
  Writing automated tests for video games. Why is it interesting to me? I started to teach myself unity in December 2021. I've personally experienced benefits to writing automated tests and using CICD; therefore, I thought it would be fun to learn about writing tests for a 3D based software. It will be different from the web/CLI based stuff I usually write. So, it turns out that the video game community (or at least the online circles I frequent) are extremely against the idea of writing automated testing for various reasons. This translates into there effectively being a non-existent pedagogy around teaching how to write tests for 3D based software. Content is scarce, and the content you do find is produced by people who obviously don't write automated tests. So, for me I've hit the books to arbitrage & translate techniques and philosophies into this "untapped" domain. It's interesting because I've figured out tips & tricks that I'd consider low hanging fruit... For example, if you place a "test" camera in the test case, you can actually see what's going on in the test when it's executed. Or how important it is to clean up every created game object in your test after each test; if done right, you can keep your SUT at origin (0,0,0). Or the importance of "test prefabs" who are effectively mocks of other "real" prefabs... One innovation that I would like to use/build that I truly consider (((revolutionary))) is this: I want the test cases I write to also automatically (or when tagged with a certain C# attribute) generate the same game objects in a "exploratory(manual) test scene." I think this innovation is the "killer app" that will completely and totally sell the value proposition of automated tests to those opposed. If you decide to build this, please also publish it on openupm and reach out to me. I have plenty of other thoughts and ideas on this space. I love talking about automated testing; it feels like a very futuristic programmer practice. I hope this post demonstrates why this work and space is so interesting.
  • cpeterso 4y ago
    I worked at an MMO game company and the only testing we had was manual QA for functional testing and bot clients for server stress testing. Not a great environment for building quality software. (Our max server uptime was about 24 hours.) The client had a secret level with all game objects for testing and debugging. But reading your post makes me see that we didn’t think ahead far enough: the secret level could have been the foundation for automated unit testing game objects and battling characters. I haven’t watched them yet, but I added these relevant videos to my YouTube backlog just this week: * Automated Testing of Gameplay Features in 'Sea of Thieves' (GDC 2019): https://youtu.be/X673tOi8pU8 https://youtu.be/X673tOi8pU8 * Taking CI and automated testing seriously (2018): https://youtu.be/YGIvWT-NBHk https://youtu.be/YGIvWT-NBHk
• ultra_nick 4y ago
  We're trying to automate tutoring. As a college student, I spent a lot of time trying to fill knowledge gaps with textbooks, Google, or other students. Now, we're trying to provide a streamlined and customized AI Tutor service to help everyone learn faster. It's a lot more technically challenging than we thought. For example, what's the best way to statistically guage a student's knowledge level? How do we recognize when an ngram counts as a new concept? We haven't launched publically yet, but we have a LinkedIn page of you'd like to see when we do. https://www.linkedin.com/company/conceptionary/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/conceptionary/
  • tdekken 4y ago
    Hi ultra_nick, >> trying to automate tutoring. >> what's the best way to statistically guage a student's knowledge level? As you have probably already discovered, there is quite a bit of research in this area :). If anyone else is interested, you can search Google Scholar for "deep knowledge tracing", "bayesian knowledge tracing", "performance factor analysis", "knowledge space theory", "intelligent tutoring systems", and "item response theory". Some intelligent tutoring systems include ALEKS, Squirrel Ai, and Riiid.
• zciwor 4y ago
  My sister works as a veterinarian and is experiencing some serious burnout from her current practice (a subsidiary of a larger corporation). I guess it's pretty common practice for corporations or private equity to snatch up smaller independent practices and then run them like a sweat shop. Her current CEO's resume is a list of Starbucks, Walmart, and a few other corporate roles that are totally unrelated to the medical industry. We're tinkering with a platform that can somehow disrupt this cycle and add some transparency to the practice structure for the would-be employee. The current form is kind of a niche Glassdoor, or we've been thinking of it as the "online dating between veterinarians & practices." Still playing with the concept. Anyone have any thoughts on how to take out these massive PE firms that are plaguing the Vet Med industry? Here's some more info on the problem: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/06/ftc-acts-protect-pet-owners-private-equity-firms-anticompetitive-acquisition-veterinary-services https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/06/...
  • ultra_nick 4y ago
    My wife and I are suffering personally from this. I'll help for free. I'm convinced Vetmed will follow human medicine's history. Currently, the future of human medicine is small clinic subscription medicine without insurance. Apps like Roo could help with temporary staffing issues. Let's talk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholascgilpin https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholascgilpin
    • zciwor 4y ago
      Connected via LinkedIn. Excited to talk!
  • w10-1 4y ago
    What's wrong with opening your own practice? Investors can only invest in scalable, replicable businesses. Veterinary practices are intensely personal, often specialize in different species and breeds, and can develop unique experimental treatments. The cost of labor is ridiculously cheap (people become Vet Tech's for love, not money), and buildings need not be in commercial centers, so capital costs are minimal. Honestly, veterinarians are really in the best possible profession for maintaining independent practices. If they can't resist investor takeover, who can?
• anthonyhn 4y ago
  I'm trying to improve my search results by building my own Search Engine. Over the past couple of years, the popular search engines haven't given me great results, and I've had to use a series of different engines, search operators, and dorks to prod out the search results I'm looking for, with mixed success. The front ends have also become a bit too feature rich for my use cases; I prefer a minimal front end with just search results, but most front ends have links to news, videos, drop downs, cards, cookie banners, SEO spam, and have too much javascript. Too much time spent loading and rendering the page, and too many requests, in my opinion. Instead, my search engine only take 1 HTTP request per search result page and is only a few KB in size. Right now this project is still in the early stages, and mostly proxies bing's api with some minor adjustments, but if anyone is interested in testing it out here is the link to the search engine [0] and a link to the blog with an RSS feed to follow future updates [1]. [0] https://simplesearch.org https://simplesearch.org [1] https://simplesearch.org/blog.html https://simplesearch.org/blog.html
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Are you trying to objectively measure your search engine vs others and if so, how? (And yes, realize yours is currently basically just custom version of Bing.)
• didgetmaster 4y ago
  A new kind of Key/Value store. In this architecture, keys and values are stored within two separate 'data objects' which are linked together. One holds all the unique values along with their reference counts, the other contains all the keys and links to their mapped values. The architecture allows any value to be mapped to one or more keys and any key to be mapped to one or more values (unless an attribute on the data object prevents it). These KV stores can be used to attach tags to other objects. They can be used to form columns in relational tables (i.e. a columnar store). It can be used to create indexes into file contents. Each object is designed for parallel access by multiple threads. Only a single block needs to be locked to update any value or key so multiple writes can occur at the same time. The data in each object is organized to find values or keys without inspecting every block. It is very fast and allows both OLTP and OLAP operations on the same data set. So far, I have used them to attach tags to millions of files and do searches. I have created relational tables that I can query much faster than the same table in Postgres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVICKCkWMZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVICKCkWMZE). I have created 3D relational tables that can be queried the same way 2D tables have traditionally been queried (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXqvWMmoL1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXqvWMmoL1M). The software is currently in an open beta and anyone can download and try it out on their own data set. https://www.Didgets.com https://www.Didgets.com
  • rileyphone 4y ago
    Sounds kinda like tuplespaces/Linda (which I think are very good, largely unpursued ideas).
    • didgetmaster 4y ago
      It might have some things in common. In my case, the objects are persistent and can be read to and written from disk with ease. The relationship between keys and values can be 1:1, 1:many, many:1, or many:many. If the KV store is a 'state' column in a DB table of US customer addresses for example, the number of unique values is limited to 50 (if you ignore D.C., Puerto Rico, etc.). The table might have 100M customers, each mapped to at least one state. Each state (except less populated ones like Wyoming) might have millions of rows mapped to it. Many customers might have addresses in more than one state. The system has to do things like: "Find every key mapped to a state that starts with the letter 'M'" or "Find every value that is mapped to this set of keys". These are the kinds of things a normal SQL query has to do.
• jokoon 4y ago
  Implement some existing c++ with gdnative. Generate a planar graph, preferably without a Delaunay triangulation.
• ArtixFox 4y ago
  Interactive 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.
• solardev 4y ago
  I'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/ 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! ----------- 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 https://www.opensolar.com/3ddesign (which is awesome! check it out). --------- 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).
• PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  I'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.
  • fikama 4y ago
    I like it so much, reading your comment make exited to reading your blogpost. In moments like this I wish there was sth in hacker news that would allow tracking progress of e.g. your project. In twitter you can just follow people, reddit has remindme thing.
    • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
      If you're interested, I created a substack I'll be publishing the first few posts to. You should be able to subscribe there. https://painfullynormal.substack.com/ https://painfullynormal.substack.com/
  • fady123 4y ago
    I am not a computer science graduate and have always been fascinated by programming languages and how they work. i am currently reading a book called crafting interpreters (https://craftinginterpreters.com https://craftinginterpreters.com) which i think is a very good introduction to the topic plus it's very practical without getting too deep into theory.
    • creativemonkeys 4y ago
      I've built a C compiler and have read the dragon book. I wish I read Crafting Interpreters before reading Compilers by Aho. It's good, and there's no nonsense. The author knows what he's talking about. Plus it's free to read online. 10/10 would recommend.
  • 11235813213455 4y ago
• ivanmontillam 4y ago
  I track parallel currency exchange market rates and provide usage-based API. It's like oil; many sub-products can be made from this. For starters, many of them: - Currency exchange basic calculator. - Commissions calculator (many exchanges claim to be "no commissions," but you pay a lot in exchange rate flexibility as well)[0] - Some financial institutions need to track economic indicators... I have that data. - Integration with CRMs, to issue correct quotes using parallel exchange rates. - Integration with ERPs, for whatever you use ERPs. - etc. etc. etc. EDIT: Clarity. -- [0]: https://www.ivanmontilla.com/blog/how-do-zero-commissions-currency-exchanges-work https://www.ivanmontilla.com/blog/how-do-zero-commissions-cu...
• jasfi 4y ago
  I've been steadily working on an automated trading system in Nim, currently for Binance only. This is a very difficult problem, to trade successfully based on rules. But it's also very interesting.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• methodical 4y ago
  Working on building a much simplified personal budgeting application. Been done to death, but usually not very well. What I'm making will put the simple and most straightforward aspects of budgeting front and center, and not try to boil the ocean with features. Mint is so convoluted now with all their credit and loan features that it no longer is useful for its actual purpose of budgeting.
  • 5xpB7n8tdbtoP 4y ago
    A simple spreadsheet has been the perfect solution for me past few years.
    • methodical 4y ago
      That was the route that I had been using, but found it difficult to manage all of the relations between the different accounts via formulas.
  • makk 4y ago
    I hear you. Are there parts of existing budgeting applications that you feel are done well? What are they?
    • methodical 4y ago
      Personally, at least among the apps I have used, no, I don't think any parts of existing apps are done well. I think there are a lot of existing applications which /do/ a lot, Mint, YNAB, EveryDollar, etc., etc. But the core budgeting/transaction aspect of them is always just the same thing, and instead of fleshing that particular aspect out, they branch out into investment management, credit building, loan/credit card recommendations. All important things, given, but the end result is a weaker product which does a lot okay but nothing great. The one exception is actual budget's (https://actualbudget.com/ https://actualbudget.com/) reporting. Really big fan of their reporting feature, as well as their FOSS approach.
• dr_dshiv 4y ago
  1. Learning systems for patients with cognitive decline 2. AI writing tutors for middle schoolers 3. Paper-digital integration to support equitable education in India 4. Systematic review of resonance in human interactions 5. Computational models of beauty 6. Generating new Socratic dialogues by fine-tuning GPT3 with the complete works of Plato 7. Promoting ADD as a valid lifestyle choice
• synu 4y ago
  I am working on video, but specifically trying to make it easier for anyone to “direct” their own content creatively without having to know all the technical skills for editing. Near to mid term is to try to use AI tech to enable this, though there’s actually a lot you can do even without that. My background is in developer tools (I was product director for CI/CD at GitLab) and so I am also trying to bring in the best from that experience around how to make hard stuff easy and difficult stuff at least possible. I suspect there will be a lot of companies in the near future that make AI models with permissive licenses easier to use, along different niches (like I am doing for video). It is a really promising area and picking a niche helps with papering over the challenges with general models.
• marginalia_nu 4y ago
  As always working on search.marginalia.nu. Search itself is a fractal of interesting problems. Haven't had much time to write about it lately, but I've pretty much doubled the size of the index and re-written a lot of the query logic to make it much better, faster, and more accurate. Will do a write-up eventually, since it may be relatively explainable without getting too into the weeds that the audience dwindles entirely. I keep having breakthroughs that make it in one way or another better, but as soon as I do I find something new that could be improved. Kinda bonkers it's been possible to build this alone and run the entire thing on what amounts to a souped up PC :P
  • potamic 4y ago
    How big is your index and how many sites do you cover?
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      1 million websites, a bit above 60 million documents in the index; the crawl is a couple of hundred million but a lot of it gets filtered out for various reasons. The crawler itself is aware of 470 million URLs. I've actually had it up to 50 million before, but that was a lot noisier data with fewer keywords per document. The current 60 million is significantly "bigger" than the old 50 million. Index size is not actually a great metric for how comprehensive a search engine is. A small index with good signal-to-noise ratio is much more useful than a large one where 95% is chaff. 100 million is my current goal. I think that's about what's doable on my current hardware. It also gets increasingly unwieldy to deal with the data. I've already got processes that require several days non-stop computation.
      • potamic 4y ago
        For sure, a large index by itself doesn't mean anything. I was more curious about the size on disk and how you manage it on a single machine. Also curious now, why you say half a 470m URLs? :)
        • 4y ago
• mistermann 4y ago
  How does reality work? How could it be changed in a substantial, positive, intentional way, ideally in a surprisingly short time frame?
  • makk 4y ago
    Im genuinely interested in this. Which aspect of reality? And when you say “positive”, from whose perspective or within which frame are you defining it?
    • O__________O 4y ago
      OP’s HN comments likely have examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mistermann https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mistermann
    • mistermann 4y ago
      > Which aspect of reality? All aspects. Reality itself. > And when you say “positive”, from whose perspective or within which frame are you defining it? All of them. Reality itself.
• needz 4y ago
  Professionally, I'm working on the frontend of a radio frequency propagation simulator for 3D "digital twins" of cities/regions. This uses ImGui under the hood, but is wrapped by Python. It's a bit of a pain, but I came up with a class that allows the UI to be composed in a manner more akin to React Components. For fun, I just implemented a finite-state machine for a videogame I'm working on in Rust. It's used to swap out sprite animations depending on the state of its parent entity. I'm glad to be solving problems I'd never come across in my normal line of work.
• abathur 4y ago
  Flipping back between ~2: - A tool for resolving external executables and sourceables in Shell scripts to absolute paths (and erroring when they aren't found). This is mainly to make it possible to package Shell with Nix in a way that they don't depend on all of their dependencies being in the environment. The top level of this is ~easy enough, but identifying executables in the arguments to other commands is significantly harder. So, much of the focus is on triaging executables to flag those most likely to exec, coming up with human/automated processes for triaging the source of those executables to confirm, finding a good way to express complex nonstandard CLI syntax for parsing (in a way that's humane enough to be maintainable and ~contributable), etc. - A toolchain for single-sourcing documentation in order to generate idiomatic markup for multiple output languages with different whitespace semantics. Because it's really hard to get good idiomatic format conversions out of largely presentational source such as markdown, this includes a flexible language with DIY semantics. The entire toolchain does something a bit like what you'd try to accomplish with j2cli, some yaml, some jinja templates (and probably some python plugins, if you're trying to do anything complex) with more precise whitespace control. Still very rough/early, but glad I finally bit the bullet and started on it.
• mkaic 4y ago
  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 neurally compressed data structure. I'm working on creating other ways to explore latent spaces like this. My current project is just to dip my toes in the water, and it's an animated music video generator built with Stable Diffusion. I hope to show it off here on HN in the near future.
  • dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Love this! How? Are there any exciting concepts or possibilities for supporting latent space exploration?
    • mkaic 4y ago
      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 https://openreview.net/pdf?id=SJzRZ-WCZ
• sailorganymede 4y ago
  Not anything interesting because I failed in my interesting endeavour! Was trying to replicate methods from some papers and couldn’t get it to work. Seemed promising but alas. Now I’m just recovering from all that jazz.
• flutas 4y ago
  Working on (actually just got my v1 up last night) a price monitoring tool for a bunch of local stores. Trying to prove they are price fixing.
  • JohnCurran 4y ago
    Please please please publish the results of what you find!
    • flutas 4y ago
      I'm hopeful that I can turn it into a public facing dashboard that others can see. It covers the entire state I live in, monitoring 32 stores and about 8k products right now. Already seeing some weird stuff in the data, like a product that changes price every 30 minutes, $30->$50->$30 repeat. It's a niche type of store (dispensary) and essentially a state blessed monopoly since they limited it to 40 store licenses total. But I'm hopeful being able to show people the data will help with some of it... or maybe I get my door kicked in.
      • arrosenberg 4y ago
        The price change you describe sounds like a poorly implemented price test. I don't think Shopify allows dispensaries to operate on their platform, but that is the type of hack you have (had? it's been a few years) to do to run a price test on Shopify.
        • flutas 4y ago
          That's what I assumed as well, but it's still... off somehow. The same product is carried at the other stores, each has it at a price of $20 exact...then this one bounces between $30 and $50 all day. I mean, maybe they are getting suckers to buy it at the inflated prices for both, but I'd be shocked if so. They also carry other products from the same line, and they are all priced normally at $20.
• Ilasky 4y ago
  I’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 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/body-doubling-proxy https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/body-doubling-proxy The technique goes way beyond just ADHD applications for executive functions and is something we tend to do anyways, e.g., running with a friend, studying in a group, etc. It solves an issue for myself and I truly want to help others with the approach by making a way to stay accountable through the help of others.
  • sophacles 4y ago
    Neat! I look forward to seeing more - For a long time I found myself saying absurd things like "i work better in distracting environments" or "It's easier to have a clean house with roomates to clutter it up". What really was happening was that I respond well to body doubling. (Never diagnosed with any sort of executive functioning disorder, but I suspect that's more because I never went and got diagnosed than me lacking one). Cool idea.
    • Ilasky 4y ago
      Thanks! I had similar thoughts as well. For whatever reason, having others around in coffee shops or bars seemed to give me the energy to focus on actually working. A very counterintuitive result for sure!
    • XargonEnder 4y ago
      I've never heard of body doubling before but you got me to Google it and that's very interesting phenomena. I definitely do better at some tasks when there's someone around with me even if they're not directly participating.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    I don't know if I have ADHD or not, and I don't think so because I'm sometimes able to focus for hours if it's really an end-of-the-world type of situation, but just having someone passively working next to me is 100% useless. My girlfriend is always working next to me, and that doesn't prevent me from getting distracted every few minutes. The only thing it helps is for stuff like cleaning the house where the problem is not focus but motivation, and we will be doing the same thing together.
• jlbbellefeuille 4y ago
  I’m working on equalizing commitment between employer and candidate within the hiring process to reduce time-to-fill, cost-per-hire and cost-of-vacancy metrics.
  • forbiddenvoid 4y ago
    This is really interesting. What do you mean by 'equalizing commitment'?
• mindcrime 4y ago
  Embodied AI / multi-modal AI. Specifically I've been working on a hardware device - nicknamed "Bosworth" - that will be packed with sensors of various sorts: - a GPS receiver - a 9-DOF magnetometer/accelerometer/gyroscope board - temperature sensors - microphones - cameras - etc and a processor, which can sense the physical world, and - possibly - facilitate learning in a manner somewhat akin to the way an infantile human learns. All of this is rooted in my belief that while embodiment may not be strictly necessary for AGI, it is probably very useful. And the reason I believe that is because I believe an awful lot of our early development is experiential and rooted in experiencing the physical world. That is, we develop our naive / intuitive understanding of physics ("there is up/down and if I drop something it falls") and our naive metaphysics and epistemology of the world ("there are objects and objects persist even when I can't see them briefly", etc) through what we see and hear and feel. So I want to try to simulate that aspect somewhat, but without necessarily going "full robot". That is, my current hardware platform can sense, but it isn't ambulatory and it doesn't currently have any ability to manipulate or affect anything in the physical world, except by generating noise (speech) and possibly by blinking LED's. Anyway, the GPS stuff is all setup and now I'm working on code for the accelerometer board. I'm using one of those Adafruit BNO055 boards for that. Currently working on getting the sensor readings off of it using I²C. At present the model has individual code modules for the various sensor types, and new sensor events go to two places: - sent via MQTT to persistent storage on a server. This is to facilitate pos-hoc analysis, off-line training of ML models, and possibly replay scenarios. - turned into a percept and sent to a "percept queue" using ActiveMQ. This all happens on the processor (a Raspberry Pi) embedded in the hardware platform. Then code modules listen on the percept queue for incoming percepts and then react. The initial idea is to use a very SOAR like "cognitive loop" as the primary "thing" that listens and responds to the percepts. But that will probably change over time. Very likely it will eventually turn into something inspired by a combination of things: - the old blackboard architecture approach - Minsky's "society of mind" stuff - the BDI (Beliefs-Desires-Intentions) model - etc. Not to mention, of course, elements of very contemporary approaches to Machine Learning - Deep Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning, etc. When I get to the vision and audio stuff it gets more interesting because there will need to be more initial processing of the audio and video streams, and more front-end intelligence to decide what counts as a "percept". I mean, you wouldn't send every video frame or every audio sample. So now you get into figuring out what kind of delta counts as a "change" that's worth of generating a percept and possibly attracting the attention of the system. And now you get into the multi-modal part, because think about how human interactions work. If you want someone's attention you may approach them and say "excuse me", OR you might approach, say "excuse me" AND tap them on the shoulder, etc. So attention might involve physical touch, sound, vision, etc. all combined. So lots of interesting stuff to explore around how to deal with all of that. An interesting aside to this is that I get to give Bosworth senses that humans don't have. For example, with the GPS board, Bosworth can "know" its location on the surface of the Earth to a fairly reasonable level of precision, at all times, even if blindfolded and transported elsewhere. Likewise it will know the precise time at all tims. And Bosworth will also "know" which direction magnetic north is at all times, and its velocity, etc. Now, will having those abilities be useful, or will this just confuse the issue? Who knows? But exploring that is part of what makes this fun.
• novask 4y ago
  Try to implement a container vessel stowage planning algorithm of some kind: https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6290/5/4/67/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6290/5/4/67/htm
• ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  Right now I'm thinking about how to silence my squat rack so it doesn't bother my neighbors when I'm using my punching bag.
  • fuzzfactor 4y ago
    Things like they have on this page might be helpful: https://www.raptorsupplies.com/p/mason/pad-anti-vibration https://www.raptorsupplies.com/p/mason/pad-anti-vibration
    • ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
      It's the safety bars and rack pins that are the problem. I'm deciding between covering them in liquid rubber or splicing tape.
• Dopameaner 4y ago
  Working on kafka clone in golang. Currently adding consumer groups.
  • vfistri2 4y ago
    would be interested to contribute if its open source
    • Dopameaner 4y ago
      Still early stages but building on top of this. - https://github.com/travisjeffery/jocko https://github.com/travisjeffery/jocko Since, the author has moved onto other projects. decided it would be an interesting challenge
• throwaway17_17 4y ago
  I am working on implementing a more easily presentable programming language for my implementation of a multi-modal, multi-mode dependent type theory. I have been using a barebones version with a minimal and slightly UX hostile (for most peoples standards) version as a personal programming language. There was a random comment in a thread asking if I had anything readable for others. So I started getting a github based ‘blog’ together and started porting the compiler to JavaScript (which I don’t know very well) to have some interesting examples/demonstrations of the type theory and compilation process. I don’t think the language will be released, but maybe some people will find the theoretical or implementation presentations helpful or interesting.
• justicz 4y ago
  Robots that build large-scale solar farms! My friend and I started working on this last year and ended up starting a company. We moved to the bay area and did YC last summer. We've been spending a lot of time on solar construction sites and did our first demo (part of the material handling system) on a site in March. Now we're working on a robotic factory + our team is up to 5 folks.
  • ducktective 4y ago
    How hard is it to found a robotic HW startup? What are the roles of your team? (Mech eng, Embedded eng, etc) Do you have a PhD? Would you advise getting one (in robotics)?
  • atlasunshrugged 4y ago
    Awesome, think I saw your launch post and sounds like an awesome project. How has the experience been with permitting and regulatory issues (not technical)? Is there a valid strategy in building at the border of hard to build states and selling electricity back to them (e.g. building a massive facility in Nevada and selling the energy to CA when they inevitably suffer another crisis to the grid)?
    • justicz 4y ago
      Hey, thanks! We haven't had too much trouble with regulatory barriers. There are some other companies operating in the robotic construction space (e.g. Built Robotics) that have served as good examples for us on the regulatory front. As for your idea, you do hear about hacks like that in this industry all the time. We're operating a little bit downstream of those decisions, working with construction companies after the site has already been chosen.
  • FeistySkink 4y ago
    Do you have a website already or somewhere else with more info?
    • justicz 4y ago
• joshruby16 4y ago
  I'm working on a people centric search engine. We're looking for more people to join us - particularly React developers. josh@sirchit.com https://sirchit.com/ https://sirchit.com/
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    The jobs pages don’t show anything
• epberry 4y ago
  Multiview, multi-object tracking - https://github.com/prcvlabs/multiview https://github.com/prcvlabs/multiview I started doing research on cameras around 2012 and have been obsessed every since. The company behind this code failed unfortunately but I've kept poking at it and finding more people interested in it, even as my day job is more about cloud infrastructure. Companies like Zippin which have carved out a niche in the cashierless space really impress me.
• zh3 4y ago
  Volumetric displays. The perfect mix of personal challenges - insane data rates, complex realtime software, weird mechanical setups and warped graphics.
  • cjwebb 4y ago
    Like, this kind of thing? https://voxon.co/ https://voxon.co/ I had to Google it, but since I've recently been diving into volumetric video, the words made me curious. How's it going? Any particular area you're working on?
    • zh3 4y ago
      Yes, like Voxon and Lumi - swept volume (rather than static, hence 'weird mechanical setups'). It's basically the problem of taking any 2D display of reasonable resolution and moving or spinning it through the 3rd dimension at least 50 times a second. For example, you could spin one or more 32x64 LED panels (like these [9]) around a vertical axis at 3000RPM. Currently working on both spinning and reciprocating ('flapping') approaches; spinning is nicer in many ways but reciprocating gives a better result. Have a look at articles tagged 'volumetric-display' on Hackaday [1] for examples. [0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/5036 [1] https://hackaday.com/tag/volumetric-display/
• memset 4y ago
  Revenue recognition accounting. (Is that not interesting to you? It's super interesting to me!) There's this whole world of rules that accountants follow to properly record revenue. These rules are different for physical products, subscriptions, contracts, and even rules for what to do when you bundle these things together. And yet, the only two options for companies to crunch all this data is to use an Oracle product or Excel. (Or get the eng team to write SQL queries, to try and produce a correct result for a topic they don't have a background in!) To do this, we're really leaning into databases like Clickhouse and DuckDB - taking raw data and very quickly summarizing them into journal entries that you can post during the month. Also using kinesis to let users stream in financial data in realtime, so we can then process that data in batch. (Kinesis -> S3 -> Lambda -> DB). In doing this, have also been writing low-level C and Go code to quickly iterate over a stream of transactions and accumulate results.
  • pwpw 4y ago
    Hey I’m a CPA (former big 4 accountant) that’s taught myself how to code. Interested in learning more if you want to share: contact+hn@winstoncooke.com
    • memset 4y ago
      I’ll reach out! Also looking at your GH, you might be interested in this blog post I wrote https://blog.journalize.io/posts/an-elegant-db-schema-for-double-entry-accounting/ https://blog.journalize.io/posts/an-elegant-db-schema-for-do...
• bugmen0t 4y ago
  The most prevalent type of security vulnerability in all of software is XSS. (If you count CVEs, which is admittedly a bit problematic). I’m collaborating on an attempt to shift the responsibility for XSS from the developers and towards the browser. The current stage focuses on getting the use case "insert HTML but without any scripts" right. There’s a public specification and prototype implementations in Firefox and Chrome. You can play with it here https://sanitizer-api.dev/ https://sanitizer-api.dev/ We think that we’ve made the best of many different tradeoffs, but we’re also keen to hear wide feedback.
  • ximm 4y ago
    What is your opinion of Content Security Policies? Last time I looked it was praised as an XSS killer.
    • codegeek 4y ago
      They are hard to configure and get right. If you overdo it, it can cause lot of issues with real users.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • jstanley 4y ago
    This sounds potentially useful, but I'm not sure about the practicality. It's usually pretty easy to not write XSS vulnerabilities, as long as you know they are a thing you need to think about. Given that people don't bother to avoid writing XSS bugs right now, why do you think they will bother to use your tool to avoid writing XSS bugs in the future?
    • bugmen0t 4y ago
      Given the new DOM API, it’s also relatively easy to forbid the "bad APIs" using something like eslint (at the source level) or Trusted Types (at runtime). The hope is to also cater to frontend frameworks enough that they will adopt it. There are already some conversations.
• kaspermarstal 4y ago
  A postgres foreign data wrapper for PACS so you can send and receive medical images with SQL. DICOM, the medical imaging standard, is from the 80's and you need a bit of domain knowledge to integrate e.g. AI with hospitals. This makes it a lot easier. And with Supabase on top you have a very cool backend for building medical imaging products in my humble opinion. We started out solving the problem of anonymizing medical images and now we want to make it easier for our customers to exchange data with hospitals, both for deployment and for extracting large amounts of data for research. We are also getting ISO 27001 and we are going to open source the entire bundle of policies and the "information security management system" itself on GitHub, so I am also working on that.
  • gurjeet 4y ago
    Is there a Git repo, mailing list, newsletter, or website that I can follow the progress on this, perhaps even contribute?!
    • kaspermarstal 4y ago
      Sure! There is tealengine.com and you can follow github.com/tealmedical to get notified when we put it up. What are you interested in? The foreign data wrapper or the iso?
      • gurjeet 4y ago
        I am interested in innovative ways Postgres is used. Been part of the Postgres community for a while, so the FDW, and innovations related to using FDW to make more/new data accessible to customers and applications is my curiosity.
  • sassy_quat 4y ago
    You're integrating AI and data management? Sounds promising for your case. For one, it's highly improbable that we're not moving towards some type of tool which would manage a person's data -- be it a spreadsheet, or just an email. And since your partner is using a spreadsheet-like tool to compose a long-form piece, it only sounds more likely. Probably socialized medicine nations are not progressive enough to attempt this.
• ximm 4y ago
  I got deep into color contrast algorithms. Human vision is a rabbit hole indeed. You would think that this is a well established field. But then I found claims in online discussions (including at the W3C) that were obviously wrong on a mathematical level. The more I looked, the more the arguments fell apart. So instead of reading online discussions I concentrated on reading the actual formulas as well as research on the topic. I now belive that the reasons people cite for choosing one algorithm over another are often completely bogus. I tried to bring this up at the W3C, but the response was anything but friendly. Not sure what I did wrong. I still think that I have something valuable to contribute, but I am not sure how. If you are interested in more details: http://tobib.spline.de/xi/posts/2022-09-10-contrast-algorithms/ http://tobib.spline.de/xi/posts/2022-09-10-contrast-algorith...
  • e-_pusher 4y ago
    Great write up. Color overall is a rabbit hole of a topic. I have been looking into color matching, delta E etc. and it is been surprise to realize that the variances of human vision mean that the field of colorimetry is as much of an art as it is science.
  • feoren 4y ago
    Your blog post makes lots of sense if all you care about is one threshold: contrast must be above X for readability. Then the equivalence-under-monotonic-function makes total sense: you literally don't care what the function does above or below your threshold. This extends to if you pick N threshold points (text must be above Contrast1, contextual borders between Contrast2 and Contrast3, etc.) by first looking at the function and then "eyeballing" those thresholds. But is that the best we can do? The difference between (Ymin / Ymax) and log(Ymin / Ymax) starts to matter a lot as soon as you start talking about "twice the contrast" or "20% more contrast", doesn't it?
    • ximm 4y ago
      Sure, perceptually uniform contrast in the sense that you can talk about things like "twice the contrast" is useful. If I had to design a modern contrast algorithm, I would try to make it perceptually uniform. But all that is irrelevant in the context of WCAG (and most other contexts). It literally only cares about thresholds.
• mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Trying to teach myself linear algebra and deep learning so I can apply it to some interesting ideas I have about making current chess AI much stronger. I don't want to reveal too much since I don't want some Stockfish dev to steal my idea but I'm interested in tips and resources on linear algebra. I always hated matrices... Interspersed with that I have a huge amount of stuff to implement for my project still(search methods and the like), so I'm working on that as well. It's a lot of code to write and I'm just one guy so progress is slow. What I'm doing at work would bore you to death so I'll leave it out.
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Assuming you have looked at MuZero, since it’s able to not only beat Stockfish, but also not specifically for chess: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero https://github.com/werner-duvaud/muzero-general https://github.com/werner-duvaud/muzero-general https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L0A86LmH7Yw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L0A86LmH7Yw
    • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      I am aware of MuZero, but I'm not convinced it's able to beat the latest Stockfish. Stockfish continues to dominate TCEC even after the advent of more advanced MCTS searchers. But MCTS is on my map as something to look into more deeply.
      • O__________O 4y ago
        For others, in cases it’s unclear: - MuZero uses MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search) - TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) is a computer chess tournament organized and maintained by Chessdom. ___ My understanding is MuZero doesn't compete in TCEC, but might be wrong. Given Stockfish is open source and open source versions of MuZero exist, it would be easy enough to test the current version of Stockfish again; honestly surprised if it’s not already done, that it is not, given MuZero already beat it.
        • 4y ago
• rustybolt 4y ago
  Kind of simple/shallow compared to what some other people are posting here, but I'm working on a Python library to compute numerical expressions with arbitrary precision: https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/reals https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/reals
• printerdev 4y ago
  I have been thinking of reconstructing history from books and all kinds of material. So if someone wants to know what a newspaper on 3rd Jan 1403 looked like, they can.
  • makk 4y ago
    Oh that would be fun!
    • printerdev 4y ago
      Can be done as an extension to wikipedia itself - who knows
  • burggraf 4y ago
    That'd be some feat, considering the first printing press wasn't perfected until about 1450! LOL
    • printerdev 4y ago
      So basically assign a date to all news articles and then the context and well - create a template for newspaper and accordingly assign importance
• raphlinus 4y ago
  A ton of stuff, arguably too many things. Right at the moment, my main focus is redoing fundamental 2D vector graphics geometry operations (stroking, path intersection) to make them more robust and higher quality. Some of this will also run in the GPU as compute shaders, which adds some interesting constraints and ups the difficulty level. I'm also building a new, high performance, high quality 2D rendering engine that runs primarily on the GPU. And I'm also exploring new approaches to building GUI, primarily in Rust. A new focus is to integrate that more tightly with the renderer mentioned above. A benefit I expect is that I'll be able to do the CPU side of the rendering work in multiple threads, where existing architectures make it very difficult to break out of a single thread. How did I end up working on this? It's a natural evolution of what I've been working on for a long time, in Ghostscript, on Google Fonts, working on the text stack on Android, and now fortunate enough to have a research position back on Google Fonts where I am able to focus on this and have great support from the rest of the team.
• philip1209 4y ago
  I'm working to reinvent personal websites. My goal is to replace social media with personal sites + newsletters, which are more distributed, privacy-friendly, and calm. https://postcard.page https://postcard.page The product seems simple, but there are so many opportunities for optimization. There's caching, CDNs, custom domain support, dynamically-generated open graph images, image optimizations, email sending, email reputations, analytics, and more.
  • once_inc 4y ago
    Please move away from email to something more decentralized and powerful. Email is the source of so many lost productivity hours and is now wholly controlled by large entities like Microsoft and Google.
    • philip1209 4y ago
      RSS feature coming soon! JSON API to follow. Any suggestions of what to offer instead of email? For instance, it's definitely more decentralized than push notifications. Every post that gets sent through email also has a permalink on the site. So, you can write it once - then share it across any channels (including social media). For instance, I'm generating opengraph images automatically now to make Postcard more friendly with sites like Twitter and LinkedIn: https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1570770548988465152 https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1570770548988465152
    • sgt 4y ago
      This is just creating FUD about e-mail.
  • cxr 4y ago
    I've always thought that plans where custom-domain-or-not is a differentiator between free and paid are unethical. In this case, antithetical, too. (If a sufficient number of people abandon Twitter as part of the your-own-personal-homepage bandwagon, but they make the unfortunate mistake of letting their dart land on Postcard and signing up for a free plan, then you really haven't achieved the stated goal. You've recreated the way she was tethered by name to twitter.com/alice, except the difference is that you're the beneficiary, not Twitter—because she is now held captive at alice.postcard.page.) Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21921176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21921176>
• scubakid 4y ago
  I'm building a privacy-friendly personal finance simulator that doesn't ask to link your accounts (projectionlab.com), and can run Monte Carlo simulations in your browser and keeps data client-side unless you choose otherwise. I'm hoping to spin up a self-hosted version soon as well. The overall design ethos/constraints have posed some interesting challenges along the way, but so far I've had good luck developing with the following: Vue.js, Vuetify, vuex, Chart.js, Threads.js for orchestrating web workers, vue-router, a bunch of smaller libraries, Paddle, Firebase, and some Google Cloud Functions (the latter only come into play for those that upgrade + choose to enable cloud sync). For now, it's still a side project :)
  • elteto 4y ago
    This sounded interesting and I want to follow up on it in a while to see what progress you've made. However, I know I will forget in the future to actually follow up so I wanted to sign up for email updates or even a newsletter if you had one, but I couldn't find one from your landing page.
    • scubakid 4y ago
      Sounds like I need to make the newsletter more discoverable. Currently it only pops up if you go to the blog or if you do the onboarding wizard or sandbox. I'll take a note to add it to the homepage as well.
• hazrmard 4y ago
  I am working on fusing classical control with reinforcement-learning based control in drones. The good thing about RL is that it is adaptive and proactive - it tunes control from data as it streams and it learns to act with delayed feedback in mind. The bad thing is that it can be sample inefficient. It needs lots and lots of data. That is not good in a time-critical case such as when faults occur. I've come to enjoy pushing back on completely black-box control of systems, foregoing the advances of decades of theory. That helps me scale back complexity of the system if only a little domain knowledge is sprinkled on the solution. So, first, I started using transfer learning to re-use existing policies from similar situations. However "similar" is a very open problem in the domain. I then thought that we can exploit insights we get from classical control of linear systems into these more complex domains. If, for example, we can make some simplifying assumptions (locally linear, there's some global optimum etc.). So far I am getting promising results. But there is always some data wrangling involved. I am hoping to use that in my dissertation later this year. (If anyone's hiring, feel free to reach out).
  • mrdmnd 4y ago
    I bet the folks at Skydio would want to talk to you.
    • hazrmard 4y ago
      Thank you for the suggestion! I will look them up.
• samsquire 4y ago
  I'm working on parallel multithreaded systems. I wrote a M:N kernel-thread to lightweight thread userspace scheduler which multiplexes multiple lightweight threads onto kernel threads. I also wrote part of my own libuv. I also wrote a multithreaded actor implementation in Java. I am currently working on solving the expression problem and thinking of how entity component systems (ECS) can be used for parallelism and solving the problem of deciding how to map data to operations efficiently. I am also thinking of how to patch running systems without downtime. See my repository multiversion-concurrency-control for my parallel work https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-control https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro... and the userspace scheduler in preemptible-thread https://github.com/samsquire/preemptible-thread https://github.com/samsquire/preemptible-thread See my profile for links to my journal/blog where I write of my progress everyday, specifically ideas4.
  • vanjajaja1 4y ago
    > I am also thinking of how to patch running systems without downtime. This is cool, I spent a few nights thinking about how this might play out. Unison-lang has a novel take on this.
    • samsquire 4y ago
      I think if the system behaviour is a data structure then data structures can be loaded during runtime and again later on, this is a bit similar to Entity Component System, entities can come and go at runtime and be efficiently handled. If you combine this with dynamic embedded scripting, you can have runtime systems that are completely reloadable while running. You can also decide when to serve requests with the new design and old design. I'm trying to bring the patch to the application itself rather than at the network layer.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• waylandsmithers 4y ago
  Maybe not exactly what you were asking for, but getting to 20 or 30 users for my latest project. It's not meant to be a start up or anything, it was more just "I wish this thing existed and think it would be fun" So this time around I'm slowly asking people I know to try it out. Honestly it takes a little courage and has given me a newfound respect for people who do sales (though it's a little different, as the whole thing was my idea). There does seem to be a big difference between an explicit ask to sign up vs. hey check this out. Oftentimes people will say that's so great but not sign up (which I try not to take personally).
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Might be worth providing way for people to know what the project is and how to use it.
    • provability 4y ago
      I know, right?
      • waylandsmithers 4y ago
        Well, welcome to my neuroses- because you asked now it's not as "thirsty" to do that. There was a fantasy sports game in the late 90s and early 2000s called wall street sports, where you'd buy "shares" of professional athletes and the prices would go up or down. My project is my start on bringing some form of it back. [https://sportfolio.money/ https://sportfolio.money/]
        • O__________O 4y ago
          Lots of ventures that have made “investing” in a given real world persona; for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitClout https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitClout ___ At least for me, your site loads for a split second, then goes completely white; might want to do some cross browser testing, especially on mobile.
• vivegi 4y ago
  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
  • dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
    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)
    • vivegi 4y ago
      For a basic calculation on the number of modules, voltage and amps relationship, see: https://thermal.ferrotec.com/technology/thermoelectric-reference-guide/thermalref13/ https://thermal.ferrotec.com/technology/thermoelectric-refer... There is a worked example in 3.3 and Fig. 13-3 in the referenced article has the chart for various temperature differentials. The TEG modules are 30mm x 30mm and arranged in a grid in series-parallel configuration (the referenced article also has this concept illustrated). The area question can be addressed after determining the number of modules, exact series-parallell configuration and spacing between the modules. The volume question is a function of the heat sink geometry.
• d0m 4y ago
  Working on an offline/real-time library for agnostic backends. (Most libraries force you to go with a specific vendor like firebase/aws) or use a completely different backend/db (like couchdb/pouchdb).
• chaibiker 4y ago
  Working on a better solution to sedentary health and sitting caused back pain at work. No one posture is the answer, so there is probably an optimal amount of regular postural variation during deskwork that wouldn't interrupt focus. That is what a chair should do for you to protect your health, so making a smart dynamic chair for standing desks. Had a cycling accident years ago, became much more sitting intolerant afterward, probably made me quit coding as a career. Have been testing prototypes for a year, people have done hours long stretches on a 2-3 min interval feeling no pain or stiffness at the end. A study showed the same strong results. Website: https://www.movably.com/ https://www.movably.com/ Early user review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUjkbMc_xBw&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUjkbMc_xBw&t=1s
  • v8xi 4y ago
    This is a great idea. On a related note I just read this ~2000s article[0] by an anthropologist about natural sleeping/resting positions amongst humans/primates. An interesting take he had was that having the chest firmly on the ground during sleep was ideal because breathing causes constant motion of your spine and prevents stiffness. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119282/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119282/
    • chaibiker 4y ago
      Interesting, that fit's one of the lines of research on disc health because the disc are nourished indirectly mostly through the porous vertebrae, it takes motion to create the pressure variations to facilitate blood flow. This may be why most active chairs don't move the needle enough, the motion is both limited and usually only triggered when a person is prompted to move by discomfort.
  • otsaloma 4y ago
    Really interesting. I too had a bicycle accident four years ago and have been really sensitive to bad ergonomics and spending too long in one position since. Just understanding what makes things worse and what better has been a big challenge. Coincidentally, just today I ordered a Håg Capisco chair, which serves the same purpose of allowing a variety of different positions with a standing desk and also makes it practically impossible to slouch. I'm hoping it'll help.
• mynameisash 4y ago
  I've been slowly learning SAT/SMT, but the materials I've found are very academic. Being almost 20 years out of my CS degree and this being a rather niche field, it's tough to learn, so I want to continue teaching myself and help others by creating useful "SAT/SMT for newbies".
• zachkatz 4y ago
  Building a platform that accelerates the construction of protected bike lanes and car-free streets worldwide by connecting citizens, advocacy groups, cities, and urban planners: https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/1570534189497483265 https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/15705341894974832... (Backstory: Started a Twitter account in July (twitter.com/@betterstreetsai) posting DALL-E-generated street transformations, it immediately took off, got lots of press, etc. and made me realize how huge the demand for this stuff is.) Feel free to send me a DM on Twitter if you're interested in helping!
  • chaps 4y ago
    Hm, have you talked with the bike lane uprising folk? I think you'll find that these problems are way, way more political than they seem. Good luck, though.
    • zachkatz 4y ago
      I've run large bike lane/car-free streets campaigns before [1] and have talked with a bunch of activists from groups all over the country, so I have a good deal of experience here. You're right that these problems are political—in fact, they're entirely political!—but the reason they're so political is because there's no existing platform for capturing latent + kinetic demand, so electeds (even the ones who want better streets—we've heard from many of them on Twitter) have absolutely no idea how much political support they have—and they need that support to take bold action. We're solving that problem! [1] https://bikeportland.org/2020/04/24/grassroots-push-emerges-for-quick-and-cheap-bike-lanes-on-se-hawthorne-313976 https://bikeportland.org/2020/04/24/grassroots-push-emerges-..., https://bikeportland.org/2020/05/20/its-official-pbot-considering-bike-lanes-on-hawthorne-blvd-315086 https://bikeportland.org/2020/05/20/its-official-pbot-consid..., https://bikeportland.org/2021/02/02/support-builds-for-bike-lanes-on-hawthorne-as-community-awaits-key-report-from-pbot-325557 https://bikeportland.org/2021/02/02/support-builds-for-bike-...
      • chaps 4y ago
        FWIW, I consider bikelane uprising an org/platform that's capturing that sort of latent/kinetic demand you're talking about, which they've been able to take their work to electeds, who in-turn take action on creating new bike lanes, fixing road damage, raising accountability for companies that park in bike lanes, etc. The emotion they work from is discrete anger and frustration, which tends to ignite action from a bunch of folk to make calls to electeds and such. If you can find a way to bring out that raw feeling on top of what I personally feel as nostalgia for the future in what you're building, it can almost definitely lead into some great stuff. Just don't forget about the politics :)
• Daegalus 4y ago
  I am still slowly working on reverse engineering an MMO. I have client source, but no server source (it was lost to time), so I am building a new server. My current problem is I have concurrency working, but there is a aspect to movement that I have little information on, and the client isn't informative enough to help. So I am kinda stuck. I plan to do some manual testing of just fiddling with a value and see what happens. Its fun, but very demoralizing at the same time to see multiple people logged in, but their characters jumping around and not properly being moved around on other people's screens. I also don't want to make any changes to client code, because that's our only source of truth to work with.
  • mattw2121 4y ago
    I'm interested to know which MMO?
    • Daegalus 4y ago
      Blackmoon Chronicles: Winds of War from like 2000/2001. It never left beta as Vircom closed down their game division and cancelled all projects. It was my first MMO and what got me into MMOs
      • cpeterso 4y ago
        That’s an interesting problem! Since you have the client source code, have you been able to fully reverse engineer and document the client/server protocol? Do you have a black box server whose responses you can record and analyze? Have you been writing your server top-down (building an idealized set of game objects and then wiring them up to the protocol) or bottom-up (layering the minimum game code on top of the protocol needed to make the server respond appropriately)? How do you obtain the client source code? Will you legally be able to open source it or at least distribute binaries you build? Is https://blackmoonchronicles.com/ https://blackmoonchronicles.com/ your project? Looks like it’s a different project because they’re writing a cleanroom implementation of a client.
        • 4y ago
• TremendousJudge 4y ago
  I am working on getting this project to compile. It's interesting in the sense that nobody in the documented history of the internet has ever ran into these specific errors. So I guess I'm going where nobody's ever gone before.
• michaelsbradley 4y ago
  An open p2p protocol/engine (builds on libp2p) for decentralized storage that incentivizes data durability. It’s not Filecoin or any other existing platform, and there’s not a public testnet yet, but the project is well underway!
• aerovistae 4y ago
  A new platform to play Magic: The Gathering digitally. Been working on it since the pandemic started. It's almost done. It's a multiplayer sandbox (no rules enforcement) that just allows you to play by providing all the different zones the game involves (play area, hand, lib, gy, ex) and letting you free-drag between them. It has features for every mechanic the game involves - tapping, turning face-down, switching card control to another player, etc - and it looks good and is smooth and easy to use. There's nothing like it. Existing options have various constraints/drawbacks or else are so old-fashioned and clumsy as to be nigh-unusable. I don't know how people will react when I announce. I don't know how Wizards of the Coast will react. I'm a bit nervous about it. I know it's the best of its class, because I play magic, and I have no idea what other people will make of it. It fits their fair-use policy (product must be free, but can be ad-supported or take patreon-revenue) but even so I'm nervous.
  • yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
    What a cool idea! Not sure if you’ve done it already, but it’d be cool to embed video calls (maybe with WebRTC?) in your UI so you can have that more visceral sensation of playing against another person.
    • aerovistae 4y ago
      I have considered adding an audio channel to a match, yes, not video though. I figure people who use it to play with friends are already going to be using discord, and people playing against strangers are very unlikely to want to make video calls. I could be wrong?
      • yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
        I don’t know :) When I was 10 years old and first getting into MtG, I was often playing against kids in the school playground that I didn’t know. It became a great way to make new friends. Also as far as I’m aware, Chatroulette and Omegle are still going strong, and those are all about video chat with random strangers. I suspect that a MtG server would net fewer instances of indecent exposure than the aforementioned two also. Probably not critical, but perhaps a worthwhile product experiment?
• tdekken 4y ago
  According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 35% of U.S. fourth graders in 2019 could read proficiently [0]. The pandemic has only made this worse [1] [2]. Once students start to fall behind in reading, they fall further and further behind their peers each year. What is, perhaps, most criminal is that there is a mountain of research [3][4][5][6][7] about what works, and yet these approaches aren’t employed nor even well-known. I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG/MAMAA/etc. [8] company turned independent educational researcher, and I believe I have developed a novel edtech approach to address this learning gap. I am collaborating with a few data scientists and educators, but am searching for UX designers, curriculum designers, writers, and marketers who can help make this a reality. In brief, one of the core challenges in edtech is how to build an engaging app that actually results in learning (many apps resort to psychological tricks [9] and gamification hacks [10] that are long-term detrimental.) Although I have a high-level direction for how to achieve this, my skill set is mostly in backend development and public speaking. If you are interested, please reach out to (my HN username) @ (Microsoft's not cold email domain acquired in 1997). [0] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ [1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/ https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/ [2] https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20Working%20Paper%20267-0522_0.pdf https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20Workin... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project) [4] https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/project-follow-through https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/project-follow-through [5] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell-Gersten/publication/249795063_Follow_Through_Revisited_Reflections_on_the_Site_Variability_Issue/links/545953a00cf2bccc4912bada/Follow-Through-Revisited-Reflections-on-the-Site-Variability-Issue.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell-Gersten/publica... [6] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED472569.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED472569.pdf [7] http://arthurreadingworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/StockardDIMetaAnalysis2018.pdf http://arthurreadingworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/... [8] MANGA, GAMMA, NAAAM, M2A3, Big Tech, Big 4, Big 5, or really whatever you would like to call them. [9] Skinner boxes, daily rewards, resource decay, loss aversion, etc. [10] Leaderboards, points, badges, etc.
• sbisker 4y ago
  It’s early days, but I’m looking into more precise and domain specific object recognition in photos. Apple or Google will generally tell me if a photo contains a chair; I would like to know what kind of chair (is it a Herman Miller Aeron or a Herman Miller Embody). There are a few domains I am interested to apply this to, but at this stage I’m still learning the limitations of the tech (and any leads / insights would be appreciated!)
  • filoleg 4y ago
    Before you embark further on this, see what the competition has first. If for anything, but inspiration for good ideas, as well as seeing what works well and what doesn't. You mentioned Apple and Google with their photo apps, but have you checked Google Lens? This one is very realtime and gets in quite a detail. I don't know whether it recognizes different models of Herman Miller chairs yet, but I can open the app, point my camera at a flower or a plant, and it will (attempt to) tell me which exact specie it is.
    • sbisker 4y ago
      Yep, surveying the landscape now! Lens is incredible and I know particularly for shopping them, Facebook and Amazon are working on merchandise recognition. Honestly that’s part of what makes me interested in the space - the fact that it’s possible, but right now limited to the biggest players.
• fwsgonzo 4y ago
  Sandboxing for high-performance rev proxies. Not WebAssembly or v8.
• wizwit999 4y ago
  I'm building an open source security lake platform (https://github.com/matanolabs/matano https://github.com/matanolabs/matano). Basically, some of the core problems we solve are: - Traditional SIEM tools are not a good fit for large amounts of data — they're either too expensive or come with a high ops burden. - Your data is locked into vendor specific formats. We solve this by ingesting and storing all your data in Apache Iceberg tables on S3, (allowing for low cost queries directly on S3 data + an open table format) and building everything using only serverless technologies(Lambda, SQS, S3, Athena, etc.). We also let you write realtime Python detections as code and are written in Rust, which makes for some interesting technical challenges.
• pinarZ 4y ago
  Hi everyone, We are building a cybersecurity marketplace for professionals looking for remote assignments. Currently it is in beta version and we are looking for test users to check functionality. We will provide gift credits for our testers when we are live so that they can be featured sellers on the main page. Just let me know if you are interested :)
• provability 4y ago
  To reduce the adverse effects of fake evidence (eventually called deepfake), off and on since 2004, and especially since ten years ago, I've been thinking up, NOT DETECTION methods, but prospective, pro-active methods to instrument a data stream, to increase the odds that video, audio, or other time-series data (including e.g. scientific experimental data) eventually can be proven to have been created from real life (and not faked) at the time & place claimed. This is not just "proof of existence" by inserting hashes of content into a Merkle tree, like Haber & Stornetta implemented in 1990 and like we talked about on the Cypherpunks email list in the early 1990s, although of course that would be part of a complete system. Nor is it relying on just the metadata that e.g. TruePic uses. I have been developing additional methods to asymptotically approach provability that the content depicted actually happened in real life. Think undetectable watermarks by multiple observers (courts want to see multiple witnesses) but it goes beyond that. Relevant to this are efforts by CAI, C2PA, and companies like TruePic. I am hoping my methods are different enough, with little enough overlap, that we can realize them without licensing their IP. My goal is a more decentralized system that protects the privacy of witnesses. My contact info is in my profile. I'd love to discuss this with anyone. I'd even be relieved if someone would explain that my ideas are not useful, or already have been done, or even would have unintended negative consequences for society. (It's hard to stay current in the relevant literature on signal processing, steganography, cryptography, and zero-knowledge proof, plus politics and game theory.) I would even considering simply donating my trade secrets (such as they are) to some person or organization who impresses me as sincere and likely to move them forward, to avoid having to sit on them hands-off (again) during my tenure at (yet another) company that is about to offer me a full-time job today to work on something unrelated. While some of my ideas "toward authenticatability" may have been ahead of their time when I first wrote them up ten years ago, they probably aren't anymore, so the window is (at best) closing now.
  • O__________O 4y ago
    To me, being able to trace the province of content is much more dangerous than deep fakes, since such systems have the potential to become wide spread, unavoidable, and constrain free exchange of information.
• yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
  My colleagues and I are writing a system for insurance companies to prepare their reinsurance submission pack data, which they would otherwise spend enormous amounts of time and money doing in Excel manually. We have some pretty big clients using this in anger, and they’re wild about it. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s important!
• PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  I am working on generating synthetic ECGs that can be conditioned on a patient but making it impossible to find the patient given the synthetic ECG and the data.
• kleiba 4y ago
  How to get over my mid-life crisis.
  • feoren 4y ago
    Me too. Let me know if you figure it out.
  • avgDev 4y ago
    The answer is clear, Corvette.
    • epolanski 4y ago
      Or a Mercedes coupe if you're in Europe.
    • simonswords82 4y ago
      Rookie. It has to be a motorcycle
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Simple: get older.
  • Existenceblinks 4y ago
    In the past 7 years from my 25, I figured out that there always be crisis .. at any age.
• kureikain 4y ago
  Im building an readonly API for bank transaction without reverseiing their internal ui but relying on alert transaction email and parse it to build transaction.
• grepLeigh 4y ago
  I'm having a blast working on https://printnanny.ai/ https://printnanny.ai/ - the embedded computer vision system is cool, plus there are many meaty unsolved problems in the 3D printing universe. To name a few... - Rolled a Linux distribution (PrintNanny OS) designed for mixing/matching controller software across a manufacturing "fleet". - Created an atomic upgrade/rollback system. - Built a WebRTC stack for live camera streaming. - Lots of fun applying queue theory to distribute work across a fleet. I'm learning a lot about how the government contract/bid process works, which I've always been insulated from as an engineer (even when working at companies known for gov support, like Red Hat). My biggest customers tend to serve an ultra-specific niche, which is always fun to learn about. I love getting to talk to people who have spent thousands of hours cracking the laser tag gun market in Canada, or top RV parts supplier in Pacific Northwest, etc. There are entire worlds-within-worlds out there. =)
  • m00x 4y ago
    Pretty interesting. Have you worked with existing manufacturers that do this like BambuLab?
    • grepLeigh 4y ago
      I haven't done any OEM deals, but I think that's an interesting angle! BambuLab added lidar defect detection to their lineup. Prusa recently launched "Prusa Connect" for remote file management. One insight that I have is that 3D printing ("additive manufacturing") is just one process among dozens used by small manufacturing shops. The hardware vendors launching software clouds/products are missing the bigger picture, which is that manufacturers need ERP and production schedule management way more than a "file cloud" per hardware vendors.
  • flutas 4y ago
    That's an awesome one. I recently had wondered why the only one I knew of was spaghetti detective. Just a heads up. Trying to preorder gives a stripe error (below) from the orders endpoint. Copy also says 50% off then shows a $199.99 original price and $149.99 discounted price (25% not 50%). > Request req_JF7zd2A0rO1rXY: One or more provided prices do not have a `tax_behavior` set which is required for automatic tax computation. Please visit https://stripe.com/docs/tax/products-prices-tax-categories-tax-behavior#tax-behavior https://stripe.com/docs/tax/products-prices-tax-categories-t... for more information.
• germinalphrase 4y ago
  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 the time I spend working. Many of the folks I know who do interesting work are either woefully underpaid or chronically overworked. I'm hoping I can thread the needle on that one.
  • FeistySkink 4y ago
    Care to share more details? I'm in a similar situation. Thanks.
    • germinalphrase 4y ago
      Of course. I grew up the son of two professional artists. While they are beautiful people, they are not particularly career minded/knowledgeable - so my direction in life has been dependent on my own designs and devotions. I spent about five years working on feature films, commercials, music videos, etc. as a Local 600 Loader and Second Assistant Cameraman. I loved the work, but the travel and lifestyle wasn't a sustainable fit for a healthy life (for me). Before film work, I studied comparative literature in a strong undergraduate program and made a shift into teaching high school English. I taught in rural, urban, and suburban school districts in the upper midwest until June of this year. The work was Good, and I was good at it. I didn't burn bridges or burn out; I just had a belly full and want to open a new door. I know a handful of people that work in tech sales, PM, infrastructure that have been willing to talk about their work and employers (for which I am very grateful). An important part of these conversations has been noting which paths are inaccessible/poor fit/rough culture. I'm in talks to accept a position at a small local tech consultancy in a role that is a mix between Customer Success/Training/Project Management - but it's more of an entry point and stepping stone than final target. All that said - if anyone works in product management, experience strategy, or simply would be open for a chat, please send me an email. I would love to schedule a short phone call.
  • 4y ago
• fuzzythinker 4y ago
  I'm building an origami application where folds are described in a simple English-like structured language. The editor will be realtime where you can see how the folds are animated. How I ended up working on this? There were a few ideas I wanted to work on. Most of them are much simpler and have easier path to monetization. But this kept coming back to the top of my thoughts stack, so I gave up fighting it. It ended up much harder than I even thought it was. Niche tech? Explored F# Fable and ReScript. Both are really still too young so they added too much typing complexity to overcome, so it's just mainly JS and some typescript.
• eranation 4y ago
  Building behavior based software supply chain security (e.g. CI/CD security using eBPF, identifying abnormal developer / bot behavior)
• LelouBil 4y ago
  I recently looked up shape matching with OpenCV for a game I'm making. Basically, you draw black and white images by spawning meatballs, then the drawing is rendered to a image and checked against a reference using openCV. I found gesture algorithm online's but they always take into account individual strokes, and the drawing system is not using strokes. I also have requirements to match the *whole* image but not *exactly*. So what I'm doing is : 1. Resizing and cropping the input image to size of the reference image. 2. Matching each shape in the source image to the closest shape in the reference image (if any shape is below a certain threshold, the drawing is failed). 3. Blur the whole image a bit, and count the percentage of overlapping pixels (if over a certain value, this makes sure the different elements of the drawing are approximately in the right position). This took me like 4 days to figure out, but it was really interesting having to prototype it using python and translate it to C# afterwards. (Though I sadly ended up buying a 80€ Unity OpenCV library since nothing else was working for me)
  • drekipus 4y ago
    Not quite sure what you're looking for but opencv's contour functions might help you here https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/d8/d1c/tutorial_js_contours_more_functions.html https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/d8/d1c/tutorial_js_contours_more... There's also a method of calculating the similarities of two areas called Union over Intersection, which is easy and quick to calculate. Although it sounds like you got it figured out, so don't let me over complicate something that's already working.. :) Would be interested in seeing the game!
• iamwil 4y ago
  I'm working on a programming environment for making interactive programs. It's focused on addressing how to handle state and network through three main parts. 1/ an embedded functional database as the scope and environment for variables 2/ a managed syncing of database state across the network 3/ the interactivity extends to the compiler itself. I've been following the Tools for Thought crowd for a long while, and recently started looking into why we still have problems building interactive web apps, and where the issues and complexities arise. It's lead to examining the Clojure, Haskell, and Rust ecosystems, various papers, data structures, and databases. I've been writing my thoughts exploring the space at https://interjectedfuture.com https://interjectedfuture.com If you're looking for niche technologies, we've got a nice assortment at our podcast The Technium: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_rEKDGBw4myn0uOnPxYsg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_rEKDGBw4myn0uOnPxYsg
  • vanjajaja1 4y ago
    Can you share some connections for "Tools for Thought crowd"? Sounds like a Bret Viktor connected thing
• eloisius 4y ago
  Automatic camera calibration refinement/healing. SfM is a well developed area, and there are well understood methods for gathering correspondences like SIFT in order to calibrate cameras. However, it usually requires a separate calibration phase prior to doing whatever you want to do with that calibration. In my case, we’re using it to triangulate 3D objects from 2D object detections done in each of our calibrated camera. Over a long time period, some perturbance befalls those cameras: gravity pulling them down, things knocking them, etc. That causes our accuracy to degrade over time, so we started looking at ways to continually heal that calibration without needing to do another stop-the-world calibration phase. Turns out you can use the 3D objects themselves (actually the 2D constituent detections that you use to compute a 3D point) as correspondences instead of doing SIFT matching. The hard part is that you have to preserve the original coordinate frame after doing a bundle adjustment. Computer vision is a ton of fun, and I highly recommend you give it a try if you’ve enjoyed data science stuff, but the incomprehensible “try it and see” engineering of working on deep neural nets turns you off.
  • dagar 4y ago
    Is this anything you're ready to share? I'm interested in something similar in the context of Drones.
    • eloisius 4y ago
      I can at least share some research that has been useful for what I'm working on: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.08568.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.08568.pdf Face reidentification is the approach this paper uses to find corresponding views of the same person, but that's not necessary if you have the ability to match the objects in your scene otherwise. For example, doing 3D triangulation to geometrically verify random matches using RANSAC.
• russellbeattie 4y ago
  Might as well drop my project in here as well. I spent the last year or so exploring and validating solutions to the "voice cliff" problem found in multimodal voice-controlled devices such as smart displays and TVs. That's when you are controlling some UI with your voice and suddenly you can't, because that particular screen hasn't been designed for voice. Think of Echo Show settings or literally all of Nest Hub's UI. As a result, I came up with a "big idea". So now I want to file some preliminary patent applications for some of the bits that might actually be new inventions. The chances of actually getting a patent are slim - most of the ideas I thought were brilliant were already thought up, patented, published in research papers or even productized, sometimes a decade ago or more! There are a lot of forward thinking researchers out there. And this doesn't even take into account patents which are pending. Apple could have a tranche of patents announced tomorrow which were submitted years ago. Or some startup could come out of stealth and you learn that a well funded group of people way smarter than you has been working on similar problems for years. Anyways, actual new ideas are rare, but I seem to have a few. Distilling a big idea into smaller pieces that can be explained in detail is a good exercise, regardless of the eventual success of any patents. So I'm churning through 100+ pages of notes, twice as many patent and paper references, and a bit of code and trying to get it into a state to share with the world. I've never been an academic, but I used to work at Nokia Research Center, so I've worked with quite a few and now I know how hard their job was.
• danielvaughn 4y ago
  I've been working on a programming language for UI designers. To put it simply, I think the trend towards no-code/low-code is misguided. The assumption behind these products is that code is slow, difficult, and expensive. I disagree - I think that "code" is merely a formalized written expression of what you want. It's actually the most efficient, easiest, and cheapest means to solving digital problems. I believe anyone can write code if it's specific enough to a domain that they understand, so what I'm trying to do is create a hyper-domain-specific language around designing UI components. The goal is to have a platform agnostic base syntax, with "dialects" that can extend the language for any current or future platforms. The idea is that designers could write in this language, and developers could build tools that will transpile this code into a consumable format for whatever system they're building for. I have a very rudimentary demo site that's like halfway built: https://matry.design https://matry.design edit - here is a simple example of what a component might look like in this language: component Button variants color bg: #007BFF text label: Click Me elements shape ButtonContainer text ButtonLabel style ButtonContainer fill: $bg padding: 10px style ButtonLabel content: $label font-size: 16px
  • solarmist 4y ago
    I love the idea of this, but I just learned about xstate.js. It was a eureka moment for me. Why was UI design such a mess? It’s because the UI vocabulary came from publishing and graphic design, but UIs are not static and describing them in that way will always fall short. I’m convinced that any UI language needs to incorporate a visual state diagram editor to really make a dent in the space. UIs are not fixed objects, but responsive object reacting to user intent. Does your language incorporate anything like this?
    • danielvaughn 4y ago
      One of the premises behind the language is parametric rendering. So nothing described with Matry is static. The difference, however, between Matry and something like xstate is that the actual state is intended to be left to developers, because I’m trying to create an interface that allows designers to just focus on what they need to focus on. So take something like dark mode. A designer might allow for a Boolean parameter that determines whether a component render in dark or light mode. But as to whether the browser supports it, or whether the user has that mode set in their system preferences - that’s the developers responsibility. That doesn’t fully answer your question but it’s a complex topic so hopefully that gives you an idea as to where my thoughts are going.
• bo1024 4y ago
  I’m working on a proof of concept for replacing passwords with public/private key authentication. Inspired by how ssh and got repo access are both more secure AND easier to use than password login. The interesting parts are convenience features like sharing an account across multiple devices, allowing temporary access to a device, etc. The goal is to implement everything user side - it would act a bit like single sign on but with no need for any trusted third party. I’m starting with a browser plug-in.
• rikroots 4y ago
  Problem: how to make HTML5 <canvas> elements responsive, interactive and (importantly) more accessible for end users. Solution: an OS Javascript library to make it easier for devs to achieve the above Progress: ongoing - possibly neverending Why: in 2013 I was having real trouble breaking into the industry; a recruiter told me I might have more success if I had a project to showcase my skills. I settled on building a canvas library because I enjoy creating pretty graphics stuff. After I (finally) landed a job I just ... carried on with it because: fun! The drive to make the canvas element responsive/accessible/etc came much later when I was looking for an edge over the competition and realised all the other JS canvas libraries didn't seem interested in solving those problems.
• otsaloma 4y ago
  Not a big project, but just last week finished a visualization of electricity spot prices in Finland. Seems like a potentially difficult winter coming in Europe, using spot priced electricity and optimizing use would make sense. I didn't find a good visualization, so I made my own. https://otsaloma.io/sahko/ https://otsaloma.io/sahko/ Open source, GitHub link at the bottom of the page. The API used serves a large part of Europe, so you might be able to fork the code and adapt it to another country with fairly minimal work.
• michaelmarkell 4y ago
  I'm building https://royal.io https://royal.io, which helps turn music royalties into an asset class people can invest in. When investors (fans, mostly) "buy" a portion of a song on our platform, they become entitled to a percent of the recurring royalty revenue stream. It's one of the few applications of crypto that I think genuinely makes sense right now, and I especially like it because crypto is not the star of the show, it's just the backend implementation detail
• affgrff2 4y ago
  I am working on trainable morphogenic functions for reaction-diffusion proceses. I.e., using Pytorch, the parameters of a neural net representing the reaction part are optimized to so the diffusion process converges in a complex, predefined structure. This is only a pet project, but I am fascinated by this because I imagine that in the future this could be used to design synthetic biological structures. All that will be needed is a compiler that translate the function to DNA...
• chrisbrndl 4y ago
  Our company uses Asana for tracking projects and their dependencies on a high level. However, for tracking programming projects in more detail we are using Linear. It is a pain to keep due dates, assignees, project status etc in sync if you need to do that manually. So I decided to develop a little bridge that syncs both platforms automatically. Once finished and fully tested I am going to open source it. Maybe someone out there has the same problem :)
• keepquestioning 4y ago
  Can someone work on improving the brains NGF?
• namrog84 4y ago
  I do gamedev(unreal). So much educational content is locked behind videos or hard to search mediums like an example project you have to download and setup. There are attempts at community wiki but I'm trying to start an opiniated blog/wiki type site since I dont agree with lots of other things that I wish existed.
• Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  I'm coming up with ways to stay on task and avoid distractions. So, I have this: 1. Make a list of tasks you need to do. 2. Take on one task and complete it. 3. Take On Me was a cool song. 4. Oh, I should go watch the video ... I'm not doing very well at it.
• westcort 4y ago
  I made a voice simulator of my own voice (https://locserendipity.com/sim/voice.html https://locserendipity.com/sim/voice.html) by recording individual phonemes. My goal was to create the smallest possible phonemes that can be concatenated into a wav file. Ultimately, I want to be able to export a wav file or mp3 file as base64 text enabling the largest amount of voice data to be stored on a CD. Does anyone have further advice on how to achieve this?
• czhu12 4y ago
  I’ve been trying to build a way to allow for more scripts to get automatically turned into UIs. Then can be built, shared and run in web browsers. It’s amazing how far browsers have come especially with the addition of ES modules. Its basically a JavaScript DSL to create little web apps with reactive, understandable code. For example: const age = input(“what is your age?”) text(“your age is” + age) Would automatically create a UI around this. Can see it at https://trytoolkit.com https://trytoolkit.com I’ve been surprised how much I’ve personally been getting value from this little app.
• gisborne 4y ago
  Programmable APIs. A HTTP request is a function call with named arguments. What if the server had some endpoints that provide basic fp (map, fold, curry, …), and you let your users create their own endpoints by currying together other endpoints?
  • vanjajaja1 4y ago
    This sounds very connected to GraphQL
• totemandtoken 4y ago
  3D solar cells for lack of a better term
  • Elof 4y ago
    What would the application be?
• Metacelsus 4y ago
  I'm trying to make artificial human ovaries ("ovaroids") to allow producing eggs in vitro.
• westonplatter0 4y ago
  Collection of python modules to run a one-person hedge fund. See https://github.com/westonplatter?tab=repositories&q=finx&type=&language=&sort= https://github.com/westonplatter?tab=repositories&q=finx&typ...
• protomyth 4y ago
  Pretty pedestrian given the others, but I'm trying to build a file server setup that makes it easy to roll back from a ransomware (encryption) attack. I starting to think that going with hourly syncs from the home directory with some versioning should do it. The hard part is to make it easy for someone to rollback when I'm not here. People are a bit scared given that its happened to a couple of other small colleges. We already do tapes and we are talking files saved to the servers (most folks aren't allowed to save locally), so it should be within a budget. Like I said, pretty pedestrian. [edit: FreeBSD & ZFS]
• mihaitodor 4y ago
  I'm contributing to a data streaming processor called Benthos: https://www.benthos.dev/ https://www.benthos.dev/ It's written in Go and I really love the project since it's so simple and, unlike most Apache projects, it's just one single static binary which does the heavy lifting and it's stateless.
• borski 4y ago
  I’ve recently gotten deep into thinking about “precision medicine.” Folks here may remember or know the story of Matt Might; I have a less sad but similarly perplexing story around both my wife (for whom diagnosis was hard) and my best friend (who remains undiagnosed), and started thinking about how to apply “whole systems” thinking and treat the body as a system that’s prone to vulnerability, trying to find ways to discover where a “patch” may be necessary by ingesting lots of data that is otherwise overlooked or seems unrelated. As a security guy previously, particularly on the offensive side, this has been a fascinating endeavor thus far. I’m particularly interested in: the application of PRP injection to various ailments in the body (where else are there oceans of stem cells we can activate to help the body heal itself), and the application of ML to surfacing data about ailments for populations that are woefully understudied (trans patients undergoing GAHT, for example).
• awavering 4y ago
  I'm learning more about the challenges and rewards of taking extended breaks away from work - sabbaticals. This involves talking with people about their experiences and writing about what I've learned from them and observed from my own sabbatical. If anyone is curious, I have some posts up at https://www.albertwavering.com/tags/sabbatical/ https://www.albertwavering.com/tags/sabbatical/ and would love to chat with anyone who is thinking about or currently taking a break.
• jsemrau 4y ago
  I always felt that I get investment information too late and waste to much time on reading articles that have no context ("why did x happen yesterday" - only to realize that that happened a while ago and is not relevant anymore) Also, most investment sites are deeply textual while investment information is more effective visually.
  • cdiamand 4y ago
    I'm actually working on a product that identifies catalysts via AI and presents them (currently through text, possibly through API and imagery later). Drop me a line if you'd like to chat more about this space.
• SMAAART 4y ago
  I was burned out at my old job, got a new job that ays better and with better work/life balance, so now that I have some spare time, I decided to start something. Then I met Stoicism (Marc Aurelius & Co.) which made me re-think my drivers for starting a business. So I took a few steps back, getting deeper and deeper into Stoicism, and brainstorming new Stoic-based business models in the e-commerce space, or Art, or both!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bowlingx 4y ago
  I 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) - but also make it really easy for the content creator to be more independent of developers - while keeping UI constraints etc. I choose to build a native iOS and MacOS App with SwiftUI that basically provides all editing UI as native components instead of using HTML/CSS - Basically an overlay on top of the website that let's you control the components and website grid/layout. It's mainly a proof of concept and for me a way to learn SwiftUI :) There are many Website builders that provide great editing UIs (e.g. Webflow, Builder.io etc.), but I feel a native app, especially on iPad OS could provide benefits and it's a nice challenge :)
  • Existenceblinks 4y ago
    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.
  • fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    Hey! Huge shot in the dark, but I am working on an ML/NLP driven CMS for content creators. Have made great progress, just started on the CMS piece. Maybe we could collaborate? Email is in profile.
• jesse__ 4y ago
  I've been writing a metaprogramming layer on top of the C programming language. It's effectively implementing a lot of C++ templates and constexpr features in a smaller, faster package. It began as a toy/experiment that turned out to be useful, so I decided to pour the gas on and push it to it's natural conclusion. It's close to hitting a first alpha release at which point I expect it to stabilize somewhat. More info : https://scallyw4g.github.io/poof/ https://scallyw4g.github.io/poof/ The website's a WIP, but the tool does compile to WASM so you can give it a try in the browser, which is pretty neat-o. I'm also actively looking for feedback. If anyone has constructive comments/criticism feel free to reach out :)
• satisfice 4y ago
  I am working giving exploratory software testing a solid scientific foundation in cognitive science, sociology, and general systems theory. This has been my project for 25 years. It is my way of providing ammunition for those who uphold humanism against the technocrats who think they can automate testing.
• wwilim 4y ago
  Having a baby in a few months
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Congrats, good luck!! ___ In case you missed this, “A method to promote sleep in crying infants using the transport response” was recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32845229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32845229
• cpeterso 4y ago
  A project idea that I've been daydreaming about for a while (but haven't moved past research) is a cleanroom implementation of the online game Space Station 13. SS13 is built on the BYOND game engine, an ancient, closed-source client/server platform with a clunky, proprietary programming language. There have been a few attempts to rewrite SS13 in Unity or custom 3D game engines, but they've all suffered from second-system syndrome and development stalled. Plus they don't leverage SS13's most valuable asset: its existing game content, a huge library of game scripts and assets still being actively developed. My vision is a new client with an interpreter for BYOND's proprietary language that can execute SS13's existing content unchanged. Compile the client to WebAssembly so people can play and develop the game in a browser without installing any software. Unshackle the game from depending on hosted servers by making the client peer-to-peer using WebRTC. If the new client dethroned the BYOND client, then incompatible improvements could then be made to its fork of the BYOND language. The name for this project in my head is "Babylon 13". :)
  • meesterdude 4y ago
    I think this is a cool idea! But I disagree with your direction. Lets say you do rework everything to be web assembly and not bound to BYOND. I'm sure the 300 people that play SS13 would love it. But I don't think that goes far enough, for the effort required. I think rebuilding SS13 in unity would overall be a great idea, but there is the problem of how complex SS13 is that would need to be worked. But I think with the right baby steps and SOLID design, it could be done. But I do feel like any effort to rebuild would not be a huge success. SS13 is fun, but comparatively niche. Though as a mobile game there's a huge market.
    • cpeterso 4y ago
      Yeah. The game is far too niche for a rewrite to be worth the effort. This idea is more of a thought experiment in software migration (and an excuse to play with writing a parser in Rust and WebAssembly for an unusual programming language :)
      • cpeterso 4y ago
• dan_mctree 4y ago
  Trying to build a computer algebra system. Basically like a small version of Wolfram Alpha, but customized and accessible by my own code so I can use it for whatever I want in the way I like to. It's starting to get cool enough to be usable for a bunch of things, but I'm still trying to figure out what I really want to use it for It's challenging and interesting work, and I'd recommend building your own as a way to gain deeper understanding of math.
• gumby 4y ago
  I am working on climate repair, specifically the removal of methane from the atmosphere. Although the excess methane is only about 1.3 ppm, it's responsible for about a third of the temperature rise. We're not building a huge machine to try to suck the atmosphere through a straw; we're doing chemistry in the open atmosphere. Plan to have a pilot running within the next year and within five years be removing up to 100 Mt per year.
  • michaelbarton 4y ago
    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.
    • gumby 4y ago
      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.
      • michaelbarton 4y ago
        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.
      • pbadg3r 4y ago
        Would love to support you on this journey! I'm on the team at Fifty Years, we've backed teams like Noya (carbon removal) and Solugen (Carbon negative chemical manufacturing). Would love to chat! Feel free to email me at peregrine at 50y.com
  • 4y ago
• amacneil 4y ago
  Web-based data visualization for robotics and self-driving. Robotics is such an interesting industry, and we're only scratching the surface of what new tools are needed. Try it live here (hit "view sample data"): https://studio.foxglove.dev/ https://studio.foxglove.dev/ And it's open source! https://github.com/foxglove/studio https://github.com/foxglove/studio Shameless plug - we're hiring: https://foxglove.dev/careers https://foxglove.dev/careers
• pkoperek 4y ago
  Evolving neural networks with use of the fitness predictors (co-evolution). The project has stalled a bit due to lack of time (family etc) but overall I want to get back hacking around it.
• sandruso 4y ago
  I'm currently building a tool for generating website just from a text content as an input. It tries to figure out what layouts would match the content. Why? Because creating these websites quickly is always content problem. We should start from content and create a design according to content not other way around.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Recreating already existing legacy apps / plumping other apps to talk to other apps. /s
• zepolen 4y ago
  I have been developing a teleportation device. I've managed to move 20 micrograms of matter over a distance of ~30mm and now it is simply about scaling up.
  • Elof 4y ago
    Do you have a blog post or some link to info about your experiments?
  • Li7h 4y ago
    Please share more details. This is incredible and defies belief.
  • ai_ia 4y ago
    Apologies for my incredible disbelief, but you cannot just leave someone hanging by saying this and not expanding further. Details please.
• allyourbasepair 4y ago
  A couple of years ago I realized that there weren't any good open source software packages for designing DNA so I wrote one. https://github.com/TimothyStiles/poly https://github.com/TimothyStiles/poly Goal is to have a suite of packages and databases that can be used to design entirely novel proteins, metabolic pathways, and DNA constructs at scale because right now that software ecosystem just doesn't exist.
  • pgayed 4y ago
    *username checks out*
• wan_ala 4y ago
  Currently I am working on a minimalist and hackable shell with a pretty enviroment. The code is kind of a mess right now and i am working on a bunch of other stuff, but hopefully i finish it soon.
• sawaali 4y ago
  Building a successor to https://metaset.io https://metaset.io. My first stab at this problem (a native data visualization app) was OK, but left a lot to be desired in efficient user workflow. I am having another go at it, this time with Swift Charts and SwiftUI on the Mac.
• geoduck14 4y ago
  I am playing with 100 Tb of data. Some of it is free form text (questions, comments, discussions), some of it is activity on that text. It is a lot of fun to see what questions people have and why some people think they know what they are talking about.
• gigatexal 4y ago
  People are talking about existential crises arising from some DNA gene stuff and I’m just here trying to understand this yaml powered dynamic DAG building airflow based ETL and ingestion framework my company built in house and that my team uses.
• scythe 4y ago
  A simple rank-two mixed-member proportional voting system. The math is surprisingly involved. Thanks due to Tideman and Gregory.
• aussiegreenie 4y ago
  I am building a "sausage machine" to commercialise Australian univerity technology and create American companies. It is a one-stop-shop for Aussie companies to enter the USA market. I have a Tech Center in Maryland (http://www.autechcenter.com http://www.autechcenter.com) which offers lots of free services to Australian startups and we ticket clip any capital to make money. Current projects are: * NASA award winning Wound Healding tech https://rapair.com.au/ https://rapair.com.au/ * AI for drug discovery https://www.polygenrx.com/ https://www.polygenrx.com/ * 3D printing bone implants https://globalsurgicalinnovations.com.au/ https://globalsurgicalinnovations.com.au/ * Water filtration - https://www.starwater.com.au/ https://www.starwater.com.au/
  • askvictor 4y ago
    When you say to commercialise AU university tech, what do you mean? In particular the university part, as opposed to the startups?
  • techdragon 4y ago
    Ever dealt with stuff beholden to ITAR? Asking for reasons I mentioned in my own post in this thread.
• probinso 4y ago
  Voice recognition tool that toggles audio triggers to be used by Parkinson's patient for improved mobility. Synthetic aperture radar scraper and aggregator across international public satellite providers. And reading statistics in my free time.
• samhuk 4y ago
  Javascript 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 embarked on solving. Some things i've observed along the road: * Typescript is weird and wonderful when you push it to it's limits, particularly around recursive structures. Strange workarounds exist, nicely provded by all of the two Stack Overflow Typescript gurus that exist. * PostgreSQL doesn't have some of the features that you would expect from other DB technologies (i.e. certain table alterations, limit on update and delete, etc.). Weird and wonderful workarounds exist, but it always leaves you thinking _why aren't those workarounds just the de facto way for doing those things?_. [0] https://github.com/samhuk/ts-pg-orm https://github.com/samhuk/ts-pg-orm
  • jiggawatts 4y ago
    I’m interested to hear what those PostgreSQL limitations are more specifically.
    • samhuk 4y ago
      I don't want to get too much in the weeds, but one well-known example is missing support for LIMIT on DELETE and UPDATE statements. The workarounds that exist range from fairly pedestrian (like using the scary ctid column) to totally wild (like creating temp tables or using transactions and all sorts). The rabbit hole goes.
    • rjbwork 4y ago
      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.
  • slekker 4y ago
    Prisma and TypeORM both are made for TypeScript. The first works wonderfully well
• khitchdee 4y ago
  A keyboard based IDE for a keyboard based GUI for PCs. Common PC GUIs are WIMP based (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers). They require the usage of a mouse and are pretty complicated. I find the usage of the mouse in a PC GUI "unnatural". So I set out designing a keyboard-input only based GUI. It turned out, that wasn't as difficult as I initially thought. Then I started writing an IDE for designing apps using this new GUI approach. I call it EngageUI, since it is user activity based. https://github.com/Rohit-Agarwal-Khitchdee/EngageUI/ https://github.com/Rohit-Agarwal-Khitchdee/EngageUI/
  • notananthem 4y ago
    I feel like if you advertise this to the various "Mechanical Keyboard" communities they'd lose their shit in a positive way. r/mechanicalkeyboard is a main public one
    • khitchdee 4y ago
      Thanks. I'll try that.
  • xani_ 4y ago
    Well, Emacs already did it. I kinda hate after moving to IDEA (as IDE it's just better, still prefer Emacs as an editor tho) I had to use mouse more.
    • khitchdee 4y ago
      Emacs is a great editor if you don't want to have to use the mouse and once you get familiar with its command set. What I'm working on is creating a keyboard-input only GUI SDK that enables you to build something like Emacs easily.
• mingyeow 4y ago
  I’m working on interoperability between blockchains. The number and variety of blockchains are exploding and approaches so far have been sharply lacking - failing to tackle key problems in decentralizing, generalizing, data translation and the economics of providing a robust, secure interchain operability. Moving from largely centralized and specific message passing and token bridging into general interoperability that is decentralized and modular for any new blockchain or multi-chain protocol to extend and build on top of is a huge challenge.
• askvictor 4y ago
  Making solar available to apartment dwellers/multi-tenancy housing. We switch a shared solar system to different circuits based on who's currently using power, to optimise on-site solar usage and reduce feeding back into the grid. As well as having some interesting electrical issues, there's an amazing world of regulatory bureaucracy to wade through. https://allumeenergy.com/ https://allumeenergy.com/
• bluesquare9 4y ago
  i'm working on a v2 of a site i created to allow people to find independent radio shows they'll enjoy (www.ephem.fm). the current site texts you when shows matching your preferences are about to start. the next iteration will have visualizations of the music being played by each station in close to real time and allow you to select between them, save them, etc. the visualizations will be updated each minute and colors will be selected by the HSL color system, where hue = tempo (from blue for slower to red for faster), saturation (or intensity of color) = loudness, and lightness = pitch (technically, spectral centroid or 'center of mass' of frequencies of music). i also want the ui to allow people to select from stickers i've taken pictures of around nyc and arrange them similar to concert venue bathrooms or middle school lockers haha. altogether, want to create a fun way to explore independent radio!
• selimthegrim 4y ago
  Investigating how disorder enhances transport in a new solid state material.
• fy20 4y ago
  For my last few positions, I've been focused on working with restaurants and trying to build technology to help them run their business more effectively. The dirty secret about the restaurant industry is that most independent restaurants are very close to bankruptcy and the people running it often do not know that until it's too late. There was a thread a few days ago about the true cost of making hardware devices often being less than 30% of the retail price. From a business perspective, the same should apply to every item on your menu as well. Except more often than not, the person running the restaurant often has no idea how much a meal costs to serve. The real issue is that people start restaurants not because they want to run a business, but because they like food. In a way it is a good thing that they don't approach it with a capitalist mindset, as I don't thing we'd have the same variety of food if everyone did, but more often than not they are running blind and just hoping for the best. They put in long hours and a lot of their own capital, and if they are lucky they can survive a few years by being able to pay their staff, suppliers and rent, and finally being able to afford to pay themselves enough to personally survive on.
• pc2g4d 4y ago
  Distributed Proof of Personhood (proof of humanity)
• lee101 4y ago
  In 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-via-crawling 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 https://text-generator.io so more people can use it
  • O__________O 4y ago
    You mentioned pricing as your primary driver, but don’t list any pricing data or price comparisons on your site. Am I missing something? EDIT: Nevermind. Used a throwaway email to signup and it’s “100 Free requests per month, then $0.01 USD per request” - which unless I am missing something appears to be more expensive that OpenAI’s pricing: https://openai.com/api/pricing/ https://openai.com/api/pricing/
• achariam 4y ago
  I'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 https://clay.earth [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/ [2]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167216637840?journalCode=pspc https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616721663784...
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Curious, how’re measure performance of your system if it’s private?
• techdragon 4y ago
  An 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.
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Curious, what functions specifically fall under ITAR? For example, have you reviewed something like this page: https://research.mit.edu/integrity-and-compliance/export-control/information-documents/my-satellite-itar-or-ear https://research.mit.edu/integrity-and-compliance/export-con...
    • 4y ago
• arionhardison 4y ago
  I am building a public health and wellness infrastructure for black men. Launching Nov 8.
  • O__________O 4y ago
    How’re you planning to get users and monetize them? Do you have to deal with HIPAA compliance, if so, how’re you doing this?
    • arionhardison 4y ago
      I finished HIPA and HL7/FHIR Integration. I am getting users through a population health model. This is phase 2 of my moon shot. This was phase one. I am writing a larger blog post about it now. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/award-winning-programmer-and-software-engineer-arion-hardison-building-medicare-for-all-health-management-system-launches-first-of-three-phases-and-funding-campaign-301298519.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/award-winning-progr...
• curious16 4y ago
  Mine is not an interesting "problem" generally speaking. But, to me, it is a problem because I haven't solved it yet. I am on the journey of learning computer science and programming on my own from awesome books and resources available out there. I came across this article by Peter Norvig: https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://norvig.com/21-days.html after I read his code of a spell checker: https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html. I was mesmerized by the code itself. It is so clean as if it is speaking to me. No series of spaghetti statements making me cringe just at the sight of it. I want to be able to achieve that skill. That is my project/problem if you can say so. In college I was studying electrical engineering when I was taught programming in C using a very bad book and I hated coding after that. Now, I am gradually beginning to see the beauty in it. It is just prose. Prose can be bad and excellent. I was taught bad prose that's why I dislike it. I hope to become an elegant and useful programmer one day and build things that are useful to people. If you have any particular resource in mind that can help me in my journey, don't forget to suggest some in the replies.
  • Chirono 4y ago
    That code is written in a very declarative, functional style. Haskell is a language that forces you to write code like that, so might be a worth a look if your goal is to write ‘pretty’ code. However, I’d also add that becoming an “elegant” and “useful” programmer are often at odds with each other. It’s very easy to spend so much time trying to make your code pretty with the perfect abstractions that you never actually finish anything. If your goal is to be useful and productive then learning by writing a lot of code in a lot of different languages, styles and code based might serve you better than focussing on beautiful source code. Though if you can do both, then please do!
    • curious16 4y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion. Will keep that in mind. I understand that too much perfection can be a roadblock to progress.
• minhmeoke 4y ago
  I was curious about the composition of music, therefore a friend and I created frequency-domain visualizations of interesting sounds using the Welch power spectral density estimation algorithm and Fast Fourier Transform. A few examples: 1. Dialtone using dual-tone multi-frequency signaling and 56K dial-up modem connection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FomWraKuDFg&list=PLn67ccdhCssEJsJE6BnAqqBCDIdQHPFQb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FomWraKuDFg&list=PLn67ccdhCs... 2. Deluxe Multitone Car Alarm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4uKcvZL7HM&list=PLn67ccdhCssEJsJE6BnAqqBCDIdQHPFQb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4uKcvZL7HM&list=PLn67ccdhCs... 3. Composition using only sounds from Windows 98 and XP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT-jr9sS6Y&list=PLn67ccdhCssEJsJE6BnAqqBCDIdQHPFQb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT-jr9sS6Y&list=PLn67ccdhCs... 4. Piano Music (Ballade Pour Adeline): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnAfrEk429w&list=PLn67ccdhCssHTboc1l6tK_j-16u9Z3G_8&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnAfrEk429w&list=PLn67ccdhCs... 5. Electronic Music Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MllJLIX1glg&list=PLn67ccdhCssHLdXIUHHNVaO-N8fCY_Wi5&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MllJLIX1glg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...
• altilunium 4y ago
  Knowledge management. To put it on scifi-like phrases : "The universal knowledge repository of humankind". Or "imagine if we can extract the entirety of knowledge that stored inside a certain person brain, then store it in the machine. So everyone else could access that knowledge." Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, social media platform, search engine and the Internet come close, but still there are rooms for improvement. Especially in "discovery" part and "overall structure" within a body of knowledge. Sure, there are quality knowledge content, but they are mostly spread out and undiscoverable and very unstructured.
• mdnahas 4y ago
  I’m working on combining economics and information theory. Econ talks a lot about “informed markets”, but doesn’t measure that in Shannon’s bits.
  • Pluglet 4y ago
    That's interesting! I don't suppose you blog or have some other way that people can follow your progress on this at all? Best of luck with it.
• perlwle 4y ago
  I built a historical feed builder[0] so I can listen to previous episodes in one feed. Most podcast feeds only include last ~100 episodes. Podcasts such as Planet Money and Radio Lab have more than 1000 episodes in total. Manually combining the feeds is too time consuming and I enjoy building this tool. [0] https://backpod.podcastdrill.com/ https://backpod.podcastdrill.com/
• the__alchemist 4y ago
  I'm working on a protein modeler and interaction tool, werein the protein is defined by primary sequence and dihedral angles. My goal is to learn more about protein folding. The most visible approaches of exploring all conformation space, and using ML models to estimate final product aren't satisfying. I'm suspicious we can learn the rules of how proteins take their shape, which would simplify the problem. My ultimate goal is protein design.
• rurban 4y ago
  On Unicode TR39 https://unicode.org/reports/tr39/ https://unicode.org/reports/tr39/ (secure identifiers). https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident/ https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident/ Also on perfect hashes: https://github.com/rurban/nbperf https://github.com/rurban/nbperf, also gperf and cmph improvements.
• dawmak 4y ago
  I always wanted to take a challenge in an old boring industry and build something completely new. Myself, my co-founder, and a couple of other guys have looked recently into a very very boring hiring industry and had decided to do something about it. That's how the idea of Careera.io (https://Careera.io https://Careera.io) was born. We have just started this month and currently working on an MLP (minimum lovable product), will launch soon and let you guys know then :) Basically, we want to completely remove and automate the majority of a very mundane process of hiring on both sides of the market (job seekers and hiring managers). We want to finally introduce a bit of magic into this industry! Wish us luck!
• ZinaSarif 4y ago
  breaking Eroom's law. in the last 50 years the costs and timeline of drug development (clinical trials) were in increase. A phenomenon first published in nature and described as Moore's law reverse. As of today it costs ar. $800Mio and it takes 12 years to bring a cancer therapeutic to the market. I spent 8 years as a cancer scientist in drug discovery space, till I realised it doesn't make much sense to keep searching for more potential targets, if they will end up on a shelf for lack of clinical trials budget. I am trying to solve this issue by platforming the infrastructure. Bringing web2.0 to clinical drug development.
• tanujnotes 4y ago
  I have been using a solo WhatsApp group as my "notes app" for years. Quite common with Android users. But when I needed a dedicated notes app to get a little more organised, I couldn't find anything satisfactory. The popular notes app are way too complicated for my purpose. The lesser knowns usually don't have a good UI/UX. And there's also the issue of privacy. I needed a privacy respecting notes app which worked like whatsapp. So I built exactly that - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.makenotetoself https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.makenoteto... Took inspiration from Signal and called it Note to Self.
• DaleksInc 4y ago
  I'm working on developing a modern version (e.g., unicode, box-drawing characters, text coloring, etc.) of Super Star Trek. It's probably not very interesting to other people, but I find it fascinating.