Ask HN: Which important problem are you working on?

46 points by manx ↗ HN
Important is subjective, what is important to you?

51 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] thread
My personal problem: Coping with long Covid. If I talk, or walk for more than a few minutes, it wipes me out for a few hours.

The next year: Figuring out some form of employment compatible with the above, or navigating the bureaucracy to get disability.

Long term: Convincing people that we need to implement capability based security. Until that point, we're going to keep losing liberties in the name of cybersecurity (theater), and nothing will actually get better. It's the only way to actually own your computer.

Other: I want to find out if Bitgrid was a dumb or smart idea before I die, for real.

Only resource/protocol I know of for long COVID: https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-recover...

"Given the lack of available treatment recommendations in the setting of large numbers of patients suffering with this disorder globally, the FLCCC developed the I-RECOVER protocol in collaboration with a number of expert clinicians including Dr. Mobeen Syed, Dr. Ram Yogendra, Dr. Bruce Patterson, and Dr. Tina Peers. Although our varied yet often overlapping treatment approaches were initially empiric, while based on both preliminary investigations into and prevailing theoretical pathophysiologic mechanisms of LHCS, the consistently positive clinical responses observed, often profound and sustained, led the collaboration to form the consensus protocol below. As with all FLCCC protocols, we must emphasize that multiple aspects of the protocol may change as scientific data and clinical experience in this condition evolve, thus it is important to check back frequently or join the FLCCC Alliance to receive notification of any protocol changes."

Which bitgrid? There are many projects with this name.
http://bitgrid.blogspot.com

The idea is dead simple, 4 bit input, 4 bit output lookup tables clocked in alternative phases, like a chess board, as a general purpose computing fabric.

Dealing w apple about finding Pegasus on my phone since 2016. They have ignored my request for help until now and technical support saying there is not much they can do about it.
How did you find it on your phone and why not get a different phone
Why would you expect Apple to do anything about it? Isn't their answer to usually wipe and rebase anyhow?
I suggest contacting Citizen Lab for technical support.
Dynamic storage allocation (DSA) from the fragmentation perspective.

DSA is as important for programming as control flow statements. Yet we keep ignoring the fact that it is not understood--see Wilson et al's "DSA: A Survey and Critical Review" for one of the best problem statements of all time.

Fragmentation is DSA's (and every Tetris player's) main enemy. Believe it or not, we haven't managed to converge on how to measure it yet.

I am working on a tool that a) computes an approximately optimal fragmentation value per application and b) also computes fragmentation for arbitrary app/allocator pairs.

Involuntary homelessness.

Trying to create a notepad based "OS" ui that devs and grandmas can use together.

Throwing events at my place and making free pizza for friends so we can keep community cohesion after our co-working space closed.

I'd like to hear more about this UI. Is it something that tuns on top of Linux or windows as a desktop environment or window manager? How do you interact with programs (all text based)?

Assuming grandmas can use it, the paradigm will be easy to pick up fast? What's the syntax like if it's meant to be used widely? I'm always interested in learning about new computing UX paradigms, there are always ways to improve things!

I'm currently designing an "Automatic Rust", something high-level that will automatically implement the usual Rust patterns (generational indices, the occasional Vec or arena, and something I call a LifeCell), so we have fast and memory safe code with no run-time GC.

Rust's biggest challenge (IMO) is that the borrow checker makes the code very brittle... many changes which should be small end up causing widespread refactors. Not great for software engineering sometimes. Perhaps this approach will solve that.

Nailing down the perfect balance of all the techniques is challenging, but it's fun and looking promising =)

I would be interested in hearing more about it. Is it a completely new language? Or a library that helps writing Rust?
Sounds to me like something to help write rust code. I would be interested as well, my rust projects have been pretty small but I do feel the pain of type changes causing major refactors to be needed
It's a new language named Vale (https://vale.dev/). The TL;DR from a Rust perspective might be "A Rust that embraces shared mutability by default, automatically borrows things, and then adds an opt-in region borrow checker."

The core insight is that Rust's memory safety and speed mostly don't really come from the borrow checker, the borrow checker just showed us the way. We can combine the resulting patterns in different ways now.

Working on cancer treatment discovery. Hoping to pivot into technologies for early detection and screening.
Helping small teams make better decisions by reducing bias and encouraging critical exploration of the decision space
Do you have any material to look at. Any drafts on his to do this?
Abolish capatilism!

Anarchist revolution by way of creators, or small groups of people, helping each other, i.e., federate with other communes in order to sustain, as earlier anarchists believed.

Working on machine learning infrastructure for self driving cars.

In my opinion, self driving cars are going to be a significant improvement in quality of life for people who do not have access to transportation (eg. the young and elderly, and people who are not able to drive for various reasons) or may need goods and food delivered at a cheaper rate than what is currently available.

Working on accurate extreme weather forecasts.
Working on making computer vision for robotics easier.

I feel like the real reason we don't have robots doing all of our physical grunt work, is that it is just way too expensive to develop robots that do advanced and custom things. Currently only big players with deep pockets can consider developing software for a robot that automates a task that requires some level of fine grained control or visual feedback.

The computer vision part is challenging as you need deep subject knowledge, you need to implement complicated algorithms and assemble huge datasets. We are working on a way to improve the efficiency of creating datasets, standard algorithm implementations and standardizing interfaces to make things as composable as possible.

It ain't much, but it's a start. https://www.strayrobots.io

That's pretty cool, and best of luck!

Lowering the barrier to entry for many of these object recognition tasks makes so many applications possible. Many years ago (before DL was a thing), I was approached to make a phone app that recognized coins; doing it with classical computer vision, with rotation invariance and potential overlaps between the coins was a rather big task and far too expensive for that customer. Nowadays it's way easier with machine learning, and SDKs such as yours seem to make that even easier.

How to bring my blood pressure down. Statins don't seem to be working and the docs can't tell me why.
- look up study on breathing and blood pressure - also potassium and sodium Dr berg on YouTube.. You need both unless like 25% of population you're sodium sensitive. - do HIIT training - consume ginger, L-Arginine, cardamom - some drugs cause high blood pressure - are you're kidneys working - wearing mask helps lower bp
Statins are for cholesterol not blood pressure directly. Blood pressure is complicated. Mine also runs high. Medicines haven’t helped and I haven’t been able to find a treatable cause. I just rest / relax more. (I am a doctor, but not your doctor and this is not medical advice).
You're right. I'm on statins too, slip of the head. I mean angiotensins. I've been on Valsartan and they keep upping the dosage. My wake-up blood pressure still hovers around 150-160/100 but it goes down during the day.
Have you done a sleep study? That sounds like sleep apnea.
Living life. It's an important project. Think small rather than big. Volunteer in your community. Hang out with family and friends. Garden. Barter. Reduce dependence. It will make a larger impact than other projects. YMMV.
Personal/financial success issue:

Trying to figure out my life. I work a job I'm starting to hate because it's dead-end, but it pays well for what it is. Mentally exhausting though.

I haven't had time anymore to find something else, and to make it worse, it's not tech-related (in a broad sense, not just FAANG).

I'm kind of stuck where I am for a bit, but it pays the bills. I don't want extravagant, I just want a small place, far out of the way. Not into the "Van Life" thing though.

Your situation is pretty common actually, unfortunately.

Keep learning new, valuable skills that will never expire and will only compound your value and keep applying for new jobs while you already have your current one.

Reduce consumption, invest as much as possible in indexes/tech stocks.

Automated theorem proving + neural language models + reinforcement learning.

I think most people seriously underestimate how powerful modern proof assistants like Lean [1] are for building things like provably correct software and chips, as well as verifying math research. But fully formalizing anything big leads to a proliferation of small annoying lemmas -- not "difficult" to prove per se, just annoying and time-wasting. I'm working on a neural theorem prover that aims to solve these lemmas fully automatically.

[1] https://leanprover.github.io/

Been thinking about this for a long time; are you documenting your progress somewhere or have a repository?
A social media with focus on moderating toxicity and hatespeech, meanwhile bringing some interactive content on the table other than just the mindless scrolling.

We're trying to build a mix of insta + twitter + Reddit, without the drawbacks of each. All these big apps have issues, Insta with its data mining, Twitter with its blatant hate speech and reddit which is very limited in terms of features.

Fingers crossed, its a bit of a stretch and tbh even I'm not sure I can pull this off but current social media has a lot of room to grow imo.

Setting up investment to pay interest ~2x my salary. Starting today.
What kind of time frame are you looking at? Also, what instruments will you choose to get there?
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Coding a new front-end interface for Hacker News
A very talented junior engineer joined our team. He puts a lot of pressure on himself and gets very bummed out when something he does isn’t perfect. He tries to do a million things at once and is at risk of burning out. I’m trying to help him manage his work, learn to take pr comments professionally (not personally), and help him have a healthy work/life balance.
I'm working on extracting Chinese subtitles from video in order to make it easier to learn the language using them. Probably 95% of all Chinese videos have hard subs. Some have soft subs but it's still pretty rare. This is certainly important to me, to allow me to learn faster with less effort so that I can talk to in-laws and family in China, and immerse myself in the culture. https://zimu.ai
Indexing hospital prices. Recent regulation requires hospitals to post all of their prices but they’re not easily searchable yet. https://turquoise.health
My team has cracked making blockchain NFTs legally control physical property: buy the NFT, get legal ownership of the underlying physical asset.

Works right now for stuff in vaults. Property in warehouses and galleries is next. It's a building block of the circular economy.