
Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? - jlevers
I know there are lots of really interesting problems out there waiting to be solved, but I haven&#x27;t been exposed to much in the software world besides web technologies.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear about what interesting problems (technically or otherwise) you&#x27;re working on -- and if you&#x27;re willing to share more, I&#x27;m curious how you ended up working on them.<p>Thank you :)
======
sgtnoodle
I'm helping to build a scalable system for delivering high value and life
saving medical supplies to hard to reach places via autonomous aircraft. The
system is currently operating in Rwanda and Ghana, and aggressively expanding
over the next couple years.

Specifically, I spend a lot of time thinking about and writing embedded
software. The aircraft is fully autonomous and needs to be able to fly home
safely even after suffering major component failures. I split my time between
improving core architectural components, implementing new features, designing
abstractions, and adding testing and tooling to make our ever-growing team
work more efficiently.

I did FIRST robotics in high school where I mainly focused on controller
firmware. I studied computer science in college while building the embedded
electronics for solar powered race cars, and also worked part time on research
projects at Toyota. After graduating with a Master's degree, I stumbled into a
job at SpaceX where I worked a lot on the software for cargo Dragon, then
built out a platform for microcontroller firmware development. I decided to
leave SpaceX while happy, and spent a couple years working on the self driving
car prototype (the one that looked like a koala) at Google. Coming up on my
third year, I was itching for something less comfortable and decided to join a
scrappy small startup with a heart of gold. Now it's in the hundreds of
employees and getting crazier and crazier.

~~~
johnmorrison
Are you working on Zipline [1] ?

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c)

~~~
iandanforth
Pro Tip: Search "<HN handle> \+ github" frequently gets a real name, and if
not current job, then look on linkedin.

The answer to your question is: Yes.

------
syllable_studio
Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion,
actually.) [https://www.terramenthq.com/](https://www.terramenthq.com/)

About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate
change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable
energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became
with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a
research paper from the U.S. DOE written in 1984 showing that the idea was
perfectly feasible and affordable, but it seems that nearly everyone has
forgotten about it since. (they didn't build it at the time because the demand
wasn't there yet. Now energy storage demand is growing exponentially)

A year later, I'm applying for grant funding to get it built. I know that
nearly everyone will tell me I can't do it because this or that reason.
Because people don't like change and they're scared of big things even if the
research shows it makes perfect sense. But I'm doing it anyways because no one
else is getting it done. The idea is too compelling and too important to
ignore. So here goes nothing!

~~~
johnmorrison
I hope to convey this in the least volatile manner, but I must bring it up.

> I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to
> displace fossil fuels.

The above is a reasonable statement, however, your website says the following:

> We can’t quit carbon without energy storage. To stop climate change,
> renewables must replace fossil fuels.

> Without energy storage, renewables will fail to reach even 25% of the energy
> market by 2040. This will cause global temperatures to rise over 3°C, a
> level which will cause catastrophic climate damage.

Those are not only misleading but outright lies. Now, I won't hide my bias
here: I work on nuclear fission. But here's the reality: there are many
possible pathways to net-zero carbon and limiting global temperature rise to
well below 3°C (below 1.5°C in fact)

To just list a few:

* Massive adoption of nuclear fission alone

* Development & massive adoption of nuclear fusion alone

* Shift from coal&oil to natural gas, cleaner fossil fuels + scaling carbon capture/sequestration

* Shift from fossil fuels to renewables + storage (probably not alone)

Or any combination of those, in addition to a number of alternative
approaches.

\---

Edit: Also, it should be noted that the energy sector alone only represents
about 1/5 of the emissions problem. In order to get to net-zero GHG and stop
anthroprogenic climate change, the clean energy sector needs to expand well
past the current global TPES and supply net-zero electricity that allows for
the decarbonization of the other main contributors:

Agriculture, steel+cement+plastic, transportation, buildings&appliances, and
flora loss leading to lost carbon stores (deforestation etc)

Even if renewables and storage could supply 100% of our electricity or even
total power supply, you would still only be 1/5 done solving climate change.
There is no unitary solution.

\---

Acting as though renewables are _necessary_ , instead of one of multiple
options, is denial or malicious. In reality, renewable energy is nowhere near
capable of reliably and safely taking on a large portion of our energy supply
globally. It is expensive (you can make claims about unit cost, but what
really matters is country-scale - look at German electricity prices vs. just
about everywhere else), it is dangerous, it takes a lot of land area, and it
is the least reliable.

I don't want to spend a lot of time here stomping on renewables, but there is
plenty of reason to, and my main point is that I feel it is unjust and immoral
for you to claim that renewables "must replace fossil fuels" if we are to stop
climate change. It's just not true, and you need to admit that.

The energy industry is arguably one of if not the most important backbone of
our modern society, and responsible for the safety and health of billions of
people. Whether you're working on the generation or storage side, it is all
our responsibility to be honest and make true claims - not to spread biased
misinformation when it benefits your particular solution.

I'd like to finish by making it clear I'm very happy you're working on your
tech and I hope you succeed in making it the best it can be - renewables are
certainly trending to higher adoption and we need reliable, efficient,
scalable storage solution in order to avoid dangerous outages and other grid
issues.

You bring up valid criticisms of existing solutions, although I do think you
should also be fair to those. Most things in life are a trade-off: maybe
pumped hydro is a better majority solution for the grid, but lithium ion is an
incredibly important, successful and expanding technology that needs to be
given credit for its wide range of great applications.

I hope this response has not been inflammatory: I just very much care about
maintaining a truthful public discussion around energy. I wish you the best of
luck, and I hope you can take something useful from this.

~~~
dangerface
> Without energy storage, renewables will fail

but none of the below are renewables

* Massive adoption of nuclear fission alone * Development & massive adoption of nuclear fusion alone * Shift from coal&oil to natural gas, cleaner fossil fuels + scaling carbon capture/sequestration

~~~
amdavidson
You're clipping the wrong part of the sentence.

Parent is primarily disputing: "To stop climate change, renewables must
replace fossil fuels." and if renewables fail, "this will cause global
temperatures to rise over 3°C"

------
i_haz_rabies
Alerting people when proposals are put before municipal councils to develop
natural land. I found out too late that a huge, beautiful forest where I live
is going to be ripped up and turned into investment condos. So in the interest
of giving natural land a fighting chance, I'm setting up a system that will
notify users when an address they've submitted is being rezoned.

The challenge is obviously scaling, since every municipality is different. For
now it's going to cover my region and we'll see from there.

~~~
zaphodX
Sounds challenging..and agree that adapting this to each municipal area would
suck big time of effort.

I tried something similar but mostly to figure where the land is being
purchased recently in a region. But then land/parcels/addresses system is all
over the place and, even that info is not consistent across cities.

have you looked at data providers who may have this data?

~~~
jlevers
Agreed, the differences between municipalities makes this really hard to
scale. If data providers like the ones you mention don't exist, the two ideas
that immediately come to mind are a) becoming that data provider (obviously),
or b) building a platform for municipalities to store their land ownership
data on.

Both sound like interesting problems, and it would be awesome if municipal-
level land data was available at scale.

~~~
MetalGuru
How do you become that data provider? You need some scalable way to get all
that data, right?

~~~
jlevers
I'm not sure how to do it scalably, other than by becoming the host for that
data, which is why I included my second option. It seems much easier (and much
more profitable) than figuring out how to access the data in its existing
format.

------
troquerre
We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate
Authorities with a distributed root of trust.

DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top
of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in
HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where
only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for your traffic
to be compromised.

We're building on top of a new protocol
([https://handshake.org](https://handshake.org), launching in 7 days!!) to
create an alternate root zone that's distributed. Developers can register
their own TLDs and truly own them by controlling their private keys. In
addition, they can pin TLSA certs to their TLD so that CAs aren't needed
anymore.

I wrote a more in-depth blog post here: [https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-
handshake-decentralizing-d...](https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-
decentralizing-dns-to-improve-the-security-of-the-internet)

~~~
geonnave
This is really interesting. Are you using concepts from self-sovereign
identity¹²? Do you think there is a relevant intersection?

¹ [http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-
sov...](http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-
identity.html) ² [https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-
primer/](https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-primer/)

~~~
troquerre
Yes! It's funny you mention that I just bought The Sovereign Individual —
haven't read it yet but from cursory glance I think there is a lot of
intersection. Would love to discuss more — we have a discord I can invite you
to if you're interested, just ping me at the email in my profile.

------
davehcker
I'm growing the freshest lettuce, iron-rich kale, and a lot of other leafy
greens!

While in college (CS & Math), I got heavily interested in growing food in the
most efficient and healthiest way possible. I was a dreamer when I started so
I thought more of how to grow 'earthly' produce on Mars, but then I realized
that my own planet Earth is so massively underserved.

It's basically like this- I mastered growing leafy greens in indoor closed
environmenet, then I tried to cover all the major physical and biological
markers, then I try to optimize the most optimal levels of 5-6 variables
(currently) that I can fully control and may produce the best phenotype- CO2,
O2, Light, Nitrate, P, K. These parameters have their own sub definitions.

So far I have had great results. I am trying to raise investment so I can
finally make it a reality. Check the numbers here: hexafarms.com (no fluff)

~~~
stef25
> THE FINAL PRODUCE IS THE ULTIMATE MANIFESTATION OF THEIR PLATONIC IDEAL
> FORMS

How's the taste?

Not denying it's possible to grow food very efficiently indoors but a vastly
oversimplified opinion is that plants need sunlight to be tasty. Is this
wrong?

~~~
davehcker
You'll have to buy my words- but taste wise (based on my surveys too) it's the
'best' they have had (mostly city dwellers I'm talking about).

Yes, you don't really need sunlight whatsoever. I was myself shocked until I
recalled high school biology concept of genotype and phenotype i.e. the
genetic structure that manifests itself given the right physical conditions
(at least of plants.) As for the plants' nutrients, here's a classic- Teaming
with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener's Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition, by
Lowenfels. I was amazed to find how complex, yet simple plants are.

------
rikkipitt
I'm working on pacing emails to a more manageable, calmer schedule. I'm doing
it with essentially a UI-less system which is a rather fun way to produce an
app. It simply requires a user to update their email of the website that
emails them too frequently with a paced.email alias. E.g.

    
    
      johndoe.shopify@daily.paced.email
      johndoe.stripe@weekly.paced.email
      johndoe.github@monthly.paced.email
    

At the end of each period, a single email is sent to the real email address
containing all of the messages the alias received over that timeframe.

[https://www.paced.email](https://www.paced.email)

I'd love to hear how you'd use it.

~~~
thewarpaint
Great idea. My suggestion: why not use the Gmail-style johndoe+spotify@
suffix? Just because people would be more used to it. That way johndoe@ also
would work.

~~~
rikkipitt
Thanks thewarpaint. Good point. Having read the below counterpoints though,
I'm not quite sure now! I'll look into it.

~~~
thewarpaint
On second thought they have a point, I have never had an email address with a
dot being rejected, but I've seen it for the plus alias several times.

------
cedricium
I'm tackling the issue of managing Reddit saves.

Across all platforms (not just Reddit), people including myself like to
save/bookmark interesting content in the hopes of getting some use out of it
later. The problem arises when you start accumulating too much content and
forget to ever check that stuff out.

I'm working on a solution to help resurface Redditors' saved things using
personalized newsletters. I'm calling it Unearth and users get to choose how
frequently they want to receive their newsletter (daily, weekly, or monthly).
The emails contain five of their saved comments or things and link directly to
Reddit so that when viewing it, they can then decide whether or not to unsave
it.

Basic functionality is all there, just needs some more styling and the landing
page could be spruced up.

[https://www.tryunearth.com/](https://www.tryunearth.com/)

~~~
SCM-Enthusiast
Signed up, and I love how fast it was to create an account. Literally two
clicks and 5 seconds as my password is saved in google crome and you sign up
through reddit. I think you're on to something with that onboarding process.

Kinda different, kind of the same but i'd love to use an app with much better
search than the 'direct search' currently in most aggrogrator/ note apps. If i
searched 'quotes' it would rip out and return all the things in italized, in
quotes, or things that the algorithm deems as quotes based on it's scrape of
the internet; Kinda like google but 'personal search' based on my notes,
articles, all my different emails (work, and my 37 different gmail accounts)
and websites I frequent (like reddit, hacker news comments, etc.) There was an
HN article the other day that got me thinking about this problem, but i can't
seem to find it. However, it approached it from a much deeper technical level,
utilizing emacs and searching through his code. If you could bring that into
an easy to use, consumer facing GUI I think it'd have potential to be pretty
game changing.

'Personalized Search, and we don't have to steal your data because you
willingly give it to us' \- Google

~~~
kahkeng
I believe this is the HN article you're referring to:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22160572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22160572)

------
nmfisher
I'm building an AI agent to help develop foreign language skills through
realtime (spoken) conversations.

It's funny how we're all working from different definitions of the word
"problem" \- I'm certainly not changing the world with medical supplies for
developing countries, renewable energy, payment systems and so on.

But it's something I'm really passionate about, and I'd be over the moon if I
came anywhere close to the picture I have in my mind.

Back when I was studying German and Chinese, I would spend hours and hours on
rote practice with little to show for it. My brain almost felt like it was on
autopilot - the eyes would read the words and the hands would write the
sentences, but the neurons weren't really firing. It didn't feel like I was
properly building the synaptic bridges necessary to actually use those words
in conversation.

On the flipside, after just 20 minutes speaking with a tutor, my proficiency
would improve leaps and bounds. Being forced to map actual, real-world
thoughts/concepts to the words/expressions I had learned - that's what made
everything clicked. It felt like the difference between just reading a chapter
in a maths textbook, and actually doing the exercises.

So after keeping track of progress in NLP and speech recognition/synthesis in
recent years, it seemed like a logical time to start. Progress is
slow/incremental, but it is there.

~~~
davedx
I think it’s a great idea. I first started learning Dutch with Michel Thomas
audio course which is very much about being in a simulated small language
class, and you need to say sentences when prompted by the “teacher”. Later in,
I learned almost all the Dutch I needed to pass the citizenship language exam
just by conversing with friends and family in Dutch, gradually building up
fluency. Let me know if you need a beta tester, email is davedx@gmail.com

~~~
nmfisher
That would be fantastic, thanks. I'll jot your e-mail down and will reach out
when I'm getting close to something testable.

~~~
camelite
I'm an English teacher. Sign me up too?

~~~
nmfisher
Sure! My email is in my profile, feel free to shoot me a note with your
contact details.

------
tobmlt
1.) A solver for the unstructured Euler equations. ...I was intending to
volunteer time for an local university project investigating parallels between
Holographic light with orbital angular momentum and hydrodynamics (in this
case the Euler/Madelung equations). Not sure what happened as... volunteers
get lost in the shuffle? Anyway, the solver is fun.

2.) Porting my Python code for nonlinear gradient driven optimization of
parametric surfaces to C++. Includes a constraint (propagation) solver based
on Minikanren extended with interval arithmetic for continuous data (interval
branch and contract). This piece is a pre-processor, narrowing the design
space to only feasible hyper-boxes before feeding design parameter sets
(points in design space) to the (real valued) solver. Also it does automatic
differentiation of control points (i.e. B-spline control points) so I can
write an energy functional for a smooth surface, with Lagrange multipliers for
constraints (B-spline properties). Then I get the gradient and Hessian without
extra programming. This makes for plug and play shape control. I am looking to
extend this to subdivision surfaces and/or to work it towards mesh deformation
with discrete differential geometry so I've been baking with those things in
separate mini-projects.

3.) Starting the Coursera discrete optimization course. This should help with,
e.g. knapsack problems on Leetcode, some structural optimization things at
work, and also it seems the job market for optimization is focused on
discrete/integer/combinatorial stuff presently so this may help in ways I do
not foresee.

4.) C++ expression template to CUDA for physical simulation: I am periodically
whittling away at this.

~~~
jlevers
Would you be willing to explain what the applications of (2) are? I'll admit
that I only undersetand a fraction of what you said in that section, but I'm
curious what you're using it for.

~~~
tobmlt
Sure: the automated design-by-optimization of ship hull form geometry which
meets constraints and is smooth according to some energy measures.

Build a functional to describe your ship problem, minimize it: if the solver
is happy, you have a boat.... uh, or if you haven’t solved the entire problem,
you have some geometry which can be stitched together with more optimization
to make a boat.

More broadly, “why a boat?” Answer: because boats have a lot of constraints,
and a lot of shape ( Gaussian curvature, non rectangular topology, a need to
be cheaply produced, etc etc)

So it’s a good problem to tax your generative design or design space
search/optimization capability.

------
coderholic
Creating the worlds best IP address and domain name APIs and data sets, at
[https://ipinfo.io](https://ipinfo.io) and [https://host.io](https://host.io).

We've solved scaling and reliability (we handle 20 billion API requests a
month), and we're now focusing almost all our efforts on our data quality, and
new data products (like VPN detection).

We're bootstrapped, profitable, and we've got some big customers (like apple,
and t-mobile), and despite being around for almost 7 years we've still barely
scratched the surface on the opportunity ahead of us.

If you think you could help we're hiring - shoot me a mail - ben@ipinfo.io

~~~
aliclark
Why/how is this better than existing IP solutions (e.g.
[https://www.maxmind.com/en/home](https://www.maxmind.com/en/home) or
[https://www.digitalelement.com/](https://www.digitalelement.com/))?

~~~
coderholic
Here are some reasons why someone might choose to use us:

\- We're super developer friendly - you don't even need an access token to
make up to 1,000 requests per day. We have a clean / simple JSON response, and
official SDKs for most popular libraries

\- We have a quick, reliable API. We obsess over latency and availability, and
handle over 20 billion API requests a month. (here's a technical overview of
how we reduced rDNS lookups by 50x: [https://blog.ipinfo.io/reducing-ipinfo-
io-api-latency-50x-by...](https://blog.ipinfo.io/reducing-ipinfo-io-api-
latency-50x-by-making-rdns-lookups-blazingly-fast-5200d0289024))

\- We obsess over data quality. We have a data team that's constantly striving
to make our data and accuracy even better than it already is.

\- We're innovating. We've launched and are working on exciting new data sets
and products in the IP and domain data space (VPN detection, the host.io
domain API, and more).

\- We care about our customers. We have people working on customer support and
customer success. If you run into an issue or need help, we'll be there to
answer your questions.

~~~
aliclark
Thanks! Do you have a work email I can contact you on? We currently lookup >1
million IPs per second and are in the middle of evaluating IP-geo solutions.

~~~
coderholic
Sure, would love to be part of your evaluation! ben@ipinfo.io

------
a_diplomat
I'm a diplomat working on international norms for cyber and information
warfare. I'm trying to get countries to agree on how to use and not use their
capabilities, the influence on global democracy, the connection to armed
conflict and the future of interstate relations. In practice, this means
meeting a lot of people and spending a lot of time negotiating with other
countries in scrappy conference rooms in the UN and elsewhere, sometimes in
weird anonymous locations.

On the side, I'm an advisor to an impact investment foundation that is
expanding their operations to East Africa. They're setting up an investment
fund and accelerator programs to help companies tackle development challenges.

I'm also involved in a startup that is working to develop a new fintech app to
create more data and access to credit for small-scale businesses in East
Africa. It's a basic PWA app, not released yet, which has some real potential
of scaling up and addressing some pretty substantial development challenges.
(If anyone is really good with writing a bare-bones PWA based on Gatsby
optimised for speed and low-bandwidth environments, please give me a shout).

I've had a weird career. Started out as a programmer in the late 90's, did my
own startup in the mid 00's which was a half-baked success, moved to Africa
for a few years and worked for the UN, moved back home and had kids, moved
back to Africa and worked as a diplomat covering lots of conflicts in the
Great Lakes region, moved back home again, worked for the impact foundation
for a year and then rejoined diplomacy to do cyber work.

~~~
jlevers
> I'm a diplomat working on international norms for cyber and information
> warfare.

I didn't know any such norms existed. What are some of the existing
agreements, and if you can talk about it, what are some of the new ones you're
trying to push forward?

Your career sounds crazy...in a good way! Was your initial involvement with
the UN in a technical role?

~~~
a_diplomat
There are several negotiations ongoing in various committees of the UN, where
the issues that surface in the "real world" are negotiated: information
warfare (such as election interference), responsibility for information across
borders etc. [https://www.cfr.org/blog/united-nations-doubles-its-
workload...](https://www.cfr.org/blog/united-nations-doubles-its-workload-
cyber-norms-and-not-everyone-pleased)

Basically, it's about trying to defend international norms from an onslaught
of attempts to make states the primary defender of the informational realm,
and thereby legitimise opression.

Yeah, first job for UN was coding a shitty CRUD system in order to keep track
of HIV infections in East Africa.

------
davidkellis
I'm trying to build a programming language that might best be characterized as
rust - ownership + GC + goroutines (coroutines with an automatic yield
semantic).

My rationale for starting this project was that I like specific features or
facilities of many individual languages, but I dislike those languages for a
host of other reasons. Furthermore, I dislike those languages enough that I
don't want to use them to build the projects I want to build.

I'm still at a relatively early point in the project, but it has been
challenging so far. I'm implementing the compiler in Crystal, and I needed a
PEG parser combinator library or a parser generator that targeted Crystal, but
there wasn't a PEG parser in Crystal that supported left recursive grammar
rules in a satisfactory way, so that was sub-project number 1. It took two
years, I'm ashamed to say, but now I have a functioning PEG parser (with
seemingly good support for left recursive grammar rules) in Crystal that I can
use to implement the grammar for my language.

There is still a _ton_ more to be done - see
[http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/LifeAfterParsing...](http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/LifeAfterParsing.html)
for a list of remaining ToDos - but I'm optimistic I can make it work.

~~~
atheiste
Maybe check out the [https://vlang.io](https://vlang.io). It might be similar
to what you are doing and personally I admire the ideas and decisions the
author made so far.

~~~
davidkellis
I saw vlang.io a few months ago. Every time I come back to the site, my jaw
hits the ground again. I am utterly impressed by Alexander's productivity - it
blows me away every time I consider it.

I think V is an impressive language, but it isn't quite geared toward my
vision of what a language ought to be.

I am more a Rubyist than a C, Rust, or Go developer, and so my preference is
for a higher level language that's a little more pleasant to use and doesn't
make me think about some details that I consider "irrelevant". I'm firmly in
the "sufficiently smart compiler" camp, and think that I shouldn't have to
think about those low level details that only matter for the sake of
performance - the compiler ought to handle that for me.

------
joelthelion
I've been meaning to improve "news" for a number of years now, with limited
success so far. The current news industry is broken beyond repair: all you get
are bite-sized irrelevant factoids. A good news service would be:

\- Relevant to you and your interests...

\- ... but diverse enough to feed your intellectual curiosity

\- Delivered in a timely fashion: apart from once a year big events, most
things can wait for a few days, no need to require you to read the news every
day

\- Include some analysis to allow you to see the big picture

When I started a few years ago, I thought naively that a little machine
learning should do the trick. But the problem is actually quite complex. In
any case, the sector is ripe for disruption.

~~~
johnmorrison
Oooh, this is a great one. You're absolutely right "the sector is ripe for
disruption"

Your list of points is great, if you can figure out a way to deliver a service
like that it would be incredible.

I think one of the biggest challenges for current publications is the tie to
advertising model - advertising business model forces products to decrease in
quality over time. Same thing happening to Google and Facebook, but super
apparent in news sites. They're fucking awful these days, I can't read a
single article without ten huge popups and a paywall.

~~~
raihansaputra
I'm not sure to reply to the parent comment or this one, but as you mentioned
advertising model, I'd like to reply here.

All the points mentioned in the parent comment has been done before: magazines
and newspapers. (Some) people used to subscribe to multiple publications to
get their intake of information. The wide ranging, impact based news is the
daily publication specialty. The newest in your specific interest is the
magazines' playing field. News special reports used to be in longform and
discusses all the finer points, including analysis and graphs to see the big
picture. Magazines with themes serves the intellectual curiosity.

Somehow in the age of niche creators, these companies die out. I think the
saying 'the sector is ripe for disruption' is true, but not in the way of
software or automation. Better business model is really needed. The business
model has been done before; the evolution to bite-sized factoids is the
consequences changing to more heavily advertising-based business model.

The limiting factor of paper space and physical distribution seems to strike a
balance: news to be printed and distributed need to be worth it for the public
to pay. Maybe bundling also made it work[0]. The specific 'small' niches in
newspaper/magazines can be fulfilled by sharing the cost with the mass of
subscribers.

There is a tradeoff in the wide influence of gatekeepers, but even in that
time independent publications managed to survive.

I think finding this balance again is really the key. Should we go back to
tax-funded publications? Or will people welcome a microtransaction for
articles? Or should the publications deliver curated, less frequent summaries
to make customers happy? I think the disconnect between the customers and
paying for content is driving down the quality and demand (in revenue) of
these publications.

The recent years have shown that subscribing to the publications themselves
are not optimal. Putting up a paywall angers people, but The Guardian have
never wiped their donation banner off their pages. The need to find the
correct business model for publication is urgent for the masses too; democracy
that actually follows the people's will depends on this.

I don't follow the current landscape, but what The Athletic is currently doing
is pretty interesting for sports.

Me, personally, really like the 'The Espresso' concept from The Economist.
They curate 5 stories each day and deliver it in the morning directly in the
app. No space to switch tabs and disengage but space to dig deeper in the
story through the links.

[0]: [https://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-
sellers-...](https://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-and-
buyers)

------
tmamic
Dental treatments, besides being very expensive, are often (up to 28%)
unnecessary. This happens because no-one keeps dentists in check. I am trying
to make dental treatment and diagnosis reviews easy, cheap, reliable and fast.

~~~
unexaminedlife
I've been wanting to disrupt orthodontistry for quite a long time. With the
state of 3d scanners, 3d printers, 3d software modeling, why hasn't the market
price of orthodontist treatments dropped to cost-of-materials yet? As soon as
at least one satisfactory / integrated open-source stack exists I think it's
only a matter of time before it does...

~~~
asiachick
I don't know if this is what you mean but in Japan many dentists have machines
to make tooth crowns. Not sure how common that is in the west. I went to a
dentist in SF, they did something and then I had to come back in 2 weeks after
they made the crown. Been to several dentists in Japan where they could make
the crown while you wait 20-30 mins

~~~
Ry4N4ejc-9K_ZfQ
They do happen in the west as well. It is faster/cheaper to print crowns/etc,
but I don't believe it's generally on par with an expert Dental Technician
yet.

------
eivarv
Persisting your OS state as a "context" \- saving and loading your open
applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so on.

Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited resources.

Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates.

[https://cleave.app](https://cleave.app)

~~~
jlevers
I didn't know I wanted this until now, and now I _really_ want it. I often
open a ton of related applications, and then avoid restarting my computer
because it's incovenient to reopen everything.

I'm on Linux, so I won't be able to use your app, but great idea and good
luck!

~~~
segmondy
You can explore running everything in a Linux Container, LXD. Then freeze the
LXD if you wish to shutdown, and unfreeze when you're ready to restart, it's
how container workloads can be moved from one system to another.

~~~
jlevers
Interesting, I'll look into LXDs. Thanks for the pointer!

------
in1tiate
Somewhat of a departure from the rest of the current comments. I'm a
dataminer/rom hacker mainly working on Nintendo handheld systems from the DS
onward and I've recently resigned myself to learning the sort of ASM code
needed to reverse engineer compiled assets (since obviously I have no way of
getting a pre-compiled version of those assets). I've been looking into the
legality of reverse engineering and I've always found it to be a fascinating
subject.

All because I can't get a 3DS game to load modified videos.

~~~
jlevers
That sounds awesome! Are these things you're doing for work, or on your own
(or both)? I'm not much of a gamer, and I don't know what the market looks
like for Nintendo systems...what are the applications for custom ROMs on DSs
and other handheld systems?

Some excellent free reverse engineering courses for Windows[0] and Linux[1]
were posted in another HN thread recently, and a couple other HNers and I
started a study group for the Linux course. We have a Discord group, and we're
meeting for the first time on Thursday, in case you're interested. (It sounds
from what you're doing as if you might already be past those resources,
knowledge-wise.)

[0]
[https://github.com/0xZ0F/Z0FCourse_ReverseEngineering](https://github.com/0xZ0F/Z0FCourse_ReverseEngineering)
[1] [https://beginners.re/](https://beginners.re/)

~~~
saghm
> what are the applications for custom ROMs on DSs and other handheld systems?

Having played around a bit with a jailbroken Switch, the primary reason is to
be able to either run mods for games (e.g. there's a surprisingly viable set
of tools for converting/bundling Skyrim mods for PC for use on the Switch
version) or to run homebrew apps, the common ones being emulators. Previously,
I had played around with GBA emulators on PSP/PS Vita, but the Switch form
factor and screen size are a lot nicer to play on.

That being said, you could also go the route of putting a completely foreign
OS instead of just modified Switch firmware. Android seems to run flawlessly
on a Switch from my testing; even though Android doesn't seem to be able to
access the joy cons directly when they're attached, you can still pair them
with bluetooth and they work fine even when they're slotted in. Android even
seems to have pretty good built-in support for that kind of input device; you
can easily navigate through the icons on the home screen, hit "A" to select
whatever's highlighted, etc.

~~~
jlevers
Fascinating. I'm going to have to do some reading about this -- it's a whole
world I didn't know existed. Thanks for explaining.

------
dabreegster
Creating a [traffic simulation]([https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/#ab-
street](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/#ab-street)) that's both
realistic enough to generate results meaningful in the real world, but easy
enough to use that anybody living in a city could use it to experiment with
some change to cycling or transit infrastructure. Some of the problems hiding
in there:

\- Getting a representation of a city that cleanly divides paved areas into
distinct roads and intersections, and understands the weird multi-part
intersections that Seattle has plenty of.
[This]([https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cF7qFtjAzkXL_r62CjxB...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cF7qFtjAzkXL_r62CjxBvgQnLvuQ9I2WTE2iX_5tMCY/edit?usp=sharing))
and
[this]([https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/art...](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/articles/map/article.md))
have some details about how I'm attempting this so far.

\- Inferring reasonable data when it doesn't exist. How are traffic signals
currently timed? No public dataset exists, so I have heuristics that generate
a plan. If I can make the
[UI]([https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dabreegster/abstreet/maste...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dabreegster/abstreet/master/docs/videos/fix_traffic_signal.gif))
for editing signals fluid enough, would it be worth trying to collect this
data through crowd-sourcing?

\- Figuring out what to even measure to demonstrate some change "helps a bus
run faster." Should people try to minimize the 99%ile time for all buses of a
certain route to make one complete loop over the whole day? Or to reduce the
worst-case trip time of any agent using that bus by some amount? Or to
minimize the average delay only during peak times between any pair of adjacent
stops?

\- Less technical: How to evangelize this project, get the city of Seattle and
advocacy groups here using it, and find contributors?

~~~
asdff
I think a good way to define a bus running faster is to perhaps measure the
average change in eta between any two stops across all stops per day, in other
words the mean pairwise difference between original and changed routes. then
maybe stratifying that for peak, off peak, evening, night, morning, however
granular you'd want to go.

you can then think about optimizing routing for commuters, or late night
service around a random event with increased traffic, etc.

~~~
dabreegster
I like this as a single aggregate measurement to base scores on. Some of the
difficulty comes from displaying this score as the simulation runs through the
day. At first the average might look great (a change helps the bus in the
early AM), but then rush hour hits, and the change actually makes things
worse. Or maybe a re-timed traffic signal helps buses going northbound in one
spot, but hurts the southbound buses, so also seeing the change between each
pair of stops is important.
[https://imgur.com/Fk1GfKG](https://imgur.com/Fk1GfKG) is what I've got for
this so far, but I think a different way to visualize this is necessary. :)

------
beatthatflight
Flight search. I hunt deals for Aussie travellers
([https://www.beatthatflight.com.au](https://www.beatthatflight.com.au)), but
an inordinate amount of my searching for deals is manual.

\- initially, all manual

\- secondly, timers - I know when some airlines do deals, so I go look

\- thirdly, I found other sites indexing unusually cheap flights, but they're
not always the same price on my site

\- fourth, built a script to search my own site for a route, but the number of
combinations rockets with the increase in date ranges. If you're taking
different stopovers etc, it becomes ludicrous.

\- it's growing at least, but finding ways to make it less hands on and less
mind-numbing is a never ending quest. Although I still enjoy it :)

~~~
jlevers
As some of the other responses mention, this is an insanely complex
problem...as evidenced by the large number of businesses in this space. In
your eyes, what are the best flight search engines at the moment? Aside from
[https://www.beatthatflight.com.au](https://www.beatthatflight.com.au) of
course ;)

~~~
stef25
Kayak?

~~~
beatthatflight
I'm a big kayak fan for their flexible search, and am sad hipmunk is shutting
down this month :/ Grabaseat.co.nz is brilliant for NZ specific deals.

------
spodek
The environment and how to lead people to enjoy acting sustainably long-term,
so they spread that joy and sustainability to others, not coerce.

I've found a strategy I think believe will work -- my _Leadership and the
Environment_ podcast.

Here's the podcast:
[http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast](http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast)

Here's an episode clarifying my strategy: [https://shows.acast.com/leadership-
and-the-environment/episo...](https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-
environment/episodes/224-clarifying-my-strategy)

Here's my corporate strategy: [https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-
environment/episo...](https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-
environment/episodes/274-applying-leadership-and-the-environment-in-
corporations)

~~~
oddsockmachine
> "enjoy acting sustainably long-term, so they spread that joy and
> sustainability to others"

This sounds great, can't wait to check it out. After taking a Permaculture
Design Course, I fell in love with the ideal of living a better, more
"luxurious" life that has not only a lower impact on the planet, but a
positive impact. I'm on my way down that path, but still figuring out how to
make it replicable.

------
boyter
Interesting to me, your mileage may vary.

Working in my spare time on a command line terminal UI application that
searches over source code and ranks the results.

It came about from watching a work college constantly opening VSCode when
trying to find things in a codebase. I mentioned he should use ripgrep/silver
searcher which he tried, but said he preferred to get more context and wanted
ranked results. The context was possible using -A and -B but he didn't want
that.

I had always wanted to make a terminal application and it seemed like an
interesting problem to solve. I had also always wanted to implement BM25/TFIDF
ranking algorithms myself and I was curious to see how well this could be done
without pre-flighting and building an index.

Still a work in progress
[https://github.com/boyter/cs](https://github.com/boyter/cs) but coming along.
Its usable now (with bugs) and is being used by my work mate.

~~~
galacticdessert
Hey! Looks cool, I tried compiling it on Windows (at work ATM, hehe) but so
far it does not seem to find any files. If I start it in a folder, the search
always says 0 in 0 files.

Is windows a supported platform?

~~~
boyter
Yes it is, or should be. I’d need more details to really work it out for your
case. I will have a look at potential issues in the next few hours.

EDIT I tried and no issues on Windows. I would need more details to
investigate. Please raise the issue on github and I will investigate.

------
tezzer
Characterizing the effect of near-surface humidity and wave action on Ka/Ku
band satellite transmissions from a surfboard-sized autonomous swimming
vessel. I have a little sensor platform, and customers that want it to do a
whole lot more. Bandwidth can be hard to come by 6000 miles from the nearest
human.

Also, working on how to integrate a small team of hackers into a big team of
production oriented engineers. Making the first of something is such a
different skill set to making thousands more.

I got here by getting headhunted for a neat-sounding job after a project
elsewhere ended, and then assuming more and more duties until my title had to
change to match my responsibilities.

~~~
mrfusion
I’m surprised there’s so much demand for that.

Also I bet you’re excited for starlink.

~~~
tezzer
The ocean's a big place, and really hard to operate in. I'm looking forward to
seeing how low power the terminals end up consuming!

------
dabockster
I'm currently working on ways to disconnect better at the end of the day. So
far, I've figured out how to create an "inverse Screen Time" on iOS so it
locks me out of most of my phone except for a 3 hour window in the evening
that ends one hour before bedtime. I've also began using timers to keep track
of how much time each of my daily tasks are eating up.

Also the usual stuff. Hitting the gym (30 min a day, 5x a week), clearing out
junk I don't need anymore, multivitamin, etc. 2020 is going to be the year of
wellness for me.

EDIT: Forgot to mention this, DELETE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA APPS. All of them. Use
the mobile websites if you need to read them. Not having the icons on my home
screen or app drawer made all the difference and really helped fix my
cyberaddiction.

~~~
ricattierger
Same. Focusing on wellness this year and it is great. Have read so much more
after forcing less screen time

~~~
dabockster
My challenge to you is to try to disconnect from HN as much as possible. I
logged off for six months last January to detox from the neurotic comments
that this place gets and it totally reset my mind. I plan on logging off for
another long period of time after I check tomorrow on some Ask HNs I posted.

Come outside, it's wonderful.

------
marcelag
Not trying to change the world here... I just want a good way to look at my
bottle caps

site: [http://collectibleapp.com/](http://collectibleapp.com/)

project:
[https://github.com/marcelaguiar/Collectible](https://github.com/marcelaguiar/Collectible)

~~~
jlevers
I dig it. Problems don't have to be world-changing to be interesting.

------
MCompeau
Alleviating homelessness using technology and data.

I recently learned that homelessness is not just about the people you see on
the street every day, but that homelessness is in fact a funnel that people
fall deeper into as their situation becomes increasingly desperate. At the
bottom of the funnel are the aforementioned group known as the "chronically
homeless". The top of the funnel however, looks a lot different, it consists
of people who might be couch surfing with friends, sleeping in cars or moving
between motels. This group is known as the "hidden homeless". We likely
encounter this group every day, at work, in the coffee shop, at the gym, but
they look just like you and I so we fail to recognise their situation.

The "hidden homeless", at the top of the funnel, actually make up the vast
majority of the homeless population. What's even more surprising is that this
group overwhelmingly has access to technology, 90% have access to a smartphone
or laptop with internet access.

The not-for-profit organisation I am involved with called Ample Labs
(www.amplelabs.co) is working on developing chatbots to more rapidly connect
this group with essential services. This allows us to get a better
understanding of their behaviours, what services they use and how effective
they are. This has two benefits - first by connecting the 'hidden homeless'
with essential services quickly, we make it less likely that they will fall
further down the funnel into chronic homelessness; secondly, it provides us
with essential data that we share with cities to inform policy making.

The long term hope, is that by using data to prevent at-risk populations from
falling deeper into homelessness we can combat the problem at its source and
start to eliminate homelessness before it even begins.

~~~
jlevers
Thank you for working to fix a problem that would materially improve people's
lives. I have a lot of respect for that. Finding a way to have both a
technological and social impact in a single project is one of my longterm
goals.

Homelessness is a topic I know embarrassingly little about. What has the data
led you to recommend to cities, policy-wise?

It seems like large-scale data collection should be (but isn't) used to inform
many public policy decisions. Another area where I think data could have a
huge impact is studying how the punishments that criminals are served in court
affects their outcomes later in life, and requiring judges to factor that data
into their verdicts.

------
gwbrooks
I'm leading a startup nonprofit exploring policy solutions for America's 100
largest cities.

Of course, there are plenty of national and state-level policy organizations;
some even dip their toes in the municipal policy scene. But in the cities,
most gropus are self-interested or focused on a single issue.

We're trying to fill the gap with original research and projects that
operationalize the research of others -- taking, for example, good research
and popularizing it, developing components for model ordinances, etc.

~~~
jlevers
Do you have a website? Public policy is an area that seems almost ridiculously
unoptimized, so I'm really interested in any organizations that are trying to
fix that.

This is the first time I've heard of doing research with the express goal of
creating actionable plans, but now that you've brought it up, it seems like
that's exactly how policy-focused research should be.

~~~
gwbrooks
It's not so much laziness or lack of vision as it is different skill sets.
Additionally, the big university-based research players (Brookings, Hoover,
Mercatus) are all prevented from anything that looks too much like advocacy,
so they stay away from things like model ordinances out of an abundance of
caution.

------
servercobra
A meal planning app for weight loss. I lost 50 pounds using calorie counting a
few years ago. The thing that frustrated me most was trying to come up with
meal plans every week. It's quite tedious to constantly find new recipes if
you get bored with eating the same meals over and over. The weeks I planned
ahead of time, I lost weight quickly. When I didn't plan I would stop losing
weight, sometimes for months. So I'm trying to build an app that automatically
builds a meal plan for you that you can then tweak.

There's a ton of problems when you're dealing with food though. Calculating
calories of a recipe you find online can be tough. On one side, it's a natural
language problem to extract the ingredient, the amount, the unit, and the
prep/notes. On the other side, it's a data/data matching problem, where you
need good data on a ton of ingredients, and then need to pick a reasonable one
for "1 cup of milk".

And of course everyone eats and prepares food so differently that suggesting
meals they'll actually enjoy is hard without asking them a bunch of questions
first.

~~~
snarf21
Not to discourage you but this seems like a tough sell. Most people gain
weight because they don't want to plan out or make nutricious meals. The
strategy I've always used is to figure out some small number of meals and then
just pick one of them. It removes any mental load for shopping and cooking and
you only have to figure it out once. It _would_ be useful to suggest very very
quick meals that are Y calories or less.

~~~
servercobra
It's definitely not for everyone! But I know there are some people who just
want to be told "go to the store, buy this stuff, you're going to be cooking
these things these days if you want to lose weight". The same as a lot of
people don't want to put in the work to do calorie counting through
MyFitnessPal/others, but some people (including me!) swear by it.

Worst case, I developed an app I like using more than MyFitnessPal just for me
and I'll still be quite happy.

------
db1
I'm working on a personal project that allows you to add notes to youtube
videos, and be able to skip quickly to specific sections.

I started this because I'm learning guitar mostly from YouTube, and I find
myself constantly seeking videos to specific sections.

I'll probably launch the site on ShowHN soon. Feel free to DM me if you can
think of other uses for this, or if you're interested to know when this
launches.

~~~
mdonahoe
I want this for annotating drone footage that our customers post to YT so that
I can have slack conversations with support and engineering more precisely.

------
tjansen
I am working on a natural language parser using symbolic AI (no machine
learning...). It's working a bit like a multi-pass parser for programming
languages, but with the ability to handle multiple ambiguous meanings of a
sentence at the same time. An English sentence is translated into an
intermediate representation. Or rather, depending on the complexity, hundreds
or thousands of intermediate representations for the same sentence. Then there
will be several passes to eliminate interpretations, until it finds the most
probable one. It's tightly integrated with a database for human knowledge to
evaluate the different interpretations. The goal is that you can add data to
and query from the database using English language. I started working on it 3
years ago, and there is still a long way to go. I have done most of the
infrastructure (including a high-level programming language for pattern
recognition that can seamlessly handle asynchronous database accesses) and I
am close to completing the first pass....

~~~
dzink
I’ve been working on merging statistical deep learning with a knowledge graph
like representation of the data. I run a consumer site focused on privacy and
build nlp secret sauce underneath to serve users. Ping me at hn username
@doerhub.com if you want to chat.

------
waychukucha
Am working on a travel site focused on showing places with activities and
having detailed information from how to get there to pricing since most of
information on google is outdated. I had stopped working on it after reading
some threads here on why disrupting travel is very difficult but seems easy to
a texh person looking for ideas and I almost shelved it. Then I remembered
most commenters on here are from western countries that are probably reaching
a saturation point of ideas in that almost any app imaginable already exists.
Anyway, the renewed interest has made me start from scratch trying to collect
the data. Anyone who would be interested in joining me and be the coder while
i focus on the rest, i’d be glad to team up. Focus is on building an extensive
trip planner which you can view a location and add to “cart” and at the end
see the total coast of the trip. This can be helpful a lot for solo travelers.
East Africa is still a popular destination. Reach me on ninaformke at g mail

------
nikij
This problem will only apply to very few people. But over the past 2.5 years
I've been tracking everything and deriving insights on my activities. This
produced some astounding results. e.g. Chewing gum makes me more comfortable
in a conversation. Recently I've found a community of robot-like people on
reddit who also do this. So I decided to build a platform. It's still in its
early stages but feel free to check it out: simplelifedata.com

~~~
mrfusion
Can you point us to the community?

Any other insights you’ve discovered? I tracked my data for a year and
discovered strawberries were a potent mood enhancer.

------
bpizzi
We're (team of 2) rewriting an old enterprise ERP system made of ~1M of C89
non-portable loc, tens of thousands of handwritten PLSQL loc, thousands of
business rules carefully abstracted in sql data, tens of complex screen
designed and scripted on a no-name RAD software that was the current fad back
in the days, and some companion pieces in VB6 because, you known, 'C89, not
anybody can do it'.

That's _fun_.

The new system is a quiet simple SOA arch with a dull, only-real data db
layer, backend in Go with code-generation, frontend in es6 migrating to elm.

That looks the IT guys have when we say 'no really, we don't need IIS or
Java', its priceless :)

The interesting part actually lies in handling both product management and
sales for the new version while handling the day-to-day coding part.

Sometimes I think I should write a book on those subjects :)

~~~
rkangel
I'm also in the planning stages of re-writing ~1M lines of C doing hardware
control for a telecoms system. It's going to be replaced with Elixir
(basically Erlang) because it's the perfect fit (which is unsurprising given
its a telecom system).

My prediction is that it will be 10-20k lines of code when I'm done because
there's so much obsolete cruft to remove. Plus ~1k of C as a shim layer to
allow an incremental transition.

~~~
bpizzi
Nice, glad to know there's other brave souls that choose the Big Rewrite path,
despite the latent idea in our industry that every one of those projects are
meant to fail.

~~~
rkangel
My approach is that there are a few things that the default answer for should
be "no" and then you have to justify (maybe just to yourself) why they're
appropriate in this case. Macro Fu in C, template meta-programming in C++ and
rewriting from scratch are all examples of these.

In this case I am avoiding the 'throw it all away and start from scratch'
approach. It would be infeasible for the intervening period. I am putting
together an approach that would get us there in a year or so, but we can lop
off smaller chunks to rewrite (the existing architecture is a series of
daemons, which helps us there).

------
johnmorrison
A while back, I posted a list of my long term focus problems here [1]

Short list:

* Pollution and the climate

* Privation

* Avoidable death

* Interplanetary settlement

* Liberty and communication

* Transportation

My primary focus is developing and commercializing reliable clean energy,
because I believe that is the most effective way to further progress in the
majority of the above problems.

To that extent, I've come to terms with an inability to spread my focus across
all of them simultaneously and drive great results so instead I've taken an
approach of working on a few of them full time myself and investing in efforts
that work on others. My intent is to keep ~100% of my net worth invested in
these main problems (either in my own or somebody else's projects) in
perpetuity.

In my personal life, I've also recently been spending a lot of time thinking
about health and purpose: how to build discipline, how people can/should
decide what to do with their life, how to stay healthy and built fitness, etc.

Side project: in my free time over the last few weeks I've also been thinking
more about how to create lasting models for information and media, and so I'm
building a markup language / static site generator in that pursuit [2]

[1]: [https://jwmza.com/long](https://jwmza.com/long)

[2]: [https://jwmza.com/polymath](https://jwmza.com/polymath)

~~~
Chris2048
All those things are pretty much industries, let alone fields of study.

Also, consider that "keep ~100% of my net worth invested in these main
problems" may not be the better strategy for funding those problems, versus
"put net worth in growth investments" that can fund the same problems later
on.

~~~
johnmorrison
You have a good point but of course the split is adjusted to that
consideration.

I don't believe in profiting from life-saving medication or anything like
that, so my intention is to drive rapid growth with my activities in the
energy, software, and automotive sectors to fund the less immediately
profitable goals.

Make money solving the problems I _can_ first, and later use that money to
fund the further-off ones.

Currently this strategy is working well, as my assets are growing at above
2000% annually.

------
abhgh
I am working on something I am calling "compact models" (as part of a PhD):
techniques to pack more information into Machine Learning models when their
size is constrained in some way. I have put up some of our work here [1] - it
has been interesting so far, and the results are promising. I would like to
release a Python library soon, well, ...in a few months - my PhD is part-time,
I have a full time day job and time management is a pain.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01520](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01520)

~~~
SJSque
Interesting name. :) I worked on developing compact models for the first few
years of my employment at NXP Semiconductors, which is (for me, at least) the
top result of a Google search for "compact models", defining them as
"mathematical descriptions of semiconductor devices used in analog circuit
simulators".

~~~
abhgh
You're right, thats what the term seems to stand for (I had Googled too, when
I was thinking of names). "Compact models" is something I am considering
calling this work - its by no means standard :)

------
Lemmih
I'm writing a 2D animation library inspired by 3b1b's manim. It's written in
Haskell, fairly well documented, and is meant to be used together with
external tools such as latex and blender. Design concepts with examples:
[https://reanimate.readthedocs.io/en/latest/glue_tut/](https://reanimate.readthedocs.io/en/latest/glue_tut/)

Source:
[https://github.com/Lemmih/reanimate](https://github.com/Lemmih/reanimate)

------
dhruvkar
standardized tracking for shipping containers

currently tracking is limited either by A) type of transportation (ships,
rail, trucks) or B) by the Freight Forwarding company.

If you use multiple freight forwarders, you're stuck entering data from PDFs
into spreadsheets to create your own custom usable dashboard.

If you use one freight forwarder, you have access to the main journey points,
either as a spreadsheet, or if they're more sophisticated, through a web app.
But I've only found one (silicon valley backed) Freight Forwarder [0] that
gives the last-mile data -- e.g. last free pickup dates, pickup numbers, last
free dropoff dates, return locations etc. -- through their web app.

This is critical for managing warehouse operations, especially for companies
that handle their own last-mile (like we do), and it's been an absolute pain
as we've scaled.

0: [https://www.flexport.com](https://www.flexport.com)

------
cdiamand
Im aggregating stock chatter from the worst parts of the internet
(wallstreetbets, 4chan), summarizing it and sending it out as a newsletter
here: [https://topstonks.com](https://topstonks.com)

~~~
avl999
Why is this a newsletter that you need to give your email address even to just
sample the content? It would be much nicer if the website showed you the
content with an option to subscribe to the newsletter or rss feed.

~~~
cdiamand
Hey sorry for the confusion! There is a link "read a sample" that you can
click on. Ill make that more prominent.

------
Aweorih
Currently working on 2 projects which would solve problems for me:

\- a jdbc driver for interacting with google sheets

\- a cross OS application which lets you share easily data

The first one is almost done and requires mostly documentation and some clean-
up. It supports at the moment simple SQL queries like select * from, insert
into foo() Values () and an update where I currently not remember the syntax.
It also has already a Datagrip integration.

The second project shall work wireless and with minimal setup. The original
idea was that devices search each other in the local network (via broadcast)
and connect then. Further ideas which rised while development where:

\- play sound on another device (which I initially thought would be super easy
but seems like it is not)

\- provide a possibility to define outside applications (like you provide a
configuration file how I communicate with your application and this lets you
show information on other devices)

\- Not just device-to-device but also something like groups

\- messaging with other devices

\- more communication possibilites, ie via (outside) IP or Wi-Fi direct

------
kvz
Downloading has been resumable since HTTP/1.1 but people uploading content
have a less reliable experience. Worse: typically upstream bandwidth is much
lower so they are exposed longer to unreliable connections.

Trying to fix uploading through tus.io (low level protocol) and uppy.io (user
interface). Both open source and free to add to any project.

~~~
WD-42
I’ve been using uppy with Transloadit on a recent project and it’s completely
changed how I think about file uploading from the web. It’s no longer a huge
undertaking. Love the service, amazing work. Now if the video/concat robot was
fixed I could use it 100%.

------
DanielGeisler
Writing Mathematica software with Stephen Wolfram's support to extend the
hyperoperators beyond exponentiation - tetration, pentation and so on, from
the natural numbers to complex numbers and even matrices. I do this by
extending the iteration of any smooth function to real and complex iterates.
[http://iteratedfunctions.com/](http://iteratedfunctions.com/) and
[http://tetration.org/](http://tetration.org/). Physics has two mathematical
methods for it's representation, partial differential equations and iterated
functions. My work is more general than physical systems or even the universe
because I can consider both measure and non-measure preserving systems. I am
looking at AI applications as a system that is tuned to solve for physically
possible models.

~~~
jlevers
I won't pretend to fully understand this, although I do understand the basic
theory of higher-order hyperoperators. I'm curious, though -- where/what are
the applications for this?

~~~
DanielGeisler
The Universe is a hierarchy of orders; quarks and gluons, atoms, molecules,
cells, multi-cellular and on. So hyperoperators form a natural hierarchy to
model multilevel systems. Feynman's Path Integral with the integral removed is
just tetration. So I believe the higher operators through self
organization/renormalization are directly associated with specific levels of
reality, but except for QFT I have no suspicion as to which hyperoperators
might be associated with levels of physics. Here is how it might work.
Hexation might model chemistry while heptation could model simple biological
systems. Thanks for asking. This is fun stuff to work on.

~~~
jlevers
That explanation was surprisingly accessible, thank you! It also blew my mind.
I'd never thought of the building blocks of the universe as forming a
hierarchy before, although in retrospect, it feels obvious.

Were you being literal when you gave the examples of chemistry as hexation and
biology as heptation? If so, why are they those levels specifically? Or were
you just using those as examples because they're roughly one "step" apart on
the hierarchy (i.e., molecules -> cells)? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

~~~
DanielGeisler
I strongly believe that quantum field theory is at the level of tetration or
pentation. The others were possible examples. Thanks for the question.

------
marikio
Most folks have been reading about the psychedelics renaissance.

A humongous problem is the absolute lack of data that many psychedelic
assisted therapists, guides, spiritualists have, to be able to point to their
specific types of therapy as effective.

You come across folks that make humongous claims about the specific modalities
they use, but don't track the progress of their patients and therefore don't
have the data to prove it. We're working with volunteers at
Tabularasa.ventures to develop some simple applications to both screen clients
and also allow for practitioners or individuals to record progress (reductions
in depression, PTSD, etc.) over time whether treating with microdosing, self
administered, or more standard psychedelic assisted therapy (PAT) methods.

Happy to collaborate -> marik@tabularasa.ventures

------
iKlsR
In the Caribbean, because of scamming and fraud, opening an account at any
financial institution or like place requires several documents and oft making
a visit to an authority figure (Justice of the Peace) to verify address and
for character reference. On average you will need your TRN (Tax Registration
Number (SSN basically), some form of photo identification, address
verification, references, proof of income) and the list can go on depending on
what you're trying to accomplish.

We're basically trying to make an opt in service that can make procuring these
relatively painless by grouping all relevant parties and then keeping these on
record. A glorified KYC of sorts and then looking to use these as means of
authenticating (I should be able to use my profile to sign up anywhere or
transfer to my data (or parts thereof) to another party. Lots more to flush
out but we have a good grasp of where we're going and what we want to achieve.
Our government has tried to do this in the past but failed at getting it past
the courts due to privacy concerns and are set to try again. I skimped on some
details but the idea should be clear.

As well as new data protection laws introduced/proposed with more amendments
to come, it's a simple but interesting problem at this point in time in
navigating everything including how we do our own verification, security and
eventual licensing to achieve the desired outcome.

~~~
omarhaneef
Where in the Caribbean are you?

Wouldn’t that just make a juicer target since a hacker would have one place to
go?

I notice a lot of people help each other against the perceived government
inflexibility so they’ll lend ID cards etc. won’t this just increase the
amount of identifiers leaked when they do so?

------
makeee
I'm building a tool that helps people scaffold React apps really quickly
(everything from auth flow, payments, DB, form handling, etc, to an actual
nice looking UI). It's at least interesting to me because I think a ton of
time is wasted on all this and I'd like to help more people get their idea out
there rather than reinvent the wheel. If you're interested in taking a look
and giving feedback it's [https://divjoy.com](https://divjoy.com)

~~~
tylerrobinson
I really like this idea and the execution. Great job.

~~~
makeee
Thanks Tyler!

------
roknovosel
I've had an idea for some time now to create a website that would act as a
better codereview.stackexchange.com. It would incorporate some of the features
of the GitHub Pull Request system like inline commenting and reactions.

I arrived at this idea from two directions. The first direction is that I
sometimes try to code review some of the questions over at CodeReview SE, and
the whole thing feels unergonomic. I dislike scrolling up and down to check
the code and constantly losing track of the things I'm reviewing. This is
where I think inline commenting would help. Also, there is not a lot of room
for discussion. You only get those comments below the review, where you only
have a few characters to argue your point. The second direction is that I
produce code snippets (programming homework, short snippets at work, etc.)
which I would like to submit for review. I don't always want to submit it to
the entire internet for review. I just want to get a private link to the code
review, which I can share with my colleagues so they can review it. Kind of
like a reviewable PasteBin.

Some of the features I would like to add: importing files from GitHub for
reviewing and users could import their unanswered CodeReview SE questions for
another review.

~~~
itsArtur
I thought about the same thing! I think having your code reviewed is one of
the fastest ways to improve and at the same time, it's currently very hard to
have it done.

I really dislike CodeReview SE for many reasons though, I don't think this Q&A
format is suitable for doing CRs

~~~
roknovosel
Hey, what kind of things do you dislike about the CodeReview SE and what would
you like to see in an improved code review system?

------
adreamingsoul
I believe I could be working in solving bigger problems, but first I need to
focus on my mental health, a healthier work-life balance, and providing the
primary income for my family.

~~~
jlevers
Don't discount how important those problems are! Kudos to you for being
intentional with them, and good luck. I wish you the best.

~~~
adreamingsoul
Thanks!

------
justinweiss
For hobby development, I'm trying to speed up the unofficial PlayStation
emulator on the Nintendo 3DS. There are all kinds of interesting problems
there, like SD reads being so slow that it tanks the framerate any time the
emulator hits the disk (so I might be writing a read thread + precache?), and
some apparent room for hardware-specific optimization in the lighting and
blending routines.

It's been fun to work around the constraints on an underpowered device. It's
also an excuse to learn ARM assembly, and a nice break from all the JavaScript
I've been spending my time in lately!

------
mrpoptart
Building a personal budgeting system that reduces the complexity of the
process to paying attention to 1 number and about 5 minutes per week to be
sure you're on budget all the time. I came up with a solution to this problem
about 5 years ago and have been testing iterations with friends and family. In
process of building an app to manage it for me.

~~~
peter303
I got budgeting down to two numbers: Total take-home pay past 12 months vs
total expenditures past two months. Try to avoid the latter going over 85%.

~~~
mrpoptart
It's awesome that you have a budget, and a process for doing it. Would you
find it useful to know whether or not you can afford something you're about to
buy, be it a taco, a couch or a car? Your budget works well in as a reflection
process, my budget gives you the constant knowledge of how you're doing right
now and how you'll probably be doing in the future.

~~~
peter303
I use a spreadsheet with rows bulk spending categories and columns months,
plus a few summary columns. More than 15 years ago it was just a table on
graph paper. I know within a few dollars how much I have earned spent in the
past 12 months. The 'budget' is awareness of such spending and trying to keep
not much more than the previous year. Stuff happens like a dead car, hospital
stay, job change etc. so its not always firm.

------
dejv
NIR spectrometer for assessing ripeness of wine grapes. It is palm sized
device that you take to the vineyard and by scanning many bunches you get
numbers you need: brix, pH, acids.

There are many research papers talking about it for many years, but till
recently there was not cheap enough hardware available so it just get stuck in
university laboratories.

It is still tough project to pull out as it combine hardware, cloud software,
machine learning and there is quite some laboratory work required as well.
Doing all of this as a single person and bootstraping is extra challenge but I
guess I don't know better.

I've got into it 5 years ago, when I decided to quit technology, bought small
farm and build winery. At first I wanted to analyze the wine itself, basically
to make traditional method obsolete, but performance of this kind of
instruments are not good enough for liquid that complex. It turned out grape
analysis is much easier target to tackle.

------
surfertas
Problem:

The hassle of splitting proceeds from a service/event/product sale after the
fact related to sending/collecting your % share, timing and details of wiring
the proceeds.

Solution:

Pre-set allocations and create a customized checkout so that splits happen on
a per-payment basis. Members dont have to wait to get their share.

[https://www.korabo.io](https://www.korabo.io)

Idea kind of came about after watching my wife, who is a yoga instructor/
studio owner try to split proceeds from a workshop she hosted with a few
collaborators.

Another example: allows you to create a shield to a checkout that will split
proceeds on a per payment basis.

[https://github.com/surfertas/deep_learning/tree/master/proje...](https://github.com/surfertas/deep_learning/tree/master/projects/chestxray)

Working on this on my spare time. Any advice from the community would be
greatly appreciated.

~~~
tylerrobinson
Is this using Stripe Connect behind the scenes? They are trying to solve a
similar problem. I tried to register on Korabo but after I signed up and went
to login I got an error saying I needed to confirm my email. Haven’t gotten
the email confirmation though, so something may be broken into your onboarding
flow.

~~~
surfertas
Thanks a lot for the response. Yes exactly, its using Stripe Connect and
related APIs.

Basically just leveraging a lot of Stripes features which are great. Their
support has been super helpful as well advising on what can and can not be
done.

Noted on the onboarding issue. Will check whats going on there. When I signed
up myself, gmail classified it as junk/spam, possibly rightfully so.

Thanks again.

------
geocrasher
I'm working on figuring out four different ways for somebody with a light
background in electronics (basic soldering really) and has a Technician or
General class ham radio license to get on the air, from scratch, for $100. No
added expenses. It's possible, and a fun challenge. Its research for some
writing I'm doing.

~~~
Chris2048
What kind of band are you thinking?

------
Aperocky
I wrote a browser based simulation game on my spare time:

[http://aperocky.com/prehistoric](http://aperocky.com/prehistoric)

It's already got a pretty sophisticated production logic, and also a unified
market.

Looking to add a few functionality like child support, new resource types and
maybe eventually a governmental system. Can even try out different government
strategies.

If you have any ideas please share. It's been my passion for 2020 so far.

~~~
TACIXAT
On the first turn I ran, the first person I moused over had my aunt's name.

~~~
cambalache
All the people generated seem to be females with Anglo/Western names.

~~~
Aperocky
One of the area that can be improved...

------
DanielBMarkham
I started off seven years ago wondering why backlogs were so bad. It seemed
like both small teams and large organizations always suck at them. I had read
tons of how-to books and watched lots of videos. Many of the instructions
conflicted with one another, however. What I wanted to know was _why_ , not
_how-to_. If I understood the why I wouldn't need the how-to.

Being a good hacker, I pulled at that thread until I had another, and another.
Now I'm writing about semiotics, language, lambda calculus, and philosophy of
science stuff. It's all related to my original quest for a better explanation,
and it affects everything from AI to coding practices. I'm about done now. Now
the trick will be getting it all in a format that's consumable by the average
programmer.

~~~
jlevers
I'd love to read some of what you've written, if you're willing to share.

------
robterrin
Helping fintechs and other startups access temporary cybersecurity defenders:
[https://www.getblueteam.com](https://www.getblueteam.com)

Having run a cybersecurity services business for three years and previously
working for federal clients, I know that government and large banks are
sucking the talent up, leaving fintechs two options: ignore security or
overpay.

On the reverse side, there are lots of talented independent providers who
simply need somebody to vouch for their skills. We meet with and vet everybody
on our platform to make sure they have the capabilities.

Will be launching a prototype to replace this landing page shortly. If you're
in the New York area and are either looking for cybersecurity contractors or
looking for a project, I would love to get your input!

------
flybyair2038
I work on software that's used by NASA (and other organizations) to model
spacecraft missions. This project spans the gambit of interesting problems in
computer science: numerical methods, high-fidelity orbit modeling, orbit
determination (using Kalman filters to estimate spacecraft state), complex 3D
visualization, language parsing, IDE design, and many more topics.

It's definitely one of the most interesting projects I've ever worked on!

~~~
on2k17nm
Which project is that ? I'm also looking for something of this sort ..

~~~
flybyair2038
FreeFlyer: [https://ai-solutions.com/freeflyer/](https://ai-
solutions.com/freeflyer/)

------
RobinL
Building a library to deduplicate data at scale in Apache Spark, where there
is no unique record identifier (i.e. fuzzy/probabilistic matching).

[https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/sparklink](https://github.com/moj-
analytical-services/sparklink)

It's currently in alpha testing, but the goal is for it to:

\- Work at much greater scale than current open source implementations (the
ambition is to work at 100 million records plus)

\- Get results much faster than current open source implementations - ideally
runtimes of less than an hour.

\- Have a highly transparent methodology, so the match scores can be easily
explained both graphically and in words (it isn't a 'black box')

\- Have accuracy similar to the best products on the marketplace.

~~~
manishjhawar
I'm currently working on a solution involving larger data sets to match a
record with a binary score (0/1). I'm using Redis with the Bloom Filter
module. This works in that the query results are sub-second, but the data
ingestion/filter population part is quite slow comparatively (<100 MB/s).
Another block for me is if having to use multiple filters to query across
multiple sets which just multiplies all the resources needed. Does Spark have
any advantages or specialized filters for this use case? (I have nil
experience with Spark, but am ready to dig up if it would really help.)

------
franze
Company alignment. I am working on a systematic framework ("way to think
about," "a way of doing things") to establish company value alignment.

Most companies at one point are internally not aligned, marketing fighting
product fighting development fighting design fighting sales.

All are wanting to contribute value, all hindering each other in the process
of doing so.

The goal is one framework where a) an initiative can start from any
group/team/individual within the company b) every other part of the company
can rally behind - with their own expertise and point of view.

I always start with a talk (gave the first about it last Thursday
[https://jtbd.ws/](https://jtbd.ws/)), then I take it from there.

~~~
bethanvincent
This sounds really interesting and as a marketer, I am constantly butting
heads with other departments simply trying to my job. I'd love to hear more
when you've developed the framework!

------
yeutterg
Working on the problem of "blue" light affecting circadian rhythms and sleep.
We launched our MVP, Bedtime Bulb [0], in 2018, and it's now the most popular
product in the category. We're expanding out of North America to Europe in the
next couple weeks.

We've had a ton of great feedback from customers, and we are working on
several new sleep technologies that we plan to release this year.

It's also been interesting to apply the lean methodology to hardware.
Iteration cycles are long, but I'd argue that lean is just as important for
hardware as it is for software.

[0] [https://bedtimebulb.com/](https://bedtimebulb.com/)

~~~
TACIXAT
I have had sleep issues my entire life. I've cut out sugar, caffeine (both for
other reasons), and used blue light filtering applications on my devices. None
made a significant difference. I think another issue worth looking at is
people not getting a daytime light signal. I've purchased and ultra bright
light that I saw in this post [1] and it seems to have helped more than
anything I have tried before.

1\. [https://www.benkuhn.net/lux](https://www.benkuhn.net/lux)

~~~
Chris2048
Have you tried a cold shower/bath followed by warm bed, or a hot bath followed
by a cold fan?

Big core temperature changes usually make me feel sleepy.

------
escot
Using constraint programming to schedule generic experiments in an automated
lab. Experiments are complex and fragile so we expose a dsl for describing the
constraints and objectives of each task so that the biology/chemistry doesn't
go awry. One of the hardest parts of this isn't the optimization but the
upfront work of defining what is/isn't necessary to be able to encode about an
experiment. You want the api to provide as much control as possible without
allowing the author to over constrain the problem, or introduce irrelevant
steps into an experiment just because that's how they're done by hand.

~~~
dcardoza
That's really cool! I just started learning about constraint programming using
Z3, and scheduling is the first area I'm looking at. Do you have any advice or
resources you found useful? Much of the underlying theory goes over my head,
but I'm not sure how much of it I need to be productive.

------
Entangled
Paysapp, a worldwide payment system that allows you to send money as simple as
texting a message like "pay 100 to George", available right now in Whatsapp,
Telegram, Keybase, Matrix, Discord, Slack and Twitter, just add the Paysapp
bot to your chats and type 'help' to start.

We're at a very early stage and looking for investors.

~~~
wtmt
Which countries is it available for? Are you compliant with all the complex
and sometimes tiresome regulations on cross border transfers?

~~~
Entangled
Worldwide, all 200 countries wherever there is internet.

Regarding regulations we are studying two possible scenarios, comply with all
or simply Uberize the model and let people sell money for a fee. For the
former we need tons of money, attorneys and on/off ramps with the banking
world. For the latter we only would be the messaging transport and people
would buy and sell money informally, that's the long tail of the unbanked and
informal merchants.

------
mhluongo
Wrapping Bitcoin trustlessly for use in Ethereum smart contracts.
[https://tbtc.network](https://tbtc.network)

~~~
lazzlazzlazz
I've been following your project — very interesting and exciting.

------
gguenerais
I built a chatbot to fight loneliness and social isolation for seniors. It
started with my grandma. She doesn't have a smartphone and internet, so it
basically transforms photos into real postcards. She receives it directly in
her mailbox, and it makes her really happy. The chatbot also reminds me to
send when I did not, so she keeps updated regularly. I released it to the
public last week. you can find it here
[https://postcard.im](https://postcard.im) (the link open a fb messenger
conversation with the chatbot)

------
markk
Reimagining what a phone interface could look like. If you have an interest in
this too, send me a note. (markkinsey@gmail.com)

I just like reimagining things, trying to elucidate first principles and go
from there.

~~~
diveintothe9
Amateur product designer here, I'm really interested in what you would
consider to be first principles when it comes to expected
appearance/behavior/functionality of a phone, especially nowadays when the
"phone" part of such a device/interface is almost an afterthought.

I'm also interested to hear what you think are the shortcomings or limitations
of our current idea of a (smart)phone interface.

------
tagami
I'm working on scaling up a network of devices connected to our laboratories
aboard the International Space Station for K-12 education. Our 7th mission
launches on the Cygnus resupply NG-13 on 2/9.

As we connect classrooms and scale across different countries, the problem set
has grown exponentially.

------
sathishvj
I'm making YouTube content to help people learn Google Cloud and also prepare
for the GCP certifications:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIGDDqu5DzlaaC4XzXj_4-A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIGDDqu5DzlaaC4XzXj_4-A)

There is an unlisted sample video in there that I've put out for feedback, and
I'm making changes based on that. Will also be putting together related
content around GCP.

p.s. do subscribe to the channel.

~~~
vlttnv
Hey, I wasn't sure where to leave the feedback so I'll leave it here: it might
be a good idea to get a microphone to improve the sound quality and clarity.
It's a bit hard to hear. Keep it up!

------
vector_spaces
I'm trying to finally learn parsing properly. I run into a lot of little
problems in my day job and have a lot of ideas for side-projects that I think
would be served by having a better handle on it. So I'm creating toy languages
and writing toy parsers for them.

One reason I'm targeting parsers in particular is because I've been finding a
lot of modern programming language books are a bit anti-parsing these days.
EOPL avoids parsing altogether by using a parser generator, effectively saying
that it's a hard problem. PLAI outright calls parsing a "distraction". SICP
(not strictly a compiler book, I know) and Lisp in Small Pieces just use the
triviality of parsing () languages, which I feel doesn't generalize well.

I emailed the author of PLAI (Shriram Krishnamurthi) about this. His response
was effectively that modern books come off anti-parsing as a reaction to old
books, which were parser heavy, and tools like YACC -- "Yet Another Compiler
Constructor" \-- even though it's just a parser generator, not a compiler
constructor! He went further to say that, given parsing is roughly trivial in
() languages, it sort of seems parsing is only incidentally a
compiler/interpreter problem, and users of () languages view non-trivial
parsing as signalling a design flaw. I found this to be an interesting take,
but in my day job I generally don't have much say in the design of "languages"
of semi-structured text that gets thrown my way.

Anyway, I know the Dragon Book covers parsing in some detail but for some
reason it's been kind of impenetrable for me -- it feels a bit more abstract
than I like. I can follow it, but while reading it I can't help but wonder --
"is this actually going to help me in practice?"

I recently have been reading Niklaus Wirth's stuff though, like the last
chapter in his algorithms book and his Compiler Construction book, and those
have been absolutely fantastic.

I also asked a question on SE about a particular parser I'm working on -- if
anyone has some thoughts I'd love to hear them :)

[https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/236222/recurs...](https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/236222/recursive-
descent-parser-implementation-for-a-recursive-language)

------
mynegation
Working on a concept of how one would crowdsource a wikipedia-like site with
the purpose of gathering information about how technology and tools progressed
from the Stone Age to today. Sort of manual for bootstrapping the civilization
from ground zero.

------
cmos
I am working on an underwater recording studio. We are building a "3D
Telescope" underwater to listen to the ocean. 28 hydrophones mounted on five 5
meter beams connected like a starfish. It will then compress the data and
telemeter it home real time.

[https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/whoi-
awarded-1-...](https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/whoi-
awarded-1-million-3d-acoustic-telescope/)

Additionally I just won a grant at work to begin designing and building an
open source underwater glider. Underwater gliders are one of the best ways of
carrying instruments to sample the ocean. They can last 6+ months and be
directed to interesting area's. The billion dollar companies that make and
sell underwater gliders are focused on oil+gas+military business and are not
giving the service, support or product depth the science community needs. They
are in dire need of a tech refresh - they fail a lot for an old technology and
run DOS. The only way we have a chance of understanding the ocean is to make
sampling the ocean more affordable, reliable and accessible.

~~~
sitkack
Does the surface buoy generate power? How is it powered?

I thought of doing something similar but based on a single vertical line, it
probably needs to be flat to account for flows and thermal gradients
refracting sound.

What cpus does it use? Is there a local backup of the sound field on the buoy?
Is the full sound field sent up, or does it have to be "pointed at" something?

------
evsamsonov
After reading recent HN post [1], I’ve started to work on my own
implementation of open source fast file transfer client-server application.
It’s in a very early stage now so it’s nothing to show yet, but I’ll be very
glad to announce it when MVP will be ready. [1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898072)

~~~
jlevers
I remember reading that post and the surrounding discussion, and thinking it
was a really tough (and worthwhile) challenge. Good luck, and I'm excited to
see the first version when you release it.

------
burmecia
I am building an encrypted file system that runs inside application
([https://github.com/zboxfs/zbox](https://github.com/zboxfs/zbox)). It focus
on security, privacy and reliability. The interesting part is it can utilize
different storage, such as memory, OS file system, RDBMS and object store. I
learned a lot and enjoyed working on this project.

------
WilliamHurst
I am working on giving solo entrepreneurs and micro business owners back more
of their valuable time by eliminating menial admin tasks. Time is typically
your most valuable resource but when you are working alone or on a small team,
someone still needs to take care of the admin, eating away at your valuable
time.

I’m starting with the sharing of common information with clients and partners.
Organizations are often required to supply information on a regular basis to a
wide range of clients and partners (bank account details, company, company
registration details, tax clearance documents, certifications, charity
registration number, etc.). A lot of these documents need to be renewed on an
annual basis so there is a constant stream of requests for updated versions.

For bank accounts, the ability to verify a bank account automatically can
prevent invoice fraud.

I’m looking at a model where a piece of business information is uploaded to a
central platform and then provide permission for others to access it and to
receive notifications when a new version is available.

In the first startup school batch for 2020 and working on validating the
problem with actual users.

------
BrandiATMuhkuh
I'm helping build a mathematics tutoring system. Compared to classic math
learning, we are trying to mimic the strength of a real tutor. Which is,
identifying the lack of math skills and teaching those.

From our experience the biggest issue students have is, they can't solve an
issue because they didn't understand a concept they have already "learned" in
the past. It's simple, yet powerful.

~~~
lovetocode
I would love to learn more about this product.

~~~
BrandiATMuhkuh
Sure. Here is our demo page. [https://demo.amy.app](https://demo.amy.app) We
usually white label our product and try to work with bigger companies like
publishers to get our products into the hands of students.

But, we are still a very small start-up.

------
mister_hn
Make security authentication in Government and Public services more secure.

At the Moment, I'm fighting with a monolithic, untouched Java 8 / JavaEE6
service which has lots of old dependencies and that uses old cryptographic
ciphers, some of them classified as unsafe (e.g. brainpool512p1).

None knows how to make a reproducible build, since everyone gets a different
and working or not-working package and some modules are not even released
(using the infamous -SNAPSHOT) in maven and there's no documentation.
Unfortunately, there's little testing, so everything can be broken easily and
none can know it.

Some developers are also really undisciplined, touching code but not running
end-to-end (manual) testing, not even running the installer.

If I had the decision power, I would throw this thing away and start from
scratch, probably without Java too or, if Java, at least the latest one and
maybe Spring, not JavaEE: Wildfly moves too fast and each release breaks
compatibility with the previous one, concerning settings (RedHat: why do you
do this??)

------
ckok
I'm trying to write a drop in LLVM codegen replacement, ie something that
takes bitcode (Which I already have) and generates x86_64, arm, object files
etc. Back story: I've done compilers for most of my professional life but
never did the actual native code generation myself, always using .net, java or
llvm to do that part.

As a fun project, as I already had code to generate llvm bitcode from .NET, I
now do mem2reg (convert stack spots to SSA registers), dead code elimination,
constant folding and other small optimizations. That part now works, and I
managed to create a simple x86_64 coff object file (with everything needed to
link to it, including pdata, xdata) that returns the "max" value for a given
integer.

That is about all that works for now, and I don't get to spend much time on
it, but the end goal is to have a "good enough" codegenerator for non
optimized cases, that could potentially be faster than llvm (to emit). The
primary goal is to learn how to do this though :)

------
clevelandguy
I’m building a highly customized, web-based inspection data and quality
management system at a medical device/aerospace manufacturer that is
essentially replacing a lot of old VB code, with some additional stuff.

Having previously worked at a marketing company and a startup, it’s been
fascinating to experience a legacy manufacturing company growing (or trying to
grow) into the future.

Yes, the engineering problems are fun and all, but I think the most
fascinating part has been thinking about what American manufacturing will look
like 5, 10, 20 years down the road.

In my experiences, I believe American manufacturers will NEED to invest in
industry 4.0 tech in order to mitigate costs associated with rising wages,
shortages of skilled machinist labor, and greater demand from
consumers/regulators/OEMs for information and transparency.

I’ve also been quite amazed at how much paper is still used and the lack of
industrial software products with quality UX.

And I don’t think American manufacturing will ever cease to exist.

------
sideproject
I’m working on Newsy.

[https://www.newsy.co](https://www.newsy.co)

I have quite a few domain names that I have purchased over the years that I am
not doing anything with at the moment.

I wanted minimal amount of work to make a good use out of these domains.

So I built Newsy. It turns your idle domain into a news aggregator.

I’m nearly there. You can sign up and I’ll invite you to check it out!

~~~
waychukucha
I like this and all the best. I have access to close to 50 idle domains I will
try see how I can put them to use. Is there a way to customize the news such
that it is relevant to each domain?

~~~
sideproject
Yep! That's the idea! :) Via RSS feeds + keywords.

~~~
waychukucha
If by any chance you would like help better testing it, I have so many parked
domains that I would like to have them on asap. Is there is any other way I
can contact you or you can reach me on nash at hoopsup dot com

------
Findeton
I'm trying to bring light-fields to the masses, as the next level of VR
immersive experiences. I'm building a cheap light-field video-camera and the
software to process it automatically and reproduce the videos with a VR
headset. BTW, not it's not just like a normal VR video because you have
parallax.

~~~
jiofih
How do you deal with occlusion? I had the impression that’s the main issue
with VR video, unless your recording rig has a massive horizontal offset to
capture the sides.

~~~
Findeton
You record the video from a matrix of cameras each at a slightly different
pov, then use a light-field algorithm to generate novel images. As you said
you only solve occlusion if your cameras are separated enough but in my case I
only expect/want the user to twitch his head around. We can add more cameras
if this tech starts get adopted.

------
vrajat
I am creating a couple of open source tools for data governance. The first one
is a data catalog (1) with tags for PII data. The second one is a data lineage
application (2). The goal is to keep these as simple as possible to install
and use.

IMO the current options are too complicated or expensive and appropriate for
the largest companies. I cannot hack a simple application for data discovery
or usage statistics. So I am building a dead simple data catalog that I can
reuse. The data lineage app is the first app on it.

(1)
[https://github.com/tokern/piicatcher](https://github.com/tokern/piicatcher)
(2) [https://github.com/tokern/lineage](https://github.com/tokern/lineage)

------
taurath
Why I can’t get through a day without anxiety. Many years of research,
consulting with experts, running experiments and correlating data. It’s a hard
problem.

~~~
spython
Have you tried a non-verbal approach? I.e. 'authentic movement', guided
dreamlike meditation, ecstatic dance? In a sense reversing the Moravec's
Paradox (1) and letting the older, bigger, more complex brain take care of
things.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox)

------
adamnemecek
IDE for music composition [http://ngrid.io](http://ngrid.io)

Launching soon.

~~~
diveintothe9
I'm guessing this is different from a DAW? Also, cloud-based music making
applications is an area I'm generally interested in, and I find it somewhat
crazy that a lot of mainstream music software companies haven't stuck a foot
in. I'm aware of some, like Cubase having cloud collaboration, but it's mostly
blue ocean.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
I'm the lead author of Ardour, a cross-platform open source DAW. Just last
night, I was helping out a user who was having issues (eventually traced to
their AMD graphics stack). Their session wasn't particularly large - about 1
hour of recorded spoken word and some backing music. The whole data set came
to 6.5GB ... non-trivial for "cloud-based" anything, even today.

Yes, there are ways to be clever about this stuff, but for "real music making"
the typical size of the data involved makes cloud-based collaboration less
immediately appealling than you might imagine.

~~~
diveintothe9
Agreed, data volumes are definitely the biggest hurdle in this scenario. Any
of the cloud DAWs I've seen mostly offer basic features, and a handful of
recording tracks at best.

Just checked out Ardour, looks great! Being able to work with videos and (I
presume) work on additional audio and eventually mix the two audio sources
back into the video is a fantastic feature.

------
varjag
An acoustic system for poor-visibility tunnel evacuation assistance using
psychoacoustic effects. Massively distributed, self calibrating, microsecond
scale synchronized system with a bunch of interesting problems in software,
electronics, acoustics and mechanical engineering.

~~~
sillysaurusx
Could you go into detail? Or explain what that means? It sounds interesting,
but none of the words seem connected.

~~~
varjag
We use sound effects to evacuate people from fires in tunnels when they can't
see any direction in the smoke. Which involves detecting the fire in the first
place, and establishing binaural effects that are directional _and_ suggestive
of the direction you should take.

Explaining the implementation would take a wall of text, just listed the
aspects that make it interesting.

------
sm001
I'm working on mobile apps to help researchers study dolphin acoustic
communication, such as DC Dolphin Communicator 2019 which is free and open
source on gitlab:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sm.app.dc&hl=e...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sm.app.dc&hl=en_CA)

During a sabbatical trip in the Canadian Arctic in 1975, I came in close
proximity with a beluga in Hudson Bay and was impressed with the unusual
vocalizations which was in-air and about 3 feet from me. The beluga was
tragically killed by Inuit a few minutes later. That's how my interest
started. I later learned the basics from two people who were leaders in this
field.

------
maddy1512
I working on a personal project which tries to solve Traffic congestion
problems using live feed cameras. Feel free to connect with me on linkedIn if
you are interested. [https://bit.ly/2RE3omt](https://bit.ly/2RE3omt)

------
erulabs
I'm building a product that aims to get people hosting software again. The
internet used to be bi-directional, in that people could host content as
easily as they could consume it. We're currently a Kubernetes hosting
platform, but I'm working hard on a system that will allow developers to
extend our cloud with their own machines at home, in a data-center, or
anywhere! From learning to host Minecraft servers at home, to Fortune 10
Software delivery, we don't see a reason why you should have to jump to
different vendors and different platforms. Democratize server-side software!
[https://kubesail.com](https://kubesail.com) (YC S19)

------
msaharia
I am trying to build a flood forecasting system for India using satellite
remote sensing, hydrologic models, machine learning, crowdsourcing etc.

~~~
on2k17nm
Nice

------
davedx
Working on [https://LightSheets.app](https://LightSheets.app), a spreadsheet
application allowing high performance data science type tasks like cleaning
big chunks of data. I'm also doing a lot of exploratory coding around how far
the spreadsheet concept can be pushed to "augment human intelligence", which
has led me to read a lot of papers about this area. One thing I'm very
interested in is how we can allow machine intelligence to "take the
initiative" during the course of human work.

Hopefully in 2020 this means more than simply resurrecting a clone of MS
Office's Clippy...

------
contingencies
Aggregating virus spread data to visualize for Wikipedia. Hacky but working.
[https://github.com/globalcitizen/2019-wuhan-coronavirus-
data...](https://github.com/globalcitizen/2019-wuhan-coronavirus-data/)

Increasing food safety and security plus availability and choice in urban
environments using robotics to automate food preparation and software to
manage operations and logistics. Hopefully also make money. Differences from
web stuff: includes embedded, mobile, electronics design, mechanical design,
fabrication, business, cross-border operations, food safety regulations, etc.

------
opsgal
Still thinking pretty loosely about the trust space, but a few conclusions on
my end: LinkedIn is frustrating because people connect even though they don't
know each other very well. I spend a lot of time meeting up with strangers
(Craigslist, meetups, dating) and generally hoping that the world is good
(though it pretty much always turns out to be). Phone number seems to be
something that people only exchange when they have a fairly meaningful
interaction - could that be used as a way to show you know someone/vouch for
them? I feel like there's something in that space that would resonate with a
lot of people.

~~~
oddnearfuture
Hmm, similar thoughts but less about trust and more about the psychology of
personal networks.

I'm interested in what value we place on connecting people in our network. Say
you meet two persons in your travels that might benefit from being connected.
What value do you place on making this connection? How does it make you feel?
Does it have to have an obvious personal utility?

These are the types of questions I would love to investigate further. Maybe
they're kinder, calmer tools that we can build for this specific purpose.

~~~
dzink
I’ve been prototyping in this space as well. Let’s all chat. Ping me at my hn
username at @doerhub.com

------
fabianlindfors
Trying to make it easier to prove your identity online. Essentially by
creating an ID for use on the web.

When signing up for services that require real identities (banking, insurance,
etc.) the standard currently is to require a picture of a passport, a video of
yourself, or copies of some paperwork. These methods are all high-friction and
provide dubious security and privacy. This is already a solved problem in some
countries and I'm working on the equivalent on a larger scale, without the
geographical restrictions.

If there is anybody else here working in this space then feel free to reach
out!

~~~
slx26
With online fingerprinting, big companies seem to have the problem of
"identity", bots and spam prevention decently solved, but at the cost of users
privacy.

There are many opportunities that could really use a good mechanism to
uniquely identify users, know for sure they are real people. This is pretty
hard to do (or outright impossible) without the collaboration of governments.
But governments will f*ck it up in a number of ways if we leave it to them. We
have to think bigger than what some countries have already solved.

First, we need something like credit cards. A physical object (identity cards
could work on many countries, but they tend to suffer from beyond horrible
usability when it comes to their digital chips / functionality) with a
password that can be changed. We would also need a place to see all the
"transactions" or actions done with your identity, as we have with credit
cards. India and their Aadhaar project has shown that biometric identification
is not good. But it sounds very nice and sci-fi, so it sadly sticks. Nothing
new yet.

But what we really would need are manageable permissions, so you can always
prove that you are an actual human, but not necessarily revealing anything
else and being a completely anonymous user, or choosing to reveal some data
(country, real name, etc).

If something like this was global and effective, not only we would have many
more opportunities through the internet, we could also come much closer to
things like direct democracy. Password management and online identity
management would also become much easier. Obviously there also are many
problems. Starting with the access to the internet itself. And all this
identification system does sound very dangerous from a privacy-minded
perspective (but the alternatives will end up being much worse, and worse
systems will be imposed on us). And I'm still completely ignoring the
political will to do something like this.

~~~
fabianlindfors
I think you really hit the nail on the head, thanks for sharing!

Privacy is definitely at the center of what I'm building. My approach is to
put full control of their own data in the users hands. Data is only shared
with a service when a user explicitly allows it and the user is always aware
of what that data is. Your idea of being able to share nothing at all is also
something I've been thinking a lot about. Being able to verify an identity
without leaking any PII is one of my main goals.

I also agree with you on the issue of governments. There are very few who have
managed to introduce a digital ID locally. A large amount of countries coming
together and building a common solution seems very far-fetched currently.
Where I'm from, Sweden, we have a well functioning digital ID used by
everybody. Funny thing is that it was created by the private banks and only
later adopted by the government.

It's definitely a hard problem but judging by the evidence it's solvable, just
hope I'm on the right path. If you have any more thoughts I'd love to hear
them!

------
beaconstudios
2 projects at the moment:

\- a graph-based task manager that incorporates dependencies between tasks and
infinitely-nested subtasks - IE maps to how we actually think about tasks
being related and broken down. Aiming to get this one shared with the world in
early Feb.

\- a visual programming environment that represents how we model software in
our heads, not how it runs on the computer/s. This is my longer-term, much
more experimental project.

Drop me an email (in my bio) if you're interested in either! I'll be
commercialising the former quite soon and I'm putting a lot of effort into
pleasant to use.

------
kop316
Interesting to me:

[https://github.com/ikorb/gcvideo](https://github.com/ikorb/gcvideo)

GCvideo has a way to convert the digital signal on the N64 into composite
video, and has VHDL to create an HDMI signal With Audio. So I have been
working on finding the digital Audio out on the N64, and converting the whole
signal to HDMI.

In not so many words, I am recreating this from scratch:
[https://www.retrorgb.com/ultrahdmi.html](https://www.retrorgb.com/ultrahdmi.html)

Mainly because it is impossible to find that.

------
arkadiyt
I'm building a service that fetches the audit logs from all your SaaS tools
(think GSuite, Okta, Dropbox, Zendesk, Salesforce, Github, etc) and pushes
them into whatever logging pipeline you use.

I built a similar tool internally at my last company and we used it to alert
on things like employees making google drive files public to the internet,
okta configuration changes, github ssh deploy keys getting added, employees
logging in from foreign countries, etc.

If anyone wants to check it out you can reach me at arkadiy{at}logsnitch.com
(or just sign up at the same domain).

------
Waterluvian
I'm trying to learn how one writes a rules engine for a digital card game.
That is, the system for defining valid moves and combinations and such that
isn't just a crap ton of bespoke code.

------
plahteenlahti
I'm trying to get people to sleep better by providing them relevant sleep
coaching by combing their sleep tracker’s data with CBT-I derived sleep
coaching program. Been working on this project for a year now, and it’s
finally starting to take the shape I wanted it to have.

Been a really tough journey. I’m was the only coder and designer in the
project for the longest time, and my development skills weren’t really that
good when I started building this.

Here’s a link to it [https://nyxo.app](https://nyxo.app)

~~~
noitsnot
*tough

Nice start! Is there any fitness trackers you believe outperform in terms of
sleep tracking? It's an interesting idea for an app. because I have personally
found specialists are booked 3+ months in advance.

~~~
plahteenlahti
Oura seems to be the most accurate at the moment, but only by a small margin,
and that is mostly because it's the only one that uses also temperature to
measure sleep (in addition to heartbeat and movement).

Detecting when person is asleep has become quite good, but there's still a lot
of work to do in also detecting sleep stages. I would not trust any wearables
deep sleep readings too much.

------
spangry
I'm trying to figure out the appropriate discount rate and methodology that
governments should use when doing cost-benefit analysis of big expenditure
projects (e.g. infrastructure). It would seem that economists have been
arguing about this for many decades now with no end in sight.

There are some interesting value-judgements that have to be made here (e.g. do
we value the consumption of future generations more/less than present
consumption?), so I suspect there will never be an objective answer to this
question.

~~~
mojomark
Interesting. For my data mining class I took NYC Open data - merging temporal
Crime Data and Capital Expenditure data by geographic district/precinct, to
see if there was evidence that spending money in a region had a positive
impact on crime reduction. Then to see if I could use that model to see if I
could predict how much crime would be reduced given a specified funding
injection into the region. We assumed there was some lag (e.g. 6 mos. or 1
year) between funded project completion and community impact (reduced crime).

The model was only a little over 70% accurate, but the data was sloppy because
we had to get creative mapping precincts to districts since their boundaries
don't overlap exactly. However, I think this could be significantly improved
since crime data is geo-tagged, so you can get much more specific about where
crimes occur with respect to funded projects.

I think that model can be made to help inform where funding could be most
beneficial from a social perspective. I realize there are other factors in
infrastructure investments than crime - I was focussed on community
improvement projects (e.g. blight removal, green space development, school
construction/repair, etc.)

------
loa_in_
I'm reworking the (already pretty old) concept of literate programming, basing
my research on the implementation written originally by Dr Ross Williams in
70's called funnelweb. Given new hardware of modern times all the ugly hacks
and compromises of the C implementation (including ugly delimiters,
unnecessary terse syntax, not using a recursive descent parser but relying on
byte values while parsing text) a new take on the subject might bring it to
today's tool chain.

~~~
nekopa
Do you have anything available for public consumption? I'm a fan of funnelweb
and would love to see it updated.

~~~
loa_in_
Since you asked, and since people who can use those tools are few and far
between... I have made my own take on funnelweb syntax. I would like your
opinion. Unfortunately not really documented, so please look at sample
(complete) input file.

It's currently in working state. [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/loa-
in-/python3-dreamwork/...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/loa-
in-/python3-dreamwork/master/tests/inputs/rendertest.txt)

You can see current output here: [https://github.com/loa-
in-/python3-dreamwork/tree/testout/te...](https://github.com/loa-
in-/python3-dreamwork/tree/testout/tests)

------
hef19898
My current longshot is the development of dropship fulfillment solution as a
service. Kind of a managed dropship network for every single dropship vendor
and every single dropship retailer out there. The solution should basically
take the pain of daily logistics management of the retailers back. Kind of
what Amazon does for their own Dropshippers. As a retailer you get full
tracking and cost transparency, as a dropship vendor you get a platform that
directly integrates with your ERP-system, gives you shipping labels and so
forth...

Funny thing is, the basic software more or less exists already. At least on
the fulfillment and logistics side of things. The tricky thing now is to
create the physical network (also companies like DHL ship for everyone, even
next day) and come up with the processes to match n retailers with m
dropshippers (some of them shared between retailers) and a basically infinite
amount of consumers.

I said long shot. First step is to get my 4PL company of the ground. A 4PL is
a nice first step, I tke care of daily logistic operations for clients. Which
also includes pretty early on a Dropship component. So once the 4PL is earning
some money, the next step will be to define processes for a scaleable Dropship
solution, identify software gaps and then create the platform. Talking about
longshots...

How I got the idea? I worked for Amazon running, among other things the
Amazon.de dropship network. After that I worked for a producer of solar
modules. That company sld some of the modules through a webshop and had some
dropshipping. Totally inefficient, intransparent and expensive. So I told
myself, that can be done better. Took me three years to take the leap into
startup world.

~~~
stef25
Amazon.de has a dropship network?

~~~
hef19898
Yeah, called direct fulfillment. Roughly 400 vendors a couple of years ago for
Amazon.de alone. Should be more by now. Quite interesting, so. Not sure why
Amazon never really pushed that instead of own fulfillment centers, would have
reduced fixed costs by quite a bit IMHO.

------
pxue
sustainability in fashion.

there's a lot of "greenwashing" in the industry driven by opaqueness and lack
of measurable data.

step #1 is to get more brands on board. step #2 make it easier to monitor
supply-chain and have actionable and measurable KPIs built around data.

~~~
dublinben
This is an interesting challenge, because reducing consumption is the most
effective way to increase sustainability. This is antithetical to selling more
clothing though, so you won't find much traction with fashion brands.

That being said, Poshmark does have a $600m valuation, so there is a market
here.

~~~
jlevers
Patagonia's also done a great job with this. I have no idea if all their
advertising around _not_ buying things you don't need has increased the number
of items they've sold, or just the price they can charge for them.

------
dopamine101
I am trying to create a metasearch engine for apparel in India. Apparel
shopping is different than commodity shopping and requires lots of browsing
before selecting your final product to buy. A user will know about a limited
number of vendors and will search for products only on them. A central web/app
is needed to give results from the long tail of vendors. This product can be
extended to furniture and lifestyle domain too.

~~~
wewake
By vendors, you mean brands right?

~~~
dopamine101
Brands, Niche e-commerce websites, boutiques

------
stewfortier
As somebody with broad interests, I've long been fascinated by what it means
to be a "generalist" and understanding when a wide, varied skillset is an
advantage over a hyper-narrow one.

I've been reading about this for years and recently started sending out short
summaries of what I've learned (typically geared at how the lessons can by
applied practically).

Last week I shared how Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely to have a side
hobby as a performer than their peers.

Ultimately, I am trying to land on a succinct answer to "how do you channel
broad interests and talents into an impactful career?"

(this is my email:
[https://stewfortier.com/subscribe](https://stewfortier.com/subscribe))

~~~
jlevers
Whoa, I just signed up for your newsletter a couple weeks ago. Small world.
I'm enjoying it so far, keep it up!

I too have really broad interests...I find basically everything interesting,
which is both a blessing and a curse, as I'm sure you've experienced. I'd love
to talk about this more...do you feel you've come to any kind of answer on how
to focus your wide interests?

~~~
stewfortier
Excited to have you on the list! Definitely hit reply every once in a while as
I'd love to chat more about all of these topics one-on-one.

One theme I'm starting to converge on is the idea of a generalist as an
"expert" at a) maintaining a wide range of mental models and skillsets and b)
developing a sense of which type of problems to apply each to.

In other words, effective generalists become good at knowing which speciality
or approach should be applied to a problem, even if they "only" grasp the
basics of any one discipline.

Example:

A software engineer wants to develop deeper friendships. They may think that
building an app that reminds them to keep in touch with friends will help.

Of course they think that... software is what they know best.

But a generalist may take a different angle and see that the root cause isn't
an automation / information problem, it may be a human psychology issue.

"The real problem is that you don't believe you're worthy of love. If you work
on that, you may feel confident enough to want to reach out more."

The next email is going to start outlining the most practical, effective mini-
mental models that generalists can use to solve practical problems.

~~~
jlevers
I'll definitely start hitting reply, thank you!

That's a really interesting, but sensible, conclusion to come to. It seems to
follow that generalists would make great business/personal coaches, as they're
good at pointing people in the right direction. I'd be curious to look at
great coaches and see if they had a ton of different interests.

I'm stoked for the next email :)

------
akdas
1\. Trying to make hiring in tech a better experience by sharing my knowledge
and experience with both job seekers and those doing the hiring. The really
hard part about this is influencing some change in how hiring is done, because
I strongly believe the current hiring process selects for the wrong skillset.
I'm publicly committing to write about this topic weekly with a newsletter
that I just launched: [https://hiringfor.tech](https://hiringfor.tech)

2\. At work, I recently completed a really long project with a large team. I'm
trying to make the lessons learned accessible to others in the company because
they'll also be undertaking similar projects soon. That means documenting my
learnings at a level of abstraction that allows others to not make the same
mistakes as us, but still have enough flexibility to tailor their
implementation based on their team's needs. The hard part is the intersection
of technical and people-oriented knowledge dissemination.

This year is going to be focused on a lot of teaching, which I'm excited
about.

~~~
JimDabell
Is it possible for you to add an Atom feed for #1? I try to reserve email for
real communication and use feeds for reading periodicals. I would subscribe to
it as a feed, but it doesn't belong in my email.

~~~
akdas
Absolutely! The feed will be available at
[https://hiringfor.tech/feed.xml](https://hiringfor.tech/feed.xml) when I
start publish content (probably next week).

------
paulorlando
I'm working on improving the understanding of systems through research,
writing and presenting. I write this regular set of articles about unintended
consequences coming from tech, politics, and business:
[https://unintendedconsequenc.es/](https://unintendedconsequenc.es/)

------
pulseflexer
I am working on Site that helps people, who are in teaching profession, track
fees. Often times, small-time tutors are left with using multiple tools like
google docs, calendar etc. to track contacts, fees. This is attempt to provide
one stop to manage all things.

[https://tracfee.com](https://tracfee.com)

------
killjoywashere
I work on things like the datasets you can find here:

[https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/search?query=whole...](https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/search?query=whole%20slide%20image)

Teaching machines to diagnose cancer with superhuman sensitivity and
specificity makes it easy to sleep at night.

------
pragmaticpirate
I am working on a solution for people to defeat procrastination. Here's how it
works, you select a time slot for work, and we assign you an accountability
assistant who will get on a call with you and keep in touch as often as
necessary to keep you from procrastinating by holding you accountable for the
task at hand.

~~~
addisonl
Sounds expensive

~~~
wheelerwj
Lets think about it and come back to it later.

------
atheiste
I am working on a blogging platform that does not need any backend (in terms
of an app listening for http connections). The overall architecture is an web
app that is talking to WebDAV and then pages get build by a static site
generator. I use getpelican.com but you can use Hugo or Jekyll based on your
preference.

~~~
Chris2048
How would that work? surely something needs to serve the static content to a
http request?

~~~
atheiste
You are right of course. There is still nginx taking care of everything. The
point is that you need nothing but nginx/caddy/Apache.

Currently, I don't know any way how to initiate execution of scripts over http
server so there is a systemd timer checking changes in files and recompiling
the whole site. This has lot of downsides. The easiest would be if the static
generator reacts on existence of a specific file - recompiles the site and
removes the file afterwards.

------
kstenerud
I'm building a new general purpose RPC mechanism to replace the current
HTTP/REST technology, as well as the whole TCP port thing. What service you're
talking to on the host will be completely hidden from prying eyes, and
unblockable.

You call an endpoint anywhere on the planet and give the name of the service
you want, which then gives you access to that service's published API (similar
to how you'd use import and gain access to a library's API).

To start, it will operate over port 80/443 to allow seamless integration into
the current world infrastructure, but I'm also hoping that in maybe 10 years
it could replace HTTPS entirely, possibly even TCP.

The first step is an encoding mechanism that supports the most common data
types natively, which I've defined here [1], and am currently writing
implementations for in go. It's a parallel text and binary encoding so that we
don't waste so much time generating bloated text that's just going to be
machine-parsed at the other end, but also allows converting on-demand to a
text format that humans can read/write. I ended up developing new encoding
schemes for floating point values [2] and dates [3] to use in the binary
format.

The next layer above that is a generic streaming protocol [4], which can
operate on top of anything from i2c to full-on HTTP(S), and supports
encryption. It's designed to be as non-chatty as possible so that for many
applications, you simply open the connection and start talking without even
waiting for the other side's acknowledgement. It supports bi-directional
asynchronous message sending with chunking and optional acknowledgement on a
per-message basis, with tuneable, negotiable message header size.

The final layer will be the RPC implementation itself. I want this as a thin
layer on top of streamux because many of the projects I have in mind don't
need full-on RPC. This part is still only in my head, but if I've designed the
lower layers correctly, it should be pretty thin.

[1] [https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-
encoding](https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding)

[2] [https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-
float](https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-float)

[3] [https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-
time](https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-time)

[4]
[https://github.com/kstenerud/streamux](https://github.com/kstenerud/streamux)

------
gumby
Symbolic AI with common sense and explanation built on top of NNs. Here’s a
talk I gave last year though I’m no longer with that company and am working on
the tech elsewhere.

[https://youtu.be/thmkaYOayCM](https://youtu.be/thmkaYOayCM)

~~~
deepnotderp
Hey! I saw your talk at EE380, mind getting in touch over email?

~~~
gumby
Sure, send me a note.

------
benologist
I am working on software that makes building web apps faster, easier and more
secure.

You host a copy of my web application, and it handles all your user account
stuff with modules that add organizations, Stripe Subscriptions and
marketplaces powered by Stripe Connect. You write your application with its
own web server in whatever language and the two servers form one site.

At the moment I am trying to finish automating my documentation based on the
test suites including API details from API tests and screenshots from UI
tests.

I am looking for testers if you are building a SaaS or a Connect marketplace.

[https://github.com/userdashboard/dashboard](https://github.com/userdashboard/dashboard)

[https://userdashboard.github.io](https://userdashboard.github.io)

~~~
tylerrobinson
I’m interested in this type of idea and would be willing to help test your
flows and give feedback. Email me at my username @ gmail!

------
catchmeifyoucan
Our current computer GUIs are not conducive to productivity. Daily things like
too many tabs, distracting notifications multiple windows are “symptoms” of
our computers not being able to understand context. Context meaning - what we
actually want to accomplish.

Whenever we begin to do something, our computer just sees a bunch of apps and
windows. It never tells us how to get better or does things on our behalf. At
Amna, we’re working on a natural interface structured around the way people
think. We believe it will change the way you interact with computers, and the
way computers learn from us.

full problem: [https://getamna.com/blog/post/amna-solves-
problems/](https://getamna.com/blog/post/amna-solves-problems/)

------
invonto
Our software development company is working on an ongoing issue. In our
experience, we find that virtual reality and augmented reality advancements
are not happening within our state, New Jersey. Late last year, we set up the
Virtual Reality Roadshow. It was our goal to help general consumers and small
businesses become more familiar with the benefits of virtual reality
technology. We shared our experience and our thoughts on VR in 2020 in a
recent post: [https://www.invonto.com/insights/virtual-reality-
trends-2020...](https://www.invonto.com/insights/virtual-reality-trends-2020/)

In 2020, we plan to continue the VR Roadshow and brainstorm new ideas to bring
more awareness to virtual reality tech.

------
ChuckMcM
Polyphase channelizers. I got interested in software defined radios, which
lead me to getting a HackRF one, and that lead to learning how to build SDRs,
and that lead to joining a company that was building cutting edge SDRs for
really diverse tasks, and that lead me to diving into DSP and the mathematics
of radios, which lead me into modern protocols and modulation schemes which
lead me to various people doing experimental RF work and started noodling on
what an SPU (Spectrum Processing Unit analog to a GPU) might look like and
that lead me to Dr. Fred Harris' work on polyphase filters and channelizers
and now I'm internalizing all of that so that I can build a device that
processes spectrum in new and novel ways.

------
yetihehe
Prototype for new kind of stirling engine, it's different from others like
two-stroke to four-stroke gas engine. That would make solar thermal efficient
even for low temperature difference (sub 100°C) or allow for storage of energy
by using liquid nitrogen tanks for low-temperature side. I'm currently
aquiring better home with garage to develop this idea.

Professionally - change IoT into one big robot, make platform to connect ALL
devices with one system, essentially what Bruce Schneier warns us about[0].

[0]
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/the_internet_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/the_internet_of_1.html)

------
kirso
I started my job search recently and realized its a trade-off between earning
a good income and being terrible bored of a company mission. I can't believe
in 2020 it's hard to find something awesome and exciting to work on whilst
being financially secure. Obviously it's not only about company product but
also values, culture & people but I realized the major driving force for
making career decision was always intellectual curiosity.

Hence I started a website to curate cool & impact projects that people are
building that nobody knows because they are small or unknown (yet). So kind of
discover amazing companies / make impact kinda thing. Hoping to launch this
month.

------
alanbernstein
I'm trying to create a program that can procedurally generate regular plane
tilings, in a way that allows them to blend into each other over space and/or
time. It makes sense in my head, but I think it won't end up working quite as
well as I hope.

~~~
helltone
Check this out
[https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse](https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse)

~~~
alanbernstein
Thanks! I've seen WFC before and I think it's brilliant. I'm trying to do
something with a little less randomness to it. I want to animate transitions
between archimedean tilings
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_tilings_by_convex_re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_tilings_by_convex_regular_polygons#Archimedean,_uniform_or_semiregular_tilings)).
There may be a connection with WFC that I'm missing. My approach is more, uh,
direct, I guess.

------
losthobbies
I am hoping to get people back into hobbies that they have lost interest in or
have fallen out of the loop.

I have build a VERY basic landing page but I am struggling to get time to
spend on it.

[https://losthobbies.com](https://losthobbies.com)

------
acwan93
Pivoting my parents' homegrown ERP business from the traditional software
sales model (one-time sale with annual support contracts) to a SaaS model with
MRR to grow and scale the company. This also comes with changing the
organization’s mindset and tools used.

I have to say that the technical challenges of bringing in modern web
technologies to interface with legacy systems has been an interesting (and
frustrating at times!) experience. After working as a software dev for a
number of years before taking this on, I’ve been jumping between sales,
marketing, devops, management, and actual software development all in a day.

~~~
jlevers
That sounds really cool -- I'd be interested to hear more about some of the
hurdles you've encountered integrating modern web tech and old enterprise
software. Any particularly notable challenges you'd be willing to share?

~~~
acwan93
It comes down to working on a project that’s been continuously changing over
the span of three decades. Over the years my parents have customized their
offerings to account for numerous clients (our focus is on wholesale
distributors). Keeping track of inventory gets especially complicated when you
start dealing with variants such as colors, sizes, perishables, and pre-
packaged goods (our customers sell in pallets or individually).

Because of this the systems end up become getting fragmented over time to
handle all these different cases and specific needs for customers. Before I
joined, the developers have attempted to unify as much as they could, but the
business need wasn’t quite there to justify it as much as it should.

Building out our initial SaaS offerings have helped a lot for us since there’s
the concept of only having one set of code running on an instance. Because of
that, we’re able to abstract away all of the different nuances of each system
such that the cloud servers don’t end up in a fragmented state as well, but
leaving the on-premise legacy system as it is for now. The plan is for the
core ERP to eventually move in that direction, but so far we’re chipping away
all the edge add-ons and functions first, such as API integrations with
Shopify, Amazon, etc. and building e-commerce storefronts for our customers in
React/Node.js.

------
rexelhoff
We're building an implantable device for blind patients that delivers
electrical stimulation to the optic nerve via the retina.

The implant helps patients perceive visual information about their
surroundings.

Pretty cool tech and fun to work on, too.

------
dnautics
not as interesting or as world-changing as many of the other problems here,
but it scratches that 'language itch' for me: I'm building an interop bridge
between Elixir and Zig that makes calling Zig from Elixir safe, elegant, easy,
and comprehensible:

[https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler/](https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler/)

On my plate currently: Figure out how to make a long-running zig function run
in an OS thread alongside the BEAM so that it doesn't have to be dirty-
scheduled.

------
artembugara
I'm building a Python package to get the latest news from most popular news
publishers without any external API use.

So, for example, the input is 'nytimes.com' and the output will be the last
headlines.

Plan to release it in a few weeks.

------
naresh_xai
Working on XAI for complex computer vision tasks. We’ve built a toolkit which
provides the following:

1\. Heatmaps based on all popular gradient based explainable AI techniques
(plus our own) for classification, regression and semantic segmentation tasks.

2\. Uncertainty modeling for classification, segmentation and regression
tasks.

3\. Concept Discovery/ Pattern Discovery (and dependence) for patterns learned
within a deep neural network. (Loosely based on TCAV)

4\. Using network internals for optimal pruning and model compression.

Send us an email at sales@untangle.ai if you’re interested in trying out our
toolkit. We offer 30 day free trial period.

------
PhilipA
Building a modern headless commerce platform with the focus of developers, and
making it fast, and easy to get started.

It might not be as impressive as some of the comments, but it does seem like
something the market is needing.

~~~
ibeckermayer
What does “headless commerce” mean?

~~~
JosephRedfern
Presumably it's the backend side of an ecommerce setup, where you provide an
API around which others can implement a UI.

------
mfalcon
I'm working (at Chequeado.com) on automated fact checking using Machine
Learning and NLP. Our first product works in Spanish (it's already been used
in Chequeado's newsroom) and we're working towards a Portuguese version for
fellow brazilian fact-checkers.

I'm also working as a contractor on automated valuation systems for real
estate properties, mainly for the argentinian market. The company have already
sold the service to a big international bank to periodically update their
mortgages.

And now I'm pondering about starting a research+prototype AI consultancy.

------
abrax3141
Helping biomedical science efficiently search treatment x biomarker space by
replacing the horrifically inefficient clinical trial system with a globally
coordinated adaptive Bayesian active learning system.

------
RMPR
I'm working on an automation app
[https://github.com/rmpr/atbswp](https://github.com/rmpr/atbswp) to make
automation accessible to non technical people. I used something like that
called tinytask back in time on windows (mostly to play automatically my
Asphalt 8 airborne races :p) but when I switched to linux I noticed that
nothing like that exist, so this is aimed to address that. Right now the
practical use I saw is for automating live demos during conferences for
example.

------
motohagiography
A few things, separately:

\- how to do digital identity in health and public services for ~15m people

\- replacing enterprise/waterfall security risk assessment with collaboration
and iteration.

\- applying product management methods in the public sector

------
coolvision
Working on computer vision & perception system that allows delivery robots to
drive autonomously 99% of the time, with only occasional remote human
assistance. Making sure robots need less and less assistance, and this is
while having hundreds of robots in production doing commercial deliveries.

[https://www.instagram.com/starshiprobots](https://www.instagram.com/starshiprobots)

Technology and business do work, so we probably will have thousands of robots
within a year, and millions not long after that )

------
ahi
Parsing enumeration and chronology data for serials. E.g. "v.1" is obviously
volume:1. But throw in years, parts, editions, copies, supplements, numbers,
page ranges, etc, shit gets weird.

------
monkeydust
Building a VR application that a domain professional could use to uncover
insights from high dimensional data. The goal being to prove that doing this
in VR beats 2D screen or 3D plot on 2D screen.

~~~
TACIXAT
I'm curious to hear what your approach is and how this turns out. I've heard
offhand (at a university) that 3d UIs had performed more poorly than 2d every
time they had tried. I guess this is not necessarily user interfaces though.
There may be some academic research on this worth looking up (maybe not though
because people don't often post negative results).

------
caviv
We are working in my company on trying to combine and solve route-optimization
problem with scheduling and transportation problem for the Electric Vehicle
drivers [https://www.makemydayapp.com](https://www.makemydayapp.com) Think of
an EV driver. Where and when should we charge the car ? why not to charge the
vehicle according to your schedule and go to your meeting while your car is
charging ? and of course. Pre booking your charging station.

------
gwicks56
Seeing if mental health crises can be predicted by gathering passive data from
your phone. ( Accel, gyro, GPS, music choices, keyboard entries, app usage,
sleep, facial expressions etc)

~~~
wheelerwj
i think we’re doing this already arent we? at least foe AdHD and depression. i
think its a great use case but the privacy risks are massive.

~~~
gwicks56
Yeah the privacy issues are bit scary. Our app can only be installed by people
who are in IRB approved studies, but the nature of the data collected means
de-identifying it is impossible. There is also the issue of what happens if it
turns out we can predict things, it's a bit pre-cog ish. Depression and
suicide are such massive problems though that new methods are absolutely
needed.

------
jimkri
Working on building a system that can be used in urban areas to help fight
climate change and water treatment issues using Algae. There has been so much
research on the uses of Algae and how effective it is at using CO2 to grow and
now I'm just trying to think of the most effective way to launch a venture.

The hardest part has been deciding what to fight first and meeting other
people who have experience working with algae. I would love to connect with
anyone that wants to talk Algae!

------
erikbrodch
Currently at YC's startup school, trying to solve the unemployment and
underemployment problem autistic and Aspergers people experience. Currently
validating assumptions and it looks like a freelancing platform for autistic
people is the most promising direction. Started accepting application from
potential autistic people: [https://www.spectroomz.com/work-from-
home](https://www.spectroomz.com/work-from-home)

------
lbutler
I simulate water distribution networks.

I create computer models of water networks and calibrate them so utilities can
do what-if and growth scenario planning. (e.g. what happens if this pipe
burst? how would the network cope with 20k new houses in 40+ years)

I'm also developing software to help water engineers build and run models,
some of it opensource and some of it commercial.

I'm currently pushing most of my effort into an opensource javascript library
to simulate water networks.

------
bogdanu
On a OSS sideproject, I'm working on a DI container for TypeScript that can
autowire interfaces, Array of types and generics.

Since the type information is erased at compile time, it uses the compiler API
to extract the data needed and generates TS code for the interface and
constructor mappings.

The library is on GH, but not really much to show. I've posted on /r/node and
it got some positive reactions, but it didn't got that much attention.

------
Jaruzel
My 'paid job' is boring - Identity Management for Blue Chip companies.

My fun stuff at the moment:

1\. Learning Windows IoT on a Raspberry Pi 3B

2\. Working on proof-of-concept Search Engine Indexers for specific datasets
and/or local file-systems (on network servers).

3\. Exploring a new paradigm of allowing people to easily publish train-of-
thought type content without having to post a long series of tweets or silo it
inside Facebook/LinkedIn/Gist etc.

~~~
Chris2048
wrt #3, see [https://thoughtstreams.io/](https://thoughtstreams.io/)

------
trevett
Creating a directory of all WhatsApp-using businesses in the world. In dog-
fooding I must say it's pretty nice booking a dentist without calling and
waiting on hold.

Business listings are fairly sparse in some countries. Many owners do not
bother creating even a google maps profile and just rely on word-of-mouth for
new clients. Acquiring the bottom of the data-iceberg will require some
creativity going forward.

~~~
monkeydust
Doesnt WhatsApp provide a eta for businesses to publish themselves on a public
directory? I am guessing not given that your looking at this but why wouldn't
they...

------
manx
I'm researching ways to scale deliberation and qualtiative decision making in
the number of participants. I think this is the base for making politics work
and tackling big wicked problems like climate change. It's slow, since my time
is limited. But talking with lots of interesting people about ideas and
approaches is promising. If you're interested to talk, please contact me.

~~~
jlevers
I'm extremely interested, but I don't see your contact info in your profile.
My email's in mine, if you want to get in touch.

~~~
manx
Ouch, thanks for telling me. I always thought having filled the email field
was enough for others to see it. Fixed now.

Anyways, just sent you a mail.

------
austincheney
I am working on exposing the file system to the web browser using OS like GUI
controls and then selectively sharing parts of it to specified users with
security controls. It’s kind of like turning your computer into a private
cross-OS shared drive.

The problem this solves is sharing. Sharing between devices/users should be as
simple as copy/paste initiated by either user like everything is local.

------
Zaskoda
I've been learning how to design game play mechanics for the Ethereum EVM by
building a game dapp with features I haven't seen before.

------
tmaly
I am building a Scratch programming course for kids.

But its more than just that. I want to take the material and make it more
entertaining as well as educational.

I am observing that more and more kids are learning things on their own by
just going online and searching for videos on how to do X. We are on the cusp
of online learning overtaking traditional in classroom learning in terms of
quality and presentation.

------
manx
I recently took a few days apart to implement my own SAT solver. The idea is
to describe the solution space of each clause by a dnf. Then intersect the
solution spaces (dnf1 and dnf2).to_dnf() in a way such that the intermediate
solution space representations are small. In the end it is solving ALLSAT, by
converting cnf to dnf.

I'm happy that it works well for many small sized problems.

------
aberry273
Automation of work. I believe as the number of daily applications we use
increases and the number of available APIs increase, the need for automation
across these applications increases.

[https://bustl-app.com](https://bustl-app.com) \- A SaaS product that acts as
a personal assistant that will integrate with a range of different apps.

~~~
tylerrobinson
Would this be something like Zapier?

------
ratsimihah
I'm working on strong AI using natural selection and reinforcement learning to
develop an intelligence not necessarily modeled to ours.

What I can't figure out is what to use as inputs, similarly to the human
senses, so that it doesn't become too specific, i.e. weak, but instead remains
general and able to understand the binary language computers use.

------
yhoiseth
I'm trying to improve people's abilities to predict the future.

Predictions are a critical part of decision-making, and it's possible to
improve – see, for example, Philip Tetlock's work. But that requires the right
tools, which we are building:
[https://www.empiricast.com](https://www.empiricast.com)

------
RangerScience
I'm re-implementing Chrome extensions for Electron. The existing
implementations are specifically for dev tools extensions, and/or so aren't
working for the extensions we want in our Electron app. I'm finding working
through the various inter-process communication models (and resulting
implementations) really interesting.

------
dchuk
I’m building a simple, opinionated tool to create and manage roadmaps the
right way (IE not features on a Gantt chart). Think of the opinions that the
basecamp guys bake into their products, but targeted at roadmapping. Going to
use it with my own internal product team for a while, but could easily see it
being a good standalone product.

------
brenden2
Working on a new company, one which (I hope) will turn the restaurant industry
on its head. I want to make in-restaurant ordering, payment, and service pure
joy.

I'm mostly heads down coding every day, building an MVP. Also trying to find
some investor interest where possible, however fundraising has never been
something I'm good at.

~~~
buzzert
This seems like something everybody wants but I’m surprised it hasn’t happened
yet. What are some of the (assumingly non-technical) challenges in such an
enterprise?

~~~
brenden2
The biggest problem I'm facing right now is credit card processing costs. The
restaurant business is a high revenue, low margin industry. The fees are
higher for online transactions (no card present) vs. in person transactions
(card present), on the order of 1-2%. I think this is the biggest reason it
hasn't happened yet. However, I have a workaround which I think will work.

~~~
dublinben
Shouldn't an in-restaurant ordering solution be processing card-present
transactions as opposed to card-not-present?

~~~
rs23296008n1
I was wondering that. Why would you to to a restaurant without an ability to
pay?

------
ryanmercer
Trying to get companies to give me a chance without a 4-year degree. Even my
own employer won't promote without a 4-year degree.

While this sounds like a complainy pants problem, this isa very real problem
for a very large percentage of the United States. Without a 4-year degree as a
de facto dues card, you are severely limited on your options.

At 34 years old, I could maybe have a degree by 40 while working full time and
have to take on 30-60k dollars of debt to be competing for entry level jobs
against 20-22 year old applicants (many schools now have programs so students
can graduate simultaneously with a high school diploma and an associates
degree). At my current income, if a degree could get me an extra 15% within a
year of graduation, I would be in my 50s before I paid the loans off at
current rates. That means I sacrifice the last half of my 30's to break even
in my 50's and _maybe_ make some extra money in my 50's and 60's losing out on
20-30 years of compounding interest because I don't have that arbitrary degree
in _anything_ as a dues card to say I'm worth hiring/promoting.

Blah.

Last year I made about 10% less than the year before because of zero overtime,
our annual merit-based increases often are break even (sometimes not even
break even) once you factor in inflation and insurance cost increases, throw
in the constant nagging pressure of cancer risks (father died of it, mother
had it, father's mother died of it), climate change, international trade
issues which could see me laid off, automation possibly replacing jobs in the
near future, it can often be quite crushing. Especially when you're trying to
maintain sobriety and just want to run off into the woods with a cask of high
proof alcohol and try and befriend a bigfoot to help provide food and shelter
for you so you can die from Lyme disease or exposure living as a refugee in
Bigfootville.

Meanwhile you see people with YouTube channels buying what equate to mansions
(What's Inside, Jenna Marbles) and taking international trips monthly (What's
Inside, Casey Neistat used to, on aircraft with seats in the tens of thousands
of dollars a flight) and even crazy domestic trips frequently (What's Inside)
and you're like, "Dude, I just want to make more than 34k a year".

I truly can't imagine what it is like for people that are consigned to working
fast food/retail/service jobs as their sole source of income. It has to be all
but crippling.

------
tixocloud
As a co-founder, we’re building a scalable AI deployment system for banks. On
the outset, not as sexy, but our system is meant to highlight deficiencies and
problems with AI like bias, fairness, etc so hopefully people are aware and
will have the impetus to fix things. Looking to impact change from within.

------
memset
I’m working on making email SaaS providers behave reliably as a side project.
I’ve written a piece of software which is self-hosted that does failover,
retries, queuing, logging, and monitoring for sending mail via SMTP so that
people don’t have to spend time implementing all of that plumbing themselves.

------
bwb
We are working on how to match engineers with engineering teams based on the
work environment and team values/culture.

I've had too many friends and family members end up at companies that were not
a match and watched the massive stress pile up. I want to help people find the
right team/culture for them.

~~~
joshschreuder
Sounds interesting, I always like to see good ideas in the hiring space.

How do you differ from something like
[https://www.keyvalues.com/](https://www.keyvalues.com/)

~~~
bwb
Thanks! I love what Lynne is doing!

We differ in a lot of ways, but the biggest is that we are trying to profile
the actual eng team and how they work / what they value. And, then match you
with teams that are a good fit + high satisfaction in key areas.

For example, say you are motivated by big tech challenges, we would match you
with teams that are motivated by similar and report satisfaction in that area
from their current eng team.

------
sharmi
There is plenty of data lost in Google Search Console due to the limit of max
1000 records for any time period. The real value is in the long tails and they
are lost.

I am working on creating a solution that gathers the data normally not seen in
console dashboard and discovering actionables that help the user.

------
bjourne
Right now I'm working on electronic music generation. That is, how neural nets
and other technologies can be used to generate electronic music. It works
roughly similar to text generation using Markov models, but there are a lot of
problems not found in text that are specific to music.

------
bovermyer
Procedural fictional world generation.

~~~
mrfusion
Explain? Can you make it for vr?

~~~
bovermyer
I'm not quite ready to reveal it here just yet, but no, it's not meant for VR.

------
bebopsbraunbaer
i am working on a similar project to lotrproject.com or a newer example would
be www.witchernetflix.com but my project would be for any book (or universe)
in general. (e.g. my fav. book series malazan book of the fallen). You could
describe it as wiki with fancy UI i guess

------
edhu2017
Data-driven robot control methods for solving furniture assembly.

It's an interesting problem, requiring both dexterous manipulation and long-
term planning. It's also compositional, so I believe some form of hierarchical
control and planning can solve it.

www.clvrai.com/furniture

------
yewenjie
1\. A tiny script for getting top N posts of past week from a subreddit into a
telegram channel. This can be extended in so many ways and I couldn't find an
existing solution.

2\. An all-encompassing personal knowledge management solution that is
effortless and universal.

------
invalidOrTaken
Symbolic math for students. More generally, UI principles for tree
manipulation.

Why am I still using pen and paper for math homework? Why do I have to rewrite
the _whole friggin thing_ every step?

And there's a hope that whatever I learn might be useful for lisps, too.

------
psp219
Working on a free lease trading website. Tried SwapALease/LeaseTrader but the
fees were WAY too expensive for just posting. Going with a freemium model with
posting being free and additional ID/verification checks charging money.

------
Gys
Making people connect offline

~~~
dang
I've often thought about trying to use HN to facilitate more of this.

~~~
Gys
Bringing an online community to offline is very challenging. HN has many
members, but spread out around the globe. An interesting challenge. There have
been some initiatives in the past, I think? Not by HN but by members I mean.

------
fredgrott
I choose something that probably is not solve-able, the shortlist:

1\. 4-manifold problem, while you can see it should be the surface volume of
the shape is equal the math proof is the impossible rub. 2 Prime number
generator

------
navyad
I am building movie-macther for alerting user for their IMDB's watchlist.

[https://github.com/navyad/moviematch](https://github.com/navyad/moviematch)

------
256lie
Models to detect strokes in medical images to be deployed in a hospital.

~~~
jcims
Could you add thermal imaging support to pick out folks with a fever in a
crowd?

------
letorruella
I am trying to translates Andrew Yang's policy site into Spanish.

------
remi_o_p
I use statistics and machine learning to study the physiology of human pain
and stress.

This can lead to ai-suggested interventions that people can apply to
themselves or to support someone else.

------
bethanvincent
I'm trying to challenge the current model of hiring which heavily relies on
CV's and frankly awful job ads.

It's a complex problem, but there must be a better way of doing things!

------
kleer001
How to write a compelling story in the form of a book.

Sounds easy...

But it's the most difficult thing I've ever tackled. Even considering I've
read books like water since I was a kid.

------
thirtythree
Nothing at the moment unfortunately. I've started creating a web app for
news/social/groups/dating but it's not that far along yet.

------
Irene
Community medicine; precision medicine - all self-funded.

~~~
mrfusion
Sounds interesting. Can you explain more?

------
cicinema
app to help me track my due payments (always forget things like monthly fee
for piano lessons or similar not automated payments, plus helps get an
overview of upcoming expenses).

released recently as my first app in google play

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.due.core&h...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.due.core&hl=en)

------
m00dy
Im working on [https://carboncredit.io](https://carboncredit.io)

It is a next generation carbon offset marketplace.

~~~
TheFiend7
I fail to understand what your product offering is by looking at your site.
Could explain what exactly is trying to be achieved by this product and why I
would even want a carbon credit cert?

~~~
m00dy
You would want a carbon credit certificate to save this planet basically.

~~~
mkl
I don't think clicking a green run button will save the planet. I don't
understand either. Your site doesn't seem to have any actual information about
the carbon offsets or who does them or where or how it relates to the API.
What do you actually do?

------
vahid4m
Im trying to suggest different Docker properties for each service in a
multiservice system in order to maximize the performance of the system

------
cjfd
I am currently writing a future in C++. We were using the future of the stlab
library but that turns out not to work 100% reliably.

------
Madmallard
Multiplayer networking for a turn-based role playing game. Lots of
difficulties I didn't foresee at all beforehand.

~~~
yetihehe
Could you list some of them?

~~~
Madmallard
Some difficulties are because I'm doing it in the browser. Things like
connection/reconnection logic and how to handle duplicate clients and
authentication and the decisions surrounding that because my game isn't a
'drop-n-go' game like Slither.io.

------
ILOVEPIE
I'm working on a HTML 5 renderer for the most complex subtitle format in the
world (that is actually in use).

------
farazbabar
A truly anonymous anti-social network and an anonymous but verifiable identity
to go along with it.

------
skwb
I'm working on automating the acquisition of cardiac MRIs using deep learning!

~~~
mrfusion
Where does deep learning come in?

~~~
skwb
We use heatmap localization to identify the cardiac landmarks that define the
viewing planes.

~~~
jobseeker990
Is there are way to get involved in something like that? It sounds so
fascinating.

------
DantesKite
Trying to figure out why learning how to cook is so tedious in a software
world.

~~~
learn_more
I'd like to know of a good book for the science of cooking. I hate blindly
following recipes.

Like a poor man's version of this book by Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold.

[https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-
Cooking...](https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-
Cooking/dp/0982761007)

~~~
charliemil4
[https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering-
ebook/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering-
ebook/dp/B01HMXV0UQ)

!

------
danielkay
I'm working on aggregator editing software for the site I recently launched.
This is a LAMP stack. If someone wants a source code, please contact me via
email.

[https://www.trumpsdaily.com/](https://www.trumpsdaily.com/)

------
BaitBlock
Baitblock ([https://baitblock.app](https://baitblock.app)) here:

We help you avoid distractions while working on websites and the internet by
installing our Chrome extension. For example, Baitblock removes recommended
videos on YouTube while you're working.

It also deals with 1st party cookie tracking. It clears cookie/storage on
every page load as long as it detects that you're not logged in to the website
(upcoming version removes many bugs) using machine learning (NLP).

Since there are too many cookie/gdpr popups now a days, Baitblock
automatically hides them while you're working.

You can also add summaries/TL;DR for any link on a website (right click) so
others dont have to click.

The end goal of Baitblock is to block all possible distractions in a webpage
and save everyone's time.

The latest version of Baitblock 0.1.0 is awaiting approval with many fixes and
new features.

------
sqreept
Leader election in a distributed system of unknown size.

------
kayge
Trying to get hired in infosec with 10+ years of web dev experience, and
failing miserably even though there is a "desperate need" for more people from
all backgrounds to enter the field :)

------
dillonmckay
Helping car salespeople sell more vehicles.

Lots of webscraping.

~~~
Sil_E_Goose
I'm helping dealerships better communicate with customers during service. The
automotive world is a wacky one.

~~~
dillonmckay
That seems a bit more ‘wholesome’ than me.

Maybe we can compare notes?

------
abrax3141
Bringing up two kids.

------
thirdsurf
I’ve discovered a new class of surfboard fins, they’re also the first ever
designs that can be simply 3D printed, sanded and surfed. This means that a
person in a developing world surf town could affordably obtain a 3D printer
and begin producing $50-$100 of fins per day; costing 1/10th that price in
filament. My site: [https://techfins.surf](https://techfins.surf) (still a bit
to go in completing it)

My Open Collective page (I’m ballin’ on a slim budget here)
[https://opencollective.com/techfins](https://opencollective.com/techfins)

You can see more of my fins effort on my instagram page, @stormfins

I recently decided to use the techfins name instead.

I ended up working on this thanks to a passion for surfing, and knowledge that
new airfoils could radically improve my surfing ability by augmenting my
surfboards’ capabilities. I learned CAD four years ago just to do this - make
fins based on new airfoil templates. This ‘new class’ is essentially high lift
fins. Compared to the current surfboard fin standard (6mm thick fins), my 16mm
thick fin designs provide radically more drive, traction and stability to
surfing at the lower speeds. Making normal to pumping surf more accessible and
enjoyable to novices and experts.

These fins are not only empowering for surfing ability, they’re also safer
because of their thicker, more rounded edges, and when 3D printed the fact
they break before your skin does. Also, if these fins could be fitted with an
internal floatation during printing, they could be recovered and glued back
into place using automotive plastic glue.

These are also literally the first high performance Wavestorm fins to be
created as well. Anything else out there is a boring, simple fin design.

Some past feats I can be proud of that you all may appreciate:

• created BeelineReader.com’s first working app, helping them get off the
ground. Helps you read much faster using a novel, internationally patented
innovation.

• Created a web browser with T9Space.com that empowered 10s of thousands of
Nokia phone users around the world to access the desktop only internet back in
‘07-‘10

Earned a bachelor’s in CE at UCSC 20 years ago.

My moniker thirdsurf is about a P2P ‘school of surfing’ project I want to get
going next. There needs to be a more dynamic connection between those with the
knowledge and those who’d like to learn.

If this fins thing gets off the ground, it’ll open up other possibilities.
Nucleos.com is an example of a company that’s been developing a cheap school
software server that can operate in developing world conditions. I want to see
3D printing fin labs sprouting that use a computer that can serve out edu apps
to anyone nearby who has a wifi device.

I also aim to set up a P2P market for people who could fabricate the digitial
fin designs I’ll be making available. This could open up a market of
innovation, empowering people to tout novel materials and fabrication methods,
helping advance greener, safer and more economical ways to make these fins,
and other goods.

Also, in places where it may be difficult to obtain filament, the machines
[https://preciousplastic.com/](https://preciousplastic.com/) and others are
developing could turn plastic refuse in devloping world areas into a precious
commodity.

------
stdsdl19
I recently launched Homematchx.com as an interactive way to connect future
home and buyers at similar stages of the real estate process. Unlike other
real estate listing platforms that shows move-in ready homes in less than 30
days, Homematchx list future homes and buyers at various stages of the real
estate process to empower users to find the right match to close when they’re
ready. Everyone has a plan and a price! Why wait until you're 30 days from
buying or selling when you can find the perfect match to extend the closing
date at your convenience.

According to bankrate.com over 60 percent of millennial home buyer regret
their home purchase. SHOCKING! In our industry this stat is overlooked and it
has made me wonder why. I was working with someone who's lease was coming up
and wanted to explore buying a home. They had two choices, rush into a home or
wait another year. They decided to move and lease in the area they wanted to
purchase. Being unfamiliar of the housing market after signing a 12-month
lease there is no way to identify future homes that will come to the market
when their lease is up. This story led us to a problem in our market. To avoid
the traditional move-in ready market in less than 30 days, our users can match
to homes that will be available for sale at their expected time to purchase.
This is a perfect way to build confidence and prepare for the journey head.

Let's keep it 100 percent! We don't have access to who is planning for the
future which could produce a better outcome. As a real estate professional
over 10 years I’ve noticed soon after buyers move into their new home better
homes in the neighborhood were listed for sale around the same price. We often
times think we purchased the best home at the right time, but everyone has a
plan and a price,That’s real estate right!

Would you be willing to wait if you found the home worth waiting for or made
the seller an offer they can’t refuse for your one of a kind? Homematchx
assures you never miss out on wishing you could have purchased the home next
door, the home across the street, or the home around the corner. Our platform
allow consumers to see available homes for sale up to three years out giving
you access to more inventory than today.

I think seller are at a serious disadvantage when they need to sell. Days on
Market is a huge issue and its a growing concern in real estate. They are
unsure how many buyers fit their home's description and would be willing to
purchase it at their desired time. To time selling your home perfectly is
unpredictable. Our platform allows you to see all the buyers, their
compatibility to your home, and if they have been qualified or not. Never will
a seller list a home for sale without know who will actually purchase it.

We are heading into the new construction industry to help home builders better
understand the real estate market and who's available. There is so many
missing things that buyers don't have access to in order to time their new
construction journey perfectly.

I'm excited about the many problems we can solve but I know we cannot be
successful without the users knowing it exist. I'm on a Godly mission to
finally change the real estate market and make it accessible regardless of
your timeline.

Stephen L.

------
photawe
I've been working on a video editor ([https://phot-awe.com](https://phot-
awe.com)), for more than 1.5 years.

Biggest challenge has been speed: first proof of concept was a prototype that
was kinda' slow (C#/WPF/Windows). I've re-written it using the lowest level
possible stuf from WPF, and that took me a looot (roughly 3-4 months, to also
make it easy to extend/modify). That was an improvement of roughtly 3-4 times,
but for non-trivial stuff, it was too slow (and especially saving the final
video was insaaaanely slow). So, I did another rewrite in UWP, and this took
another 4+ months.

Now, I'm really happy about the speed - it's 3-4 times faster than before, and
at saving, it's 10-12 times faster.

In order to make it happen, I've worked insane hours (and still am) - but
that's that. Right now (the following 2 months) I'm focusing on stability and
some improvements. Hope to have apretty cool new feature ready in roughly 3-4
months, and we'll see.

Challenges: countless, probably I could write a book ;)

1\. Parsing existing videos - in WPF that was insanely hard, and it took me a
lot of time to come up with a viable solution (which when porting to UWP, I
ended up throwing away)

2\. Estimates - I was pretty good at estimating how long a task would take.
But due to the fact that everything was new to me (basically, animating using
low level APIs was close to undocumented), so pretty much everything took 4-5
times more than I expected. This was soooo exhausting and depressing, since at
some point I just stopped estimating, because I knew it would take me longer.

3\. Changing the UI due to user feedback - basically, I ended up redesigning
80% of the UI to make it easier to use. What I thought would take me 1 week,
ended up taking me 1+ months.

4\. Tackleing everything at once: trying to implement a new feature, while
dealing with bugs people would find or dealing with issues that would come up
when trying to implement the feature. And dealing with issues that came up
from the photographers I collaborate with (those that create the app's
effects/transitions).

5\. Porting to a new technology (UWP/WinRT). This is something that I hope I
never have to do again - I was forced to do it, because of the speed gains. I
had to reimplement / retest every control I initially developed - that's one
thing. The other one is dealing with the idiocracy of WinRT - which loves
async stuff / and also loves limitations. Also, the UWP documentation is soooo
bad compared to WPF - and there are very few resources, because most people
are put off by it (not going to go into detail as to why, that's another book
I could write). Not for the faint of hearted. 6\. Compilation times - on the
old technology (WPF), everything was insanely awesome. On UWP, compilation
times are roughly 6 times slower. That is baaaaaaaaad. I'm doing all sorts of
workarounds to make things faster.

------
lichtenberger
I'm working on a versioned, temporal DBMS[1] called SirixDB in my spare time,
which is the most exciting thing :-)

It's based on a university project on which I was working basically since day
one in 2006.

I know it's crazy to work on such a large project initially alone. Lately,
however, I'm getting the first contributions, and maybe I should start
collaborating with the university or with the company of my former supervisor
(who began the project for his Ph.D.).

I'm now more than convinced that the ideas are worth to work on, especially in
the advent of modern hardware as byte-addressable NVM :-)

Currently, I'm working on the storage engine itself, to reduce storage space
consumption further and to make the system stable. I'm experimenting with
larger data sets to import (JSON and XML currently up to 5GB) with and without
auto-commits, enabling/disabling different features, for instance, storing a
rolling merkle hash for each node, storing the number of descendants, a path
summary and so on.

Some of the features:

    
    
        - the storage engine is written from scratch
        - completely isolated read-only transactions and one read/write transaction concurrently with a single lock to guard the writer. Readers will never be blocked by the single read/write transaction and execute without any latches/locks.
        - variable-sized pages
        - lightweight buffer management with a "kind of" pointer swizzling
        - dropping the need for a write-ahead log due to atomic switching of an UberPage
        - rolling merkle hash tree of all nodes built during updates optionally
        - ID-based diff-algorithm to determine differences between revisions taking the (secure) hashes optionally into account
        - non-blocking REST-API, which also takes the hashes into account to throw an error if a subtree has been modified in the meantime concurrently during updates
        - versioning through a huge persistent and durable, variable-sized page tree using copy-on-write
        - storing delta page-fragments using a patented sliding snapshot algorithm
        - using a special trie, which is especially good for storing records sith numerical dense, monotonically increasing 64 Bit integer IDs. We make heavy use of bit shifting to calculate the path to fetch a record
        - time or modification counter-based auto-commit
        - versioned, user-defined secondary index structures
        - a versioned path summary
        - indexing every revision, such that a timestamp is only stored once in a RevisionRootPage. The resources stored in SirixDB are based on a huge, persistent (functional) and durable tree 
        - sophisticated time travel queries
    

Besides the storage engine challenges, the project has so many possibilities
for further research and work:

    
    
        - How to shard databases
        - Query compiler rewrite rules and cost-based optimization
        - A brand new front-end
        - Other secondary index-structures besides AVL trees stored in data nodes
        - Storing graphs and other data types
        - How to best make use of modern hardware as byte-addressable NVM
    

[1] [https://sirix.io](https://sirix.io) or
[https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix](https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix)

------
bashwizard
My lack of sleep.

------
ronilan
Not sure it’s interesting. But it did become a problem :)

Anyway...

This summer & fall I wrote a JS core lib and a set of compatible packages that
together greatly simplify the creation of terminal based node apps and games
(in the realm of blessed, blessed-contrib and ink, but with no dependencies
and with a novel api/architecture)

I got into it because my son did this node project where an animated car drove
in a forest of cellular automata generated trees. Yah. You read it right.
Things spiraled from there...

It is not a small project and it is pretty close to release form. I’ve used
the lib and components to write a couple of small but non-trivial things. So,
yes, it works.

In December, though, I stopped actively working on it. There are various
reasons. One of which is that there is snow on the mountains. There are other
reasons, none of which is code related.

More curious? More question. Cheers.

------
fhcgffgfxgfgfd
Raising a child.

~~~
lqet
How did you end up working on that?

~~~
wheelerwj
tag this NSFW

~~~
thedevindevops
Surely that would be 'making a child'?

------
_myles
The past several years I've been trying to find some tangible philosophical
ground to stand on. This (desperate) search is and has been the produce of
mental illness I've dealt with since my adolescence (I'm 32 now).

Quite a long story short, I managed to get the mental illness under control;
something I thought I'd be living with the rest of my life.

My research has included mostly standing/walking meditation, and reading a lot
on philosophy, religion, psychology, and such.

This is a personal project I've only just sort of revealed, after some
persuasion by my peers. I didn't really have much intention on putting out in
the public but it has turned out to be something significant. There is a lot
to say about it.

EDIT: If you're curious, here is what I came up with after I started recording
my research. DISCLAIMER: there is some personal stuff I talk about.

[https://github.com/myles-moylan/head_project](https://github.com/myles-
moylan/head_project)

~~~
tuesday20
Could you please elaborate on meditation? How has it helped you, how much time
do you spend, what is walking meditation etc?

Thank you

~~~
_myles
When I meditate all I'm trying to do is keep my attention in the present
moment; if my mind starts to wander I bring it back, and so on.

I've always loved going on walks, and they've just turned out to be a good way
to work through mental/emotional stuff. Walking helps you stay in the moment
as well, and when you're focusing your attention on the moment there's always
new things to sense.

Let me know if that's not clear enough.

EDIT:

Another important part of meditation is the analysis of your thoughts and
emotions. Whatever comes up, try to understand why it did as well as you can.

~~~
tuesday20
I go on long walks, this is something I will try. I usually listen to podcasts
while walking, maybe it is time to try something different.

About analyzing thoughts - I tend to over analyze everything. How do you not
fall into this trap?

~~~
_myles
It's vital that you're honest with yourself in order to find some sort of base
cause to any given thought/emotion. I honestly end up catching myself lost in
thought after a minute or so more often than not.

It's really a best effort sort of thing. But the more you practice, and the
more effort you put forward, the stronger you'll get and the easier it will be
to filter the signal from the noise.

------
graycat
How to find an accurate numerical approximation to e, the base of the natural
logarithm? Last weekend stumbled onto a shockingly easy and effective way!

Google query

"base of the natural logarithm e"

reports

e = 2.718281828459

that is, 13 digits.

The calculator with Windows 10 reports

e = 2.7182818284590452353602874713527

that is 32 decimal digits.

Last weekend found

e = 2.71828182845904523536028747135266250

that is, 36 decimal digits.

The math and code are below and could just as easily get e to, say, 500
decimal digits!

How'd that happen?

Last weekend worked on some short but relatively careful notes to get a nephew
of 9 started on calculus, and part of that was Taylor series in just two pages
with large fonts!

The code and the core of the Taylor series derivation are below.

In TeX, Taylor series is

f(x) = \sum_{i=0}^n {(x - x_0)^i \over i!} f^{[i]}(x_0) + R_n(x_0)

with R_n(x_0) as the error term.

To _derive_ the Taylor series, really just find the error term

R_n(x_0)

and for that just differentiate f(x) with respect to x_0 where then nearly all
the terms cancel, simplify, integrate from x_0 to x, and apply the mean value
theorem. That's all there is to it!

The results are, for some s between x_0 and x:

R_n(x_0) = (x - x_0) {(x-s)^n \over n!} f^{[n+1]}(s)

As above, the final output of the code:

e = 2.71828182845904523536028747135266250

From R_n(x_0) the error is less than

3 x 10^(-40)

The numerical output of the code is curious: Get a little over 1 decimal digit
of accuracy for each term of the series! So the output shows two big
triangles, one for the values of n! and one for the number of correct digits
in the estimate of e.

A key to why this code is so simple and works so well, Kexx can do arithmetic
with 1000 decimal digits of precision!

"Look, Ma, here's the code -- dirt simple":

    
    
              macro_name = 'NATLOG'
    
              out_file = macro_name || '.out'
    
              'nomsg erase' out_file
    
              Call msgg macro_name':  Find natual logarithm base e'
    
              numeric digits 1000
    
              n = 35
    
              sum = 1
    
              factorial = 1
    
              Do i = 1 To n
                factorial = i * factorial
                sum = sum + 1/factorial
                Call msgg Format(i, 5) Format(factorial, 50) Format(sum, 2, 35)
              End
    
              error = 3 / factorial
    
              Call msgg macro_name':  The error is <='
    
              Call msgg Format( error, 59, 50 )
    
              Call Lineout out_file
    
              Return
         msgg:
              Procedure expose out_file
    
              Call Lineout out_file, arg(1)
    
              Return

~~~
Hitton
That's Calculus 1.

~~~
graycat
Yes, to quote, as I wrote,

> notes to get a nephew of 9

I'm writing the notes for my 9 year old niece. So, the notes are for a boy of
9. And it's calculus, for a boy of 9. Of course it's "calculus 1".

I thought I mentioned it was for a boy of 9.

So, I omitted (1) a real valued function of a real variable with a compact
domain has a Riemann integral if and only it is continuous on a set of measure
zero, (2) for such function, if it is differentiable, then it has no jump
discontinuities, (3) there is such a function that is differentiable but whose
Riemann integral does not exist.

But, still, it is amazing how easy it is to get 36 decimal digits of e, and
500 if want.

I've been through calculus, advanced calculus, advanced calculus for
applications, differential equations, local series solutions to the Navier-
Stokes equations, exterior algebra, real analysis, measure theory, and more,
have taught calculus in college, applied it in US national security and
business, and published in it, and still I'd never seen a clear treatment of
how easy it is to get so many digits of e from Taylor series.

The results I found are amazing, and my good and long experience indicates
that only a tiny fraction of calculus students appreciate that.

And as we know,

e = lim_{i \rightarrow \infty} (1 + 1/i)^i

and it turns out that that iteration is painfully slow, and from my experience
this fact is also amazing and poorly known.

It was amazing stuff and a productive weekend.

