[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
This is a follow up of this thread (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22174828 ) which got some
amazing responses but considering it's been almost two years, It's
time for new edition I'd love to hear about what interesting
problems (technically or otherwise) you're working on -- and if
you're willing to share more, I'm curious how you ended up working
on them. This time, with a twist. Please include web technologies
too if it's really niche and not a lot of people know about it
Author : rohith2506
Score : 242 points
Date : 2022-09-16 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
| sandreas wrote:
| I'm currently working on a file indexer for my pet project
| tonehub[1] (an audio API like navidrome or audiobookshelf). I
| thought this is gonna be an easy task, but after running into a
| lot of problems it turned out that this is indeed an interesting
| problem to solve. Just to name a few problems I ran into:
|
| - Performance: How to scan files as fast as possible?
|
| - Tag-Storage: How to store audio tags as generic as possible?
|
| - File-Watchers: How to prevent fully indexing the filesystem
| over and over again and only react to changes?
|
| - File-Sources: How to manage multiple file scanners as efficient
| as possible?
|
| - Cancellation: How to cancel running tasks, when File-Sources
| are removed?
|
| - Moved files: How to not lose all customized information
| (rating, playlists, playcount, etc.) when a file gets moved to
| another place?
|
| - and many more :-)
|
| [1] https://github.com/sandreas/tonehub
| samsquire wrote:
| You might find the idea of "cancellation trees" useful. Create
| a hierarchy of loop data structure of loop iterating variable
| and loop limit then cancelling any part of the tree cancels its
| children.
|
| If you have a worker thread that has a hot loop that checks a
| pthread structure as its limit. You can then send a virtual
| interrupt to it, or preempt it from running further by setting
| the loop to its limit.
|
| You can see my C, Java and Rust code of this in this
| repository: https://github.com/samsquire/preemptible-thread
|
| It can be used to create extremely responsive software without
| slowing down the system with cancellation checks.
|
| https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#120-cancellation-trees
| https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#99-register-loop
| [deleted]
| zh3 wrote:
| Volumetric displays. The perfect mix of personal challenges -
| insane data rates, complex realtime software, weird mechanical
| setups and warped graphics.
| cjwebb wrote:
| Like, this kind of thing? https://voxon.co/
|
| I had to Google it, but since I've recently been diving into
| volumetric video, the words made me curious.
|
| How's it going? Any particular area you're working on?
| hk__2 wrote:
| I've been learning Italian for a few years and one thing that's
| frustating is searching for words I don't know. Italy has a lot
| of local languages/dialects that influence regional variants of
| Italian; it's common to see dialectal words enter the mainstream
| Italian language. The largest dictionary, Treccani, is very good
| but often misses words that are either too recent / vulgar /
| dialectal.
|
| There are various other big dictionaries and websites specific to
| different dialects, but I don't want to have to search on each of
| them by hand.
|
| I'm currently working on a meta-dictionary, which is a fancy name
| for unique search engine for all the dictionaries I can find out
| there. It's not finished but so far it works great; I use it
| almost daily.
|
| I started with Phoenix (Elixir framework) and Svelte to learn
| them but I ditched Phoenix because it was a hell to work with how
| implicit things are there (no import; just assume that variable
| is defined "somewhere") and went back to a very basic Python
| Flask app that serves an API for Svelte.
|
| Nothing very fancy on the tech side but it's interesting to deep
| dive in the languages of Italy and learn a lot of things about
| both Italy and linguistics at the same time.
| veqq wrote:
| wiktionary
| SMAAART wrote:
| I was burned out at my old job, got a new job that ays better and
| with better work/life balance, so now that I have some spare
| time, I decided to start something. Then I met Stoicism (Marc
| Aurelius & Co.) which made me re-think my drivers for starting a
| business.
|
| So I took a few steps back, getting deeper and deeper into
| Stoicism, and brainstorming new Stoic-based business models in
| the e-commerce space, or Art, or both!
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Can someone work on improving the brains NGF?
| hazrmard wrote:
| I am working on fusing classical control with reinforcement-
| learning based control in drones.
|
| The good thing about RL is that it is adaptive and proactive - it
| tunes control from data as it streams and it learns to act with
| delayed feedback in mind.
|
| The bad thing is that it can be sample inefficient. It needs lots
| and lots of data. That is not good in a time-critical case such
| as when faults occur. I've come to enjoy pushing back on
| completely black-box control of systems, foregoing the advances
| of decades of theory. That helps me scale back complexity of the
| system if only a little domain knowledge is sprinkled on the
| solution.
|
| So, first, I started using transfer learning to re-use existing
| policies from similar situations. However "similar" is a very
| open problem in the domain. I then thought that we can exploit
| insights we get from classical control of linear systems into
| these more complex domains. If, for example, we can make some
| simplifying assumptions (locally linear, there's some global
| optimum etc.). So far I am getting promising results. But there
| is always some data wrangling involved. I am hoping to use that
| in my dissertation later this year. (If anyone's hiring, feel
| free to reach out).
| mrdmnd wrote:
| I bet the folks at Skydio would want to talk to you.
| wan_ala wrote:
| Currently I am working on a minimalist and hackable shell with a
| pretty enviroment. The code is kind of a mess right now and i am
| working on a bunch of other stuff, but hopefully i finish it
| soon.
| namrog84 wrote:
| I do gamedev(unreal).
|
| So much educational content is locked behind videos or hard to
| search mediums like an example project you have to download and
| setup.
|
| There are attempts at community wiki but I'm trying to start an
| opiniated blog/wiki type site since I dont agree with lots of
| other things that I wish existed.
| rikroots wrote:
| Problem: how to make HTML5 <canvas> elements responsive,
| interactive and (importantly) more accessible for end users.
|
| Solution: an OS Javascript library to make it easier for devs to
| achieve the above
|
| Progress: ongoing - possibly neverending
|
| Why: in 2013 I was having real trouble breaking into the
| industry; a recruiter told me I might have more success if I had
| a project to showcase my skills. I settled on building a canvas
| library because I enjoy creating pretty graphics stuff. After I
| (finally) landed a job I just ... carried on with it because:
| fun! The drive to make the canvas element
| responsive/accessible/etc came much later when I was looking for
| an edge over the competition and realised all the other JS canvas
| libraries didn't seem interested in solving those problems.
| [deleted]
| sbisker wrote:
| It's early days, but I'm looking into more precise and domain
| specific object recognition in photos. Apple or Google will
| generally tell me if a photo contains a chair; I would like to
| know what kind of chair (is it a Herman Miller Aeron or a Herman
| Miller Embody). There are a few domains I am interested to apply
| this to, but at this stage I'm still learning the limitations of
| the tech (and any leads / insights would be appreciated!)
| filoleg wrote:
| Before you embark further on this, see what the competition has
| first. If for anything, but inspiration for good ideas, as well
| as seeing what works well and what doesn't. You mentioned Apple
| and Google with their photo apps, but have you checked Google
| Lens?
|
| This one is very realtime and gets in quite a detail. I don't
| know whether it recognizes different models of Herman Miller
| chairs yet, but I can open the app, point my camera at a flower
| or a plant, and it will (attempt to) tell me which exact specie
| it is.
| sbisker wrote:
| Yep, surveying the landscape now! Lens is incredible and I
| know particularly for shopping them, Facebook and Amazon are
| working on merchandise recognition. Honestly that's part of
| what makes me interested in the space - the fact that it's
| possible, but right now limited to the biggest players.
| otsaloma wrote:
| Not a big project, but just last week finished a visualization of
| electricity spot prices in Finland. Seems like a potentially
| difficult winter coming in Europe, using spot priced electricity
| and optimizing use would make sense. I didn't find a good
| visualization, so I made my own.
|
| https://otsaloma.io/sahko/
|
| Open source, GitHub link at the bottom of the page. The API used
| serves a large part of Europe, so you might be able to fork the
| code and adapt it to another country with fairly minimal work.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I'm working on the expert elicitation of priors. We're making web
| UIs to better capture human judgement, especially for
| forecasting. I work at a data driven company, sometimes I think a
| bit _too_ data driven. I want to capture more intuition for our
| systems in a rigorous way.
|
| It's incredibly interesting and very niche. There are a handful
| of academic papers out there. I think it will be a big deal in
| the next 10 years.
| konradh wrote:
| What angle are you tackling this from? People submitting
| maximally informative priors and you do some model selection on
| the effectiveness of the prior?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Right now I'm working on the elicitation process. To see an
| example, it's similar to SHELF[1]. They've been very helpful
| by the way.
|
| We already have so many places internally to put in
| forecasts. Cash flow projections for example. But, all you
| get is a text box. I'm working on making that easier and more
| representative before anything else. Making a web app (when
| all you have is a hammer...) to start. From there, there will
| be lots more to do but beyond what I'd like to share publicly
| for now.
|
| [1] https://shelf.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/
| solardev wrote:
| What is an expert elicitation of priors? Sounds like something
| the FBI would do when interrogating an old timey train robber
| or something.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| "Priors" in the "Bayesian priors" sense. Beliefs represented
| as probabilities.
|
| "Expert" is that you're asking people who should know what
| they're talking about, not random laypeople.
|
| "Elicitation" is that there's a whole process to it. You
| don't _just_ ask "What are the odds this movie will do $100
| million in domestic box office in its first month?". You ask
| lots of smaller questions and use visuals to build up an
| answer.
|
| I also like how "expert elicitation" sounds like we should be
| doing a good job eliciting!
| idreyn wrote:
| You might be interested in the S-process:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWivz6KidkI
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| This sounds incredibly interesting to me!
|
| For years I've had this idea rattling around in my head to
| build a web UI that shows a graph of some historical quantity,
| e.g., company revenue, disease cases, global mean temperature
| anomaly, stock prices, etc. The historical data is shown as a
| curve which terminates at the present, and there's some empty
| space for the future. The user then uses a freehand drawing
| tool to extend the historical curve into the future, based on
| what they feel will happen. Save this data, and let users view
| some average(s) of all crowdsourced curves, grouped by
| submission date. Stretch goal: let users track their own
| forecast accuracy, and let users view forecasts weighted or
| filtered by the historical forecast accuracy of contributing
| users.
|
| Is this close to what you're working on? I have no idea how
| useful or interesting this would be, but I feel like I'd learn
| a ton just trying to build it. Alas, I just haven't made the
| time, and lack the skills to hack something together in a
| reasonable time.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I'd like to do things in the whole space. What you described
| that's very close to what I'm working on is that drawing
| tool. Imagine you _already_ had a system where you asked
| people how a number would change over time, but you just gave
| them 12 boxes with a month name next to each. I'm trying to
| make a reusable system for improving that experience. Your
| chart drawing would be an example.
| bowlingx wrote:
| I started working on a WYSIWYG CMS Editor for Web-Applications
| and Websites.
|
| Based on my experiences, I think there is something missing in
| the market for content creators / editors for WebApps (with
| landing pages etc.) and websites. There are many headless CMSs
| available but many are lacking a simple editing experience.
|
| I want to make it easy for the developer to integrate it into a
| project (using React for example) - but also make it really easy
| for the content creator to be more independent of developers -
| while keeping UI constraints etc.
|
| I choose to build a native iOS and MacOS App with SwiftUI that
| basically provides all editing UI as native components instead of
| using HTML/CSS - Basically an overlay on top of the website that
| let's you control the components and website grid/layout. It's
| mainly a proof of concept and for me a way to learn SwiftUI :)
|
| There are many Website builders that provide great editing UIs
| (e.g. Webflow, Builder.io etc.), but I feel a native app,
| especially on iPad OS could provide benefits and it's a nice
| challenge :)
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| Hey! Huge shot in the dark, but I am working on an ML/NLP
| driven CMS for content creators. Have made great progress, just
| started on the CMS piece. Maybe we could collaborate?
|
| Email is in profile.
| gigatexal wrote:
| People are talking about existential crises arising from some DNA
| gene stuff and I'm just here trying to understand this yaml
| powered dynamic DAG building airflow based ETL and ingestion
| framework my company built in house and that my team uses.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| A new kind of Key/Value store. In this architecture, keys and
| values are stored within two separate 'data objects' which are
| linked together. One holds all the unique values along with their
| reference counts, the other contains all the keys and links to
| their mapped values.
|
| The architecture allows any value to be mapped to one or more
| keys and any key to be mapped to one or more values (unless an
| attribute on the data object prevents it). These KV stores can be
| used to attach tags to other objects. They can be used to form
| columns in relational tables (i.e. a columnar store). It can be
| used to create indexes into file contents.
|
| Each object is designed for parallel access by multiple threads.
| Only a single block needs to be locked to update any value or key
| so multiple writes can occur at the same time. The data in each
| object is organized to find values or keys without inspecting
| every block. It is very fast and allows both OLTP and OLAP
| operations on the same data set.
|
| So far, I have used them to attach tags to millions of files and
| do searches. I have created relational tables that I can query
| much faster than the same table in Postgres
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVICKCkWMZE). I have created 3D
| relational tables that can be queried the same way 2D tables have
| traditionally been queried
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXqvWMmoL1M).
|
| The software is currently in an open beta and anyone can download
| and try it out on their own data set. https://www.Didgets.com
| rileyphone wrote:
| Sounds kinda like tuplespaces/Linda (which I think are very
| good, largely unpursued ideas).
| didgetmaster wrote:
| It might have some things in common. In my case, the objects
| are persistent and can be read to and written from disk with
| ease. The relationship between keys and values can be 1:1,
| 1:many, many:1, or many:many.
|
| If the KV store is a 'state' column in a DB table of US
| customer addresses for example, the number of unique values
| is limited to 50 (if you ignore D.C., Puerto Rico, etc.). The
| table might have 100M customers, each mapped to at least one
| state. Each state (except less populated ones like Wyoming)
| might have millions of rows mapped to it. Many customers
| might have addresses in more than one state.
|
| The system has to do things like: "Find every key mapped to a
| state that starts with the letter 'M'" or "Find every value
| that is mapped to this set of keys". These are the kinds of
| things a normal SQL query has to do.
| philip1209 wrote:
| I'm working to reinvent personal websites. My goal is to replace
| social media with personal sites + newsletters, which are more
| distributed, privacy-friendly, and calm.
|
| https://postcard.page
|
| The product seems simple, but there are so many opportunities for
| optimization. There's caching, CDNs, custom domain support,
| dynamically-generated open graph images, image optimizations,
| email sending, email reputations, analytics, and more.
| once_inc wrote:
| Please move away from email to something more decentralized and
| powerful. Email is the source of so many lost productivity
| hours and is now wholly controlled by large entities like
| Microsoft and Google.
| sgt wrote:
| This is just creating FUD about e-mail.
| philip1209 wrote:
| RSS feature coming soon! JSON API to follow.
|
| Any suggestions of what to offer instead of email? For
| instance, it's definitely more decentralized than push
| notifications.
|
| Every post that gets sent through email also has a permalink
| on the site. So, you can write it once - then share it across
| any channels (including social media). For instance, I'm
| generating opengraph images automatically now to make
| Postcard more friendly with sites like Twitter and LinkedIn:
| https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1570770548988465152
| cxr wrote:
| I've always thought that plans where custom-domain-or-not is a
| differentiator between free and paid are unethical. In this
| case, antithetical, too. (If a sufficient number of people
| abandon Twitter as part of the your-own-personal-homepage
| bandwagon, but they make the unfortunate mistake of letting
| their dart land on Postcard and signing up for a free plan,
| then you really haven't achieved the stated goal. You've
| recreated the way she was tethered by name to
| twitter.com/alice, except the difference is that you're the
| beneficiary, not Twitter--because she is now held captive at
| alice.postcard.page.)
|
| Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21921176>
| philip1209 wrote:
| In this case, it's just cost-based pricing. I'm using
| Render.com to host, and they charge $1.25/mo per custom
| domain. I can't afford to give away domains for free.
|
| I'm open to some kind of free trial, too.
|
| I don't offer domain name purchasing - so people own their
| domain, independent of Postcard.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| 3D solar cells for lack of a better term
| Elof wrote:
| What would the application be?
| eranation wrote:
| Building behavior based software supply chain security (e.g.
| CI/CD security using eBPF, identifying abnormal developer / bot
| behavior)
| tmilard wrote:
| Working on Distance-immersion Example: click here (twice)
| https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01
|
| Ps : I knew today's Standard technology was 360degphotos. But I
| was convinced this was not an immersive enough technology.
|
| Immersion, for me, should feel more like a video game FPS.
|
| So I gave it a try: - A No-Coding Editor, just photos as input,
| plus 20 minutes of clicks and you have your immersion.
|
| Solo project
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Might as well drop my project in here as well.
|
| I spent the last year or so exploring and validating solutions to
| the "voice cliff" problem found in multimodal voice-controlled
| devices such as smart displays and TVs. That's when you are
| controlling some UI with your voice and suddenly you can't,
| because that particular screen hasn't been designed for voice.
| Think of Echo Show settings or literally all of Nest Hub's UI. As
| a result, I came up with a "big idea". So now I want to file some
| preliminary patent applications for some of the bits that might
| actually be new inventions. The chances of actually getting a
| patent are slim - most of the ideas I thought were brilliant were
| already thought up, patented, published in research papers or
| even productized, sometimes a decade ago or more! There are a lot
| of forward thinking researchers out there. And this doesn't even
| take into account patents which are pending. Apple could have a
| tranche of patents announced tomorrow which were submitted years
| ago. Or some startup could come out of stealth and you learn that
| a well funded group of people way smarter than you has been
| working on similar problems for years.
|
| Anyways, actual new ideas are rare, but I _seem_ to have a few.
|
| Distilling a big idea into smaller pieces that can be explained
| in detail is a good exercise, regardless of the eventual success
| of any patents. So I'm churning through 100+ pages of notes,
| twice as many patent and paper references, and a bit of code and
| trying to get it into a state to share with the world. I've never
| been an academic, but I used to work at Nokia Research Center, so
| I've worked with quite a few and now I know how hard their job
| was.
| memset wrote:
| Revenue recognition accounting. (Is that not interesting to you?
| It's super interesting to me!)
|
| There's this whole world of rules that accountants follow to
| properly record revenue. These rules are different for physical
| products, subscriptions, contracts, and even rules for what to do
| when you bundle these things together. And yet, the only two
| options for companies to crunch all this data is to use an Oracle
| product or Excel. (Or get the eng team to write SQL queries, to
| try and produce a correct result for a topic they don't have a
| background in!)
|
| To do this, we're really leaning into databases like Clickhouse
| and DuckDB - taking raw data and very quickly summarizing them
| into journal entries that you can post during the month. Also
| using kinesis to let users stream in financial data in realtime,
| so we can then process that data in batch. (Kinesis -> S3 ->
| Lambda -> DB). In doing this, have also been writing low-level C
| and Go code to quickly iterate over a stream of transactions and
| accumulate results.
| pwpw wrote:
| Hey I'm a CPA (former big 4 accountant) that's taught myself
| how to code. Interested in learning more if you want to share:
| contact+hn@winstoncooke.com
| memset wrote:
| I'll reach out! Also looking at your GH, you might be
| interested in this blog post I wrote
| https://blog.journalize.io/posts/an-elegant-db-schema-for-
| do...
| rustybolt wrote:
| Kind of simple/shallow compared to what some other people are
| posting here, but I'm working on a Python library to compute
| numerical expressions with arbitrary precision:
| https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/reals
| mynameisash wrote:
| I've been slowly learning SAT/SMT, but the materials I've found
| are very academic. Being almost 20 years out of my CS degree and
| this being a rather niche field, it's tough to learn, so I want
| to continue teaching myself and help others by creating useful
| "SAT/SMT for newbies".
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I track parallel currency exchange market rates and provide
| usage-based API.
|
| It's like oil; many sub-products can be made from this.
|
| For starters, many of them:
|
| - Currency exchange basic calculator.
|
| - Commissions calculator (many exchanges claim to be "no
| commissions," but you pay a lot in exchange rate flexibility as
| well)[0]
|
| - Some financial institutions need to track economic
| indicators... I have that data.
|
| - Integration with CRMs, to issue correct quotes using parallel
| exchange rates.
|
| - Integration with ERPs, for whatever you use ERPs. - etc. etc.
| etc.
|
| EDIT: Clarity.
|
| --
|
| [0]: https://www.ivanmontilla.com/blog/how-do-zero-commissions-
| cu...
| jasfi wrote:
| I've been steadily working on an automated trading system in Nim,
| currently for Binance only.
|
| This is a very difficult problem, to trade successfully based on
| rules. But it's also very interesting.
| dbingham wrote:
| Academic and Scientific publishing. It's the primary source
| material of human knowledge. It should be completely open and
| accessible to _everyone_ with no barriers to access the
| literature or to add to the literature.
|
| The structure it currently takes - academic journals - made
| perfect sense in the 1600s when that structure was developed, and
| it continued to work reasonably well for distributing academic
| results up into the early 1900s. But then it got privatized. Now
| there are tens of thousands of academic journals, 80% of them
| charge a fee for access, and most of the remainder charge a fee
| to publish. Often thousands of dollars.
|
| Given that science works in the aggregate and you can't know if
| you have the real answer to your question until you've accessed
| all of the literature on the topic, this structure is now making
| it impossible for people not in the institution to even figure
| out what we know on a topic. And hard even for people in the
| institution.
|
| The ultimate decider of policy in a democracy is the average
| citizen. The people who decide our government policy don't have
| access to the primary source material of science. In the US, a
| lot of really important policy is set at the municipal level
| (city, county), and in that case the people _actually writing and
| implementing_ the policy also don 't have access.
|
| If we can develop a web platform that does all the journals do
| (match papers to qualified reviewers, maintain literature
| integrity by filtering out bad work, and dole out reputation),
| then I think it's possible we could draw publishing out of the
| journals and into the open where it belongs.
|
| I've got an idea for a platform that does all that by
| crowdsourcing it (the journals are already crowdsourcing it -
| just manually using an editor). It's basically
| Github+StackExchange for academic publishing. It works by tying
| the reputation system to academic fields, so papers are tagged
| with fields and then reputation is gained and lost in those
| fields.
|
| I'm building it now, I'm month or two out from beginning a closed
| beta. (Aiming for end of October, beginning of November.)
|
| I wrote up a detailed description here: https://blog.peer-
| review.io/we-might-have-a-way-to-fix-scien...
| mirror_neuron wrote:
| If you haven't heard of it, you may be interested in
| openreview.net
|
| They operate mostly in the computer science academic community,
| last time I checked.
| dbingham wrote:
| Yep! I came across them. There are a ton of different
| projects and platforms out there trying to tackle this
| problem. But so far every alternative I've come across can
| only handle some of the various services the journals are
| providing (or are trying to side step and redesign the whole
| process from the ground up, which is an even bigger hill to
| climb).
|
| For example, there are several attempts to overlay review on
| pre-prints and open repositories (like Zenodo), but they
| aren't identifying qualified reviewers and matching them to
| papers in any way. There are the repositories and pre-prints
| themselves, but they aren't providing review. There are
| attempts to build open journals, but they're still taking the
| journal form, which means they still have lots of manual
| overhead.
|
| Most of them have varying amounts of traction, but few seem
| to actually be on a course to replace the whole system.
|
| ...it remains to be seen whether peer-review.io will fare any
| better. I think it has a chance because it does provide an
| alternative system for each of the services the journals
| provide. Well -- except one, which is the moderator role the
| editor sometimes plays. That may prove fatal, but only time
| will tell.
| w10-1 wrote:
| As you suggest, journals are a critical area for society.
|
| Since we're on HN, we get to take off our technical hat and put
| on our product hat -- not the fit-to-customer product, but
| disrupt-the-industry product.
|
| What are the incentive structures that would destroy this or
| make it work?
|
| Consider the scenarios today...
|
| - What's wrong with the thousands of similar-sounding journals
| popping up on China publishing research that is either unvetted
| or copied from other journals, so researchers can satisfy their
| publish-or-perish needs?
|
| - How do you deal with reviewer networks?
|
| - How do you get the best of the best, people with no time and
| plenty of opportunities and money, to provide effective
| feedback on an avalanche of articles?
|
| - How do you get the support of, without being dominated by,
| the big research companies and universities?
|
| - Look at the history of reputation systems, from quora to
| stackexchange to games, on a matrix with the difficulty of
| determining correctness of questions:
|
| -- Who won the game?
|
| -- Does this code work?
|
| -- Which library should I use?
|
| -- Is this paper correct and valuable?
|
| - What about prediction markets, which try to use
| money/investment as a measure of seriousness: how would that
| help or hurt? (and isn't that what we're doing by insisting
| academics publish for tenure?)
|
| In the spirit of MVP, you might consider a pivot to a much
| smaller problem: how to professional groups establish and
| document their standard of care? A team wiki? (gets stale,
| disconnected from operations) Run books? (too stepwise to
| convey meaning needed to transform the system) Slack-capture?
| email? documentation?
|
| What about capturing the benefit in a change of format, from
| opaque text/pdf to something like a per-domain semantic web,
| with connections to empirical methods and findings? That could
| provide incentives for everyone. Like the professional-group
| scenario, the killer feature would be something that grows
| incrementally with multiple authors (as code does for
| developers).
| bo1024 wrote:
| Quick suggestion from a researcher: people will only want to
| submit if there's an editorial team with high trust and
| reputation for their specific area.
|
| Automated reviewer matching won't be good enough to find decent
| reviewers.
|
| I would suggest partnering with people in very specific
| disciplines who want to break away and establish open access
| journals, but want to focus on the editor and review process
| rather than the logistics (which you provide).
| bo1024 wrote:
| I would call it something more specific than peer review.
| dbingham wrote:
| Name suggestions welcome!
|
| I suck at naming - Peer Review was a working title intended
| to be somewhat tongue in cheek (similar to StackOverflow).
| But... because I suck at naming, it is, of course, a little
| on the nose. So far I haven't come up with anything better.
| dbingham wrote:
| This is on the roadmap. The plan is to create a "Journal"
| entity on the site. Editors can create a Journal on the site
| and then create teams of reviewers which they tag with
| fields. Authors submitting papers can then submit those
| papers to community review, or one or more journals, or both.
| Reviews coming from journal's teams will be highlighted. At
| any point during the review process, once the journal's team
| is satisfied, they can mark the paper with their badge of
| approval. Papers can collect badges from multiple journals.
|
| If the authors disagree with the journals team, or just get
| tired of waiting, they can still publish at any time just
| like with community review. For authors who choose both, the
| journal's team and community reviewers can interact with each
| other just as in normal community review.
|
| I think it's a way to provide a stepping stone for people
| from the existing system towards full community review and
| would provide logistics to those organizing open journals
| with teams of high quality reviewers.
|
| The plan is to implement it during the closed beta period. I
| would welcome feedback on this concept as well :)
| solardev wrote:
| Important work! Thanks for trying to do something about it.
| imnotreallynew wrote:
| I've been interested in building a similar platform for quite
| some time. I actually bought the scholar.io domain for that
| purpose, but never got around to it.
| dbingham wrote:
| I'm working open source and would welcome contributions!
| (https://github.com/danielbingham/peerreview)
|
| (Although, the first contribution would probably need to be
| getting the local working again in a new context... I've been
| going fast and taking on some techdebt that will need to be
| paid down soon.)
| methodical wrote:
| Working on building a much simplified personal budgeting
| application. Been done to death, but usually not very well. What
| I'm making will put the simple and most straightforward aspects
| of budgeting front and center, and not try to boil the ocean with
| features. Mint is so convoluted now with all their credit and
| loan features that it no longer is useful for its actual purpose
| of budgeting.
| makk wrote:
| I hear you. Are there parts of existing budgeting applications
| that you feel are done well? What are they?
| 5xpB7n8tdbtoP wrote:
| A simple spreadsheet has been the perfect solution for me past
| few years.
| zachkatz wrote:
| Building a platform that accelerates the construction of
| protected bike lanes and car-free streets worldwide by connecting
| citizens, advocacy groups, cities, and urban planners:
| https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/15705341894974832...
|
| (Backstory: Started a Twitter account in July
| (twitter.com/@betterstreetsai) posting DALL-E-generated street
| transformations, it immediately took off, got lots of press, etc.
| and made me realize how huge the demand for this stuff is.)
|
| Feel free to send me a DM on Twitter if you're interested in
| helping!
| slekker wrote:
| NotJustBikes channel on youtube would love this stuff
| zachkatz wrote:
| He's definitely seen the account, we made one of his hometown
| ("Fake London," Ontario) and he retweeted it: https://twitter
| .com/betterstreetsai/status/15541736198734520...
| chaps wrote:
| Hm, have you talked with the bike lane uprising folk? I think
| you'll find that these problems are way, way more political
| than they seem. Good luck, though.
| zachkatz wrote:
| I've run large bike lane/car-free streets campaigns before
| [1] and have talked with a bunch of activists from groups all
| over the country, so I have a good deal of experience here.
|
| You're right that these problems are political--in fact,
| they're entirely political!--but the reason they're so
| political is because there's no existing platform for
| capturing latent + kinetic demand, so electeds (even the ones
| who want better streets--we've heard from many of them on
| Twitter) have absolutely no idea how much political support
| they have--and they need that support to take bold action.
| We're solving that problem!
|
| [1] https://bikeportland.org/2020/04/24/grassroots-push-
| emerges-..., https://bikeportland.org/2020/05/20/its-
| official-pbot-consid...,
| https://bikeportland.org/2021/02/02/support-builds-for-
| bike-...
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I've been working on a programming language for UI designers.
|
| To put it simply, I think the trend towards no-code/low-code is
| misguided. The assumption behind these products is that code is
| slow, difficult, and expensive. I disagree - I think that "code"
| is merely a formalized written expression of what you want. It's
| actually the most efficient, easiest, and cheapest means to
| solving digital problems.
|
| I believe anyone can write code if it's specific enough to a
| domain that they understand, so what I'm trying to do is create a
| hyper-domain-specific language around designing UI components.
| The goal is to have a platform agnostic base syntax, with
| "dialects" that can extend the language for any current or future
| platforms.
|
| The idea is that designers could write in this language, and
| developers could build tools that will transpile this code into a
| consumable format for whatever system they're building for.
|
| I have a very rudimentary demo site that's like halfway built:
| https://matry.design
|
| edit - here is a simple example of what a component might look
| like in this language: component Button
| variants color bg: #007BFF text label: Click
| Me elements shape ButtonContainer
| text ButtonLabel style ButtonContainer
| fill: $bg padding: 10px style ButtonLabel
| content: $label font-size: 16px
| roperzh wrote:
| Having worked a bit in a conceptually similar product, in my
| opinion the real problem is how you define the layout of your
| UI, not the individual components.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Yep. And I'm still on the fence about how to tackle that, but
| I've got some ideas.
|
| My favored approach is to use what I'm calling a "this goes
| here, that goes there" syntax.
|
| The idea is to give designers a conceptual framework that
| mimics how they understand layout, and allows them to
| describe positioning using a syntax that feels as close to
| natural language as possible.
|
| Much easier said than done, of course. And there are good
| arguments for allowing the platform dialects to handle those
| more complex features (in addition to things like scrolling
| and animation).
| solarmist wrote:
| I love the idea of this, but I just learned about xstate.js.
|
| It was a eureka moment for me. Why was UI design such a mess?
| It's because the UI vocabulary came from publishing and graphic
| design, but UIs are not static and describing them in that way
| will always fall short.
|
| I'm convinced that any UI language needs to incorporate a
| visual state diagram editor to really make a dent in the space.
|
| UIs are not fixed objects, but responsive object reacting to
| user intent.
|
| Does your language incorporate anything like this?
| danielvaughn wrote:
| One of the premises behind the language is parametric
| rendering. So nothing described with Matry is static.
|
| The difference, however, between Matry and something like
| xstate is that the actual state is intended to be left to
| developers, because I'm trying to create an interface that
| allows designers to just focus on what they need to focus on.
|
| So take something like dark mode. A designer might allow for
| a Boolean parameter that determines whether a component
| render in dark or light mode.
|
| But as to whether the browser supports it, or whether the
| user has that mode set in their system preferences - that's
| the developers responsibility.
|
| That doesn't fully answer your question but it's a complex
| topic so hopefully that gives you an idea as to where my
| thoughts are going.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| My first impression is that this looks a _lot_ like Kivy 's "Kv
| Design Language":
| https://kivy.org/doc/stable/gettingstarted/rules.html
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Ah interesting, wow it does look very similar. I'd heard of
| Kivy but never looked into it.
|
| The language syntax is in fact inspired by Python; mostly
| because I tried to remove as many extraneous characters as
| possible.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| I'm trying to make artificial human ovaries ("ovaroids") to allow
| producing eggs in vitro.
| jesse__ wrote:
| I've been writing a metaprogramming layer on top of the C
| programming language. It's effectively implementing a lot of C++
| templates and constexpr features in a smaller, faster package.
|
| It began as a toy/experiment that turned out to be useful, so I
| decided to pour the gas on and push it to it's natural
| conclusion.
|
| It's close to hitting a first alpha release at which point I
| expect it to stabilize somewhat.
|
| More info : https://scallyw4g.github.io/poof/
|
| The website's a WIP, but the tool does compile to WASM so you can
| give it a try in the browser, which is pretty neat-o.
|
| I'm also actively looking for feedback. If anyone has
| constructive comments/criticism feel free to reach out :)
| LelouBil wrote:
| I recently looked up shape matching with OpenCV for a game I'm
| making.
|
| Basically, you draw black and white images by spawning meatballs,
| then the drawing is rendered to a image and checked against a
| reference using openCV.
|
| I found gesture algorithm online's but they always take into
| account individual strokes, and the drawing system is not using
| strokes.
|
| I also have requirements to match the *whole* image but not
| *exactly*.
|
| So what I'm doing is :
|
| 1. Resizing and cropping the input image to size of the reference
| image.
|
| 2. Matching each shape in the source image to the closest shape
| in the reference image (if any shape is below a certain
| threshold, the drawing is failed).
|
| 3. Blur the whole image a bit, and count the percentage of
| overlapping pixels (if over a certain value, this makes sure the
| different elements of the drawing are approximately in the right
| position).
|
| This took me like 4 days to figure out, but it was really
| interesting having to prototype it using python and translate it
| to C# afterwards. (Though I sadly ended up buying a 80EUR Unity
| OpenCV library since nothing else was working for me)
| drekipus wrote:
| Not quite sure what you're looking for but opencv's contour
| functions might help you here
|
| https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/d8/d1c/tutorial_js_contours_more...
|
| There's also a method of calculating the similarities of two
| areas called Union over Intersection, which is easy and quick
| to calculate.
|
| Although it sounds like you got it figured out, so don't let me
| over complicate something that's already working.. :)
|
| Would be interested in seeing the game!
| satisfice wrote:
| I am working giving exploratory software testing a solid
| scientific foundation in cognitive science, sociology, and
| general systems theory. This has been my project for 25 years.
|
| It is my way of providing ammunition for those who uphold
| humanism against the technocrats who think they can automate
| testing.
| jlbbellefeuille wrote:
| I'm working on equalizing commitment between employer and
| candidate within the hiring process to reduce time-to-fill, cost-
| per-hire and cost-of-vacancy metrics.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| This is really interesting. What do you mean by 'equalizing
| commitment'?
| mindcrime wrote:
| Embodied AI / multi-modal AI. Specifically I've been working on a
| hardware device - nicknamed "Bosworth" - that will be packed with
| sensors of various sorts:
|
| - a GPS receiver
|
| - a 9-DOF magnetometer/accelerometer/gyroscope board
|
| - temperature sensors
|
| - microphones
|
| - cameras
|
| - etc
|
| and a processor, which can sense the physical world, and -
| possibly - facilitate learning in a manner somewhat akin to the
| way an infantile human learns. All of this is rooted in my belief
| that while embodiment may not be strictly _necessary_ for AGI, it
| is probably very useful. And the reason I believe that is because
| I believe an awful lot of our early development is experiential
| and rooted in experiencing the physical world. That is, we
| develop our naive / intuitive understanding of physics ("there
| is up/down and if I drop something it falls") and our naive
| metaphysics and epistemology of the world ("there are objects and
| objects persist even when I can't see them briefly", etc) through
| what we see and hear and feel. So I want to try to simulate that
| aspect somewhat, _but_ without necessarily going "full robot".
| That is, my current hardware platform can sense, but it isn't
| ambulatory and it doesn't currently have any ability to
| manipulate or affect anything in the physical world, except by
| generating noise (speech) and possibly by blinking LED's.
|
| Anyway, the GPS stuff is all setup and now I'm working on code
| for the accelerometer board. I'm using one of those Adafruit
| BNO055 boards for that. Currently working on getting the sensor
| readings off of it using I2C.
|
| At present the model has individual code modules for the various
| sensor types, and new sensor events go to two places:
|
| - sent via MQTT to persistent storage on a server. This is to
| facilitate pos-hoc analysis, off-line training of ML models, and
| possibly replay scenarios.
|
| - turned into a percept and sent to a "percept queue" using
| ActiveMQ. This all happens on the processor (a Raspberry Pi)
| embedded in the hardware platform.
|
| Then code modules listen on the percept queue for incoming
| percepts and then react. The initial idea is to use a very SOAR
| like "cognitive loop" as the primary "thing" that listens and
| responds to the percepts. But that will probably change over
| time.
|
| Very likely it will eventually turn into something inspired by a
| combination of things:
|
| - the old blackboard architecture approach
|
| - Minsky's "society of mind" stuff
|
| - the BDI (Beliefs-Desires-Intentions) model
|
| - etc.
|
| Not to mention, of course, elements of very contemporary
| approaches to Machine Learning - Deep Neural Networks,
| Reinforcement Learning, etc.
|
| When I get to the vision and audio stuff it gets more interesting
| because there will need to be more initial processing of the
| audio and video streams, and more front-end intelligence to
| decide what counts as a "percept". I mean, you wouldn't send
| every video frame or every audio sample. So now you get into
| figuring out what kind of delta counts as a "change" that's worth
| of generating a percept and possibly attracting the attention of
| the system. And now you get into the multi-modal part, because
| think about how human interactions work. If you want someone's
| attention you may approach them and say "excuse me", OR you might
| approach, say "excuse me" AND tap them on the shoulder, etc. So
| attention might involve physical touch, sound, vision, etc. all
| combined. So lots of interesting stuff to explore around how to
| deal with all of that.
|
| An interesting aside to this is that I get to give Bosworth
| senses that humans don't have. For example, with the GPS board,
| Bosworth can "know" its location on the surface of the Earth to a
| fairly reasonable level of precision, at all times, even if
| blindfolded and transported elsewhere. Likewise it will know the
| precise time at all tims. And Bosworth will also "know" which
| direction magnetic north is at all times, and its velocity, etc.
| Now, will having those abilities be useful, or will this just
| confuse the issue? Who knows? But exploring that is part of what
| makes this fun.
| pkoperek wrote:
| Evolving neural networks with use of the fitness predictors (co-
| evolution). The project has stalled a bit due to lack of time
| (family etc) but overall I want to get back hacking around it.
| qsort wrote:
| I'm on a (currently very experimental) project where we're trying
| to answer natural-language queries using data from an arbitrary
| database (given hypotheses on the schema).
|
| The natural-language plaintext is fed into a language model that
| annotates it. That output is converted into an intermediate
| representation based on relational algebra, which we manipulate
| and finally compile to SQL.
|
| It's probably not scientifically groundbreaking, but there are a
| lot of interesting technical bits along the way, at least for me.
| feoren wrote:
| So you're making big assumptions that the database's table
| names map to important concepts in the user's vocabulary, and
| that a thorough understanding of the data model can be
| ascertained from the schema alone? To be brutally honest:
| that's a silly assumption and likely a dead-end.
|
| (One thing I want to emphasize here is how abysmally,
| unbelievably, depressingly god-awful the vast majority of
| database schemas are.)
|
| You wouldn't expect _any_ user-friendly feature to be
| automatically stamped on top of a database without the
| involvement of a programmer, and this is no different. You need
| some sort of descriptive layer between the database and the
| query engine (or beside it, helping out) that programmers are
| involved in building. AI is not going to magically solve this
| problem for you. Figure out what you need described to you and
| turn that into a meta language that application developers can
| write to help your engine out.
|
| Frankly I'm wary of any direct link between the user and the
| database. How do you deal with constraints like "users should
| only be able to see data associated with their organization in
| tables X, Y, and Z" if the programmer doesn't tell you? How
| could you possibly prevent exploits and security problems?
| Another reason to focus on querying an intermediate layer or
| relying on a programmer-provided description of what's
| available.
|
| (Or am I assuming way too much, and "hypotheses on the schema"
| is already this meta-language?)
| qsort wrote:
| I haven't explained this very well.
|
| By "hypotheses on the schema" I mean we are assuming the
| schema is already in a very normalized form. I fully agree
| most database schemas are awful, this is a deliberate choice
| to avoid getting us into that kind of trouble.
|
| The "intermediate layer" role is played by the IR I was
| talking about in my previous comment. The user would never be
| able to see anything not provided by the IR because it's not
| even representable.
|
| Our scope is much narrower, really.
| solardev wrote:
| Kinda like Wolfram Alpha?
| qsort wrote:
| Sort of a Wolfram Alpha that hooks up to your own SQL DB,
| yeah.
| omeysalvi wrote:
| Are you working on the Yale Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL
| Challenge? Are you already on the leaderboard? The topic has
| always fascinated me and got me learning natural language
| processing to understand how it works.
| qsort wrote:
| We are going for a narrower scope than that. We are working
| with stricter restrictions on the database schema, where you
| are only allowed to join on synthetic keys and there is an
| enforced distinction between measures and dimension
| attributes.
|
| On the other hand we are aiming for reasonable response times
| on large scale datasets.
| jokoon wrote:
| Implement some existing c++ with gdnative.
|
| Generate a planar graph, preferably without a Delaunay
| triangulation.
| sandruso wrote:
| I'm currently building a tool for generating website just from a
| text content as an input. It tries to figure out what layouts
| would match the content.
|
| Why?
|
| Because creating these websites quickly is always content
| problem. We should start from content and create a design
| according to content not other way around.
| mkaic wrote:
| I'm currently working on tools for better latent space
| exploration in generative models. The latent space of Stable
| Diffusion for example, is incredibly rich, and the traditional
| txt2img and img2img pipelines for accessing it are only
| scratching the surface of what's possible. We're talking about
| billions of images compressed (lossily) into 4 GB -- yet we're
| still using very basic interfaces for interacting with this
| neurally compressed data structure. I'm working on creating other
| ways to explore latent spaces like this. My current project is
| just to dip my toes in the water, and it's an animated music
| video generator built with Stable Diffusion. I hope to show it
| off here on HN in the near future.
| Daegalus wrote:
| I am still slowly working on reverse engineering an MMO. I have
| client source, but no server source (it was lost to time), so I
| am building a new server.
|
| My current problem is I have concurrency working, but there is a
| aspect to movement that I have little information on, and the
| client isn't informative enough to help. So I am kinda stuck. I
| plan to do some manual testing of just fiddling with a value and
| see what happens. Its fun, but very demoralizing at the same time
| to see multiple people logged in, but their characters jumping
| around and not properly being moved around on other people's
| screens.
|
| I also don't want to make any changes to client code, because
| that's our only source of truth to work with.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| I'm interested to know which MMO?
| Daegalus wrote:
| Blackmoon Chronicles: Winds of War from like 2000/2001. It
| never left beta as Vircom closed down their game division and
| cancelled all projects. It was my first MMO and what got me
| into MMOs
| cpeterso wrote:
| That's an interesting problem!
|
| Since you have the client source code, have you been able
| to fully reverse engineer and document the client/server
| protocol? Do you have a black box server whose responses
| you can record and analyze?
|
| Have you been writing your server top-down (building an
| idealized set of game objects and then wiring them up to
| the protocol) or bottom-up (layering the minimum game code
| on top of the protocol needed to make the server respond
| appropriately)?
|
| How do you obtain the client source code? Will you legally
| be able to open source it or at least distribute binaries
| you build?
|
| Is https://blackmoonchronicles.com/ your project? Looks
| like it's a different project because they're writing a
| cleanroom implementation of a client.
| Daegalus wrote:
| That is our project. We also have a FB Page we put up.
| The clean room implementation is not us but someone else
| that we linked to, in order to funnel those that prefer
| that style of work. We can't work in the open yet.
|
| I have been able to fully reverse engineer the protocol,
| including what data is expected by the client and what
| data the client sends for various packet types.
|
| No blackbox server, game has been dead for years.
|
| Writing bottom up. Protocol is more important. We
| actually have some left over server files with npcs,
| quests, items, mobs, etc. So I can recreate the entire
| world by loading those in (already reversed the file
| formats and can parse them into memory as data
| structures)
|
| We have the client source because one of the former QA
| devs on the game bought the rights to the client many
| years ago, and he is working with me on the project. We
| will be able to open source the project eventually, if we
| can prove we have a custom server. Because BMC was built
| by the people that built T4C and shared server designs.
| But Dialsoft currently owns the rights to that. We need
| to show we have a server implementation to that is net
| new and unrelated to T4C, and then we can legally open
| source everything, and that is the goal as we mention on
| our site.
|
| We already have the capability of walking around maps,
| teleporting, and dealing with inventory and equipped
| items. We have all the packets reversed. Most of the work
| now is in concurrency and world state. Loading mobs,
| quests, items, and broadcasting information to those
| around you, etc. Right now a lot of stuff is hardcoded.
| Once I get this part working, the rest is mostly filling
| out the world and getting combat to work.
| samsquire wrote:
| I'm working on parallel multithreaded systems. I wrote a M:N
| kernel-thread to lightweight thread userspace scheduler which
| multiplexes multiple lightweight threads onto kernel threads. I
| also wrote part of my own libuv.
|
| I also wrote a multithreaded actor implementation in Java. I am
| currently working on solving the expression problem and thinking
| of how entity component systems (ECS) can be used for parallelism
| and solving the problem of deciding how to map data to operations
| efficiently.
|
| I am also thinking of how to patch running systems without
| downtime.
|
| See my repository multiversion-concurrency-control for my
| parallel work https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-
| concurrency-contro... and the userspace scheduler in preemptible-
| thread https://github.com/samsquire/preemptible-thread
|
| See my profile for links to my journal/blog where I write of my
| progress everyday, specifically ideas4.
| westonplatter0 wrote:
| Collection of python modules to run a one-person hedge fund. See
| https://github.com/westonplatter?tab=repositories&q=finx&typ...
| scubakid wrote:
| I'm building a privacy-friendly personal finance simulator that
| doesn't ask to link your accounts (projectionlab.com), and can
| run Monte Carlo simulations in your browser and keeps data
| client-side unless you choose otherwise. I'm hoping to spin up a
| self-hosted version soon as well.
|
| The overall design ethos/constraints have posed some interesting
| challenges along the way, but so far I've had good luck
| developing with the following: Vue.js, Vuetify, vuex, Chart.js,
| Threads.js for orchestrating web workers, vue-router, a bunch of
| smaller libraries, Paddle, Firebase, and some Google Cloud
| Functions (the latter only come into play for those that upgrade
| + choose to enable cloud sync).
|
| For now, it's still a side project :)
| elteto wrote:
| This sounded interesting and I want to follow up on it in a
| while to see what progress you've made. However, I know I will
| forget in the future to actually follow up so I wanted to sign
| up for email updates or even a newsletter if you had one, but I
| couldn't find one from your landing page.
| scubakid wrote:
| Sounds like I need to make the newsletter more discoverable.
| Currently it only pops up if you go to the blog or if you do
| the onboarding wizard or sandbox. I'll take a note to add it
| to the homepage as well.
| wwilim wrote:
| Having a baby in a few months
| fwsgonzo wrote:
| Sandboxing for high-performance rev proxies. Not WebAssembly or
| v8.
| cpeterso wrote:
| A project idea that I've been daydreaming about for a while (but
| haven't moved past research) is a cleanroom implementation of the
| online game Space Station 13. SS13 is built on the BYOND game
| engine, an ancient, closed-source client/server platform with a
| clunky, proprietary programming language. There have been a few
| attempts to rewrite SS13 in Unity or custom 3D game engines, but
| they've all suffered from second-system syndrome and development
| stalled. Plus they don't leverage SS13's most valuable asset: its
| existing game content, a huge library of game scripts and assets
| still being actively developed.
|
| My vision is a new client with an interpreter for BYOND's
| proprietary language that can execute SS13's existing content
| unchanged. Compile the client to WebAssembly so people can play
| and develop the game in a browser without installing any
| software. Unshackle the game from depending on hosted servers by
| making the client peer-to-peer using WebRTC. If the new client
| dethroned the BYOND client, then incompatible improvements could
| then be made to its fork of the BYOND language.
|
| The name for this project in my head is "Babylon 13". :)
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I am working on generating synthetic ECGs that can be conditioned
| on a patient but making it impossible to find the patient given
| the synthetic ECG and the data.
| acdw wrote:
| I'm writing an ed clone in scheme. I hope to have autoindentation
| since that's about the only thing I miss with ed.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| My colleagues and I are writing a system for insurance companies
| to prepare their reinsurance submission pack data, which they
| would otherwise spend enormous amounts of time and money doing in
| Excel manually.
|
| We have some pretty big clients using this in anger, and they're
| wild about it.
|
| It's not glamorous work, but it's important!
| protomyth wrote:
| Pretty pedestrian given the others, but I'm trying to build a
| file server setup that makes it easy to roll back from a
| ransomware (encryption) attack. I starting to think that going
| with hourly syncs from the home directory with some versioning
| should do it. The hard part is to make it easy for someone to
| rollback when I'm not here. People are a bit scared given that
| its happened to a couple of other small colleges. We already do
| tapes and we are talking files saved to the servers (most folks
| aren't allowed to save locally), so it should be within a budget.
| Like I said, pretty pedestrian. [edit: FreeBSD & ZFS]
| novask wrote:
| Try to implement a container vessel stowage planning algorithm of
| some kind: https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6290/5/4/67/htm
| solardev wrote:
| I'm not as smart as the other folks in this thread, but I've been
| lucky enough to work on a few fun, if small, web projects...
|
| One was an indoor web map built on an entirely open-source stack
| (QGIS and OpenLayers): https://map.fieldmuseum.org/ It was an
| interesting challenge because the open-source web mapping
| libraries (and many/most of the commercial ones too) were
| designed for outdoor use and didn't really account for indoor
| idiosyncrasies. Take rooms and doors, for example... while you
| can import vector SVGs geoJSONs to these mapping libraries, you
| can't easily indicate "this shape is solid except for these two
| doors" -- whether for visuals or for an eventual turn-by-turn
| routing/navigation layer. Another challenge was the concept of
| "floors", overlapped groups of geometry (walls, balconies,
| whatever) and points of interest that are mutually exclusive. We
| ended up having to trace floors against each other in QGIS (map
| editing software) and then adding state at the Javascript level
| to store each floor as a separate object to render or hide. Then
| there were a bunch of UX/UI tweaks we had to do, like how to draw
| arrows for Covid one-way flows, how zooming should work (we
| categorize POIs according to level of importance, then show/hide
| them at different zooms, and also dynamically scale fonts to
| ensure readability), which geometries to make clickable (a
| sidebar opens with pics and more details), how to hide easter
| eggs.
|
| The whole thing was written as a vanilla JS single-page app tied
| to a headless CMS (Contentful at first, eventually DatoCMS) so
| that editors could easily change copy, graphics, etc. But editing
| geometries (the shapes and positions of things) still required
| QGIS knowledge or at least the ability to manually edit geoJSON
| files.
|
| We launched this as a MVP with the intent of rapidly following up
| with additional features (blue-dot positioning, turn-by-turn
| routing, audio directions, a better codebase, etc.) At the end of
| the project we ended up open-sourcing it (after much begging and
| pleading with The Powers That Be), but then soon thereafter
| abandoned it altogether :( Just as well, really, because the code
| was really terrible -- I can say that with confidence because I
| wrote it, lol. But it's still an interesting problem space. As
| far as I know, there isn't a ready-built solution for this sort
| of stuff... especially not an open-source/source-available one.
| Some commercial solutions have limited indoor support, but as of
| our last evaluation (early 2021), none of them were especially
| powerful, elegant, or user-friendly. Hope that keeps evolving!
|
| -----------
|
| Fast-forward to my current job, and we're now working on a
| similarly graphical frontend app. I now work for a solar company,
| and we're designing a map-like tool to help installers plot out
| the PV modules (the technical term for a single "solar panel") on
| their customers' roofs, which then enables historical monitoring
| of various metrics like power output, temperature, etc.
|
| Aside from the graphical challenges (rendering React states to
| Canvas shapes), there were also some interesting frontend
| engineering challenges, like how to plot tens of thousands of
| points in a chart while allowing real-time scrubbing in a
| timeline, but where no two datapoints were ever at the same time,
| because the devices we were working with all communicated in a
| one-at-a-time queue.
|
| Anyway, I won't get too much into the details here... nothing
| that exciting, just a lot of nuance. What we're building is like
| a super-simplified version of https://www.opensolar.com/3ddesign
| (which is awesome! check it out).
|
| ---------
|
| But overall, I just love that I get to work on these sorts of fun
| apps instead of bog-standard blog pages or ecommerce sites. Even
| a few years ago, things like this would've been complex desktop
| apps with difficult lifecycles to manage... now they can be web
| apps that are updated multiple times a week and evergreen
| everywhere, to all our customers. Pretty cool stuff!
|
| I feel very lucky to be in my line of work -- web dev for
| nonprofits and small/medium businesses in interesting spaces, who
| have challenges unique to their industries, not just "how do we
| optimize this database" or the such (though there is that too).
| It was easy enough to pick up these technologies and frameworks
| in just a few months or years. I'm very grateful that is a career
| option for people now... I'm a high school dropout who eventually
| went to a natural resources school, but couldn't find a job in
| that industry so picked this up instead. It's all entirely self-
| teachable (with tutorials and Stack, of course).
| iamwil wrote:
| I'm working on a programming environment for making interactive
| programs. It's focused on addressing how to handle state and
| network through three main parts. 1/ an embedded functional
| database as the scope and environment for variables 2/ a managed
| syncing of database state across the network 3/ the interactivity
| extends to the compiler itself.
|
| I've been following the Tools for Thought crowd for a long while,
| and recently started looking into why we still have problems
| building interactive web apps, and where the issues and
| complexities arise. It's lead to examining the Clojure, Haskell,
| and Rust ecosystems, various papers, data structures, and
| databases. I've been writing my thoughts exploring the space at
| https://interjectedfuture.com
|
| If you're looking for niche technologies, we've got a nice
| assortment at our podcast The Technium:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_rEKDGBw4myn0uOnPxYsg
| pillefitz wrote:
| A small webapp to allow for collaborative estimation of
| quantities and their distribution. It's the vehicle I use to
| learn serverless development, but also intend to replace the
| Excel Sheet I use to provide PMs with times estimates with.
| nmaleki wrote:
| I'm working on the incompleteness theorems, human-centered
| artificial intelligence, infinite spatial systems, and more
| https://recursion.is https://notes.recursion.is
| https://recursion.is/youtube
| dan_mctree wrote:
| Trying to build a computer algebra system. Basically like a small
| version of Wolfram Alpha, but customized and accessible by my own
| code so I can use it for whatever I want in the way I like to.
| It's starting to get cool enough to be usable for a bunch of
| things, but I'm still trying to figure out what I really want to
| use it for
|
| It's challenging and interesting work, and I'd recommend building
| your own as a way to gain deeper understanding of math.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The most recent interesting problem I was working on was building
| a more compact and portable respiratory breath analyzer for
| measuring metabolic state. I actually achieved my goal, but my
| designs were flawed and I was not as experienced with electronics
| so I made mistakes that I can now avoid. I've put that project
| aside for now but plan on going back to it and redesign it from
| the ground up (which I have done somewhat). The prototype took me
| around 4 months to complete. I had quit my job so I worked on it
| full time.
|
| In case one isn't familiar with this kind of device, it would be
| able to measure how many calories you are "burning" in a more
| accurate way than pretty much any wearable device, as well as
| inform you on how much fat or glucose you are burning. My device
| is intended to be a battery-operated facepiece that is both
| microSD and Bluetooth capable, allowing for readings in real-time
| to be displayed on a graph.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| Decentralization and bidirectional real-time communications. I
| don't mean blockchain. I mean no servers with end-to-end
| encryption, no third parties of any kind.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| How do endpoints find each other?
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| That is a different but very real problem.
|
| Without consideration for mobile where IPs rapidly change
| currently it's based upon IP swapping and I recently added a
| convention to auto-update addresses when a node makes a
| connection to other trusted nodes.
|
| Later I envision an optional opt-in service that resolves
| node identity to IP address. Something like DNS but for
| hashes instead of domains.
|
| Currently I am focused on updating a bunch of test automation
| and then I want to turn my attention to adding a command
| shell to the application GUI, which would solve for SSH into
| remote personal devices in your node list.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| If you can tolerate transient centralization, webrtc might be
| a good choice and it's very likely if you are skilled at it
| and thought hard about the trust model you could figure out
| how to multihome webrtc, which would re-decentralize it.
| kleiba wrote:
| How to get over my mid-life crisis.
| feoren wrote:
| Me too. Let me know if you figure it out.
| avgDev wrote:
| The answer is clear, Corvette.
| epolanski wrote:
| Or a Mercedes coupe if you're in Europe.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Rookie. It has to be a motorcycle
| bo1024 wrote:
| I'm working on a proof of concept for replacing passwords with
| public/private key authentication. Inspired by how ssh and got
| repo access are both more secure AND easier to use than password
| login.
|
| The interesting parts are convenience features like sharing an
| account across multiple devices, allowing temporary access to a
| device, etc.
|
| The goal is to implement everything user side - it would act a
| bit like single sign on but with no need for any trusted third
| party. I'm starting with a browser plug-in.
| andrewallbright wrote:
| Writing automated tests for video games. Why is it interesting to
| me?
|
| I started to teach myself unity in December 2021. I've personally
| experienced benefits to writing automated tests and using CICD;
| therefore, I thought it would be fun to learn about writing tests
| for a 3D based software. It will be different from the web/CLI
| based stuff I usually write.
|
| So, it turns out that the video game community (or at least the
| online circles I frequent) are extremely against the idea of
| writing automated testing for various reasons. This translates
| into there effectively being a non-existent pedagogy around
| teaching how to write tests for 3D based software. Content is
| scarce, and the content you do find is produced by people who
| obviously don't write automated tests. So, for me I've hit the
| books to arbitrage & translate techniques and philosophies into
| this "untapped" domain.
|
| It's interesting because I've figured out tips & tricks that I'd
| consider low hanging fruit... For example, if you place a "test"
| camera in the test case, you can actually see what's going on in
| the test when it's executed. Or how important it is to clean up
| every created game object in your test after each test; if done
| right, you can keep your SUT at origin (0,0,0). Or the importance
| of "test prefabs" who are effectively mocks of other "real"
| prefabs...
|
| One innovation that I would like to use/build that I truly
| consider (((revolutionary))) is this: I want the test cases I
| write to also automatically (or when tagged with a certain C#
| attribute) generate the same game objects in a
| "exploratory(manual) test scene." I think this innovation is the
| "killer app" that will completely and totally sell the value
| proposition of automated tests to those opposed. If you decide to
| build this, please also publish it on openupm and reach out to
| me.
|
| I have plenty of other thoughts and ideas on this space. I love
| talking about automated testing; it feels like a very futuristic
| programmer practice. I hope this post demonstrates why this work
| and space is so interesting.
| cpeterso wrote:
| I worked at an MMO game company and the only testing we had was
| manual QA for functional testing and bot clients for server
| stress testing. Not a great environment for building quality
| software. (Our max server uptime was about 24 hours.)
|
| The client had a secret level with all game objects for testing
| and debugging. But reading your post makes me see that we
| didn't think ahead far enough: the secret level could have been
| the foundation for automated unit testing game objects and
| battling characters.
|
| I haven't watched them yet, but I added these relevant videos
| to my YouTube backlog just this week:
|
| * Automated Testing of Gameplay Features in 'Sea of Thieves'
| (GDC 2019): https://youtu.be/X673tOi8pU8
|
| * Taking CI and automated testing seriously (2018):
| https://youtu.be/YGIvWT-NBHk
| mihaitodor wrote:
| I'm contributing to a data streaming processor called Benthos:
| https://www.benthos.dev/ It's written in Go and I really love the
| project since it's so simple and, unlike most Apache projects,
| it's just one single static binary which does the heavy lifting
| and it's stateless.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Right now I'm thinking about how to silence my squat rack so it
| doesn't bother my neighbors when I'm using my punching bag.
| wizwit999 wrote:
| I'm building an open source security lake platform
| (https://github.com/matanolabs/matano). Basically, some of the
| core problems we solve are:
|
| - Traditional SIEM tools are not a good fit for large amounts of
| data -- they're either too expensive or come with a high ops
| burden. - Your data is locked into vendor specific formats.
|
| We solve this by ingesting and storing all your data in Apache
| Iceberg tables on S3, (allowing for low cost queries directly on
| S3 data + an open table format) and building everything using
| only serverless technologies(Lambda, SQS, S3, Athena, etc.).
|
| We also let you write realtime Python detections as code and are
| written in Rust, which makes for some interesting technical
| challenges.
| kureikain wrote:
| Im building an readonly API for bank transaction without
| reverseiing their internal ui but relying on alert transaction
| email and parse it to build transaction.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 1. Learning systems for patients with cognitive decline
|
| 2. AI writing tutors for middle schoolers
|
| 3. Paper-digital integration to support equitable education in
| India
|
| 4. Systematic review of resonance in human interactions
|
| 5. Computational models of beauty
|
| 6. Generating new Socratic dialogues by fine-tuning GPT3 with the
| complete works of Plato
|
| 7. Promoting ADD as a valid lifestyle choice
| [deleted]
| ArtixFox wrote:
| Interactive extensible low level programming languages no one is
| trying to do this, forth exists but its one of the only attempts
| that is successful and still its ugly as hell. Sure you can use
| lisp to do everything but its horribly clunky when it comes to
| low level programming.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I am working on getting this project to compile. It's interesting
| in the sense that nobody in the documented history of the
| internet has ever ran into these specific errors. So I guess I'm
| going where nobody's ever gone before.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| I'm having a blast working on https://printnanny.ai/ - the
| embedded computer vision system is cool, plus there are many
| meaty unsolved problems in the 3D printing universe. To name a
| few...
|
| - Rolled a Linux distribution (PrintNanny OS) designed for
| mixing/matching controller software across a manufacturing
| "fleet".
|
| - Created an atomic upgrade/rollback system.
|
| - Built a WebRTC stack for live camera streaming.
|
| - Lots of fun applying queue theory to distribute work across a
| fleet.
|
| I'm learning a lot about how the government contract/bid process
| works, which I've always been insulated from as an engineer (even
| when working at companies known for gov support, like Red Hat).
|
| My biggest customers tend to serve an ultra-specific niche, which
| is always fun to learn about. I love getting to talk to people
| who have spent thousands of hours cracking the laser tag gun
| market in Canada, or top RV parts supplier in Pacific Northwest,
| etc. There are entire worlds-within-worlds out there. =)
| flutas wrote:
| That's an awesome one.
|
| I recently had wondered why the only one I knew of was
| spaghetti detective.
|
| Just a heads up. Trying to preorder gives a stripe error
| (below) from the orders endpoint.
|
| Copy also says 50% off then shows a $199.99 original price and
| $149.99 discounted price (25% not 50%).
|
| > Request req_JF7zd2A0rO1rXY: One or more provided prices do
| not have a `tax_behavior` set which is required for automatic
| tax computation. Please visit
| https://stripe.com/docs/tax/products-prices-tax-categories-t...
| for more information.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| Oops, thank you so much for letting me know! I'm trying to
| roll out Stripe's tax product for VAT this week. If you send
| a quick hello to leigh@printnanny.ai, I can ping you when
| that's fixed. I'll honor the 50% discount too - thanks for
| catching that copy snafu.
| m00x wrote:
| Pretty interesting. Have you worked with existing manufacturers
| that do this like BambuLab?
| grepLeigh wrote:
| I haven't done any OEM deals, but I think that's an
| interesting angle! BambuLab added lidar defect detection to
| their lineup. Prusa recently launched "Prusa Connect" for
| remote file management.
|
| One insight that I have is that 3D printing ("additive
| manufacturing") is just _one_ process among dozens used by
| small manufacturing shops. The hardware vendors launching
| software clouds /products are missing the bigger picture,
| which is that manufacturers _need_ ERP and production
| schedule management way more than a "file cloud" per
| hardware vendors.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| Maybe not exactly what you were asking for, but getting to 20 or
| 30 users for my latest project. It's not meant to be a start up
| or anything, it was more just "I wish this thing existed and
| think it would be fun"
|
| So this time around I'm slowly asking people I know to try it
| out. Honestly it takes a little courage and has given me a
| newfound respect for people who do sales (though it's a little
| different, as the whole thing was my idea). There does seem to be
| a big difference between an explicit ask to sign up vs. hey check
| this out. Oftentimes people will say that's so great but not sign
| up (which I try not to take personally).
| O__________O wrote:
| Might be worth providing way for people to know what the
| project is and how to use it.
| provability wrote:
| I know, right?
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| An open p2p protocol/engine (builds on libp2p) for decentralized
| storage that incentivizes data durability. It's not Filecoin or
| any other existing platform, and there's not a public testnet
| yet, but the project is well underway!
| synu wrote:
| I am working on video, but specifically trying to make it easier
| for anyone to "direct" their own content creatively without
| having to know all the technical skills for editing. Near to mid
| term is to try to use AI tech to enable this, though there's
| actually a lot you can do even without that. My background is in
| developer tools (I was product director for CI/CD at GitLab) and
| so I am also trying to bring in the best from that experience
| around how to make hard stuff easy and difficult stuff at least
| possible.
|
| I suspect there will be a lot of companies in the near future
| that make AI models with permissive licenses easier to use, along
| different niches (like I am doing for video). It is a really
| promising area and picking a niche helps with papering over the
| challenges with general models.
| gumby wrote:
| I am working on climate repair, specifically the removal of
| methane from the atmosphere. Although the excess methane is only
| about 1.3 ppm, it's responsible for about a third of the
| temperature rise.
|
| We're not building a huge machine to try to suck the atmosphere
| through a straw; we're doing chemistry in the open atmosphere.
| Plan to have a pilot running within the next year and within five
| years be removing up to 100 Mt per year.
| michaelbarton wrote:
| That sounds interesting. How do plan to fund that? 100mt a year
| of sequestration sounds like there would be a fair amount of
| costs and labour involved.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Is the plan to remove it by converting methane to CO2?
| borski wrote:
| I've recently gotten deep into thinking about "precision
| medicine." Folks here may remember or know the story of Matt
| Might; I have a less sad but similarly perplexing story around
| both my wife (for whom diagnosis was hard) and my best friend
| (who remains undiagnosed), and started thinking about how to
| apply "whole systems" thinking and treat the body as a system
| that's prone to vulnerability, trying to find ways to discover
| where a "patch" may be necessary by ingesting lots of data that
| is otherwise overlooked or seems unrelated.
|
| As a security guy previously, particularly on the offensive side,
| this has been a fascinating endeavor thus far.
|
| I'm particularly interested in: the application of PRP injection
| to various ailments in the body (where else are there oceans of
| stem cells we can activate to help the body heal itself), and the
| application of ML to surfacing data about ailments for
| populations that are woefully understudied (trans patients
| undergoing GAHT, for example).
| Dopameaner wrote:
| Working on kafka clone in golang. Currently adding consumer
| groups.
| vfistri2 wrote:
| would be interested to contribute if its open source
| Dopameaner wrote:
| Still early stages but building on top of this. -
| https://github.com/travisjeffery/jocko
|
| Since, the author has moved onto other projects. decided it
| would be an interesting challenge
| aerovistae wrote:
| A new platform to play Magic: The Gathering digitally. Been
| working on it since the pandemic started. It's almost done.
|
| It's a multiplayer sandbox (no rules enforcement) that just
| allows you to play by providing all the different zones the game
| involves (play area, hand, lib, gy, ex) and letting you free-drag
| between them. It has features for every mechanic the game
| involves - tapping, turning face-down, switching card control to
| another player, etc - and it looks good and is smooth and easy to
| use.
|
| There's nothing like it. Existing options have various
| constraints/drawbacks or else are so old-fashioned and clumsy as
| to be nigh-unusable.
|
| I don't know how people will react when I announce. I don't know
| how Wizards of the Coast will react. I'm a bit nervous about it.
| I know it's the best of its class, because I play magic, and I
| have no idea what other people will make of it. It fits their
| fair-use policy (product must be free, but can be ad-supported or
| take patreon-revenue) but even so I'm nervous.
| mrdmnd wrote:
| this reminds me a bit of Cockatrice - hope your version ends up
| cooler though!
| aerovistae wrote:
| Yep, Cockatrice is one of those old-fashioned options I'm
| trying to improve on :)
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| What a cool idea! Not sure if you've done it already, but it'd
| be cool to embed video calls (maybe with WebRTC?) in your UI so
| you can have that more visceral sensation of playing against
| another person.
| aerovistae wrote:
| I have considered adding an audio channel to a match, yes,
| not video though. I figure people who use it to play with
| friends are already going to be using discord, and people
| playing against strangers are very unlikely to want to make
| video calls. I could be wrong?
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I don't know :)
|
| When I was 10 years old and first getting into MtG, I was
| often playing against kids in the school playground that I
| didn't know. It became a great way to make new friends.
|
| Also as far as I'm aware, Chatroulette and Omegle are still
| going strong, and those are all about video chat with
| random strangers. I suspect that a MtG server would net
| fewer instances of indecent exposure than the
| aforementioned two also.
|
| Probably not critical, but perhaps a worthwhile product
| experiment?
| michaelmarkell wrote:
| I'm building https://royal.io, which helps turn music royalties
| into an asset class people can invest in. When investors (fans,
| mostly) "buy" a portion of a song on our platform, they become
| entitled to a percent of the recurring royalty revenue stream.
| It's one of the few applications of crypto that I think genuinely
| makes sense right now, and I especially like it because crypto is
| not the star of the show, it's just the backend implementation
| detail
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Recreating already existing legacy apps / plumping other apps to
| talk to other apps. /s
| awavering wrote:
| I'm learning more about the challenges and rewards of taking
| extended breaks away from work - sabbaticals.
|
| This involves talking with people about their experiences and
| writing about what I've learned from them and observed from my
| own sabbatical.
|
| If anyone is curious, I have some posts up at
| https://www.albertwavering.com/tags/sabbatical/ and would love to
| chat with anyone who is thinking about or currently taking a
| break.
| flutas wrote:
| Working on (actually just got my v1 up last night) a price
| monitoring tool for a bunch of local stores. Trying to prove they
| are price fixing.
| JohnCurran wrote:
| Please please please publish the results of what you find!
| flutas wrote:
| I'm hopeful that I can turn it into a public facing dashboard
| that others can see. It covers the entire state I live in,
| monitoring 32 stores and about 8k products right now. Already
| seeing some weird stuff in the data, like a product that
| changes price every 30 minutes, $30->$50->$30 repeat.
|
| It's a niche type of store (dispensary) and essentially a
| state blessed monopoly since they limited it to 40 store
| licenses total. But I'm hopeful being able to show people the
| data will help with some of it... or maybe I get my door
| kicked in.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The price change you describe sounds like a poorly
| implemented price test. I don't think Shopify allows
| dispensaries to operate on their platform, but that is the
| type of hack you have (had? it's been a few years) to do to
| run a price test on Shopify.
| flutas wrote:
| That's what I assumed as well, but it's still... off
| somehow.
|
| The same product is carried at the other stores, each has
| it at a price of $20 exact...then this one bounces
| between $30 and $50 all day.
|
| I mean, maybe they are getting suckers to buy it at the
| inflated prices for both, but I'd be shocked if so. They
| also carry other products from the same line, and they
| are all priced normally at $20.
| jwarden wrote:
| I'm working on applying game theory to the design of social media
| algorithms in order to help curb the spread of misinformation.
|
| https://deliberati.io/give-truth-the-advantage/
| jfim wrote:
| That's a really cool project, best of luck!
| makk wrote:
| Agreed, I'm excited to see where this may go.
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| I am working on implementing a more easily presentable
| programming language for my implementation of a multi-modal,
| multi-mode dependent type theory.
|
| I have been using a barebones version with a minimal and slightly
| UX hostile (for most peoples standards) version as a personal
| programming language. There was a random comment in a thread
| asking if I had anything readable for others. So I started
| getting a github based 'blog' together and started porting the
| compiler to JavaScript (which I don't know very well) to have
| some interesting examples/demonstrations of the type theory and
| compilation process.
|
| I don't think the language will be released, but maybe some
| people will find the theoretical or implementation presentations
| helpful or interesting.
| bugmen0t wrote:
| The most prevalent type of security vulnerability in all of
| software is XSS. (If you count CVEs, which is admittedly a bit
| problematic).
|
| I'm collaborating on an attempt to shift the responsibility for
| XSS from the developers and towards the browser. The current
| stage focuses on getting the use case "insert HTML but without
| any scripts" right.
|
| There's a public specification and prototype implementations in
| Firefox and Chrome. You can play with it here https://sanitizer-
| api.dev/
|
| We think that we've made the best of many different tradeoffs,
| but we're also keen to hear wide feedback.
| uneekname wrote:
| This is fantastic work! One thing I've been trying to
| accomplish on my own site is embedding others' HTML fragments
| along with CSS and/or fonts. I reckon there would be
| sanitization concerns for those technologies as well? I
| understand that might be outside the scope of your project, but
| I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
| jstanley wrote:
| This sounds potentially useful, but I'm not sure about the
| practicality.
|
| It's usually pretty easy to not write XSS vulnerabilities, as
| long as you know they are a thing you need to think about.
|
| Given that people don't bother to avoid writing XSS bugs right
| now, why do you think they will bother to use your tool to
| avoid writing XSS bugs in the future?
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Am I right that this makes the tradeoff of removing the
| possibility for vulnerabilities in specific web applications,
| but creates the (admittedly slimmer) chance for Universal-ish
| XSS in browsers?
| ximm wrote:
| What is your opinion of Content Security Policies? Last time I
| looked it was praised as an XSS killer.
| codegeek wrote:
| They are hard to configure and get right. If you overdo it,
| it can cause lot of issues with real users.
| [deleted]
| jsemrau wrote:
| I always felt that I get investment information too late and
| waste to much time on reading articles that have no context ("why
| did x happen yesterday" - only to realize that that happened a
| while ago and is not relevant anymore)
|
| Also, most investment sites are deeply textual while investment
| information is more effective visually.
| cdiamand wrote:
| I'm actually working on a product that identifies catalysts via
| AI and presents them (currently through text, possibly through
| API and imagery later). Drop me a line if you'd like to chat
| more about this space.
| affgrff2 wrote:
| I am working on trainable morphogenic functions for reaction-
| diffusion proceses. I.e., using Pytorch, the parameters of a
| neural net representing the reaction part are optimized to so the
| diffusion process converges in a complex, predefined structure.
| This is only a pet project, but I am fascinated by this because I
| imagine that in the future this could be used to design synthetic
| biological structures. All that will be needed is a compiler that
| translate the function to DNA...
| zepolen wrote:
| I have been developing a teleportation device. I've managed to
| move 20 micrograms of matter over a distance of ~30mm and now it
| is simply about scaling up.
| Elof wrote:
| Do you have a blog post or some link to info about your
| experiments?
| vivegi wrote:
| Working on a prototype for a thermoelectric generator. While the
| core generation module is a seebeck effect based solid-state off-
| the-shelf components, my focus is on optimizing the thermal
| gradient for voltage and current control and continuous operation
| (night and day).
|
| A few experiments planned around
|
| - design of heat absorbers and heat sinks
|
| - night and day operation using radiative cooling/paints &
| coatings
| justicz wrote:
| Robots that build large-scale solar farms! My friend and I
| started working on this last year and ended up starting a
| company. We moved to the bay area and did YC last summer. We've
| been spending a lot of time on solar construction sites and did
| our first demo (part of the material handling system) on a site
| in March. Now we're working on a robotic factory + our team is up
| to 5 folks.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Awesome, think I saw your launch post and sounds like an
| awesome project. How has the experience been with permitting
| and regulatory issues (not technical)? Is there a valid
| strategy in building at the border of hard to build states and
| selling electricity back to them (e.g. building a massive
| facility in Nevada and selling the energy to CA when they
| inevitably suffer another crisis to the grid)?
| justicz wrote:
| Hey, thanks! We haven't had too much trouble with regulatory
| barriers. There are some other companies operating in the
| robotic construction space (e.g. Built Robotics) that have
| served as good examples for us on the regulatory front.
|
| As for your idea, you do hear about hacks like that in this
| industry all the time. We're operating a little bit
| downstream of those decisions, working with construction
| companies after the site has already been chosen.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Do you have a website already or somewhere else with more info?
| justicz wrote:
| We don't have a ton of info available publicly yet, our
| Launch HN thread [0] and jobs board [1] are the best places
| to learn more for now (or email me!).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780455
|
| [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-
| robotics/jobs
| ducktective wrote:
| How hard is it to found a robotic HW startup? What are the
| roles of your team? (Mech eng, Embedded eng, etc)
|
| Do you have a PhD? Would you advise getting one (in robotics)?
| sawaali wrote:
| Building a successor to https://metaset.io. My first stab at this
| problem (a native data visualization app) was OK, but left a lot
| to be desired in efficient user workflow.
|
| I am having another go at it, this time with Swift Charts and
| SwiftUI on the Mac.
| ultra_nick wrote:
| We're trying to automate tutoring. As a college student, I spent
| a lot of time trying to fill knowledge gaps with textbooks,
| Google, or other students. Now, we're trying to provide a
| streamlined and customized AI Tutor service to help everyone
| learn faster.
|
| It's a lot more technically challenging than we thought. For
| example, what's the best way to statistically guage a student's
| knowledge level? How do we recognize when an ngram counts as a
| new concept?
|
| We haven't launched publically yet, but we have a LinkedIn page
| of you'd like to see when we do.
| https://www.linkedin.com/company/conceptionary/
| tdekken wrote:
| Hi ultra_nick,
|
| >> trying to automate tutoring.
|
| >> what's the best way to statistically guage a student's
| knowledge level?
|
| As you have probably already discovered, there is quite a bit
| of research in this area :). If anyone else is interested, you
| can search Google Scholar for "deep knowledge tracing",
| "bayesian knowledge tracing", "performance factor analysis",
| "knowledge space theory", "intelligent tutoring systems", and
| "item response theory". Some intelligent tutoring systems
| include ALEKS, Squirrel Ai, and Riiid.
| chrisbrndl wrote:
| Our company uses Asana for tracking projects and their
| dependencies on a high level. However, for tracking programming
| projects in more detail we are using Linear. It is a pain to keep
| due dates, assignees, project status etc in sync if you need to
| do that manually. So I decided to develop a little bridge that
| syncs both platforms automatically. Once finished and fully
| tested I am going to open source it. Maybe someone out there has
| the same problem :)
| allyourbasepair wrote:
| A couple of years ago I realized that there weren't any good open
| source software packages for designing DNA so I wrote one.
|
| https://github.com/TimothyStiles/poly
|
| Goal is to have a suite of packages and databases that can be
| used to design entirely novel proteins, metabolic pathways, and
| DNA constructs at scale because right now that software ecosystem
| just doesn't exist.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| As always working on search.marginalia.nu.
|
| Search itself is a fractal of interesting problems. Haven't had
| much time to write about it lately, but I've pretty much doubled
| the size of the index and re-written a lot of the query logic to
| make it much better, faster, and more accurate. Will do a write-
| up eventually, since it may be relatively explainable without
| getting too into the weeds that the audience dwindles entirely.
|
| I keep having breakthroughs that make it in one way or another
| better, but as soon as I do I find something new that could be
| improved.
|
| Kinda bonkers it's been possible to build this alone and run the
| entire thing on what amounts to a souped up PC :P
| potamic wrote:
| How big is your index and how many sites do you cover?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 1 million websites, a bit above 60 million documents in the
| index; the crawl is a couple of hundred million but a lot of
| it gets filtered out for various reasons.
|
| The crawler itself is aware of 470 million URLs.
|
| I've actually had it up to 50 million before, but that was a
| lot noisier data with fewer keywords per document. The
| current 60 million is significantly "bigger" than the old 50
| million. Index size is not actually a great metric for how
| comprehensive a search engine is. A small index with good
| signal-to-noise ratio is much more useful than a large one
| where 95% is chaff.
|
| 100 million is my current goal. I think that's about what's
| doable on my current hardware. It also gets increasingly
| unwieldy to deal with the data. I've already got processes
| that require several days non-stop computation.
| potamic wrote:
| For sure, a large index by itself doesn't mean anything. I
| was more curious about the size on disk and how you manage
| it on a single machine.
|
| Also curious now, why you say half a 470m URLs? :)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Size of disk is like 3-400 Gb I think. Fairly manageable.
| I think it would require significantly more hardware with
| a multi-node approach. Locality is hella efficient.
|
| I accidentally a word while editing the sentence.
| pinarZ wrote:
| Hi everyone,
|
| We are building a cybersecurity marketplace for professionals
| looking for remote assignments. Currently it is in beta version
| and we are looking for test users to check functionality. We will
| provide gift credits for our testers when we are live so that
| they can be featured sellers on the main page. Just let me know
| if you are interested :)
| danap wrote:
| perpetual motion machine implemented with gravity and magnets
| vfistri2 wrote:
| thats interresting I had some thoughts about ferrofluids and
| magnets as a way to build perpetual motion.
| kaspermarstal wrote:
| A postgres foreign data wrapper for PACS so you can send and
| receive medical images with SQL. DICOM, the medical imaging
| standard, is from the 80's and you need a bit of domain knowledge
| to integrate e.g. AI with hospitals. This makes it a lot easier.
| And with Supabase on top you have a very cool backend for
| building medical imaging products in my humble opinion. We
| started out solving the problem of anonymizing medical images and
| now we want to make it easier for our customers to exchange data
| with hospitals, both for deployment and for extracting large
| amounts of data for research.
|
| We are also getting ISO 27001 and we are going to open source the
| entire bundle of policies and the "information security
| management system" itself on GitHub, so I am also working on
| that.
| gurjeet wrote:
| Is there a Git repo, mailing list, newsletter, or website that
| I can follow the progress on this, perhaps even contribute?!
| kaspermarstal wrote:
| Sure! There is tealengine.com and you can follow
| github.com/tealmedical to get notified when we put it up.
| What are you interested in? The foreign data wrapper or the
| iso?
| d0m wrote:
| Working on an offline/real-time library for agnostic backends.
| (Most libraries force you to go with a specific vendor like
| firebase/aws) or use a completely different backend/db (like
| couchdb/pouchdb).
| mistermann wrote:
| How does reality work?
|
| How could it be changed in a substantial, positive, intentional
| way, ideally in a surprisingly short time frame?
| makk wrote:
| Im genuinely interested in this. Which aspect of reality? And
| when you say "positive", from whose perspective or within which
| frame are you defining it?
| O__________O wrote:
| OP's HN comments likely have examples:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mistermann
| provability wrote:
| To reduce the adverse effects of fake evidence (eventually called
| deepfake), off and on since 2004, and especially since ten years
| ago, I've been thinking up, NOT DETECTION methods, but
| prospective, pro-active methods to instrument a data stream, to
| increase the odds that video, audio, or other time-series data
| (including e.g. scientific experimental data) eventually can be
| proven to have been created from real life (and not faked) at the
| time & place claimed.
|
| This is not just "proof of existence" by inserting hashes of
| content into a Merkle tree, like Haber & Stornetta implemented in
| 1990 and like we talked about on the Cypherpunks email list in
| the early 1990s, although of course that would be part of a
| complete system.
|
| Nor is it relying on just the metadata that e.g. TruePic uses. I
| have been developing additional methods to asymptotically
| approach provability that the content depicted actually happened
| in real life. Think undetectable watermarks by multiple observers
| (courts want to see multiple witnesses) but it goes beyond that.
|
| Relevant to this are efforts by CAI, C2PA, and companies like
| TruePic. I am hoping my methods are different enough, with little
| enough overlap, that we can realize them without licensing their
| IP. My goal is a more decentralized system that protects the
| privacy of witnesses.
|
| My contact info is in my profile. I'd love to discuss this with
| anyone. I'd even be relieved if someone would explain that my
| ideas are not useful, or already have been done, or even would
| have unintended negative consequences for society. (It's hard to
| stay current in the relevant literature on signal processing,
| steganography, cryptography, and zero-knowledge proof, plus
| politics and game theory.)
|
| I would even considering simply donating my trade secrets (such
| as they are) to some person or organization who impresses me as
| sincere and likely to move them forward, to avoid having to sit
| on them hands-off (again) during my tenure at (yet another)
| company that is about to offer me a full-time job today to work
| on something unrelated. While some of my ideas "toward
| authenticatability" may have been ahead of their time when I
| first wrote them up ten years ago, they probably aren't anymore,
| so the window is (at best) closing now.
| O__________O wrote:
| To me, being able to trace the province of content is much more
| dangerous than deep fakes, since such systems have the
| potential to become wide spread, unavoidable, and constrain
| free exchange of information.
| provability wrote:
| I agree! I've put some thought into how to keep the power
| decentralized -- and ideally to make it more so than the
| status quo. I think the techniques are compatible with that.
| I don't like the emphasis of Truepic et all on identifying
| which individual or which device recorded the evidence. I
| mean, yes, many in the West would like to know that a video
| clip is just as a specific, named, respected photojournalist
| filmed it, but imagine what would happen under a despot who
| doesn't respect press freedom.
| O__________O wrote:
| People generally speaking are too lazy to manage an
| independent system and governments have to much incentives
| to abuse systems like this if given the chance. If
| anything, if I was spending time on the topic it would be
| to drive public interest in systems that happen to also
| make sourcing province of media harder, not easier.
|
| Fakes are not the issue, they're an excuse for people to do
| something they would have done anyway, nothing more. No
| amount of reasoning or facts will ever will ever change a
| biased person's beliefs. Fake news is just a symptom of the
| real issue, it's not the problem.
| provability wrote:
| I feel like your statement reduces to "people are not
| affected by evidence."
|
| There is a category of people for whom that is true, but
| is there not also a category of people whose beliefs and
| actions _are_ affected by evidence?
|
| That may be the case now, or maybe it only was in the
| past? What will we do when ALL true evidence is
| indistinguishable from fake evidence?
|
| I mean, at least in the US, trial lawyers bill by the
| hour, which, as I see it, is already a conflict of
| interest on a meta level. This system is pretty
| inefficient. What if we could prevent most "he said, she
| said" situations by making recording of all one's
| experiences the norm, while also safeguarding the privacy
| of those recordings until such time as a dispute (such as
| a court case) arises? (This latter, especially in the
| context of doctor-patient relationships, was the original
| inspiration for this line of thought, circa 2004.)
| intrasight wrote:
| I too have been contemplating architectural solutions to this
| problem for about a year. I've probably posted about it on HN
| at some point. I'll email you - or try to ;)
| provability wrote:
| Great! Please do email me.
| needz wrote:
| Professionally, I'm working on the frontend of a radio frequency
| propagation simulator for 3D "digital twins" of cities/regions.
| This uses ImGui under the hood, but is wrapped by Python. It's a
| bit of a pain, but I came up with a class that allows the UI to
| be composed in a manner more akin to React Components.
|
| For fun, I just implemented a finite-state machine for a
| videogame I'm working on in Rust. It's used to swap out sprite
| animations depending on the state of its parent entity. I'm glad
| to be solving problems I'd never come across in my normal line of
| work.
| tdekken wrote:
| According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress,
| only 35% of U.S. fourth graders in 2019 could read proficiently
| [0]. The pandemic has only made this worse [1] [2]. Once students
| start to fall behind in reading, they fall further and further
| behind their peers each year. What is, perhaps, most criminal is
| that there is a mountain of research [3][4][5][6][7] about what
| works, and yet these approaches aren't employed nor even well-
| known.
|
| I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG/MAMAA/etc. [8]
| company turned independent educational researcher, and I believe
| I have developed a novel edtech approach to address this learning
| gap. I am collaborating with a few data scientists and educators,
| but am searching for UX designers, curriculum designers, writers,
| and marketers who can help make this a reality.
|
| In brief, one of the core challenges in edtech is how to build an
| engaging app that actually results in learning (many apps resort
| to psychological tricks [9] and gamification hacks [10] that are
| long-term detrimental.) Although I have a high-level direction
| for how to achieve this, my skill set is mostly in backend
| development and public speaking.
|
| If you are interested, please reach out to (my HN username) @
| (Microsoft's not cold email domain acquired in 1997).
|
| [0] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/
|
| [1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/
|
| [2]
| https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20Workin...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project)
|
| [4] https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/project-follow-through
|
| [5] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell-
| Gersten/publica...
|
| [6] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED472569.pdf
|
| [7] http://arthurreadingworkshop.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/05/...
|
| [8] MANGA, GAMMA, NAAAM, M2A3, Big Tech, Big 4, Big 5, or really
| whatever you would like to call them.
|
| [9] Skinner boxes, daily rewards, resource decay, loss aversion,
| etc.
|
| [10] Leaderboards, points, badges, etc.
| ximm wrote:
| I got deep into color contrast algorithms. Human vision is a
| rabbit hole indeed.
|
| You would think that this is a well established field. But then I
| found claims in online discussions (including at the W3C) that
| were obviously wrong on a mathematical level. The more I looked,
| the more the arguments fell apart. So instead of reading online
| discussions I concentrated on reading the actual formulas as well
| as research on the topic. I now belive that the reasons people
| cite for choosing one algorithm over another are often completely
| bogus.
|
| I tried to bring this up at the W3C, but the response was
| anything but friendly. Not sure what I did wrong. I still think
| that I have something valuable to contribute, but I am not sure
| how.
|
| If you are interested in more details:
| http://tobib.spline.de/xi/posts/2022-09-10-contrast-algorith...
| e-_pusher wrote:
| Great write up. Color overall is a rabbit hole of a topic. I
| have been looking into color matching, delta E etc. and it is
| been surprise to realize that the variances of human vision
| mean that the field of colorimetry is as much of an art as it
| is science.
| feoren wrote:
| Your blog post makes lots of sense if all you care about is one
| threshold: contrast must be above X for readability. Then the
| equivalence-under-monotonic-function makes total sense: you
| literally don't care what the function does above or below your
| threshold. This extends to if you pick N threshold points (text
| must be above Contrast1, contextual borders between Contrast2
| and Contrast3, etc.) by first looking at the function and then
| "eyeballing" those thresholds. But is that the best we can do?
| The difference between (Ymin / Ymax) and log(Ymin / Ymax)
| starts to matter a lot as soon as you start talking about
| "twice the contrast" or "20% more contrast", doesn't it?
| printerdev wrote:
| I have been thinking of reconstructing history from books and all
| kinds of material. So if someone wants to know what a newspaper
| on 3rd Jan 1403 looked like, they can.
| makk wrote:
| Oh that would be fun!
| burggraf wrote:
| That'd be some feat, considering the first printing press
| wasn't perfected until about 1450! LOL
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm coming up with ways to stay on task and avoid distractions.
| So, I have this:
|
| 1. Make a list of tasks you need to do.
|
| 2. Take on one task and complete it.
|
| 3. Take On Me was a cool song.
|
| 4. Oh, I should go watch the video
|
| ...
|
| I'm not doing very well at it.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I am playing with 100 Tb of data. Some of it is free form text
| (questions, comments, discussions), some of it is activity on
| that text. It is a lot of fun to see what questions people have
| and why some people think they know what they are talking about.
| zciwor wrote:
| My sister works as a veterinarian and is experiencing some
| serious burnout from her current practice (a subsidiary of a
| larger corporation).
|
| I guess it's pretty common practice for corporations or private
| equity to snatch up smaller independent practices and then run
| them like a sweat shop. Her current CEO's resume is a list of
| Starbucks, Walmart, and a few other corporate roles that are
| totally unrelated to the medical industry.
|
| We're tinkering with a platform that can somehow disrupt this
| cycle and add some transparency to the practice structure for the
| would-be employee.
|
| The current form is kind of a niche Glassdoor, or we've been
| thinking of it as the "online dating between veterinarians &
| practices." Still playing with the concept.
|
| Anyone have any thoughts on how to take out these massive PE
| firms that are plaguing the Vet Med industry?
|
| Here's some more info on the problem: https://www.ftc.gov/news-
| events/news/press-releases/2022/06/...
| amelius wrote:
| Vets have crazy high margins, and thus salaries, so from an
| outsider perspective perhaps the market is ready for some more
| competition.
| gmadsen wrote:
| those savings don't go to you, at least not the majority. It
| goes to the starbucks ceo that turns the industry into a
| sweat shop.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, but that is a wider problem. At least vets have better
| salaries than most other employees in the same business-
| construct.
|
| Perhaps they should start a union, like the rest of us?
| w10-1 wrote:
| What's wrong with opening your own practice?
|
| Investors can only invest in scalable, replicable businesses.
| Veterinary practices are intensely personal, often specialize
| in different species and breeds, and can develop unique
| experimental treatments. The cost of labor is ridiculously
| cheap (people become Vet Tech's for love, not money), and
| buildings need not be in commercial centers, so capital costs
| are minimal.
|
| Honestly, veterinarians are really in the best possible
| profession for maintaining independent practices. If they can't
| resist investor takeover, who can?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > The cost of labor is ridiculously cheap (people become Vet
| Tech's for love, not money)
|
| I guess the question is then whether labour is
| abundant/available. Even if there are people willing to work
| for little, are there anywhere near enough?
| barkerja wrote:
| > The cost of labor is ridiculously cheap (people become Vet
| Tech's for love, not money), and buildings need not be in
| commercial centers, so capital costs are minimal.
|
| This is absolutely not true and it's a big issue in the field
| currently (my wife is a Veterinarian). This kind of thinking
| is also what is causing a lot of mental health issues in the
| field.
| blamarvt wrote:
| I'll echo that. Also being married to a vet it's insane how
| little very qualified and experienced techs are being paid.
| gmadsen wrote:
| how is that in disagreement? Cost of labor is indeed
| cheap
| worik wrote:
| That is a problem that needs solving!
|
| That is what burns the labour out
| barkerja wrote:
| It's often referred to as compassion fatigue. Just
| because you have a love for something doesn't mean you
| should do it for free or cheap. The job also isn't all
| love and cuddles; there's a lot of having to turn away
| care or euthanizing because owners can't afford the
| needed care.
| educaysean wrote:
| You are saying two different things here. Are you agreeing
| with the poster's position that veterinary professionals
| aren't getting paid what they're worth (aka. cheap labor),
| or are you refuting it?
| neill wrote:
| I don't believe they are saying two different things,
| given the indication of mental health considerations- I
| would imagine that it is not true that people become vet
| tech's only for love and don't actually want to make more
| money. You can't pay bills with your pride. This is an
| issue with nurses, among other professions. Yes they love
| what they do, yes they also want to be paid worth their
| societal value. It's diminishing to think otherwise.
| ultra_nick wrote:
| My wife and I are suffering personally from this. I'll help for
| free.
|
| I'm convinced Vetmed will follow human medicine's history.
| Currently, the future of human medicine is small clinic
| subscription medicine without insurance. Apps like Roo could
| help with temporary staffing issues.
|
| Let's talk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholascgilpin
| zciwor wrote:
| Connected via LinkedIn. Excited to talk!
| abathur wrote:
| Flipping back between ~2:
|
| - A tool for resolving external executables and sourceables in
| Shell scripts to absolute paths (and erroring when they aren't
| found). This is mainly to make it possible to package Shell with
| Nix in a way that they don't depend on all of their dependencies
| being in the environment.
|
| The top level of this is ~easy enough, but identifying
| executables in the arguments to other commands is significantly
| harder. So, much of the focus is on triaging executables to flag
| those most likely to exec, coming up with human/automated
| processes for triaging the source of those executables to
| confirm, finding a good way to express complex nonstandard CLI
| syntax for parsing (in a way that's humane enough to be
| maintainable and ~contributable), etc.
|
| - A toolchain for single-sourcing documentation in order to
| generate idiomatic markup for multiple output languages with
| different whitespace semantics. Because it's really hard to get
| good idiomatic format conversions out of largely presentational
| source such as markdown, this includes a flexible language with
| DIY semantics.
|
| The entire toolchain does something a bit like what you'd try to
| accomplish with j2cli, some yaml, some jinja templates (and
| probably some python plugins, if you're trying to do anything
| complex) with more precise whitespace control. Still very
| rough/early, but glad I finally bit the bullet and started on it.
| zschuessler wrote:
| I heard few song lines from a new artist I've discovered. It has
| me thinking on a problem I want solved. Although, I'm not
| actively working on it.
|
| Why aren't there more employee-owned companies? And I don't mean
| solely shareholder programs, I mean actually owned by every
| employee and they are paid dividends of profit after all planned
| R&D costs. Similar to the Alaska oil pipeline bonus. Even
| interns.
|
| All studies show that the companies structured this way that do
| exist (they seem few) have much higher output, quality, and
| happiness among staff.
|
| After more research I found that this exists: https://esca.us/ -
| Wawa is a member, pretty cool.
|
| Talking more to others about the idea I've heard interesting
| stories. Some machine tooling shops have an actual employee-owned
| setup. All employees are incentivized to make every product
| output great and keep profits high, because they all share the
| profits.
|
| Anyway, I'm not actively working on this. But wanting to shape
| this idea more in the future. It feels like it could help the
| current state of America. But perhaps I'm too hopeful and naive
| :-)
|
| ---
|
| Hobo Johnson - My Therapist:
|
| "The idea's about equity, it's about wealth
|
| Most think that it's dumb, you should think for yourself
|
| If I buy a pizza place that makes a definite profit
|
| Yeah, let's say yearly, the owners make $100,000 off it
|
| And if I buy this pizza place for, let's say, $300k
|
| And when the workers recoup in three years, I'll sign it over
| that day
|
| And wouldn't everybody not see
|
| They should buy their pies from me?
|
| You'd rather have a boss
|
| When you can work democratically?"
|
| ---
|
| "Incentives are the strongest force in the world. They explain
| why good people do awful things, why smart people do stupid
| things, and why ordinary people do amazing things."
|
| - Quote I have pinned from @morganhousel
| solardev wrote:
| There are some employee owned cooperatives, including a few in
| tech I've seen, but I think they're a lot harder to raise
| capital for (and thus a lot harder to grow) than either public
| companies or member owned cooperatives.
|
| How do you fundraise outside of the small pool of employee-
| owners?
| elil17 wrote:
| The US Small Business Administration actually offers small
| business loans to groups of employees trying to get a
| controlling share of their companies. However, the program is
| pretty hard to use (like every other government program).
| https://www.sba.gov/brand/assets/sba/sba-
| lenders/ESOP_Borrow...
|
| There's actually a bill in congress right now that would,
| among other things, provide technical assistance and outreach
| for employees who might be able to use the program:
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-
| bill/4141...
| evancharles wrote:
| I am involved with a company called Teamshares that helps small
| businesses convert to employee ownership. A big part of what
| makes it work is exposing company financials to all employees
| in a way that helps connect one's actions with financial
| performance.
|
| We are hiring software engineers, in case anyone is curious.
| https://www.teamshares.com/careers
| makeworld wrote:
| Look into coops.
| aaronax wrote:
| Tessitura and NISC are two great examples of technology-
| centric co-ops.
|
| Technically a co-op is usually "member-owned" whereas they
| were talking about employee owned. A substantial difference
| in some ways but not in others.
| olinda wrote:
| How would this be different from a partnership like a law firm
| or consultancy? Or are you just suggesting that more firms are
| structured as partnerships?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am writing a book (The Software Mind) and am bouncing around
| the next stage of company formation. Democratic companies are
| such an obvious next stage.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Hobo Johnson is amazing. Not sure about his pizza place idea,
| but his stories about relationships are so raw.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nberWl0EU
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Most business ventures have risk of failure and loss of
| capital. How does that work in this model?
|
| If the capital comes from the employees, this loss would be
| very hard for them and probably would not appropriate for more
| workers.
|
| If the capital comes from a bank, is there collateral? If so,
| where did the capital for that collateral come from? If not,
| does the bank need to lend to you at an extremely high interest
| rate for it to be worth the investment?
|
| If the capital comes from investors who have an equity stake in
| this, how is it different than any other VC? Who keeps the
| profits when the business is up and running (the employees or
| the investors)? If the employees, why would the investors
| invest?
| cpeterso wrote:
| Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative
| model consultancy focused on open source software. They've
| contributed significant JavaScript and CSS features to Chrome,
| WebKit, and Gecko.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Ownership implies both risk and reward. Those who own anything
| (a private company or stock in a public company) are entitled
| to their share of the profits but also must take on the risk of
| the value going down. How do you convince all the employees of
| any company ('even the interns') to take on the risks
| accompanying ownership?
| 8note wrote:
| They already do - when the value goes down today, they are
| laid off, or the bosses do more wage theft than usual
| reidjs wrote:
| Maybe take a hybrid approach? The leadership members
| contribute some investment funding and in turn own portions
| of the company's profit relative to their investment. You
| also have hourly/contracted workers who do not have a stake
| in the company, but have well defined job specs.
|
| My fear in that situation would be 'lazy investors' who
| donate some money but do no work to grow or manage the
| company.
| diordiderot wrote:
| > 'lazy investors' who donate some money but do no work to
| grow or manage the company.
|
| so regular investors then xD
| uoaei wrote:
| I think people will do that calculus on their own and decide
| their level of risk tolerance. Typically it takes a lot of
| trust and communication, at the very least a solid decision-
| making structure, for people to feel comfortable signing on
| to such an enterprise.
| elil17 wrote:
| In ESOPs part of your pay is in the form of company shares.
| Your risk and reward increases as you build up company shares
| and pays out when you retire.
| smcn wrote:
| High level: finding the next big meme stocks (which morphed into
| finding any stock that could increase a lot)
|
| I was pretty late to GME, despite having been on Reddit for a
| good few years. I started researching what had happened, and
| where the conversations were taking place just trying to
| understand where to place myself to be a part of the next one. I
| ended up checking out the typical r/WallStreeBets and the other
| big trading subreddits but I always felt that I'd need to devote
| 100% of my time to Reddit in order to capitalise on any of the
| information. So I built a scraper to do the heavy lifting for me.
| That worked well. Then I started trying to find ways to identify
| the good stocks from the bad. That worked even better. So I
| turned it loose onto many different social media platforms where
| people discuss trading.
|
| It worked well enough that I ended up quitting my job to develop
| it and trade full time. There are still improvements that I'm
| working on but I think that'll always be the case.
|
| A great proof of concept of this is BBBY last month. Out of
| nowhere it went from ~$5 to $30. There was no real business
| reason for this, just rumour and speculation. It won't be the
| last.
|
| I don't know if links are allowed but if you want to follow
| along, it's https://feetr.io (unfortunately not accepting any
| more beta users currently, but all data is posted to Twitter
| until we launch). There's also a leaderboard at
| https://feetr.io/leaderboard if you're only interested in the big
| numbers.
|
| The tech stack is 100% lisp. I use CCL locally, SBCL on AWS.
| Also, hunchentoot will power the backend when it launches. I
| mention that because a lot of people have this fear that
| hunchentoot is slow or something but in my case it's pretty
| rapid. Of course, make sure you're writing fast code, but it's
| not the bottleneck that I think people think it is.
| aklemm wrote:
| Why does this feel like a good use of skills and time to you? I
| ask because to my mind it feels like a value scraper rather
| than a value maker, so I'm genuinely curious.
| smcn wrote:
| It was earning me a lot more money than a salaried position.
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| smcn wrote:
| I can understand the criticism that it's not adding value
| to the world. However, the same could be said of the stock
| market in general. If they shut that down, I'll happily
| close Feetr.
|
| In the meantime, someone will be making money from the
| stock market. Why shouldn't it be you? Or me? Or anyone
| reading this?
| uoaei wrote:
| The exact same thing could be said by the people running
| toxic mining operations with clearly safer alternatives,
| monopolistic healthcare firms who regularly deny basic
| access, lobbying operations to eliminate laws that keep
| kids from getting addicted to nicotine, and plenty else.
| These are all things your investments are surely
| contributing to.
|
| Ethics is hard because there's no enforcement like there
| is in the legal system. You have to think through the
| consequences of your actions yourself to understand the
| harms you engender throughout the system you inhabit, and
| then choose for yourself what level of harm you feel is
| acceptable to bring onto others for your own benefit.
| smcn wrote:
| Sure, I guess. However, the market will not die due to my
| lack of participation.
|
| It would be amazing if we lived in a world where morality
| would win out but we don't. My concern is "how do I help
| the most amount of people?", and that's why Feetr is
| public and cheap.
|
| You can live the life that makes you happiest but how are
| you helping people deal with the current economic
| downturn? There's a food bank near me and the line is
| much longer than I'd care to describe. It's not even cold
| yet. And it's going to get much worse.
|
| You can either pretend to help by avoiding the big bad,
| or you can work within the current framework to try to do
| as much good as you can.
| uoaei wrote:
| I give my time to folks in my neighborhood who are food-
| insecure, and help those who can't or won't drive to fix
| their bikes so they can still get around to their jobs,
| doctor's appointments, grocery runs, etc. Why do you ask
| that question when you have nothing to show in kind?
|
| Further, why do you imply that participating in the
| market contributes to "good"?
|
| Your reliance on a false dichotomy to make your point
| shows everything about how little you care about the
| actual problems we face as a society, if you can only
| come up with such unimaginative and ultimately selfish
| approaches.
|
| I don't understand why people snap back like you have,
| when you have literally nothing to stand for.
| smcn wrote:
| I'm saying that helping people make money is good.
| doix wrote:
| How are you finding communities to track? Are you crawling and
| flowing links to shitty subteddits? Creating honeypot accounts
| to try and get spammed invites to telegram/discord groups? Are
| you following the different *Chan's? IRC?
|
| I had a friend that did something for crypto. He would try to
| map pump and dump efforts to crypto projects. Gave them
| codenames and followed which ones had the most successful pump
| and dumps and then get in on them and sell early. It was a lot
| of work getting the spam early and being involved in all the
| places. I don't think he ever managed to fully automate it.
| smcn wrote:
| Good question!
|
| It's a manual process of discovery. As in, I actually go out
| and hunt down groups talking about stocks and if it looks
| interesting, I'll add it into the algorithm. I'll then
| analyse the data over a period of a week or two and determine
| whether it's worth continuing. If it is, I move it to
| production and it'll perform as the rest do.
|
| If a community is not publicly visible (discord, telegram,
| etc) I'll ask an admin if they're okay with what I'm trying
| to do. If it's a no, it's a no.
|
| There are those groups that do try and force a pump and dump
| but I'm against using them. That's ultimately not what I'm
| after as I prefer organic conversation with genuine reasons
| to buy. Maybe the reason doesn't turn out to be true (BBBY)
| but that's the case with a lot of stock analysis anyway.
| Sometimes the reason a stock makes it to me is due to a pump
| and dump but there are measures taken to make sure that we're
| not acting on artificial metrics.
|
| There is also a period of premarket validation which tries to
| measure the stocks that are deemed interesting each day, so
| people are (hopefully) not getting sent duds. It can happen,
| yesterday ADTX only managed 0.58% but moments like that help
| us fine tune the algo and those happen fewer and fewer.
| doix wrote:
| Wait, I thought the whole point was to find pump and dumps
| early.
|
| I'm not sure what you're trying to do now. The most
| interesting (for me anyway) would be to figure out what is
| going to be on Reddit before it appears by analyzing
| spam/pump and dump groups etc. If you're analyzing Reddit
| after the fact, isn't that kinda late?
| smcn wrote:
| No, not pump and dumps. Just stocks that a large amount
| of people are about to buy into. A pump and dump is a
| coordinated effort, whereas I'm looking for something
| more organic.
|
| It might be late in that you might make less money than
| you would if you were in those groups but I can't say
| that I'm unhappy with what the algorithm is currently
| finding. It's primarily built for day trading, so you're
| in and out of trades that same day. There are times
| you're out within 30 minutes. The goal is near daily
| compounding, which leads to higher gains than holding for
| X number of days.
|
| It has been recording data since 9th of August 2021 and
| is averaging 4.5648% across 340 stocks. Since Jan 1st
| this year, it's averaging 5.1779%, and I would like to
| think that I can get that number higher.
|
| Note that these are perfect values, using the open price
| and the highest price of the day, they're unachievable
| consistently, I use them to understand how much potential
| for profit we could've had.
| doix wrote:
| > No, not pump and dumps. Just stocks that a large amount
| of people are about to buy into. A pump and dump is a
| coordinated effort, whereas I'm looking for something
| more organic.
|
| I guess what you call "organic", I call the very end of
| the tail of a "pump". I believe that Reddit sentiment is
| largely manipulated. When GME was going crazy, there was
| definitely a coordinated effort to pump AMC, BB and some
| other garbage that I forget.
|
| I don't believe that suddenly a group of people will all
| randomly pick the same tickers to start hyping up. I'm
| not saying everyone involved is trying to pump/dump those
| stocks, I think it's a small group of people posting
| bullshit analysis in random places trying to get other
| people to buy + hype up the stock to create that
| "organic" interest that you are capturing.
|
| I reckon BBBY was definitely an organized pump and dump
| for example, but only a small amount of threads/comments
| were organized. A lot of people buy into the hype and
| continue to hype it up themselves.
|
| The most interesting part is identifying which stocks
| will end up "going" viral, by analyzing who/when/how the
| first mention of these tickers starts up. Maybe a certain
| writing style works really well, maybe if some ticker
| gets mentioned at the same time in 3 specific discord
| channels then that stock goes on to do well. Maybe if a
| certain reddit account posts it first it goes well, etc.
|
| Using PRAW to get counts of ticker mentions in some
| subreddits isn't super interesting, at least in my eyes.
| smcn wrote:
| > Using PRAW to get counts of ticker mentions in some
| subreddits isn't super interesting, at least in my eyes.
|
| Just to clarify, this isn't what is happening. And I
| agree that's not interesting. It's measuring the response
| to mentions and that's the score we save (we call them
| impressions). It's like that saying "if a tree falls in
| the forest, does it make a noise?", if a post goes
| unseen, will people still buy the stock?
|
| We also don't just release the top X number of stocks
| that we recorded per day, we're looking for patterns in
| the data and this becomes the interesting stocks of each
| day, which then go on to be validated.
|
| > that suddenly a group of people will all randomly pick
| the same tickers to start hyping up
|
| Of course not, like you said: it's memetic. Sure it can
| start off coordinated but when it goes viral its self-
| perpetuating. Those are the kinds of patterns I mention
| in the last paragraph. You can see these upticks, the
| strength of them, and try to gauge how sustainable they
| are.
|
| Here's me semi freaking out about BBBY just before it
| really ran:
|
| https://twitter.com/0xsmcn/status/1558770400095502336
| koeng wrote:
| A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis
| using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning
| analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA
| synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would
| reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly
| gene synthesis by 10x.
|
| For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from
| scratch for less than $1000 and enable anyone to be able to do
| so. While I'm handling the other bits elsewhere, DNA synthesis is
| a key technology primed for open source disruption.
| imnotreallynew wrote:
| Do you mean completely from scratch?
|
| If so, why would one want to do that versus taking an existing
| cell and injecting custom DNA?
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| How will you prevent people from using this technology to
| create DIY pathogens? If the answer is "I won't" or "it'll be
| open source, I won't be able to", consider doing something less
| harmful instead.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This specific attitude is something that I have capitalized
| on in many ways in my life to do well: ad tech, location
| data, trading. There is massive alpha in not being like this.
| And if this DNA synthesis thing had some value to me I would
| gladly do it and may the terrorists breed superbugs from it
| if they will. Even if you convince him, you won't convince
| me. I will become _even more convinced_ that I should build
| the building blocks for extinction weapons. Every time you
| make this argument, I will move closer to doing it.
|
| One day, I will do it just because I can and because you
| argued I shouldn't. Then your actions will be a proximate
| cause of the existence of the thing.
|
| Ideally, I would not be so controllable but a deep part of me
| loves the transgressive nature of fighting a puritan.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| All talk, no action
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hahaha! Fair fair :D
|
| Upvotes for the bants
| [deleted]
| thfuran wrote:
| How far down this road do you go? Someone engaged in
| bioweapons manufacturing probably uses laptops and chairs
| too.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| The difference is that those already exist. I think concern
| about the development of new technology is valid.
|
| Suppose nuclear weapons did not exist and someone was
| concerned about the Manhattan project -- would you say that
| chairs enable people to build regular bombs, so we
| shouldn't worry about nuclear bombs?
| f1shy wrote:
| The technology already exist. The OP stated, patents are
| over, and that is why (s)he is working on it. Even if it
| not exist, security by obscurity is no security... if
| anybody can do the tech, the bad guys are going to be as
| fast, or faster than the good guys... So I hope the good
| guys do the tech for everybody...
| EricMausler wrote:
| You are severely underplaying how chaotic people can be,
| and how valuable a barrier to entry is at deterring that
| chaos from causing damage.
| thfuran wrote:
| Nuclear bombs have very few uses other than blowing up
| cities or threatening to do so. DNA synthesis is both of
| considerable use outside of bioweapons production and not
| really a critical bottleneck in bioweapons, which is why
| I'd consider it more like laptops or chairs than like,
| say ICBM guidance systems or weapons grade enrichment
| programs.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Presumably the answer is "do exactly what is done now", which
| is to say offer the tech as a service (i.e. don't sell the
| hardware) and screen the uploaded sequence requests for
| dangerous sequences.
| mattwest wrote:
| Synthesizing oligos is not the same thing as creating an
| infectious clone. This technology would be used to synthesize
| primers and custom promoter+gene fragments.
| O__________O wrote:
| For anyone interested, found following blog post on OP's
| website, which is linked to from their HN profile:
|
| _____
|
| How to make DNA synthesis affordable
|
| https://keonigandall.com/posts/affordable_dna_2.html
| waiquoo wrote:
| Having worked at the largest synthetic DNA manufacturer (at
| least they were, I think they still are)... a lot of his
| information is just wrong. There is a huge incentive to
| lowering the cost of producing oligos and synthetic genes.
| This is actually a very interesting time in the space
| (shoutout AnsaBio).
|
| I encourage him to continue explore new ways of making DNA,
| but understanding the market is very different from building
| off an expired patent.
| eezurr wrote:
| I'd just like to echo (verbally "vote") my concern. Every great
| step forward comes with the potential for an order of magnitude
| steps backward, i.e. destruction. The amount of man hours to
| e.g. blow up a building is far fewer than the amount needed to
| build it.
|
| Will the output of your product add a suicide timer to a cell?
|
| Will the output of your product prevent the cells from
| procreating/multiplying?
|
| Will the output of your product prevent pathogen creation?
|
| Will the output of your product require a specific, unnatural
| energy source that can only be man made?
|
| Professionals take great care in thinking about those problems,
| and sometimes still fail. (IIRC, a synthesized breed of
| mosquitos that were released in Brazil failed to die off and
| are now a part of the biosystem).
|
| [0] https://www.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-
| breed-...
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| > Will the output of your product prevent the cells from
| procreating/multiplying?
|
| How would unicellular organisms procreate exactly?!
|
| I am not being pedantic here but procreation usually entails
| sexual reproduction and I don't see how this is possible for
| these organisms.
| zxexz wrote:
| I'm pretty sure procreation just refers to the process of
| reproduction, sexual and asexual inclusive.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| My understanding of the pertinent terms in this specific
| context is as follows:
|
| 1) Multiplying: Asexual reproduction only.
|
| 2) Reproduction: Sexual and asexual reproduction.
|
| 3) Procreation: Sexual reproduction only.
| peyton wrote:
| Cart is way before the horse. Also grad students doing this
| type of work are absolutely not taking great care in thinking
| about these problems.
| evanlivingston wrote:
| I fail to see how considering the impacts of a tool before
| building a tool is putting the cart before the horse. How
| is that not a necessary step in building a thing?
| peteradio wrote:
| hcks wrote:
| I don't understand why, if it really worked, the org holding
| the patent didn't do anything of it.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| kodak invented digital photography
| neodypsis wrote:
| Pretty cool. May I ask, what is your background? And, what
| resources are you using to learn about analog IC chip design?
| iron2disulfide wrote:
| (Digital) chip designer here: this is super cool. What tech
| node are you targeting? Have you checked out any of the free
| open-source tools and PDK from Skywater, Google, eFabless and
| co?
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an
| open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip.
|
| Any resources and books you'd recommend?
| elicash wrote:
| This is not at all an area I know anything about, but a
| podcast I was listening to (Moore's Lobby) recently mentioned
| on chip design broadly:
|
| https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com
|
| And also:
|
| https://www.udemy.com/user/anagha/
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Thank you!
| jfim wrote:
| Not knowing anything about this field, what could someone do
| with such a chip?
|
| Is it something like a 3D printer where you can get a rough but
| usable finished product, or is it more like a "if you want to
| make bacterium X produce Y product, you need to do X, Y, Z, W,
| etc." and the chip is used to do one of the steps.
| natch wrote:
| Sounds fascinating, what could possibly go wrong?
|
| "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they
| could, they didn't stop to think if they should." --Dr. Ian
| Malcolm (Jurassic Park).
| neodypsis wrote:
| What's your point? The technology already exists and is being
| used.
| natch wrote:
| Your name, password, and the names and addresses and phone
| numbers and emails of all your family members already exist
| and are being used. So, by your logic, you have no reason
| to share them to everyone?
|
| The logic doesn't hold up.
|
| You can make the same argument for anything. It makes sense
| to think about the dangers, not pretend that bad logic is
| an excuse to do anything you want.
| mattwest wrote:
| No, actually your first sentence's logic doesn't hold up
| as it isn't a fair comparison at all. You can already
| order custom oligos and synthesized genes for relatively
| cheap. The chip idea would just reduce the cost more.
| natch wrote:
| Digging into personal information on people can be done
| for relatively cheap. I'm not sure it's a good thing to
| make it cheaper.
| neodypsis wrote:
| But, in the concrete case in question (gene synthesising
| technology), what are those potencial dangers?
| [deleted]
| bawolff wrote:
| This is silly. Unix already existed, what's the point of
| linux?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| "Possibly" is the crux of that question, as it requires
| knowledge and expertise to answer in any kind of real way.
|
| It's very easy to come up with answers to that question if
| you don't know what is actually possible. Not very useful
| answers, though.
| worik wrote:
| > "Possibly" is the crux of that question, as it requires
| knowledge and expertise to answer in any kind of real way.
|
| That is untrue. If you mean by "...it requires knowledge
| and expertise to answer" domain knowledge.
|
| It is possible to understand the implications of technology
| without mastering it.
|
| The experts in the field have huge incentives to say it is
| safe.
|
| If we are to make decisions about releasing novel self
| replicating organisms into the environment, we should not
| task the people who will profit (scientists) to decide if
| it is a good idea or not.
| StickyThink wrote:
| That's an excellent question. Another of my faves is "what
| are the worst consequences and how do we reduce the risk of a
| negative outcome? Is it possible to entirely eliminate issues
| responsibly?"
|
| The former tends to stop all progress, while the latter
| considers that negative outcomes are real, but that we can
| productively reduce risk.
|
| Kind of like how OpenAI removed racist, sexist, and other
| troubling images from their AI training pool and then
| released it in pieces (to a small group of subjects) to
| remove as many issues as possible. With that said, they
| definitely still made mistakes.
| natch wrote:
| I like the motto "safety is our number three priority" but
| I also think that people sharing info about their danger-
| spraying project should take a moment to say a line or two
| about how they think about the issues. Instead of just
| ignoring them.
| fdsffaef334 wrote:
| LunarCamper wrote:
| Is there a page, blog, twitter account, newsletter, Github repo
| or anything to follow this? I have no knowledge in this space
| so I'm of no help, but I'm very interested in the prospect of
| this stuff becoming more accessible!
| dialdial wrote:
| Likewise, piggybacking!
| durkie wrote:
| this sounds so cool! i wish you the best luck with it.
| westcort wrote:
| I made a voice simulator of my own voice
| (https://locserendipity.com/sim/voice.html) by recording
| individual phonemes. My goal was to create the smallest possible
| phonemes that can be concatenated into a wav file. Ultimately, I
| want to be able to export a wav file or mp3 file as base64 text
| enabling the largest amount of voice data to be stored on a CD.
| Does anyone have further advice on how to achieve this?
| tiniuclx wrote:
| Deploying wireless networks within legacy building automation
| systems. Most of these systems communicate through twisted wire
| pairs routed through the walls - tearing the walls down and
| upgrading this technology is very expensive and inconvenient.
| However, wireless Thread-based IPv6 networks can be installed
| fairly easily and take advantage of the internet technology
| that's already there, and also interoperate with the existing kit
| through e.g. a gateway device.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Trying to teach myself linear algebra and deep learning so I can
| apply it to some interesting ideas I have about making current
| chess AI much stronger. I don't want to reveal too much since I
| don't want some Stockfish dev to steal my idea but I'm interested
| in tips and resources on linear algebra. I always hated
| matrices...
|
| Interspersed with that I have a huge amount of stuff to implement
| for my project still(search methods and the like), so I'm working
| on that as well. It's a lot of code to write and I'm just one guy
| so progress is slow.
|
| What I'm doing at work would bore you to death so I'll leave it
| out.
| v8xi wrote:
| I'm actually in a similar boat learning these things to apply
| to chess but rather than making a stronger AI, trying to learn
| and catalog strategies to make learning chess more intuitive.
| Would be interested in talking more if you are! Can message me
| on lichess.org/@/v8xi if you play there
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| That's a really interesting and sorely needed niche! I
| originally started out thinking about this, but the only
| ideas I could come up with were strength related, so I
| switched directions.
|
| Today's engines are hard if not impossible for amateur
| players to use correctly. I sent you a message on lichess!
| O__________O wrote:
| Assuming you have looked at MuZero, since it's able to not only
| beat Stockfish, but also not specifically for chess:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero
|
| https://github.com/werner-duvaud/muzero-general
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L0A86LmH7Yw
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I am aware of MuZero, but I'm not convinced it's able to beat
| the latest Stockfish. Stockfish continues to dominate TCEC
| even after the advent of more advanced MCTS searchers.
|
| But MCTS is on my map as something to look into more deeply.
| O__________O wrote:
| For others, in cases it's unclear:
|
| - MuZero uses MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search)
|
| - TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) is a computer chess
| tournament organized and maintained by Chessdom.
|
| ___
|
| My understanding is MuZero doesn't compete in TCEC, but
| might be wrong. Given Stockfish is open source and open
| source versions of MuZero exist, it would be easy enough to
| test the current version of Stockfish again; honestly
| surprised if it's not already done, that it is not, given
| MuZero already beat it.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| MuZero doesn't, but from what I know MuZero was only on
| par with AlphaZero, and while AlphaZero beat Stockfish
| initially, Stockfish has since caught up and continues to
| beat LeelaZero, an OSS implementation of AlphaZero in
| TCEC.
| O__________O wrote:
| My understanding is that MuZero beats AlphaZero, but not
| by a significant amount. Even if Stockfish is better, to
| me at this point feels needless, given it's highly
| unlikely a human over significant volume of matches would
| have any hope of beating any of them. It is possible that
| new approaches for masters might be found, but for
| average player, guessing it's highly unlikely that
| anything new might be uncovered. Am I missing something?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| You're not missing something. I just wanna see how far we
| can take this thing, you know? 4000 ELO seems within
| reach now. What about 5000, 6000 etc?
|
| Computer chess is essentially a sport unto itself at this
| point, beating humans is sort of uninteresting, though
| I'm sure grandmasters will always find uses for ever
| stronger engines. They're mainly used to study openings,
| and since analysing from the start of the game is
| extremely complex, stronger engines are always helpful.
| O__________O wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| As you likely know, ELO has no maximum upper limit and
| chess has 10^120 possible matches -- so in theory maximum
| ELO for chess has a long way to go, assuming there is
| even one engine that keeps improving over time to beat
| its prior version. Huge aspect of performance is tied to
| availability of compute; as such, my understanding is
| that if quantum computers ever became mainstream, even a
| "dumb" algorithm using true quantum computer would beat
| non-quantum algorithm over significant number of matches
| and the "ELO race" would then only be define by progress
| by the non-quantum algorithms against themselves.
| Basically, at this point, it's a race that's already
| theoretically over; might be wrong though.
| epolanski wrote:
| I think you're naive if you think decades of chess engines
| development are going to be disrupted by you picking up linear
| algebra.
|
| I also applaud and envy the craziness.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| It's not like I'm abandoning the decades of development. I'm
| starting with a fork of Stockfish 10(pre-NN, and using too
| recent a version could make it hard to submit it to TCEC due
| to rules about similarity to existing participants.) and I've
| been digging into the code and algorithms therein for months
| now. My approach is an extension of existing techniques.
|
| I actually started with a greenfield implementation, but
| found myself reading more and more Stockfish code anyway as
| it's an excellent reference for the state of the art. And I
| realised it was far too much work to reimplement all this
| stuff, so that's why I switched to a fork.
|
| And I wanna learn linalg and deep learning anyway.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting
| tax loopholes.
|
| I'm a contractor, I work through my company. It's way more tax
| efficient than being perm.
|
| But, it could be even more efficient.
|
| So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can
| have multiple business codes. Activities the company is
| registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software
| development company. But I also added artistic production as a
| business code.
|
| Why artistic productions? Well, because it's the most liberal
| business code for expenses.
|
| As a software company, I can expense travel for some things, the
| most useful for me being conferences. But that means I need to
| buy the conference ticket even if I'm not interested and can only
| expense accommodations for the duration of the conference. That's
| good but a bit restrictive.
|
| Now, as a artistic production company, I'm not limited by that.
| As long as I can prove I traveled in order to produce, well, just
| about anything that can be construed as being art, I can expense
| travel and I can expense accommodations for as long as I need.
| You can't rush art, you know how it is.
|
| So, obviously, first thing I did, I whipped up a blog, posted
| some random pictures every day and called it good. I'm not using
| company money to travel the world you see, I'm using company
| money in order to produce art. Haven't paid a euro of my own
| money on accommodation or travel for close to a year now. And the
| best part, I get to deduce this from my profit.
|
| I love the tax system. I really do.
|
| But, doing this, I got curious. I thought, hey, why not make it
| better. So I thought let's see what all the rage is with dalle
| and stable diffusion and all that. So, what I'm doing now is, I'm
| changing my approach. My art will no longer be just pictures
| taken quickly with my iphone. No no. I'm getting the picture and
| I'm sending it to an API I built. The API runs some computer
| vision, labelling what it sees, some classification, some stuff
| with the pic metadata, tries to put it all together and turns it
| into a description of the picture.
|
| The description of the picture I took is used as a prompt for
| stable diffusion. And that result ends up being the art. I'd like
| to thank of my art as a modern commentary on the age old "is art
| imitating life or is life imitating art?" - At least that's what
| I told my accountant and he concerned, it would stand up in the
| case of an audit!
|
| So, yeah, tldr, I'm working on image to text and text to image to
| expense my nomad lifestyle on the company.
| wheybags wrote:
| Don't you ever feel bad for not contributing to society? Living
| like that seems morally reprehensible to me.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| Not even a moment.
| michalf6 wrote:
| He probably still pays more than an average person in
| absolute terms, and almost certainly more than he uses in
| public services. I bet society is better off with him being
| around than otherwise.
| Test0129 wrote:
| > Why artistic productions? Well, because it's the most liberal
| business code for expenses.
|
| > As a software company, I can expense travel for some things,
| the most useful for me being conferences. But that means I need
| to buy the conference ticket even if I'm not interested and can
| only expense accommodations for the duration of the conference.
| That's good but a bit restrictive.
|
| > Now, as a artistic production company, I'm not limited by
| that. As long as I can prove I traveled in order to produce,
| well, just about anything that can be construed as being art, I
| can expense travel and I can expense accommodations for as long
| as I need. You can't rush art, you know how it is.
|
| Clever. But given the IRS just bought more guns and ammo than
| many small countries I'm sure this makes your dog nervous.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| It doesn't. I'm in the EU.
|
| There seems to be a false idea that only the USA has tax loop
| holes. I assure you. It's not the case. And tax heavens are
| also way easier to use as a EU citizen because there's no
| global income declaration required.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Did you ever explore Estonian e-Residency to open a biz and
| run it there? Curious your thoughts/experience about that.
| pavlov wrote:
| If you're ever audited, the tax man may find objections to lots
| of expenses billed for activity X when all your income is from
| activity Y.
|
| They've seen all these schemes before.
| solardev wrote:
| How much do you end up saving this way, through all that
| effort, rather than just paying the taxes?
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| Quite a bit actually ( for me at least ) seeing as there's
| progressive taxation. I'd reckon at least 30k per year.
| Probably more.
|
| I take out only 11k or so per year from the company as
| personal income. That's the tax free bracket. The rest I use
| is just expenses. And I pay myself minimum wage as well. Also
| tax free, but qualifies me for national insurance :D
|
| I love the tax system!
| solardev wrote:
| So you make enough and just don't really want to pay taxes,
| so it's a fun side hobby? Heh, that's such a foreign
| mentality to me, but to each their own.
|
| Do you think the tax money serves any societal good at all?
| Is it worth paying any tax or would you rather avoid all of
| it if you could?
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| I will answer your questions but first I want to show you
| something. It's the link at the bottom.
|
| In the UK there's something called IR35. Without getting
| into to much detail, the client will decide if you fall
| inside or outside. If you are inside or outside you will
| pay different amounts of tax.
|
| Not that long ago I was offered PS1000 per day inside.
| That seemed like a really good rate to me. Or so I
| thought. In a month, 21 working days, that's PS21k per
| month, how much can taxes be right? Let's call it PS17k -
| I mean c'mon, PS4k per month in taxes is already
| ludicrous. I couldn't possibly be more. Right?
|
| Please go to the link and plug in PS1000 per day. Look at
| what it says you get cash in hand at the end of the month
| and tell me, does that seem ok? Is that tax worth paying?
|
| https://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/insideir35contract
| orc...
| solardev wrote:
| I am not sure how the UK tax code works, or what I'm
| looking at here (the "inside" vs "outside" part is
| confusing). At a glance, it looks like it wants to tax
| you 46% of revenue (52% of profit) at PS220,000/year if
| you're a contractor, which (it says) is the same as
| earning PS180,100 as a regular employee.
|
| Those numbers don't seem particularly significant either
| way to me, coming from the US. Our tax brackets cap out
| at about 40% right now, but they used to be in the high
| 90%s decades prior -- and that's just the federal, and
| then some states have a bunch of other tax burdens on top
| of that. But personally, I'm economically pretty left-
| leaning and would prefer expanded social services rather
| than private wealth accumulation, so I doubt I'm
| representative of what the average person would consider
| reasonable vs excessive when it comes to taxes.
|
| That's not really the question though. I get that a lot
| of people (probably most?) wouldn't pay more taxes than
| they have to, and frankly I can hardly fault them for
| that. Everything from our genes to our industrialized
| capitalist societies encourages in-group prioritization
| and selfish behaviors. That's just how this world that
| we've made works, and even the most fervent idealists
| dare not dream of making the entire world pool and share
| income. We just ain't built that way, and that's just
| opening the floodgates to insane corruption.
|
| The more interesting question, IMO, is whether ANY of it
| is worth paying for collaboratively. If I could design my
| own tax system (and have a billion minions happily
| working in it...) the upper bracket would be insanely
| high, like 99% or some such, but there would also be a
| high degree of choice, per taxpayer, for some portion of
| their funds. Like there might be a mandatory % going to
| roads, defense, schools, health -- basic infrastructure,
| broadband -- but then each taxpayer would get to choose
| where the rest of it goes (say, space, basic research,
| the arts, land trusts, energy development, whatever). Two
| millionnaires would maybe each keep 50% of their income,
| spend 25% on basic infra, but be able to choose (within
| constraints) how the remaining 25% is spent. One than
| decide to split his 25% among various pet causes, the
| other might give all of hers to increase defense R&D.
| Basically a democratic Robin Hood, where an armed bandit
| takes your money and gives it to charity, but asks you,
| "Which charity?". Heh.
|
| That's just me.
|
| My question to you, as someone who goes out of their way
| to avoid paying taxes, is... how would you do it? Is some
| of it still worth it, after all the pork-barrel spending
| and corruption and inefficiency and bureaucracy? Should
| it all be private? Like take what you're doing, how would
| you ideally scale it up to country-level with a few
| million taxpayers?
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| So, the reason I sent you that link is if you look at the
| numbers, that 21k per month pre tax turns into 8k cash in
| hand per month after tax.
|
| That is nothing short of insane to me. That is almost 3
| quarters of your money taken by the government. Maybe you
| can live with that. I can't. It's insane to me. I simply
| refuse to participate in that.
|
| As for taxes, I get your point. Sounds good in theory.
| Until you realise people like me are not that uncommon.
| That 25% I still have a say on is going to go to my
| charity. A social change sort of charity. A charity aimed
| at offering educational alternatives to promising young
| leaders. The sort that will grow up to question the
| justice of your tax regime and advocate for it's
| dismantling. And with a bit of luck and push from other
| rich people, give it a few decades and it will go away.
|
| But to answer you:
|
| 1. 1% flat tax, applied to income for people and profit
| for businesses.
|
| EUR1000 goes into your business -> you're left with
| EUR990 -> you take them all out as dividends, you're left
| with EUR980.1
|
| This will provide an annual bulk income.
|
| 2. Flat transaction fee. Every time money changes hands,
| the government skims 0.1EUR from it.
|
| This will provide a steady income stream.
|
| You buy a laptop, you pay EUR1000 for it, the vendor only
| gets EUR999.9 - This is not something operators worry
| about, this is done automatically by the banks.
|
| But this won't be enough to <insert something here>.
| Well, tough luck. Better start prioritising. Start by
| cutting foreign aid. Start by cutting aid to ngos
| shipping migrants from africa, start by cutting welfare
| to illegals, get rid of the useless government
| bureaucracy like "period dignity officers", plenty of
| stuff to cut.
|
| Make do with less, that's what I would tell the
| government.
| solardev wrote:
| It's not quite 3/4, is it? More like 1/2? And that's if
| you're earning 1000/day (sorry, can't type that currency
| symbol)... which is like 10x the UK median wage. At lower
| revenues you're paying much less. But still, your point
| stands -- it's taking money away from you that you want
| to keep and spend your own way. Whether that exact
| percentage is 46% or 66% or whatever doesn't seem quite
| relevant if you'd rather it be as close to 1% as possible
| :)
|
| Are there any examples of a system like you're describing
| working out in reality? Doesn't have to be a country, but
| maybe a local government, a private community, a
| membership club, etc.?
|
| Sounds like a libertarian fantasy out of Atlas Shrugged
| or Bioshock... but hey, we all have our dreams, and my
| utopia would be your dystopia, lol.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| If I read the site correctly it's the last bit that is of
| particular concern. Why on earth does one need to make
| 220,000 per year independently in order to clear the same
| amount as some making 180,000 as an employee?
| solardev wrote:
| Does that take into costs of employment of employee
| benefits (like providing healthcare, worker's comp,
| retirement income, various insurances, accounting,
| payroll, etc.?) Not sure how it all works in the UK.
|
| In the US, at least, companies provide a lot of benefits
| that contractors don't get and have to buy out-of-
| pocket... but not sure if that's what the difference
| comes from in this case.
| volkk wrote:
| this is absolutely bonkers, but one of the more unique things
| i've read on here. i'm sure there are a ton of tax loopholes
| that exist, but how do you find these? just reading the IRS
| website?
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| IRS equivalent of the jurisdictions I fall under, talking to
| friends, talking to people who are into this, forums. I'm
| lucky to have a very good account who often gives me
| suggestions and who is happy to validate or invalidate my
| crazier ideas. The same way you get into any hobby I guess.
| petercooper wrote:
| "A person after my own heart," I originally thought. I, too,
| enjoy reading HMRC technical guidance, although I haven't
| actually taken it to such extremes, instead focusing on genuine
| deductions few people tell you about (like annual medicals).
|
| Your post was entertaining, but there might be a fly in the
| ointment! Are you actually carrying on a trade? Your consulting
| work _is_ trade, but there are rules around businesses having
| multiple lines of business and what is and what is not
| considered a trade (see BIM20090 and possibly BIM85740). If
| your art is not commercially available and making more money
| than it "costs" in expenses, HMRC would probably determine
| that this line of business is a hobby with no expenses
| deductible.
|
| If, however, you _are_ selling this art, it 's a fantastic
| wheeze, and also a quite legitimate one as you would, indeed,
| be a professional artist. You could, too, perhaps find ways to
| use said art in your trade such that it would commercially
| justify its creation, even at a high cost.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| Haha I must say, HMRC has got to be the most well documented
| jurisdiction I dealt with. I think you are right with HMRC.
| But I incorporated in one of the tax friendly countries in
| Eastern Europe. The way I understood the rule is, I only need
| to try to make an income. And I do. I have a paypall button.
| But, there's no rule on the cost/income. I'm just spending
| money to try to make money, which is what every body does. I
| just happen to do it with less success.
| petercooper wrote:
| Ha, okay, if you're not dealing with HMRC, then different
| kettle of fish! :-) That's an interesting approach I'd not
| thought about before, having expenses being paid from an
| out of jurisdiction company.. good luck!
| sfpotter wrote:
| It makes me sad that all these spun cycles could have been put
| to use doing something productive if only the tax code were
| simplified and the IRS automatically pre-filled our taxes, as
| is done in other, saner countries.
| Test0129 wrote:
| Oh hey look its the "America backwards" trope again. How
| tiring.
|
| Sure. The IRS could change things. But you're also able to do
| _a lot_ more in America that they can 't track. Other
| countries (e.g. Sweden, etc) are far "simpler", and
| homogeneous. For example, the depth at which one can trade
| various instruments, produce companies, etc is far far
| greater in America than almost anywhere else. This
| necessitates a somewhat (perhaps not as much as today)
| complicated tax code.
|
| I would say this is very productive. The tax code isn't
| _actually_ the problem. It 's corporate interests like intuit
| who, through regulatory capture, make it impossible to truly
| _solve_ the problem. Honestly, it cannot get easier than a
| 1040EZ which is what mostly everyone uses. In fact the 1040EZ
| is so easy you basically fill in the things to confirm the
| number the IRS already has is correct. OP, like myself, need
| more complicated solutions. I have a fairly vast portfolio of
| different investment types and OP has a business. In both
| cases, investing time into making the IRS 's life difficult
| pays a return on par with bonds.
| nautilius wrote:
| Not tiring at all, when it's not a trope. This forum
| contains a surprising number of posts of sometimes
| ridiculously blind US-praising that is rooted in simple
| ignorance of how things run elsewhere and in the US.
|
| Concerning taxes though, I'll have to (quasi) side with
| you. 1040EZ is as easy as it gets. One could of course
| argue that in that case, in which the IRS has the numbers
| already, why do you have to be forced to do your taxes at
| all (think Germany).
| Test0129 wrote:
| > Not tiring at all, when it's not a trope.
|
| The greatest fallacy of the pseudo-intelligent is
| comparing different first world countries to each other
| without considering demographics. It's a fallacy you have
| committed, along with everyone else who says "America is
| backwards lol". That is why it is a trope. It has nothing
| to do with American exceptionalism and everything to do
| with a relatively poor understanding of how we arrived
| here.
|
| America is a punching bag for the rest of the first world
| because it has problems literally no other first world
| country has to face. Problems that are too innumerable to
| list here. Without considering the various reasons
| America is a Special Case (TM) in many ways, you're
| missing the greater point. Sure we could have a German
| tax system for the simplest filers. We got to the 1040EZ
| because we believe in theory governments should stay out
| of our business. Fundamentally this is a driver of the
| majority of the policies in America, and when viewed from
| the lens of other western countries it seems backwards
| because every country listed in comparison has a
| stronger, more involved, and (in my opinion) more
| dangerous government. Perhaps not dangerous now but given
| enough power and enough reason could become dangerous
| faster than America's current government system. In fact,
| the unparalleled level of power corporations in America
| have over things like tax law parallels the level of
| dangerous power governments have over their citizen's
| taxes elsewhere. It's an iteration on the same old
| process of control. Missing how they're the same it's
| simple to arrive at the conclusion America is the only
| "backwards" one. Usually this argument devolves into tax
| utility, which I won't get into here because that's a
| philosophical argument beyond the scope of the mocking of
| America that _ALWAYS_ comes with this nonsense.
| sfpotter wrote:
| Clearly you think that the government should stay out of
| your business. I think the opposite. I am also an
| American citizen. There are a large number of Americans
| who believe that America is backwards in many ways. The
| fact that you live in America means that you have to deal
| with this reality to some extent. You're of course free
| to leave high-handed comments anonymously on an internet
| forum, but you should recognize that that's all you're
| doing. Being more strident will not increase the validity
| of your position, nor will it reduce the number of people
| who disagree with you. Probably the opposite, if
| anything.
| sfpotter wrote:
| I'm sorry you're tired. Are you sure you aren't tired from
| wrangling with your taxes?
| snicky wrote:
| It's all fun and games, but can't the auditors just challenge
| your "artistic production" by asking for the actual invoices
| proving any sort of income from it? I mean lots of costs and no
| related income is questionable AF. Or do you actually sell any
| of this "art"?
| joshruby16 wrote:
| anthonyhn wrote:
| I'm trying to improve my search results by building my own Search
| Engine.
|
| Over the past couple of years, the popular search engines haven't
| given me great results, and I've had to use a series of different
| engines, search operators, and dorks to prod out the search
| results I'm looking for, with mixed success. The front ends have
| also become a bit too feature rich for my use cases; I prefer a
| minimal front end with just search results, but most front ends
| have links to news, videos, drop downs, cards, cookie banners,
| SEO spam, and have too much javascript. Too much time spent
| loading and rendering the page, and too many requests, in my
| opinion. Instead, my search engine only take 1 HTTP request per
| search result page and is only a few KB in size.
|
| Right now this project is still in the early stages, and mostly
| proxies bing's api with some minor adjustments, but if anyone is
| interested in testing it out here is the link to the search
| engine [0] and a link to the blog with an RSS feed to follow
| future updates [1].
|
| [0] https://simplesearch.org
|
| [1] https://simplesearch.org/blog.html
| sailorganymede wrote:
| Not anything interesting because I failed in my interesting
| endeavour!
|
| Was trying to replicate methods from some papers and couldn't get
| it to work. Seemed promising but alas. Now I'm just recovering
| from all that jazz.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I ended my career in June, and I am attempting to entirely
| reinvent my professional life at 36. It's interesting going
| through this sort of open ocean search having a little bit of
| savings and stability, but the stakes _feel_ higher (emotionally)
| even though, rationally, I am in a better position to take on
| risk than when I was young and completely broke.
|
| The hardest part of it is actually deciding what do I want from
| the time I spend working. Many of the folks I know who do
| interesting work are either woefully underpaid or chronically
| overworked.
|
| I'm hoping I can thread the needle on that one.
| awavering wrote:
| Hey germinalphrase, I'm doing something similar after leaving
| my job earlier this year.
|
| I took a bit of time off, then started exploring how people use
| their time on sabbatical to learn new skills, work on personal
| projects, raise kids, travel, etc.
|
| After talking with a bunch of people about their experiences,
| the high-stakes feeling you observed is pretty common - I think
| people tend to underestimate the emotional aspects of taking a
| break from work.
|
| My current transition plan is to spend a bit more time studying
| sabbaticals and turn that into something concrete (a book/guide
| and coaching) before doing some part-time consulting with my
| professional skills (marketing analytics) to cover my living
| expenses ala CoastFIRE.
|
| I think there's a gap in part-time professional work - it's
| really hard to find long-term, part-time positions that take
| advantage of professional skills and offer benefits.
|
| If you want to bounce ideas off someone who is also trying to
| thread the needle I'd love to chat more.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Shoot me an email. I'll throw a few questions at you.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Care to share more details? I'm in a similar situation. Thanks.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Of course. I grew up the son of two professional artists.
| While they are beautiful people, they are not particularly
| career minded/knowledgeable - so my direction in life has
| been dependent on my own designs and devotions.
|
| I spent about five years working on feature films,
| commercials, music videos, etc. as a Local 600 Loader and
| Second Assistant Cameraman. I loved the work, but the travel
| and lifestyle wasn't a sustainable fit for a healthy life
| (for me).
|
| Before film work, I studied comparative literature in a
| strong undergraduate program and made a shift into teaching
| high school English. I taught in rural, urban, and suburban
| school districts in the upper midwest until June of this
| year. The work was Good, and I was good at it. I didn't burn
| bridges or burn out; I just had a belly full and want to open
| a new door.
|
| I know a handful of people that work in tech sales, PM,
| infrastructure that have been willing to talk about their
| work and employers (for which I am very grateful). An
| important part of these conversations has been noting which
| paths are inaccessible/poor fit/rough culture.
|
| I'm in talks to accept a position at a small local tech
| consultancy in a role that is a mix between Customer
| Success/Training/Project Management - but it's more of an
| entry point and stepping stone than final target.
|
| All that said - if anyone works in product management,
| experience strategy, or simply would be open for a chat,
| please send me an email. I would love to schedule a short
| phone call.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| I hope that goes well for you. Have you considered taking a
| part time job or maybe in apprenticeship or internship in
| something you are interested in?
|
| I imagine that if I was doing what you are describing, I'd
| enjoy keeping busy while still having most of my day to pursue
| something new. And having my side job (that pays or not, who
| cares?) help push me forward into learning something I couldn't
| easily do on my own.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Since I've only been unemployed since June, I've largely been
| plowing my time into house projects and taking care of my
| young son.
|
| I would be very open to an apprenticeship/internship if it
| allowed me a more direct entry into an exciting position (I
| have the freedom to do so, certainly); however, the
| internship pipeline seems almost exclusively focused on
| undergraduate age young people.
| rikroots wrote:
| I wish you great luck on your journey! I did this when I was 42
| - studied for a degree part-time, wrote some books, ran out of
| money and did some minimum wage jobs, etc - and it was a scary-
| yet-exhilarating adventure which, thankfully, ended well when I
| finally landed a full-time job developing websites.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Hope sustains me, but if it all falls apart I might just have
| to commit to punching out that solarpunk AR novel I've been
| taking notes about for ten years.
| tdekken wrote:
| I can so relate :). I left my position as a principal engineer
| at a FAANG/MAAMA/etc. company in 2020 with a general direction
| to try to make a difference in the education space. It has been
| maddening trying to live up to my own expectations.
|
| Good luck!
|
| p.s. In the off chance that you are interested in the education
| space, you might find my post in this thread of interest:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32870101
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Thank you for the comment, and I commend your mission. Do you
| have a website or more detailed information about your
| intended approach? My email is in profile if you would prefer
| to share privately.
| tdekken wrote:
| I have built a proof of concept that demonstrates the core
| mechanics of the approach. The challenge is that my
| background is in backend development, and so the UX doesn't
| make a good first impression. I am building a more polished
| demo, but it is slow going given my lack of frontend
| expertise.
| czhu12 wrote:
| I've been trying to build a way to allow for more scripts to get
| automatically turned into UIs. Then can be built, shared and run
| in web browsers. It's amazing how far browsers have come
| especially with the addition of ES modules.
|
| Its basically a JavaScript DSL to create little web apps with
| reactive, understandable code. For example:
|
| const age = input("what is your age?")
|
| text("your age is" + age)
|
| Would automatically create a UI around this.
|
| Can see it at https://trytoolkit.com
|
| I've been surprised how much I've personally been getting value
| from this little app.
| gisborne wrote:
| Programmable APIs.
|
| A HTTP request is a function call with named arguments. What if
| the server had some endpoints that provide basic fp (map, fold,
| curry, ...), and you let your users create their own endpoints by
| currying together other endpoints?
| [deleted]
| Ilasky wrote:
| I'm working on making body doubling a more main stream approach
| to accomplishing everyday tasks.
|
| Body doubling is known within the ADHD community and entails
| performing a task in the presence of another. More details here:
| https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/body-double-adhd
|
| It helps to engage motivation by using another person as the
| proxy. I wrote a bit about how I think it works here:
| https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/body-doubling-proxy
|
| The technique goes way beyond just ADHD applications for
| executive functions and is something we tend to do anyways, e.g.,
| running with a friend, studying in a group, etc.
|
| It solves an issue for myself and I truly want to help others
| with the approach by making a way to stay accountable through the
| help of others.
| satisfice wrote:
| I have no discipline of the superego variety-- but when I
| realize I will let someone else down, I become motivated and
| focused. I'm learning Linear Algebra now by working with a
| self-described ADHD colleague. We are 150 pages in and actually
| doing the homework.
|
| I wrote about an approach called "Bold Boast" in my book on
| coping with my particular mentality (which led me to quit high
| school, but also led, a few years later, to managing a team at
| Apple). I feel like everyone else has a powerboat, but I am
| forced to sail by the wind.
|
| Anyway Bold Boast means you publicly commit to achieving a
| learning or teaching goal that involves a presentation or
| visible product.
|
| (see Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar, which I believe you find
| pirated online here and there)
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, I've signed up for the waitlist. I never
| knew there was a name for this concept, but I realized that
| I've been doing this for a long time. I've set up some pair
| programming sessions just so I could get the motivation to work
| through a boring or difficult task. I'm a solo founder who
| works from home, so it would be good to spend some more time
| with people as well (even if it's online.) I'm not sure if I'm
| ready to go back to a coworking space though. Maybe after I get
| my next booster shot.
|
| I've also noticed that weekly accountability meetings don't
| seem to work well for me. I joined a group where we would meet
| once a week to share our progress and discuss goals for the
| next week. I realized that this didn't seem to help with
| procrastination or focus, and I was just feeling additional
| pressure and guilt when I wasn't able to achieve my goals.
| Working with (or next to) someone in real time is a very
| different experience.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| This is great! I have ADHD and find this helps a lot. A
| YouTuber I follow has a two hour video called "Work with me" of
| just him working at his desk with music playing. When I first
| saw it, I laughed. But then one day I was having trouble
| staying focused, remembered the video and put it on my TV and I
| found it to be surprisingly effective! Unreasonably so! So good
| luck with your project! You're on to something.
|
| https://youtu.be/vEqJAReXiN4
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| I've checked out the video but I got really distracted
| instead. Maybe I am not the target audience of this video but
| to stay on topic and expand on the same theme, I came across
| this video [1] that's probably more effective in extracting
| productivity gains from you than that video and I reckon it's
| less distracting as well:
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RGEo2Kohb8
|
| (4 Hours of Asian Mum to Help You Focus on
| Practising/Studying/Working)
| sophacles wrote:
| Neat! I look forward to seeing more - For a long time I found
| myself saying absurd things like "i work better in distracting
| environments" or "It's easier to have a clean house with
| roomates to clutter it up".
|
| What really was happening was that I respond well to body
| doubling. (Never diagnosed with any sort of executive
| functioning disorder, but I suspect that's more because I never
| went and got diagnosed than me lacking one).
|
| Cool idea.
| XargonEnder wrote:
| I've never heard of body doubling before but you got me to
| Google it and that's very interesting phenomena. I definitely
| do better at some tasks when there's someone around with me
| even if they're not directly participating.
| Ilasky wrote:
| Thanks! I had similar thoughts as well. For whatever reason,
| having others around in coffee shops or bars seemed to give
| me the energy to focus on actually working. A very
| counterintuitive result for sure!
| agumonkey wrote:
| Isn't that a bit like rubber duck debugging ?
|
| I also find pair work to be very special on many levels
| (intellectually, emotionally,. logistically). I wish there was
| more theory on this
| Ilasky wrote:
| Exactly! Pair programming is definitely within the realm of
| tasks we have in mind for Double.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I didn't know about body doubling so in the mean time let
| me ask you some things:
|
| - do you consider the friendly competition aspect (seeing
| someone do a task revives inspiration, desire, confidence,
| motivation to do it, when the other is tired you feel happy
| to fill the role)
|
| - the emotional bond from sharing: sharing any task is
| often a strong bond (even just carrying a load), pain and
| success
|
| - the intellectual benefits: a bit like the first point but
| searching for solutions gets much much cheaper with a peer.
| You can validate point of view / theories, feel less
| emotional pain from doubts it the other doesn't know too
|
| I had more topics but I forgot
| Ilasky wrote:
| These are all amazing points.
|
| In my opinion, they all fall under the category of a body
| doubling effect. Your second and third points strike a
| particular chord for me as well. I wrote a bit about why
| my cofounder and I are creating Double rather than doing
| it alone. In essence, we are cofounding because seeing
| the other person also trying their best and going through
| the rough parts with me drives me to keep going. (It's a
| quick read here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/dont-sleep-
| in-the-mud ).
| agumonkey wrote:
| Amazing. Have you ever considered the effect at large ?
| In education or workplace ?
|
| I see so much misery that could be replaced by joy,
| insight, friendship..
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I don't know if I have ADHD or not, and I don't think so
| because I'm sometimes able to focus for hours if it's really an
| end-of-the-world type of situation, but just having someone
| passively working next to me is 100% useless.
|
| My girlfriend is always working next to me, and that doesn't
| prevent me from getting distracted every few minutes.
|
| The only thing it helps is for stuff like cleaning the house
| where the problem is not focus but motivation, and we will be
| doing the same thing together.
| papandada wrote:
| thank you for this! It describes me very well. I'd say having
| someone next to me even makes me more anxious.
| Ilasky wrote:
| There's still a lot to be learned about body doubling and
| why/how it works so it definitely varies from person to
| person.
|
| I'm in the same boat that house chores need someone there
| doing the same thing, rather than just their presence.
|
| One of the things we're playing around with is different user
| experiences for different tasks (e.g., computer work vs house
| chores). It'd be great to hear what you've tried when it
| comes to focusing on work and how it went!
| techstrategist wrote:
| that sounds like hyperfocus, which is absolutely part of
| ADHD.
| Lionga wrote:
| What makes this different from Focusmate.com?
| Ilasky wrote:
| Great question!
|
| Focusmate is a great product centered around virtual co-
| working and work productivity, whereas Double will not be
| centered around co-working, but for everyday tasks (which can
| include co-working). As a result, we are designing the
| experience to be tailored towards the everyday experiences
| rather than a co-working product used for everyday task.
|
| Essentially, we want to expand the scope of tasks you can
| double up to do together and provide a better UX for those
| diverse tasks.
| Lionga wrote:
| Nice, afaik focusmate is used for every day tasks, but not
| much. What do you want to do different? I Used focusmate
| for a week or so but It stopped helping me at all once
| novelty wore off ( same as every adhd/ procrastination tool
| yet)
| Ilasky wrote:
| Task-specific Double communities and interfaces will be
| the primary difference between Double and competitors.
| For instance, not all tasks are best, or preferable, when
| you are on video (e.g., exercising/running).
|
| Additionally, we are building Double with the ethos that
| you don't need to always "crush it", but doing a little
| bit is okay too. We want to help you build the habits
| you'd like to see a little step at a time (one of our key
| inspirations is Tiny Habits).
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Are these body double volunteers active part of the ADHD
| community?
|
| I can see how this can set you apart from the competition
| as you have already an active and enthusiastic members
| among the community doing their best to help each other
| since they share the same background and life experience.
| sdmike1 wrote:
| I am so happy to finally have a term for this phenomenon! I
| find it really hard to explain to friends and co-workers why I
| prefer to work in pairs, up until now I've been describing it
| as something along the lines of a motivational feedback loop,
| but your description of it being a proxy for your own
| motivation is quite good and I'm going to have to steal that
| going forward! Thank you!
| bjackman wrote:
| +1 I've never encountered this term but absolutely recognise
| the effect although I don't have ADHD myself.
|
| Ever since school where I was wholly unable to revise or do
| homework anywhere but the library (where others would be
| doing the same), and all the way to today where I tell my
| partner "I'll do the washing up if you stay in the kitchen"!
| Doesn't really matter if she talks to me, the task is just
| hugely more bearable in her physical presence.
| Ilasky wrote:
| I'm glad you found it helpful!
| amacneil wrote:
| Web-based data visualization for robotics and self-driving.
| Robotics is such an interesting industry, and we're only
| scratching the surface of what new tools are needed.
|
| Try it live here (hit "view sample data"):
| https://studio.foxglove.dev/
|
| And it's open source! https://github.com/foxglove/studio
|
| Shameless plug - we're hiring: https://foxglove.dev/careers
| raphlinus wrote:
| A ton of stuff, arguably too many things. Right at the moment, my
| main focus is redoing fundamental 2D vector graphics geometry
| operations (stroking, path intersection) to make them more robust
| and higher quality. Some of this will also run in the GPU as
| compute shaders, which adds some interesting constraints and ups
| the difficulty level.
|
| I'm also building a new, high performance, high quality 2D
| rendering engine that runs primarily on the GPU.
|
| And I'm also exploring new approaches to building GUI, primarily
| in Rust. A new focus is to integrate that more tightly with the
| renderer mentioned above. A benefit I expect is that I'll be able
| to do the CPU side of the rendering work in multiple threads,
| where existing architectures make it very difficult to break out
| of a single thread.
|
| How did I end up working on this? It's a natural evolution of
| what I've been working on for a long time, in Ghostscript, on
| Google Fonts, working on the text stack on Android, and now
| fortunate enough to have a research position back on Google Fonts
| where I am able to focus on this and have great support from the
| rest of the team.
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| I'm going back to basics and learning to write a compiler in the
| dumbest way possible. I'm starting with a basic assignment (a =
| 3) and reverse engineering what it would take to turn that into a
| working executable. Then I'll add more features, lather, rinse
| and repeat. I'm hoping to eventually turn it into a series of
| blog posts so everyone can see just how little I remember from
| college.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| for an interpreted language like JS, this project is really
| nice https://github.com/engine262/engine262. More or less 2
| parts: parser and evaluator
| fady123 wrote:
| I am not a computer science graduate and have always been
| fascinated by programming languages and how they work. i am
| currently reading a book called crafting interpreters
| (https://craftinginterpreters.com) which i think is a very good
| introduction to the topic plus it's very practical without
| getting too deep into theory.
| sankha93 wrote:
| This is exactly how Compilers are taught at the University of
| Maryland. The class CMSC430
| (https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2021/cmsc430/) actually
| starts off with a Scheme (limited subset of Racket) and
| gradually grows the language to include more features. The
| first class compiles just numbers to x86 code, followed by
| arithmetic operations for numbers, building up to higher level
| features like function calls, pattern matching, and so on. See
| the notes at:
| https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2021/cmsc430/Notes.html
|
| This style of building compilers is called the Nanopass style
| (https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano-jfp.pdf), making
| it much easier to teach.
|
| Source: I was a TA for the earlier iteration of the class.
| fikama wrote:
| I like it so much, reading your comment make exited to reading
| your blogpost. In moments like this I wish there was sth in
| hacker news that would allow tracking progress of e.g. your
| project. In twitter you can just follow people, reddit has
| remindme thing.
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| If you're interested, I created a substack I'll be publishing
| the first few posts to. You should be able to subscribe
| there.
|
| https://painfullynormal.substack.com/
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| I'm building an origami application where folds are described in
| a simple English-like structured language. The editor will be
| realtime where you can see how the folds are animated.
|
| How I ended up working on this? There were a few ideas I wanted
| to work on. Most of them are much simpler and have easier path to
| monetization. But this kept coming back to the top of my thoughts
| stack, so I gave up fighting it. It ended up much harder than I
| even thought it was.
|
| Niche tech? Explored F# Fable and ReScript. Both are really still
| too young so they added too much typing complexity to overcome,
| so it's just mainly JS and some typescript.
| chaibiker wrote:
| Working on a better solution to sedentary health and sitting
| caused back pain at work. No one posture is the answer, so there
| is probably an optimal amount of regular postural variation
| during deskwork that wouldn't interrupt focus. That is what a
| chair should do for you to protect your health, so making a smart
| dynamic chair for standing desks.
|
| Had a cycling accident years ago, became much more sitting
| intolerant afterward, probably made me quit coding as a career.
|
| Have been testing prototypes for a year, people have done hours
| long stretches on a 2-3 min interval feeling no pain or stiffness
| at the end. A study showed the same strong results.
|
| Website: https://www.movably.com/ Early user review:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUjkbMc_xBw&t=1s
| v8xi wrote:
| This is a great idea. On a related note I just read this ~2000s
| article[0] by an anthropologist about natural sleeping/resting
| positions amongst humans/primates. An interesting take he had
| was that having the chest firmly on the ground during sleep was
| ideal because breathing causes constant motion of your spine
| and prevents stiffness.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119282/
| chaibiker wrote:
| Interesting, that fit's one of the lines of research on disc
| health because the disc are nourished indirectly mostly
| through the porous vertebrae, it takes motion to create the
| pressure variations to facilitate blood flow. This may be why
| most active chairs don't move the needle enough, the motion
| is both limited and usually only triggered when a person is
| prompted to move by discomfort.
| otsaloma wrote:
| Really interesting. I too had a bicycle accident four years ago
| and have been really sensitive to bad ergonomics and spending
| too long in one position since. Just understanding what makes
| things worse and what better has been a big challenge.
| Coincidentally, just today I ordered a Hag Capisco chair, which
| serves the same purpose of allowing a variety of different
| positions with a standing desk and also makes it practically
| impossible to slouch. I'm hoping it'll help.
| chaibiker wrote:
| The Capisco was the last chair I had before diving into this
| and it actually worked pretty well. I mostly alternated legs,
| with one standing while the other was draped on the chair.
| The only drawback was the friction of repositioning and I
| think the trick is to minimize friction so frequent movement
| is easy.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I wonder if a chair that allows muscles to relax for hours on
| end can be a solution.
|
| I went the 'standing as much as possible' route and am thankful
| to have made the move from a health standpoint.
| epberry wrote:
| Multiview, multi-object tracking -
| https://github.com/prcvlabs/multiview
|
| I started doing research on cameras around 2012 and have been
| obsessed every since. The company behind this code failed
| unfortunately but I've kept poking at it and finding more people
| interested in it, even as my day job is more about cloud
| infrastructure. Companies like Zippin which have carved out a
| niche in the cashierless space really impress me.
| eloisius wrote:
| Automatic camera calibration refinement/healing. SfM is a well
| developed area, and there are well understood methods for
| gathering correspondences like SIFT in order to calibrate
| cameras. However, it usually requires a separate calibration
| phase prior to doing whatever you want to do with that
| calibration. In my case, we're using it to triangulate 3D objects
| from 2D object detections done in each of our calibrated camera.
|
| Over a long time period, some perturbance befalls those cameras:
| gravity pulling them down, things knocking them, etc. That causes
| our accuracy to degrade over time, so we started looking at ways
| to continually heal that calibration without needing to do
| another stop-the-world calibration phase.
|
| Turns out you can use the 3D objects themselves (actually the 2D
| constituent detections that you use to compute a 3D point) as
| correspondences instead of doing SIFT matching. The hard part is
| that you have to preserve the original coordinate frame after
| doing a bundle adjustment.
|
| Computer vision is a ton of fun, and I highly recommend you give
| it a try if you've enjoyed data science stuff, but the
| incomprehensible "try it and see" engineering of working on deep
| neural nets turns you off.
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