Author here. With https://evcc.io I have (with tremendous help) developed a home energy management system, originally for solar-optimised EV charging (big in Germany/Europe with users in the US or even Australia).
Turning into a general HEMS proves hard. While all our current algorithms are strictly predictable, we're lacking global, multi-goal, non-linear optimisation. Maybe SAT solvers, maybe non-linear programming, maybe stochastic or ML/AI can be part of the solution. We have lots of data but no algorithm or technical approach and I'm unsure where to go next.
Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
261–270 of 281 posts
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#262Very basic compared to everyone here. Self-host software in the cloud. I have worked in tech my whole life and feel now is the time to make the jump to hosting something myself.
Nothing special, prob will be a todo app, but such a steep learning curve to wrap my head around the jargon with everything hosting and docker related.
Wish me luck!
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#263I really resonate with this. For the longest time, I felt I just “wasn’t wired” to explore deeper reasoning tasks with AI — things like philosophy, creative synthesis, or even serious debugging just seemed like they needed some genius-level prompting or coding skill.
Weirdly enough, what helped me break through wasn’t a course or a YouTube tutorial… it was a PDF.
Sounds silly, but I found this open-source project called WFGY, which is basically a semantic reasoning booster for any LLM. You just upload the PDF to ChatGPT (or any model), and it starts interacting in a way that feels like actual understanding — not just parroting surface logic.
No install, no sign-up. Literally a 60-second experiment.
I used it to challenge GPT with questions it usually fumbles (like nested logic, or paradoxes), and it actually got better. The framework even comes with sample questions to test against it. Kind of surreal.
If you’ve ever felt AI prompting is a weird dark art... this made it feel like turning on a light.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
For kernel, I have tried to write simple modules and it's okay. But when I am going deep in the internals, things become really complicated and my memories from OSes exam are rusty. For eBPF, I wrote a quite simple DNS visibility tools and while I am okay with the logic, I struggled on writing low-level C code that parse the network packet. Moreover, I found documentation incomplete and really confusing, for example:…
For Linux kernel dev, I found Linux Kernel Programming: A Comprehensive Guide to Kernel Internals to be a really helpful resource. For eBPF, the early chapters of Brendan Gregg’s BPF Performance Tools gave me the context I needed to get started. From there, what’s helped me most is a cycle of reading new material, building prototypes and exploring how an open source system solves similar problems. I've definitely hit…
Thank you!
I already know Brendan Gregg, but never read his book.
> I’ve also noticed that I sometimes get stuck trying to make something perfect before I’ve even started experimenting.
Exactly, this is something that I am struggling with too.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#265I really resonate with this. For the longest time, I felt I just “wasn’t wired” to explore deeper reasoning tasks with AI — things like philosophy, creative synthesis, or even serious debugging just seemed like they needed some genius-level prompting or coding skill. Weirdly enough, what helped me break through wasn’t a course or a YouTube tutorial… it was a PDF. Sounds silly, but I found this open-source project cal…
"I found this open-source project" which you built. The lowest level of astroturfing.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#266Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc. but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not enough constraints. I'm not sure.
See my previous comment here for how to get started - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33628025 I highly recommend downloading Understanding Signals with the Propscope from Parallax (available for free online) and following the tutorials from it with an Arduino+Analog Discovery 2/3 device. You can use the Digilent "Real Analog" learning course along with it - https://digilent.com/reference/learn/courses/real-anal…
I have a feeling that in circuitry the focus is to manipulative the components so that the final chart is similar to what you want (e.g. a sine wave), and then try to improve the quality and reduce the # of components to save cost. Is it correct?
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#267Mathematics and Physics, just solving derivations and problems is so much fun, but I am scared to jump back in.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#268Author here. With https://evcc.io I have (with tremendous help) developed a home energy management system, originally for solar-optimised EV charging (big in Germany/Europe with users in the US or even Australia). Turning into a general HEMS proves hard. While all our current algorithms are strictly predictable, we're lacking global, multi-goal, non-linear optimisation. Maybe SAT solvers, maybe non-linear programming…
thank you for evcc - awesome pice of software that I'm using every day. I actually built some small prediction models around it figuring out if I should charge my car or feed in the electricity. Not sure if that is what you have in mind but I would be interested to hear what kind of algorithm you have in mind. Maybe I can help?
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#269Building a hardware project and converting that into real application is hard.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#270Author here. With https://evcc.io I have (with tremendous help) developed a home energy management system, originally for solar-optimised EV charging (big in Germany/Europe with users in the US or even Australia). Turning into a general HEMS proves hard. While all our current algorithms are strictly predictable, we're lacking global, multi-goal, non-linear optimisation. Maybe SAT solvers, maybe non-linear programming…
thank you for evcc - awesome pice of software that I'm using every day. I actually built some small prediction models around it figuring out if I should charge my car or feed in the electricity. Not sure if that is what you have in mind but I would be interested to hear what kind of algorithm you have in mind. Maybe I can help?
Sounds great! Wanna post on GH Discussions with your idea and we take it from there?