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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#471

Post by cdiamand »

jiofih wrote: post #314
cdiamand wrote: post #165

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

Aren’t there some legal hurdles to providing investment advice like that? Didn’t find the standard disclaimers on your site. You might want to look into it before showing up in SEC’s Radar.

At this point were just covering what is being spoken about, not advising any route of action. I will look into this further and see if we need to add a disclaimer. Thanks for bringing this up :)

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#472

Post by pouta »

joelthelion wrote: post #334

I've been meaning to improve "news" for a number of years now, with limited success so far. The current news industry is broken beyond repair: all you get are bite-sized irrelevant factoids. A good news service would be: - Relevant to you and your interests... - ... but diverse enough to feed your intellectual curiosity - Delivered in a timely fashion: apart from once a year big events, most things can wait for a few…

I'm also on a mission to make news better but with a different approach.

We're making sure journalists get the best tooling to make their work. By empowering them, we help them spend time on what's actually important: writing quality content.

Would love to exchange some ideas with you.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#473

Post by syllable_studio »

2rsf wrote: post #347
syllable_studio wrote: post #203

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

> affordable affordable, but efficiency is so-so. 70-80% according to Wikipedia [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

I love this quote: Hydro pumped storage is “astoundingly efficient…In this future world where we want renewables to get 20%, 30%, or 50% of our electricity generation, you need pumped hydro storage. It’s an incredible opportunity.” – U.S. Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu in 2009. Still true today.

And actually, we think that 80-85% round trip is more accurate for our projects because we'll use the latest/greatest tech (variable-speed reversible francis style pump/generator turbines). I think the 70% from these figures is citing older projects with pump/turbines that were not quite as efficient.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#474

Post by coderholic »

jcims wrote: post #171
coderholic wrote: post #88

Creating the worlds best IP address and domain name APIs and data sets, at https://ipinfo.io and https://host.io . We've solved scaling and reliability (we handle 20 billion API requests a month), and we're now focusing almost all our efforts on our data quality, and new data products (like VPN detection). We're bootstrapped, profitable, and we've got some big customers (like apple, and t-mobile), and despite being a…

Is there a way to correct location data for an IP address? I have a static from my ISP and it’s almost never close to correct.

Yep, shoot me a mail :) Or see https://ipinfo.io/corrections

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#475

Post by syllable_studio »

dpflan wrote: post #209
syllable_studio wrote: post #203

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

How large is a typical system - how much land you need to excavate?

If we attach our installation to an existing reservoir, we'll take up nearly zero land above ground. If we build a new self-contained upper reservoir it will be about 0.5 miles on each side and 40 feet deep. It can be built with material excavated from the lower reservoir. This may seem large, but it's for a huge amount of storage 20GWh - enough to balance the load of a large city. And keep in mind that it's about the same size of the many large reservoirs that are scattered around a large city.

Again, the most promising option would be to simply attach our installation to an existing reservoir. We don't use any additional water, we just borrow it. For an ample sized reservoir, each cycle would just raise and lower the water level by an inch or so. Another promising option is that we can even use the ocean as an upper reservoir. Salt water can be accommodated -- See our notes about the Okinawa Yanbaru Station.

There are more details in our white paper posted on the website.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#477

Post by syllable_studio »

samstave wrote: post #213
syllable_studio wrote: post #203

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

Do you have a link to the 1984 paper? How can I help?

Thanks to the commenter below who posted the link to the paper. Yes please! If you want to email me I'd love to see how we could work together. eric at terramenthq.com or syllablehq.com

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#478

Post by clevelandguy »

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#479

Post by kstenerud »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#480

Post by ralphhughes »

jodrellblank wrote: post #302
syllable_studio wrote: post #203

Solving the world's trillion-dollar energy storage crisis. (multi-trillion, actually.) https://www.terramenthq.com/ About a year ago, I started spending more time researching about climate change. I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the idea of building underground pumped hydro energy storage. I found a…

Kinda surprised to hear that date, as the UK has a pumped hydro plant[1] which started construction in 1974 and opened in 1984; Tom Scott has a YouTube video about it[2]. It's not all underground, but the machinery is built into a hill and it pumps from a reservoir at the bottom up to the top when electricity is cheap, and is used as a fast-startup generator when demand is higher. Is it really more feasible to build…

I live near Dinorwig pumped storage hydro and can highly recommend the tours they do if you're in the area. The tour bus drives into the mountain and stops literally a few metres from the generating turbines where you can get out and take photos of the huge underground turbine hall.
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