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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?

#401

Post by omarhaneef »

iKlsR wrote: post #397

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

Where in the Caribbean are you?

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

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

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

#403

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

One of my friends is a physicist that had the plan to install a closed cistern under his house and heat it up in summer with mostly solar energy. Looked really promising and he had all the numbers figured out to supply a family home with heating and warm water through a normal winter. Didn't do it in the end because there were some problems with building a cistern on his property and the large up front investment necessary.

I wish you luck with your endeavor. I think you are correct that the problem of energy storage is the most important one to solve to allow renewables to really take off for general power supply.

I also believe that the efficiency of storage is secondary to a degree as renewables can supply an enormous amount of energy. So loss from pumps or energy conversions are nearly insignificant. At least at the moment where energy storage is in such a bad shape. Certainly a lot more promising than having batteries everywhere.

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

#405

Post by raihansaputra »

bpizzi wrote: post #387
raihansaputra wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally what's interesting for me is: 1. (Assuming you're an outside contractor) How much do you charge? 2. How do you do estimates on this project? Or do you just do it bit by bit? 3. Are you switching over part by part or will deploy in a period? If you can, you should at least write a blog post. A book will be amazing though!

I'm a simple employee with some management duties, it's small company (20p), I estimate my wage to be on the low end of the local market (french, not in the capital), but the position is quiet unusual so it's difficult to compare. At the beginning there was only vague goals, not estimates, now 4y later I can tell how much days a functionality will take within a 30% margin error. But it's only based on personal apprec…

Definitely quite a unique position compared to the common rewrite story. Small company, long-term rewrite timeline, small rewrite team, able to influence the sales activity and deployment. I think these constraints are important to your success (and fun factor), but I don't have the complete picture. I'm really welcome to any points against what I wrote above; currently I'm intrigued on reading on how software projects works or doesn't work in real life and your story is really interesting.

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

#406

Post by galacticdessert »

davedx wrote: post #320
jpfr wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are working on the most urgent and important topic that I know of. But it is also very hard to pull through. I wish you the best success. Here are two recent startups in the field with multi-million funding. They were serious approaches. Many people involved with good planning, etc. They still fizzled out when it came to installing their first capacity. https://www.power-technology.com/news/newsgaelectric-receive…

Yeah if you drill into how the Tesla grid storage solutions make money, it’s not just about the storage capacity but also about being able to respond to demand or frequency issues extremely quickly, which LiIon batteries are very good at. There’s a lot of money available to the fastest dispatcher.

A lot of money seems excessive, at least in Europe. The flexibility market profitability depends a lot on the national market it plays in, as for instance the prices are quite low in Germany/north Europe, but very high in Australia.

Rather than a way of making money, I like to think about flexibility and fast dispatching as an enabler for way more renewables to come online, and that is crucial for the human race right now.

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

#407

Post by galacticdessert »

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...

It does not matter. The alternative is curtailing wind parks/solar generation, and wasting clean energy and even more money.

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

#408

Post by tasuki »

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...

> affordable, but efficiency is so-so. 70-80% according to Wikipedia

Say what? So-so? 70-80% efficiency sounds pretty damn amazing!

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

#409

Post by Gys »

dang wrote: post #62
Gys wrote: post #17

Making people connect offline

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

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

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

#410

Post by raxxorrax »

johnmorrison wrote: post #325
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…

I hope to convey this in the least volatile manner, but I must bring it up. > I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The above is a reasonable statement, however, your website says the following: > We can’t quit carbon without energy storage. To stop climate change, renewables must replace fossil fuels. > Without energy storage, renewables will fail to reac…

I am for research in fission, but it is expensive in deployment and it needs to solve the problem with nuclear waste in my opinion. I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium.

> look at German electricity prices

True, pretty expensive. But they also include capital for investment in energy infrastructure. Such as building lines to get power from the north (high production) to the south (high consumption). The implementation tends to slow, but there are other reasons for that.

Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities.

So fission can be utilized, but I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision.

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