Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#291

Post by kevin_nisbet »

ashtonkem wrote: post #280
yosamino wrote: post #196

Geothermal Energy. Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference. Then stick in two pipes, on for sending water down, one for steam to come up. Run a turbine, add a valve to regulate how much water you want to converted into steam to be able to regulate output, enjoy your first mover advantage and price the competition out of the market. ... It's not that I do…

My understanding is that it’s geographically limited due to depth issues.

I don't know if it's just depth issues, I think I saw a story about some sample projects in Alberta where they were looking for the right types of rock for the heat exchange to occur. It definitely sounded significantly more complex than just drilling holes, but finding areas with the correct properties to get worthwhile ROI.

One nice advantage is it draws on skills common to the oil and gas industries.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#292

Post by yurishimo »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #150
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #102

Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)

Hot water heaters are doing this. You can buy a hybrid hot water heater for around $1200 from your local hardware store. The crazy upside is it acts as an air-conditioner for your garage, and the heat exhaust is used to keep the tank of water warm. They're loud, but it pays for itself in a few years. I'm also surprised other homebuilders/designers haven't connected the a/c condenser heat exhaust to a centralized loca…

My parents have two of these in the attic of their new house. I went up there over the summer and it was noticeably cooler than the garage where the access is. This is in the summer in Texas.

They also put their HVAC into the attic and the entire house is insulated with spray foam, so the attic only a few degrees warmer than the house below it.

I need to ask them what the energy bills were but I imagine they were low enough to prevent complaint.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#293

Post by cratermoon »

jdkoeck wrote: post #204
cratermoon wrote: post #192

You know how we have an overabundance of ways to design, describe, develop, and document rpc-based distributed systems like REST and microservices? Why isn't there anything like that for event-driven, message-based systems? If there's a message bus in your architecture, it's usually just a pipe-shaped widget on a diagram. There's dozens of tools that can describe and API down to the finest detail, like swagger/openap…

Hi, you’ll be pleased to learn about the AsyncApi initiative! https://www.asyncapi.com/ Haven’t looked into it too closely but it looks promising

Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#294

Post by imgabe »

Nextgrid wrote: post #131
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #102

Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)

Regarding refrigeration appliances, this is a solved problem. Most commercial refrigerators and ACs have a separate condensing unit placed outdoors (which also houses the compressor so its own heat doesn't affect the indoor location which is a problem when cooling). The problem is that most homes aren't build with this in mind and don't provide a place to run the refrigerant lines (nor comes with the lines built-in)…

It also adds a lot of complexity if you want to change anything. Want to remodel your kitchen and move the fridge to the other side? Now you have to reroute refrigerant lines. Want to add a second fridge in the garage? Is your outdoor compressor large enough to handle it? You have to run new lines to it, maybe replace the compressor, or add a second one. Way more expensive and complex than just buying a refrigerator at Home Depot and plugging it in.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#295

Post by Aeolun »

dragontamer wrote: post #167
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #102

Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)

Most of the people who know that are Architecture and/or Landscape people. Yeah, landscaping. You plant trees which have shade in the summer and lose their leaves in the winter. As such, it cools the house in the summer, and heats up the house in the winter. Talk to a few architecture / landscaping experts. They got plenty of ideas of how to optimize homes. EDIT: And then a technologist comes in, wonders who put this…

But I want sunlight in my living room, not shade!

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#296

Post by ioseph »

Sustainable timber. Given it's popularity as a building material (at least in Australia) I'm surprised there isn't more research into genetically modifying trees to grow quickly / have desirable characteristics for construction / need less land and water. I wonder if lab grown timber is a possibility. (I could also imagine a GM'd fast growing tree becoming a ecological disaster though...)

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#297

Post by screye »

nickjj wrote: post #262
screye wrote: post #252

A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows) I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it. Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a re…

While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/ It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too. Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid. [0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

I will be following obsidian's development with great interest. It isn't exactly what I am looking for, but with it might just be enough to convince me to move away from onenote.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#298

Post by TeMPOraL »

trevett wrote: post #35

Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.

> and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content

...and a history feature that's nearly unusable. I don't even trust it anymore - Chrome's history UI feels like it's losing information, and there've been plenty of times I'm 99% I visited a page few days or weeks before, but it's nowhere to be found in history. And honestly, I don't even need full-text search. I need a table with the following columns: page URL, page title, and access time. I need that table to be sortable by these columns, and filterable by their values.

In a way, we've regressed from the days of IE 5, back from the time where browser cache was a folder. Because back then, I could open that folder, sort it by date, and guess the sites I visited from the name of the files - that being a much better UX than what I get in Firefox today.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#300

Post by uncomputation »

Voice assistant technology. It seems like Alexa and Siri keep getting more features and integrations (one far more than the other) but the actual language processing is rather basic. A different way of phrasing something throws off the assistant entirely, or your basically using a hard-coded menu just with your voice.
Post reply on HN