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

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

#621

Post by jhayward »

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…

There's a very useful and up-to-date writeup of the four main types of geothermal projects, and the latest (AGS) that features 1) no injection wells or other fluid contact down-hole, 2) re-using existing oilfield wells when possible, 3) no need for "hot rock" steam flashing, and 4) no parasitic energy use for pumping (thermosiphon). Well worth the read.

The author, Dave Roberts, is a reliable read in the energy world and has recently launched a Substack dedicated to energy.

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/215154...

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

#622

Post by jhayward »

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.

AGS systems (e.g. Eavor[1]) don't need "hot rock" to be cost effective and can supposedly be operated in just about any area.

[1] https://eavor.com/

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

#623

Post by t0astbread »

ineptech wrote: post #437

Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone). It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on,…

Maybe not for non-technical people but what I'd like to have is something like Docker Compose for virtual machines. I.e. just give it a description of what you'd like and the hypervisor takes care of building immutable machine images and setting them up including networking and potentially also backups of data volumes.

There are a lot of tools that do parts of this but connecting it all is a lot of work and in the end you probably end up with something hacky.

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

#624

Post by anchpop »

decasteve wrote: post #595
ineptech wrote: post #437

Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone). It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on,…

I wondered if this would move along more quickly if hosting from home were easier. Give everyone their own IP addresses and people tinkering their way to personal servers becomes more likely.

With things like Hyperswarm [0], building things like that is easier than it used to be

[0]: https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm

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

#625

Post by wyattpeak »

x0x0 wrote: post #408
Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

I share this surprise. My guess is that, at this point, Apple has absorbed the vast majority of people who care about these things. And that is causing the other manufacturers not to care, because they have already lost the audience who does...

I wouldn't think so. I reckon they've probably absorbed the vast majority of non-gamers and people who don't need Windows for work, but neither of those two groups is small.

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

#626

Post by newsbinator »

Klonoar wrote: post #379

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

> I would pay literally twice what I pay Apple for a competing product.

In what way is Apple so bad that you would pay twice as much (thousands of dollars more) for a competing product?

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

#627

Post by jhayward »

geoffeg wrote: post #611

The coding part of the software development process. We're still writing code in a text editor like we were 40+ years ago. The editors have become more powerful but writing code is still very similar.

40* years ago I was using an IBM 029 keypunch, and sequencing my cards using an offline sequencer in case I dropped the deck.

Today I use an editor that knows, semantically, the context of everything I type. It suggests nouns, and checks compatibility. It automatically shows me documentation for APIs. It knows several hundred common pitfalls to watch out for and suggests corrections for them. It even auto-formats my code so I don't have to dink around doing that.

We've come a long long way in 40 years.

* Ok, it was actually 1979. We got Vaxes and VT100 terminals with VMS EDIT 4 years later. The state of the art in editing was QED, a souped up version of unix 'ed', and vi hadn't really escaped Berkeley yet. Somewhere in MA and CA, some people were munging TECO to become Emacs.

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

#628

Post by gcmeplz »

gfxgirl wrote: post #512
mehrdadn wrote: post #261

Flexible regex engines. Pattern matching is a much more general problem than string matching, and you don't necessarily always have the entire input available initially. (In fact, especially for performance reasons, you might the pattern itself to tell you what possibilities to consider for the next portion of your sequence.) I've repeatedly found that a regex engine that can work on more general objects (not necessa…

I just wish there were better UIs for much of this stuff. Most code editors have a regex search and replace figuring out the regex requires too much regex expertise. I can't think of a good example off the top of my head but for example, being able to search for things that match multiple rules. It would be much easier for many users to be able to say "starts with x", "ends with y", "has abc in the middle" as 3 separ…

> It would be much easier for many users to be able to say "starts with x", "ends with y", "has abc in the middle" as 3 separate statements than to have to derive the regex that does it.

This seems like a less error-prone and more testable way of writing regular expressions in code too! Writing out the individual portions of a regular expression might be a ton more verbose, but it's because regular expressions hide a ton of complexity with "write-only" shorthand.

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

#629

Post by Wump »

baron816 wrote: post #243

In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…

Absolutely agree. I've been reading a lot about this recently, recommend:

Lost Connections by Johann Hari The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg Better Together by Robert Putnam

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

#630

Post by pcr0 »

ineptech wrote: post #437

Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone). It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on,…

https://sandstorm.io/

This is the closest project I can think of.

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