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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?

#481
post #394

I am working on climate repair, specifically the removal of methane from the atmosphere. Although the excess methane is only about 1.3 ppm, it's responsible for about a third of the temperature rise. We're not building a huge machine to try to suck the atmosphere through a straw; we're doing chemistry in the open atmosphere. Plan to have a pilot running within the next year and within five years be removing up to 100…

BTW we are looking for MEs, EEs, and a physicist

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

#482
Making solar available to apartment dwellers/multi-tenancy housing. We switch a shared solar system to different circuits based on who's currently using power, to optimise on-site solar usage and reduce feeding back into the grid. As well as having some interesting electrical issues, there's an amazing world of regulatory bureaucracy to wade through. https://allumeenergy.com/

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

#483
post #394

I am working on climate repair, specifically the removal of methane from the atmosphere. Although the excess methane is only about 1.3 ppm, it's responsible for about a third of the temperature rise. We're not building a huge machine to try to suck the atmosphere through a straw; we're doing chemistry in the open atmosphere. Plan to have a pilot running within the next year and within five years be removing up to 100…

That sounds interesting. How do plan to fund that? 100mt a year of sequestration sounds like there would be a fair amount of costs and labour involved.

For the past year I've been paying the bills (this is hardly my first startup) but we're just starting to talk to investors to bring some more staff on and start scaling up. We only need a few million for this stage.

There are people who pay for GHG removal and we have plans on how to expand that. We think it can be self-sustaining.

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

#484

A keyboard based IDE for a keyboard based GUI for PCs. Common PC GUIs are WIMP based (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers). They require the usage of a mouse and are pretty complicated. I find the usage of the mouse in a PC GUI "unnatural". So I set out designing a keyboard-input only based GUI. It turned out, that wasn't as difficult as I initially thought. Then I started writing an IDE for designing apps using this new…

Well, Emacs already did it. I kinda hate after moving to IDEA (as IDE it's just better, still prefer Emacs as an editor tho) I had to use mouse more.

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

#485
post #394

I am working on climate repair, specifically the removal of methane from the atmosphere. Although the excess methane is only about 1.3 ppm, it's responsible for about a third of the temperature rise. We're not building a huge machine to try to suck the atmosphere through a straw; we're doing chemistry in the open atmosphere. Plan to have a pilot running within the next year and within five years be removing up to 100…

I have heard that terpenes are a major source for the production of HO (hydroxides), which only last for a microsecond, but are responsible for transforming most methane molecules to CO2. Did I get that right? (Also, is my vape pen making a difference?)

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

#486
post #445

Javascript and ORMs have a (fairly well-known) interesting set of problems: * There aren't many * Those that you can find, don't support Typescript, so it's all guesswork. * Don't have much (if any) support for related data queries So I've been working on a ORM for PostgreSQL and Typescript for a few months now in my spare time [0]. It's been probably one of the biggest, challenging, and interesting problems I have e…

I’m interested to hear what those PostgreSQL limitations are more specifically.

I don't want to get too much in the weeds, but one well-known example is missing support for LIMIT on DELETE and UPDATE statements. The workarounds that exist range from fairly pedestrian (like using the scary ctid column) to totally wild (like creating temp tables or using transactions and all sorts).

The rabbit hole goes.

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

#487

Building a platform that accelerates the construction of protected bike lanes and car-free streets worldwide by connecting citizens, advocacy groups, cities, and urban planners: https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/15705341894974832... (Backstory: Started a Twitter account in July (twitter.com/@betterstreetsai) posting DALL-E-generated street transformations, it immediately took off, got lots of press, etc. and…

DALL-E also can transform American suburban shopping centers into mixed-use urban attractors.

https://aixd.substack.com

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

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big is your index and how many sites do you cover?

1 million websites, a bit above 60 million documents in the index; the crawl is a couple of hundred million but a lot of it gets filtered out for various reasons. The crawler itself is aware of 470 million URLs. I've actually had it up to 50 million before, but that was a lot noisier data with fewer keywords per document. The current 60 million is significantly "bigger" than the old 50 million. Index size is not actu…

I really appreciate your work.

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

#489

A postgres foreign data wrapper for PACS so you can send and receive medical images with SQL. DICOM, the medical imaging standard, is from the 80's and you need a bit of domain knowledge to integrate e.g. AI with hospitals. This makes it a lot easier. And with Supabase on top you have a very cool backend for building medical imaging products in my humble opinion. We started out solving the problem of anonymizing medi…

You're integrating AI and data management? Sounds promising for your case. For one, it's highly improbable that we're not moving towards some type of tool which would manage a person's data -- be it a spreadsheet, or just an email. And since your partner is using a spreadsheet-like tool to compose a long-form piece, it only sounds more likely.

Probably socialized medicine nations are not progressive enough to attempt this.

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

#490
i'm working on a v2 of a site i created to allow people to find independent radio shows they'll enjoy (www.ephem.fm).

the current site texts you when shows matching your preferences are about to start. the next iteration will have visualizations of the music being played by each station in close to real time and allow you to select between them, save them, etc. the visualizations will be updated each minute and colors will be selected by the HSL color system, where hue = tempo (from blue for slower to red for faster), saturation (or intensity of color) = loudness, and lightness = pitch (technically, spectral centroid or 'center of mass' of frequencies of music).

i also want the ui to allow people to select from stickers i've taken pictures of around nyc and arrange them similar to concert venue bathrooms or middle school lockers haha.

altogether, want to create a fun way to explore independent radio!

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