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Ask HN: What's the most exiciting thing happening in your niche?

by soultrees on 12/29/23, 1:41 AM with 13 comments

or rather, what are you most excited about?

This is one of my favourite questions to ask at parties as its an opportunity for someone to open up what they are good about and a chance for the listener to learn something they likely never would have before.

  • by taurath on 12/29/23, 11:25 AM

    The expansion of what we know about the mind and memory. New research on dissociation, trauma recovery, the neurology of traumatic memory, etc. are fascinating and incredibly potent leaps in understanding for healing a large host of mental health issues and advancing our understanding of how we think from the external behavior all the way down to the neuron pathways.

    It’s not really been a choice for me to be in this niche, but when you develop the lens to see some of the come drivers of how people all around the world act and think it gives you such a lovely sense of connection, shared experience, and empathy for humanity.

  • by solardev on 12/29/23, 5:38 PM

    In the web dev space, Vercel is beta-ing AI generated frontends. I'm really excited about this, even though it will probably put me out of work soon, lol (already had a hell of a time finding work this year, and I suspect it's only going to get worse). https://v0.dev/

    Wix also does something similar for simple blogs and marketing pages, but having a general purpose frontend generator would be awesome. I hope this allows smaller teams and businesses to create better websites and UX without a dedicated frontend team.

    Mostly, I just want the web to be better, whether it's made by me, another dev, or a robot. Bad UIs are annoying!

    -----

    On the solar side, I see more and more companies take on the storage problem (batteries, state change materials, etc.). Right now we already have a ton of renewables out West, in some cases too much (California's grid really struggles with it). Spikes in production from sunrise to sunset unfortunately doesn't match up neatly with consumption patterns, and it's hard for the grid to suddenly have to spin up a bunch of fossil fuel plants to meet the mismatched demand when the sun goes down.

    Utility-scale batteries/storage basically act as a buffer, smoothing out the demand vs production spikes.

    It's interesting to me, as a software person, how this problem has some parallels to API rate limits, vertical vs horizontal scaling, etc. I love these problems at scale, how individual solar panels can build up to grid instability at the large scale, and wish I understood them better.

  • by morjom on 12/29/23, 9:44 AM

    I don't have a niche and I'm not really excited for anything in particular. One could also say I'm in too many niches at once, thus spread thin and not managing to follow any specific one.

    Which is to say I'm not fun at parties I guess ;)

  • by oaw-bct-ar-bamf on 1/1/24, 12:46 AM

    Microcontroller switch from 40nm to 28nm devices.

    Adding support to re-flash our control unit „over the air“.

  • by nevodavid10 on 12/29/23, 6:37 AM

    I started gitroom.com - open-source marketing, around 9 months ago. And while it's still a small niche, I see it's growing like crazy. The last batches of Techstars and YC are full with open-source companies!