from Hacker News

What are you most interested in?

by acidpanda on 1/8/24, 8:34 PM with 14 comments

I’m asking this because I think about PG’s essay on “How to do Great Work” at least once a week and until this point, I haven’t connected to the YC community. I’m curious to learn of some new things y’all studying, making, or are obsessively curious about.

I’ll start: my main interests right now are online social networks.

  • by giantg2 on 1/8/24, 11:16 PM

    I'm most interested in how I can be successful, enjoy my work, or not need to work anymore. I'm tired of sucking at my job (after being a high performer for the first half of my career) and being miserable.

    But I guess in reality I'm interested in technology that I can apply to my own life,m including stuff thats not thought of as "tech". One example would be culturing mushrooms. It is technology, but not the electronics/computers kind. But also things like Flir Lepton projects, long range wifi antenna designs, etc.

  • by mikewarot on 1/10/24, 2:36 AM

    I'm scratching an itch that's been plaguing me since the 1990s... an idea for a computing fabric that deliberately wastes transistors in exchange for performance. I have a hunch it might lead to incredibly cheap Petaflops. Along the way to finding out if it's just a silly idea, or useful, I'm learning VHDL and hope to get a chip made so I can measure the performance in terms of compute/joule and compute/watt. I've written about it here quite a bit, I call it a BitGrid. I give it a 50/50 chance.

    Also, I've been watching fringe science as a hobby for a while. I'm hopeful that the Barry-1 satellite[1] which is currently in orbit (and slowly falling towards earth), will soon turn on it's thruster (which is purely electric, no reaction mass/propellant) and shift itself into a 100 Km higher orbit using only solar power and broken laws of physics. I give it a 50/50 chance.

    Lastly, I'm just trying to push, ever so persistently, the idea of capability based security into the world. It makes me so damned sad that we've had decades to fix computer security, and know exactly how to do it, but we keep just applying band-aids instead of fixing it. It's like if the power grid never adopted circuit breakers or fuses. - I give that a 5% chance of happening. 8(

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    [1] https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/graph-orbit-data.php?CA...

    (Note, this is a public source, not affiliated with the owners of the satellite in question, it's quite handy for other satellites as well)

  • by pantantrant on 1/8/24, 9:57 PM

    Whatever new thing is distracting me.

  • by Faint_Black on 1/9/24, 11:56 PM

    C++, spent so much time using this language yet i feel like i barely scratched the surface of its potential.

  • by atomicnature on 1/9/24, 6:38 AM

    Human organization (theory & practice)

  • by atleastoptimal on 1/8/24, 10:38 PM

    AI