HN Explorer

What are you most interested in?

11 points by acidpanda ↗ HN
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.

18 comments

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giantg2
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.

acidpanda
That’s awesome - I had to Google Flir Lepton lol. Really interesting stuff. Definitely feel ya on the not needing to work anymore. Are you doing YC?
giantg2
No. I'm a midlevel dev working a dead-end job at a non-tech company.
jjice
/r/financialindependence and the surrounding financial independence community may be of interest
giantg2
Eh, the biggest problem is having a spouse that wants to spend money on stuff like a big house and fancy cars.
Faint_Black
C++, spent so much time using this language yet i feel like i barely scratched the surface of its potential.
mikewarot
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)