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The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem
There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
Ask HN: Advice for finding an entry-level remote job?
Hi HN,<p>I realize this isn't super on topic but I also feel like this is the best place I know of to ask for this advice, so here goes. I need some entry-level, remote-based work. What should I do? Help desk work seems the most promising / practical, but I haven't been able to find anything yet. The remote jobs I see posted are nearly all for higher-end positions.<p>I live in the poorest region of the United States, but I do the best with what I have. I’ve worked on my family’s farm and done a couple stints at retail beauty supply shops that friends own. I helped open two of those shops. That’s the extent of my non-existent resume. Given a chance to interview, I believe I would do ok. Maybe even exceed expectations for the sort of job I'm looking for.<p>I need to work remotely for family reasons. I have a special-needs sister and I look after my youngest brother. They are what's most important to me, which is why I don't want to relocate. I have another brother who was helping me, but he accepted a job offer far away. Now I am the only relative near who'll be able to care and look over them. I have time for a full-time job, though, and I need a way to support us.<p>I do have a job offer that would require me to move by March 13th. The problem is that it is far from my family, and with my brother gone, I would be leaving them on their own. The job is at is an auto body repair shop paying minimum wage. I would be stressed every day worrying about my family back home. What I want is a way to work that lets me stay at home, fulfill my family responsibilities, and make money to keep things afloat.<p>I am a techie at heart. I’m a Linux/MacOS person, but I easily adapt to other technologies. My first PC was a Compaq Presario that ran Windows 3.1. My father saw the ‘future’ in it, and he hoped I would be part of that future. To use it, you needed to enjoy torture to some extent. Still, it sucked me in. Something about that mysterious DOS prompt promised treasures if only I learned its magic. A few years later, I was dual-booting an ugly Dell machine (Windows 98 SE and Ubuntu). In between that time, my school still had an Apple IIe on which I loved playing Oregon Trail. I bought one a few years back for nostalgic reasons, but I had to leave it behind at my old residence. I miss it a lot. I hope it got a good home.<p>I am currently working through the freeCodeCamp course and intend to pick up Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke soon. I use VS Code and Spacemacs as my editors. I google like a madman. I have fun playing ukulele and guitar, and I’m teaching my youngest brother about the different parts of a Raspberry Pi. Oh, and I love to read. I am a habitual reader. There’s a lot more, but those are the kind of things that interest me.<p>I learn quickly, I am flexible, and due to working in customer service (beauty supply shops) I have a calm and understanding demeanor. I am a friendly person and I am always willing to find a solution, even when a solution seems impossible.<p>I would be grateful for any advice, and I am particularly thankful for dang's / Daniel's time in editing this to be a better Ask HN submission.<p>I can be contacted at AskHNremote2021@gmail.com and I can provide my GitHub as well, which is mostly documentation editing. I have been told I am a competent writer, if that counts for anything.<p>Edit: I know that this is an unusual Ask HN post and I am grateful to anyone who takes the time to read through it. I'm curious how others in my situation managed to find remote work. I feel lost in all of this. To say that this has been a stressful time would be an understatement, but I'm turning to HN in the small chance the right person sees this and can give me suitable advice or point me in the right direction. I have always found comfort in this community, so this is where I've turned. Thank you.
Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August
Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August
Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint
Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it
Supermicro Hack: China Exploited a US Tech Supplier over Years [2021 Follow-Up]
Changes to LastPass Free
Functorio
Many small queries are efficient in SQLite
'New car smell' is the scent of carcinogens
Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online
“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
What I Worked On
What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
Hello HN!<p>I'm Josh, one of the co-founders of Noya (<a href="https://noyalabs.com" rel="nofollow">https://noyalabs.com</a>). Noya is designing a cheaper process to capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere. We do this by retrofitting industrial cooling towers owned and operated by other companies to perform carbon capture. We then sell the captured CO2 to companies that need it, and pay a piece of the proceeds to the companies that own the cooling towers.<p>As the wildfires in California became worse and worse, my co-founder (and roommate at the time) Daniel and I became increasingly concerned that we weren't doing enough to be a part of the solution. The more that climate catastrophes became the norm, the more we became obsessed with one seemingly-simple question:<p>If climate change is caused by having too much CO2 in the sky... can't we just reverse it by yanking CO2 out of the sky?<p>Humans have known how to scrub CO2 out of gas mixtures for almost a century [1]; but, we haven't been able to widely apply this type of tech to scrubbing CO2 from the air because of its high cost. For example, one popular direct air capture project is estimated to capture 1M tons of CO2/year [2], but has an estimated equipment cost of $700M and all-in costs of ~$1.1B [3]. The single largest component of this cost is in the piece of equipment called the air contactor — the big wall of fans you see in the image linked above — which clocks in at $212M by itself. Yet fundamentally, all that air contactors do is put air into contact with something that captures CO2, whether it's an aqueous capture solution or some sort of solid sorbent.<p>These costs felt astronomical to Daniel and I, so we set out with the singular focus to reduce the costs of carbon capture by reducing the costs of the air contactor. But no matter how we thought about it, we couldn’t get around the fact that to capture meaningful amounts of CO2, you need to move massive amounts of air since CO2 is very dilute in the atmosphere (0.04% by volume). Looking at the existing solutions, we began to understand why it makes sense to build something equally massive: so you can go after economies of scale.<p>As Daniel and I were feeling stuck late one night, he got a call from his dad. They started talking about the refrigeration facility Daniel’s dad runs in Venezuela (where Daniel's from), and they started talking about the cooling towers at the facility. Cooling towers move air and water into contact with each other to provide cooling to industrial processes (descriptive video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXaK8_F8dn0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXaK8_F8dn0</a>). As Daniel listened to his dad, Daniel realized that if we could just add the blend of CO2-absorbing chemicals we had been developing into the water his dad’s cooling tower used, we could use it as an air contactor and achieve CO2 capture at the same time the cooling tower was cooling its processes. This eliminates the need to build millions of dollars worth of dedicated equipment to pluck CO2 from the sky.<p>Our cooling-tower-based carbon capture process works as follows: we add our chemical carbon capture blend into a cooling tower's water, we connect the tower to some pieces of downstream processing equipment to regenerate the captured CO2, and then we pressurize the CO2 into cylinders for sale as "reclaimed CO2" to companies that need it. All of this is installed onto a cooling tower that another company already owns and operates. In exchange for letting us install this process on their towers, we will cover the cost of installation, and the companies will get a piece of the revenue generated through the sale of their CO2.<p>We’re well on our way towards making this process a reality. We’ve partnered with a local farm to install our process in their cooling towers, and we've just produced CO2 using our industrial-scale prototype.<p>We're excited for the opportunity to reverse climate change and ensure we have a future on this planet that is good. Please let us know what questions, concerns, or feedback you have about what we're building - I’ll be here all day!<p>[1]: <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5948/1652" rel="nofollow">https://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5948/1652</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2019/10/1-air-contactor.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2019/10/1-a...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118302253" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...</a>