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Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#341

Post by jes5199 »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #192
tito wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of energy will go near zero. The marginal cost of an electron captured with solar is free. Solar is starting to beat fossil fuel installations already, below $0.05 USD per kWh. This was not predicted even by the biggest cheerleaders even 10 years ago: "In 2017, the solar industry achieved SunShot’s original 2020 cost target of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar power three year…

Okay, how about the copper that transports that electron to somewhere it can do useful work? How about the 1800C furnace that melts sand into the silicon for the solar panel? How about the diesel fuel that the massive mining trucks used to haul the copper ore out of the mine are fueled with (these things are heavy and get something like 8 gallons to the mile (not a typo) good luck running them on batteries)? Those th…

even if there were tens or even hundreds of UNIVAC installations, who’s going to run the telegraph lines for all the teletype terminals this would require??

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#342

Post by codesushi42 »

hiram112 wrote: post #319
Enginerrrd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man this is me. Knowing a bit of coding and machine learning in engineering has been such a boon over my career in civil/environmental engineering. But it's like math, if you know it well enough, you'll find ways to use it everywhere. If you don't, you won't. You have to be the type of person that likes to innovate. Its hard to sell to prospective employers, but its great for demonstrating value once you are with an…

How much machine learning have you been able to pick up and did you learn formally (in school) or just on your own? It's a broad subject, so where would you recommend one begin, assuming I have a decent undergrad math background? Thanks!

Study stats and convex optimization. If you understand logistic regression and MLE, you're mostly there.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#343

Post by dhruvkar »

peterangular wrote: post #282
gota wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have anything going on related to process mining?

YES. I didn't even know that nomenclature before you said it... I employ an ELK and TIG stack for a huge part of what I do. You can very much say that I "process mine" my own process. I also have a ton of regex capability that's often employed to rip through large datasets to extract key data. Lots of times I have to measure certain things before I begin to fix a problem, and the above stated tooling (typically ran i…

Man.. I wish I knew what you know.

These are the things I need at my current role, and I'm woefully overwhelmed. Tying together processes spread out over multiple systems is a large portion of my role.

I'm having trouble tracking all the various scripts running on different versions of my own packages, and reacting to breaking changes on 3rd party sites. I definitely need a dashboard to tie all these automations together.

I'd love to chat if you're up for it.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#344

Post by Geee »

windsurfer wrote: post #97
mathewsanders wrote: post #22

I think AR has potential to be the most impactful new type of technology, but I don’t have any idea if wide adoption is 1 year away, or 10 years away (or more). At the moment most of the focus is around overlaying some virtual world in the real world, but I think that technologies like U1 chip being added to new Apple devices could be really interesting to allow objects in the physical world to better mesh with digit…

It's a fun tech, but I fail to see any real world value that can be derived from it. I have worked on AR stuff before and found some niche uses, but I am having real trouble finding general commercial applications apart from fun and games.

AR will replace every display in the world. There's nothing special about it, it's just a better form-factor.

You would probably use the same kind of applications, but you'll be able to have 1000 windows open at the same time, located all around your room, easily accessible (just turn your head).

All those gimmicky 'AR applications' are gimmicks. The real use case is replacing our tiny displays.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#345

Post by dcolkitt »

screye wrote: post #273

ML for healthcare. The whole industry is so far behind everything else, it is not even funny. Problem is, Just like Airbnb or Uber, the biggest road blocks are not technological, they are organizational and political. It is entirely possible, we might need some major privacy / security related leaps in ML to convince the medical industry to adopt it fully. ML in movies and rendering. Deep Fakes is just an amateur's t…

Healthcare tech has been the "next big area" for the past 40 years. Maybe this time is different, but historically it never pans out. Healthcare's an extremely regulated, extremely change-averse area of the economy where entrenched insiders will always close ranks to protect their own.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#347

Post by rhlsthrm »

windsurfer wrote: post #97
mathewsanders wrote: post #22

I think AR has potential to be the most impactful new type of technology, but I don’t have any idea if wide adoption is 1 year away, or 10 years away (or more). At the moment most of the focus is around overlaying some virtual world in the real world, but I think that technologies like U1 chip being added to new Apple devices could be really interesting to allow objects in the physical world to better mesh with digit…

It's a fun tech, but I fail to see any real world value that can be derived from it. I have worked on AR stuff before and found some niche uses, but I am having real trouble finding general commercial applications apart from fun and games.

Imagine your entire workstation as a full AR display that can be any size you want on your desk.

AR is literally real life holograms, there's amazing amounts of applications. Everything you do on your smartphone today can be blown up into AR applications.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#348

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

john_moscow wrote: post #327
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #276

Crypto. And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that just goes "up and to the right". I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy, permissionless, autonomous machines. MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many others collectively are very likely to chan…

Up until an average person stops treating crypto as a magical get-rich-quick possibility, I would rather suggest to stay away from it. Currently, even if you come up with something truly remarkable and solving an actual problem, many people will still treat it like yet another ponzicoin.

You're absolutely correct, and that's what makes it a great area of study.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#349

Post by peterangular »

virgilp wrote: post #307
peterangular wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's finicky technology that is hard to make sustainable This 100 times over. The only way I've been able to make it work is being one heck of a generalist. I've found that training on what I do is near-impossible and I don't even know if I could scale a real company in this beyond myself.

Well, UiPath's valuation is currently 7B... But yeah. They have an "academy" for training RPA developers, forums/ social presence, big sales teams, a process for developing automation, an "automation framework", a marketplace for automation activities, etc.... all these are stuff outside of the core software (robot/"activity executor", orchestrator, and studio for designing said activities). Maintaining & expanding t…

Right on! Yeah - I would love to learn more about what the bigger guys are doing.

Everything you're saying is 100% something I deal with on a day-to-day basis, and ongoing support is a huge struggle to workout with the companies I've implemented software at.

Looking at your product offerings made me chuckle - I definitely have versions of a lot of what you do! My robots are called workers, my orchestrator is called a broker, etc etc ha. Lemme know if you guys are ever looking for a remote automation engineer w/tons of cloud experience ;)

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#350

Post by radcon »

peterangular wrote: post #261
derefr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a possibility of ...automating, this kind of automating? I understand that, like regular application programming, a lot of this kind of automation comes down to requirements-gathering and formal specification of workflow. But, in theory, could there be some kind of sufficiently-advanced software wizard that does most of your job? Maybe by monitoring entry-level employees' interactions with the software-to-be…

> Is there a possibility of ...automating, this kind of automating? Nah - I'm going to be cocky for a second so please take this with a grain of salt... Automation is the only job that's safe from automation ;) That being said, it's prime for development of tools... I've been working on taking a lot of my workflow out of Charles Proxy and moving it onto a more "man-in-the middle" model that can replay certain web tra…

They're already automating the exact job you've been describing:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/uipath-rpa-series-d/?rende...

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