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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?

#411

Post by pacoWebConsult »

radcon wrote: post #350
peterangular wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

To expand upon this, UiPath also announced acquisitions of ProcessGold (https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-acquires-process-gold...) and StepShot (https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-acquires-stepshot-add...) as a step towards bringing the process documentation and automation planning tasks down to the level of understanding that SMEs and BAs have about automation. These tools will be a really great addition to the ecosystem as I (and clearly they) have found the most difficult work in this space to be understanding the client's existing process and planning to automate it.

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

#412

Post by peterangular »

ethbro wrote: post #384
olivermarks wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big challenge with the Blue Prism world is getting the people who will lose their jobs to map the processes Robotic processes will automate. Fiddly, tricky and easy to automate a vast number of errors. Only works once extensively tested and results verified. Ignore analyst and sales hype at your peril.

- Never use an RPA tool that doesn't integrate with third-party SCM. If they tried to roll their own, that's a bad sign - Never use an RPA tool that doesn't generate plaintext-serialized scripts. You're going to have a bad time if they're binary locked - Never choose an RPA tool that's been around fewer than 3 years. It's probably just a shim on top of MS automation libs, and can't handle the really gnarly stuff - Ne…

Everyone listen to this - this is 100% accurate and SUPER applicable. Have reached out via email - thanks for the offer to chat in your other comment =)

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

#414

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

tito wrote: post #53

Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it. Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, us…

> Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it

You start off with a free lunch fallacy.

Open an led bulb sometime. You’ll find a large heat sink, at least one fiberglass circuit board, 30-100 electronics components with their own printing / cases / production footprints, ROHS-exempt parts have heavy metals like lead and mercury, you’ll find metal stampings and plastic coated wire, there will be plastic lenses and injection molded mounts, there will be LEDs themselves of course which have tens of thousands of hours time into their design that come from specialized facilities... all the production and shipping and testing and development that goes into each bulb.

... remember old light bulbs? Glass, a wire, a metal thread.

Remember the argument that LED bulbs will last 10 years? They don’t. Tell me... which one do you think will be better in a landfill?

I still think it’s the right move to go with LED bulbs overall - but I’ve been around the world, I’d like to think I have a sense of scale.

When I see people write “just make it electric” i think of things like but not limited to my bulb example and I’m confident that person doesn’t understand much on making things at scale.

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

#415

Post by SimbaOnSteroids »

ghaff wrote: post #266
SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AR almost has to be Apple, not from a tech perspective, but from "this tech is very creepy, invasive, and visibly so" angle. Apple may be the only company that is simultaneously big enough to make the tech happen and charismatic enough to get us to let down our guard to it. Although that latter one is rapidly diminishing.

That's an interesting angle. Though I'm not sure to what degree the average consumer draws this distinction between Apple and Google. Apple also probably just has about as much brand permission as anyone to create a new category of consumer device and shepherd it through the first couple of versions that will doubtless have shortcomings.

When I say charisma I mean literally being charming, like Google didn't have the tact to role out glass, because glass _looked_ creepy. Apple would have had the tact to know not to. Furthermore I think we're looking at the first couple of pseudo-generations of of Apple AR glasses in the form of the latest iPhones and Apple Watches. Watches are testing the hardware that will be colocated with the UI and the A13 the overpowered chip responsible for doing the more powerful CV functions in like the users pocket.

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

#417

Post by rwmurrayVT »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #385
rwmurrayVT wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely one of the best ways to get into the system.

Can you comment more about this? Curious about how people get into it. Applying for a grant?

https://www.sbir.gov/solicitation-listing/open

This is a list of the current solicitations available. You can navigate around to the different departments. They have a calendar of announcements and due dates.

If you click on the DoD SBIR[0] it brings up the available topics. Each period has different areas of interest. You create a little proposal and then they announce "Phase 1" awards. They usually have different terms, but I think it's typical to get up to 100k for 4 months. After your demo you can apply for Phase 2 which is more money over a longer term, after that you can move to Phase 3, commercialization, etc.

The problem is that you have to work on it "full time" or at least the principal investigator has to work full time. The other problem is that they give you the topics of interest. There are so many over all of the departments. The biggest are definitely HHS and DoD. There are a lot of ML/AI, IT, sensors, etc.

Unfortunately, the current cycle mostly ends tomorrow for DoD.

[0]https://www.sbir.gov/node/1620805

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

#418

Post by olivermarks »

ethbro wrote: post #384
olivermarks wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big challenge with the Blue Prism world is getting the people who will lose their jobs to map the processes Robotic processes will automate. Fiddly, tricky and easy to automate a vast number of errors. Only works once extensively tested and results verified. Ignore analyst and sales hype at your peril.

- Never use an RPA tool that doesn't integrate with third-party SCM. If they tried to roll their own, that's a bad sign - Never use an RPA tool that doesn't generate plaintext-serialized scripts. You're going to have a bad time if they're binary locked - Never choose an RPA tool that's been around fewer than 3 years. It's probably just a shim on top of MS automation libs, and can't handle the really gnarly stuff - Ne…

Perfect. Also, set project start boundaries to ensure realistic goals and expectations. Under promise and possibly over deliver - all too often data and information discovery reveals unforeseen problems and opportunities

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

#419

Post by revax »

tito wrote: post #151
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see that happening. Most of the things you've suggested would require large amounts on energy to produce. I don't see energy getting cheaper over the next 50-100 years. It seems to me that climate change and reduced dependency on fossil fuels we lead to reduced globalization and population reduction.

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…

Does your current price of PV include storage?

Also the PV cells made mainly from China are currently manufactured using coal power plant. But what would be the price of photovoltaics if only renewable energies were used? My guess is it will be much higher.

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

#420

Post by menacingly »

basch wrote: post #232
mring33621 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A whole lot of valuable business software is essentially domain-specific or workflow-specific mail merge.

Which is actually a terrible step backwards when it comes to interchangeability and iteroperability. You have data in a database, you flatten it into a non structured document, send it, and then the other end uses data entry to add it to a database. What should be the realm of EDI/CrystalReports/Blockchain take your pick, instead everyone wants to interchange data in the pretty human readable format, as opposed to ju…

This is sort of like saying it would be a step backward to drop humanoid robots into an office and let them take over tasks. A large part of the problem is that right now, a lot of the interfaces for performing work are optimized for humans, so automation that uses those interfaces is drop-in
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