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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?

#421

Post by rkwasny »

peterangular wrote: post #38

I work in this field so I'm incredibly biased: automated business solutions that cut entry-level data employees out of the equation. You save TONS on the bottom line, and cut out human-driven process that is error prone and difficult to manage. I'm talking about things beyond "API-driven dev", more in the realms of Puppeteer, Microsoft Office automation, screen-scraping (mouse/keyboard), etc. I make API's out of thin…

That's exactly what we do, with a nice interface business people can use, email me at rafal@evolution.ai if you want a demo.

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

#422

Post by simplify »

pgt wrote: post #60

Differential Dataflow is going to cause a huge upset in several high value areas, including incremental compilation, database view maintenance, UI view maintenance (subsumes React), and differential database streaming: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow

What's the main difference between this and event sourcing?

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

#424

Post by abledon »

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…

so.... elon musk?

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

#425

Post by aj7 »

Somebody finish automating the closing papers for real estate deals. Yes, you can sign contracts on line. Yes, it’s probably a very good idea to have the final papers notarized and witnessed in-person by neutral humans. What I’m after is the $35 after-the-fact FedEx charge for overnight delivery of the NOW-VALID papers. That’s your low hanging fruit target.

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

#426

Post by bbleciel »

peterangular wrote: post #38

I work in this field so I'm incredibly biased: automated business solutions that cut entry-level data employees out of the equation. You save TONS on the bottom line, and cut out human-driven process that is error prone and difficult to manage. I'm talking about things beyond "API-driven dev", more in the realms of Puppeteer, Microsoft Office automation, screen-scraping (mouse/keyboard), etc. I make API's out of thin…

I seriously want to begin working in this field as a consultant/architect/developer. So much so that I've registered the LLC, opened a bank account, and even had a few clients I built web apps for. However, I'm not exactly sure how to pivot to business solutions/productivity tools though. Do you usually approach companies where you expect to have a solution for them? Or do you find clients through advertising? Do they find you? Any advice is appreciated!

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

#427

Post by crispinb »

nostrademons wrote: post #369
gnode wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pessimistic about governments coming together and coordinating an expensive effort to avert climate change. I also think the world is on a course to become increasingly divided and rivalrous, such that collaboration would be less likely, and nations less willing to compromise on their economic competitiveness. I think if there is an effort made (which there will probably have to be), it'll be something cheap and…

It won't be governments that avert climate change, it'll be individuals acting in their own self-interest. This might be violent (everybody kills their neighbors, reducing the population and hence greenhouse emissions), or it might be economic (as fossil fuel prices rise, renewables become increasingly price-competitive, such that some people end up making a lot of money electrifying the world). Personally I'm rootin…

> Personally I'm rooting for the economic solution.

An impossibility because so called 'economic growth' (which is no more than global entropy increase) is coming to an end as degraded ecosystems worldwide fall into collapse. Climate change is only the most salient of literally thousands of distributed causes of this, but the overview is: the physical loans taken out on our global systems over the past two centuries are coming to maturity. It's payback time.

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

#428

Post by Miraste »

burntoutfire wrote: post #331
hokumguru wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already a thing. In the upcoming video game Death Stranding, Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn both play physical roles without having taken part in the motion-capture or voice acting. They gave the rights for their likenesses to be used without actually taking part.

There's an ocean of quality difference between a video game and a (non-CGI) movie.

There really isn't, any more. A few more polys in the models and a few more rays in the path tracing aren't a big difference. Check out what Blender can do with Eevee, which is more-or-less a realtime engine. Better physics simulations are still a big differentiator, but that doesn't matter for characters. The only reason rendered likenesses don't appear in films more (because they already do, look at Peter Cushing) is that they're still expensive and take a lot of manual work, and both of those factors are decreasing rapidly.

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

#429

Post by throwaway40324 »

paulvorobyev wrote: post #155
windsurfer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are tons of applications! The thesis behind AR is that your phone (or some other device) can be a passport to accessing a digital world around you. Some ideas, in no particular order: * Tourism of any kind (think AR museum or city tours) * Location and event discovery -- as of late there have been quite a few startups trying to capitalize on giving people things to do , but none successful. This is definitely o…

Yep, for tourism. Look at some of the examples this small company is/has worked on: gamifi.co

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

#430

Post by pyrale »

safog wrote: post #372
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…

One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon. It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each pr…

The answer is pretty simple: carbon fuels release energy when burned. This means an organism reversing the operation needs to absorb energy (in the case of photosynthesis, solar energy). Sunlight is not that energy-dense, and concentrating that energy too much would burn the plant anyway.
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