Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

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…

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Never attribute to a changing world that which can be attributed to inflation.

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

#472

Post by thorwasdfasdf » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

jliptzin wrote: post #144

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 could use help automating a simple task for one of my businesses involving submitting refund requests to USPS. Please get in touch if you're looking for new clients!

message sent.

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

#473

Post by jason0597 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

kofejnik wrote: post #311

starpilot wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very common when you do tech work in a non-tech industry. Comes up a lot with coding-inclined mechanical engineers. Zed Shaw's words are really true: > Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession. People who can code in th…

strongly disagree 1. you _won't_ be happier running a fast food joint - the work is gruelling, and it's so easy to go bust. And you won't bring home six figures 2a. people who _actually_ can code are scarce, even in the tech industry. Source: conducted over 300 interviews 2b. quite logically, your coding skill will be most appreciated and compensated at a Big Tech Co, not at a government department where they will be…

>2a. people who _actually_ can code are scarce, even in the tech industry. Source: conducted over 300 interviews

As a young person with an interest in software programming (currently studying chemical engineering but still write C code now and then), what do you look for when trying to find out people who can _actually_ code?

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

#474

Post by alexhutcheson » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

BubRoss wrote: post #397

alexhutcheson wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone aware of a good resource to learn VBA? All the resources I've seen online are either tutorials for very quick hacks, or assume you have 0 programming knowledge. I would love a "VBA for people who are familiar with at least one other programming language".

You don't have to learn VBA to do this, you can just include windows.h in C and call the SendKeys function.

I'm interested in scripting stuff in Excel.

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

#475

Post by crispinb » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #464

crispinb wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discontent amongst world populations is growing, with wildfire riots increasingly breaking out. The root cause of this discontent is the gross inequality encouraged by (amongst other forces) contrepreneur culture. The near-term world is not going to be hospitable to the uber-rich, fortunately in my view. The world's masses are coming after them.

Is climate change really tied to wealth inequality or are you just looking for a way to rationalize your blood lust?

Well it's tied in one direction: poorer populations will suffer for the material benefit of richer ones. My nation is quite explicit about this - our government is on record as being happy for Pacific nations to lose their land as long as Australia continues 'economic growth'. And we'll even allow them to labour for us in exchange! The other direction is conceivable: more equal populations may be less liable to vanity status purchases, and less resistant to equitably-distributed change. Perhaps hard to prove either way.

Anyway, that's not much to do with my comment which was merely noting that disaster capitalists trying to make trillions from climate change may meet mass resistance.

As for my alleged blood lust - well I doubt the discontent will result in many billionaires being torn limb from limb. Though as many seem to think paying their fair share of tax would be pretty much equivalent, why not?

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

#476

Post by monkeydreams » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

revax wrote: post #419

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…

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.

I have never understood what people are trying to argue when they make this point. It would be like an oncologist arguing against surgery that would inhibit a tumour on the basis that it wouldn't eradicate it.

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

#477

Post by jason0597 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

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…

>Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air.

I thought this story was put to bed a long time ago? [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw

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

#478

Post by johnsimer » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

julienreszka wrote: post #194

Don't ask this question here, people here who know what is promising won't tell you because that's too valuable information. Ask your children if you have any. They will be able to tell you.

People usually dont steal ideas, but they will copycat you once you have a profitable business, i.e. once you've executed the risk away

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

#479

Post by momentmaker » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

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…

You can think of it like Trust as a Service (Taas).

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

#480

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:30 PM UTC

applecrazy wrote: post #377

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…

> ML for healthcare. I'm kind of apprehensive about this advancement. There's many ways to mess this up, from intentional dataset poisoning (to encourage patients to get unnecessary procedure) to just terrible errors made with just a shift in data capture methodology. This paper has a lot of detail on how such systems can fail ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.05296.pdf ).

People are already encouraged to get procedures or medications they don't need. A data set isn't going to change that.