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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?

#631

Post by JoeAltmaier »

hanniabu wrote: post #628
dilippkumar wrote: post #470

I listened to Robert Green's talk at Google recently [0] He proposes the following idea: - Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation" - Generations follow a cycle: - There is a rebellious generation - The next generation is trying to keep the ideals of the rebellious generation alive - The third generation is very conservative - The fourth generation is a "crisis" generation that will event…

I see this rebellious generation as those paving the way for financial revolution with permissionless and trustless blockchain technologies. They are ignoring suppressive regulation and moving forward building the world they want to see.

I see idealists making all the mistakes that led to the monetary system we have now. They may end up in a different place, but they'll make lots of mistakes and it'll blow up in their faces many times before they're done.

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

#633

Post by james_s_tayler »

genidoi wrote: post #96
maxhallinan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find processes that can be automated? I've often thought that there must be a ton of this stuff in various industries where programmers aren't typically embedded.

Go on forums where people who use a platform/API/SaaS post implicit feature requests Off the top of my mind: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/c/selling-on-amazon/... https://community.ebay.com/t5/Tools-Apps/bd-p/tools-apps-db

MWS is not fun. Trust me. Haha.

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

#634

Post by johnmorrison »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #625
johnmorrison wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General answer: Become a specialist, or drive funding/regulatory pushes towards these new hardware technologies. Figure out what you see as the barriers to their commercialization, then figure out what component of that problem you'd love to work on, and become an expert in that. My biased answer: If you're in the position to spend a lot of time learning and experimenting with new stuff (e.g. a highschool or uni stud…

I love how you say you're working on fission because it's at > If all goes well, I'll be needing people in just about every specialization there. How far along are you in the Oak Ridge guys' elaborately detailed Molten Salt Reactor development program plan from 1974 [1], as far as it's relevant? If parts of it are irrelevant, how significant are the things you have to do that they didn't? [1] https://www.osti.gov/bib…

There are some things that have become irrelevant for now, particularly the need for a stellite alloy. Most of the things we are doing differently from ORNL in our division for thermal MSRs is based on the progress in materials and CAD since the winding down of the ORNL MSRs.

There are a lot of promising mostly mix-able design choices in MSRs that have become apparent in the last few decades, so we are never fully committed to a particular set.

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

#635

Post by ilkan »

8ytecoder wrote: post #226
awinder wrote: post #147

I'm gonna go in a different direction: broadly, solutions that deal with the problems of an aging population: 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients 2. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area) 3. Personnel management for homecare nursing List could go on and on. None of this is especially "trendy" but there's clear demographic reasons to…

A tool for children to remotely manage parents' phones, tablets, routers and (may be) computers would be nice to have. My parents are not very tech savvy and when something goes wrong getting someone to fix it takes forever. If I had remote access I'd do it in just a few minutes.

Same. I got mine a used iphone4 mainly for whatsapp a few years ago and it was hard doing phone support for an 80+ year old. Harder when she can't describe the ux, interfaces aren't standard (back vs cancel vs < vs x), and in modern design few things stand out as tappable/clickable. Remote access would've been fantastic.

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

#636

Post by hm10 »

K0SM0S wrote: post #546
inopinatus wrote: post #507

Communications technology has moved past the ability of human brains to tolerate and mitigate the adverse effects. Every addicting dopamine surge from a Like or Retweet is the evidence; every viral pile-on, every echo-chamber lunatic fringe. Making humanity resilient to the negative externalities of our own technological advancement is essential for the survival of our species. Right now, a vast army of the smartest…

I don't think it's the best way to make money, but this may be the most important topic for our near future as a species . Emphasis: not just civilization(s) but species as a whole, as in rewiring perception, brain functions, social life, freedom of thought. Here's my conundrum: we could design a transparent and 100% user-controlled communication network — basically some open-sourced Twitter / Facebook / Whatsapp / I…

> How do we get 2.5 billion people to move when none has moved already — chicken-and-the-egg problem of “but all my friends...”

By migrating 'groups' over to the new platform, rather than targeting individuals to migrate. Make it easier for your most popular groups or communities on the existing platform to move over to the new network (ex. by sharing a join link in the existing group * ) effectively bringing over the 'network effect' to the new network, rather than relying on individual users to switch one by one.

* Existing platforms might not play well this strategy. I've heard of FB blocking group messages which contain invites to join rival platforms.

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

#637

Post by lumera »

How about visible light based communication systems? With all the regulations around how radiowave spectrum can be used, the much higher spectrum bandwidth offering by visible light seems more promising as 5G, IoT and autonomous driving hardware evolves?

https://youtu.be/UulEFh8yhCg

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

#638

Post by SkyMarshal »

Offline First web and mobile app frameworks. Not as big as social/mobile/local, but a need. Building offlinefirst web/mobile sites/apps is still a big hack.

http://offlinefirst.org/

A few years ago there was a lot of activity around creating web frameworks that made rich UI's possible, like Cappucino, Meteor.js etc.

There may be a similar opportunity now to create a full-featured, polished offline-first framework, and then make an enterprise version and/or get acqui-hired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappuccino_(Application_Develo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(web_framework)

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

#640

Post by radlad »

turk73 wrote: post #624
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important. After more than three decades in corporate life, I have "dropped out," and I'm working on doing stuff that makes me feel good. Being happy is a lot more important to me than toys; but I have a company that provides the kinds of toys I like to play with, anyway. I've been focusing on re-establishing my working engineering cred; mostly by creating a pretty vast portfolio of new, relevant projects. It wi…

I think you're missing a key ingredient--your network of colleagues. I don't think companies care that much about technical skills after a certain level. The way you get work is by having associates who know you and can get you in.

Most of your comments are dead but nothing seems obviously off about them to me. I vouched for this one.
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