Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

701–710 of 947 posts

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

#701

Post by braindead_in »

neltnerb wrote: post #138

Cooperatives. The economy needs to shift away from giant companies with pay ratios of a thousand to one between CEOs and average employees and employees need control over their workplace to move to the next stage of capitalism. Make it easier for collectives to start up businesses that aren't purely focused on profit and instead focused on employees taking ownership of their work. It may not be the biggest profit pos…

Is it possible to have a independent-contractor coop? We are looking to convert into a coop and have run into this legal grey area of contractor vs employee. It looks like coops are only for employees.

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

#702

Post by astrofinch »

brendanmc6 wrote: post #264
jnsaff2 wrote: post #125

The climate emergency has pushed me hard into quite a few areas that have a lot of promise for huge impact, to name a few: - electromobility: concerting bikes, kick-scooters, cars ... this all is much easier than it seems, also has a vibrant open source culture - demand response in electricity grids has quite a few startups (one of which I just joined) that help integrating a lot of renewables in a way that does not…

I studied sustainability related topics for my Bachelor's and Master's degrees, but transitioned to full-time software development. Now I've promised myself I'll try to work exclusively for companies doing something climate positive. I must admit the intersection of sustainability and TypeScript is more narrow than I'd like! Let me know which companies you find. There are some great, mission driven urban and smart-ci…

Drones which plant trees seem pretty exciting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkNdrTZ7CG4

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

#703

Post by Ruthette »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #323
8ytecoder wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My solution to this is loading them up with iOS and macOS devices, enabling iCloud backup, and having them live near an Apple store for hardware issues. They can click on all the shady links they want, but I haven’t had to field tech support in a long time.

Seniors minds are less flexible to change so a consistently exact OS with exact functionality is best even it looks out of date to us. I had to hire someone to exactly recreate my mom's desktop and and find and install her 15 yo apps. This kept her going with searches and email for another five years when otherwise she would just have given up. Also in-home tech people who are very, very patient. I'd happily pay $100/hour not to do that.

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

#704

Post by atombender »

simplify wrote: post #422
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?

Not the OP, but as I understand this project, the idea is that you can represent a pipeline that looks like it's operating on an entire collection of data, but in reality can operate on a delta.

That means that if you have a million items in your input, and you add another million to it, your pipeline only needs to run on one million, even though the output will be two million. In this case, the input is a collection that may be modified at any point, not a linear sequence of "events".

I've designed a similar system to ingest data that comes in the form of snapshots. The pipeline has many discrete steps and starts by splitting up the snapshot (e.g. a big monolithic JSON file) into smaller parts, which gets parses, transformed, split, joined etc. When a modified file comes in, the pipeline only performs actions on modified items; as data trickles through the pipeline, subsequent steps only run if a step modifies an item (relative to current state). It significantly reduces processing.

Pachyderm works on a similar principle, but using files in a virtual file system.

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

#705

Post by rejschaap »

deanCommie wrote: post #687
johnmorrison wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. I don't believe most would agree here. There are a lot of problems humanity faces, and humanity is a lot of different people. Those still living in extreme poverty today probably don't care about our worries of climate disruption. > Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful. Why is this?…

> Those still living in extreme poverty today probably don't care about our worries of climate disruption. Tell that to 100Million people in poverty in Bangladesh that will become climate refugees if the sea level rises in any meaningful way. In the west, sea-side living is a privilege for the richest. And sea level rise is mostly ignorable with the virtue of new seawalls. In the developing world, the most poverty-st…

Also have a look at Zimbabwe where climate change is already seriously compounding existing problems. The poorest are hit the hardest.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/13/health/climate-change-zimbabw...

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

#708

Post by t0astbread »

ncmncm wrote: post #542
johnmorrison wrote: post #171

In the online world, it seems like there are two big things happening right now: - Neural networks / ML (eg GPT-2) Definitely nowhere near its potential for being applied to a wide variety of areas. Find a niche you like and apply there. - Security / Privacy (eg Telegram) Rapidly growing demand pretty much everywhere. Bonus points if you can make your product great for standard users and at the same time hackable/cus…

The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful. Wind, solar power, energy storage still have huge room for improvement. Direct solar or wind -> liquid fuel will be essential to adapting fast. Windmills can drive production of liquid ammonia on farms (needing only air and water inputs), for use d…

It's not like climate change is or should be our only concern. Not doing anything against any of humanity's problems could be considered a harmful waste of time and talent maybe.

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

#709

Post by K0SM0S »

mellosouls wrote: post #697
K0SM0S wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was probably drawing from the Strauss-Howe generational theory[1], which is more than 20 years old now. He (or you) should have credited the original thinkers for these ideas. Their 1997 book "The Fourth Turning" is considered pseudoscience but nonetheless great food for thought, imho. Note that the cycle may sometimes be shorter (3 gens) or longer (5). It's not really a theory, more like empirical observation. Un…

The idea of cycles in social history is as old as the hills. It's possible your claim that he drew from Strauss-Howe is correct, but while they may have packaged the idea in a distinctive way, it has a long history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory

Oh indeed! Thanks for the precision, well worth noting.

The particular arrangement of The Fourth Turning is adamantly specific though (and quite famous in sociological circles, iirc it's where our modern concepts of "millenials" or "gen X" etc. come from); it's hard to mistake it for anything else.

I don't doubt for one second that Greene knows it, or that he'd expect a sophisticated audience (such as Googlers) to know it too — the credit is probably very much implied as soon as you present things this way. Like we don't need to credit someone for E=mc² or a²+b²=c² because it's obvious. Green is notoriously awesome at doing synthesis of a bunch of seminal sources, that's his M.O. — more than original thinking imho, but his delivery is often incredibly worthy of interest.

Fwiw, I'd argue it's extremely easy to take pretty much any social dimension(s) and slap some abstract model on top of it with relevance. I've read countless such accounts, and did it myself in regard to cycles in concentration of political power. Strauss-Howe's model is relatively interesting insofar as it draws upon quite long-term history (some variations / extensions go back to ~1200 iirc, though the core theory was fundamentally applied to the American civilization), which gives it weight.

Source: I studied sociology-anthropology-politics.

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

#710

Post by bnegreve »

kortilla wrote: post #683
ncmncm wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful. Wind, solar power, energy storage still have huge room for improvement. Direct solar or wind -> liquid fuel will be essential to adapting fast. Windmills can drive production of liquid ammonia on farms (needing only air and water inputs), for use d…

> Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035. This is a joke not backed by any scientific consensus or evidence. Maybe some more instability in some countries, but nothing close to the collapse of civilization.

When I see charts showing the temperature raising at exponential rate like this one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...

I find it very hard to deny that something bad is going to happen eventually. Because whatever is the phenomenon that is pushing the temperatures up, I see no reason for it to stop.

So massive disruption in a near future is a reasonable hypothesis, rather than a joke.

Post reply on HN