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Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

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Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#21

Post by CuriouslyC »

0xdeaddead wrote: post #16
CuriouslyC wrote: post #11

The way I see it, the biggest opportunities for the foreseeable future are VR and tools that leverage deep learning to enable unskilled people to produce high quality creative works (e.g. neural drawing, neural music making, neural writing, etc). Doing a side project in either of these areas is more likely to lead to something revolutionary, and even if you fail your job prospects will be greatly improved. On the oth…

This is one of the hype filled and most valley answers I've ever read. You even used the word "revolutionary". Jony is that you?

What were you trying to accomplish with this comment?

Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#22

Post by 0xdeaddead »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #21
0xdeaddead wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the hype filled and most valley answers I've ever read. You even used the word "revolutionary". Jony is that you?

What were you trying to accomplish with this comment?

Put some reality into the conversation.

The OP's opening sentence asked for a project to make $500-$1000, not ride a hype wave.

Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#23

Post by mindcrime »

One idea you could try is this: take an "old" idea and "remix" it, improve it, etc. The book Rethink[1] has a lot on this. And it makes sense.. in computing, things really tend to go in cycles and what's old is often new again. Take Neural Networks for example. This is an idea that's so old it's practically archaic. But add some new ideas on training (backprop, discovered in the 80's or so), along with hardware advances due to Moore's Law and the advent of the GPU, as well as the surge in data volumes enabled by the Internet, always-connected devices and advances in storage technology, and BOOM... you have the hottest topic in the world today.

So go back in time... read old computing books, read old issues of InfoWorld or Network Computing from the 90's or early 2000's, or find some old issues of Byte magazine on Ebay, and mine through those... and find an old idea that can be combined with some new advances or new technologies, to make something that's mondo radical.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Rethink-Surprising-History-New-Ideas/...

Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#24

Post by mindcrime »

fspear wrote: post #18
CuriouslyC wrote: post #11

The way I see it, the biggest opportunities for the foreseeable future are VR and tools that leverage deep learning to enable unskilled people to produce high quality creative works (e.g. neural drawing, neural music making, neural writing, etc). Doing a side project in either of these areas is more likely to lead to something revolutionary, and even if you fail your job prospects will be greatly improved. On the oth…

I agree however, creating something revolutionary in these spaces takes more than just fiddling with a couple of tensorflow tutorials or udacity courses. For instance I've always wanted to have a music recommendation engine/app that instead of using collaborative filtering uses some kind of machine learning or deep learning algorithm(s) to identify lyric sentiment, complexity and melodic/rhythmic patterns to recommen…

Offhand, I would have thought that would be limited more to knowledge about audio signal processing and what-not, than the actual machine learning itself. I mean, yeah, you can get REALLY deep in the weeds with neural networks, but you can do an awful lot without doing so. If you ever feel like writing about this, I think a lot of people might find value in a blog post from you about what challenges you ran into and what you found out so far. I know I would.

Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#25

Post by mindcrime »

0xdeaddead wrote: post #13

Don't create anything new, find a product that people use (and pay for) but are not 100% satisfied with, and make it better.

One thing to try is do a google search for "$PRODUCT_NAME sucks". Find the forums and blogs where people rant about the problems with that product, and then use those ideas in your own thing.

For example:

https://www.google.com/search?num=30&q="sharepoint+sucks"

Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#26

Post by b_emery »

"Live in the future, then build what's missing."

http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Looks of good meta advice there. Also, read a lot from adjacent fields. I do this in research and the cross pollination is a big source of ideas. See the book "Where good ideas come from" for details.

Based on watching my kids, I'm convinced that we're input-output machines. If I give them a bunch of ideas (without them realizing it) I see these ideas come back later, distorted and recombined with other ideas in their play. I think that basic mechanism of creativity is inherent - and also very useful.

Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#27

Post by JohnnySpaghetti »

fspear wrote: post #15

I'm stuck in the same spot. I agree that a lot of niches are already quite saturated. Are you open to collaborate? Maybe if we put our heads together we could think of something.

That would be awesome :) How do I contact you?

Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#29

Post by CuriouslyC »

0xdeaddead wrote: post #22
CuriouslyC wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were you trying to accomplish with this comment?

Put some reality into the conversation. The OP's opening sentence asked for a project to make $500-$1000, not ride a hype wave.

Do you think that is a good reason to be snarky?

The title of the OP's post wasn't "I need a way to make some quick extra cash". Most people I know work on side projects more for learning and career development. I gave an answer based on that prior belief.

Sometimes, hype exists because things are genuinely cool. I feel this is the case for VR and smart tools. On the other hand, I'd be inclined to agree with you about chat bots, for instance.

Re: Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

#30

Post by theoh »

mindcrime wrote: post #23

One idea you could try is this: take an "old" idea and "remix" it, improve it, etc. The book Rethink [1] has a lot on this. And it makes sense.. in computing, things really tend to go in cycles and what's old is often new again. Take Neural Networks for example. This is an idea that's so old it's practically archaic. But add some new ideas on training (backprop, discovered in the 80's or so), along with hardware adva…

I'm sure I've read a jokey guide to succeeding as a CS grad student that tells you to do exactly this, but tongue-in-cheek. Maybe someone else will recall the URL.
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