Autonomous Driving
AR / VR
Automation generally but particularly in manufacturing
3D printing for manufacturing
Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
81–90 of 947 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#82I 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…
Is there a possibility of ...automating, this kind of automating?
I understand that, like regular application programming, a lot of this kind of automation comes down to requirements-gathering and formal specification of workflow.
But, in theory, could there be some kind of sufficiently-advanced software wizard that does most of your job? Maybe by monitoring entry-level employees' interactions with the software-to-be-automated over some period, and using that as a training input to a workflow guesser?
I'm not imagining that you could be cut out of the loop entirely, mind you, but rather that you'd reduce the human-interaction man-weeks part of your job down to a few hours of pairing with a domain expert to clean up the output of workflow-guesser into a final model.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#83Climate 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…
Who's going to pay for it?
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#84ML on the edge.
What's "the edge"?
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#85I 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…
This. I work in a small, physical goods business in the Midwest (~30 employees), and the amount of time spent doing data entry is incredible. Documents (often PDFs, sometimes excel) flow between buyers, shippers, freight forwarders and internally. These documents are often updated. I'm looking into EDI for a solution, but there's so much value to be created from cutting out all this data entry. At least 1-1.5 full ti…
And these industries are so far outside the tech bubble, it's two different worlds.
Facebook and Co. get a bad rap for many things, which I agree with. But I credit these social platforms in speeding up tech adoption rates for the average person, who can now use this knowledge at their job.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#86I 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…
How do you find customers for that? Any job board tricks, maybe?
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#87Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#88Quick control-f tells me no one has said "Environment" or a phrase I'm hoping catches on "Green-tech". There's just no way this doesn't blow up into something big in my mind. Earlier today i was discussing with a biologist friend how there should be a better partnership between the environmental world and the tech world, citing examples of biologists learning to code v's focusing on what they're good at. The environm…
> but i have a feeling that if the climate is changing, eventually it'll start paying very well to attract the people it needs The problem is that it's a tragedy of the commons, so no matter how important it gets, unless governments really start putting money towards it there will continue to be little interest from the private sector.
sequester that attitude, dude.
if "governments really start putting money towards it"... that money comes from your paycheck first and foremost.
if you're going to advocate for a market based solution (and you are, if you're talking about putting money somewhere) then consider the hard work of pricing external costs (those costs to the commons, you're so fond of considering), that governments are truly good at.
we don't need governments spending our money. we need governments to help us coordinate prices for the consequences of our desires, which would otherwise not be priced at all (e.g. dumping billions of tons of pollutants, etc... into the shared environment).
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#89I 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…
Wow, interesting comment. I just started with such a Puppeteer (et al.) project...
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#90In software, I am hopeful for applications of homomorphic encryption. It could solve some privacy issues preventing some classes of software from moving to the Cloud. There have been huge efficiency improvements over the last 10 years, there needs to be even more, probably hardware-assisted.
In general, climate change is the topic of the century, and with it energy generation and storage. I think intermittent renewables (wind and solar) are overvalued today. Nuclear fission has a large role to play (with SMRs for instance), hydrogen as well. Of course if we make fusion work all bets are off.