Smart assistant in some narrow field of knowledge.
Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
101–110 of 947 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#102Real time raytracing
Given slowing growth of computing power, and that ray tracing algorithms are already mature and well studied, I don't think high-sample real-time raytracing will come along for a long time.
Instead, I think de-noising based on machine-learning will be the crucial factor for real-time raytracing, as Nvidia has been showing.
I think a coming advancement will be in dispatching rays based on ML too. That is, economically deciding where to cast rays, based on feedback from the de-noiser.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#103podcasts, virtual reality, deep fake detection, diy internet
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#104Climate 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…
Siberia will be the next California ;-)
Wow! Here's a review of Siberia's climate by 2080: "Even under mild climate change, they estimate a five-fold increase in the potential human capacity."
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-siberia-habitable-climate-ch...
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#105I 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…
sounds like RPA
I was going to say. Many companies are already investing heavily in RPA (Robotic Process Automation) these days. It’s not widely known in tech circles but kind of common knowledge in traditional companies trying to automate tedious workflow tasks.
When I first saw it, I thought: this looks like a glorified Autohotkey or Automator. But companies like UiPath are doing very well selling this type of automation software.
It sounds mundane but for a company with lots of entry level staff, the paybacks are appreciable.
Coupled with cloud based OCR as a service offerings etc. a lot of data entry tasks can be automated.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#106Real time raytracing
This is up-and-coming, but so many people are working on making graphics shinier, it's a very crowded space.
> This is up-and-coming
Real-time raytracing is usable in games today. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-t...
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#107Climate 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?
likely individuals, not governments. We bought our way into this problem.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you missed the train friend.
Crypto is the internet in 1996, and you are telling me I missed the train because SUN Microsystems is going to be the first trillion dollar company.
Crypto is not the internet in 1996. It's a scam. The internet never was. "Crypto is the early internet" is such a lame over-repeated phrase by crypto enthusiasts. Doesn't make it correct in any way.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#109I 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…
Agreed, there is definitely a need for 'smart' automation. There are a lot of tools out there which work however, finding the right tool for the right job is difficult. Also, I think its extremely difficult to get the automation right in 100% of the cases. False positives (even 1%) could be extremely dangerous in cases. Hence, I think there is a huge market for 'smart' automation tools, people who can build them and also for people who can use them efficiently.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#110ML on the edge.
What's "the edge"?
Edge might mean leaf-level IoT devices. Plenty are smart enough to do their own trending or anomaly detection (ie ML), for example, and only report to the cloud the results of that.
So you have edge, cloud, and you might also ponder the "fog", where there's an intermediate aggregation layer. Think leaf devices in some building (edge) with some medium smarts done on prem (fog) before clouding it.