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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?

#131

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

pjc50 wrote: post #83
tito wrote: post #53

Climate 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?

You either pay to fix the problem, or you pay treat the symptoms with insurance premiums.

You pay no matter what.

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

#132

Post by _bxg1 »

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #88
_bxg1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 do…

> that money comes from your paycheck first and foremost

Fantastic! I would love to help prevent a global catastrophe.

> if you're going to advocate for a market based solution (and you are, if you're talking about putting money somewhere)

I am not. I'm pointing out that this kind of problem is fundamentally impossible for the market to solve unless enormous, non-profit-seeking organizations (i.e., governments) artificially bridge it into the market via coordinated incentives. That's not the only way to solve it, but it's the only way businesses would have anything to do with a solution.

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

#133

Post by friendlybus »

gabythenerd wrote: post #8

Gaming on the cloud. VR and AR.

Still white elephants after decades. Every few years someone tries to stream games, it doesn't work.

The closest example right this moment is Microsoft's flight sim that'll download world data from bing maps as you fly around. Simply because they are using synthesized petabytes of map data. Guildwars and other mmo's download world data as you are playing to fill out areas you will visit in the future. It still uses a traditional game client and business model. There's a slew of games that run on nearly every bit of hardware. I don't see the advantage cloud gaming brings.

You could stream every mobile game that's existed as low latency is rarely a requirement for those games. Those games are still downloaded to memory and rendered on the client and use a conventional business model.

Vr is getting a valve style game soon that might well be a killer app for it, but the problem of movement remains.

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

#136

Post by wenc »

airstrike wrote: post #81

Autonomous Driving AR / VR Automation generally but particularly in manufacturing 3D printing for manufacturing

3D printing for manufacturing has now been rebranded “additive manufacturing” (kinda a less descriptive term if you ask me — sounds like making glue — but it is what it is)

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

#137

Post by somatic »

rapsey wrote: post #115
windsurfer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What value does augmented reality add to anything?

If you don't need a monitor, you don't need the computer as we know it today. Combine it with a brain computer interface and you throw away the keyboard and mouse as well. Subsequently you also throw away all the OS'es as we know them. AR/VR is a toy today. In the future our computers and mobile phones might look as arcane as an eniac.

I recommend Hegel with Neuralink: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ppGlEiQXrRI

Unless the computer is itself capable of anticipating and satisfying your desires — which, I grant, is possible, but, I would argue, incredibly, incredibly dystopian — you will need to consciously articulate your thoughts in such a way that the computer serves your will. That conscious articulation is the bottleneck. Not the keyboard, not the mouse, and certainly not the typing speed.

This is, of course, assuming that the computer remains the servant rather than becoming the master.

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

#138

Post by neltnerb »

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 possible, but I think that if you enable 22 small worker-owned cooperatives to exist more easily somehow that's a huge karmic return on investment.

Maybe said cooperatives are software companies that work together to do contract work. I think that there are a number of places that try to match up contractors with clients, and places like Gusto work great for employees but I don't think they can handle member distributions (the IRS's term for payments a company makes to an owner versus an employee).

I'm not sure what to do to help the most exactly, but I think this kind of company is going to be increasingly important in the future. Maybe even just like an online forum for people trying to start cooperatives to discuss their common issues.

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

#139

Post by johnmorrison »

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #94
aey wrote: post #28

Crypto! 17% of the worlds GDP is spent on financial services. Software can eat it all.

crypto is fake money, and it will never survive government scrutiny. we need our dollars to be made by governments, not basement dwellers.

All money is fake money, the notion of a currency is a value fiction shared among a group of people.

Most governments are very young, and do not last very long historically. Central banking is a handful of decades old, cryptocurrency is one decade old.

Neither the maximalists nor deniers are right at this point. It remains to be seen when/whether cryptocurrency will replace fiat currency.

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

#140

Post by ghaff »

dlivingston wrote: post #18

I have a hunch that the Next Big Thing (TM) will be augmented reality: though the technology is currently in its infancy, when compelling AR glasses are finally released (Apple is rumored to be released theirs in 2020) I think that it will have a massive impact. AR frameworks are a dime a dozen, but if you're an Apple person look into ARKit + Swift.

One of the big wildcards for widespread consumer use is the social aspect. We can envision what AR might look like in everyday life. What's far less clear to me is the degree to which people will accept AR glasses that are constantly using video and audio to deliver information to the wearer will be accepted. If I know that person I just met has inconspicuously scanned me and looked up all kinds of information that are now being displayed, am I OK with that?
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