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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?

#161

Post by antupis »

windsurfer wrote: post #93
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.

What value does augmented reality add to anything?

Think about car mechanics seeing what do next if you want to open this specific motor or electrician seeing where cables are in the wall. Or physicians seeing specific information about patients eg how fast is he is breathing, what patient temperature is etc.

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

#163

Post by jacbop »

blhack wrote: post #112

Lonliness, particularly among the elderly.

I volunteer with Little Brothers: Friend of the Elderly in Chicago, and this is a serious problem and getting worse as we see slow decline of social institutions. My grandparent's generation had the VFW, Lions Club, a bowling league, golfing league, their church, volunteering, etc.

I think part of it is economic: they had a much more comfortable retirement than what is possible today, so they had time for all this leisure. And part of it is technology and media, providing a distraction from loneliness.

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

#164

Post by KhoomeiK »

somatic wrote: post #137
rapsey wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Not if the BCI is trained on data produced by users in a natural thinking state.

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

#165

Post by darepublic »

somatic wrote: post #137
rapsey wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I am thinking of the keyboardless typing with wrist bands as an intermediary step. I agree controlling conscious thought is difficult, but you could just key in commands with small impulses of the wrists and it would still be quite a bit more convenient than pulling out the phone

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

#166

Post by mring33621 »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #118
peterangular wrote: post #38

I 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…

One of the most useful programs I made at my last job was an automated letters program. We had a whole slew of standard letters that we'd send out, most of the time requests would go to the typing pool (yes, this was a thing) that were basically "Do letter ABC for client XYZ", where letter ABC was a standard thing that always went to the same recipient. I built a screen in our system that let you tell it to request a…

A whole lot of valuable business software is essentially domain-specific or workflow-specific mail merge.

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

#167

Post by gnode »

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…

I'm pessimistic about governments coming together and coordinating an expensive effort to avert climate change. I also think the world is on a course to become increasingly divided and rivalrous, such that collaboration would be less likely, and nations less willing to compromise on their economic competitiveness.

I think if there is an effort made (which there will probably have to be), it'll be something cheap and dirty, like stratospheric aerosol injection.

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

#169

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

ivarv wrote: post #14

As to your question of promising areas, I see two major opportunities in health that are coming online in the near future: * psychedelics as medicine * gut/microbiome

Psychedlics will be useful but hard to monetize, but lol @ microbiome.

You realize what this is, right? High throughput sequencing + multiplexing makes it cheap as chips to start doing -omics on anything you can write a grant for. So everyone and their mother starts getting funding for doing the most boring possible experiments that are total fishing expeditions. The results: we see ... stuff! Isn't that great!? We've got correlations coming out of every conceivable orifice, must be something interesting there, right!?

It's great for writing shitty headlines, but piss-poor for doing any sort of science. Seriously, try talking to any 'microbiome' expert about microbiology. It's scary!

Here's what will happen; we'll get some minor insights into diet wrt health, a handful of treatments for some specific niche gut issues (e.g. fecal transplant), and some handwavy BS about inflammation that will only be meaningful with more work on good old-fashioned signalling from cell/mol. biology.

Of all the scam-y biotech startups (which is basically redundant), microbiome stuff is by far the worst.

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