Some people predict that fixing stuff will become a big business. As resource and energy get more scarce, there will be more incentive to fix existing stuff.
Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
211–220 of 947 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#212I 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…
I was working for a scientific journal. In the peer-review department, they had to use this proprietary software, and we had 2 employees who just mindlessly went through this proprietary software's form day-in, day-out. This form spammed scientists for reviews of science articles for our somewhat-predatory journal (we solicited authors to publish in our journal for a fee)...
First, it was a massive waste of those 2 human's intellect, entering data over and over into a generic form from a proprietary business' website, in order to spam scientists. I started a ruby project to automate out all those processes, just using selenium to enter the data onto the web form for us. Before I could get very far, I got a huge promotion elsewhere and left that under-compensating journal.
It all gave me a depressing vibe though, both the ethics of what we were doing and the waste of time/life that those employees had to endure to do it.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#213Gene editing tech. CRISPR is only the beginning and the payoffs for getting all this right are potentially heroic.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
A whole lot of valuable business software is essentially domain-specific or workflow-specific mail merge.
I've never thought about it that way before, but you're absolutely right. Another "domain-specific mail merge" that I built was a tool to pull summary data out of the client financial records and populate specific fields in some off-the-shelf income tax software. That was a terrible tool to write and maintain. The tax software's import feature didn't actually work correctly. I reached out to the vendor and the respon…
> SendKeys
Holy cow why didn't I know about this 6 months ago =|
VBA is something I have had to reluctantly learn. It's a horrid/ancient language. Sorry if someone gets offended at that but to someone who uses a lot of modern development languages/tools it's just very very difficult with near-zero "nice to haves"... you just end up taking this huge lib of code around with you with functions like "inArray" etc.
> As a program, it was horrible, horrible code. As a useful tool for the business, it was incredible.
That's something that's rough for us engineers but can be hedged with great documentation, both inline and and otherwise =)
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#215I'm gonna go in a different direction: broadly, solutions that deal with the problems of an aging population: 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients 2. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area) 3. Personnel management for homecare nursing List could go on and on. None of this is especially "trendy" but there's clear demographic reasons to…
There are a number of companies already starting on this. One in particular that comes to mind is Reliq Tech, which does remote monitoring for patients. Currently they have pilots with native reserves, where doctors are hundreds of kilometres away from their patients.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#216I 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…
I worked in the Automated Guided Vehicles industry, and so I want to extend your suggestion: any automation that can replace employees.
Those systems are easy to sell with "This system will pay itself back in 2,5 years, taking into account your current labour cost".
Given all the AI/deep learning possibilities, lots can be automated still.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#217* Low-code/No-Code platforms that lets rapid application development by non-tech/citizens.
Gartner has a category after this field called LCAP.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#218Cooperatives. 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 pos…
> 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.
Needs? Citation needed. That's just a simplistic and Marxist view of the world, but not everyone buys into that. Actually, hardly anyone buys into that.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
A little tangential, but I hope the answer to this is a resounding "no", and that adoption is sufficient to make a lot of people really uncomfortable. Perhaps this is naive of me, but I still believe that a great contributor to tolerance of our society for massive dragnet surveillance is that it isn't very visible.
Not tangential at all. On the one hand, I can see AR that's extremely powerful and useful given wearable hardware, sophisticated software, image recognition, connectivity, etc.
On the other hand, that would clearly be a step beyond today's smartphones to, as you suggest, potentially always on video and audio that's constantly communicating with and being analyzed by databases.
By contrast, VR seems to me to be a niche.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#220I 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…
Do you find it difficult to sell the idea of automating the work of "entry-level data employees"? Middle management generally thrives by building kingdom of such minions.