Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by FloresHernandez » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #228

johnmorrison wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

cryptocurrency will never replace gold-backed fiat currency.

There is no gold-backed fiat currency.

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

#252

Post by eyegor » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

phumbe wrote: post #239

starpilot wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very common when you do tech work in a non-tech industry. Comes up a lot with coding-inclined mechanical engineers. Zed Shaw's words are really true: > Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession. People who can code in th…

Great quote -- surprised I've never seen it before! In my limited experience, it's a mixed bag. Good: you get special treatment/opportunities because of a unique skill set and increased visibility on the end results of what you do. Bad: management doesn't really know what you do between software releases, you're paid the going rate for your industry while SWEs make far more, and in-house software quality standards mi…

Side ish bonus: you're basically prepared to run a one man show or move into niche consulting (much much higher rates). You also get to set the quality standards/procedures going forward, which can be satisfying.

As a tangential bonus, I've accidentally converted my PhD research coworkers to strict git/markdown thanks mostly to typora (windows application). I showed one person what my work flow and version history look like for some internal documentation and now they do the same and convert to word/pdf as a last step. As far as I can tell, no one outside of the math/cs intersection has the patience for latex.

Source: in that boat.

Edit: In regards to market rates, that can be alleviated somewhat in follow up negotiations (6-12 months in or so). It's hard to convince someone what you're worth / what your value proposition is when they're not used to hiring software people. You need to demonstrate your business effect first, since they typically don't have a clear picture of it.

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

#253

Post by draw_down » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

mcrad wrote: post #220

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…

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.

There exist more powerful forces in the world than "middle management".

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

#254

Post by peterangular » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

friendlybus wrote: post #71

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…

Yes I did some of this at an old telecoms job. It was incredibly obvious that an automated system could put 5-10 people out of work depending on the sophistication of the implementation. I started automating my own analysis job and left before spreading it or letting it work without super vision. Definitely a lot of low level knowledge worker jobs can be evaporated.

> telecom

That's the industry I'm currently working on... they're generally regressive and have shot themselves in the foot in regards to tech and ease-of-use for a lot of their solutions.

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

#255

Post by MiracleUser » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #182

Memristors. Thus far, they have not been used very well, mostly due to 'lock in' effects. But their power savings are fairly intense (as compared to current solutions, about a factor of ~10^3 - 10^4). With AI and ML stuff literally heating up, those power savings will become more and more attractive. Eventually, a sea change will occur and memristive based computing will become the dominant one. Personally, I think t…

The wikipedia page seems to imply we still dont know if any memristors physically exist. Your comment implies it's in experimentation, so I am assuming wiki is out of date

I would love to learn more about this topic, do you have any additional information / sources?

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

#256

Post by mattmaroon » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

Whatever area you're interested in. Whatever it is, if you love it enough, it's got promise.

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

#257

Post by makeee » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

Tools that make development 10x easier for the next generation of programmers. There’s many different ways to approach this and there are going to be a number of very successful startups in this space IMHO. Examples: darklang.com, webflow.com, retool.com, modulz.com, divjoy.com (disclaimer: my project).

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

#258

Post by Qasaur » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #228

johnmorrison wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

cryptocurrency will never replace gold-backed fiat currency.

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” - Paul Krugman

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

#259

Post by Waterluvian » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

jl2718 wrote: post #114

I see a huge trend coming in “DIY Medicine”. Doctors, insurers, and the FDA are way too expensive for mere gatekeeping, and technology is developing new treatments and dropping equipment costs an order of magnitude faster than they can respond. For example, I can buy all of the equipment necessary for a PRP injection for less than the cost of a single treatment, and the doctor that does it knows no more about how to…

This got me thinking about ideas for a product that would work internationally vs. just in one country and if that signal means much about the viability of a product.

In terms of work being "promising", wouldn't I want to takle a global problem, not one unique to a specific country?

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

#260

Post by nanomonkey » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #192

tito wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of energy will go near zero. The marginal cost of an electron captured with solar is free. Solar is starting to beat fossil fuel installations already, below $0.05 USD per kWh. This was not predicted even by the biggest cheerleaders even 10 years ago: "In 2017, the solar industry achieved SunShot’s original 2020 cost target of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar power three year…

Okay, how about the copper that transports that electron to somewhere it can do useful work? How about the 1800C furnace that melts sand into the silicon for the solar panel? How about the diesel fuel that the massive mining trucks used to haul the copper ore out of the mine are fueled with (these things are heavy and get something like 8 gallons to the mile (not a typo) good luck running them on batteries)? Those th…

Mining trucks are going electric. They actually make energy when loaded and going down a hill.

https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces...

Furnaces have been run off of solar (parabolic mirrors) for quite some time.