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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?

#311

Post by kofejnik »

starpilot wrote: post #203
maxhallinan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find processes that can be automated? I've often thought that there must be a ton of this stuff in various industries where programmers aren't typically embedded.

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…

strongly disagree

1. you _won't_ be happier running a fast food joint - the work is gruelling, and it's so easy to go bust. And you won't bring home six figures

2a. people who _actually_ can code are scarce, even in the tech industry. Source: conducted over 300 interviews

2b. quite logically, your coding skill will be most appreciated and compensated at a Big Tech Co, not at a government department where they will be simply unable to see the difference

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

#312

Post by peterangular »

jcmontx wrote: post #294
peterangular wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My market value is $10-15k/mo USD for just myself (sometimes more if I'm needed in an emergency). If you have a proven track record with a solid reputation you can command that sort of pay without an issue. I also bring a lot of general web development capability to the table, so selling on an easy-to-use interface also does a lot to add to my value. If you think about it - $35-40k for a 2-3 month dev timeline (which…

Solid comment. How do you deal with getting the knowledge of the process out of the people you are trying to leave without a job? That must be rough.

They're entry level positions usually so figuring out their processes is typically not that difficult. Often I will not work directly with them vs. having a big sheet of instructions delivered with a ton of bullet points. I also get a ton of process diagrams as well.

Usually it's better for the business I'm supporting to document their own workflows before it's handed over to me for a lot of common sense reasons.

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

#313

Post by alexhutcheson »

peterangular wrote: post #214
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is anyone aware of a good resource to learn VBA? All the resources I've seen online are either tutorials for very quick hacks, or assume you have 0 programming knowledge. I would love a "VBA for people who are familiar with at least one other programming language".

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

#314

Post by exhilaration »

the-dude wrote: post #154
dhruvkar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I work in a small, physical goods business in the Midwest (~30 employees), and the amount of time spent doing data entry is incredible. Documents (often PDFs, sometimes excel) flow between buyers, shippers, freight forwarders and internally. These documents are often updated. I'm looking into EDI for a solution, but there's so much value to be created from cutting out all this data entry. At least 1-1.5 full ti…

I read about EDI in the early 80s.

The largest companies in the world - Amazon, for example - still actively use EDI.

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

#315

Post by Zaskoda »

Blockchain Gaming: I only saw one other crypto/blockchain comment and I suspect people are avoiding the topic because of the amount of noise from the scene compared to a lack of real world applications. It's that lack of real applications that speaks (for me) about how far out we are from feeling the real impact of any blockchain related solution. However, like so many other technologies, right now is a great time to explore, learn, and evolve the technology through gaming. My gut feeling is that blockchain gaming will do well over the next 3 to 5 years.

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

#316

Post by Balgair »

MiracleUser wrote: post #255
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?

The Talk page on the wiki has some activity from this year, so it may be up to date - ish. There are a few companies that are selling memristors [1], but, as you say, they may not be fully truthful in describing their products. I'd take a look at some of the texts that are for sale [2] to dive deeper, provided you already know a fair bit of EE. If you do not, pick up this book [3] to get a good education. I may not be the best resource on this though. I'd email Dr. Chua directly and just ask him [4] for some resources, or just go through his publications list on it [5]. If you do email him, try for breaks in semesters, as Profs tend to be less busy then. Also, he has had 25 PhD students, so you can reach out to them as well.

[1] https://knowm.org/product/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/memristor/s?k=memristor

[3] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+art+of+electronics&crid=T6LE1...

[4] chua@eecs.berkeley.edu

[5] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~chua/circuitrefs.html

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

#317

Post by john_moscow »

a-priori wrote: post #130
pjc50 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to pay for it?

As one example, imagine that someone invents a process to manufacture gasoline using carbon extracted from the air, at a price that's cost competitive with gasoline extracted from the ground. Any car running on that as fuel would immediately become carbon-neutral, and it could be produced anywhere on the planet. Almost overnight you could make the entire automotive industry carbon neutral (burning this gasoline would…

There is already a process for it and it's called biodiesel [0]. It has its own range of problems and is not as sexy as the electric cars (that depend on rare earth metals for production of batteries with limited recyclability BTW), but could be much more sustainable long-term.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel

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

#318

Post by departure »

Zaskoda wrote: post #315

Blockchain Gaming: I only saw one other crypto/blockchain comment and I suspect people are avoiding the topic because of the amount of noise from the scene compared to a lack of real world applications. It's that lack of real applications that speaks (for me) about how far out we are from feeling the real impact of any blockchain related solution. However, like so many other technologies, right now is a great time to…

Gambling was a big deal when currencies like ethereum came out but the inability for true randomness, without an external oracle, really killed it. IMO.

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

#319

Post by hiram112 »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #243
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…

Man this is me. Knowing a bit of coding and machine learning in engineering has been such a boon over my career in civil/environmental engineering. But it's like math, if you know it well enough, you'll find ways to use it everywhere. If you don't, you won't. You have to be the type of person that likes to innovate. Its hard to sell to prospective employers, but its great for demonstrating value once you are with an…

How much machine learning have you been able to pick up and did you learn formally (in school) or just on your own? It's a broad subject, so where would you recommend one begin, assuming I have a decent undergrad math background? Thanks!

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

#320

Post by crusso »

ghaff wrote: post #140
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 a…

These "privacy vs features" questions of new technologies keep coming up. Over and over, people seem to shrug their shoulders over the privacy violations while they eat up the new features.
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