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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?

#321

Post by aswanson »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #193
mring33621 wrote: post #166

Earlier 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…

I abhor VBA as much as any sane person but this sounds so useful.

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

#322

Post by crankylinuxuser »

deadmutex wrote: post #291
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #276

Crypto. And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that just goes "up and to the right". I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy, permissionless, autonomous machines. MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many others collectively are very likely to chan…

I think the people behind "trustlessness" should have chosen a better word. When people that are not familiar with crypto hear trustless, they can associate the solution with the common definition: "not worthy of trust; faithless; unreliable; false". I.e. the solution isn't reliable. I realize that the people behind it are trying to apply the world trustless to the problem they are solving, but that is definitely not…

Yeah I was thinking more "Provable".

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

#323

Post by lotsofpulp »

8ytecoder wrote: post #226
awinder wrote: post #147

I'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…

A tool for children to remotely manage parents' phones, tablets, routers and (may be) computers would be nice to have. My parents are not very tech savvy and when something goes wrong getting someone to fix it takes forever. If I had remote access I'd do it in just a few minutes.

My solution to this is loading them up with iOS and macOS devices, enabling iCloud backup, and having them live near an Apple store for hardware issues.

They can click on all the shady links they want, but I haven’t had to field tech support in a long time.

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

#324

Post by hokumguru »

screye wrote: post #273

ML for healthcare. The whole industry is so far behind everything else, it is not even funny. Problem is, Just like Airbnb or Uber, the biggest road blocks are not technological, they are organizational and political. It is entirely possible, we might need some major privacy / security related leaps in ML to convince the medical industry to adopt it fully. ML in movies and rendering. Deep Fakes is just an amateur's t…

This is already a thing. In the upcoming video game Death Stranding, Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn both play physical roles without having taken part in the motion-capture or voice acting. They gave the rights for their likenesses to be used without actually taking part.

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

#325

Post by NickM »

yters wrote: post #284

Human in the loop machine learning. All the successful big players use it, but pretend it is all ML. Merely making the human explicit and finding the best trade-off between human and algorithm can do wonders for machine learning. Plus it has better optics than "AI WILL EAT YER JORBZ". In this case human in the loop ML inherently creates jobs as an essential element.

Not a bad suggestion, but are the optics really that much better? Definitely gives me a dystopian vibe of "paying humans pennies to help AI automate away what few other jobs they have left to them".

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

#326

Post by peterangular »

julius wrote: post #86
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…

How do you find customers for that? Any job board tricks, maybe?

Networking and knowing people in industries that have a need =)

I've never really done the job board thing so no idea on that.

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

#327

Post by john_moscow »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #276

Crypto. And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that just goes "up and to the right". I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy, permissionless, autonomous machines. MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many others collectively are very likely to chan…

Up until an average person stops treating crypto as a magical get-rich-quick possibility, I would rather suggest to stay away from it. Currently, even if you come up with something truly remarkable and solving an actual problem, many people will still treat it like yet another ponzicoin.

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

#328

Post by afroisalreadyin »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #276

Crypto. And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that just goes "up and to the right". I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy, permissionless, autonomous machines. MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many others collectively are very likely to chan…

This is definitely an area that will get more and more interesting and profitable. It's extremely complicated and "centralized" right now to get things to work with each other in a secure and reliable way. You need to dive into the arcana of authentication mechanisms each with their oddities or complex and difficult to debug subsystems like IAM. An understandable and debuggable solution would be very popular and profitable.

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

#329

Post by peterangular »

jonaldbobson wrote: post #47
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…

Is this similar to RPA (Robotic Process Automation)?

Yep - it's definitely that, although I typically avoid the nomenclature because laypeople think "robotics" which is definitely not what I do!

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

#330

Post by onemoresoop »

zip1234 wrote: post #250
windsurfer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What value does augmented reality add to anything?

Visualizing any change to the exterior of a building or new construction project in the actual location that it will be.

And how many people would need that on a daily basis? This sounds to be a useful but somewhat niche area
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