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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?

#331

Post by burntoutfire »

hokumguru wrote: post #324
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.

There's an ocean of quality difference between a video game and a (non-CGI) movie.

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

#332

Post by crankylinuxuser »

jiveturkey wrote: post #205
tsmarsh wrote: post #145

Democratising manufacturing. CAD / CAM is still hard. CAM especially. You have to know a great deal about materials and tools, even order of operations to help the computer build efficient tool paths. There is a lot of scope for process improvement and there are commercial opportunities to sell to job shops who would like have their engineers working more on CAD and less on CAM. There is also potential here to make i…

this will never happen. your example isn't very good. you still have to ship the raw materials and -- much worse -- deal with unit volumes of waste.

Uhh.... I've heard the "this can never happen" before.

5 and 6 DoF is tough, but there's tons of improvement everywhere in this realm. And we're talking of major improvement.

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

#333

Post by beatpanda »

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…

> Those things aren't going to zero anytime soon.

Not with that attitude

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

#334

Post by codesushi42 »

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…

I don't buy it.

There are tons of software "engineers" who try to escape fintech for FAANGs or even startups, coming from top tier firms like Goldman and McKinsey.

Likewise, bioinformatics generally pays a lot less than traditional SWE roles.

So what I have seen is the exact opposite in practice: people with minimum coding skills in other fields trying to jump into tech firms.

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

#335

Post by achillesheels »

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…

Years ago I was shared an anecdote of researchers affiliated with Scripps Research were able to predict a cholera outbreak in subsaharan Africa from reports in another country using analytics.

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

#336

Post by Geee »

makeee wrote: post #257

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).

This applies to everything. The idea is that the talent pool for a given job will increase, as jobs become easier and easier. Especially AI will drive down the needed expertise for a given job. E.g. nurses will increasingly be able to do jobs that require doctors today.

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

#337

Post by 1-6 »

Graphical Programming - You have an ever increasing number of people needing to perform computational tasks but lack education in coding. As WYSIWYG/GUI transformed personal computers, the GUI will eventually transform the way we program as well.

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

#339

Post by meheleventyone »

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…

I’m curious to what you think the application will be?

All of those I’ve seen seen so far have been terminally hopeless.

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

#340

Post by yters »

NickM wrote: post #325
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".

Depends where the humans live. Some areas of the world this is great work: good pay and safe work conditions.

Also depends on whether there is a limit to this work. It seems there is plenty to go around given the enormous amount of training data ML needs.

And as ML becomes more widespread the value of this work will increase and pay will go up.

Also, the current paradigm is a simple active learning approach. There may be a large variety of ways humans can contribute at various skill and hence pay levels. E.g. compare the work of original 'computers' to today's enormously well paid software developers. As one example consider the FoldIt protein folding game, which was very successful.

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