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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?

#371
A meta-aspect:

- hot areas will attract a lot of producers, so go for the boring areas (who would have guessed analyzing logs would be such an important issue?).

- Consider the essay by Chris Dixon posted here a couple of days ago that these days most big innovations start as "toys". So if you can start with something small and easy to use you may be able to get airborne.

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

#372
post #53

Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it. Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, us…

One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon.

It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each produces and pick Top N and repeat. Of course, this needs thousands of years to run manually because the improvement with each generation would be minimal.

Is the issue that we don't know what gene(s) control photo-synthesis?

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, UiPath's valuation is currently 7B... But yeah. They have an "academy" for training RPA developers, forums/ social presence, big sales teams, a process for developing automation, an "automation framework", a marketplace for automation activities, etc.... all these are stuff outside of the core software (robot/"activity executor", orchestrator, and studio for designing said activities). Maintaining & expanding t…

Right on! Yeah - I would love to learn more about what the bigger guys are doing. Everything you're saying is 100% something I deal with on a day-to-day basis, and ongoing support is a huge struggle to workout with the companies I've implemented software at. Looking at your product offerings made me chuckle - I definitely have versions of a lot of what you do! My robots are called workers, my orchestrator is called a…

If anyone in this thread wants to talk RPA, I'm happy to talk your ear off.

At this point, I've been doing it for... about 7 years?

It's been an interesting ride.

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

#374

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…

I'm living in Ireland and this is what I've wanted to do for years. There are loads of older small to medium businesses with SO many things that can be automated but I don't know how to get into it. I don't even know how to research it. What's the process for getting a client? Cold calling? Partnership with another provider? What is the job title I should search for more information? Automator?

You should look at business operations analyst, UI Path training is on linkedin learning/lynda.com too. I think information management systems too?

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

#375
post #104
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siberia will be the next California ;-)

Wow! Here's a review of Siberia's climate by 2080: "Even under mild climate change, they estimate a five-fold increase in the potential human capacity." https://www.newsweek.com/russia-siberia-habitable-climate-ch...

Except permafrost melts into muskeg which is too expensive to farm or build roads on.

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

#376
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…

Healthcare tech has been the "next big area" for the past 40 years. Maybe this time is different, but historically it never pans out. Healthcare's an extremely regulated, extremely change-averse area of the economy where entrenched insiders will always close ranks to protect their own.

I wouldn't be so sure. My millionaire uncle built his fortune on medical software, and I have a friend who works in the field with a degree just for it (medical technologies).

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

#377
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…

> ML for healthcare.

I'm kind of apprehensive about this advancement. There's many ways to mess this up, from intentional dataset poisoning (to encourage patients to get unnecessary procedure) to just terrible errors made with just a shift in data capture methodology. This paper has a lot of detail on how such systems can fail (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.05296.pdf).

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

#379

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 people who need these things?

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

#380
post #53

Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it. Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, us…

Discontent amongst world populations is growing, with wildfire riots increasingly breaking out. The root cause of this discontent is the gross inequality encouraged by (amongst other forces) contrepreneur culture. The near-term world is not going to be hospitable to the uber-rich, fortunately in my view. The world's masses are coming after them.
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