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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?

#401

Post by carapace »

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…

Ages ago Glyph (he of Twisted Python fame) said we would get to the point where we can e.g. use the Indiana Jones movies to build a computer model of Indiana Jones and make more movies...

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

#402

Post by peterangular »

dhruvkar wrote: post #343
peterangular wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. I didn't even know that nomenclature before you said it... I employ an ELK and TIG stack for a huge part of what I do. You can very much say that I "process mine" my own process. I also have a ton of regex capability that's often employed to rip through large datasets to extract key data. Lots of times I have to measure certain things before I begin to fix a problem, and the above stated tooling (typically ran i…

Man.. I wish I knew what you know. These are the things I need at my current role, and I'm woefully overwhelmed. Tying together processes spread out over multiple systems is a large portion of my role. I'm having trouble tracking all the various scripts running on different versions of my own packages, and reacting to breaking changes on 3rd party sites. I definitely need a dashboard to tie all these automations toge…

Absolutely! Feel free to reach out - you can get to my email address at folkhack.com

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

#404

Post by jakemal »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #348
john_moscow wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're absolutely correct, and that's what makes it a great area of study.

It reminds of the article that was posted yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21315942) that said the biggest disruptors are the technologies that start out looking like toys. An HN commentor mentioned (which I now can't find) that what differentiates actual toys from big technologies that start out looking like toys is the fact that the fad never passes despite looking like a toy. Crypto has seemed like a toy with no practical applications since it's inception but for some reason it's still around. I wonder if that points to eventual significant growth for the field.

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

#405

Post by madamelic »

safog wrote: post #372
tito wrote: 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 pr…

>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.

Jurassic Park Effect.

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. CRISPR is pretty unknown and releasing man-made organism we don't know every little thing about could topple the ecosystem incredibly quickly. Not to mention how incredibly divisive it would be to do so.

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

#406

Post by Delk »

tito wrote: post #104
tabtab wrote: 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...

Too bad that will be offset by desertification and other negative changes elsewhere in the world.

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

#407

Post by gameswithgo »

safog wrote: post #372
tito wrote: 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 pr…

trees have been optimizing that problem for a long time already, and then if you don't bury the tree and prevent decomposition, you don't really solve anything but create a short term buffer.

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

#408

Post by godtoldmetodoit »

dr_ wrote: post #268
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…

"Doctors know that the price of the most effective treatments may not sustain their profession." This is not really a fair assessment. The most cost effective treatments can be self administered. But if you are coming in to see me because of persistent knee pain, more often that not you have already tried tylenol and over the counter nsaids (ibuprofen, etc.), and your pain has been persistent. The next set of treatme…

Telemedicine is pretty cool. I was pretty amazed when I had a pretty nasty rash on my leg, went to my insurance site looking for a nearby doctor, and saw the "talk to a Doctor in 5 minutes option". Filled in some basic info and was talking to a Doctor who prescribed me the appropriate medication all within 30 minutes.

Seems likely it will just be a matter of time until little storefronts pop up in strip malls with various user friendly diagnostic equipment to give the remote Doctor more data to treat more conditions (maybe this already exists)?

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

#409

Post by godtoldmetodoit »

tsmarsh wrote: post #157
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…

I work in Pharma, we're not worried yet. We've done a few trials of nano-fabs, essentially 3D printed labs where you inject the raw materials and drugs pop out the end. They kind of work, but its still a lot of work and would mean consumers getting hands on a bunch of controlled substances. Being able to produce meth in a 'lab' that fits in your hand is not crazy... except you can clearly see how crazy that is.

Ignore the legal aspect of this - if the technology gets good enough and cheap enough people will make their own nano-fabs and damn the laws. People would LOVE to pirate pharmaceuticals. It's an industry just begging for disruption.

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

#410

Post by defen »

fingerlocks wrote: post #296
slowrabbit wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same money running a fast food joint? You're underpaid bro or you know some crazy overpaid fast food managers. People from science based fields are coming to computer science because those other fields lack job opportunities at competitive pay.

McDonald’s franchise owners make $500k to $1 million a year, in average. That’s profit, not revenue. My source is from the McDonald’s franchise disclosure documents. The money blog mentioned in sibling comments claim it’s less.

According to this random quora link: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McDonalds-make-in-a-day the average McDonald's unit in the USA has $2,670,320 in annual sales. 25% - 40% profit margin sounds really high for a restaurant, but I don't know enough about the industry to dispute it. Are you sure those numbers were presented as averages and not the high end of what you could make? Or does the typical owner have multiple locations?
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