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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?

#461

Post by crispinb »

antocv wrote: post #451
crispinb wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You wish. Just like the early socialists of 19th century wished. Many of his suggestions are outright harmful, like pulling water out of air. Same thinking got us in this mess in the first place, hey just pull out oil of the ground and burn it.

Oh yes and no I guess. A certain Schadenfreude would ensue for sure. But as I'm pretty sure it's too late to save our civilisation now, it'll be a lot of chaos & suffering for not much.

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

#464

Post by TearsInTheRain »

crispinb wrote: post #380
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…

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.

Is climate change really tied to wealth inequality or are you just looking for a way to rationalize your blood lust?

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

#465

Post by Rooster61 »

surbekznrlsnt wrote: post #360
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…

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?

Automation Engineer. It's a broad term, but does carry the idea that you know how to program, and do so in a way that automates normally manual processes. Also doesn't hurt to list yourself on a resume as an Automation/Software Engineer. That gets the idea across that you also understand how software is written, not just how code is cranked out.

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

#466

Post by ethbro »

olivermarks wrote: post #418
ethbro wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Never use an RPA tool that doesn't integrate with third-party SCM. If they tried to roll their own, that's a bad sign - Never use an RPA tool that doesn't generate plaintext-serialized scripts. You're going to have a bad time if they're binary locked - Never choose an RPA tool that's been around fewer than 3 years. It's probably just a shim on top of MS automation libs, and can't handle the really gnarly stuff - Ne…

Perfect. Also, set project start boundaries to ensure realistic goals and expectations. Under promise and possibly over deliver - all too often data and information discovery reveals unforeseen problems and opportunities

I've got a story about how we were spec'd at handling 50% of incoming workload, hit 60% on the first iteration, customer got so excited that we pushed, and project ended up being canned when we failed to hit the (then) final 95% target.

Taught me a big lesson about realistic messaging and never up-negotiating expectations.

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

#467

Post by enos_feedler »

shafyy wrote: post #398
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.

I run a VR startup so I'm biased, but: AR and VR. Different side of the same coin. But first (next 5-10 years) VR will be more mainstream, because it's easier to solve from a technological point of view.

In what sense are they different sides of the same coin? I see AR as very practical and VR not so much. I look at everyone walking down the street trying to simultaneous look down at their phone and do other things (walk, drive, etc) and see a huge TAM for AR. Meanwhile, in 1993 I went to the local fairground in my small town and experienced VR-enabled multiplayer game of Doom. It had much lower fidelity than VR today, but if the market really wanted it, there would have been a constant pull for their technology to improve. Instead it's just been fits and starts for the past 26 years since I experienced that demo. Big tech has pumped huge money into VR the last 5 years and the uptake is just not happening.

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

#468

Post by munchbunny »

hectorr1 wrote: post #80

Usable cryptography. iPhone-level UX for private key management. People care about privacy, and more are willing to pay for it. There is a massive opportunity for direct monetization through cryptocurrency users, and the things you could build when this problem is solved...

As someone who uses cryptography daily (and not for crypto currency), I would kill for that.

The problem is that it's really hard to build good abstractions. You can't get the math to do things that the math doesn't do, so the complexity comes from (1) preventing people from mathematically shooting themselves in the foot, and (2) twisting the math into something that approximates real world problems.

We all want to be able to say "here is cryptographic magic that tells you that this data is trustworthy", but trust is fundamentally a human problem. Cryptography ultimately allows humans to make and move around declarations of fact, but how you glue those facts together is messy because humans are kind of bad at saying what they mean and meaning what they say.

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

#469

Post by fingerlocks »

defen wrote: post #410
fingerlocks wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mul…

My source was this pdf: https://www.bluemaumau.org/sites/default/files/MCD%202013%20...

Very possible I skimmed and may have read it incorrectly, accounting is not my thing. As I have now reached the maximum amount of effort I'm willing to put into a forum comment, I'm not going to dig any further. But if you can tease out better information, I'd be curious to know.

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

#470

Post by dilippkumar »

I listened to Robert Green's talk at Google recently [0]

He proposes the following idea:

    - Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation" 

    - Generations follow a cycle:
       - There is a rebellious generation
       - The next generation is trying to keep the ideals of the rebellious generation alive
       - The third generation is very conservative
       - The fourth generation is a "crisis" generation that will eventually lead to a rebellion in the next generation and the cycle continues.

    - Millennials are the crisis generation today
It's a very interesting theory - and provides a new way to think about what comes next. Looking back, the last generation that appears to be a "rebellious" generation were the hippies centered around 1969. I can't think of any giants that started in that era. Instead, that era felt like it produced most of the core technologies that drove big economic changes in the next several decades.

History doesn't really repeat, but it sometimes rhymes with itself. If the next generation is rebellious - and they end up being like the last rebellious generation - we are looking at 22 years of deep technological developments that will lead to the next big things in two generations from now.

Honestly - this is just an interesting way to think about the world but I wouldn't act upon it. If I was forced to place a bet on who (not what) will make it big in the next 25 years, I'd put $5 (and not a cent more) on somebody who is doing a PhD today and will get to work on deep research for a few decades.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcaVhMt71qE

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