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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?

#481

Post by Uptrenda »

Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for: but I think CRISPR-Cas9 seems like the most exciting technology probably in all of science. It's a system that can be used to literally change the DNA of living creatures, and on top of that it's highly accessible. Think of the hacker culture today and now imagine the same rate of change for biological engineering.

We'll have massive libraries of re-usable "components" for interesting DNA-sequences. People will slowly slice together more complicated features, and freely trade organic components with each other via post. At some point in the future electronics will catch up to bioengineering, leading to better ways to make changes to DNA. We'll eventually be able to change DNA in something like a "biology IDE" and have usable components printed out the other end. After that point, our world probably won't look anything like it does today.

It won't be long before someone decides to give themselves glowing skin or super strong muscles (and people have already tried the latter!) I for one welcome our super-human overlords.

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

#482

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

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…

What a future we would live in, if you were able to create prescriptions at home with FDA-levels of tolerance. I stumbled upon DIY instructions on GitHub once.

In reality, I know someone who works in an environment where pharmaceuticals are manufactured. He can't even lift a ceiling tile (steam fitter) without getting approval.

Maintaining FDA quality-level may not be possible in a DIY-context. These are clean rooms where the manufacturing occurs. High up-front costs.

But it would certainly be incredible for people who pay $1,000 per pill for some life-saving medication today, if they could totally roundabout the pharmaceutical industry.

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

#484

Post by hedvig »

gameswithgo wrote: post #407
safog wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How long for a "full" tree to decompose?

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

#485

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

dilippkumar wrote: post #470

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 event…

This looks like it could just be cherry picking. If you look hard enough, you can find someone rebellious, then 20 years later, someone trying to maintain those ideals, and so forth. There's so many people, so many stories out there, you could form any narrative you wanted about theories of generational cycles.

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

#487

Post by thundergolfer »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #464
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.

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

Naomi Klein’s most recent book has parts that argue that addressing wealth inequality is a must if we want to address climate change.

In her words, wealth equality is tied to a “climate justice” movement. Some points:

- If you tax the struggling lower middle and working classes to raise funds for climate action they will get justifiably angry that they’re being stressed when they didn’t really create this mess and have the lowest ability to pay. Eg. Frances ‘Yellow Jackets’ - The antidemocratic forces that are produced by wealth inequality have allowed fossil fuel industries to maintain the status quo despite popular support for climate action

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

#488

Post by vvpan »

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 suspect a lot of people have this on their mind but the whole money-grab brouhaha made it bad manners to mention in civilized society. Better for those who are nevertheless on the bandwagon I guess.

I do agree with you, though. I recently had to work with Uniswap and I am blown away by how simple yet convenient and powerful it is. Not possible pre-blockchain at all. I think the mistake that people are making is thinking that blockchain is trying to replace some current relationships, and unsuccessfully, yet with these Ethereum projects it seems like completely novel systems are emerging that were not possible before blockchain.

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

#489

Post by Elof »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #125

The climate emergency has pushed me hard into quite a few areas that have a lot of promise for huge impact, to name a few: - electromobility: concerting bikes, kick-scooters, cars ... this all is much easier than it seems, also has a vibrant open source culture - demand response in electricity grids has quite a few startups (one of which I just joined) that help integrating a lot of renewables in a way that does not…

You make it pretty hard to figure out where you work. Mind sharing?

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

#490

Post by robocat »

dhruvkar wrote: post #70
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…

This. I work in a small, physical goods business in the Midwest (~30 employees), and the amount of time spent doing data entry is incredible. Documents (often PDFs, sometimes excel) flow between buyers, shippers, freight forwarders and internally. These documents are often updated. I'm looking into EDI for a solution, but there's so much value to be created from cutting out all this data entry. At least 1-1.5 full ti…

And how do you find a solution that will last more than a few years, and also handle changes as they occur?

Software solutions require ongoing work: ongoing maintenance costs of a customised solution could easily be higher per year than 1 cheap FTE.

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