Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by alexcnwy » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

peterangular wrote: post #288

wenc wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say. Many companies are already investing heavily in RPA (Robotic Process Automation) these days. It’s not widely known in tech circles but kind of common knowledge in traditional companies trying to automate tedious workflow tasks. When I first saw it, I thought: this looks like a glorified Autohotkey or Automator. But companies like UiPath are doing very well selling this type of automation software.…

> Autohotkey Yep I've had to employ this software to get things done before. Also OCR doesn't need a cloud vs. a beefy computer - I do a lot of that too.

> OCR doesn't need a cloud vs. a beefy computer - I do a lot of that too.

Can you elaborate on this?

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

#492

Post by GreeniFi » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

What I’m going to say is a little different to most others on this board.

I’m an environmental economist - quite a specialised field. I work with a team of software developers to embed environmental economic knowledge systems in software, which makes those knowledge systems scalable and accessible. It’s been quite an experience to lay down that knowledge - basically my life’s work -in a way which democratises its use.

This experience gives me the sense that what a developer could do is look for an expert in a field in which they are interested. The more niche the better, and partner to build a system which embeds in IT a knowledge system. I might also add that many of today’s big challenges cannot be solved from within one field of expertise, but instead require multi-disciplinary toolkits, which can also be be developed within IT systems.

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

#493

Post by owyn » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

fingerlocks wrote: post #469

defen wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From the document... Across ~12,000 locations they put the majority of restaurants in a range but they do have the numbers pretty well crunched.

Average profit margin 26-28% Average gross sales 2.2 - 2.6M Average operating income before rent/tax: 570k - 716k

"The rent paid to McDonald’s will vary based upon sales and McDonald’s investment in land, site improvements, and building costs."

It looks like that rent paid to McD's home planet is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of that investment (yearly? I guess?) but it seems to average about 100k-150k.

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

#494

Post by dhruvkar » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #490

dhruvkar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's definitely a question to be answered.

More than the # of hours involved, it's the error-prone nature of the work and the lag between when the data should be entered vs when it's actually entered.

These three factors -- hours saved, errors prevented, time lag avoided -- make me think that it's worth automating.

You're right, however, it's not clear cut it's the right way to go.

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

#495

Post by rodprice » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

atoko wrote: post #99

AlexCoventry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you go about developing skill in experimental design?

Probably Kaggle competitions

Read "Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial," by D.S. Sivia for an excellent introduction to experimental design for scientists. This gives you a quantitative approach to the design of experiments, with tools to properly evaluate your results.

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

#496

Post by dev_dull » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

WhompingWindows wrote: post #212

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 was working for a scientific journal. In the peer-review department, they had to use this proprietary software, and we had 2 employees who just mindlessly went through this proprietary software's form day-in, day-out. This form spammed scientists for reviews of science articles for our somewhat-predatory journal (we solicited authors to publish in our journal for a fee)... First, it was a massive waste of those 2 h…

> First, it was a massive waste of those 2 human's intellect

This is usually the reality and it's nothing to be ashamed about.

At work, do what you're paid to do. In your free time, pursue interests (literally, things that are interesting to you).

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

#497

Post by johnmorrison » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #228

johnmorrison wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All money is fake money, the notion of a currency is a value fiction shared among a group of people. Most governments are very young, and do not last very long historically. Central banking is a handful of decades old, cryptocurrency is one decade old. Neither the maximalists nor deniers are right at this point. It remains to be seen when/whether cryptocurrency will replace fiat currency.

cryptocurrency will never replace gold-backed fiat currency.

Fiat currency is not backed by gold, in fact, it is not backed by anything.

Also, gold is not inherently valuable. It will become a regular common metal once we shift extraction to the asteroid belt.

The truth is there really isn't much with "inherent" value out there, with the notable exception of potential energy.

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

#498

Post by dividedbyzero » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

BubRoss wrote: post #397

alexhutcheson wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone aware of a good resource to learn VBA? All the resources I've seen online are either tutorials for very quick hacks, or assume you have 0 programming knowledge. I would love a "VBA for people who are familiar with at least one other programming language".

You don't have to learn VBA to do this, you can just include windows.h in C and call the SendKeys function.

There's also java.awt.Robot – I've used it a lot for similar things, really neat if you already have Java/Scala code for getting the data to fill in.

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

#499

Post by adamsea » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

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?

I would argue the ones lusting for blood are those who, like decision-makers at Amazon, create abusive conditions for the people who work for the companies they manage.

I'm specifically referring to the disgraceful way workers are treated at Amazon shipping facilities.

Most blood seems to be spilled by those with money wanting more.

One could argue that the arms business spills more blood than everything else put together ...

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

#500

Post by cosmolev » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

sebringj wrote: post #121

possibly Behavior-driven code generation... meaning create some platform to enable watching users use an application, then it could make machine code to create a similar application. This would enable making videos for training that simulated a working application but the AI would not care if the application worked or not in reality but could make it work type thing?

Are you talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_by_example ?