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

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

#501

Post by datavirtue » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

neltnerb wrote: post #138

Cooperatives. The economy needs to shift away from giant companies with pay ratios of a thousand to one between CEOs and average employees and employees need control over their workplace to move to the next stage of capitalism. Make it easier for collectives to start up businesses that aren't purely focused on profit and instead focused on employees taking ownership of their work. It may not be the biggest profit pos…

It's called an EEOC. Been around forever. Some are very very successful. Messer Construction in Cincinnati,for instance.

Then you have companies like Gore Industries that has been using a flat management model where the employees, who "own" thier work, elect reluctant leaders.

There are other companies that want to get out from under stodgy command control cultures but it is hard to turn a large ship.

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

#502

Post by tunesmith » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

8ytecoder wrote: post #226

awinder wrote: post #147

I'm gonna go in a different direction: broadly, solutions that deal with the problems of an aging population: 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients 2. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area) 3. Personnel management for homecare nursing List could go on and on. None of this is especially "trendy" but there's clear demographic reasons to…

A tool for children to remotely manage parents' phones, tablets, routers and (may be) computers would be nice to have. My parents are not very tech savvy and when something goes wrong getting someone to fix it takes forever. If I had remote access I'd do it in just a few minutes.

This is tough for us too - we were even thinking of buying two iPads connected to their Cloud account, just so whenever they locked themselves out, we could mail them the one we have while they mail us the broken one.

The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password. They set one, thinking they are guessing one they've already set, they don't remember it, and they get locked out every time.

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

#503

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

hiram112 wrote: post #319

Enginerrrd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man this is me. Knowing a bit of coding and machine learning in engineering has been such a boon over my career in civil/environmental engineering. But it's like math, if you know it well enough, you'll find ways to use it everywhere. If you don't, you won't. You have to be the type of person that likes to innovate. Its hard to sell to prospective employers, but its great for demonstrating value once you are with an…

How much machine learning have you been able to pick up and did you learn formally (in school) or just on your own? It's a broad subject, so where would you recommend one begin, assuming I have a decent undergrad math background? Thanks!

Not the parent, but I did an undergrad maths/physics degree some time back and found https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning to be good as an introduction, unfortunately a new job [unrelated] has prevented my finishing the course but I hope to pick it up again later in the Winter.

I would be interested in thoughts from anyone with ML experience who has reviewed said course's materials?

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

#504

Post by dividedbyzero » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #232

mring33621 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A whole lot of valuable business software is essentially domain-specific or workflow-specific mail merge.

Which is actually a terrible step backwards when it comes to interchangeability and iteroperability. You have data in a database, you flatten it into a non structured document, send it, and then the other end uses data entry to add it to a database. What should be the realm of EDI/CrystalReports/Blockchain take your pick, instead everyone wants to interchange data in the pretty human readable format, as opposed to ju…

If you build things like that, you probably don't have authority or leverage to rebuild everything from scratch, and even if you did, it might be much costlier to disrupt an inefficient web of human-computer-paper interaction that works reliably and that everything else has adapted to.

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

#505

Post by jcconnell » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

peterangular wrote: post #241

caseydonahue wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some more insight into what you work on automating specifically?

Anything - green screens, Excel spreadsheets, PDF generation, Docusign, tying 6 web experiences with separate logins into one, simplification of complex auth scenarios, etc. Most of my day is literally just getting one step further and one step further into a "process" of some sort, and then handling a metric boatload of edge-cases as they come up. Then the last portion of the contract is the actual integration into…

I'm curious how you market yourself or your services? I automate processes, workflows and tasks like this for some clients and I really enjoy it. It's easy to see the value I provide and the clients are happy. However I struggle with how to acquire new/more clients. The ones I have now I've acquired through past business relationships. I'd love to be able to do more of this work.

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

#506

Post by alexcnwy » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

dev_dull wrote: post #233

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…

The key to these types of solutions is always to follow the 80/20 rule. For example, it’s foolish to say and attempt “I will automate all of your data entry people” because there will always be weird idiosyncrasies that are better fit for humans. You will dash yourself against the rocks trying to get a “100% complete” solution. Instead, create software that allows 1 person to do the job of 5. You create massive busin…

I’m building a tool to speed up data entry. It highlights OCR‘d words with low confidence for human review. It uses templates for capturing structured data and a fast interface for capturing unstructured data.

It grew out of consulting projects and is almost ready for beta testing if anyone is interested in playing with it and giving me some feedback - my email is in my profile :)

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

#507

Post by inopinatus » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

Communications technology has moved past the ability of human brains to tolerate and mitigate the adverse effects.

Every addicting dopamine surge from a Like or Retweet is the evidence; every viral pile-on, every echo-chamber lunatic fringe.

Making humanity resilient to the negative externalities of our own technological advancement is essential for the survival of our species. Right now, a vast army of the smartest people are employed at the intersection of cognitive and computer sciences, but in the service of political and commercial interests. I'd like to see more of them on the other side of this arms race, working on our individual and societal defenses.

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

#508

Post by secabeen » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

jakemal wrote: post #404

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

If someone can figure out how to do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute, they would have a real winner on their hands. Of course, execution is also a key factor in success. There are lots of good ideas that were had by multiple people, but only one successfully executed.

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

#509

Post by johnmorrison » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

jes5199 wrote: post #355

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…

This is interesting to me because it’s such a cultural blindspot: the left-wing point of view is that energy efficiency is the only way forward, and the right-wing point of view is that more traditional fuels is the only way forward. But solar panels seem to have a version or Moore’s law - and even a single doubling of efficiency from here would completely revolutionize our energy economy (and dramatically shake up w…

Solar panel efficiency does not have an analogue to Moore's law, and their efficiency physically cannot double two or more times.

Solar cell record efficiency is 46%, that only gives room for 1.12 doublings theoretically, and thermodynamics is nasty in the real world so we probably cannot even get past 1 doubling from here.

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

#510

Post by jariel » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

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…

This is an ideological statement, which I do not believe is based in reality.

There have always been 'meta causes' of various kinds, and they didn't create billionaires.

If there were something very specific about the sector that created such conditions one might be inclined to agree, but I'm doubtful.

'Climate Change' is like 'AI' in that it will affect everyone, everywhere, in every industry, but there might very well be very few 'AI companies' that are huge, in much the same way there may be very few 'climate change' specific companies.

Consider that the 'climate change' movement is well afoot and has been for quite a long time ... and where are the billionaires?

Oil rights can be acquired at some scale, solar and wind, not really.

If someone advanced some nuclear tech, lobbied to get approval to build a lot of cookie-cutter plants built around America, had major subsidies, huge protective moats (i.e. $10B entry point to get in the game) tons of IP and know-how - like the 'Space X' of Nuclear - then maybe we could see a billionaire there.

But I don't see any companies or entities on the horizon, or on the theoretical horizon that would validate this claim. I think people might think it's true because the 'want to believe it's true' but that doesn't make it true or even more likely.

That said ... it's probably a 'promising area' to work in.