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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?

#531

Post by robbya »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #245
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…

I worked in these spaces for the past few years. Money is the biggest challenge. Elderly who can afford to pay for their care have plenty of options available for all of this. Many elderly (on Medicare or fixed income) simply don't have any money. > 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients Telemedicine and home care services, like Honor, are addressing this. Telemedicine will improve a…

> Telemedicine will improve as more technically adept people age.

There's a little bit of user blaming in that statement (not being critical, just thinking out loud). Dealing with the elderly and folks who are less familiar with tech is an interesting design space.

Does anyone know design patterns that specifically seek to improve the experience for non-tech savy elderly?

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

#532

Post by johnmorrison »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #519
johnmorrison wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I work at a nuclear fission company. We think we can get our electricity prices to around $0.0025 / kWh by around 2045. This represents a ~20x reduction from off-peak cost in Ontario where I live, and ~150x reduction from average electricity prices in Germany. Also, w.r.t. population, the way I see it our population is growing very quickly whether we like it or not (look at Africa). I think there's a good opport…

Hmm, Hinkley C is signed up at a strike price of £92.50/MWh, in 2012 Pounds. A 400x reduction when so much of the cost of nuclear is safety, waste management and decommissioning? That's surprising to say the least. Can you give any clue on how? The trend of solar and wind continuing the inexorable march downward seems much more certain.

· Liquid fueled MSR, safety is best of any other source. So, we think regulators will lower barriers over time as we prove this.

· Waste management is easier since our waste will be ~5x less mass per kg fuel (~500x less mass per kWh energy), and also returns to natural radioactivity much faster (one or two centuries). We actually plan to sell most of the fission products as useful materials.

· As of now, our reactors are planned to be mostly stainless steel. Most of the lifetime mass-throughput of current GI-GIII fission plants is concrete and steel, of which we have basically none of the concrete and much less steel because no pressure vessel. So, decommissioning is much easier and probably will be internally profitable.

You're right about the last part, because solar will almost definitely get at least 2x cheaper than it is today, and within not more than a few decades.

My perception is biased (ofc), but in my view it's actually very likely that we will reach or surpass our goal, though, so I personally wouldn't bet on renewables.

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

#534

Post by energybar »

GreeniFi wrote: post #492

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…

Are you willing to share an example of the embedded environmental economic knowledge system you mention? I'm having a hard time understanding what that means?

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

#535

Post by reubens »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #222
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 wish I could address everything that's wrong with this comment. The biggest thing is you seem extremely willing to take risks without understanding the gravity of what you're doing. Sure, you CAN give yourself PRP injections and LIKELY will have little to no side effects. Healthcare providers need extreme confidence that (a) a procedure will be effective (b) the risks are appropriate.

I disagree. Some doctors will attempt new procedures with only a company promoting new tools.

I once saw a surgeon try out new combined cut & staple hardware designed for bowel surgery on a patient's liver, because he had been told it would work. It didn't, and there was a ridiculous amount of staples in the patient's abdomen afterward.

Doctors often become more risk prone the more power they have, and the hierarchy of human medical doctoring contributes to this.

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

#536

Post by ashishb »

inopinatus wrote: post #507

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…

I wrote an auto snooze that snoozes all the irrelevant emails in my inbox to a particular day & time of the week. This process ensures that my Inbox has only relevant emails and not the gazillion newsletters which enter my mailbox even before I wake up in the morning.

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

#537

Post by bumby »

Improving validation and interpretation of DL.

For all the leaps forward in NN models, I have a feeling it's at risk because of a lack of trust. It's potential may be limited if the public perceives it to be too brittle or maladaptive.

DARPA is currently trying to work on DL models that are truly interpretable. If that gets sufficient progress I think the public/regulators will be much more willing to let software control aspects of their lives than a black box

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

#538

Post by anthony_doan »

I think streaming is up and coming.

The problem is I'm not sure how big the market can grow or the upper bound of it.

People are making software for streamers out there but at the same time there is only so much money. All streamers are at the mercy of subscribers.

The two software that stand out are statistic/dashboard and the other is bots. As for hardware the only one that stands out is irl streaming, it's a backpack with a day worth of battery and 4 mobile data plan for high quality streaming.

I personally feel like it's a gold rush like the mobile app early days before it got saturated (remember flappy bird?). But I think the market is much smaller.

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

#539

Post by johnmorrison »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #526
johnmorrison wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I work at a nuclear fission company. We think we can get our electricity prices to around $0.0025 / kWh by around 2045. This represents a ~20x reduction from off-peak cost in Ontario where I live, and ~150x reduction from average electricity prices in Germany. Also, w.r.t. population, the way I see it our population is growing very quickly whether we like it or not (look at Africa). I think there's a good opport…

I'm excited about nuclear, but it seems like we will eventually run out of uranium fuel unless we switch to breeder reactors. Am I off on this? This is assuming that nuclear usage grows to become a larger portion of our total energy use. I see nuclear as potentially solving a lot of our problems, but it seems to have some difficulties as well. I'm more skeptical that we can support such a large population. Right now…

You're absolutely right, U235 reserves are only enough to last a couple hundred years at current consumption and exploration. We could probably sustain a long time with burner LWRs but it will require massive investment.

Breeders however (whether you go with Th-U or U-Pu fuel) both should be able to take us to at least another 10,000 present-equivalent years on a wholly nuclear powered economy.

You're also right to suspect fertilizer, I feel the same way. I've seen some of the phosphate mines around the world and it's kind of horrifying, so I'm hoping asteroid mining can fix our metal extraction problem.

I heard C-Type asteroids have plenty of phosphorus, but I'm definitely not an expert on asteroid mining. If they do, though, it will likely be enough to sustain us for quadrillions of human-years (humans * years) because the asteroid belt is just so damn massive compared to the Earth's crust.

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

#540

Post by scubbo »

secabeen wrote: post #508
jakemal wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If someone can figure out how to do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute...

I will freely admit that I'm only passingly familiar with many of the concepts of cryptocurrency, but - isn't that precisely the point? If coins are easy to mine, then they're valueless. I must be missing something...

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