I think the transition from plastics will be vital. It will require new innovations in product manufacturing alternatives. Look around everything is made from it. It will change supply chains, goods lifecycles, costs, and consumer habits. For example, if a grocery store existed that didn't use plastics (in mass) for selling goods, what would that look like? Can it scale? Is it basically a farmers market, etc.
Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
571–580 of 947 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I don't blame them either. Why would you do home health when you can get similar pay working at a factory, warehouse, or, even, fast food. My mother was a nurse for years in the aged care sector. The pay for a qualified nurse is actually pretty good (I would still argue it should be higher for the work, but it was well above average). Homecare aids (or AIN/care assistants as they were called here) are paid horribly…
We are at a turning point in society right now because of all the things you address. In the last few decades have seen a rapid shift in the willingness of family members to look after their elderly.
There's a few reasons for this, the biggest I think is the ageing population. When your parents need care at 85 years old, and you are 60 looking at retiring soon (or perhaps can't retire and need to work for another 7 years), most people decide they'd rather enjoy the last few years of their "active" life before perhaps even needing care themselves, rather than be "burdened" with caring for parents, relatives, etc. And so it falls either on the state, or on the generational wealth of the elderly to foot the bill and pay for care. Relatives often shoot themselves in the foot though. Their inheritance is being spent on paying somebody to wipe their mum's backside, because they didn't want to look after them themselves. (Unless their parents are on medicare or whatever, in which case there's even less reason for them to care).
The only part is just societies disdain and repulsion of sickness, bodily fluids, etc. Centuries ago, if you could live comfortably (not amazingly, but not be in the street), just by showering a few old people and cleaning up poo, you'd have people lining up round the block to do it. Now, the willingness to work (and therefore the salary curve) has inverted, and you need to pay people increasing amounts of money to do what was once considered menial or easy work.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#573Improving 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 co…
what does DL stand for?
deep learning
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#574In the online world, it seems like there are two big things happening right now: - Neural networks / ML (eg GPT-2) Definitely nowhere near its potential for being applied to a wide variety of areas. Find a niche you like and apply there. - Security / Privacy (eg Telegram) Rapidly growing demand pretty much everywhere. Bonus points if you can make your product great for standard users and at the same time hackable/cus…
The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful. Wind, solar power, energy storage still have huge room for improvement. Direct solar or wind -> liquid fuel will be essential to adapting fast. Windmills can drive production of liquid ammonia on farms (needing only air and water inputs), for use d…
HFCs are already being phased out in favor of HFOs (though you could certainly argue that this should be happening more quickly), is there a strong reason to go for ammonia based systems over HFO?
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#575May be this will help
Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-st...
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#576Yourself. One of the most complex areas, having lots of users, that need to be fixed, is human beings. Spend all your time to know who you are, why you are like that, and change this world starting from the most promising thing it has on it: you. In the meantime, try to carry out activities that you like (ride your bike, walk alone or with real people). Do it disconnected from any device or social network. Do things…
This is some of the best advice I've ever read on HN. I started doing this about 6 months ago. I also want to warn that you can focus too much on that and it can burn you out. Moderation is key in any decision/lifestyle. Also can say self love and compassion is key as well and can take a long time to develop depending on the parenting you received.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#577I 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…
That's funny, the multi-national company I work for is removing all MS Office automation because MS apparently told us that unattended automation is against the licensing terms. It's OK if you're watching the computer I guess, but not on a server.
Personally this didn't match what I found online (they said it was not supported i.e. if it breaks tough luck) but what would I know. Money must be spent retrofitting other solutions now.
I joked we should pay a minimum wage high school kid to sit in a room and 'watch' the servers but I guess that's too low tech ;)
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#578Event sourcing. See dataintensive.net TL;DR - rip the writeahead log out of databases and materialize not just SQL commands but events yourself, returning control to reality rather than systems.
I think in the same lines (I'm building a relational lang http://tablam.org ) and think a modern RDBMS could be made alike: command "city.define miami" |> event pre-process (ie: validations and transformations!) |> write-ahead log |> fire-observers: [post log for later OR block writes] The idea is to put some of the stored procedures in the "event pre-process" before commit to write-ahead. In the "fire-observers" ste…
Not sure if this is what you mean but these exist - Oracle Queues, MQSeries, RabbitMQ (open source MQSeries copy), all part of a generic thing called Enterprise Service Bus
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#579Communications 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 don't think it's the best way to make money, but this may be the most important topic for our near future as a species . Emphasis: not just civilization(s) but species as a whole, as in rewiring perception, brain functions, social life, freedom of thought. Here's my conundrum: we could design a transparent and 100% user-controlled communication network — basically some open-sourced Twitter / Facebook / Whatsapp / I…
Think you nailed it - the most important problem is overcoming the social friction that enables companies to centralize control of entire industries for no reason other than - they got to it first. We need ways for consumers to organize en-masse to switch services - since trickling out one by one has such a disadvantage ("all my friends use X...").
My hope there, if any, lies in someone developing a mature incentivization system to get people to commit to leaving en-masse. If you just have to click a single button that says "I'll leave Facebook if 50% of my friends do", then that's super low effort - and as soon as those commitments trickle up to a big enough number, the software can organize the move en-masse. Problem is, nobody needs to actually commit to that, so there might need to be additional layers of carrot/sticks.. but that's doable too! You could e.g. commit $20 to your decision, and the software could automatically track whether you followed through (e.g. leaving Facebook for Freebook). Likewise, many of these migrations ("mutinies"?) could be very lucrative for the receiving party - so much so that they might be happy to pay people that $20 to move, just to guarantee future business. (and presumably Freebook would be a little less evil than Facebook). The problem today is just that anyone who hates these services has to make so much effort to do anything useful about it that it's just never going to happen. We require mass-organization tools. (These are also, coincidentally, the exact same tools needed for effective Unionization, so - speculate however you want on why they don't exist yet).
Additional comment, for what it's worth: the underlying system of contracts that implements the above is a very strong use case for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. The amount of power and flexibility you get at dealing with all the complex financial incentives of the above could really come in handy - especially when you consider that such organizations will probably also need some kind of internet governance to decide what to do (which decentralized software is key for). With crypto, it's forseeable you could even do some crazy things like tie the incentives for each user to a (e.g. Facebook) stock-shorting contract - effectively making a profit off of tearing down one company and moving to the next... self-financing the whole movement.
And that to me then begs a whole other realm of speculation, because if this kind of organizational technology became widespread and actually used by people - shit... the entire relationship of consumer and producer gets flipped over. Any company that's making profit, unless it has some completely unique quality that can't be repeated by another startup company, could just be attacked by this mob of consumers - transferring all business to the new company en-masse, giving them even less profit. I guess in theory that's kinda how it works already, but this really could up the carnage to levels we've never seen before - and takes away that inherent platform advantage that so many companies are leaning on.
In summary though: yeah, seems the biggest problem is platform centralization. Moving from that requires high-quality decentralized platforms, and organizational tools that can incentivize and plan such big en-masse movements. I believe the tech to do that is fresh, still being worked on, but is coming - and it could have some pretty cool implications for how the world works if it does.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SendKeys Holy cow why didn't I know about this 6 months ago =| VBA is something I have had to reluctantly learn. It's a horrid/ancient language. Sorry if someone gets offended at that but to someone who uses a lot of modern development languages/tools it's just very very difficult with near-zero "nice to haves"... you just end up taking this huge lib of code around with you with functions like "inArray" etc. > As a…
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".
I’d recommend learning at least one other programming language, then use the tutorials.