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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?

#721

Post by Arn_Thor »

johnmorrison wrote: post #693
deanCommie wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those still living in extreme poverty today probably don't care about our worries of climate disruption. Tell that to 100Million people in poverty in Bangladesh that will become climate refugees if the sea level rises in any meaningful way. In the west, sea-side living is a privilege for the richest. And sea level rise is mostly ignorable with the virtue of new seawalls. In the developing world, the most poverty-st…

You're right about those people, but I'm not talking about them. There are people living in extreme poverty today who won't even be alive anymore by the time sea level rise causes a problem. Who are we to claim that climate change is the most pressing issue facing humanity, when much of humanity faces unrelated life threatening issues?

There are people who are alive today, and who won't be next year because of extreme weather events tied to climate change.

And that's before getting into real live issues to do with water rights, habitation, crop resilience to changing weather patterns, energy access and usage. These issues are likely to spark wars in our lifetime (if they haven't already.. Syria and the Arab Spring was tied to crop failures and high food prices). And these issues disproportionately affect the poor living today. Entirely aside from rising sea levels which will compound the damage

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

#722

Post by arbol »

fyfy18 wrote: post #619

Residential PV installs are becoming more and more common so consumers are looking for smart devices to take advantage of them more efficiently. If you are grid-tied without a battery (batteries like the Powerwall take much longer than a PV install to pay back, so the payback time is often greater than the warranty period) you want to use the energy at peak generation rather than selling it to the grid (which typical…

On this note, I would say a huge opportunity here is better energy storage. Perhaps along the lines of

micro hydro

consumer compressed air

some new type of battery (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21319039)

carbon nanotube springs

We have lots of methods of generating electricity but storing it is an issue.

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

#723

Post by mackrevinack »

mtsr wrote: post #696
cbetti wrote: post #665

Platforms that enable a diaspora of small businesses to operate as effectively as large organizations with minimal startup cost. Why build a massive services organization when you can enable and finance a takeover by a multitude of smaller players?

This is interesting. Do you have any examples in mind that achieve this? Whether in particular niches or solving common problems throughout small business?

the safe network is something that comes to mind. when / if its released the costs for setting up an online service will be peanuts compared to today. way cheaper storage, cheaper computing if your service needs it, and also less maintenance since you don't need to worry about securely storing data. it should all be handled by the network

https://safenetwork.tech

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

#725

Post by codesushi42 »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #695
codesushi42 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy it. There are tons of software "engineers" who try to escape fintech for FAANGs or even startups, coming from top tier firms like Goldman and McKinsey. Likewise, bioinformatics generally pays a lot less than traditional SWE roles. So what I have seen is the exact opposite in practice: people with minimum coding skills in other fields trying to jump into tech firms.

I suppose it's hard to match the salaries at The Big Corps working in other industries. Still, outside of software companies, people think I'm basically a wizard for doing simple things, like automatically generating climographs from JSON files. I just don't get that kind of positive reinforcement from software people. I think it's just more enjoyable to be the hacker rather than a hacker .

That's great, but I prefer to work with people who can teach me new tech knowledge.

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

#726

Post by xcubic »

jhow15 wrote: post #711

I had the same question recently and so built an app to surface rapidly growing google trends. It was a Show HN project not long ago and people seemed to like it: https://trennd.co I've also noticed a lot of larger trends that other commenters have highlighted too: - data privacy focussed products (DuckDuckGo/SimpleAnalytics) - everything machine learning - meat substitutes - alternative forms of entertainment (axe t…

This is very nice. How kind of algorithm do you use to split the rapidly growing trends from the rest?

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

#727

Post by SeaSeaRider »

ncmncm wrote: post #542
johnmorrison wrote: post #171

In 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…

“Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.”

This is deathcult type rhetoric which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

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

#728

Post by ahje »

johnmorrison wrote: post #685
ncmncm wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. I don't believe most would agree here. There are a lot of problems humanity faces, and humanity is a lot of different people. Those still living in extreme poverty today probably don't care about our worries of climate disruption. > Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful. Why is this?…

> Those still living in extreme poverty today probably don't care about our worries of climate disruption.

No doubt about it. At this point it's probably a better idea to start preparing for the changes rather than stopping them, unless we somehow manage to achieve some magical global unity around a single goal.

> I don't see why civilization would collapse any time soon

Civilizational collapse is a slow process. I doubt the people of the later stages of the Roman empire felt their society collapsed. It's more likely they simply experienced slowly decaying infrastructure as maintenance was neglected, social unrest, and the absence of the advantages we get from a large centralized authorities, all in a span of many decades.

I'm not saying that it's happening, or not happening -- It's just that you wouldn't know until it's happened.

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

#729

Post by jhow15 »

xcubic wrote: post #726
jhow15 wrote: post #711

I had the same question recently and so built an app to surface rapidly growing google trends. It was a Show HN project not long ago and people seemed to like it: https://trennd.co I've also noticed a lot of larger trends that other commenters have highlighted too: - data privacy focussed products (DuckDuckGo/SimpleAnalytics) - everything machine learning - meat substitutes - alternative forms of entertainment (axe t…

This is very nice. How kind of algorithm do you use to split the rapidly growing trends from the rest?

Thanks!! It's based on regression analysis of the topic's data.

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

#730

Post by ryanlol »

johnmorrison wrote: post #171

In 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…

>- Security / Privacy (eg Telegram)

But Telegram offers just as much security and privacy as Slack.

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