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

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

#761

Post by kofejnik » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:16 AM UTC

jason0597 wrote: post #473

kofejnik wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

strongly disagree 1. you _won't_ be happier running a fast food joint - the work is gruelling, and it's so easy to go bust. And you won't bring home six figures 2a. people who _actually_ can code are scarce, even in the tech industry. Source: conducted over 300 interviews 2b. quite logically, your coding skill will be most appreciated and compensated at a Big Tech Co, not at a government department where they will be…

>2a. people who _actually_ can code are scarce, even in the tech industry. Source: conducted over 300 interviews As a young person with an interest in software programming (currently studying chemical engineering but still write C code now and then), what do you look for when trying to find out people who can _actually_ code?

a somewhat serious answer: simple things should be easy to you, and hard things possible

examples of simple things: DFS/BFS walks; simple Project Euler problems; or "write a simple game in terminal, maybe with some form of minimax search" (a bit harder), or maybe a parser for simple arithmetic expressions

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

#762

Post by johnmorrison » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

baq wrote: post #749

SeaSeaRider wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.” This is deathcult type rhetoric which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

With the way things are going ww3 will be about water. It’s easy to imagine half of Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia to pack and move as a whole.

Can you expand on what you mean by this? How will water cause a war? Do you mean freshwater access?

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

#763

Post by thedstrat » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

dilippkumar wrote: post #470

I listened to Robert Green's talk at Google recently [0] He proposes the following idea: - Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation" - Generations follow a cycle: - There is a rebellious generation - The next generation is trying to keep the ideals of the rebellious generation alive - The third generation is very conservative - The fourth generation is a "crisis" generation that will event…

Millenials are the first generation to realize that they will be around for the climate crisis. In the circle of people I know, it’s a huge motivator to learn and hopefully do something about.

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

#764

Post by ziggrat » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

Real AI, i mean making machines make decisions will be interesting

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

#765

Post by xenocratus » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

arnaudsm wrote: post #737

SeaSeaRider wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.” This is deathcult type rhetoric which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

With a more scientific approach, the IPCC[1] models show we could see mass migrations between 200M and 1.5B due to climate change before the end of the century. Not a total collapse, but the collapse of a dozen of countries due to unsustainable heat and drought. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php%3Fi...

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

#766

Post by johnmorrison » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:31 AM UTC

arnaudsm wrote: post #737

SeaSeaRider wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.” This is deathcult type rhetoric which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

With a more scientific approach, the IPCC[1] models show we could see mass migrations between 200M and 1.5B due to climate change before the end of the century. Not a total collapse, but the collapse of a dozen of countries due to unsustainable heat and drought. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php%3Fi...

Yes, this is much more accurate of our best predictions.

Bjørn Lomborg says[1] by the end of the century, climate change left unchecked will only lower the global GDP by a 2-4 percentage points of what it would have otherwise grown to, which is going to be 300-1000% higher than today. So basically, best case scenario 980% GDP growth, worst case 288% GDP growth.

This shows climate change is a problem, but it's too slow to cause a global catastrophe by 2100.

Even better news, I'm very confident it will not be left unchecked, in fact I think we can get to net-zero emissions by 2040 or so.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QyXduteiWE

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

#767

Post by pgt » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

simplify wrote: post #422

pgt wrote: post #60

Differential Dataflow is going to cause a huge upset in several high value areas, including incremental compilation, database view maintenance, UI view maintenance (subsumes React), and differential database streaming: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow

What's the main difference between this and event sourcing?

Differential Dataflow solves the second hardest problem in computer science - caching - by calculating the optimal reactions to an event that will maintain the client's view. Of course, this requires tracking client queries and state cursors.

For more background, look at Adapton and Jane Street's incremental DOM implementations: https://github.com/janestreet/incr_dom

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

#768

Post by johnmorrison » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:38 AM UTC

ahje wrote: post #728

johnmorrison wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> At this point it's probably a better idea to start preparing for the changes rather than stopping them

Yeah, this is probably best practice for people in regions that are projected to be left mostly uninhabitable / with severe barriers to life. This won't really be too much of a problem even if climate change is left unchecked, as Bjørn Lomborg says[1], it will only cost us 2-4% of GDP by end of century.

> Civilizational collapse is a slow process. I doubt the people of the later stages of the Roman empire felt their society collapsed.

I'd like to point out an important note: the guy said civilization would collapse, not a civilization. I'm not sure if you mean the same thing he does, but civilization itself has never, in history, collapsed, even during the plague and fall of the roman empire. We've been pretty much A-okay on a global level since 12,000 years ago.

You're definitely right about individual states, and it is almost certainly true that several countries may end up collapsing due to climate disruption, but not the big ones and probably no time soon.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QyXduteiWE

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

#769

Post by eitland » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:39 AM UTC

ryanlol wrote: post #730

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.

1. They are vey different. Those who arent aware of the large differences shouldn't comment as if they are they are subject experts. Telegram might be full of holes but it is a very different thing to Slack. (I use both for different things.)

2. I have my own issues with Telegram (the refusal to introduce sustainable funding, pushing of crypto currencies, possibly also marketing it as more than it is) but except that there's a lot to like about it and I think it is a decent starting point if someone with strong cryptographic skills wants to start with a decent client and go ahead to provide something better (either introduce e2e-encryption or improve, document and provide some way to verify the current solution.)

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

#770

Post by johnmorrison » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 9:45 AM UTC

bitcoinbutter wrote: post #732

johnmorrison wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're looking at humanity through the lens of an individual. The reality is that the threats to people in extreme poverty are not going to threaten humanity as a whole. I am defining humanity as the progression and prosperity of the human race. Climate change could ultimately threaten the entire human race. It could even result in extinction in the worst case scenario. I disagree with the comment that because of thi…

Only a small percentage of the population lives in extreme poverty today, yes.

But even a smaller percentage deals with significant issues due to climate change, today. The changes thus far have been excessively inflated, and may be net-positive so far.

You're right about the worst case scenario, GHG emissions could in theory lead to Earth becoming like Venus or somewhere in between the two where the atmosphere is bad enough to cause the end of humanity. But this is extremely unlikely and might not even be possible with the sum of our economically accessible fossil fuel reserves.

In reality, it seems there is still a threat of huge increase in poverty due to some WW3 type event, or a superbug global plague, or something like that.

I think it's unfair to weigh climate change above poverty at the moment, even for the overall prosperity of the human race.

In fact, I think climate change will end up being much worse for the rest of life on Earth than humanity. We have the advantage of being able to plan and react in advance, so we will probably be fine for a long time to come, but most plants and animals might go extinct.