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

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

#801

Post by r34 » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:02 PM UTC

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…

The most pressing problem for humanity is poverty. But I agree that working on natural energy is crucial to solve it.

We need to provide energy to the network of machines that will produce the basic supplies to cover humanity's fundamental needs.

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

#802

Post by osipov » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:08 PM UTC

jhow15 wrote: post #729

xcubic wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for building this project! I'm a big fan. With that said, I think you should add a filter for "at least X searches per month" because right now Vue.JS appears right next to Juul, and these are vastly different market sizes. Also, having a filter "Between X and Y searches/month" would be great.

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

#803

Post by johnmorrison » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:09 PM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #800

johnmorrison wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you're conflating two different types of migration, and the issue isn't nearly as big as your 150 million deaths figure. Almost all countries have ample space that will still be habitable for their entire population in 2100, even if climate change is left unchecked. Those that don't represent a small portion of the global population, certainly less than 500 million people. I grew up in Botswana, and I know tha…

> Almost all countries have ample space that will still be habitable for their entire population in 2100, even if climate change is left unchecked That's a really dubious one. There's multiple issues with global warming, drought and desertification being one of them (and it probably will not affect a whole country) but the second one is just the max temperature the human body can, withstand especially with high humid…

> drought and desertification

This is an issue, but increased atmospheric carbon and the latitude land distribution of the Earth probably means desertification will be net-negative for at least a while. (I don't have a source for this, but I recall reading that we have more trees today than ever in history?) Keep in mind, carbon is what plants eat.

> When every summer, heatwaves take a few of your neighbours you start reconsidering how nice your country is.

This is also a good point, but once again, there are also people who die from cold. I've been living in Toronto for the last year, and there are many people who die of cold in the winter every year, mainly the poor and elderly. It's not clear that global warming is net-negative at the moment for extreme temperature related deaths.

> we're going to have more than a 2°C increase in mean temperature by the end of the century, and maybe 4°C

I don't agree with this. This might be true if population+QoL growth continues and our emissions per capita stay at today's levels, but that won't happen. Like I said, we are going to fix CC by mid-century, and mean temp increase above pre-industrial levels will be less than 1.5°C by 2100 - not 4°C above today's levels.

> Because that's where they arrive

This is a different type of migration. Nobody is migrating internationally because their country is uninhabitable due to climate change, because there are no such countries today.

> About (a), you should probably read this...

Thank you, I'm aware of what's necessary to accomplish this. We are well on our way. If it wasn't for funding and regulatory limitations, I'm pretty sure we could be net-zero by 2028 just based on the technologies we have in development today.

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

#804

Post by gota » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:11 PM UTC

peterangular wrote: post #282

gota wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have anything going on related to process mining?

YES. I didn't even know that nomenclature before you said it... I employ an ELK and TIG stack for a huge part of what I do. You can very much say that I "process mine" my own process. I also have a ton of regex capability that's often employed to rip through large datasets to extract key data. Lots of times I have to measure certain things before I begin to fix a problem, and the above stated tooling (typically ran i…

Great to hear. I'm finishing my doctorate researching a specialized Process Mining approach and its great to hear there's people doing concrete significant work like that out there

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

#805

Post by johnmorrison » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:15 PM UTC

maze-le wrote: post #791

johnmorrison wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sl…

If the history of the last 40 years of "climate debate" teaches us anything, then that it will not only be left unchecked, but it will become worse. There is absolutely no reason to be optimistic about CO2 emissions on a global scale. If zero emissions by 2040 is a realistic scenario, then we have to create the foundations of this development now. What we do instead is: lackluster regulations in Europe, active denial…

> There is absolutely no reason to be optimistic about CO2 emissions on a global scale. > we have to create the foundations of this development now

We are. The company I work at aims to eliminate ~60% of global emissions ourselves and provide the economic basis for the other 40%.

The only major section of global emissions that doesn't seem to have an obvious full solution is concrete production, which I'm sure we can offset with sequestration, and reduce with wood-based CLT construction.

Every other major component of emissions has a solution that is in active development right now, or already available and in the process of adoption. I think there's plenty of reason to be optimistic.

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

#806

Post by cbetti » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:16 PM UTC

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?

I believe Quicken is behind the recent resurgence of independent mortgage lenders, which was a market all but captured by traditional banks until recently.

Services like Rover seem to be displacing kennels for doggy daycare. They should consider micro-loans to their highest rated dog watchers for things like fences if they have not already.

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

#807

Post by johnmorrison » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:22 PM UTC

chimprich wrote: post #798

johnmorrison wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > Civiliza…

> it will only cost us 2-4% of GDP by end of century The projections suggest that it's much cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the consequences, and much less painful. If we can afford to lose x% of GDP dealing with the problems, why can't we spend less than that to avoid the problem, and avoid a huge amount of human misery and ecological collapse in the process?

> why can't we spend less than that to avoid the problem

We can, and we are. That's why I do what I do.

You're absolutely right, it is much cheaper to avert climate change than deal with the consequences. It's also necessary to transition to sustainable energy eventually because we will run out of fossil fuels regardless of what happens with the climate.

The solutions to climate change are being worked on right now by many talented people around the world. I'm confident we will reach the IPCC SR15 1.5 degree Celsius goals.

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

#808

Post by pdm55 » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

I forecast that plastics' cleanup and recycling, a hard problem, will have a lot of money thrown at it by governments. Many new petrochemical plants are being built in anticipation of increased demand for plastics from developing countries. So it seems that the already-large problem of plastics waste, including microplastics, will continue to grow to the point of being overwhelming. In particular, we are poisoning our oceans with discarded plastics, choking sea creatures such as turtles which mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish their main food. And, perhaps most insidious, we are introducing microplastics into our oceans' food chains with consequences unknown. I fear that this "waste product" will grow to be as damaging as that other industrial waste, carbon dioxide. What's the solution?

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

#809

Post by Crinus » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:50 PM UTC

Uptrenda wrote: post #481

Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for: but I think CRISPR-Cas9 seems like the most exciting technology probably in all of science. It's a system that can be used to literally change the DNA of living creatures, and on top of that it's highly accessible. Think of the hacker culture today and now imagine the same rate of change for biological engineering. We'll have massive libraries of re-usable "components"…

> Think of the hacker culture today and now imagine the same rate of change for biological engineering.

I can't wait for all the pre-alpha version creatures :-P

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

#810

Post by archi42 » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:59 PM UTC

lewisjoe wrote: post #27

Unpopular opinion: Domain driven stack. We have been living in the golden era of software industry, thanks to Moore's law. We were able to afford RISC (= general purpose CPU arch), general purpose operating systems, general purpose languages, general purpose databases etc all because the hardware was going to evolve and get faster anyway. Now with Moore's law showing signs of death, the future for better computing wo…

Unpopular answer: Meh.

I see your point, but we are already using specialized algorithms to solve problems on generic hardware (CPU). You can move to different generic hardware (GPU/OpenCL/...) which might be better suited (depending on the problem), or use/rent more generic hardware on demand (cloud computing).

What you're implying is already happening, using/programming "generic" FPGAs to act as specialized accelerators seems to be slowly trending (e.g. Xilinx UltraScale); and if that's working well, "larger" process nodes seem to be getting cheaper these days (e.g. >= 45nm ASICs). But as far as I am aware the tooling and ecosystem for all this is still pretty bad; especially compared to how C/C++ compilers came a long way, JS's ease of accessibility or python's trove of libraries. (Disclaimer: I am not working in that field, so I might be outdated).

So to refine you suggestion: Improving the eco system around hardware synthetization could be a thing?

However, that doesn't seem to be what user richtapestry was thinking of(?).