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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?

#841

Post by sebringj »

cosmolev wrote: post #500
sebringj wrote: post #121

possibly Behavior-driven code generation... meaning create some platform to enable watching users use an application, then it could make machine code to create a similar application. This would enable making videos for training that simulated a working application but the AI would not care if the application worked or not in reality but could make it work type thing?

Are you talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_by_example ?

Yah I think so maybe like that but more in a way that it was setup for existing workflows in that marketing people could actually create some video mockup demonstration then an AI could look at that video then produce a working product from it, similar to how a developer would. But this is shooting developers in the foot obviously as those that are not AI programmers would be screwed.

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

#842

Post by nate »

eismcc wrote: post #838
nate wrote: post #833

A lot of folks are look forward to what's coming in tech, which is fine and good and can lead to promising careers and innovation. But I'm even more impressed with folks like Nintendo who do the exact opposite. They look at all the junk we've already passed up to see what can be done with it. So many times along their path they came up with products using what the Sony's would have considered obsolete junk. This is a…

This what Roku did as well - built tech out chips nobody even wanted to sell.

Oh wow, thanks for the reference. Any good histories of Roku out there you recommend?

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

#843

Post by closeparen »

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…

As someone using ML in production at scale, it's not the sophistication of the models themselves, but all the "boring" operational stuff around them.

- Keeping them fed with clean, high quality, low latency feature data.

- Understanding the impact of an ML intervention on the overall system or business process, in aggregate and for all the relevant subpopulations.

- Understanding why scores may be drifting. These are very challenging alerts to investigate.

- Resource efficiency at very high QPS or in mobile contexts.

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

#844

Post by jason0597 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #586
jason0597 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Literally the ability to write working code . You'd be amazed how few interviewees can even put together a working for... loop.

I've heard this story before, but it sounds absolutely insane and I can't begin to imagine (let alone expect!) that such a thing occurs. Is it really true?

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

#845

Post by sghiassy »

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"…

DIY Cas9 Crisper DNA Kit: http://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/

Not affiliated with the company. Just amazed at how accessible that tech is becoming.

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

#846

Post by Pinbenterjamin »

Process Automation / Business Rule Optimization is a nearly untouched field for large, existing software driven companies.

For goal N, where N is an amalgam of small processes, what can we do to isolate, automate, and optimize the process?

Everyone is hyper focused on generic ML solutions, but there's it has been a hell of a lot easier to hand-code solutions to problems in existing mid-to-large scale businesses that are looking to alleviate a process pain point. If you have the brains to determine some basic ROI ballparks, you can make back engineering hours fast if you can either increase the output of your business, or decrease the required people to accomplish that output.

There's some fields that touch upon this, like Dev-Ops, but this is a more strict definition of 'operations', in that I'm referring to the non-technical people.

The impact of this practice is amplified by two major factors; 1. Quantity of work 3. Difficulty of work

If you have high quantity of N, small optimizations are compounded across all the work centers. If you have highly difficult work, reducing the time it takes to 'handle' or 'create' output can be reduced.

This idea ties in to a fantastic book, 'The Goal' by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

Being in 'hot tech' is cool, but mastering old concepts is valuable to businesses rigid to change. As the number of established companies that leverage tech for a majority of their work grows, the need for brains that are capable of process improvement with a scalpel, rather than a chainsaw.

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

#847

Post by safog »

SamBam wrote: post #386
safog wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon. It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each pr…

Not my area of expertise, but I would assume that there is an efficiency limit, much like there is for solar panels. Remember that organisms can't just pull CO2 out of the air for free. Plants do it via photosynthesis, which requires the sun's energy. There is a maximum amount of energy falling on each organism, and I would guess that there is some theoretical limit to the efficiency of photosynthesis that is well be…

Yup I agree with you almost entirely. The only thing I was thinking of was if evolution would optimize for the amount of energy a plant receives vs other things like survival, reproduction etc and how much efficiency we can gain by optimizing purely for photosynthesis.

Also I don’t know if plants are adapted to the high CO2 atmosphere yet so even if evolution optimized the ability of a plant to photosynthesize, given this happened in relatively low CO2 environments like forests and without man made climate change, it’s possible that human intervention can improve it.

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

#848

Post by safog »

Gatsky wrote: post #442
safog wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon. It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each pr…

This is being worked on. The problem is we are terrible at engineering biosystems, CRISPR currently works mainly to knockout genes rather than the kind of enhanced evolution you describe, and upscaling a solution to the point it can have a planetary impact is non-trivial.

Re: upscaling, I was reading another article on HN about a specific species of plant when grown in sufficiently large quantities (6x size of Texas I think) would basically bring us down to carbon neutral. We can probably scrounge up that land if the world works together but who knows.

Re: engineering biosystems, I imagine engineering native plants (if possible) has much fewer ecosystem wide chain effects) than using gene drives to eliminate mosquitoes or whatever.

Re: crispr, I see photos of glow in the dark monkeys and super muscular dogs, so as a layman it seems like cutting a gene and vaguely throwing the desired gene near the cut location seems to work. We don’t have as many ethical implications about rapidly iterating on plants as we do on animals, so it seems like if an experiment doesn’t work, just repeat 1000x until it works would do it. People talk about off-target effects etc. but you won’t really know unless you try I guess.

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

#849

Post by tabtab »

alexanderdmitri wrote: post #522
tabtab wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: "cloud applications will be written with cloud-friendly languages" Carefull, you invest your code base on a "cloud-friendly" language and clouds then could fall out of style. That goes for other components as well.

I feel like the language choice isn't going to be what bites people here, the danger is more architecting to a specific platform, relying on its SDKs and optimizing to a provider's specific resource idiosyncrasies.

That is true, but somebody did mention a "cloud friendly language". Most of the languages in common use were designed pre-cloud. This new thing, whatever it is, could thus have cloud dependencies that current languages don't.

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

#850

Post by al_chemist »

johnmorrison wrote: post #762
baq wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Global warming will melt ice caps and flood the world. Or global warming will evaporate water and dry the world.

One thing is sure. Global warming, water and world war three. /s

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