Anything that goes from Zero to 1 (Peter Thiel). An example, pre-airplane civilization to a jet set civilization. I'd say that in 2016, that was the year for ML to seriously influence world events. In 2019 I'd give a serious look at this list https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs and chances are the next big thing isn't on it. Personally, I'm shorting credit card companies since 50% of millennials have maxed out credit cards.
Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
181–190 of 947 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#182Memristors. Thus far, they have not been used very well, mostly due to 'lock in' effects. But their power savings are fairly intense (as compared to current solutions, about a factor of ~10^3 - 10^4). With AI and ML stuff literally heating up, those power savings will become more and more attractive. Eventually, a sea change will occur and memristive based computing will become the dominant one. Personally, I think that the synapse-like characteristics of memristors aren't as fully exploited as they should be and new chip designs will greatly aide the transition to better and better AIs and ML devices on less power and smaller form factors. Think the modern image classification on a Tesla but powered by a watch battery, for months.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#183tools for micro-entrepreneurs: with the growth of automation (e.g. RPA and AI) and the consequent decline of the world middle class, many people are being forced to work informally as a food deliverer or be an uber driver. others will become micro-entrepreneurs (solo-entrepreneurs for many). the opportunity is that these entrepreneurs will need all kinds of specialized tools during their journey (payment, marketing,…
In calling these people entrepreneurs you are really contorting the language. The entrepreneurs in this system are the creators and owners of the system. The other people are something else entirely.
i do not disagree regarding how we will call these "entrepreneurs". but problems looking for solutions for these people will be there (is already). it might even a chance to improve their lives
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#184Cooperatives. The economy needs to shift away from giant companies with pay ratios of a thousand to one between CEOs and average employees and employees need control over their workplace to move to the next stage of capitalism. Make it easier for collectives to start up businesses that aren't purely focused on profit and instead focused on employees taking ownership of their work. It may not be the biggest profit pos…
I've always thought it would be interesting to figure out the smallest number of people needed to create a pop-up town or microtown. If you get a sufficient number of people together, plop them down anywhere, run water/electricity/sewer, and start a community. It might be that most of them would have to telecommute for revenue, but then you'd also have the local general store or whatever else you'd need. But the peop…
I think there's wide variability in the social needs of humans as a function of past experience, genetics, and age.
But I think that 15-20 is about right for a sustainable group generally as long as you've got the right skills in the mix. Fewer than that and a few lazy people and things fall apart. More than that and you start forming cliques.
Once you get into multi-generational it gets interesting. I know at least one place like this where a bunch of families sort of just went in on some land and then coparent as a community.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#185I 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…
Once you create an api or solution, are you able to resell it to other businesses or or do you create once off solutions?
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#186AI-driven drug discovery.
New pharmaceuticals are immensely expensive to develop, but that's largely because pharma companies aren't using available data to its full potential.
Its never been easier to start a software business, which is bad for most software companies since it means that they'll have no opportunity to create monopolies.
AI-driven pharma companies are defensible since their work is much more patentable than a typical software-enabled business, and because they'll benefit from data network-effects in the long term.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#187Unpopular 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…
Not sure this adds up for me. So long as network latency and throughput remain asymmetrically limited with respect to machine and CPU cache speed, the implementation detail of data locality will bleed into anything you write. At that point, what makes a language, database, OS anymore "cloud-friendly" than what we have today? I can already get 90% of the way there with Kubernetes, Aurora and any language of choice.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#188Build the smallest OS possible that can run Kubernetes at scale in Rust You’ve just deprecated Linux & C in the data center :-D
Although Kubernetes is for containers, so you'd also need to re-implement Linux in Rust.
Sorry, did the omission of a very detailed list of todos imply I don’t know what this would entail?
You’d need to reimplement a variety of layers and could leave out of a lot too.
Personally a rudimentary BIOS type system in hardware that can read/write to an OS layer would be the design I’d start with
The OS doesn’t need userland tooling then
But no one cares about the OS that powers everything being an archaic mess. Gotta fetishize where the profit is
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#189Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#190I 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…
How do you find processes that can be automated? I've often thought that there must be a ton of this stuff in various industries where programmers aren't typically embedded.
Honestly your best bet is to talk to people. I doubt cold calling/knocking on the door of a business will succeed, but people get enthusiastic when it comes to complaining about tedious/monotonous work. Especially at bars. Turn to someone nearby and say "I am looking for ideas to yadda yadda save people time and frustration. Is there any tedious process you deal with at work which you think doesn't need a person to deal with?" If you travel, this is especially common in airports. I've never asked someone this question and yet people rant at me all the time once I say "software developer".