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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?

#191

Post by dhruvkar »

the-dude wrote: post #154
dhruvkar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I work in a small, physical goods business in the Midwest (~30 employees), and the amount of time spent doing data entry is incredible. Documents (often PDFs, sometimes excel) flow between buyers, shippers, freight forwarders and internally. These documents are often updated. I'm looking into EDI for a solution, but there's so much value to be created from cutting out all this data entry. At least 1-1.5 full ti…

I read about EDI in the early 80s.

Right. It's been around for 30+ years and it's meant to solve this exact problem.

However, the cost of training staff and implementation is often out of reach for SMBs, still.

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

#192

Post by jeffreyrogers »

tito wrote: post #151
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see that happening. Most of the things you've suggested would require large amounts on energy to produce. I don't see energy getting cheaper over the next 50-100 years. It seems to me that climate change and reduced dependency on fossil fuels we lead to reduced globalization and population reduction.

The cost of energy will go near zero. The marginal cost of an electron captured with solar is free. Solar is starting to beat fossil fuel installations already, below $0.05 USD per kWh. This was not predicted even by the biggest cheerleaders even 10 years ago: "In 2017, the solar industry achieved SunShot’s original 2020 cost target of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar power three year…

Okay, how about the copper that transports that electron to somewhere it can do useful work? How about the 1800C furnace that melts sand into the silicon for the solar panel? How about the diesel fuel that the massive mining trucks used to haul the copper ore out of the mine are fueled with (these things are heavy and get something like 8 gallons to the mile (not a typo) good luck running them on batteries)?

Those things aren't going to zero anytime soon.

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

#193

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

mring33621 wrote: post #166
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most useful programs I made at my last job was an automated letters program. We had a whole slew of standard letters that we'd send out, most of the time requests would go to the typing pool (yes, this was a thing) that were basically "Do letter ABC for client XYZ", where letter ABC was a standard thing that always went to the same recipient. I built a screen in our system that let you tell it to request a…

A whole lot of valuable business software is essentially domain-specific or workflow-specific mail merge.

I've never thought about it that way before, but you're absolutely right.

Another "domain-specific mail merge" that I built was a tool to pull summary data out of the client financial records and populate specific fields in some off-the-shelf income tax software.

That was a terrible tool to write and maintain. The tax software's import feature didn't actually work correctly. I reached out to the vendor and the response was basically "Works for us", so doing it the right way wasn't an option.

Instead, I used VBA to blindly enter data into the program using SendKeys[0]. Maintaining the program was a case of tabbing through and counting the number of times I had to tab. Enter first name, tab, enter last name, tab three times, enter address line 1, etc. Next year when the forms in the tax software changed I'd have to add/remove tabs in the appropriate places, sometimes input stuff in a different order, etc.

As a program, it was horrible, horrible code. As a useful tool for the business, it was incredible. It saved a ton of time and the staff that used to do this by hand, in addition to doing actual work on the more complex files, were incredibly happy.

Overall, it was completely worth it.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/language/referen...

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

#195

Post by pjc50 »

a-priori wrote: post #130
pjc50 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to pay for it?

As one example, imagine that someone invents a process to manufacture gasoline using carbon extracted from the air, at a price that's cost competitive with gasoline extracted from the ground. Any car running on that as fuel would immediately become carbon-neutral, and it could be produced anywhere on the planet. Almost overnight you could make the entire automotive industry carbon neutral (burning this gasoline would…

Sure, that would be great. Processes to do this exist - at higher energy costs. The thermodynamic hill is heavily against you on this.

Cheap fusion or safe cheap thorium reactors would also be great. But an awful lot of smart people have bounced off those problems without success.

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

#196

Post by neltnerb »

Arkdy wrote: post #174
neltnerb wrote: post #138

Cooperatives. 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…

A collection of relevant links I recently collected: 1. A Technology Freelancer's Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative [pdf] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20908452 2. Platform Cooperativism Consortium | A hub that helps you start, grow, or convert to platform co-ops https://platform.coop/ 3. Stoop.cp Incubator for co-ops with a revenue sharing model and 10k grant https://start.coop/#program 4. Savvy Cooperat…

Awesome list! I feel like what a lot of these groups just starting out need is:

- A starting grant ideally, maybe help them find local grants for worker owned cooperatives or create a non-profit to get donations for this purpose (for instance, the first six months rent for a new coffee shop). That stoop.cp looks pretty much like what I am thinking of. It's hard to stress how important $10k can be to people starting a low-margin business who likely can't get a business loan for this.

- Moral support that while this is a risk they have a support network at least online to mutually bitch with and get advice on little stuff like dealing with the city. Or heck, make a platform so that people can directly donate money to other cooperatives to help them out when they run into trouble. I've definitely supported coops on gofundme and the like to help them get their seed money to start their whatever. Can this be more communal? A successful cooperative can offer a heck of a lot more than just money to a brand new one.

- Help with internal management. Being your own boss is hard. No one knows how to do it, meaning how to set goals and make a clear coherent plan and bring people on board to help you without using management authority. How do you solve disputes between equals both legally and practically? How do you mentally switch from a command and control management style to a collaborative management style? Should you go into business with your friends? How should you evaluate your partners and understand the risk that their personalities bring to the table?

But this list is awesome! I'm sure there's a subreddit for this right? Definitely feeling optimistic that these things exist!

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

#197

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #44
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well honed skill set in 'ML' isn't even about the algorithms or data structures or any of that. If you want to be competitive in ML, study and think about experimental design, and what it takes to be able to confidently state the accuracy, precision, and reproducibility of a given analysis when you apply it to real world data. The biggest issue/ liability with most 'AI'/'ML' is unsubstantiated/ irreproducible resul…

How do you go about developing skill in experimental design?

I think the first step is to develop a skeptics mindset. As a scientist, your job isn't to believe, its to address evidence and evaluate whether or to it supports or conflicts with a given hypothesis. A profound influence on my development in the sciences was a older (he was 55+ at the time), physical chemist I shared an office with,'John'. Arguably, he was one of the greatest critical thinkers I had ever had the privilege of working with. Many other people at that office would avoid him entirely when discussing their work because if John heard about what they were doing, he would always 'challenge' (politely and professionally) them on what they were doing: how they had decided to set up their experiment; how they had decided to sample; how they intended to analyse their data; how they (physically and literally) planned on getting their data.

John did this because on his own work, he was constantly challenging his own assumptions. The result of this was that John 'appeared' to be far less productive; however, the results of his work were orders of magnitude more robust than our other colleagues at that time.

By incorporating a skeptics mindset, less becomes much more. A skeptic doesn't believe the internal error rates produced as a result of a model run, they take a long time to become convinced that a 'thing' is the truth. Don't believe, measure.

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

#199

Post by danjc »

kilimchoi wrote: post #50
peterangular wrote: post #38

I 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…

sounds like RPA

I've been conflicted about RPA because my view is that if there's an API, you should use that rather than comparatively brittle screen-based "integration". What's extremely compelling about this approach though is that you can cut through all of the friction of API's - even end users understand how to use the UI so they're really empowered to build their own automation in a way that they haven't been previously.

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

#200

Post by StreamBright »

luch wrote: post #117
strken wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what more recent xboxes are like, but the original xbox was a cut down windows 2000 running on Intel and Nvidia. It was really close to commodity hardware and software.

the current Xbox is running a Windows 10 (one kernel design) while the PS4 run a patched up FreeBSD. Only Nintendo bothers with writing custom kernels, and historically Sony with the PS2 having exotic "Cell" processor units.

You mean PS3? It had the CBE.
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