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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?

#271

Post by ebj73 »

julienreszka wrote: post #194

Don't ask this question here, people here who know what is promising won't tell you because that's too valuable information. Ask your children if you have any. They will be able to tell you.

Not really, julien.

If Sergey Brin had told you back in 1998 that he planned to start Google, and to start indexing the web out of his garage, it would not have meant anything. Or if the Wright Brothers had confided in you that they planned to build a workable flying machine back in 1903, they would not have been running any great risk either.

What's valuable is having the vision, and the ability to connect all the little dots, and to see exactly _why_ something is a good proposition. Just hearing that something will be great usually won't help you a lot.

To quote Howard H. Aiken:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

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

#272

Post by RedBeetDeadpool »

ghaff wrote: post #140
dlivingston wrote: post #18

I have a hunch that the Next Big Thing (TM) will be augmented reality: though the technology is currently in its infancy, when compelling AR glasses are finally released (Apple is rumored to be released theirs in 2020) I think that it will have a massive impact. AR frameworks are a dime a dozen, but if you're an Apple person look into ARKit + Swift.

One of the big wildcards for widespread consumer use is the social aspect. We can envision what AR might look like in everyday life. What's far less clear to me is the degree to which people will accept AR glasses that are constantly using video and audio to deliver information to the wearer will be accepted. If I know that person I just met has inconspicuously scanned me and looked up all kinds of information that a…

Well it would be socially acceptable to be wearing one while working on-the-job for example, a construction worker, doctor, or even a motorcyclist.

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

#273

Post by screye »

ML for healthcare. The whole industry is so far behind everything else, it is not even funny. Problem is, Just like Airbnb or Uber, the biggest road blocks are not technological, they are organizational and political. It is entirely possible, we might need some major privacy / security related leaps in ML to convince the medical industry to adopt it fully.

ML in movies and rendering. Deep Fakes is just an amateur's tech demo. In a few years, I expect to see render rights actually become a thing. Like, you don't act in the movie, but give a company rights to use a 3d render of you in it.

real time and full time holograms / AR. With remote work becoming a thing, I see a huge market for full 3d renders of the person presenting or even completely virtual AR work places where people check in to work. Maybe not for a decade or two, but whoever builds the flagship product will make a ton of money.

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

#275

Post by omarchowdhury »

8ytecoder wrote: post #226
awinder wrote: post #147

I'm gonna go in a different direction: broadly, solutions that deal with the problems of an aging population: 1. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients 2. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area) 3. Personnel management for homecare nursing List could go on and on. None of this is especially "trendy" but there's clear demographic reasons to…

A tool for children to remotely manage parents' phones, tablets, routers and (may be) computers would be nice to have. My parents are not very tech savvy and when something goes wrong getting someone to fix it takes forever. If I had remote access I'd do it in just a few minutes.

LogMeIn, Teamviewer, VNC..?

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

#276

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

Crypto.

And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that just goes "up and to the right".

I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy, permissionless, autonomous machines.

MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many others collectively are very likely to change the fundamental assumptions we make when using software.

Here's a great talk regarding trustlessness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0rZcpfF5dU

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

#277

Post by peterangular »

kilroy123 wrote: post #143
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…

I've been thinking a lot recently at trying to do this kind of work as well. I'm just not sure where to start. I have a pretty weak network form living abroad for so long and moving around a lot. Any advice about how to even get started doing this kind of work? What tools to study or learn? How to find work?

Absolutely!

Don't move around all the dang time. I've lived in two places and have an incredibly strong network in both. I find people who are bouncing around 50-times-over usually lack the deep business relationships that it takes to establish trust to solve "big" problems.

As far as getting started - once you start, just never stop. Solve every dang problem you can get your hands on big or small, and continue to publish code every day.

Tools to study and learn - web web web. Also Microsoft Excel automation is an incredible need for lots of businesses. Puppeteer, and learning how to mimic what a browser can do without using a browser would be the two most useful skills I have personally. If you don't have a VERY solid background in webdev you need to get that going first, so much of what I do is reverse-engineering someone's website so I have to be very versed in the way that sites are built (all the way from ancient ones to the most modern of frameworks).

How to find work is network. Once you have the skills, you need to know people that have potential needs. I've already reached out to two people who found me through this thread and regardless of "making money", I genuinely want to help them, if even to just point them in the right direction (like yourself).

People are (*generally) awesome if you put aside your own ego, and I would be absolutely nowhere if I wasn't a sociable person. I love to learn about the world by making connections with people, and genuinely want to help them with what I can do!

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

#278

Post by sixstringtheory »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #192
tito wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> How about the 1800C furnace that melts sand into the silicon for the solar panel

I wonder if a process similar to that used for molten salt batteries, using reflected, concentrated sunlight, could be used to melt sand into what is needed for more solar panels, electronics etc, and use the stored energy while it cools off, essentially combining the processes? And of course for other [s]melting processes powered by fossil fuels today?

Hmm, after doing a bit of research: the melting point for saltpeter (used in molten salt storage [0]) is only 550°F, while silicon's is 2,577°F... would a reflecting solar array be able to reach those temperatures? If I'm reading this [1] correctly, you could only practically get to 3,698.33°F (really close to your example of a 1,800°C furnace) if you collected all the sunlight falling onto earth. It's got to be much worse than that though in practice, because to focus all of it onto a single point would require beaming reflections from the perimeter a long distance through air, and also around the curvature of the earth...

So, we need to build this on the moon or in orbit? Oooh, Futurama actually showed us what could go wrong here [2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_sa...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Ideal...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qksm5cRtcU

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

#279

Post by tudelo »

peterangular wrote: post #214
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 respon…

> SendKeys Holy cow why didn't I know about this 6 months ago =| VBA is something I have had to reluctantly learn. It's a horrid/ancient language. Sorry if someone gets offended at that but to someone who uses a lot of modern development languages/tools it's just very very difficult with near-zero "nice to haves"... you just end up taking this huge lib of code around with you with functions like "inArray" etc. > As a…

Do you use AutoHotkey ever?
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