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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?

#301

Post by omarchowdhury »

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #228
johnmorrison wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All money is fake money, the notion of a currency is a value fiction shared among a group of people. Most governments are very young, and do not last very long historically. Central banking is a handful of decades old, cryptocurrency is one decade old. Neither the maximalists nor deniers are right at this point. It remains to be seen when/whether cryptocurrency will replace fiat currency.

cryptocurrency will never replace gold-backed fiat currency.

Pray tell which fiat currency is gold backed.

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

#305

Post by rwmurrayVT »

colek42 wrote: post #43
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #21

Govtech and defense tech Super high barriers to entry, governments are spending more and more but people are demanding better more efficient services and won't put up with waiting in line at the DMV forever. In defense, it's hard to see the applications and what to build from an outside view, hard to get contracts and permissions, and hard to compete with established co's like Boeing that have all of the relationship…

Check out the SBIR program. It provides an easy way to get into the system and innovate.

Absolutely one of the best ways to get into the system.

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

#306

Post by odonnellryan »

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…

This is what I do for work (mostly) as well. The challenge I've had trying to grow the business is "convincing" (for lack of a better word) businesses that they will really save a lot - even after showing them case-studies. Companies can be stubborn.

Hit me up if you ever want to chat! ryan luma.im

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

#307

Post by virgilp »

peterangular wrote: post #247
nwsm wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Examples are UI Path and Blue Prism. It's finicky technology that is hard to make sustainable, but a lot of companies are really interested in it because of the amount of work that could be cut out like you said.

> It's finicky technology that is hard to make sustainable This 100 times over. The only way I've been able to make it work is being one heck of a generalist. I've found that training on what I do is near-impossible and I don't even know if I could scale a real company in this beyond myself.

Well, UiPath's valuation is currently 7B... But yeah. They have an "academy" for training RPA developers, forums/ social presence, big sales teams, a process for developing automation, an "automation framework", a marketplace for automation activities, etc.... all these are stuff outside of the core software (robot/"activity executor", orchestrator, and studio for designing said activities).

Maintaining & expanding the automation is a heck of a challenge though. Like, once you got the stuff deployed, make sure that it works without headaches, in the face of other software/ OS upgrades. The robots/automation services are essentially a "fleet of microservices" that you have to maintain for a customer whose strength is likely not IT, and who will change the infrastructure from underneath your "microservices". It's a hard problem, but I feel we're well positioned to tackle that, and if we do, the sky is the limit really. (disclaimer: I work for UiPath, though that should be obvious from the message)

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

#308

Post by istorical »

derefr wrote: post #82
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…

Is there a possibility of ...automating, this kind of automating? I understand that, like regular application programming, a lot of this kind of automation comes down to requirements-gathering and formal specification of workflow. But, in theory, could there be some kind of sufficiently-advanced software wizard that does most of your job? Maybe by monitoring entry-level employees' interactions with the software-to-be…

This is what Zapier and IFTTT and others are doing.

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

#309

Post by olah_1 »

airstrike wrote: post #218
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…

> 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. Needs ? Citation needed. That's just a simplistic and Marxist view of the world, but not everyone buys into that. Actually, hardly anyone buys into that.

I don't see how co-operatives have anything to do with a hegelian dialectic. I just like localism.

>next stage of capitalism

That does sound super cringe, yes lol.

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

#310

Post by [deleted] »

yodsanklai wrote: post #206
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…

> Solar is starting to beat fossil fuel installations already, below $0.05 USD per kWh. I read that over and over, but it's like comparing apples and oranges.

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