Lab-grown meat ordering page. Hyperloop ticket sales website. Daily personal diet recipe. Group consensus platform. Factual information sharing
Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
351–360 of 947 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Mining trucks are going electric. They actually make energy when loaded and going down a hill. https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces... Furnaces have been run off of solar (parabolic mirrors) for quite some time.
While it sounds like an excellent candidate in all mines, one must keep in mind that the majority of mines tend to move ore/waste rock upwards. In those other, rarer cases (for instance: mountain top mining), electrification of the haulage fleet makes good sense.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#353Graphical Programming - You have an ever increasing number of people needing to perform computational tasks but lack education in coding. As WYSIWYG/GUI transformed personal computers, the GUI will eventually transform the way we program as well.
This exists, it's called LabVIEW. I make a money by replacing horrible LabVIEW-based systems with nice text-based ones (Python / C / whatever- all are better than LabVIEW).
LabVIEW is ok if your virtual instrument fits on one screen. Anything larger and you are better off using a conventional programming language.
So here is one program with graphical programming: how do you make it compatible with GIT / source control? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's not easy. [There is a 3d CAD system called OnShape that does it].
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great quote -- surprised I've never seen it before! In my limited experience, it's a mixed bag. Good: you get special treatment/opportunities because of a unique skill set and increased visibility on the end results of what you do. Bad: management doesn't really know what you do between software releases, you're paid the going rate for your industry while SWEs make far more, and in-house software quality standards mi…
Side ish bonus: you're basically prepared to run a one man show or move into niche consulting (much much higher rates). You also get to set the quality standards/procedures going forward, which can be satisfying. As a tangential bonus, I've accidentally converted my PhD research coworkers to strict git/markdown thanks mostly to typora (windows application). I showed one person what my work flow and version history lo…
Sounds like a pain in the ass.
It's already a huge pain dealing with know-nothings inside of tech firms. Now imagine having to cater to know-less-than-nothings somewhere else.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#355Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it. Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, us…
This is interesting to me because it’s such a cultural blindspot: the left-wing point of view is that energy efficiency is the only way forward, and the right-wing point of view is that more traditional fuels is the only way forward.
But solar panels seem to have a version or Moore’s law - and even a single doubling of efficiency from here would completely revolutionize our energy economy (and dramatically shake up world politics!). Two doublings and we have a green future. Three or more doublings and we suddenly have the biggest energy surplus in human history.
It might be a little slower than the computing revolution - but it also might not be. If this is 1980, and solar is at the Apple II phase, the next 30 years are going to be wild.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
cryptocurrency will never replace gold-backed fiat currency.
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” - Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman - the original stable genius
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#357The next big wave (in that this is already happening) is that of mass job displacement due to automation in every industry that has routine predictable work from the fast food industry, retail, transportation, legal, administrative and clerical work, routine data entry.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#358Anything that reduces last mile shipping time. Drones route planning planning platforms, personnel allocation software, Smart fridges/locks. Big retailers are racing to <1 day shipping and buying fairly untested tools to try to get there.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#359Crypto. 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 chan…
I think the people behind "trustlessness" should have chosen a better word. When people that are not familiar with crypto hear trustless, they can associate the solution with the common definition: "not worthy of trust; faithless; unreliable; false". I.e. the solution isn't reliable. I realize that the people behind it are trying to apply the world trustless to the problem they are solving, but that is definitely not…
A very fair point.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#360I 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'm living in Ireland and this is what I've wanted to do for years. There are loads of older small to medium businesses with SO many things that can be automated but I don't know how to get into it. I don't even know how to research it. What's the process for getting a client? Cold calling? Partnership with another provider?
What is the job title I should search for more information? Automator?