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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?

#442
post #372
post #53

Climate 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…

One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon. It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each pr…

This is being worked on. The problem is we are terrible at engineering biosystems, CRISPR currently works mainly to knockout genes rather than the kind of enhanced evolution you describe, and upscaling a solution to the point it can have a planetary impact is non-trivial.

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

#444
post #100
post #53

Climate 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…

FED money printing and the subsequent bubbles will create the first trillionaire.

Zimbabwe beat them to it

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

#445
post #252
post #239

Earlier 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…

I disagree with your edit. Pay is categorically higher in tech than not for engineers.

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

#446
post #53

Climate 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…

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

> Elon Musk

There you go...

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

#447
I live without a car. I have for more than a decade.

Trying to plan car-free travel routes in the US is a huge pain in the butt. If Google maps can't spit out a solution that gets you all the way to your destination, it won't tell you a partial answer.

This means piecing together information from multiple sources. I spent a lot of time checking Amtrak routes and then looking for commuter bus routes, local shuttle services and the like to find a viable route.

In the past few days, I've done some googling to try to see if there is a website that handily aggregates commuter bus route info. There doesn't seem to be such.

In Southern California, you can travel from San Diego to Victorville via commuter bus, but there is no travel site that will tell you that. You have to research all the connections yourself.

(Well, I had to. I posted it to my homeless site: https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2015/05/o...)

I have to wonder how many other places in the US actually have similar situations where you can get there via bus or other transit, assuming you can dig up the information.

Living without a car is an environmentally-friendly choice and it's hugely painful in the US, often very unnecessarily so. Serving this need could promote not only environmental goals but also serve social justice because car-free Americans are frequently poor. We make it so painful to live without a car in the US that most Americans who can afford a car have one, even if they don't really want one, with the exception of a few dense metro areas with good local transit (like New York).

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

#449

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 think UIPath recent success shows that the market already values this.

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

#450

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'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?

A handful of places around Dublin have active Robotic Process Automation (RPA) teams, which seems to be what's being discussed here.

The Big Four consultancies and Accenture spring to mind. I think the likes of Fidelity and Citi have few roles too.

Note however that you'd be using off the shelf tools to do the automating - you wouldn't be developing the automation tools yourself.

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