Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by neverhigh » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

maxhallinan wrote: post #42

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…

How do you find processes that can be automated? I've often thought that there must be a ton of this stuff in various industries where programmers aren't typically embedded.

At the moment many corporates are just automating the incoming invoice process. However, many processes are document (any kind of digital file) based to share information between departments, vendors or customers. Many processes could be automated. To identify a business case for automation worth coding such an application or offer an API we use three main KPI to identify processe worth automating it:

- more than 10 documents per day on year average, e.g a bank will receive new annual reports only in some calendar months but in massive scale

- average number of pages or lines of text per document, the longer the document the more mistakes will be made by humans, as they don't have the time to read everything in detail

- average pay of the FTE who is able to understand and process the document manually should be higher than the average pay of all employees in the company, to make sure the documents encapsulate business value

It's not a fixed set of KPI but helps us to sort out too narrow use cases.

By we I refer to the team behind my startup Konfuzio:

http://www.konfuzio.com/en/

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

#512

Post by pruthvishetty » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

Whatever is needed. At this point in time, it would be areas like clean energy for the whole planet, digitizing governance, helping people keep fit and healthy, growing nutritious food, population control, conserving forests and staying out of the way of mother nature.

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

#513

Post by colechristensen » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #209

One general theme I think is getting more and more apparent is the phenomenon of large systems breaking down. One of the side effects of globalization and the internet is that it becomes more and more apparent over time when there are opportunities for asymmetric impact. And there will always be bad actors that look to take advantage of that. This is partly because we as consumers get used to the abuses and start acc…

A book to greatly add to your perspectives about large complex systems failing: Inviting Disaster

https://www.amazon.com/Inviting-Disaster-Lessons-Edge-Techno...

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

#514

Post by david_shaw » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #345

screye wrote: post #273

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 t…

Healthcare tech has been the "next big area" for the past 40 years. Maybe this time is different, but historically it never pans out. Healthcare's an extremely regulated, extremely change-averse area of the economy where entrenched insiders will always close ranks to protect their own.

> Healthcare tech has been the "next big area" for the past 40 years. Maybe this time is different, but historically it never pans out.

How do you figure that it never pans out? Healthcare providers use a lot more technology today than they did in 1979.

From medical devices to billing software to electronic health records, I think this is an area that will continue to grow.

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

#515

Post by johnmorrison » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #148

tito wrote: 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…

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.

Hey, I work at a nuclear fission company. We think we can get our electricity prices to around $0.0025 / kWh by around 2045. This represents a ~20x reduction from off-peak cost in Ontario where I live, and ~150x reduction from average electricity prices in Germany.

Also, w.r.t. population, the way I see it our population is growing very quickly whether we like it or not (look at Africa). I think there's a good opportunity for us to support a population much larger than we have right now with improved sustainable energy tech.

(Solar panels are also getting cheaper, and will probably run around $0.02/kWh in the near future if iteration continues, and are probably capable of supporting us up to 20 billion people as well)

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

#516

Post by bcyn » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #502

8ytecoder wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is tough for us too - we were even thinking of buying two iPads connected to their Cloud account, just so whenever they locked themselves out, we could mail them the one we have while they mail us the broken one. The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password. They set one, thinking they are guessing one they've already set, they don't remember it, and…

> The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password.

I don't think that's true. What iOS version did they experience this on?

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

#517

Post by jariel » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

blhack wrote: post #112

Lonliness, particularly among the elderly.

The broad range of issues relating to the fact there were very few retirees 50 years ago that were old ... and who will now make up the 'majority' of people ... this is a huge deal.

People retire at 65 and live to 100 - that's a long time and there are a lot of them, and there are a huge range of issues there from healthcare to mobility.

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

#518

Post by el_dev_hell » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

johnmorrison wrote: post #171

In the online world, it seems like there are two big things happening right now: - Neural networks / ML (eg GPT-2) Definitely nowhere near its potential for being applied to a wide variety of areas. Find a niche you like and apply there. - Security / Privacy (eg Telegram) Rapidly growing demand pretty much everywhere. Bonus points if you can make your product great for standard users and at the same time hackable/cus…

> That all being said, if you are ambitious and talented without an all-consuming passion for software, I highly recommend you find something you can work in hardware. Since the '70s or so most industries have been basically frozen, besides computer hardware/software. Yet in the meantime materials science and engineering design has advanced considerably, both of which form the basis for innovation in new technologies. This is why SpaceX was able to build components for 10-100x cheaper than the leading suppliers in the early 2000s.

I honestly feel like reading this is a moment that I will l recall in about 8 years and think: "Damn, I wish I listend to that comment about hardware from johnmorrison".

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

#519

Post by NeedMoreTea » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

johnmorrison wrote: post #515

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.

Hey, I work at a nuclear fission company. We think we can get our electricity prices to around $0.0025 / kWh by around 2045. This represents a ~20x reduction from off-peak cost in Ontario where I live, and ~150x reduction from average electricity prices in Germany. Also, w.r.t. population, the way I see it our population is growing very quickly whether we like it or not (look at Africa). I think there's a good opport…

Hmm, Hinkley C is signed up at a strike price of £92.50/MWh, in 2012 Pounds. A 400x reduction when so much of the cost of nuclear is safety, waste management and decommissioning? That's surprising to say the least.

Can you give any clue on how?

The trend of solar and wind continuing the inexorable march downward seems much more certain.

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

#520

Post by romanixromanix » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

makeee wrote: post #257

Tools that make development 10x easier for the next generation of programmers. There’s many different ways to approach this and there are going to be a number of very successful startups in this space IMHO. Examples: darklang.com, webflow.com, retool.com, modulz.com, divjoy.com (disclaimer: my project).

>> Tools that make development 10x easier for the next generation of programmers.

Fully agree.

>> Examples: darklang.com, webflow.com, retool.com, modulz.com, divjoy.com

To me, those look still very much focused on the software engineer.

My preference is rather something like Oracle APEX or Atlassian Jira.

Jira already provides many generic features that are typically used in custom, corporate applications: - UI with forms, tables, sorting, filtering - queries - Workflow editor and workflow engine - notifications - csv file import / export - mobile client