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

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611–620 of 947 posts

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

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything in this world has a value you have to pay. Money comes at the right time if you go the right path in your life. Don't think about money, think about the path you want to go, a path you would be happy to go and money comes in its right time Choose "infinite" goals in your life, and follow them.

That’s reasonable advice, but it’s hard to pay the bills when you are off getting Zen on yourself.

And likewise, it's hard (though I guess not impossible) to achieve that Zen when you can't afford food or shelter. Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that.

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

#612
Any "problem" area is promising since you can help to find a solution to it. If you're flexible and problem-solving oriented, you'll always find yourself involved in interesting projects.

One example: before we had a lack of access to information, now we have too much information to deal with and have a lack of tools to sort out unbiased objective information from the rest.

Finding new tools of thought to help society raising its average IQ and EQ might be the highest-leverage activity I can think of.

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

#613

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 ser…

Definitely take a look at Rome2Rio, https://www.rome2rio.com . We've been using it for years, and have been carless nearly as long.

Thanks. I'll check it out sometime.

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

#614

Home meal prep. I think there's an opportunity for someone to nail this, just nobody has. I'd love somewhere to create a schedule, dietary preferences, family size, and have a fresh, healthy, varied meal delivered every day, without having to think about it again.

What do you think is missing from current options, because an awful lot of podcasts have ads for these right now. Freshly comes to mind as a brand I would recognize, but I've definitely heard multiple services advertizing that you can customize to your schedule, number of mouths to feed, dietary preferences (common sensitivities, kosher / halal, veg*, etc.)

Huh. Maybe nothing and I'm just behind the times. Will check it out.

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

#615

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.

My solution to this is loading them up with iOS and macOS devices, enabling iCloud backup, and having them live near an Apple store for hardware issues. They can click on all the shady links they want, but I haven’t had to field tech support in a long time.

I've had pretty good experiences with handing them Linux machines (usually openSUSE + Xfce). There's an initial adjustment period as they figure out "okay the orange fox replaces the blue e", but quite a few people I know who made that switch are now at least reasonably productive. Chromebooks are another option here that I've seen be pretty successful, and they have the advantage of being absurdly cheap.

The absolute biggest bang for the buck: ad-blockers. Fewer sketchy links to click on, and absolutely nothing to relearn.

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

#616
post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone can figure out how to do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute, they would have a real winner on their hands. Of course, execution is also a key factor in success. There are lots of good ideas that were had by multiple people, but only one successfully executed.

> If someone can figure out how to do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute... I will freely admit that I'm only passingly familiar with many of the concepts of cryptocurrency, but - isn't that precisely the point? If coins are easy to mine, then they're valueless. I must be missing something...

There are other potential ways to make currency difficult to obtain without such significant energy usage.

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

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2a. people who _actually_ can code are scarce, even in the tech industry. Source: conducted over 300 interviews As a young person with an interest in software programming (currently studying chemical engineering but still write C code now and then), what do you look for when trying to find out people who can _actually_ code?

Literally the ability to write working code . You'd be amazed how few interviewees can even put together a working for... loop.

This absolutely blows my mind. I have a hard time even believing it. But having never conducted interviews, I just don't know.

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

#618

Communications technology has moved past the ability of human brains to tolerate and mitigate the adverse effects. Every addicting dopamine surge from a Like or Retweet is the evidence; every viral pile-on, every echo-chamber lunatic fringe. Making humanity resilient to the negative externalities of our own technological advancement is essential for the survival of our species. Right now, a vast army of the smartest…

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

#619
Residential PV installs are becoming more and more common so consumers are looking for smart devices to take advantage of them more efficiently. If you are grid-tied without a battery (batteries like the Powerwall take much longer than a PV install to pay back, so the payback time is often greater than the warranty period) you want to use the energy at peak generation rather than selling it to the grid (which typically pays less than you pay to buy it).

There are a few devices to do this. In the UK the MyEnergi range is quite popular. They have devices to divert excess power to an electric vehicle and a electric hot water heater. However the data you can get out of them is limited - there are frequent complaints by YouTubers about this - and they require the cloud to get anything useful. Plus a full set is over £1000 - for what is effectively a CT clamp, relay and a nRF chip.

On a similar note it's impossible to control appliances like washing machines and dish washers to run during peak generation (unless you solder some wires to the control board), so they have to be started manually or set on a timer. Timers worked fine to take advantage of off-peak electricity tarrifs, but for PV they don't really work (maybe there is a cloud in the middle of the day). Ideally you want the device to know how much power is needed for each stage of the program, and pause if the available power is less than that.

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

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I tend to agree with you here. The difference I see is that solar has already been heavily invested in and developed recently, so it's probably near the limit of today's material science. My personal philosophy about technological progress is based heavily on the idea that material science is the principle barrier to what we can accomplish. That's why humanity's progress is recounted in "ages" named by material…

I can believe significant price improvements to come for solar, fission, and fusion since their fuel costs are zero or tiny. What new hydrocarbon sources could be 10x cheaper than coal or natural gas?

Well, I'm not really supposed to talk about this but we're working on a hydrocarbon byproduct of our fission reactors. Can't extrapolate but point is, there are unconventional ways to make hydrocarbons that become economically viable when they are a byproduct of an already profitable process.
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