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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?

#71

Post by friendlybus »

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…

Yes I did some of this at an old telecoms job. It was incredibly obvious that an automated system could put 5-10 people out of work depending on the sophistication of the implementation. I started automating my own analysis job and left before spreading it or letting it work without super vision. Definitely a lot of low level knowledge worker jobs can be evaporated.

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

#72

Post by avgDev »

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.

Any midsize company has tremendous amount of things that could be automated. For example, I work at manufacturing company, we produce parts for bigger companies. Bigger companies already have APIs, web portal, etc. We have people who often manually enter data.

Any time, a piece of paper is passed around or when people enter data manually you can either automate or improve the process. People are prone to errors.

Right now, I am rewriting a mission critical application, some trivial changes will save hours a week and improve the integrity of the information. It is not as exciting as writing algorithms but it is nice to see an application written by you used by 200+ people.

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

#73

Post by tabtab »

lewisjoe wrote: post #27

Unpopular opinion: Domain driven stack. We have been living in the golden era of software industry, thanks to Moore's law. We were able to afford RISC (= general purpose CPU arch), general purpose operating systems, general purpose languages, general purpose databases etc all because the hardware was going to evolve and get faster anyway. Now with Moore's law showing signs of death, the future for better computing wo…

Re: "cloud applications will be written with cloud-friendly languages"

Carefull, you invest your code base on a "cloud-friendly" language and clouds then could fall out of style. That goes for other components as well.

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

#74

Post by unlinked_dll »

lewisjoe wrote: post #27

Unpopular opinion: Domain driven stack. We have been living in the golden era of software industry, thanks to Moore's law. We were able to afford RISC (= general purpose CPU arch), general purpose operating systems, general purpose languages, general purpose databases etc all because the hardware was going to evolve and get faster anyway. Now with Moore's law showing signs of death, the future for better computing wo…

So DSLs and ASPs?

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

#75

Post by nostrademons »

penagwin wrote: post #37
aey wrote: post #28

Crypto! 17% of the worlds GDP is spent on financial services. Software can eat it all.

I think you missed the train friend.

That's what somebody told me about crypto in 2015, or for that matter about Google in 2009 and computer science in 2002.

There's always another train, right up until the point where everybody assumes that there'll always be another train and world domination is assured. At that point, it's time to hop on another track.

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

topkai22 wrote: post #29

To borrow a term from Microsoft, "Intelligent Edge." With the shift to the cloud, we are finding there are still many scenarios that should start local for latency, bandwidth, or legal considerations. Organizations still want those scenarios to be easy to manage though. An example might be in store retail analytics- a set up with a bunch of cameras that can detect what people are touching or otherwise interested in.…

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by tabtab »

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…

Siberia will be the next California ;-)

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

#80

Post by hectorr1 »

Usable cryptography.

iPhone-level UX for private key management.

People care about privacy, and more are willing to pay for it. There is a massive opportunity for direct monetization through cryptocurrency users, and the things you could build when this problem is solved...

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