
Ask HN: What to Pursue? - ekns
I&#x27;m tired of making stuff (software) that has no impact on anyone&#x27;s lives.
Ultimately I&#x27;d like to pursue AI research and&#x2F;or to build the future of humanity in some manner, but meanwhile I also need some money to live.<p>I&#x27;ve been bouncing off various ideas, but either I&#x27;m prematurely killing them, or they haven&#x27;t had any (apparently) feasible target markets:<p>- a service to save 2-factor authentication backup codes with client-side encryption - I couldn&#x27;t convince myself finishing this was worth the effort<p>- a personal analytics service, taking in &quot;the kitchen sink&quot; from health devices and other data sources, drawing up correlations, etc. -- it didn&#x27;t seem like anyone would pay for this<p>- a service to lend expertise on demand inside software engineering teams, like a &#x27;virtual engineer&#x27; inside a client team (I figured there are loads of inefficiencies in software development) -- I couldn&#x27;t find a way to even start this. I think the &#x27;silos&#x27; separating companies from the outside are probably considered a feature so there&#x27;s no chance even for this<p>- an index of all geospatial open(&#x2F;closed) datasets -- I made some preliminary work here but ultimately I fail to see who would possibly pay for this in some way<p>- tools for geospatial processing -- GDAL&#x2F;OSGeo&#x2F;QGIS&#x2F;rasterio came short so I made some of my own for joining datasets and such -- also doesn&#x27;t seem monetizable easily?<p>- reproducible datasets and computation -- this also didn&#x27;t seem worth the effort<p>Am I just prematurely killing off all my ideas without finding a single customer?<p>Is there some productive way to refine ideas and find better ones?<p>Should I find a different viewpoint to this entirely?
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XCSme
If you want to create something of high quality you should pursue something
that you are passionate about or already have a lot of knowledge of.

For example, I like table tennis a lot, if I could work a few years on
whatever I want, I would create some tool to improve the ways you can train in
table tennis, for example create some TT robot that you can play against, or
some AI to watch you play and show what you are doing wrong or how much
spin/speed was on the ball.

If you want to make something that's useful, don't make what everyone else is
making or, if you do, make it A LOT better.

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XCSme
The main idea is that it's very unlikely to make something that will benefit
every human on the earth. Choose a specific niche/category you are interested
in and improve it.

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raobit
Hey, I can really understand your problem,even i am going through similar
situation.

