
Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? - richtapestry
What&#x27;s an area that people think is up and coming?  (e.g. like social networks were in 2004, mobile apps in 2010, or vlogging in 2014)<p>I&#x27;ve finished several projects simultaneously and I&#x27;m looking to work in an area with lots of users, but as yet few producers. Wouldn&#x27;t even need to involve programming, but probably would need to be online, as I&#x27;m pretty introverted!
======
johnmorrison
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/customizable for people who want to do that.
Capitalize on both legs of the pareto distribution.

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 work at a startup in nuclear fission, particularly because this tech is at
<1% of its potential right now. The same could be said for many other areas.

Here's some ideas you might find interesting, that I think could work in the
next decade or so: \- Supersonic air travel \- Electric air travel \-
Nano/micro-scale metallurgy and materials for industry \- Biological materials
\- Gut/microbiome \- Genetic engineering \- Nuclear fission / fusion \- Carbon
capture \- Cross-laminated timber (CLT) for construction \- Indoor farming /
optimizing farming in general \- Synthetic meat / meat alternatives

~~~
ncmncm
The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. Arguably,
working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but
actively harmful.

Wind, solar power, energy storage still have huge room for improvement.

Direct solar or wind -> liquid fuel will be essential to adapting fast.

Windmills can drive production of liquid ammonia on farms (needing only air
and water inputs), for use directly as fertilizer and fuel, without need for a
grid attachment and without blocking sunlight needed for the plants. Ammonia
is not a very dense fuel (e.g. terrible for aircraft), but that doesn't matter
for farm machinery.

Direct solar -> hydrogen has been demonstrated, with bio-reaction for hydrogen
+ CO2 -> liquid fuel suitable for aircraft. Direct hydrogen-fueled aircraft
are feasible, and more efficient than with kerosine, but the design cycle is
too long.

Wind turbines will be wearing out as the blades erode. No-moving-parts screens
might be the next generation, extracting power by releasing ions to be carried
away from an electric field. The old towers will still be useful, and the rare
earths can be mined out for other uses, probably vehicle motors.

Batteries are a very material-intensive storage medium. Underwater air storage
does not need exotic materials or tech, and the pressure at depth makes the
strength of materials needed minimal, other than piping.

We need to replace huge amounts of refrigeration equipment with versions that
don't rely on HFCs, and get the HFCs incinerated. One gram of HFC traps as
much heat as 2500 g of CO2, and lasts centuries in the atmosphere. Once
vented, it cannot be recaptured. Ammonia-cycle systems need to be made safe
enough for general use, and HFC versions outlawed.

Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably
collapse by 2035.

~~~
echelon
> The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption.

Our climate and ecology are certainly at risk, but I think the biggest threat
in the world right now is the rapid rise of fascist China. They're challenging
the notion that free speech and democracy are required for capitalism and
economic gain.

China has grown so emboldened under President Xi that they're no longer
content to just alter or buy out our media companies. They're flat out
dictating marching orders to Western organizations and asking for employees
that oppose their mandates to be fired. They're kidnapping foreign nationals
and holding them hostage on trumped up charges. They've grown beyond stealing
our ideas - now they're trying to supplant them.

That doesn't even begin to capture the things they're doing within their own
borders. Surveillance state, social credit, travel limitations, Uyghur
detention camps, supposed organ harvesting, Hong Kong / Tibet / Taiwan, ... In
China it's actually 1984, and they're teaching the world that it works. If
they win this battle, I worry we might wind up facing similar prospects in our
future.

> Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably
> collapse by 2035.

That's a little bit overblown. Want to make a bet on longbets.org? I'll
happily donate to a green cause.

~~~
snowwrestler
Everything you fear about the rise of fascist China was far worse under the
USSR in the latter 20th Century, and in fact far worse in China during that
time too.

I’m not intending to downplay the impact on minorities within China, or their
growing global influence. It’s just that what China is doing is fundamentally
the same category of human and national behavior we have seen for 100 years.
Relatively speaking, it is less destructive than what came before. We must
address it but the tools to do so are available and obvious.

It pales before the threat of climate change because that is a new category of
threat to global society.

Why? Because water, food, and real property are fundamental to the health and
economies of all nations, and climate change will create massive unfunded
changes to those. It’s one thing to have an aggressive nation on the world
stage a la China. It’s quite another if hundreds of millions of people need to
migrate and have no money to do so. The latter is well within the realm of
possibility given what we know about climate change.

~~~
aianus
What is the point of the human race surviving if it turns into some 1984-like
dystopia with cameras in my house making sure I pledge allegiance to Emperor
Xi's portrait every morning or my social credit score plummets?

Give me the climate (or nuclear) apocalypse, instead, please.

~~~
ncmncm
Humanity never had a point. It just is. Humans will survive everything
imaginable, in much reduced numbers.

There were once 100M people in the Amazon basin, wiped out by plagues brought
by Europeans 5 centuries ago. A few survived. The trees growing in unchecked
in the depopulated Americas reduced CO2 enough to cause a mini ice age.

That won't be enough to bring down temperatures in the next collapse because
the CFCs and HFCs won't go away. But at least the oceans will get less acid.

------
awinder
I'm gonna go in a different direction: broadly, solutions that deal with the
problems of an aging population:

1\. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients

2\. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push
towards this area)

3\. Personnel management for homecare nursing

List could go on and on. None of this is especially "trendy" but there's clear
demographic reasons to build startups in this area and there's going to be a
natural onramp of capital & solutions for how to care for a radically older
population are going be sorely needed.

~~~
8ytecoder
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.

~~~
lotsofpulp
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.

~~~
yellowapple
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.

------
lewisjoe
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
would be domain driven stack. A quick thought experiment will be that: cloud
applications will be written with cloud-friendly languages, using cloud
friendly databases, on cloud-ready operating systems and processors that are
architected for heavy cloud workloads. Much like how gaming was relying on
custom stack for performance (GPUs, play station, X-box, etc)

The advent of TPUs by Google is a symptom of this pattern too. Of course,
personal computers with general-purpose-everything will keep existing, but the
business industry will start shifting towards domain driven stack slowly and
steadily for obvious reasons.

~~~
strken
Not sure what more recent xboxes are like, but the original xbox was a cut
down windows 2000 running on Intel and Nvidia. It was really close to
commodity hardware and software.

~~~
luch
the current Xbox is running a Windows 10 (one kernel design) while the PS4 run
a patched up FreeBSD.

Only Nintendo bothers with writing custom kernels, and historically Sony with
the PS2 having exotic "Cell" processor units.

~~~
StreamBright
You mean PS3? It had the CBE.

------
Uptrenda
Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for: but I think CRISPR-Cas9 seems
like the most exciting technology probably in all of science. It's a system
that can be used to literally change the DNA of living creatures, and on top
of that it's highly accessible. Think of the hacker culture today and now
imagine the same rate of change for biological engineering.

We'll have massive libraries of re-usable "components" for interesting DNA-
sequences. People will slowly slice together more complicated features, and
freely trade organic components with each other via post. At some point in the
future electronics will catch up to bioengineering, leading to better ways to
make changes to DNA. We'll eventually be able to change DNA in something like
a "biology IDE" and have usable components printed out the other end. After
that point, our world probably won't look anything like it does today.

It won't be long before someone decides to give themselves glowing skin or
super strong muscles (and people have already tried the latter!) I for one
welcome our super-human overlords.

~~~
K0SM0S
> I think CRISPR-Cas9 seems like the most exciting technology probably in all
> of science.

I tend to agree. However, having spoken at length about this with a friend
doing her PhD, there are a few _major_ problems between now and then.

\- Scope: if you thought Big Data (relating to human _behavior_ ) was a
massive endeavor (still very much not solved, not by a long shot), try
genetics. We're talking orders of magnitude Bigger Data. We have the PoC but
finding practical solutions remains a hard problem as we speak (needle in a
haystack).

\- Money: Bio-sectors don't pay software engineers enough to compete with the
tech sector (almost no one does), and bio-experts are generally not good
enough at it. So there's a huge lack in terms of dual [SE skills + domain
knowledge] experts for this category of problems. Research funding is massive
in big (private) pharma and comparably non-existent in basic research — and
for now, CRISPR-Cas9 is mostly the latter.

The first problem (resources) will probably solve itself as time goes by
(assuming some Moore's Law continuation however it's done), however the second
problem (domain / education politics? Idk how to call it) could virtually be
forever — academia and big pharma aren't exactly known for being fast movers
or innovators, let alone disruptors. Especially when CRISPR-Cas9 is a direct
threat to well-established revenues in the trillions — curing whatever is much
less profitable than selling drugs to ease symptoms over a lifetime.

If this sounds like somptuous irony, it's probably because it is.

~~~
Balgair
> We have the PoC but finding practical solutions remains a hard problem as we
> speak (needle in a haystack).

One of my former lab mates was doing his thesis on some fluorescent cancers
screening stuff, somewhat similar. In his presentations, he'd use a slide
explaining the order of magnitude issues in finding cancer cells this way. To
illustrate this he'd explain it wasn't like finding a needle i a haystack, but
more like trying to find a 20-gauge needle in a Walmart filled with 19-gauge
needles.

>Bio-sectors don't pay software engineers enough to compete with the tech
sector (almost no one does), and bio-experts are generally not good enough at
it.

I've a fair amount of programming (enough to be really dangerous), so other
students would come to me with help every once in a while. One of my friends
getting his PhD in neuroscience traded a case of beer for an afternoon in
helping him. He was doing some vision research with gerbil and was trying to
time neuron spikes with some images on a screen. By the 32nd nested 'if
statement', I requested another case of beer.

Generally, research-grade programming and software is, at best, spaghetti. At
worst, you get answers that you think are right, but are wildly off. You can
really lie to yourself, and the rest of the world, when you publish those
errors as facts. Most grad students are learning programming by the seat of
their threadbare pants, and it shows.

------
lazzlazzlazz
Crypto.

And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that
just goes "up and to the right".

I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic
primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy,
permissionless, autonomous machines.

MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many
others collectively are very likely to change the fundamental assumptions we
make when using software.

Here's a great talk regarding trustlessness:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0rZcpfF5dU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0rZcpfF5dU)

~~~
deadmutex
I think the people behind "trustlessness" should have chosen a better word.
When people that are not familiar with crypto hear trustless, they can
associate the solution with the common definition: "not worthy of trust;
faithless; unreliable; false". I.e. the solution isn't reliable. I realize
that the people behind it are trying to apply the world trustless to the
problem they are solving, but that is definitely not clear from the quick
soundbites people read.

source:
[https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trustless](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trustless)

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Yeah I was thinking more "Provable".

~~~
steamer25
Maybe 'trustification'? A novelish term for novel concepts around creating
trust where it wouldn't otherwise be.

------
screye
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 tech demo. In a
few years, I expect to see render rights actually become a thing. Like, you
don't act in the movie, but give a company rights to use a 3d render of you in
it.

real time and full time holograms / AR. With remote work becoming a thing, I
see a huge market for full 3d renders of the person presenting or even
completely virtual AR work places where people check in to work. Maybe not for
a decade or two, but whoever builds the flagship product will make a ton of
money.

~~~
dcolkitt
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.

~~~
loufe
I wouldn't be so sure. My millionaire uncle built his fortune on medical
software, and I have a friend who works in the field with a degree just for it
(medical technologies).

~~~
abrichr
I’d love to learn more about your uncle’s story! Can you provide any
additional details? What does the software do?

------
jl2718
I see a huge trend coming in “DIY Medicine”. Doctors, insurers, and the FDA
are way too expensive for mere gatekeeping, and technology is developing new
treatments and dropping equipment costs an order of magnitude faster than they
can respond. For example, I can buy all of the equipment necessary for a PRP
injection for less than the cost of a single treatment, and the doctor that
does it knows no more about how to do it than any nurse that took a weekend
course. There are also many simple drugs that aren’t used because they either
can’t be patented or because the cost is too low. Many of these treatments
obviate the need for much more expensive and dangerous treatments with
questionable outcomes, like surgery and high-priced drugs. Doctors know that
the price of the most effective treatments may not sustain their profession.
So if we’re not there already, it’s coming to the point where the medical
industry does more harm than good, and gray market treatments will give far
better outcomes for an order magnitude lower cost.

~~~
dr_
"Doctors know that the price of the most effective treatments may not sustain
their profession."

This is not really a fair assessment. The most cost effective treatments can
be self administered. But if you are coming in to see me because of persistent
knee pain, more often that not you have already tried tylenol and over the
counter nsaids (ibuprofen, etc.), and your pain has been persistent. The next
set of treatment options, aside from maybe some physical therapy, are more
expensive, because they involve using drugs that are more expensive or
treatment measures that are more expensive. With re: PRP, it is not covered by
insurance, since the benefits of it over a placebo are still not entirely
clear. Many doctors offer it however, and to insure accuracy of needle
placement, they usually perform it under ultrasound guidance- not something
most people would be able to do on their own, at least not yet. As more and
more physicians offer it, and if it remains uncovered, market forces will
drive the prices down (like Lasik), although I'm doubtful PRP is considered an
effective treatment option in the future.

I don't disagree with the notion that healthcare remains quite expensive in
general. I see telemedicine, for certain conditions, reducing costs and maybe
Direct Primary Care - bundling care into one package instead of serving it
piecemeal could be a good way to go forward.

~~~
jl2718
I was including the price of the ultrasound imaging machine. And I’m not
talking about Tylenol either, which is a harmful and oversubscribed drug
anyway. Example: I’ve been given a choice: surgery that includes removal of
hip cartilage, or nothing. But there are many natural growth factors that have
shown excellent cartilage regeneration. PRP wouldn’t be among my first
choices, but as an example, it’s better than nothing, better than surgery, and
the FDA can’t make my own blood illegal. The two surgeries I did get elsewhere
were terrible and didn’t really solve the problem. There are other cheap
options for regenerative injections, and they are extremely common among elite
and professional athletes. They are also used extensively by large animal
vets, and it turns out that there’s nothing I need that a race horse doesn’t,
but it’s legal for him and not for me. Diagnostics also, a huge area for free
market expansion. The cost of an MRI is dropping below the cost of a copay.
And most of all, it’s a question of value added by doctors, which is mostly
informational, and as with all information commodities, rapidly dropping to
zero. In my vision of the future, I decide what I want, and I pay for it.
Simple.

~~~
travisporter
Maybe see a better doctor. If you’ve self diagnosed and researched a treatment
yourself, they should be understanding. However, without high evidence data or
guidelines, you could sue them and they woruld have no leg to stand on, so I’m
sure there’s a component of defensive medicine.

------
tunesmith
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
accepting them. Back in the 90s, the onset of email spam was something that
caused a _lot_ of indignance and active outrage. Banner ads were a huge deal,
too.

But a lot of it is just from the bad actors getting more sophisticated.
Including state actors that are invested in causing the breakdown of
democratic norms in other countries.

So I think there will continue to be opportunity in the decentralization
realm. Tools for various forms of self-governance. That could mean publishing
(activitypub), hosting (ipfs), or even actual governance (decision-making and
voluntary policy compliance among groups).

~~~
colechristensen
A book to greatly add to your perspectives about large complex systems
failing: _Inviting Disaster_

[https://www.amazon.com/Inviting-Disaster-Lessons-Edge-
Techno...](https://www.amazon.com/Inviting-Disaster-Lessons-Edge-
Technology/dp/0066620821)

------
dilippkumar
I listened to Robert Green's talk at Google recently [0]

He proposes the following idea:

    
    
        - Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation" 
    
        - Generations follow a cycle:
           - There is a rebellious generation
           - The next generation is trying to keep the ideals of the rebellious generation alive
           - The third generation is very conservative
           - The fourth generation is a "crisis" generation that will eventually lead to a rebellion in the next generation and the cycle continues.
    
        - Millennials are the crisis generation today
    

It's a very interesting theory - and provides a new way to think about what
comes next. Looking back, the last generation that appears to be a
"rebellious" generation were the hippies centered around 1969. I can't think
of any giants that started in that era. Instead, that era felt like it
produced most of the core technologies that drove big economic changes in the
next several decades.

History doesn't really repeat, but it sometimes rhymes with itself. If the
next generation is rebellious - and they end up being like the last rebellious
generation - we are looking at 22 years of deep technological developments
that will lead to the next big things in two generations from now.

Honestly - this is just an interesting way to think about the world but I
wouldn't act upon it. If I was forced to place a bet on who (not what) will
make it big in the next 25 years, I'd put $5 (and not a cent more) on somebody
who is doing a PhD today and will get to work on deep research for a few
decades.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcaVhMt71qE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcaVhMt71qE)

~~~
K0SM0S
He was probably drawing from the Strauss-Howe generational theory[1], which is
more than 20 years old now. He (or you) should have credited the original
thinkers for these ideas. Their 1997 book "The Fourth Turning" is considered
pseudoscience but nonetheless great food for thought, imho.

Note that the cycle may sometimes be shorter (3 gens) or longer (5). It's not
really a theory, more like empirical observation. Unfortunately, it has no
predictive power whatsoever, so it's just that, food for thought.

Edit: Interestingly, it came out almost at about the same time as Huttington's
"Clash of the Civilizations"[2], and a number of interesting scenarios from
Shell[3][4] and the CIA (link?), which notably informed Clinton's push for
global democracy — all these studies concurred, at the time, that positive
disruption was a plausible scenario.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations)

[3]: [https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-
futur...](https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-
future/scenarios/new-lenses-on-the-future/earlier-
scenarios/_jcr_content/par/expandablelist/expandablesection_225706646.stream/1519772477959/e19b5221f581ce9c5e5cee0069c7439720e81526/shell-
global-scenarios19952020.pdf)

[4]: [https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-
futur...](https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-
future/scenarios/new-lenses-on-the-future/earlier-
scenarios/_jcr_content/par/expandablelist/expandablesection_225706646.stream/1519772497153/2c501efef838a67595501d4acb83194f6c5da570/shell-
global-scenarios19982020.pdf)

~~~
mellosouls
The idea of cycles in social history is as old as the hills. It's possible
your claim that he drew from Strauss-Howe is correct, but while they may have
packaged the idea in a distinctive way, it has a long history.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory)

~~~
K0SM0S
Oh indeed! Thanks for the precision, well worth noting.

The particular arrangement of The _Fourth_ Turning is adamantly specific
though (and quite famous in sociological circles, iirc it's where our modern
concepts of "millenials" or "gen X" etc. come from); it's hard to mistake it
for anything else.

I don't doubt for one second that Greene knows it, or that he'd expect a
sophisticated audience (such as Googlers) to know it too — the credit is
probably very much implied as soon as you present things this way. Like we
don't need to credit someone for E=mc² or a²+b²=c² because it's obvious. Green
is notoriously awesome at doing synthesis of a bunch of seminal sources,
that's his M.O. — more than original thinking imho, but his delivery is often
incredibly worthy of interest.

Fwiw, I'd argue it's extremely easy to take pretty much any social
dimension(s) and slap some abstract model on top of it with relevance. I've
read countless such accounts, and did it myself in regard to cycles in
concentration of political power. Strauss-Howe's model is relatively
interesting insofar as it draws upon quite long-term history (some variations
/ extensions go back to ~1200 iirc, though the core theory was fundamentally
applied to the American civilization), which gives it weight.

Source: I studied sociology-anthropology-politics.

~~~
mellosouls
Thanks I didn't realise the naming originated with them. wrt pseudo science
the whole social cycles subject is interesting and _sometimes_ plausible
enough to read about even if you take it with a large pinch of salt.

~~~
K0SM0S
Yes, social cycles are definitely a thing empirically, historically. The
learning curve over humanity's civilization is tedious, hard, but we're making
progress overall. We have reached a situation where some actors, being super-
massive, have enough data and tools to effectively move social behavior —a
long movement from 'States' (whatever the name) since immemorial centuries up
to big tech in the 21st.

I think the future of social sciences is there, currently tightly secured
intellectual property and datasets in the beating core of giant tech. Those
who command enough of that elusive 'power' are now capable of shaping humanity
to an unprecedented degree.

Like any tool, _neither good nor bad but what we make of it..._

------
folkhack
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 things that other devs balk at -
and trust me, it has a lot of market value.

This isn't as "up and coming" as all of the other items people are mentioning,
but I'd put it on a "always increasing in popularity" trajectory due to an
ever-increasing need. It's not really sexy or interesting, but there will
always be a HUGE market for the things that I can do =)

I will warn people that "up and coming" tech is often fad-based and has boom
and bust cycles, and personally I'd rather be working for a paycheck then
waiting to win the lottery in this regard.

~~~
maxhallinan
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.

~~~
starpilot
Very common when you do tech work in a non-tech industry. Comes up a lot with
coding-inclined mechanical engineers. Zed Shaw's words are really true:

> Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good
> job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast
> food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in
> another profession. People who can code in the world of technology companies
> are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology,
> medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are
> respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.

[https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/advice.html](https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/advice.html)

~~~
slowrabbit
Same money running a fast food joint? You're underpaid bro or you know some
crazy overpaid fast food managers. People from science based fields are coming
to computer science because those other fields lack job opportunities at
competitive pay.

~~~
fingerlocks
McDonald’s franchise owners make $500k to $1 million a year, in average.
That’s profit, not revenue.

My source is from the McDonald’s franchise disclosure documents. The money
blog mentioned in sibling comments claim it’s less.

~~~
defen
According to this random quora link: [https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-
McDonalds-make-in-a-day](https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McDonalds-make-
in-a-day) the average McDonald's unit in the USA has $2,670,320 in annual
sales. 25% - 40% profit margin sounds really high for a restaurant, but I
don't know enough about the industry to dispute it. Are you sure those numbers
were presented as averages and not the high end of what you could make? Or
does the typical owner have multiple locations?

~~~
fingerlocks
My source was this pdf:
[https://www.bluemaumau.org/sites/default/files/MCD%202013%20...](https://www.bluemaumau.org/sites/default/files/MCD%202013%20FDD.pdf)

Very possible I skimmed and may have read it incorrectly, accounting is not my
thing. As I have now reached the maximum amount of effort I'm willing to put
into a forum comment, I'm not going to dig any further. But if you can tease
out better information, I'd be curious to know.

~~~
owyn
From the document... Across ~12,000 locations they put the majority of
restaurants in a range but they do have the numbers pretty well crunched.

Average profit margin 26-28% Average gross sales 2.2 - 2.6M Average operating
income before rent/tax: 570k - 716k

"The rent paid to McDonald’s will vary based upon sales and McDonald’s
investment in land, site improvements, and building costs."

It looks like that rent paid to McD's home planet is somewhere in the
neighborhood of 10% of that investment (yearly? I guess?) but it seems to
average about 100k-150k.

~~~
fingerlocks
Good, this was my takeaway as well. My range was loosely rounded since 716k
was something like the 85th percentile.

------
neltnerb
Cooperatives. The economy needs to shift away from giant companies with pay
ratios of a thousand to one between CEOs and average employees and employees
need control over their workplace to move to the next stage of capitalism.
Make it easier for collectives to start up businesses that aren't purely
focused on profit and instead focused on employees taking ownership of their
work.

It may not be the biggest profit possible, but I think that if you enable 22
small worker-owned cooperatives to exist more easily somehow that's a huge
karmic return on investment.

Maybe said cooperatives are software companies that work together to do
contract work. I think that there are a number of places that try to match up
contractors with clients, and places like Gusto work great for employees but I
don't think they can handle member distributions (the IRS's term for payments
a company makes to an owner versus an employee).

I'm not sure what to do to help the most exactly, but I think this kind of
company is going to be increasingly important in the future. Maybe even just
like an online forum for people trying to start cooperatives to discuss their
common issues.

~~~
tunesmith
I've always thought it would be interesting to figure out the smallest number
of people needed to create a pop-up town or microtown. If you get a sufficient
number of people together, plop them down anywhere, run
water/electricity/sewer, and start a community. It might be that most of them
would have to telecommute for revenue, but then you'd also have the local
general store or whatever else you'd need. But the people there would be the
community and social support network.

~~~
newman8r
I'm also interested in this and have spent considerable time
learning/practicing off-gridding. The key is finding good land in
unincorporated areas with a permissive county code. There's a few good
counties in California for this.

Some counties are more willing than others to grant variances for experimental
communities.

It's feasible for the first time ever because of the opportunities for remote
work, cheap PV, delivery of anything via amazon (yes, they'll deliver to
places on dirt roads which is awesome - negates a need for a general store),
etc. There's also an increased interest in being closer to nature and away
from the city for a variety of health reasons apart from the considerable
savings.

------
mywittyname
Quantum computing is becoming more viable for amateurs to experiment with. A
few years ago, Microsoft released an SDK for quantum computing and you can run
your solutions on a real quantum computer using Azure.

You'll learn a ton of linear algebra as a side-effect of working with quantum
computing, which is the foundation of lots of other fields of computer
science, like graphics and AI. I'm confident that the pool of quantum
programmers is effectively zero, and I wouldn't be surprised if AI spills over
into the field and causes an explosion of demand for quantum programmers. By
2024, it might be a field where you can write your own paycheck.

~~~
reikonomusha
Microsoft does not allow one to run programs on real quantum computers. Only
Rigetti Computing and IBM provide that service.

------
jhow15
I had the same question recently and so built an app to surface rapidly
growing google trends.

It was a Show HN project not long ago and people seemed to like it:
[https://trennd.co](https://trennd.co)

I've also noticed a lot of larger trends that other commenters have
highlighted too:

\- data privacy focussed products (DuckDuckGo/SimpleAnalytics)

\- everything machine learning

\- meat substitutes

\- alternative forms of entertainment (axe throwing/escape rooms)

~~~
jl2718
The prevalence of IT topics is surprising to me. I didn't think there were
that many of us out there. Is there any bias of the results toward tech
topics?

~~~
jhow15
Yeah right now there is a tech bias since the scripts and sources on the
backend are focussed more on that.

------
dlivingston
I have a hunch that the Next Big Thing (TM) will be augmented reality: though
the technology is currently in its infancy, when compelling AR glasses are
finally released (Apple is rumored to be released theirs in 2020) I think that
it will have a massive impact.

AR frameworks are a dime a dozen, but if you're an Apple person look into
ARKit + Swift.

~~~
ghaff
One of the big wildcards for widespread consumer use is the social aspect. We
can envision what AR might look like in everyday life. What's far less clear
to me is the degree to which people will accept AR glasses that are constantly
using video and audio to deliver information to the wearer will be accepted.
If I know that person I just met has inconspicuously scanned me and looked up
all kinds of information that are now being displayed, am I OK with that?

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
I think AR almost has to be Apple, not from a tech perspective, but from "this
tech is very creepy, invasive, and visibly so" angle. Apple may be the only
company that is simultaneously big enough to make the tech happen and
charismatic enough to get us to let down our guard to it. Although that latter
one is rapidly diminishing.

~~~
ghaff
That's an interesting angle. Though I'm not sure to what degree the average
consumer draws this distinction between Apple and Google.

Apple also probably just has about as much brand permission as anyone to
create a new category of consumer device and shepherd it through the first
couple of versions that will doubtless have shortcomings.

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
When I say charisma I mean literally being charming, like Google didn't have
the tact to role out glass, because glass _looked_ creepy. Apple would have
had the tact to know not to. Furthermore I think we're looking at the first
couple of pseudo-generations of of Apple AR glasses in the form of the latest
iPhones and Apple Watches. Watches are testing the hardware that will be
colocated with the UI and the A13 the overpowered chip responsible for doing
the more powerful CV functions in like the users pocket.

~~~
ghaff
Yes, I suspect we'll see AR on phones/watches well before we'll see it in
glasses and associated wearables. There are some AR-ish apps today but they're
very limited.

There are a lot of challenges to get glasses right--both from a hardware and a
usability/acceptability perspective. But people are already used to using
their phones for things so it seems a very natural transition.

------
topkai22
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.
It makes little sense to ship the video streams all the way back to a cloud
provider, but orgs want the capability all the same.

~~~
antisemiotic
>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.

Because the one thing desperately needed in this world is even more
surveillance?

~~~
topkai22
Most retail stores have been heavily surveilled for a long time by cctv for
shoplifting purposes.

One, perhaps naive, hope I have for edge based technologies is to enable
scenarios that are actually more private. In my scenario, if the processing of
the video stays at the edge and only anonymized or aggregated information is
sent up to the cloud/ larger organization, then is much better then if the
video is shipped offsite and processed.

It’ll take some interesting legislative efforts to really frame this well, but
the Europeans (and the state or Illinois with their facial recognition law?)
at least seem to be headed that way.

------
cbetti
Platforms that enable a diaspora of small businesses to operate as effectively
as large organizations with minimal startup cost.

Why build a massive services organization when you can enable and finance a
takeover by a multitude of smaller players?

~~~
mtsr
This is interesting. Do you have any examples in mind that achieve this?
Whether in particular niches or solving common problems throughout small
business?

~~~
cbetti
I believe Quicken is behind the recent resurgence of independent mortgage
lenders, which was a market all but captured by traditional banks until
recently.

Services like Rover seem to be displacing kennels for doggy daycare. They
should consider micro-loans to their highest rated dog watchers for things
like fences if they have not already.

------
makeee
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).

~~~
Geee
This applies to everything. The idea is that the talent pool for a given job
will increase, as jobs become easier and easier. Especially AI will drive down
the needed expertise for a given job. E.g. nurses will increasingly be able to
do jobs that require doctors today.

------
jnsaff2
The climate emergency has pushed me hard into quite a few areas that have a
lot of promise for huge impact, to name a few:

\- electromobility: concerting bikes, kick-scooters, cars ... this all is much
easier than it seems, also has a vibrant open source culture

\- demand response in electricity grids has quite a few startups (one of which
I just joined) that help integrating a lot of renewables in a way that does
not break grid stability

\- passivhaus buildings that can save 90% of heating/cooling for 10% extra
cost in construction

\- storing carbon into buildings with wood/CLT

\- plating trees, reforesting deserts etc

\- if you really want to go long there are a few fields of microbiology that
could reduce our pollution from agriculture a lot

~~~
brendanmc6
I studied sustainability related topics for my Bachelor's and Master's
degrees, but transitioned to full-time software development. Now I've promised
myself I'll try to work exclusively for companies doing something climate
positive. I must admit the intersection of sustainability and TypeScript is
more narrow than I'd like! Let me know which companies you find.

There are some great, mission driven urban and smart-city related companies--
Swiftly, Sidewalk Labs, Remix. The whole mobility SaaS scene like Ioki (my
employer), Via, door2door. Some cool unique projects like Doconomy.

But unfortunately for me the most impactful companies will have a much more
specific niche than just "sustainability", and often are more in science and
engineering than software. Like the ones you've pointed out, or lab grown meat
and meat substitutes, renewable energy, geospatial tech, manufacturing, etc.

So I try take this extra motivation and energy and throw it at side projects:
getting [https://offsetra.com](https://offsetra.com) off the ground, and
trying to find people to use my mapping tool for citizen science and civic
engagement [https://canvis.app](https://canvis.app)

While there isn't a lot to be optimistic about in the grand sense, we can at
least feel a bit optimistic in the career sense-- sustainability and climate
are more hot than ever these days (no pun intended).

~~~
astrofinch
Drones which plant trees seem pretty exciting:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkNdrTZ7CG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkNdrTZ7CG4)

------
tito
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, use solar and satellites. Instead of
refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead
of roads, take to the air.

We won't fix the climate out of kindness. Warren Buffet invested $$ Billions
into wind farms because it makes his wallet feel better. Tim Cook just
yesterday gave a speech that Apple said "We don't see climate change as risk,
but opportunity", that's straight from the world's first trillion dollar
company. [1] Elon Musk announced that SpaceX Starship will be pulling its fuel
out of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth, and on Mars [2]

We'll need to completely reinvent society. Sustainable transportation,
vertical agriculture, solar/wind/nuclear energy, air mining, an all-electric
economy.

Topics: Direct Air Capture, making products out of atmospheric carbon dioxide,
carbon removal. Check out all the companies in the space here:
[http://airminers.org](http://airminers.org)

[1] [https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/22/tim-cook-talks-
sustaina...](https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/22/tim-cook-talks-
sustainability-ceres-gala-nyc/)

[2] [https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850](https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850)

~~~
safog
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 produces and pick Top N and repeat. Of
course, this needs thousands of years to run manually because the improvement
with each generation would be minimal.

Is the issue that we don't know what gene(s) control photo-synthesis?

~~~
Gatsky
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.

~~~
safog
Re: upscaling, I was reading another article on HN about a specific species of
plant when grown in sufficiently large quantities (6x size of Texas I think)
would basically bring us down to carbon neutral. We can probably scrounge up
that land if the world works together but who knows.

Re: engineering biosystems, I imagine engineering native plants (if possible)
has much fewer ecosystem wide chain effects) than using gene drives to
eliminate mosquitoes or whatever.

Re: crispr, I see photos of glow in the dark monkeys and super muscular dogs,
so as a layman it seems like cutting a gene and vaguely throwing the desired
gene near the cut location seems to work. We don’t have as many ethical
implications about rapidly iterating on plants as we do on animals, so it
seems like if an experiment doesn’t work, just repeat 1000x until it works
would do it. People talk about off-target effects etc. but you won’t really
know unless you try I guess.

------
inopinatus
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 people are employed at the intersection of
cognitive and computer sciences, but in the service of political and
commercial interests. I'd like to see more of them on the other side of this
arms race, working on our individual and societal defenses.

~~~
K0SM0S
I don't think it's the best way to make money, but this may be _the most
important topic for our near future as a species_. Emphasis: not just
civilization(s) but _species_ as a whole, as in rewiring perception, brain
functions, social life, freedom of thought.

Here's my conundrum: we _could_ design a transparent and 100% user-controlled
communication network — basically some open-sourced Twitter / Facebook /
Whatsapp / Instagram etc. — which would let people control their feed order of
priorities, implement 'psychologically sane' features, prove that it's
objectively better for mental health and a slew of other things (politics,
media come to mind) through studies, even distribute resources so as to bypass
a need for massive funding — just consider how much time the average consumer
CPU spends idling over its lifetime, there's _loads_ of free resources
available.

But ultimately we face the same issue as for-profits: friction. How do we get
2.5 billion people to move when none has moved already — chicken-and-the-egg
problem of “but all my friends...”

I may be low-balling humanity but I think it'll take PR momentum, textbook
buzz — support by famous people, icons, thought leaders, influencers, etc at a
massive scale. Ideally governments would be on board and even subsidize such a
neutral network in the name of protecting citizens and their rights.

Is it challenging, herculean, foolish, or simply impossible an endeavor? Wish
I knew. But I'll sure die trying —hopefully of other unrelated causes, eh.

~~~
dogcomplex
Think you nailed it - the most important problem is overcoming the social
friction that enables companies to centralize control of entire industries for
no reason other than - they got to it first. We need ways for consumers to
organize en-masse to switch services - since trickling out one by one has such
a disadvantage ("all my friends use X...").

My hope there, if any, lies in someone developing a mature incentivization
system to get people to commit to leaving en-masse. If you just have to click
a single button that says "I'll leave Facebook if 50% of my friends do", then
that's super low effort - and as soon as those commitments trickle up to a big
enough number, the software can organize the move en-masse. Problem is, nobody
needs to _actually_ commit to that, so there might need to be additional
layers of carrot/sticks.. but that's doable too! You could e.g. commit $20 to
your decision, and the software could automatically track whether you followed
through (e.g. leaving Facebook for Freebook). Likewise, many of these
migrations ("mutinies"?) could be _very_ lucrative for the receiving party -
so much so that they might be happy to pay people that $20 to move, just to
guarantee future business. (and presumably Freebook would be a little less
evil than Facebook). The problem today is just that anyone who hates these
services has to make _so_ much effort to do anything useful about it that it's
just never going to happen. We require mass-organization tools. (These are
also, coincidentally, the exact same tools needed for effective Unionization,
so - speculate however you want on why they don't exist yet).

Additional comment, for what it's worth: the underlying system of contracts
that implements the above is a very strong use case for blockchain technology
and cryptocurrencies. The amount of power and flexibility you get at dealing
with all the complex financial incentives of the above could really come in
handy - especially when you consider that such organizations will probably
also need some kind of internet governance to decide what to do (which
decentralized software is key for). With crypto, it's forseeable you could
even do some crazy things like tie the incentives for each user to a (e.g.
Facebook) stock-shorting contract - effectively making a profit off of tearing
down one company and moving to the next... self-financing the whole movement.

And that to me then begs a whole other realm of speculation, because if this
kind of organizational technology became widespread and actually used by
people - shit... the entire relationship of consumer and producer gets flipped
over. Any company that's making profit, unless it has some _completely unique_
quality that can't be repeated by another startup company, could just be
attacked by this mob of consumers - transferring all business to the new
company en-masse, giving them even less profit. I guess in theory that's kinda
how it works already, but this really could up the carnage to levels we've
never seen before - and takes away that inherent platform advantage that so
many companies are leaning on.

In summary though: yeah, seems the biggest problem is platform centralization.
Moving from that requires high-quality decentralized platforms, and
organizational tools that can incentivize and plan such big en-masse
movements. I believe the tech to do that is fresh, still being worked on, but
is coming - and it could have some pretty cool implications for how the world
works if it does.

~~~
briandear
> centralize control of entire industries for no reason other than - they got
> to it first.

But those big companies didn’t get there first.

History is littered with companies that were too big to beat. The secret is
obvious but difficult: find a better way and people that agree it’s a better
way. Look at Cirrus Aircraft for a relatively recent example — they tackled an
ultra regulated, expensive business and are now the best selling GA airplane

~~~
pharke
Exactly, we need a Facebook that actually encourages healthy human interaction
and is adverse to viral pollution, dopamine addiction and rage triggers. If
it's genuinely useful it will win out.

~~~
K0SM0S
That is exactly my view too. You win by being _better_ than whatever else
exists at the time.

------
DoreenMichele
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...](https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2015/05/oceanside-
to-victorville-for-1525-in.html))

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).

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

~~~
DoreenMichele
Thanks. I'll check it out sometime.

------
reilly3000
Information quality, the nascent field of labeling content with metadata about
its veracity. Its dense with hard problems, but a good solution that gains
majority consensus is critical for the future of digital communication.
Facebook or any private entity ought not be the canonical fact-checker of the
21st century. Ideally IMHO is it delivered as an open protocol.

------
pdm55
I forecast that plastics' cleanup and recycling, a hard problem, will have a
lot of money thrown at it by governments. Many new petrochemical plants are
being built in anticipation of increased demand for plastics from developing
countries. So it seems that the already-large problem of plastics waste,
including microplastics, will continue to grow to the point of being
overwhelming. In particular, we are poisoning our oceans with discarded
plastics, choking sea creatures such as turtles which mistake clear plastic
bags for jellyfish their main food. And, perhaps most insidious, we are
introducing microplastics into our oceans' food chains with consequences
unknown. I fear that this "waste product" will grow to be as damaging as that
other industrial waste, carbon dioxide. What's the solution?

------
mathewsanders
I think AR has potential to be the most impactful new type of technology, but
I don’t have any idea if wide adoption is 1 year away, or 10 years away (or
more).

At the moment most of the focus is around overlaying some virtual world in the
real world, but I think that technologies like U1 chip being added to new
Apple devices could be really interesting to allow objects in the physical
world to better mesh with digital world.

Experimenting with live filters for Instagram could be an easy way to dip your
toes into AR: [https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-
studio/](https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/)

~~~
windsurfer
It's a fun tech, but I fail to see any real world value that can be derived
from it. I have worked on AR stuff before and found some niche uses, but I am
having real trouble finding general commercial applications apart from fun and
games.

~~~
paulvorobyev
There are tons of applications! The thesis behind AR is that your phone (or
some other device) can be a passport to accessing a digital world around you.
Some ideas, in no particular order:

* Tourism of any kind (think AR museum or city tours)

* Location and event discovery -- as of late there have been quite a few startups trying to capitalize on giving people things to _do_ , but none successful. This is definitely on Snap's radar with their acquisition of Vurb[1] and Placed[2]

* Interactive public art -- Paris has something like this[3] and I really want to see these types of ARGs spread to other cities

* E-commerce -- superimposing clothing or furniture[4] onto the real world

Also, why are fun and games not valid applications? Epic Games, for example,
is worth 4.5bn. Interactive media is finally being recognized by the
mainstream, and it's just getting started :)

[1]
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vurb](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vurb)
[2]
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/placed](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/placed)
[3]
[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashinvaders/id895180919](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashinvaders/id895180919)
[4] [https://www.amazon.com/adlp/arview](https://www.amazon.com/adlp/arview)

~~~
throwaway40324
Yep, for tourism. Look at some of the examples this small company is/has
worked on: gamifi.co

------
pgt
Differential Dataflow is going to cause a huge upset in several high value
areas, including incremental compilation, database view maintenance, UI view
maintenance (subsumes React), and differential database streaming:
[https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-
dataflow](https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow)

~~~
simplify
What's the main difference between this and event sourcing?

~~~
atombender
Not the OP, but as I understand this project, the idea is that you can
represent a pipeline that looks like it's operating on an entire collection of
data, but in reality can operate on a delta.

That means that if you have a million items in your input, and you add another
million to it, your pipeline only needs to run on one million, even though the
output will be two million. In this case, the input is a collection that may
be modified at any point, not a linear sequence of "events".

I've designed a similar system to ingest data that comes in the form of
snapshots. The pipeline has many discrete steps and starts by splitting up the
snapshot (e.g. a big monolithic JSON file) into smaller parts, which gets
parses, transformed, split, joined etc. When a modified file comes in, the
pipeline only performs actions on modified items; as data trickles through the
pipeline, subsequent steps only run if a step modifies an item (relative to
current state). It significantly reduces processing.

Pachyderm works on a similar principle, but using files in a virtual file
system.

------
SkyMarshal
Offline First web and mobile app frameworks. Not as big as
social/mobile/local, but a need. Building offlinefirst web/mobile sites/apps
is still a big hack.

[http://offlinefirst.org/](http://offlinefirst.org/)

A few years ago there was a lot of activity around creating web frameworks
that made rich UI's possible, like Cappucino, Meteor.js etc.

There may be a similar opportunity now to create a full-featured, polished
offline-first framework, and then make an enterprise version and/or get acqui-
hired.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappuccino_(Application_Develo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappuccino_\(Application_Development_Framework\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(web_framework)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_\(web_framework\))

------
ivarv
As to your question of promising areas, I see two major opportunities in
health that are coming online in the near future:

* psychedelics as medicine

* gut/microbiome

~~~
cryoshon
seconding both of these.

psychedelics as medicine are finally starting to gain the traction and serious
research which they will need to be utilized therapeutically. while imperfect,
they're potentially curative therapies which are likely a quantum leap ahead
of much of what psychopharmacology has had in its roster so far.

the gut/microbiome stuff is also starting to come to a head after about 9
years of intense research activity. clinical applications are right around the
corner, and there's an entire universe to explore which we've only scratched
the surface of so far.

i'd also like to add cannabinoid (CBD) therapeutics as an addendum to
psychedelic medicines. while there's a tremendous amount of hype and folk
science surrounding CBD, it appears as though the chemical does in fact have a
massive impact in domains ranging from immunology to psychiatry to geriatrics.
we're just at the very start of the research process, and there are already a
cornucopia of compelling and empirically valid leads which need to be
followed.

------
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...

~~~
munchbunny
As someone who uses cryptography daily (and not for crypto currency), I would
kill for that.

The problem is that it's really hard to build good abstractions. You can't get
the math to do things that the math doesn't do, so the complexity comes from
(1) preventing people from mathematically shooting themselves in the foot, and
(2) twisting the math into something that approximates real world problems.

We all want to be able to say "here is cryptographic magic that tells you that
this data is trustworthy", but trust is fundamentally a human problem.
Cryptography ultimately allows humans to make and move around declarations of
fact, but how you glue those facts together is messy because humans are kind
of bad at saying what they mean and meaning what they say.

------
blhack
Lonliness, particularly among the elderly.

~~~
tabtab
Dogs, man's best friend.

~~~
dang
Gets harder as you get more elderly.

------
tabtab
I'm hoping Dynamic Relational will catch on. Unlike the dynamic NoSql
products, this is pro-SQL so you don't have to relearn much. You get dynamism
AND familiarity (per existing RDBMS experience). I believe the industry wants
it, they just don't know it yet, expecting a rigid dichotomy between either
"stiff" RDBMS's -or- NoSql.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic-
database-s...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic-database-
schema#46202802)

------
Balgair
Memristors. Thus far, they have not been used very well, mostly due to 'lock
in' effects. But their power savings are fairly intense (as compared to
current solutions, about a factor of ~10^3 - 10^4). With AI and ML stuff
literally heating up, those power savings will become more and more
attractive. Eventually, a sea change will occur and memristive based computing
will become the dominant one. Personally, I think that the synapse-like
characteristics of memristors aren't as fully exploited as they should be and
new chip designs will greatly aide the transition to better and better AIs and
ML devices on less power and smaller form factors. Think the modern image
classification on a Tesla but powered by a watch battery, for months.

~~~
MiracleUser
The wikipedia page seems to imply we still dont know if any memristors
physically exist. Your comment implies it's in experimentation, so I am
assuming wiki is out of date

I would love to learn more about this topic, do you have any additional
information / sources?

~~~
Balgair
The Talk page on the wiki has some activity from this year, so it may be up to
date - ish. There are a few companies that are selling memristors [1], but, as
you say, they may not be fully truthful in describing their products. I'd take
a look at some of the texts that are for sale [2] to dive deeper, provided you
already know a fair bit of EE. If you do not, pick up this book [3] to get a
good education. I may not be the best resource on this though. I'd email Dr.
Chua directly and just ask him [4] for some resources, or just go through his
publications list on it [5]. If you do email him, try for breaks in semesters,
as Profs tend to be less busy then. Also, he has had 25 PhD students, so you
can reach out to them as well.

[1] [https://knowm.org/product/](https://knowm.org/product/)

[2]
[https://www.amazon.com/memristor/s?k=memristor](https://www.amazon.com/memristor/s?k=memristor)

[3]
[https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+art+of+electronics&crid=T6LE1...](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+art+of+electronics&crid=T6LE1KKXENK8&sprefix=the+art+of+ele%2Caps%2C177&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_14)

[4] chua@eecs.berkeley.edu

[5]
[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~chua/circuitrefs.html](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~chua/circuitrefs.html)

~~~
MiracleUser
Amazing reply. Thank you. I see Dr Chua is dropping a new text in December.
I'll see what I can learn by then and if it sticks I'll support with a
purchase

~~~
p1esk
Don’t bother. I work at a lab where some of the largest and best memristor
based crossbars have been developed, and I can tell you it’s almost all hype
at this point. There are significant problems with memristive circuits, and
very little advantage over something a lot more mature such as NOR flash
crossbars (we work on both). There are many competing device technologies to
use for analog computation, it’s far from clear which one is better.

~~~
MiracleUser
Ah bummer! I'll just keep an eye on it then. Anolog computation is where my
interest is. I have a personal project where I have a subproblem of trying to
use analog hardware to create a digital "impression" for processing. Terrible
description, sorry

------
fyfy18
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.

~~~
tpkj
SPI 2019 Day Zero Interview with Raghu Belur of Enphase Energy

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glSXghzDZcs&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glSXghzDZcs&feature=youtu.be&t=105)

------
geonnave
You may find this useful: [https://80000hours.org/key-
ideas/](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/)

> At 80,000 Hours, we do research into how people can most effectively use
> their careers to help solve the world’s most pressing problems.

It seems their two top priority areas that attend to a "huge, neglected, and
solvable" filter are:

\- Positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence

\- Biorisk reduction

------
yboris
Most relevant: [https://80000hours.org](https://80000hours.org)

 _80,000 Hours_ is roughly how many hours a typical person will spend working.
It's an organization that answers this question: How can you best use them to
help solve the world’s most pressing problems?

------
catwell
In software, I am hopeful for applications of homomorphic encryption. It could
solve some privacy issues preventing some classes of software from moving to
the Cloud. There have been huge efficiency improvements over the last 10
years, there needs to be even more, probably hardware-assisted.

In general, climate change is the topic of the century, and with it energy
generation and storage. I think intermittent renewables (wind and solar) are
overvalued today. Nuclear fission has a large role to play (with SMRs for
instance), hydrogen as well. Of course if we make fusion work all bets are
off.

------
nate
A lot of folks are look forward to what's coming in tech, which is fine and
good and can lead to promising careers and innovation. But I'm even more
impressed with folks like Nintendo who do the exact opposite. They look at all
the junk we've already passed up to see what can be done with it. So many
times along their path they came up with products using what the Sony's would
have considered obsolete junk. This is a great book about that history:
[https://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Nintendo-Conquered-
Americ...](https://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Nintendo-Conquered-America-
ebook/dp/B004IYJEWE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1571846082&sr=8-1)

I mention it because I think there's a lot of value looking at the "no longer
promising" areas and see what can still be done with those tools and pieces in
innovative ways. And so few are actually doing that.

~~~
eismcc
This what Roku did as well - built tech out chips nobody even wanted to sell.

~~~
nate
Oh wow, thanks for the reference. Any good histories of Roku out there you
recommend?

------
jey
You need to take a longer term view if you want to notice things before they
become trends. Hopping on the bandwagon once it's a "hot" or "promising" area
is too late.

------
tsmarsh
Democratising manufacturing.

CAD / CAM is still hard. CAM especially. You have to know a great deal about
materials and tools, even order of operations to help the computer build
efficient tool paths. There is a lot of scope for process improvement and
there are commercial opportunities to sell to job shops who would like have
their engineers working more on CAD and less on CAM.

There is also potential here to make it so easy and affordable that having a 5
axis machine on your property is as common place as having a laser printer. 3D
printing offers the ability to create more plastic crap you don't want, or
prototype things you want made on a CNC in the future. 5 Axis CNC in the home
means that you could download a mocha pot, wait a day (instead of shipping)
then screw it together. Drones, motors (winding is still hard), car parts
could either be downloaded or you take a video on your phone and let AI figure
out the CAD / CAM.

~~~
jiveturkey
this will never happen.

your example isn't very good. you still have to ship the raw materials and --
much worse -- deal with unit volumes of waste.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Uhh.... I've heard the "this can never happen" before.

5 and 6 DoF is tough, but there's tons of improvement everywhere in this
realm. And we're talking of major improvement.

------
siriniok
There is an organisation 80000hours.org devoted to discovering careers related
to future high-impact areas, it has a list of perspective career paths and
reviews on them, including the obvious ones, like Machine Learning PhD, and
not so obvious, like China specialist.

[https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/](https://80000hours.org/career-
reviews/)

------
DrNuke
> What's an area that people think is up and coming? I'm pretty introverted!

Spend 3 to 6 months on theatre acting and you will never need asking the cold
internet again for anything personal!

~~~
monk_e_boy
Bingo! Correct answer. Anyone can learn to 'act' ... I got into teaching to
help myself be more confident infront of adults. It turns out that groups of
strangers are perfectly normal people, and there isn't anything to worry
about.

------
dlojudice
tools for micro-entrepreneurs: with the growth of automation (e.g. RPA and AI)
and the consequent decline of the world middle class, many people are being
forced to work informally as a food deliverer or be an uber driver. others
will become micro-entrepreneurs (solo-entrepreneurs for many). the opportunity
is that these entrepreneurs will need all kinds of specialized tools during
their journey (payment, marketing, finance, distribution, etc.)

~~~
somatic
In calling these people entrepreneurs you are really contorting the language.
The entrepreneurs in this system are the creators and owners of the system.
The other people are something else entirely.

~~~
dlojudice
i do not disagree regarding how we will call these "entrepreneurs". but
problems looking for solutions for these people will be there (is already). it
might even a chance to improve their lives

------
Zaskoda
Blockchain Gaming: I only saw one other crypto/blockchain comment and I
suspect people are avoiding the topic because of the amount of noise from the
scene compared to a lack of real world applications. It's that lack of real
applications that speaks (for me) about how far out we are from feeling the
real impact of any blockchain related solution. However, like so many other
technologies, right now is a great time to explore, learn, and evolve the
technology through gaming. My gut feeling is that blockchain gaming will do
well over the next 3 to 5 years.

~~~
departure
Gambling was a big deal when currencies like ethereum came out but the
inability for true randomness, without an external oracle, really killed it.
IMO.

------
mortivore
Machine Learning is the hot thing right now. Just find an area you like, and
apply it. Not sure what is after this.

~~~
richtapestry
Thanks, I've had it on my list of stuff to look into for a while. Any advice
on where to start?

~~~
RosanaAnaDana
A well honed skill set in 'ML' isn't even about the algorithms or data
structures or any of that. If you want to be competitive in ML, study and
think about experimental design, and what it takes to be able to confidently
state the accuracy, precision, and reproducibility of a given analysis when
you apply it to real world data.

The biggest issue/ liability with most 'AI'/'ML' is unsubstantiated/
irreproducible results that come from not being rigorous with ones
experimental design.

~~~
AlexCoventry
How do you go about developing skill in experimental design?

~~~
RosanaAnaDana
I think the first step is to develop a skeptics mindset. As a scientist, your
job isn't to believe, its to address evidence and evaluate whether or to it
supports or conflicts with a given hypothesis. A profound influence on my
development in the sciences was a older (he was 55+ at the time), physical
chemist I shared an office with,'John'. Arguably, he was one of the greatest
critical thinkers I had ever had the privilege of working with. Many other
people at that office would avoid him entirely when discussing their work
because if John heard about what they were doing, he would always 'challenge'
(politely and professionally) them on what they were doing: how they had
decided to set up their experiment; how they had decided to sample; how they
intended to analyse their data; how they (physically and literally) planned on
getting their data.

John did this because on his own work, he was constantly challenging his own
assumptions. The result of this was that John 'appeared' to be far less
productive; however, the results of his work were orders of magnitude more
robust than our other colleagues at that time.

By incorporating a skeptics mindset, less becomes much more. A skeptic doesn't
believe the internal error rates produced as a result of a model run, they
take a long time to become convinced that a 'thing' is the truth. Don't
believe, measure.

~~~
AlexCoventry
How does this apply to ML, beyond the usual train/validation/test split?

~~~
RosanaAnaDana
Because, the usual train/ validation/ test design often fails to generate a
useful ML model/ pipeline. With out some serious consideration into the nitty
gritty of the 'experiment design' (see above for what I mean by that), we get
'all-hat no cattle' results.

Lets take a small toy example from one that came up a few days ago, the model
that could predict 'heart-disease' from one heartbeat. Their data set came
from two different sources: their 'disease state' and 'null state' patients
had their cardiograms recorded via different instruments. They did some
statistical re-sampling to get the data to 'match', so, a skeptics flags
should already be raised. Second major issue: without resampling, they had an
effective N of 30; they made the decision to 'slice' every ones cardio gram
into thousands of examples. The RNN (i think it was an RNN), obviously, will
need thousands of examples to train. They then randomly sampled (according to
their train/validation/test split) from this distribution of 'beats' to train
their model.

So they didn't do anything 'wrong' according to what myself, and what I would
assume yourself were told when we did this or that course in ML. But actually,
from an experimental design POV, this is clearly going to overfit. Even
disregarding the resampling of the original data (its own, very suspect
issue), the slicing alone is enough to realize 'Ah. This is horse crap'. Think
about it like this. Say its a 80:10:10 split. Take a random sample of n
heartbeats, 3 heartbeats long, from n=100k heartbeats. What is the probability
of a heartbeat in the training data set not being very close (in time
proximity) to a heartbeat in the validation/ test set? I don't have the time
to work it out on paper, but its most likely that anything in the test/
validation set will be temporally adjacent to something in the training set.
The probability of anything in the test/ validation being very different from
something in the training dataset (say, 3-4 beat sets away in either
direction) is very very unlikely. The vast majority of data in the
test/validation dataset will have two direct neighbors, both used in training,
the next most populated class will have 1 neighbor in one direction, and the
almost none will be separated at great distance (even 2-3 beats isolated from
something in the training dataset).

This issue central here is the lack of independence in the experimental
design. They've created quasi-independence in their sampling methodology, but
at the end of the day, they've still only got an n of 30 (not
300,000-3,000,0000). I get it. For most cases, one _almost always_ has to
create a condition of quasi-independence in ones data. To get these algorithms
to work, you need lots of data.

Knowledge of what ML is, how it works under the hood (a bit), and how to
implement it (more imp. imo), all matter in this space. What matters more
(imo), is the mindset that can be developed by doing science as an
intellectual exercise. Its good science to remain skeptical and be adherent to
the evidence rather than our assumptions.

------
crankylinuxuser
I'm working on starting my own business with SDRs, radio, and the final area
of hacking.

SigInt.

How do you protect yourself and your company from the myriad of radios and
devices and BYOD policies? Can you keep up with what's talking over radio? Do
you know what's secure and what's not? Do you want to not only find bad
devices, but locate them in your facility?

Do you also want to detect radio attacks that originate in or out of your
facility? Or, do drones disturb you?

That's what I'm working on.

~~~
mtnGoat
sounds like some pretty interesting stuff!

------
atlasunshrugged
Govtech and defense tech

Super high barriers to entry, governments are spending more and more but
people are demanding better more efficient services and won't put up with
waiting in line at the DMV forever. In defense, it's hard to see the
applications and what to build from an outside view, hard to get contracts and
permissions, and hard to compete with established co's like Boeing that have
all of the relationships already.

~~~
colek42
Check out the SBIR program. It provides an easy way to get into the system and
innovate.

~~~
rwmurrayVT
Absolutely one of the best ways to get into the system.

~~~
TurkishPoptart
Can you comment more about this? Curious about how people get into it.
Applying for a grant?

~~~
rwmurrayVT
[https://www.sbir.gov/solicitation-
listing/open](https://www.sbir.gov/solicitation-listing/open)

This is a list of the current solicitations available. You can navigate around
to the different departments. They have a calendar of announcements and due
dates.

If you click on the DoD SBIR[0] it brings up the available topics. Each period
has different areas of interest. You create a little proposal and then they
announce "Phase 1" awards. They usually have different terms, but I think it's
typical to get up to 100k for 4 months. After your demo you can apply for
Phase 2 which is more money over a longer term, after that you can move to
Phase 3, commercialization, etc.

The problem is that you have to work on it "full time" or at least the
principal investigator has to work full time. The other problem is that they
give you the topics of interest. There are so many over all of the
departments. The biggest are definitely HHS and DoD. There are a lot of ML/AI,
IT, sensors, etc.

Unfortunately, the current cycle mostly ends tomorrow for DoD.

[0][https://www.sbir.gov/node/1620805](https://www.sbir.gov/node/1620805)

------
lumera
How about visible light based communication systems? With all the regulations
around how radiowave spectrum can be used, the much higher spectrum bandwidth
offering by visible light seems more promising as 5G, IoT and autonomous
driving hardware evolves?

[https://youtu.be/UulEFh8yhCg](https://youtu.be/UulEFh8yhCg)

------
julienreszka
Don't ask this question here, people here who know what is promising won't
tell you because that's too valuable information.

Ask your children if you have any. They will be able to tell you.

~~~
ebj73
Not really, julien.

If Sergey Brin had told you back in 1998 that he planned to start Google, and
to start indexing the web out of his garage, it would not have meant anything.
Or if the Wright Brothers had confided in you that they planned to build a
workable flying machine back in 1903, they would not have been running any
great risk either.

What's valuable is having the vision, and the ability to connect all the
little dots, and to see exactly _why_ something is a good proposition. Just
hearing that something will be great usually won't help you a lot.

To quote Howard H. Aiken:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good,
you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

------
c3534l
It seems like there's a lot of profit in synthesizing existing technonogies,
like decades old tech and new stuff (bitcoin, uber, neural nets + GPUs). And
also overlooked are dying industries. They tend to consolidate on their way
down, which allows a new competitor to buy them up. A lot of software is
changing its business and pricing model, so it would allow a smaller firm to
offer up an alternative to what established players are doing. Software used
to be the big next thing where everything and anything was new and innovative.
People got used to thinking of it in those terms and now fail to see it as the
established industry it is, chasing high risk investments that aren't even
going to be that high reward. There may not be a next Google, Facebook, or
Amazon. You may have to look for another industry entirely if you want to get
in early to become an industry giant.

------
thrwn_frthr_awy
Find a popular web app. Make a privacy-centric version of it. Features
publicly listed on the home page:

\- No 3rd party analytics

\- No 3rd party data sharing

\- GDPR for users worldwide

\- Logs deleted after x days

\- Clear data retention policies

\- Clear process on how to communicate change on these features

Apple, Firefox, and others have started to realize that people are now taking
privacy seriously and willing to pay a premium for it. And, no, security is
not a acceptable form of privacy. We should not be complacent with "Trust us"
platforms with out clear definitions.

------
GreeniFi
What I’m going to say is a little different to most others on this board.

I’m an environmental economist - quite a specialised field. I work with a team
of software developers to embed environmental economic knowledge systems in
software, which makes those knowledge systems scalable and accessible. It’s
been quite an experience to lay down that knowledge - basically my life’s work
-in a way which democratises its use.

This experience gives me the sense that what a developer could do is look for
an expert in a field in which they are interested. The more niche the better,
and partner to build a system which embeds in IT a knowledge system. I might
also add that many of today’s big challenges cannot be solved from within one
field of expertise, but instead require multi-disciplinary toolkits, which can
also be be developed within IT systems.

~~~
energybar
Are you willing to share an example of the embedded environmental economic
knowledge system you mention? I'm having a hard time understanding what that
means?

~~~
GreeniFi
Sure - check out ecosystemequity.com and follow links from there. Amongst
other projects - a core banking system that integrates natural capital values
into credit decisions. Sorry the umbrella website is a bit rough at the
moment, it’s just a placeholder for a short while.

------
fjp
Real-time communications.

There's a hell of a lot more to building and scaling voice and video than you
think, and tons more parts of the world are going to "come more online" with
higher-bandwidth telecommunications access in the coming decades.

------
hugehackman
AI-driven drug discovery.

New pharmaceuticals are immensely expensive to develop, but that's largely
because pharma companies aren't using available data to its full potential.

Its never been easier to start a software business, which is bad for most
software companies since it means that they'll have no opportunity to create
monopolies.

AI-driven pharma companies are defensible since their work is much more
patentable than a typical software-enabled business, and because they'll
benefit from data network-effects in the long term.

------
AdrienLemaire
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.

------
Pinbenterjamin
Process Automation / Business Rule Optimization is a nearly untouched field
for large, existing software driven companies.

For goal N, where N is an amalgam of small processes, what can we do to
isolate, automate, and optimize the process?

Everyone is hyper focused on generic ML solutions, but there's it has been a
hell of a lot easier to hand-code solutions to problems in existing mid-to-
large scale businesses that are looking to alleviate a process pain point. If
you have the brains to determine some basic ROI ballparks, you can make back
engineering hours fast if you can either increase the output of your business,
or decrease the required people to accomplish that output.

There's some fields that touch upon this, like Dev-Ops, but this is a more
strict definition of 'operations', in that I'm referring to the non-technical
people.

The impact of this practice is amplified by two major factors; 1\. Quantity of
work 3\. Difficulty of work

If you have high quantity of N, small optimizations are compounded across all
the work centers. If you have highly difficult work, reducing the time it
takes to 'handle' or 'create' output can be reduced.

This idea ties in to a fantastic book, 'The Goal' by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

Being in 'hot tech' is cool, but mastering old concepts is valuable to
businesses rigid to change. As the number of established companies that
leverage tech for a majority of their work grows, the need for brains that are
capable of process improvement with a scalpel, rather than a chainsaw.

------
bumby
Improving validation and interpretation of DL.

For all the leaps forward in NN models, I have a feeling it's at risk because
of a lack of trust. It's potential may be limited if the public perceives it
to be too brittle or maladaptive.

DARPA is currently trying to work on DL models that are truly interpretable.
If that gets sufficient progress I think the public/regulators will be much
more willing to let software control aspects of their lives than a black box

~~~
civilian
what does DL stand for?

~~~
vuknje
deep learning

------
Myrmornis
An alternative for alcohol that is as attractive from the point of view of
intoxication quality but is easily and quickly reversible and has little
hangover.

~~~
postsantum
legalized weed?

~~~
Myrmornis
You find that easily and quickly reversible?? :)

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

~~~
tossAfterUsing
crypto is fake money, and it will never survive government scrutiny.

we need our dollars to be made by governments, not basement dwellers.

~~~
johnmorrison
All money is fake money, the notion of a currency is a value fiction shared
among a group of people.

Most governments are very young, and do not last very long historically.
Central banking is a handful of decades old, cryptocurrency is one decade old.

Neither the maximalists nor deniers are right at this point. It remains to be
seen when/whether cryptocurrency will replace fiat currency.

~~~
tossAfterUsing
cryptocurrency will never replace gold-backed fiat currency.

~~~
Qasaur
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s
law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005,
it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no
greater than the fax machine’s.” - Paul Krugman

~~~
tossAfterUsing
Paul Krugman - the original stable genius

------
fumar
I think the transition from plastics will be vital. It will require new
innovations in product manufacturing alternatives. Look around everything is
made from it. It will change supply chains, goods lifecycles, costs, and
consumer habits. For example, if a grocery store existed that didn't use
plastics (in mass) for selling goods, what would that look like? Can it scale?
Is it basically a farmers market, etc.

~~~
yellowapple
You'd probably see a lot of things packaged in paper, metal (foils, cans),
and/or glass. So the follow-up question here would be "how do we sustainably
produce paper/metal/glass packaging?", its own follow-up in turn being "how do
we sustainably produce paper/metal/glass _anything_?".

Paper can be answered with some alternative pulp sources, e.g. bamboo and
sugarcane. Recycling of existing paper products, as well as an emphasis on
tree farms and wildfire prevention, also help here.

Metal and glass can be answered with recycling. Aluminum is pretty common for
consumer packaging, and both aluminum and glass are pretty favorable to
recycling (at a fraction of the energy cost of mining and smelting new
materials).

------
jfdi
If you're looking for (1) area w/lots of users (2) few producers and (3)
likely involves software, I'd consider human computer interfaces w/the goal of
making technology more integral and natural for more of us to leverage to more
significant and healthy effect.

\- voice \- augmented reality \- abstraction atop all remote controls \-
something next beyond the rectangular brick mobile phone \- etc

$.02. Great thread to start up!

------
faizshah
Graph/Network Representation Learning/Embedding:
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8395024](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8395024)

[https://github.com/chihming/awesome-network-
embedding](https://github.com/chihming/awesome-network-embedding)

------
gumby
A meta-aspect:

\- hot areas will attract a lot of producers, so go for the boring areas (who
would have guessed analyzing logs would be such an important issue?).

\- Consider the essay by Chris Dixon posted here a couple of days ago that
these days most big innovations start as "toys". So if you can start with
something small and easy to use you may be able to get airborne.

------
sebringj
possibly Behavior-driven code generation... meaning create some platform to
enable watching users use an application, then it could make machine code to
create a similar application. This would enable making videos for training
that simulated a working application but the AI would not care if the
application worked or not in reality but could make it work type thing?

~~~
cosmolev
Are you talking about
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_by_example](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_by_example)
?

~~~
sebringj
Yah I think so maybe like that but more in a way that it was setup for
existing workflows in that marketing people could actually create some video
mockup demonstration then an AI could look at that video then produce a
working product from it, similar to how a developer would. But this is
shooting developers in the foot obviously as those that are not AI programmers
would be screwed.

------
clavalle
Gestalt, context-aware UI.

We have a lot of different ways to interact with systems but they are all
separate and relatively dumb (not context-aware). I think there is a
confluence of forces that will lead to a more seamless user interaction with
and between systems that will reduce the friction between app and user, app
and app, and user to user. Eventually, for better or worse, a lot of the
underlying differences between apps and data and modes of interactions will
largely disappear to the end user.

Voice commands, AR, gesture recognition, traditional mouse and keyboard,
wearables, powerful phones, laptops, bluetooth, environmental devices, smart-
speakers, cloud-based microservices, data transfer and description standards,
ad hoc contexts, ubiquitous fast internet, etc, coming together to have user
and app interaction happen in a smooth, natural , and intelligent way. Machine
learning will be at the heart of it all.

Imagine all of the progress made over the years in app-to-app interoperability
jumping into meatspace.

------
aj7
Somebody finish automating the closing papers for real estate deals. Yes, you
can sign contracts on line. Yes, it’s probably a very good idea to have the
final papers notarized and witnessed in-person by neutral humans. What I’m
after is the $35 after-the-fact FedEx charge for overnight delivery of the
NOW-VALID papers. That’s your low hanging fruit target.

------
0x0100
I am a firm believer in the esports and gaming industry overall. That is why I
created Mascot Logo Maker
([https://mascotlogomaker.com/](https://mascotlogomaker.com/)). If you like
video games and do not mind putting in a little bit of work I think it can pay
off big time gg.

------
Ahmedb
Computer Security. Lots of software and hardware is getting shipped everyday
and all of it is full of vulnerabilities.

------
nyxtom
The next big wave (in that this is already happening) is that of mass job
displacement due to automation in every industry that has routine predictable
work from the fast food industry, retail, transportation, legal,
administrative and clerical work, routine data entry.

------
1-6
Graphical Programming - You have an ever increasing number of people needing
to perform computational tasks but lack education in coding. As WYSIWYG/GUI
transformed personal computers, the GUI will eventually transform the way we
program as well.

~~~
jhallenworld
This exists, it's called LabVIEW. I make a money by replacing horrible
LabVIEW-based systems with nice text-based ones (Python / C / whatever- all
are better than LabVIEW).

LabVIEW is ok if your virtual instrument fits on one screen. Anything larger
and you are better off using a conventional programming language.

So here is one program with graphical programming: how do you make it
compatible with GIT / source control? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am
saying it's not easy. [There is a 3d CAD system called OnShape that does it].

~~~
Delk
I don't know LabVIEW, but I can see how a naive or even a somewhat informed
attempt at something like that could lead to, ahem, suboptimal results.

I guess you could, in principle, replace text-based code with visual diagrams,
but the essential requirement for logical rigor would remain. That's just part
of the essential complexity in software.

Replacing code with visual diagrams might make things easier for some people
since understanding strict logical rigor and the ability to write code aren't
the same thing, but in the end I don't think the difficult part of programming
is actually learning to write code.

I'm also not sure at all that you'd get very good productivity setting all
those details right in the diagram through a GUI unless the interface were
really well designed, with a liberal employment of keyboard shortcuts. GUIs
are faster than CLIs at many things, but I'm not sure setting programming-
level details is one of those. You'd probably need to employ keyboard
shortcuts or something similar quite liberally, and learning those well
wouldn't be too far from learning to write the code.

------
szczepano
Smart assistant in some narrow field of knowledge.

------
d4mi3n
Security and privacy. Demand for security folks is white-hot right now, and
the need for better security products continues to grow.

I've been seeing a lot of companies in adjacent spaces making headway into the
security domain as well—ML assisted intrusion detection and cloud-centric
security tooling come to mind.

In a broader sense, I think more governments and regulatory bodies are
starting to take cybersecurity much more seriously than they did in the past.
GDPR and CCPA are likely the tip of the iceburg in coming year and—regulations
aside—I think there is a real and pressing need for better privacy and
protection in both consumer and enterprise contexts.

~~~
rubicon33
This is the most "for sure" answer in this thread. If I had to bet on any one
of these answers being true, this is the answer I would bet on.

Security has always been a big deal, but in light of all the attacks we're
seeing lately, there's likely going to be REGULATIONS involved, that may mean
demand for these jobs skyrockets.

------
anthony_doan
I think streaming is up and coming.

The problem is I'm not sure how big the market can grow or the upper bound of
it.

People are making software for streamers out there but at the same time there
is only so much money. All streamers are at the mercy of subscribers.

The two software that stand out are statistic/dashboard and the other is bots.
As for hardware the only one that stands out is irl streaming, it's a backpack
with a day worth of battery and 4 mobile data plan for high quality streaming.

I personally feel like it's a gold rush like the mobile app early days before
it got saturated (remember flappy bird?). But I think the market is much
smaller.

------
woranl
Folks have many good ideas here, but most of them require high upfront
capital... Not something a regular person can afford. The good thing about
software or internet in general is that the barrier of entry is lower.

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
People are all talking about niches over here. Work on fundamentals. Strong
fundamentals are an investment that pays dividends. If you want to learn
something niche like ML, because you think it's gonna be big, then learn the
math and calculus and stats that underlies the ML. Then if ML really becomes
something most devs should know, you'll be able to pick it up better than the
people who have to only get the surface. And if it doesn't, you'll have a
strong foundation for other things, which is great because foundations are by
definition broad.

~~~
mantap
Absolutely this. Linear algebra has been the gift that has kept on giving
since the 1800s underpinning everything from quantum mechanics to video games.

Unlike most mathematics where you quickly hit a usefulness ceiling, the more
linear algebra you learn the more useful it gets - linear algebra is just such
a rich subject that there's an ocean of useful things to learn and apply.

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
frequency_trading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading) is
pretty cool for introverts

------
xk3
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies)

------
mherrmann
[https://trennd.co](https://trennd.co) is a service that specialises in
uncovering new trends. Maybe you'll find something there.

------
ReD_CoDE
I think there are a lot of areas as the most promising

1\. Digital Twin(s) -- Soon all people all around the world will have two
worlds, one real and one virtual The virtual world would be like the next
generation of Minecraft and people all around the world will work together on
open-source projects, like what people do on Github but in a virtual
n-Dimensional world

2\. AI and Biotech --> See Yuval Noah Harari lectures on Youtube

3\. Climate Change related activities

4\. Fusion which is the next generation of renewable energy

------
z3phyr
Real time raytracing

~~~
moab
Can you elaborate? I’m not familiar with the current state of graphics
research. Can a high end GPU today do this, and if not, how far are the
fastest high-quality algorithms from realtime today?

~~~
z3phyr
A high end GPU today (like GTX 10 series) can absolutely stun! Check this out,

[http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_R...](http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_RayTracingGems_v1.6.pdf)
[33MB PDF]

It sheds light on some ray tracing techniques with the focus on the new RTX
API with DirectX12

Real time rendering portal page generally my goto for checking out new stuff
in graphics and now they have a Raytracing section
[https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing.html](https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing.html)

I am on phone right now, and will try to put more material as soon as I get
back to my workstation!

Edit: Courtesy Onion2k

~~~
onion2k
Note to users on mobile - link is a 33mb pdf.

------
mcs_
Yourself.

One of the most complex areas, having lots of users, that need to be fixed, is
human beings. Spend all your time to know who you are, why you are like that,
and change this world starting from the most promising thing it has on it:
you.

In the meantime, try to carry out activities that you like (ride your bike,
walk alone or with real people). Do it disconnected from any device or social
network.

Do things that make you feel real and unique, without layout, template,
guidelines, best practices. Ignore any negativism (fortunately you are
introverted, it should help). Recognize in every moment that you have to learn
a lot. Learn a lot and repeat.

~~~
prad9104
Hey. I am 22 (from India), suffering from depression and with zero skills
which can get me a job. I have wasted last 4-5 years without doing anything or
learning anything. All i do is sleep, laying on bed and daydream through out
the day. Can you tell me how should i go about improving my life?

~~~
wayoverthecloud
Have you seeked medical professional help?

------
yters
Human in the loop machine learning. All the successful big players use it, but
pretend it is all ML. Merely making the human explicit and finding the best
trade-off between human and algorithm can do wonders for machine learning.

Plus it has better optics than "AI WILL EAT YER JORBZ". In this case human in
the loop ML inherently creates jobs as an essential element.

~~~
NickM
Not a bad suggestion, but are the optics really that much better? Definitely
gives me a dystopian vibe of "paying humans pennies to help AI automate away
what few other jobs they have left to them".

~~~
yters
Depends where the humans live. Some areas of the world this is great work:
good pay and safe work conditions.

Also depends on whether there is a limit to this work. It seems there is
plenty to go around given the enormous amount of training data ML needs.

And as ML becomes more widespread the value of this work will increase and pay
will go up.

Also, the current paradigm is a simple active learning approach. There may be
a large variety of ways humans can contribute at various skill and hence pay
levels. E.g. compare the work of original 'computers' to today's enormously
well paid software developers. As one example consider the FoldIt protein
folding game, which was very successful.

------
spicyramen
I worked in Unified communications for many years and is a very well
established and solid technology with protocols like SIP, RTP, sRTP and webRTC
as we move to space and that area is growing, inter space communications Is an
interesting are to work on. How to transmit via other media (radio, light) to
be able to communicate across the solar system

------
sarahcone
I think the alt credentialing space is extremely promising: that is, anything
that solves the problem for employers "How do I know that this person is
better than anyone else in the world at this problem set I need?" Without the
usual leaps of faith and logic necessary to think a Harvard degree means that.

------
viach
Probably agriculture. There is an opinion that food will become much more
valuable and rare than it is today.

------
sjustns
Geriatric care and home health services.

------
jl2718
While this thread is still popular, I would like to see some renewed
innovation in “management science”, as in, how to set up a large modern
organization for sustainable success. Like, install an app and just follow the
plan. No more management shakeups and genius dear leaders.

------
mattmaroon
Whatever area you're interested in. Whatever it is, if you love it enough,
it's got promise.

------
cryptozeus
May be this will help

Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020

[https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-
top-10-st...](https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-
top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/)

------
pruthvishetty
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.

------
bsaul
Before facebook, there was myspace, before iphone we had java phones and
winphones, before twitch there was chatroulette, etc.

Remember that it’s very hard to notice a « disruption » is taking place,
because at the time it looks like just an evolution of something already
existing.

------
tdevito
About time for a new social network.

~~~
salsadip
Whats the killer feature that's missing from social networks right now that a
15 year old would care about?

------
jiveturkey
Not tech for tech's sake, but the only thing that is going to matter soon
enough is climate change mitigation. So of course there will lots of tech
involved.

Perhaps something that touches all of it and could be lucrative is data
collection and analysis tools.

------
lammalamma25
Anything that reduces last mile shipping time. Drones route planning planning
platforms, personnel allocation software, Smart fridges/locks. Big retailers
are racing to <1 day shipping and buying fairly untested tools to try to get
there.

~~~
philfrasty
Can you give an example of an untested tool you have in mind?

~~~
lammalamma25
I'm mostly thinking of in home delivery for e-commerce. There was a company
called Latch that was acquired that was more or less a smart lock for this
purpose. You can see fairly regular news stories of Walmart/Amazon attempting
this sort of thing. I believe amazon has some way to put items in the trunk of
your car, but I don''t have a link handy.

------
jimmies
Make a new Podcast?

------
olah_1
This radar, motion-detection UX from Google
[https://atap.google.com/soli/](https://atap.google.com/soli/)

Don't be fooled by the toyness of it now. The potential for this is amazing.

------
shermozle
Differential privacy. Solving some of the analytics use cases for businesses
that currently involve invasive tracking that browser makers are making
unviable. Continue to solve the important use cases while respecting privacy.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I've played with devices all my career. It's always had some traction, but I
wouldn't call it The Big One.

I tend to program for the love of the art; not to get rich, which I guess
makes me a heretic, but there you are...

------
vinrob92
Productized services :) People want the "job done" more and more and that is
going to apply to many more services, mostly enabled by tech!

I am also running a pretty growing community on that on FB (Productized
Startups)

------
snek
IOT blockchain AI running in the cloud with integrated cryptocurrency and ICO.

~~~
UncleOxidant
We have a buzzword BINGO!

------
einpoklum
Personal coaching services to people looking for a different area to work in?

------
11235813213455
Techs for the environment, like wireless sensor grids used to monitor and help
the nature, or monitor warehouses, ports

Now sensors can run nodejs or similar familiar languages, and with more
capacities than a decade ago

------
carapace
Hypnosis for HCI. (Neuralink et. al. are looking through the wrong end of the
telescope. When you want to connect a computer and a brain the most effective
thing to do is program the brain.)

~~~
salsadip
Could you elaborate please?

~~~
carapace
Yes. All year. And thank you for asking. :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20746802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20746802)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20601806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20601806)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434897)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564989)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565101)

------
contingencies
Automating manufacturing supply chains. I am sure it is possible to build a
profitable business in this space extremely quickly. If I wasn't already
committed, I'd do it myself.

------
d--b
Just a quick comment here:

In scale, mobile apps in 2010 and vlogging in 2014 are nothing like social
media in 2004.

You can compare social media in 2004 to web searching in 1998 if you know what
I mean...

------
chrischen
Deep learning. Unlike Crypto, actual companies are actually implementing it
for real non-illegal uses cases, like camera Night Mode, translation, self-
driving cars.

------
yodsanklai
Some people predict that fixing stuff will become a big business. As resource
and energy get more scarce, there will be more incentive to fix existing
stuff.

------
barce
Anything that goes from Zero to 1 (Peter Thiel). An example, pre-airplane
civilization to a jet set civilization. I'd say that in 2016, that was the
year for ML to seriously influence world events. In 2019 I'd give a serious
look at this list
[https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs) and chances
are the next big thing isn't on it. Personally, I'm shorting credit card
companies since 50% of millennials have maxed out credit cards.

------
kvdmolen
Lab-grown meat ordering page. Hyperloop ticket sales website. Daily personal
diet recipe. Group consensus platform. Factual information sharing

------
acd
Recycling, the worlds needs to reuse materials to prevent climate change. You
will make the world a better place by working in this field.

------
eveFromKarmaFm
As we trend towards full automation, both manufacturing and distribution jobs
are likely to be structurally disintegrated. Services will probably also be
rendered obsolete, aside from highly personal / human / creative services that
rest on the long-tail of AI. So a more realistic prediction might suggest that
the majority of "promising areas" will lie in fields like AI, big data,
statistics, decentralization, advanced mathematics, etc. The character and
arrangement of these domains will depend largely on whether we continue a
trajectory of capitalism focused on profits, or whether we begin a shift
towards socialism and co-op models that focus on psychosocial and
environmental value.

Profit path = more advanced big data and exploitative mechanisms, psy-ops
tooling for political power preservation, centralized power, etc (think
robocop / cambridge analytica on steroids). Psychosocial path = more
innovation rooted in positive psychology, complex systems, decentralization,
and facilitating self-actualization (think Her / pragmatic utopia). The
overlap between the two seems to be psychology and complex systems thinking,
so maybe "complex systems psychology" or even "social engineering" would be
solid candidates?

Complex systems psychology would essentially be the next evolution of
behavioral economics, where we observe and engineer the emergence of system-
level phenomena by motivating individual agents to behave in ways that are
psychologically positive (or aligned with a profit/power motif of someone atop
a hierarchy) for the individual parts and the whole.

Social engineering is just more the micro version of that - figuring out how
to infiltrate / manipulate complex social systems and then equipping
organizations with defense tactics and tooling. Maybe even anticipating the
emergence of new attack vectors before they can be exploited.

For anyone interested in complex systems, Santa Fe Institute is in the middle
of Week 3 of their free online course. Highly recommended.

For anyone interested in positive psychology, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow
are great places to start.

For anyone interested in social engineering, the SECTF is a goldmine.

------
rllyboredonline
Automated the shit out of a customer service process. Current doing contract
work doing the same thing. It pays bills.

------
auiya
Gene editing tech. CRISPR is only the beginning and the payoffs for getting
all this right are potentially heroic.

------
beardedman
Ironically, I think the replies in this thread show how the importance of
problems can be very subjective.

------
PinkMilkshake
I suspect online learning - especially through established universities - is
ready to grow in a big way.

------
mathattack
Computing shifting to the background. (Ubiquitous sensors plus Cloud based AI
anticipating our needs)

------
erikerikson
Event sourcing. See dataintensive.net

TL;DR - rip the writeahead log out of databases and materialize not just SQL
commands but events yourself, returning control to reality rather than
systems.

~~~
mamcx
I think in the same lines (I'm building a relational lang
[http://tablam.org](http://tablam.org)) and think a modern RDBMS could be made
alike:

    
    
        command  "city.define miami" |> event pre-process (ie: validations and transformations!) |> write-ahead log |> fire-observers: [post log for later OR block writes]
    

The idea is to put some of the stored procedures in the "event pre-process"
before commit to write-ahead. In the "fire-observers" steps is possible to
directly commit to a table (sync) and get immediate feedback (ie: primary key
duplicate) OR store the log to be processed later.

The idea is that is possible to send "events" that are not necessarily "insert
into table" or similar, just pure business stuff. BUT still possible to
operate as always!

~~~
chadcmulligan
Not sure if this is what you mean but these exist - Oracle Queues, MQSeries,
RabbitMQ (open source MQSeries copy), all part of a generic thing called
Enterprise Service Bus

~~~
erikerikson
I would suggest thinking more along the lines of Kafka/Kinesis/et cetera. ESBs
are often not persistent and as a result not available for reprocessing
against new use cases or with fixed code.

------
mikorym
> vlogging in 2014

Not quite sure I understand this. Is this a US thing? Is it blogging by
posting videos?

~~~
unlinked_dll
Think YouTube stars

------
gabythenerd
Gaming on the cloud. VR and AR.

~~~
friendlybus
Still white elephants after decades. Every few years someone tries to stream
games, it doesn't work.

The closest example right this moment is Microsoft's flight sim that'll
download world data from bing maps as you fly around. Simply because they are
using synthesized petabytes of map data. Guildwars and other mmo's download
world data as you are playing to fill out areas you will visit in the future.
It still uses a traditional game client and business model. There's a slew of
games that run on nearly every bit of hardware. I don't see the advantage
cloud gaming brings.

You could stream every mobile game that's existed as low latency is rarely a
requirement for those games. Those games are still downloaded to memory and
rendered on the client and use a conventional business model.

Vr is getting a valve style game soon that might well be a killer app for it,
but the problem of movement remains.

------
spraak
Technology for post collapse

------
daxfohl
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.

~~~
TallGuyShort
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.)

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

------
rahsut44
how about something around electric vehicles, especially in the developing
world where it's a very hot topic. I am not saying develop an EV, but some
info product or EV specific store.

------
verelo
Quick control-f tells me no one has said "Environment" or a phrase I'm hoping
catches on "Green-tech". There's just no way this doesn't blow up into
something big in my mind. Earlier today i was discussing with a biologist
friend how there should be a better partnership between the environmental
world and the tech world, citing examples of biologists learning to code v's
focusing on what they're good at. The environmental fields have not paid well
historically, but i have a feeling that if the climate is changing, eventually
it'll start paying very well to attract the people it needs.

Stop optimizing driving routes for food delivery, selling CPG products to poor
people...start worrying about humanity! It may not pay amazingly, but at least
you're doing something that has the potential to be looked back at as
important as fighting Nazi Germany or Polio.

~~~
_bxg1
> but i have a feeling that if the climate is changing, eventually it'll start
> paying very well to attract the people it needs

The problem is that it's a tragedy of the commons, so no matter how important
it gets, unless governments really start putting money towards it there will
continue to be little interest from the private sector.

~~~
false_alarm
no disrespect intended at all, but this seems to capture a very non-tech
ethos. as an industry we need to have boundless optimism and practice a
philosophy of idealism with a healthy sprinkle of realism. we are very well
positioned to solve sustainability problems/change culture

~~~
_bxg1
I think I partly misread the original post and thought they were looking for a
lucrative new field of work; if they just want something worthwhile to put
effort into, then I can see how my comment might've come off as cynical. That
wasn't my intent.

I'm not saying nothing can be done about our environmental problems, just that
it'd be tough to turn it into a career. Unfortunately.

------
airstrike
Autonomous Driving

AR / VR

Automation generally but particularly in manufacturing

3D printing for manufacturing

~~~
wenc
3D printing for manufacturing has now been rebranded “additive manufacturing”
(kinda a less descriptive term if you ask me — sounds like making glue — but
it is what it is)

------
sys_64738
COBOL programming?

~~~
tabtab
COBOL.js++ with qubit edge-cloud blockchain microservices

------
mister_hn
My two cents:

\- Privacy-focuses/Decentralized social networks

\- E-Sports

\- Food & Leisure

\- Travel

\- Climate-friendly services

------
kootenpv
Privacy & Personal Analytics

I am working on an open-source implementation that is based on the fundamental
idea of privacy. The consumers should have full control eventually.

For now only Google etc have all the information on us, but the great thing is
that because of GDPR we see a move towards us being able to download it.

The system I am building allows us to combine data from across companies. This
is huge. We are talking so much opportunity. The real challenge is making it
easy for people to onboard while still providing security.

Feel free to contact me if you're more interested.

------
paulz_
Virtual Reality.

If you're reading this and you haven't tried VR yet - I can't recommend it
highly enough. Particularly a higher end experience connected to a PC with
tracking (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or Valve Index). The lower end ones like a
gear VR are fun and novel but it just isn't the same experience.

I have introduced dozens of people to VR for the first and you just can't
explain it to people. Videos are no help. Trying to describe is better than
nothing I guess but it just doesn't get you there. If you take anything away
from this comment it would be to just try to find somewhere that you can try
VR yourself and you'll understand what I'm about to say better than I could
ever explain it.

The equipment available to consumers today is pretty low end compared to what
is possible with prototypes / commercial systems when it comes to resolution,
framerate, and other factors. There are also quality of life features that
work but haven't been brought to market yet for consumers. Things like
wireless for the headsets. But even with this early days tech - when you put
the headset on you feel like you are being transported to a different place.

If you've tried VR you probably know what I'm talking about. There is this
distinct feeling of being present in the virtual world. Remembering places in
VR feels more like remembering a physical location you've been to rather than
something you saw in a computer game. And VR is going to be so much more than
games.

Because of this feeling of presence - going places in VR actually feels like
going to a different place. Likewise, when you meet someone in VR it feels
different than meeting someone in a fourm like this or even in a voice chat in
a video game. It feels closer to actually being in a room with them. I think a
lot of this is related to being able to see some of their body language.

Everything in VR feels like a hacked together prototype and works like one
too. I like to show VR to people but I can't really recommend it to most
people because it just doesn't work well enough for them to be able to fix it
when various things break or settings need to be changed. Some options that I
offer to them are things like PSVR or I've heard the new Oculus Quest is
pretty good as a casual experience but I haven't tried it yet. But both of
those route you to walled gardens that are missing a lot of the really cool
stuff.

If you know the right nooks and crannies to look there are some amazing things
to see and do. I'll list a couple of my favorites but the best ones all have
something in common. They are a platform that allow people to make their own
content. In some cases they are made that way on purpose, others it feels more
like an accident of design.

Remember when the internet was a little younger and you'd find a cool or
bizarre website in an irc channel or something and think "who even made this?"
Well that time is back except you can't view it through a screen anymore. You
have to put on an HMD and venture directly into the internet. When you take a
walk through the internet what do you find? Mostly weird stuff and brief
glimpses of the future - both are worthwhile.

VRChat is probably the best example of the above. Like everything in VR the
interfaces are terrible and everything half works. But even through that fog
you start to get an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes. In VRChat you
choose an Avatar and then go to virtual worlds and meet people other people.
They have default Avatars and Worlds to choose from but the best content is
what people make themselves. It's a unity game and there is a shocking degree
of freedom in what people can upload (content made with apps like blender or
unity itself).

Copyright may as well not exist yet in VR because it's too new for anyone to
know to look. So people decide to be various superheros or characters from all
kinds of fiction. I once visited a world where you could choose from hundreds
of Marvel and DC characters. It's not that in VRChat you can be Spiderman.
It's that you can choose from dozens of spidermen from various comics and
movies (the real spiderverse perhaps).

As you might expect there is a lot of anime. There are also a lot of
unconventional avatars. Sometimes People choose to be a car. Or a firetruck.
Or a toaster. Or an ATM Machine. Sometimes people choose to be something
incredibly large like a robot towering hundreds of feet in the air. Sometimes
people choose to be a tiny avatar like a mouse or an RC car.

The strange thing is that there is a sense of scale in VR. So if you are a
giant robot, everyone looks small and you really do feel like you are that
large. Likewise if you pick a tiny avatar everything in the world looks giant.
This feeling of presence remains. A very present toaster.

For many users of VRChat the Avatars are the most compelling parts. Don't get
me wrong, they are really cool. It's amazing to see some of the things that
people come up with. Especially the avatars that have some sort of animation
without it being obnoxious / trolling (hey I did say we were walking into the
internet here). People spend hours creating these versions of their virtual
selves and build in abilities to do things in game. Most of these things just
boil down to character animations or sounds. Any animation or sound you want
leaves a lot of room for creativity (with few limits on size, or unfortunately
volume).

But to me this isn't the real draw of VRChat. The worlds are. You can look at
the most popular worlds in the game in menu but I prefer the search bar
(searching is one of the things that half works.) Being able to be some
character from fiction or someones imagination is one thing - but being able
to travel somewhere is another thing all together.

So you may find yourself in a VR bar or arcade having a conversation when
someone drops a portal to another world. Some of my favorites I've been to
include a recreation of the secret base containing the Stargate from the show
by the same name. Once you're there you can dial the gate and walk through to
find yourself walking out of a pyramid on a desert planet called Abydos. Or
you may find yourself climbing into a helicopter with friends in a world of
abstract and surrealist art created to go along with an album somebody made. A
sort of VR music video that you can fly through to a soundtrack. Or if a
helicopter doesn't suit you how about another world where you can put on a
jetpack and fly through what feels like various settings on an old media
player visualizer (avoid this one if you get motion sickness!). Or how about
one of those rides from a theme park where they put you in a hydraulic car
that doesn't move and project a "ride" onto the screen in front of you?
Because yes, somehow people have put a couple of these in VR too (I like the
Back To The Future one).

There are literally thousands of these worlds you can visit. It really reminds
me of the old internet where you would find these amazing little things tucked
away and hidden.

The community is probably closer to today's internet as far as signal to noise
ratio goes. But if you're willing to look there are definitely kind and
interesting people to meet as well.

VRChat is fun and interesting but it's actually not where I spend most of my
time in VR.

In VR there are maybe a dozen first person shooter games to choose from. In VR
shooter games kind of feel like a mix between a game and paintball or
something like that. My favorite is called Pavlov VR. It is a shameless knock
off of counter-strike (I mean shameless. Down to the same exact same guns,
mechanics, and win conditions.) But thats ok! Because it means you can play
counter-strike in VR. Which is incredibly fun. There are also Call of Duty
clones, Battlefield clones, and Battle Royale games. But what makes pavlov so
special is that you can upload maps, similar to VRChat. Just like VRChat it's
boundless creativity.

So in addition to having all the same mechanics as counter-strike it also has
all the same maps. I've been playing Dust II for years (not as long as some,
never did play 1.6). But now I get to actually run around there. Same goes for
maps from a lot of other games I used to play. In addition to people uploading
maps they also turn them into these custom game modes that you can instantly
play just by joining or starting a server. Because of this, Pavlov winds up
feeling like lots of different games. There are the classic default modes but
there are also lots of other game modes to try (zombies, duel servers,
conversions for weapons). Some of the coop modes are fun because they are a
more social experience like VRChat but there is more to do. VRChat can wind up
a little boring just standing around sometimes.

~~~
uwuhn
Do you have a link to a recommended parts list? Or a recommendation for
somewhere I could go in/near SF to try it without purchasing my own parts. You
have me interested. It would be great to experience something similar to the
late 90s internet again.

~~~
paulz_
For parts you basically want a high end gaming PC[0] + a Valve Index.

SF is probably a great place to find VR Arcades. Googling it looks like there
are a couple here is one[1].

Might be better to ask / google around and see which ones have the best
reviews.

edit: this one looks good too[2]

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme/comments/dfpwr0/1000_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme/comments/dfpwr0/1000_1200_usd_valve_index_vr_build/)

[1] [https://sandboxvr.com/sanfrancisco/](https://sandboxvr.com/sanfrancisco/)

[2] [https://www.theherohangout.com](https://www.theherohangout.com)

------
alexjray
Law

~~~
Wh1skey
Seconded

------
fhood
Probably image processing.

------
diyseguy
podcasts, virtual reality, deep fake detection, diy internet

------
toephu2
Carbon capture and storage.

Space mining.

Biohacking.

------
LAMike
Lightning Network

------
redmattred
Making GDPR and CCPA compliance easy for developers

------
milkers
online gaming / esports

------
abetusk
Here are my opinions:

* AI and ML. Assuming Moore's law still holds in some capacity, it will be about 10 years before we have a $1000 machine that is within shooting distance of the computational power of the human brain.

* Solar. Prices are dropping exponentially which means power will become cheaper and open up whole new industries. Solar just dropped below coal and is halving about every two years. The first obvious market is solar for housing but there could be plenty of others.

* Battery technology. Hand in hand with solar, battery technology is getting better and the cost of battery power is dropping exponentially. All fields adjacent to battery technology, including power management, drones, autonomous vehicles, etc. will be bolstered by having bigger, cheaper batteries.

* DNA sequencing and synthesis. I don't think we've gotten past the $1000 whole genome sequencing number in the past couple of years, so we may be in a sequencing "winter" but this won't last and these prices will plummet exponentially. I don't have any big hope of private enterprises offering personalized health as incentives don't align and the barrier is high, so my opinion is that projects that do 'crowd sourcing' with a focus open data and open source have a higher chance of success (see OpenSNP, OpenHumans, Personal Genome Project (PGP)). How is health care transformed when I can ask 1000 other people who have the same liver enzymes whether the drug I'm considering taking has worked for them? How about when I correlate the relevant gene sequence and environmental exposure to get insight on my probability of getting some specific type of cancer?

* Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin gets a lot of hate on this community but it's been steadily appreciating in value and is the only alternative to a centralized currency. At one point during the heydays of the 2000s when the internet was just burgeoning, 'micro payments' were floated around as a way to monetize. I don't see any other alternative than something like Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency.

* Ubiquitous computing. Maybe the most nebulous on this list, but consider what things look like when we have 1GHz, 4 core, 2G RAM, 4G hard drive Linux boxes for less than $1. Smart homes? Smart cars? Smart clothing? After playing around with a Raspberry Pi Zero W that's a full GHz processor, multi gigs of RAM and hard disk space with Linux running for less than $20, it's clear to me we're starting to transition to a next phase in 'personal' computing.

My own heavy bias is towards free/libre/open source and I firmly believe that
"open source will eat the world", but this might be my hopefulness outweighing
my perception of reality. I will say that anecdotally, projects that are FOSS
may not have any greater chance of initial success but tend to have a greater
success at staying relevant.

Obviously what you want to focus on will depend on what resources you have
access to both socially or financially. I'm also not a successful entrepreneur
so all these suggestions should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. I
am surely going to be surprised by what new comes in the next ten years.

One final note is to keep on top of other technologies that might not look
that promising but could grow into something bigger. I don't think laser
cutting or 3D printing are all that promising in the short term even though I
think they're cool. I also want to know more about FPGAs and VR even if their
adoption might not be clear. The above list seems like it's pretty certain to
be relevant in some capacity.

------
redmattred
Tooling to make GDPR and CCPA compliance easier for companies

------
drelihan
Others.

------
redmattred
GDPR and CCPA compliance

------
diminoten
I'm not convinced we're done with social networks, considering how many are
shutting down, how many are privacy nightmares, and how many are failing to
respond to user feedback.

------
ivanjaros
Take when someone streams on youtube - it is exactly that. Ability to stream
video live, let your viewers chat amongst eachother + being able to receive
donations. With Youtube becoming more Goolag than before, and because Youtube
is actively becoming platfrom just like any other where they don't share
profits with creators anymore, I storngly believe this is where it's going to
be "at" for startups. I already looked into it and I believe the issue with
large data storage and traffic is now solved with cheap hardware AND P2P
streaming like bittorent and the js client for the web browser.

Then you can see that YT creators now rival TV - easily. So I believe the
internet will transform in a way where an youtube channel will become
something like a tv show or late night show or whatever TV equivalent from the
past. People will be actively looking and subscribing to these individuals or
shows on purpose and will be consuming them periodically like they did in the
past with television. Hence video is the tech I'd look into and the concept of
making good platform/s for creators and viewers to connect and interact(!).

Blogs are dead. FB is good only for groups(many people in one place with many
interests can easily connect). Twitter is pure pollitical cancer. Instagram is
just for worshipping attention whores..eh "models". Any non-mainstream social
network became too singular because people who were kicked out form ms sn went
there. So all in all, social networks are dead. But video, video is a medium
that is too deeply rooted in humans for some reason. I guess the ease of
consumption? So I stirngly believe that is the way to go. I mean, you have
hundreds of streaming services nowadays...no one will be buying all of them.
People still want to consume good content but TV is shite and these online
stremaing service will become unafordable. So there will have to be
alternatives for people and as I have mentioned, YT is cutting sharing of
profits with creators(not to mention censorship), so these creators will be
looking for alternative means of earning and creating and sharing.

(I didn't proof-read my response so sorry for typos, I type fast and don't
have time for this)

------
cloudyo
Digital privacy / security. People and companies are becoming more and more
privacy aware/conscious/concerned. All the scandals (e.g. data breaches,
targeted advertising, selling of user data) and new regulations such as GDPR
are only increasing the need and demand for privacy

------
codesushi42
ML on the edge.

~~~
semiotagonal
What's "the edge"?

~~~
imglorp
Edge might mean leaf-level IoT devices. Plenty are smart enough to do their
own trending or anomaly detection (ie ML), for example, and only report to the
cloud the results of that.

So you have edge, cloud, and you might also ponder the "fog", where there's an
intermediate aggregation layer. Think leaf devices in some building (edge)
with some medium smarts done on prem (fog) before clouding it.

------
campfireveteran
AI/ML that involves self-programming systems. If you can crack that nut, you
have the potential to be a centibillion/trillionaire.

------
marknadal
dWeb!

------
nicelyjunaid2
Nice info

------
keoeoOeo8
Build the smallest OS possible that can run Kubernetes at scale in Rust

You’ve just deprecated Linux & C in the data center :-D

~~~
gnode
Although Kubernetes is for containers, so you'd also need to re-implement
Linux in Rust.

~~~
keoeoOeo8
Sorry, did the omission of a very detailed list of todos imply I don’t know
what this would entail?

You’d need to reimplement a variety of layers and could leave out of a lot
too.

Personally a rudimentary BIOS type system in hardware that can read/write to
an OS layer would be the design I’d start with

The OS doesn’t need userland tooling then

But no one cares about the OS that powers everything being an archaic mess.
Gotta fetishize where the profit is

------
qubex
The area of the Circle. I’m led to believe there’s pie in there somewhere.

------
bovermyer
Figure out a way to apply modern software automation to a root problem of
society. For example, hunger.

