Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on in 2024 -ideally not crowded already?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39012175

by fsndz • 3 years ago

31 41 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

cranberryturkey• 3 years ago

webxr

nodra• 3 years ago

I heard this a few years ago and haven’t heard much. Care to share why you think it’ll grow?

gully_boy• 3 years ago

With the advances in ML (not just LLMs, but mostly image generation/recognition), getting a cheap EEG machine to read your thoughts and visualize your dreams.

tlyleung• 3 years ago

This was presented at NeurIPS 2023: Cinematic Mindscapes: High-quality Video Reconstruction from Brain Activity

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11675

max_5• 3 years ago

Here is my list of areas I would like to work on if I attain the financial security.

I consider these low hanging fruit that no one is looking at.

- Fundamental AI research. (Everyone currently has a tunnel vision on deep learning, there is very little fundamental research focusing on new models that might be less data intensive, and less computationally expensive than deep learning)

- TLA+ For high level description of systems. Both hardware, software & physical phenomena. The creation of relevant educational material.

- An Iversonian language designed for mass adoption. (This will be needed to facilitate the modeling of complex systems. Imperative languages and mathematics have are not sufficient)

- Smart Contract powdered CFDs. (Contracts for difference that allow people outside the US to speculate on US/Global Equities)

- A security focussed OS, Smartphone, Laptop & Hardware Wallet that people who care about security can truly trust.

- Complex Systems. The field is so wide and so exciting. Very few complexity theorists exist. And what I like about it is that alot of the concepts can be practically applied in the real world. This is how Science is going to be done in the 21st century.

If you would like to talk further about these, feel free to send me an email (in bio)

a2code3• 3 years ago

What do you mean by fundamental AI research? What kind of computational model?

What are some practical applications of complex systems?

max_5• 3 years ago

What do you mean by fundamental AI research?

Coming up with new/original models that solve the same exact problems that people are trying to solve with neural networks (computer vision, language translation, image generation etc) hopefully that are better performing & cheaper computationally.

What kind of computational model?

I think answering that question would be what the researcher in this field is trying todo. I think a place to start would be exploring abandoned AI strategies like Genetics Algorithms & Markov Logic

What are some practical applications of complex systems?

- Modeling Financial Markets [1]

- Drug discovery via Molecular Dynamics Simulations [2]

- Urban Planning [3]

- Modeling Epidemics [4]

- Cosmology

- Computer Graphics

- Much more ....

[1] https://sites.santafe.edu/~wbarthur/elfarol.htm

[2] https://youtu.be/PGqCeSjNuTY?si=uNP8o6DW1cSeAjo-

[3] http://traffic.phys.cs.is.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~mstf/index_e.html

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaneer_Bar-Yam

If interested, subscribe to these podcasts.

1: Simplifying Complexity: https://pca.st/podcast/1c42ee40-3735-013b-efb2-0acc26574db2

2: Complexity: https://pca.st/podcast/87eef2d0-cd12-0137-1e17-0acc26574db2

cl42• 3 years ago

Do you have recommendations on good semi-advanced textbooks for fundamental AI research? I agree with you about this space... I would love to spend more time in it, even if it's just an hour or two per day, but nearly all the content out there is about deep neural networks and transformers.

I also have a sneaking suspicion this is what John Carmack is exploring.

max_5• 3 years ago

The best books I would recommend are;

— The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos

— The Book of Why by Judea Pearl

— What Computers Still Can't Do by Hubert L. Dreyfus

— Society of Mind & The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky

— The Feeling Of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

— Language & Mind by Noam Chomsky

— A great mooc is also, the "Learning From Data" Telecourse from Caltech https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse

carenoless• 3 years ago

In the previous decade or so, everyone has been shifting to technological fields. Whether they are computer science or even things like marketing.

I think CS will be, if not already, very crowded.

I think it's psychology, particulary being a therapist. I know this is hard if you already graduate. But in the next few years unfortunately more people will get depressed and anxious. And they will need more therapist. This is because of social media and similar stuff (I think this topic has been discussed greatly. For more information see Social Dilemma movie.)

This will even increase greatly in the future, due to virtual reality. I think Apple Vision Pro will ruin society more and more.

eszed4• 3 years ago

You're not wrong, but will people be able to pay for it?

warner25• 3 years ago

I like your take on this. I've been in awe of the explosive growth of software developer salaries, college CS departments, "learn to code" initiatives, etc. over the past 15 years and really wondering how long it can go on.

On the other side, my family has started consuming a lot of mental health care over the past couple of years, and it has not been easy to get in with therapists. The trend is for insurers to cover more of it. With that and teletherapy being the norm now, I think a lot more people are willing to sign up for more sessions, and the overhead of running a practice must be much lower (due to teletherapy, not dealing with insurers).

gjvc• 3 years ago

browser replacements

fsndz• 3 years ago

anything in mind ?

f0e4c2f7• 3 years ago

AI probably feels crowded but it's really not. Still very early for mass adoption and even within tech it remains somewhat niche.

jebarker• 3 years ago

I agree. What's crowded is generative AI for chatbots and image generation. Applications of deep learning outside of those areas is wide open still.

admissionsguy3• 3 years ago

Work time tracking tools to control developers. Companies would love to stop paying devs for scrolling social media, but so far no tool has gained anything close to widespread adoption. Developers tend to be able to argue themselves out of using them based on privacy concerns and sheer negotiating power.

Now that the market is more employer-friendly, could be a good time to introduce a killer surveillance app. Perhaps go around the privacy concerns by sending mouse movement patterns or anonymized keyboard use patterns instead of screenshots and use ML to detect working time?

ivanjermakov• 3 years ago

As a hardcode vim/vimium/wm user, my mouse usage is near zero.

eszed4• 3 years ago

Yeah, "hard-core vim [etc]" positively correlates with high-salary, and opinions of your own. Firing you is the point!

admissionsguy3• 3 years ago

That is good, too much mouse movement typically indicates that the developer is not typing.

saasjosh3• 3 years ago

It's interesting how in 2024, managers still believe that building software is simply the act of pushing random buttons on a keyboard while moving a mouse.

If the developer stops typing for a minute, or a few hours in order to use his brain to think about a hard problem, then the developer doesn't deserve to get paid because he's not actively using his computer?

If you really want to track developer hours accurately, you need to invent a microchip that will be implanted in the developer's brain.

This chip will track all electrical activity related to building your software, so that you get the best bang for the hourly rate you're paying the developer.

fragmede• 3 years ago

So I can get paid for all the time I spend thinking about the problem while I'm sleeping and in the shower? Sign me up!

potta_coffee2• 3 years ago

Almost all of my best work is done while I'm out taking a walk. I leave my desk and the problem solves itself.

eszed4• 3 years ago

That it's useless - or actively destructive! - does not mean it can't be sold. I hope OP was being satirical, but I fear he wasn't.

admissionsguy3• 3 years ago

or actively destructive!

Business considerations aside, monetary penalty attached to procrastination/doomscrolling might do wonders for the developers' mental wellbeing.

For the penalty, I would suggest an extension of the model my recent client had me implemented for his blue collar workers: every missed hour (rounding up) is deducted from the pay.

hoofhearted2• 3 years ago

JavaScript is going through another major renaissance, and I see a big future for it.

Traditionally in the last 20 years, Rule number 404 of development has always been “thou shall not use JavaScript on the server side”.

That rule has been flipped on its head in the last year or so, and I see a big future ahead for server side JavaScript.

atemerev2• 3 years ago

Last year? It was all in awe already in 2014 or so.

hoofhearted2• 3 years ago

Server Components introduced in React 18

mikewarot• 3 years ago

Read up on capability based security, data diodes, and the Bell-LaPadula model. Computer "security" needs a serious upgrade, be one of the people making it happen.

chrisdalke• 3 years ago

Autonomous exploration & utilization of the world’s oceans

countWSS• 3 years ago

Any architecture that could compete with LLMs is going to reshape the ML landscape that is now dominated by GPU-heavy algorithms like transformer attention. Its likely there is something more fundamental that could work without much training, like finding exactly what training process changes and\ forming architecture around optimizing that. I don't think people realize how much influence 'dumb stochastic parrots' have now, and the whole progress in identifying what exactly happens inside these networks is still a mystery: there hints that by sheer size they forming structures capable of cognition but only as side effect(finding out what exactly is going there and replicating in simpler terms would yield massive speed-ups).

a2code3• 3 years ago

So. Transformers work well due to scale, but fall short without it. Why this happens is not known?

Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on in 2024 -ideally not crowded already?

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