Teaching. All education politics aside, in my experience teaching is hard because you have to juggle and be responsive to so many people at the same time. Teaching is hard to scale. Everyone complains that schools are so regimented and conformist, but when YOU are the one in front of a group of two dozen (or three dozen!) kids who don't want to be there and are distracted by everything and you only have 90 minutes to get them through a lesson, you realize how hard it is to convey information.
Especially since in every class there will be one or two kids who take up like 40% of your energy, and you end up completely ignoring self-disciplined kids.
If there was a way we could provide automated teaching, that would be huge. And I mean teaching, not just making resources available. Stack Overflow and Wikipedia and Khan Academy are great, but they won't replace schools and teachers. An AI system that could motivate, answer questions, pose questions, encourage learning without judging failure, etc. would be wonderful.
As a dev with constant pressure to learn new stuff I'd prefer the flip side: learning / acquiring relevant skills for my career. The perfect future AI-driven tutor that presents me exactly what I need to study and at the exact level of difficulty so that learning becomes fun and seemingly effortless (btw something I try to solve)
Laundry and dishes. Put them onto a little conveyor belt that goes somewhere. Everything gets cleaned, sanitized, pressed, dry cleaned, etc. The next day, everything appears back in my closet & cabinets.
With the ability for machine learning to recognize your dishes, cutlery and paper trash, a robot arm could pick up these objects while a pressure washer of hot water sprays and dries. Wrap this up in a box with a conveyor belt on the front and half the battle is done. Putting the dishes back in the cupboard is another matter. It seems like a robot would be easier to build than a big box that somehow integrates with existing cabinets and drawers.
This probably puts me in the “not a people person” camp but “Starting and maintaining business relationships.” Most great human interactions I’ve had simply have nothing to do with business. Yet relationships are so important to most businesses around the world, and simultaneously most of the motions seem really mundane and dull compared to family time, dating, or even sitting at a bar with a random stranger.
Oh, and web infrastructure security and identity management including derivatives like ssh configurations. I have to do it every dang job I go to and despite it having surprisingly little deviance in terms of requirements in most places, nobody has the same setup. Ever. It drives me up the wall every time and it makes me somewhat dread starting new companies because it’s such a time sink yet so important.
Applying to jobs. So many jobs corporate jobs require re-entering information ad infinitum already on a CV. My ideal world would be uploading a resume to one service and then having one-click applications that would give you a text field to write a cover letter or whatever non-CV info you want to give the hiring managers.
Some of the more... bespoke, (?) recruitment agencies will normally do this. I work with a recruiter locally who specialises recruiting for mid-senior Ops and Dev roles and has landed me a couple of very good contracts and one very good full time role over the last 5 years or so. In each case they've already taken on board my CV and distributed that info to their clients, meaning I don't have to stuff around with forms etc each time.
Having said that, you really need to watch out for these kind of agencies. Some will just endlessly fling rubbish contracts at you and demand a new CV each time.
The process is still very broken. I've applied for multiple jobs where I've been forced to use a site called successfactors.eu, and the interface leads you to think it's integrated with Linkedin ("apply with Linkedin" button), in reality you're forced to re-enter your CV data multiple times, or the data is all over the place after being imported. I'd much rather send my CV attached as a PDF along with a cover letter directly to a recruiter or HR person.
Laundry. Collect it, wash it, dry it, fold it, steam/iron it (if necessary), put it away. I don't want to cummicate, coordinate, deliver, or pick-up. Just make it happen once a week and I'd pay a few hundred dollars a month.
I'm with ya. Hopefully something like Cleanly or Rinse is available where you are. They will wash/dry/fold/iron but won't put it away just yet and you also have to collect it, put it in a bag and give wait for them to pick it up.
Executive class job operations. Imagine how much better the world would be if instead of having a half dozen executives breaking the companies back with absurd compensation packages, there was just an automated system that replaced their functionality. Employee increases in productivity could actually result in greater employee earnings! It would be like living before 1980 again!
It really seems like one of those jobs that ought to become a human being for "social stuff", largely assisted by, or even taking directions from, a machine learning system. Well, that, or an electorate of the company's workers. After all, in established firms, there often isn't a really clear relationship between executive compensation, executive hiring, and firm performance. Every position needs to pay for itself, these days, so if executives can't point to the revenue they've created...
Deployment of open source applications that are time consuming and painful to install and configure. I've started a project to automate this already => https://serviceshop.io
It looks like a great service. I went to it at first thinking it didn't add any value over just launching the service in a Docker swarm (most open source apps have pre-built containers now) but I see the enterprise options as a good value add.
If I have to do something twice, I would look to automate it.
The best thing so far is my stock market trading robots, been doing it for years with a great results. e.g. making more money on average compared to 6 digits salary... Too bad I love my job too much or I would have retired already...
Very cool to hear that you've found success doing this. Any resources you'd recommend for someone just getting started? What tools / platforms / APIs do you use?
I don't want to go into too much details (for security reasons), but I am using my brokers API, the coding is done in python and everything is hosted on a few VPS in different location around the planet for redundancy...
I would recommend starting with Interactive Brokers API - it is free, small linux VPS, some data for back testing and off you go, for around $100 you can start + a lot of time of course... Start by testing any trading strategy you can fin on the net for free, they will fail, but you'll observe why and one day you will find your own edge...
I am sorry, but I cannot share anything, event the systems that are not working... Let's face it: we are competing in the stock market every day, so why I should help you to get edge over me?... Frankly this is the best side business in the world and I have to preserve it and hopefully one day leave it to my kids to continue...
Given the tips in your bio I assume you're trading on some set of metrics you've developed yourself. If I may pick your brain, and I understand that you may not be able to answer.
- Are you trading on the order of minutes (or greater)? I assume from your bio tips that what you're suggesting doesn't require hft.
- Do you have a book recommendation for the actual quantitative part of things? The domain knowledge of trading if you will. I'm most curious about this because I have plenty of experience implementing autonomous systems that act under risk but have little guidance for going from raw market data to signals.
Hello, no I don't day trade, because I cannot compete with HFT - I just don't have the money to do so... Unfortunately I am yet to read a good book on the subject, largely because no one will share a working strategy or method - e.g. if someone is making money, he's not going to write on how it... The one book I can recommend is more for motivation/history lessons and it is called More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby
I do this with cryptocurrency (ethereum and bitcoin) with what is now quite a lot of money, but I've pulled most of it out recently since this run cannot last. It will correct and people will lose lots of money. Except for that, I will warn you that what is illegal HFT on the stock exchange is now happening on the crypto exchanges. It is exceptionally challenging. Now, for my part, that's also part of the reward. But don't say I didn't warn you. You could get started pretty easily with the GDAX API, just to point you in the right direction.
This is tough. I would suggest looking through Github for some basic algotrading bot repos. This will give you a real basic foundation for strategy. Besides that, the way I learned my strategies was to sit, for hours, in front of GDAX and watch trading like television, and make all my trades manually, taking notes (incidentally, I picked up this learning method by teaching myself networking by sitting and watching tcpdump and later Ethereal/Wireshark). Once I'd developed a fairly straightforward trading strategy, I implemented it. From there, it was just iterative until I had something I felt could trade unsupervised. I still am fairly OCD about checking in on it when it's trading lots of money. Your strategy will change in interesting ways as you scale up the amount you are trading: Being an invisible small fish is pretty easy, but once you start having an effect on the price -- even in small ways, like some kind of "less small fish" -- you'll find that it also affects other traders (read: bots). Manipulating other bots is what a significant proportion of cryptocurrency trading strategies seems to be a fairly popular thing to do.
Well, for one, spoofing is absolutely probably the most common bot trading strategy in use on any crypto exchange. You really can't trust the order book too much except for major support/resistance levels, because everybody's spoofing. Just an example.
Too risky for me right now, e.g. I cannot imagine transferring 6 digits account to crypto broker so I can trade with it... Every other month there are news of brokers being hacked, money lost, people arrested, there is no government protection, etc... Not to mention the market is tiny and probably manipulated... This article was posted here few days ago:
"Warning Signs About Another Giant Bitcoin Exchange"
I am glad I have sparked your interest... I am even a bit jealous (or just maybe nostalgic), because it is a great journey with a lot of stuff to learn and experiment in the coming years... Hopefully it will change your life forever... there is nothing better in this world to know you have the FU money - this is the freedom everyone should aim for...
Time tracking. No matter how many fancy time tracking apps you use, it's still painfully manual. I want a robot that watches me and quietly makes intelligent decisions about what I'm really doing, and tracks that.
I recently started using WakaTime to track my programming and it's an improvement over what I've used before (RescueTime). I know what you mean though, I want to somehow track my "state" which means a combination of things like:
- Working
- Working on X project
- At home
- Sleeping
- Eating
- Driving
- With Someone
- With brother
- With friend X
- With Mom
- etc...
- Drinking coffee
- etc.
Most of these things are somewhat doable with data that is already out there. If I'm in the same location as my brother (as determined by our phones) it probably means I'm in the state "With brother". This data is already floating in the interwebs but it's somehow hard to get considering it's just four numbers.
So 2 weeks ago I dug out my long-forgotten knowledge about WINAPI and wrote something in Rust. It's an MVP - it queries the active window every second and writes a bit of info to a logfile in JSON format. Then I can run a python script on the daily log and analyze it. It's been fun, but you instantly notice a few things:
a) using a "window changed" hook would be better, but mine's good enough for now, but this prepared
b) idle times are important. Don't leave the computer and then wonder about off times. Current workaround: focus the media player window that's usually not really active
c) dual monitors are really hard. There's 2 windows open - one on each monitor, only one will be tracked.
d) Everything is hard, when I'm listening to a podcast during some other task that doesn't need much concentration, this won't be tracked.
e) actual quality of the data. On the one hand I'm simply not interested in adding all my browser history to this via window titles. On the other hand, maybe you want finer-grained tracking. Same with songs played, videos watched for example. Mayyybeee it could make sense tracking source code files in your editor, but I think that's too finegrained. browser vs editor is good enough for me right now
Yes, tracking multiple activities at the same time is too hard. I just stick to tracking the focused window.
On macOS I use accessibility API to read content on the screen, including address bars in browsers. But a browser extension sending URLs to your app on localhost can work too.
Acquisition and administration of public housing projects. The world needs more publicly housing for people of all economic statuses. It seems incredibly time consuming to build or convert private housing due to vast amounts of paperwork and groups that must be involved to finance and manage these projects. Automation can help to find a business plan, search for funding, help run governance, and do accounting for the on-going operations.
Food. Millions and millions of hours are wasted everyday by people as they scramble to prepare dinner. So many hours would be freed, so much health improved if all we had to do was grap a tasty, nutritiounes brick, that also filled us.
I mean if you want to make food, that is great, but just like making your own furniture or sewing your own clothing it would be something most people didn't have to do.
I've mentioned this on HN before, but: calorie and nutrition intake monitoring.
Imagine an app that tells you how many calories you've consumed and the nutrition you've consumed in real time, with reasonable accuracy, without you having to manually input the food you've consumed. Like hands free MyFitnessPal. Couple that with what's already available in activity monitoring...
I tried to figure out how make that some time ago - although my goto solution was cheap Indians rather than AI, but the problem boils down to the same thing anyone who has tried to diet this way finds: judging portions is really, really difficult. In matters a lot whether you put one or two teaspons of creamer in the coffee, and how much, if any, oil is over your salad.
De-cluttering my home and office space. The ability to take pictures of my entire living space, with every item in its place, to show a robot which then puts everything back into position every night. Maybe with the ability to add avoidance areas so my active work projects don't get disturbed.
Buying groceries, and I'm even willing to pick it up myself.
I just want a smarphone app where I click "refill", and everything that is not in my fridge and shelves but should be, is ordered. I then go pick it up the next day.
Nice extra: buys extra stock when discounted (taking expiration into account)
I'd take this one step further. I love cooking, but not for every meal. Some way of automating the entire calorie delivery process with the correct amount of macro/micronutrients. Similar to Soylent - except tailored for me personally.
I'd still cook a few meals a week and I'd still go out to dinner, but it would be a rare occasion.
Dishes, laundry, cars, floors, walls, furniture, windows, lawns, roofs, pets, any of it and all of it. We have tools for making these tasks easier, but even with the latest technology the amount of human labor hours spent cleaning one individual and their environment is staggering.
The benefits include not only a reduction in labor, but health and wellness benefits as well. In addition, cleaning automation has a history of being widely adopted. Almost everyone in the US uses dish washers and laundry machines. Roombas and automatic car washes are also widely distributed.
- Appliances that have no scripting API and force you to install a certificate in the GUI (I have a lot of these)
- Some Microsoft services that will only take a new certificate after a restart, causing downtime. You can automate it, but not every 90 days without upsetting people.
- Political issues
I know you're getting down voted but you make a very valid point about the way the question is phrased. Perhaps you shouldn't have been down voted so harshly.
Especially since in every class there will be one or two kids who take up like 40% of your energy, and you end up completely ignoring self-disciplined kids.
If there was a way we could provide automated teaching, that would be huge. And I mean teaching, not just making resources available. Stack Overflow and Wikipedia and Khan Academy are great, but they won't replace schools and teachers. An AI system that could motivate, answer questions, pose questions, encourage learning without judging failure, etc. would be wonderful.