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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

> If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area.

If you found something in a big, fashionable field with a huge surface area (cough ai/ml cough), wouldn't this multiplier apply to that fashionable field, too?

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Fashionable problem. Played out field.

So, essentially, yes - fashionable fields will be well explored; the essay is about not getting sucked into fashionable problems in whatever field you're working in.

So in the case of AI/ML, the fashionable new thing is unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, GANS, etc. The played out problems are image classification, speech recognition, etc.

Well I guess you can't see AI as a played out field yet. More likely it is just starting to take off. Say you find a new exciting spin on ERPs to replace e.g. SAP solutions that will have a large surface area. At least that is how i read the linked post.

... or payment processing. Look what Stripe is carving out.

There are still many problems in payment processing. One I can think of is acceptance. Merchant fees are way too high especially for physical payments. I can't pay using card at my barber or local convenience stores here. I suppose the reasoning is that card fees make it not worthwhile accepting for amounts below, say, £5-10 (inflated for microtransactions). Doesn't make sense for them to accept a big % loss in profits just to accept cards over cash.

If we're to become a cashless society extortionate merchant processing fees need to lower.

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