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

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)

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

Autonomous exploration & utilization of the world’s oceans

webxr

browser replacements

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.

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?