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Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

• dvdhnt 10y ago
  Semi-related... I work in wellness and healthcare. I don't know about you, but I despise filling out the same forms over and over again when seeing new healthcare providers. I'd love to start a service modeled after granular smartphone permissions where (a) I check in at a new office (scan a code, they scan my code, beacon, something like that) (b) the office then requests x, y, and z information (c) a push is sent to my phone where I can review the information and approve or disapprove some or all permissions (d) a final step of either entering my pin at the office, using my thumbprint on my device, or something else. The key components would be storing the data encrypted at rest, following HIPAA and then some, having a solid auth protocol (keys, jwts, etc). I think adoption would be helped because the public are already used to permissions like these when installing apps. The benefits are a lack of paper trail, no one is going to not shred my SSN, my most up to date data is now available, and instead of hosting N apps/databases, I'm storing 1 and can reduce my maintenance, customer support issues because one for all, all for one. Edit: edited for readability.
  • mason240 10y ago
    The military is terrible for this. You are constantly filling out forms that amount to a half page of your basic information, followed by a couple of text fields that form is actually for.
    • patrickk 10y ago
      It might not work for the military specifically, but for browser based forms, Lastpass has a form fill feature: https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/fill-form-basics/ https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/fill-form-basics/ I'm sure it's possible to hack together an AHK script[1], combined with Pulover's macro creator[2] to automate virtually anything repetitive on a Windows PC, or use Selenium to automate browser actions[3]. Of course then you run the risk of having to fall into the classic XKCD automation time sink[4]. [1] http://ahkscript.org/ http://ahkscript.org/ [2] http://www.macrocreator.com/ http://www.macrocreator.com/ [3] http://www.seleniumhq.org/ http://www.seleniumhq.org/ [4] https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/
      • mason240 10y ago
        It's mostly paper.
        • gluggymug 10y ago
          Can't they just use their dog tags like an ink stamp or something? It is supposed to be enough to ID them right?
    • dvdhnt 10y ago
      > The military is terrible for this. Agreed. Especially considering they have an ENTIRE department devoted to personnel along with an office at every single unit level above platoon.
  • tacostakohashi 10y ago
    Too much inertia on the provider side for this to catch on and reach critical mass - many septuagenarian sole practitioners out there using paper diaries / files, and larger organisations with some monstrosity written in COBOL (or MUMPS?) that will never change to accommodate this. I'd suggest something much more low-tech - a website where you can punch in all your details - insurance, allergies, medical history, etc, etc... and then you can print it out (or a subset of it, for different kinds of providers) or generate a PDF that they can copy & paste into their horrible legacy system (an improvement on retyping), or, for those truly at the cutting edge - the kind of electronic transmission you speak of.
    • dvdhnt 10y ago
      I'm probably bias because I've lived in two areas now where healthcare is one of a few, if not the, major industry in the area. They're always trying out new apps and services here. I am on board with what you're saying; an escape hatch for non- or semi-adopters. Obviously, printing is a way to go, so maybe on the mobile app, the ability to check each piece of information required then export/email to your preferred destination. It'd also be interesting to look to make money on conversion i/e replacing, or integrating with, the outdated monsters you're talking about. Maybe we're not even talking about healthcare anymore, maybe just the ability to piece together PII (personally identifiable information) and deliver it to X. >>>> on another note This goes into a topic I've seen posts on recently, and something of interest to me, personal indexing; a better way to throw blobs against the wall and have it indexed for me, leading to a personal Google. I mean, that's already coming, really, between Facebook and Google (especially Google Photos) but currently I see nothing about piecing together information I'd like to share on a professional level.
      • tacostakohashi 10y ago
        Hmm, Google Drive does a reasonable job of that. It indexes everything (including OCR for images + PDFs), has decent search, and has per-folder permissioning and sharing. It's actually a pretty good solution for ad-hoc "working together" with someone (a lawyer / architect / whatever) on a project, where you have lots of files you need to share and refer to during the project.
  • rancar2 10y ago
    I am working on a patient-driven platform which brings together all key stakeholders with support of a few good partners, and I am currently conducting user interviews for it. I would love to talk with you more about your ideas. To make scheduling painless, I have a link in my LinkedIn profile summary: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rancar2 https://www.linkedin.com/in/rancar2 I would love to hear from anyone else with big ideas relating to or are working on driving outcomes towards holistic wellness with patient-center healthcare, patient data collection/quantified self, and patient-powered research networks. In the bigger picture, I am passionate about making the world a better place through innovation and working on what really matters for humanity.
  • dzjin 10y ago
    we're making something similar, currently sitting at ~40k patient users, 200+ health systems adopted - https://crosschx.com/patients https://crosschx.com/patients
  • Animats 10y ago
    Insurance card scanning and recognition is available. Costs $999.[1] This has apparently been around for years; there's Windows 98 support. It's been acquired by AcuFill [2] They also offer identity document verification with facial recognition crosscheck. They want to use this to detect visa overstayers for immediate deportation.[3] That now looks like a market with potential. [1] http://www.card-reader.com/medical_cards.htm http://www.card-reader.com/medical_cards.htm [2] http://www.acuantcorp.com/autofill-software/ http://www.acuantcorp.com/autofill-software/ [3] http://sandhill.com/article/its-high-time-we-build-border-technology-not-walls/ http://sandhill.com/article/its-high-time-we-build-border-te...
  • grizzles 10y ago
    We just built something like this for the health market. Users can auto-sigin to websites with one of their identities or set it to ask for each visit. Here is a lil demo I made that uses Craiglist as an example: http://tricorder.org/cl http://tricorder.org/cl When the user goes to your website, say wellness.com/newcustomer, there are javascript APIs to get at your standard data, that brings up a perm dialog and if the user accepts, the data is sent to the website. Send me an email (profile) if you want to talk biz, tho was planning to open source it. Auth is very solid, but its currently android only.
  • 205guy 10y ago
    France has national healthcare and everyone has a smart card with vital information, and all doctors have the hardware to read it and software to process it. Or at least they did 15 years ago when I was there. Edit to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Vitale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Vitale
  • 205guy 10y ago
    France has national healthcare and everyone has a smart card with vital information, and all doctors have the hardware to read it and software to process it. Or at least they did 15 years ago when I was there.
  • EricDeb 10y ago
    agreed providing the same exact 4 pages of info to every doctor's office is insane.
    • snarf21 10y ago
      It is but you need to understand why that happens (hint: $$) When you go to the doctor for a sinus infection, the cost of this is not fixed, even across insurance companies. The other factor is the "level" of service. (ref: http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics/RC/evaluation-and-management-bill-correct-level-care http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics...) The more in-depth the examination and the more time you spend with the patient, the more they can charge. All those forms are "taking family history", etc. and it is free money since you have to do the work. Those are then scanned so they can be used later in an audit. (Source: I also worked at a start-up that was trying to disrupt out patient medical systems. It's very hard and has lots of roadblocks. btw, of the top 50 EMRs in the US, only 3 have APIs and these are mostly to pull data, not push it back in).
  • KingMob 10y ago
    I'm surprised none of the comments mentioned ZocDoc, which does most of this already. You can fill out forms once, schedule appointments and click to send your info to the office.
  • OliverJones 10y ago
    Here's an observation. HIPAA applies to health care providers, insurance companies, and other entities like that. HIPAA does NOT apply to me when I am in possession of my own personal health records. Not saying such an app should not be secure, but for me to hold my own records is regulatorily simpler than HIPAA.
• bigmattystyles 10y ago
  Not in my industry but I'm part of an HOA and I swear 2/3 of what the people paid to administer it do seems streamlinable/automatable with lots of opportunity for making money along the way. Every time I deal with them I proclaim to myself, STARTUP! Then I forget about it..
  • bmh100 10y ago
    What would your HOA pay to automate and how much would it be worth?
  • tacostakohashi 10y ago
    There's BuildingLink in this space. I think this is the kind of thing where selling software to existing, backwards organizations is a big marginal, and it might be better to be a property management company with good in-house systems, instead of trying to sell good systems to individual HOAs or small management companies.
  • snomad 10y ago
    Have HOA and totally agree. So many key functions that could be improved: submit work orders and report security incidents online, pay dues and special assessments electronically, review association budget, monthly news and events, etc. Problem is these who would benefit (residents) are often disconnected from those against it (the employees). You would need boards that really are sold on the benefit.
  • LeanderK 10y ago
    What does HOA stand for?
    • bigmattystyles 10y ago
      Homeowners Association - Might be US thing - but basically Condos / Townhouses / even neighborhoods form associations to take care of the 'commons' / enforce a look for the neighborhood, etc... There's usually a monthly payment. Repairs / work orders / disputes are settled through them. There's bylaws...
• earthly10x 10y ago
  I'm in the AI industry and our problem is that we have so little grasp on what intelligence actually is, that we stumble in getting our machines to mimic portions of human cognition even on the vector space level.
• takinola 10y ago
  As a SaaS provider, one of the key indicators of a customer at risk of churn is the presence of another competitor in their account. A service which notifies you once an account signs up for a competing service would be immensely valuable in helping to target retention activities.
  • tacostakohashi 10y ago
    As a SaaS provider, would you be ok with having your competitors find out when one of their customers signs up with you?
    • devoply 10y ago
      You could employ some sneaky tactics to ferret out if a customer's browser visits a competitor's website... without letting the competitors or the custom know.
      • pc86 10y ago
        Or as this is otherwise known, "spying on your customers."
        • philtar 10y ago
          I believe the term you're looking for is 'analytics' /s
    • takinola 10y ago
      I am ok with my competitors using the same Adwords or other marketing tools I use so I am not sure why this would be different.
  • ohstopitu 10y ago
    I can think of a solution that's VERY VERY anti-consumerish. Being a SaaS provider, create an extensions that you have to install (something consumers want...). This extension should have the permissions to read history / or urls visiting. Have a blacklist transmitted of urls (so you don't need to transfer the user's data back to the server) and match with it. If it matches...you have to work on that consumer a lot more.
• scrollaway 10y ago
  Content and patch distribution for video games: Data integrity, progressive downloads, file-level patching, compression, encryption, and platform/version branching. It's quite mind-boggling; nobody is really doing it on an industry-scale level. Every video game developer has their own way, all of which have their own problems. It is a very hard problem. Blizzard actually came up with a very good system, but it's not in a state where it can be commercialized or open sourced. I actually think whoever comes up with a system which solves these problems in a clean and consistent way will be sitting on a little revolution for content distribution.
  • chipperyman573 10y ago
    What's wrong with Valve's?
  • mcheshier 10y ago
    Didn't Steam already solve this?
    • scrollaway 10y ago
      For themselves! It's also not a great system, lots of legacy. More to the point though, it's not a commercial system. Steam behaves as a distribution platform and licenses the publishing rather than the distribution. Which is not at all interesting for self-published games (be it indies who want to avoid steam, big publishers with their own systems etc).
      • danielvinson 10y ago
        Steam supports any game from any publisher, including self-published games. Steam is exactly what you get when you try to solve this problem, because none of the big companies want to be involved, since they see it as competition. Blizzard and EA are the only two big companies I know of that are not on Steam, and they both have direct competitors to it that are vendor-locked.
        • 10y ago
• contingencies 10y ago
  Normally I live in China, and rarely eat western breakfast. Recently I returned to Australia to spend some Christmas time with my extended family. A few mornings ago, I put some real bread I cut from a sourdough loaf in a toaster. Due to its irregular size, when it popped it didn't pop out completely, resulting in a sort of "toaster is too hot to insert fingers, toast is too hot to hold, toast is ready, find metallic implement to insert in to mains-powered device to extract toast" problem. I mentally facepalmed. Someone should really fix toasters.
  • zackbloom 10y ago
    Isn't a toaster oven a solution to this?
    • contingencies 10y ago
      Sure, but it's very space and energy inefficient.
      • Jtsummers 10y ago
        In the US, most toaster ovens I've seen have about 2-3 times the footprint of the average toaster, with additional height. This is actually pretty reasonable as you can use the toaster oven instead of the oven or microwave oven for many tasks (it's a less specialised tool than a toaster).
        • contingencies 10y ago
          Last I read, US homes are the second largest in the world, after Australia. In Asia, many people live in apartments and that space is unavailable / non-negotiable. In addition, microwaves are not nearly so widely used.
          • pc86 10y ago
            To be fair, Australian homes need to be larger to house all the spiders.
• chollida1 10y ago
  Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data so that we don't have to wait until the end of the day to parse it all. 4) Oh and all of this data is unstructured and comes from 75 different sources. Soon the average hedge fund will have more people just cleaning and managing data than they do in quantitative research, dev ops, software development and trading. Oh and lots of the data is considered proprietary so while AWS/Azure, etc is fine, sending it to a third party to process is not. TL/DR Help me, I'm drowning in data. How do I get the time from when I acquire data to when I trade based on it down to a reasonable time frame, where reasonable is closer to hours rather than days/weeks.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • juskrey 10y ago
    Will hedge funds take such a huge risk of using 3rd party centralized (or centrally developed) data management system?
    • otoburb 10y ago
      Provided they can deploy the 3rd party solution onsite (aka "on premise"), this wouldn't be seen as a "huge risk".
      • juskrey 10y ago
        And what about the risk of 3rd party dev error which will throw several funds at once out of the business?
        • otoburb 10y ago
          Great question, but I don't see this much different from other industries or companies with millions or billions of dollars at stake. They don't all roll their own software inhouse, and most companies (hedgefunds or not, small or even large) simply cannot afford to for financial and commercial risk-management reasons unless they can justify the software truly being a core competitive competency. The same line of inquiry has been evaluated for most 3rd party software that companies rely on. For this specific instance of data collection and cleaning, I'm imagining it's not going to be a much different calculus, although perhaps you'll see a higher percentage of firms choosing to roll their own if they have the chops and pockets (e.g. Two Sigma, Bridgewater, Goldman Sachs, etc.). I will note that there are commercial mechanisms firms could try to implement to try to limit the downsides in case something like this happens: warranty & damages provisions, and insurance are two come that spring to mind. I'm sure there are numerous other considerations in the age-old "build or buy" cost-benefit analysis.
• ggcdn 10y ago
  As a structural engineer, I see a good opportunity to make reinforced concrete design software available in a SaaS format. The competition is outdated, clunky, requires local installation and messing about with licenses. Design firms are paying $1000-$3000/year per user/seat for what amounts to a pretty basic app. Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineering.
  • tacostakohashi 10y ago
    What is the total size of this market - how many users/seats are there out there for this?
    • ggcdn 10y ago
      Not sure. In the US there are about 281,400 civil engineers [1]. I couldn't find more detailed information on structural engineers. -Assume about 10% are practicing structural engineers who need to design concrete structures = 28140. -Assume a company wants 1 license for every 2 engineers = 14070. (I base this off the fact that my company has 6 licenses for 12 engineers, but we may be higher than average) -Assume we could get 10% market share = 1407 subscribers. -Assume $1000/subscriber/year = $1,407,000 from the US market Obviously this isn't a very rigourous analysis. [1]: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/civil-engineers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/civil-en...
      • sharemywin 10y ago
        So, current market size about 10k * 14,070 = 140M.
      • rgovind 10y ago
        Its at least a structured analysis. Thanks for teaching something today.
      • myegorov 10y ago
        I think this is an overoptimistic view of the size of the market. The field is highly fragmented. A large fraction of structural engineers are contractors or work for smaller firms (think wood design, rather than concrete/steel) and wouldn't be target customers for section analysis and concrete detailing software. An absolute majority of those that work for the larger firms don't require anything more than Excel spreadsheets. From my experience, a typical structural engineer is a rather savvy computer user, often times writing Excel macros or AutoLISP scripts to automate their tasks.
• seancoleman 10y ago
  In real estate, developing with MLS data. - There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas. - You use RETS, a complicated, non web standards interface for downloading data. - MLS data is plagued with errors and denormalized data making queries difficult.
  • headcanon 10y ago
    A lot of them are so legacy that they "require" IE via a byzantine browser check that prevents modern browsers from using them.
  • joshuamcginnis 10y ago
    Have you seen https://simplyrets.com/ https://simplyrets.com/? I haven't used it but it looks like a great start. This problem is hard to solve at the root because each MLS is independently owned and heavily influenced by the National Association of Realtors and local governments. As an active RE investor myself, I'd love to work on a problem in this space.
    • tylercubell 10y ago
      You hit the nail on the head. Having developed with MLS data before, my opinion is there's little incentive for MLSs to make the data easy to work with. As long as each MLS gets their data distributed on the large portals that most consumers use, there's little reward to update (read: spend money on) their systems to implement a modern format to help indie developers and startups. That's the status quo. I don't think anything is going to change unless the large portals band together and spearhead some kind of industry-wide effort to fix this problem. As an aside, I'm working on a RE investment product that solves challenges similar to this one and I'm looking for RE investors to join me. If you're interested, shoot me an email at hello[at]myname.com.
  • mabbo 10y ago
    In Canada, they standardized and built a single website. realtor.ca is, shockingly, a really great user experience when finding a new home.
• kolbe 10y ago
  Not my industry, but a friend of mine in law was discussing how incredible her in-house software is for managing billable hours relative to all her past companies. I poked around, and most law firms, even very deep pocketed ones, use somewhere between a bad tech system and no tech system to manage and track their work. A small team could easily collaborate with some law firm (maybe take an investment from a few law firms), and create some very valuable software.
  • david927 10y ago
    Most law firms, even small ones, use 'Time Matters'; it's actually quite sophisticated and is now a De Facto standard for the industry.
    • a3camero 10y ago
      Here's another product used by major law firms called "Carpe Diem": https://www.tikit.com/products/large-law-firms/time-recording-carpe-diem/ https://www.tikit.com/products/large-law-firms/time-recordin...
  • AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    tech system to manage and track work This is an exceedingly hard problem unless 100% of your work is input through a revision control system.
    • kolbe 10y ago
      not when 90% of your work is done through email....
      • tmail21 10y ago
        Consider TMail21 (https://tmail21.com https://tmail21.com) which (amongst other things) combines mail with revision control.
  • ruairidhwm 10y ago
• shinamee 10y ago
  Tech industry: I want to be able to go to Mars for the weekend... leaving on Friday and coming back early Monday morning. This is still a big problem in tech industry.
  • mabbo 10y ago
    You're being facetious but maybe you should actually consider the history behind that sort of thing. Yesterday my friend in LA invited a few of us in Toronto to come to his BBQ this weekend. The group chat became us discussing the logistics and price of how we might do that. 150 years ago, that would have been an insane concept.
    • nhebb 10y ago
      300 years ago, when Benjamin Franklin traveled from Philadelphia to Boston, the trip took two weeks. The fastest mode of travel was by boat, and he nearly died in a boat wreck.
  • pc86 10y ago
    How about a Friday in 2075 and a Monday in 2091?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • buckbova 10y ago
    How about a virtual vacation? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100802/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100802/
  • sah2ed 10y ago
    If you are willing to experience it using VR, could be a startup idea ;)
• zelon88 10y ago
  Not sure how much startup potential there is, but in my industry we struggle with adhering to procedures, and the root cause of that is because our procedures are written in the dark by management that doesn't always have a complete picture or much insight into what they're enforcing. The problem that creates is that employees only look for work-around's for the procedures (because they are misguided or misinformed most of the time) and it creates a bigger mess than if we had no procedures at all. It's almost as though if we had a Procedural Consulting firm that could come in, look at the big picture, and help companies to create EFFICIENT and WORTHWHILE procedures that ACTUALLY do justice to the customer requirements without breaking the bank. Then they can sit everyone down and explain the procedures and enforce the assimilation that most companies usually have growing pains with. I noticed that when moving to a new company that is trying to grow and achieve higher levels of accreditation. Management had intended a two-way assimilation to take place between my procedural knowledge and the procedures they already had in-place. What happened instead is old procedures are etched in stone and new ones are seen as an obstacle... The assimilation was one-way and the other middle-managers like myself are mainly concerned with keeping everything the same, despite there being improvements that could easily be made.
  • Jtsummers 10y ago
    There are probably a fair number of consulting firms you can find for that. But another (part of the) solution is using workflow software. Something that allows you to define and share procedures, indicate status of various taskings along the defined workflows, move data and such along. This clarifies to the employees what's needed, and gives an opportunity for them to provide feedback for improvements (too much granularity, not enough, too inflexible, etc.). Management, then, also gets better insight into the actual status of projects and taskings. It's part of continuous improvement to constantly be evaluating these sorts of procedures and clarifying, culling, adding to them. Management that's unfamiliar with these concepts is just bad management. In the manufacturing world, the Procedural Consulting firm would conduct "lean events". (NB: Many, if not most, places do this incorrectly.) The correct way is to collect metrics (meaningful) over time, encourage and reward employee feedback about ways to improve things. Then improve them (sometimes as a move across the board, but often by conducting experiments to see how well the new concepts work, then roll out to everyone). The risk is that improved efficiency will obsolete employees, some fear this (like may have actual panic attacks about this level of fear). Instead, you need a culture that sees this improved efficiency as an opportunity for growth (the same number of employees can now do more once people get retasked to new things).
• saosebastiao 10y ago
  These questions pop up every now and then, and while I get the intent, you're not gonna get anything useful out of it. The idea that someone who knows how to code can disrupt an industry that they are not a part of is disingenuous, and the examples that you can find are exceptions, not the rule. It's also extremely naive and presumptuous...what makes you think people in the industry haven't already tried? People who fall ill to this delusion end up in one of two categories: those that attack easy problems with tiny markets, and those that attack hard problems and spend decades learning about and becoming a part of the industry before they solve them. As someone in the supply chain and logistics industry, I can list for you hundreds of people that know the traveling salesman problem and precisely why its not applicable to their situation. I know hundreds of people that already know how to better manage their safety stock than someone who suggests using Gaussian demand models. I know hundreds of people who can optimize last mile delivery costs orders of magnitude better than a drone engineer. I know hundreds of people who can manage inventory distribution and ordering automation better than someone who knows databases. And sure, there are companies out there that are doing everything ass backwards and could use some help, even if it is primitive and simplistic. And when they decide to look for it, who are they gonna choose: the guy who saved Amazon $500M/year with their truck load optimization expertise, or you, with your shiny website and a trick you learned from a textbook? So as a piece of advice, if you aren't part of the industry already, don't try to do B2B in that industry. B2C is fine, because as a consumer you are ostensibly a part of the industry...but B2B is a death march.
  • tomtheelder 10y ago
    I'm sorry, but this is rude, discouraging, and flat out wrong. This sort of stuff happens all the time. I personally work for a company whose founders implanted them in an incredibly calcified industry despite no industry experience, and I can rattle off dozens of successful examples of this. In fact, this very attitude is the exact reason why there have been industries that are primed for "disruption." If only those within the industry, burdened with preconceived notions and patterns of thought, try to improve an industry, you are very rarely going to see revolutionary change. You don't need to "disrupt" anything to be a very good business, but I really resent this "leave it to the pros" attitude.
• AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.
  • reneherse 10y ago
    What is the use case for the models themselves?
    • devopsproject 10y ago
      Anyone who does work with 3d content: visual effects, video games, vr, ar, etc. Being able to quickly build your scenes from a huge library or accurate models would be amazing and would save businesses lots of money.
    • AndrewKemendo 10y ago
      There are multiple but mine specifically is AR. It's valuable also for VR, 3D space planning for Designers/Architects/Engineers, Assets for Game Dev, Objects for modeling and simulation, Training Deep Vision nets and on and on...
    • polmuz 10y ago
      This combined with 3D printers would make fixing stuff much easier by printing the broken piece.
    • my_username_is_ 10y ago
      Product development engineer here. In the early stages of a project it can be useful to have CAD models of a competitor's product when analyzing how to improve upon them. Recently we had an intern reverse engineer a competitor's product, and we've used some of these CAD models as the basis for our new designs.
      • javiramos 10y ago
• ThomPete 10y ago
  I posted a similar question last year great discussion there too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 I would suggest we make a monthly of these as they provide important insight into industries.
  • misiti3780 10y ago
    that is a great idea!
  • takinola 10y ago
    Yep, I was reading through the discussion in your post and thought it would be interesting to shake that tree once more so I reposted the question.
    • ThomPete 10y ago
      Great to hear. I got so exited about the thread and it made me realise something very interesting which I turned into an essay. I call it looking for hidden problems underneat obvious solutions. https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-47ee63bb3511#.izv1qx34b https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...
  • 33W 10y ago
    Do the problems change rapidly enough for the monthly discussion to be radically different than before? Perhaps Quarterly?
    • Styx- 10y ago
      Well, I'm sure you would still get different people commenting due to one set being home on a Friday night one month and then a different set the next. I would prefer monthly, personally.
  • pj_mukh 10y ago
    Seconded. Might even help us get out of the mindset of building things for other 20-somethings to replace their moms.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• kevinskii 10y ago
  Curing congestive heart failure. We're not even close. The space is ripe for disruption by a team of Growth Hackers with a foosball table.
  • sheraz 10y ago
    Just going to assume this one needs a /sarcasm tag :-)
  • itsthewrongway 10y ago
    Not suggesting this is an end all solution, since CHF can also stem from non diet related issues, but eating a whole food plant based diet can start to reverse heart disease in as little as a few weeks. It can also prevent and reverse many other diet caused/related diseases. I think part of the issue has mainly been a lack of education on what a poor diet consists of. If anyone is interested, Dr. Gregor is a great resource of knowledge on this subject. He did a talk at google https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ which is based on his book "How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250066115/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_bEXsybYE2VWH2 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250066115/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_bEXs... His website is http://nutritionfacts.org http://nutritionfacts.org All not for profit.
  • 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
    I've got a foosball table.
• rmrm 10y ago
  My wife is a corporate attorney. They pass drafts of contracts around by email using MS word with change tracking enabled. Some sort of attorney targeted simple revision tracking front end using git would be a mighty step forward.
  • quantumtremor 10y ago
    Office 365?
  • emerongi 10y ago
    I'm actually close to launching this kind of product. A bit more complex than Word + Git, but I hope it will be worth it. One question: is there a use case for live group-editing? Same way live code editors work. I have to admit that I'm not super familiar of the workflows in that industry, so I am mostly just designing features the way I would like them to work.
    • trevmckendrick 10y ago
      I ran into this exact problem when selling my company. It's horrible. How far along is the product? Have you talked to any lawyers about it?
      • emerongi 10y ago
        I'm expecting to get the MVP done before the end of this year. The MVP is mostly targeted at businesses who have to sign/generate contracts at scale. There's a lot of features for those use cases, and then there's features for users that the parent is talking about (pure contract-drafting). I have not talked to any lawyers yet. I think the worst part is that I don't even know how good the computer-skills of lawyers are, so... designing features by my competence feels wrong. Since I can design the UI to match the general structure of a contract, there's a lot that I can add to make the user's life easier, but it also adds more for the user to learn.
        • jv22222 10y ago
• 6stringmerc 10y ago
  A monthly subscription service for a fee of $5 - $10 where every month I get a new kind of quirky instrument (shaker, wind, wood block and stick, whistle, triangle, or other noise maker) as a surprise by mail. The point of the service in the music industry is to inspire new sounds and the device can either be kept or given away to somebody without a lot of second thought. Getting stuck is a big problem. Also in music it's important to collaborate and giving gifts is a good way to make connections and impressions. Great tie-in with various Manufacturers or even retailers to get rid of excess stock / failed impulse buy items / etc.
  • tomcam 10y ago
    $5 doesn't even pay for shipping, sadly. Amazon still pays a average of $6 per order.
    • 6stringmerc 10y ago
      Eh I was thinking more USPS and less expectation of timeliness. More about the "set it and forget it until it shows up" kind of thing. Point understood though, as $10 starts to get into a competitive space (e.g. Spotify).
    • alphor 10y ago
      Yeah, but Amazon's also shipping exercise machines. These can't be more than 2-3 pounds of stuff if they're not worth $5.
  • fudged71 10y ago
    This would be fantastic for educators as well!
    • 6stringmerc 10y ago
      Now that you mention it, I think the idea might be inspired by what Dolly Parton does with her reading program. A child can sign up and the program will send them books for free. Considering music and arts funding don't seem to be high priorities in modern US systems (my perspective, could be wrong) having a low-cost or charitable music version sounds like it fits nicely too. Honestly I'm pulling up memories now of watching other people's kids over the years playing with various music stuff I've handed over (Korg Monotron synths were the biggest hit) and those are really pleasant to recall!
• 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  A cheap durable texting cel phone with long battery life for use as a pager. Edit: probably without android.
  • aj0strow 10y ago
    Which industry is that? :)
    • 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
      The ones poorly served by iphones and androids. The ones that see gadgets as a tool and not an identity. The ones that want to augment their abilities without enslaving themselves.
    • bbcbasic 10y ago
      Organised crime
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  • guftagu 10y ago
    I can sell you a Nokia 1210 if you want
• scardine 10y ago
  A ticketing system that doesn't sux (I like RequestTracker, but it shows its age). Top players are ridiculously overpriced. My management style is like this: every task/request is numbered, placed in a queue and assigned to a professional. What I expect from my ticketing system: - every manager should be able to assign tasks to someone and set the order they must be executed. He needs know what his team is doing and when they finish each task. - every professional should know what to do and what are the priorities. - everything is numbered and linked, all communication recorded. Everything should be well integrated with email (please, don't send me a notification email about an answer and an url, send me the f* answer). If I answer the email, everything goes into the system, I should be able to send commands to the system by email (for example, add a keyword in order to make it a comment instead of answering).
  • fusiongyro 10y ago
    I blogged recently about some problems I have with JIRA: http://www.storytotell.org/constraints-and-semantics/ http://www.storytotell.org/constraints-and-semantics/ In a nutshell, I argue that the problem with most ticket systems is that they do not constrain the domain enough, so they wind up having similar problems to email (sifting through a chronologically-ordered pile of text rather than structured, semantically-ordered information). Your comments make me think the crux of the problem is that people want tickets to be like email and use email to manage them. I'm not sure you can ever overcome the "chronological pile-up" problem if you allow email as a user interface to ticketing.
    • wolfgang42 10y ago
      The simplest solution to the 'chronological pile-up problem' (nice name BTW) is a Wiki model, where replies are appended by default but the entire content can be edited if necessary. (C2 demonstrates this quite well.) For simple problems, conversations behave exactly the way they used to, but when it starts getting complex someone can go in and rearrange the conversation into a more logical form. This actually maps quite well to email: by default replies are appended to the bottom, but they can also be inserted inline (some mailing list etiquettes even demand this) or indeed the entire conversation can be rewritten. You'd probably want some sort of merge algorithm in case someone replies to an older email. In fact, my usual approach to dealing with tickets/issues/emails which start to develop this problem is to make my own private copy of the thread and edit it in precisely this manner, though I'm the only one this benefits since it doesn't get sent back upstream.
• komali2 10y ago
  Many doctor offices still have horrifying paper record systems, don't use e-invites, etc. Companies are fixing this but the market is still huge. I don't know why the few companies that are in the IoT space for oil and gas aren't scooping up literally billions in missed opportunities for sticking cell-enabled sensors on oil platforms, fields, etc. Then there's the next billion dollars waiting for whoever starts sticking controllers next to the sensors on valves, etc. Drone inspection and repair in oil and gas. People are doing this but it's taking way too long to take off for how much money is there just waiting to be picked up. Sticking a laser scanner on a drone. Again, people are doing it, but what the fuck, there's so much money just sitting there. If you're looking for contract work, just start browsing random EPC websites and calling up the shitty ones. Probably a good 10,000 at least that are still rocking 1995 crapsites, and not in the "good" "low functionality low load time" way, the "using tables for layout" way. Trains should be automated. They already are in Taiwan for some lines, it's been feasible for years. Motorcycle safety is still subpar for where we are in material science. There are a lot of riders out there that will pay buckets for greater safety. We've figured out how to not get our skin ripped off but I believe there's still a market for preventing broken bones, spinal snaps, decapitations, and the like. Somehow we still don't have GUI HUDs in our moto helmets. Like BMW is working on something but honestly it would be a relatively simple and profitable thing for a very small startup (2 man team working part time). Literally even just casting your smartphone screen to the visor would be enough to get people buying so they can have a HUD map and shit. Big market for motorcycle storage solutions. I giggle whenever I see someone with an ammo box strapped onto their sports bike. We already dropped hundreds on gear and thousands on the bike, we spend many more hundreds or thousands on modding the things, there's ample opportunity for more elegant and functional storage solutions. VR allows for limitless desktop screen space in a portable package. I'd like to be able to bring an HTC vive and a tiny screenless box to plug it into that would allow me to have a "multi-monitor" setup while I travel. Some say the resolution isn't there yet, I say make the text bigger. I have no problem reading the stuff in steamVR. I get made fun of every time I bring it up but I'm convinced people are stupidly ignoring lighter than air travel, transportation, and data distribution, especially in an automated sense. Google has their wifi balloon thing but they dropped their blimp transport truck project. I think it could've been a thing. There may be some margins available in teaching low-income people how to cook and eat basic foods instead of frozen meals. It took me to getting scholarshipped into college to realize that we were losing buckets of money eating frozen meals and fast food because we thought it was the "cheapest option," not to mention how unhealthy we were for it. Think like somehow getting low-income folks to buy potatoes, onions, peppers, dried beans, cheap cuts of meat, etc and demonstrating how it's faster, cheaper, healthier, etc. Potentially a gov funding opportunity, would save on EBT and healthcare costs. Kids learn by doing. Good luck changing anything about education in the USA though. Someone would be able to take over any industry in Taiwan that they please if they start up the company and instantly pay 2x local salary, give PTO, and have other basic benefits that we take for granted here. It wouldn't be much, you'd be paying ~44k/year USD for an Engineer, for example. You'd be able to poach the best talent, you'd draw shitloads of negative press from pissed of old Taiwanese businesspeople (no press is bad press), everyone would be telling you you're wrong, and you'd Donald Trump your way straight to the top. Think Scranton Oakmont or Gordon Ramsay as well. Just don't break the law. Also learn Chinese.
• protomyth 10y ago
  Not my industry, but in my area. I'm still looking for a good modular house that can be setup reasonably quickly, low cost, and can survive North Dakota winter and summer. Something suitable for a single person or a couple.
  • andrewl 10y ago
    I wonder if shipping containers could be the basis for a solution in this space.
    • protomyth 10y ago
      They would seriously have to be cleaned given how toxic the paint on those things is. Plus, I would rather have something not prone to giving the local inspector a fit.
      • andrewl 10y ago
        I have no experience with them myself, but I know there's a good bit of interest in them for non-traditional uses. A Google search for shipping container homes will turn up a lot of interesting results. It still might give your inspector a fit, but there are resources out there. You wouldn't be blazing completely new ground.
        • protomyth 10y ago
          I don't see a lot on insulating and we are a bit far from the coasts to make availability great. There was a thread a while back where these were discussed.
  • paraplegic 10y ago
    These guys sell full size or tiny model geodesic domes, which go up pretty quickly on a poured platform. They are supposed to be able to withstand hurricane force winds ... http://aidomes.com/tiny-homes/ http://aidomes.com/tiny-homes/
• vegabook 10y ago
  Finance, specifically fixed income: Regulations will unbundle research from liquidity provision starting sometime in 2018 (moving regulatory target, but theme seems clear). Sellside will have lower incentive to pay large research groups; buyside will have to pay explicit fees for research advisory. There is a big opportunity in providing platforms, with macro and market data live, where researchers can interact with capital managers, given that said researchers will likely find themselves bereft of their current distribution networks (bank sales forces) sometime in the next few years. Equities already have a hybrid form of this where buyside earns "credits" to be allocated at the end of each year to research providers. But fixed income is at least twice as big as equities, is much more opaque because is essentially unlisted (mainly "OTC" = "over the counter" ie only those in the know), and therefore much more susceptible to disruption.
  • blobwalker 10y ago
    Are you suggesting an extension of CSA into fixed income, or a platform for selling/distributing research?
    • vegabook 10y ago
      apologies the only "CSA" I know is the Credit Support Annex between counterparties, which seeks to minimize risk on mark to market of derivative contracts. Is this what you are referring to?
• mixedbit 10y ago
  Global CDN with a fixed monthly cost and a capped bandwidth. For example, pay 100$/month and get up to 1Gb/s, traffic above this limit is dropped. Providers today offer uncapped bandwidth, some, like Amazon, without any cost cap, some, like KeyCDN, allow to set a cost cap, but take the resources off-line when the limit is exceeded.
  • artursapek 10y ago
    Why on earth would anyone want their CDN traffic to drop? Rise in traffic usually comes with a rise in revenue - it's a good problem to have.
    • funnyfacts365 10y ago
      Unless the traffic increase is a DDoS, then you're spending money on people who are attacking you...
      • artursapek 10y ago
        Yes, but one has to assume that's an exception and mitigate that manually (like shutting down the CDN temporarily)
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• xiaoma 10y ago
  Everyone is ignoring the low-end of the market.
  • csdreamer7 10y ago
    Low end of what market? Propose an idea.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • xiaoma 10y ago
      I was just answering the OP. With all these downvotes for that I have nothing more to say.
      • goshx 10y ago
        Sorry but I have no idea who you are or what you are talking about. What kind of market are you referring to?
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
      • csdreamer7 10y ago
        You gave a very vague, short answer to something that really needed a better answer. A story the poor are dealing with. A volume market possibility you were hoping someone would supply. The downvotes are deserved. You could always give a good paragraph answer that everyone else is contributing to this otherwise excellent post. Maybe the downvotes would disappear.
        • farm_code 10y ago
          http://www.thebopstrategy.com http://www.thebopstrategy.com
  • 10y ago
• jakub_g 10y ago
  Email parsing and extracting data from it, (input data in multiple languages), that is not strictly depending on predefined templates but being able to adjust itself. Think parsing emails from multiple providers of certain kind of service and exposing common data model. Looks like perfect usage of machine learning.
  • endisukaj 10y ago
    Doesn't GMail do this already? It's not perfect but it extracts data such as plane tickets or hotel reservations and saves those to your calendar.
    • tomascot 10y ago
      Gmail extracts data from emails with certain tags in it, microformats or one of those standars. I think OP is talking about something more flexible using nlp.
    • elgfare 10y ago
      I think it just parses some standardized markup https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview
  • r_edwards 10y ago
    https://mailparser.io/ https://mailparser.io/ ?
    • jakub_g 10y ago
      Haven't checked, but from description, looks like it's template-based and rule-based. What I have in mind is something that can be more autonomous, and still work if the sender's template has changed. Thanks for the link, will try it!
• nsm 10y ago
  Immigration. Every time I change jobs as an H1-B employee, I've to fill in the same ridiculous data with every law firms weird interface. I wish the US Digital Services would focus on streamlining forms and having auto-import from all the data they already have about me (e.g. automatically translate I-94 records to how much time I actually spent in the US, infer my past I-797 records automatically, have a one time education related upload since that obviously never changes). I realize there are certain valid reasons the agencies don't share data, but I find that hard to believe in an era of infinite surveillance, they can't use the surveilled data to at least make my life easier. I can see how the immigration law industry would never allow this, but I can hope. The green card process is another minefield. Also for Schengen countries, I've to apply for a visa every time I travel, and they make me list every time I visited the Schengen zone in the past 5 years, fill out the same application form across different countries, and get the same paystubs and letters from employers. Even a tool that could just machine read all the documentation a particular country requires for a specific visa, and just goes and pulls everything that can be pulled (bank statements, pay stubs, fill in travel dates based on the flight ticket emails in my inbox, hotel reservations and so on.) Just make it convenient for me to travel :)
  • ForrestN 10y ago
    Unfortunately any assumptions built into an immigration business are likely to be upended soon. I'd wait at least a year before trying to solve this problem because the regulatory environment could break your resulting startup.
    • akhilcacharya 10y ago
      > I'd wait at least a year I'd say closer to four to be safe.
      • up_so_floating 10y ago
        But then you'd have to wait four more. And then four more? Four more after that?
• fatdog 10y ago
  Work in software, key problem in my industry is a lack of leadership.
  • miles_matthias 10y ago
    We started StartupCTO.io as a way to address this. We saw the same lack of support for CS grads thrust into leadership, so we're doing something about it.
• joeld42 10y ago
  One of the best places to look is where an emerging platform overlaps with existing specialty fields. For example, VR is currently an emerging platform, here's a few things that maybe someone is pursuing but there's no established solution for: - 3D Storyboarding for VR cinematic storytelling (mixed desktop/VR) - VR home tours for real estate - VR sports training for golf/tennis/baseball - Rehearsal/Staging VR for event planning. - VR Training for DIY/Construction. etc.. In particular if there is a field that you personally work in or know someone that's a great place to start.
  • rubicon33 10y ago
    What about VR for surgery training?
    • bduerst 10y ago
      That would better be served with AR, no?
• biztos 10y ago
  This is not the industry I work in, but one of which I'm often a customer: A turnkey package tracking system for small-to-medium shippers. In much of the world the shipping (as in DHL, FedEx) markets are still very fragmented and do not look like they're going to consolidate all that much. (As to why, I have guesses but I don't know for sure. I'm looking at Central Europe right now but I expect this is true in many other regions). As far as I can tell the package tracking systems are something the companies compete on, with the result that a lot of them suck or (worst case) don't exist. Case in point: I'm currently waiting for a shipment that the seller swears they gave to the shipper, but the shipper's system doesn't recognize the code. Both parties maintain it's probably just not "processed" yet at the shipper's, going on three days now. As a software guy, I find it crazy that nobody has a generic white-label tracking system that any random shipper can use in combination with some smartphones/tablets for label scanning. It only has to cost less than the company pays the owner's cousin's teenage son to write the tracking PHP code these companies would otherwise use, and I bet you could upsell all kinds of premium add-ons if it worked well. I would love to see this, and I think it's a big enough market to actually accommodate a startup.
  • zilchers 10y ago
    I was just at slush, and I think one of the startup finalists was working on this problem, though honestly, it's a pretty foreign problem to me. The company is ShipWallet: http://www.shipwallet.com/ http://www.shipwallet.com/ Article about the other companies (one was doing a handheld inkjet printer for skin, that was not a normal startup pitch): http://www.slush.org/news/winner-slush-100-announced/ http://www.slush.org/news/winner-slush-100-announced/
  • confiscate 10y ago
    Hey Biztos, why do you think this would be a big market? What would be some potential customers of such a turnkey tracking system? I imagine big players like DHL/FedEx would not be target customers due to their high traffic and already existing internal package tracking systems
    • biztos 10y ago
• scaramouche 10y ago
  A request/approval system. The current offerings are laughably unusable.
  • gary__ 10y ago
    I bookmarked a few gmail apps for this a while back, though have not used them myself. Does either of these look like what you are after? https://www.wizy.io/solutions/gmail_workflow.html https://www.wizy.io/solutions/gmail_workflow.html https://kissflow.com/how-it-works/ https://kissflow.com/how-it-works/
  • DrJid 10y ago
    Can you elaborate some more?
  • LeanderK 10y ago
    can you elaborate a bit?
  • oheard 10y ago
    Could you give examples of the current offerings you refer to?
• iamgopal 10y ago
  Government should allow company to pay part of the salary as life long Income bond. Company will have tax credit for that. Government will pay them fixed monthly income depend upon value of bond. I.e. Deferred inflation. But this can solve minimum income idea very easily.
  • cheriot 10y ago
    I'm not sure I really understand what you're describing. Is this like buying an annuity tied to lifespan and a tax subsidy to encourage it?
• tlb 10y ago
  (AI research industry) We'd like to run learning algorithms on robots, but there are no great options for hardware. (Happy to discuss in depth if someone wants to build it) We want to train large models much faster than any GPU box you can buy. (There are several new things announced, but there's room for more).
  • lowglow 10y ago
    Might be good to chat with you. We're working on Asteria. Happy to reach out.
  • digikata 10y ago
    What kind of robots are you talking about?
• tommynicholas 10y ago
  BI for developers. Developers run many organizations and teams now, but most Business Intelligence-ish tools are either built for business people (Tableau, Domo) or for marketing (all analytics products, specifically GA). I feel like there's a big opportunity for a tool/tools that are installed in apps as a package and then customized from there. Many teams build a version of this in house (Instacart open-sources theirs), and I think it should be a product.
  • teej 10y ago
    Newrelic is converging on this. Also you should take a look at Looker.
    • tommynicholas 10y ago
      New Relic was the inspiration for this idea. I shouldn't have to put my data into NR to get value, the data is already either in my app's DB or running through my app. There are actually a lot of reasons why having it be installed and within the app itself is ideal, opens up many doors that are closed by NR. I want something that starts with that as a first principle and then figures out the way to best execute it. Will check out Looker!
  • tbrock 10y ago
    Check out Looker. Life changing.
    • tommynicholas 10y ago
      Looker looks great! Not EXACTLY what I'm looking for but also definitely close enough, especially for companies at scale.
  • brettlangdon 10y ago
    Not 100% what you are looking for, since you specify "installed in apps as a package", but we are using https://redash.io/ https://redash.io/ and love it. They are open source and very easy to run ad-hoc queries, save/schedule queries and alerts, and build dashboards.
• tmsam 10y ago
  A family member is a lawyer in the Worker's Comp, SS, and Family Law space. THE software for lawyers in this space is called A1 Law. It solves a lot of real problems lawyers in that space have (form letter generation, calendar integration, case management)... but it's so slow to use new technologies. They advertise PalmOS integration. My family member has to have their own server in a closet running the server version of this so his team can use it! He has no idea how to manage a server, it's absurd that he has to. Everyone I know in law is dissatisfied with every part of their tech stack. If someone could come up with an integrated SaaS solution, and be SUPER careful about compliance... they would be printing money.
  • DavidPlumpton 10y ago
    Make the slightest mistake and you are getting sued!
    • vornth 10y ago
      And getting sued by lawyers, at that.
      • ChristianGeek 10y ago
        Exactly this. I wouldn't code legal software for any amount of money.
  • rpedela 10y ago
    I investigated doing a SaaS product in the legal space. One of the things I heard multiple times from lawyers is that they are more likely to buy a product if they can bill their clients directly. What you are talking about would not fall into that category. That doesn't mean you couldn't build a successful business, but I think it is important to understand that the market has different rules.
    • exceptione 10y ago
      (...) if they can bill their clients directly. Can you explain what you mean? Letter generation etc is still usefull, I don't see what billing has to do with it. They can still charge what they want to.
• jdc0589 10y ago
  Industry: Any tech company that hosts sensitive/regulated data. The problem: privlidged access management and auditing. The solution: Cyberark, but not $250k to cover 1,000 servers. Ain't nobody got money for that.
  • bduerst 10y ago
    I feel like this is a common/old enough problem there should be some open sourced solutions for it already.
    • jdc0589 10y ago
      In linux land, there is Teleport, which is relatively new. There are probably some other options, but I liked the POC I did with teleport, it just needs to mature a hair. In windows land.....I've got nothing, hence the problem. - https://gravitational.com/teleport/ https://gravitational.com/teleport/
    • meowface 10y ago
      The problem is big enterprises need support agreements and the other typical enterprisation features. An open source project alone will never fit most enterprise's appetites, especially for something as important as security/auditing/compliance. You at least need a company behind the open source project willing to provide enterprise setup and support.
• eli 10y ago
  It's still surprisingly hard to send email newsletters. I want software or a service that sits on top of mailgun/ses/my own SMTP server and handles list management, templating, link redirection, and analytics. And that stores everything in a way that makes further data mining easy. Lots of services solved the just sending email part. And lots of mailchimp type services offer a complete product geared towards marketers. Not much in between and most existing players have laughably poor APIs that make custom integrations and extensions painful.
  • aj0strow 10y ago
    Check out Sendy - https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/
    • eli 10y ago
      Seemed pretty immature last I looked at it a year or two ago, but I can give it a other spin. One-time pricing and a DRM scheme that involves obfuscated PHP files also makes me little nervous.
  • rafaelm 10y ago
    Besides Sandy which aj0strow already mentioned, there's another solution called Mailtrain. It's open source and has some of the missing sendy features. I've been meaning to try it for a while now.
    • eli 10y ago
      Will check it out, thanks. I could imagine an OSS based business model working here. I'd gladly pay for support and perhaps sponsor feature development.
• Avshalom 10y ago
  There's probably a SaaS in locksmithing. http://masterkeypro.com/ http://masterkeypro.com/ is sort of the only entry in the market and cores/companies-that-need-key-schedules change just often enough that say $5-10 month could gain traction.
  • bb611 10y ago
    Essentially inventory management for locks, including the specific bitting(s) for each lock? That actually sounds really fun to build, not terribly challenging, and probably has huge market reach. One quick challenge though, my understanding is that the average org that needs this either contracts or has full time staff who manage their locks. Those are normally guys who manage this by placing the 10 cores they need to re-key on their work bench, maybe putting a tape label on, and then just going to the individual locks and dropping in a new core. I get the value as a management tool, but does this really improve things for the average staff locksmith?
    • Avshalom 10y ago
      Usually yes either they just go through some one like Hull Supply (the company I worked for) or they have their own department. Whoever they go through however still has to deal with this shit. Masterkey is fine if you already have a key schedule, it'll spit out as many pinning combos as it can. at 300$ a license there's room for competition and if you could make a GUI that says calls to a prolog style logic engine to automatically create the keying hierarchy (Management needs keys to these doors, renters need keys to these doors, janitorial needs key to these doors, etc...) you could easily beat the functionality of Masterkey.
• strobe 10y ago
  One problem from my past experience at architecture industry: every country has it own rules & regulations for represent drawings of designs(documentation)(many small things like floor plans, sizes, fonts, frames, symbols descriptions all are different) as result CAD software developed in one country very hard to use in another without lot of weird tricks which works only for subset of original functionality. I believe it may be solved be separating actual building model and view/render representation like AST and interpreter. But unfortunately is super hard to do just because that AST model should include lot of complex stuff.
• starik36 10y ago
  Radio Industry. I know it's a slowly dying business, but that's because the giants are too slow to turn. I want to be able to go to a website, ask for demographics that I am looking for and be able to purchase an advertisement and hire talent to record my commercial. As it stands, you have to deal with salespeople.
  • jdavis703 10y ago
    Isn't this what ad agencies are supposed to do? Or are you saying you want a digital-only ad agency, like Adwords, except for radio?
    • paulrosenzweig 10y ago
      I think the poster meant Adwords or some similar self-serve solution.
    • starik36 10y ago
      Yes, something similar to AdWords. Which Google previously did do, but then cancelled it. http://betanews.com/2007/04/16/google-s-ad-moves-ruffle-feathers/ http://betanews.com/2007/04/16/google-s-ad-moves-ruffle-feat... I want my pool cleaning guy to be able to go online and buy a radio commercial advertising his business. If he has to go through a salesperson and negotiate and all that, you've already lost him. I think there is a ton of money sitting on the table waiting to be claimed for this opportunity.
      • confiscate 10y ago
        Why do you think there is a ton of money for this? Currently buyers go through salespeople--it's not elegant but not it is working. How much more money would an automated system be able to extract, given that some buyers are comfortable with doing it in-person?
        • starik36 10y ago
          Right now the small time business money is not on the table at all. Couple of reasons for that. One is that it's expensive to buy. One cause of that is that you have to pay sales people. If you remove sales people layer, you would lessen the cost of the ads and allow these people to come to the table. Second reason is that dealing with sales people is a hassle. Their incentives do not align with those of the buyer. Salespeople do not want to deal with small timers because commission is too small.
• Avshalom 10y ago
  It's not really start up material but Sage/MAS is basically crap for companies that need custom work. The door warehouse I worked at basically needed 2-3 parallel system (1-2 of them being us scribbling on paper) because we custom fabricated doors and MAS was basically useless for passing that kind of thing around. P.S. If any of you are in Austin I recommend Hull Supply, they're good people.
  • Axsuul 10y ago
    Can we get in touch? Currently building something in this space and would like to understand your problem better. My email is in my profile!
    • Avshalom 10y ago
      I left Hull/Texas in April 2015 but if you want to bug somebody http://hullsupply.com/page/contact/ http://hullsupply.com/page/contact/ ask to be transferred to Gabe, I'm sure he's still IT there. P.S. I don't know if he'll remember the name but Axel -from the cage and lockshop- if you want a name to drop.
• costcopizza 10y ago
  A one stop service for moving. Connecting/disconnecting utilities, address change, car registration, new laws I should be aware of. End the piecemeal.
  • tompetry 10y ago
    I suggest checking out Updater: http://www.updater.com/ http://www.updater.com/
  • ktaylor 10y ago
    I invested in a startup that did this--the first one--called http://www.urbanbound.com http://www.urbanbound.com. they quickly realized there was no demand for this in the B2C world so they switched to become a B2B employee relocation platform (again the first to do this as a SAAS) and they just landed a Series B. Fish where the money is!
• frodprefect 10y ago
  Industrial heat treating. PID controllers with expansive reporting software. Whole industry is scrambling right now to make their own or buy systems upwards of 10K. Think Wi-Fi thermostats that record data.
• analog31 10y ago
  An easy way to design things using catalog mechanical parts. I imagine being able to create a structure or assembly from stuff in the McMaster-Carr or ThorLabs catalogs without having to be a CAD expert. When I'm satisfied with the thing on my screen, I press a button, enter my credit card number, and the parts arrive from their respective vendors in a couple days. A search feature would be vital, of course. Being able to modify some parts would be useful, e.g., if I need 14 inches of pipe, I can cut down a 24 inch piece. Drawing from multiple disciplines would be necessary, e.g., combining an electrical box, optical assembly, and structural framework. Maybe you get paid via a little kickback from those vendors, who also agree to integrate their catalogs with your service.
  • notananthem 10y ago
    It exists in the form of them and other suppliers providing cad for everything
• ninjamayo 10y ago
  Bret Victor-style dashboard and visualisation systems. I 've been using Qlikview, Tableau and Excel for years and they are all very limited in what they can do. New dashboard solutions come out every hour but everyone is copying each other. I want something that I can mould to my problem, that I can touch and fully interact with. Hard, hard problem but worth spending time on this. Make it work in real-time scenarios too please.
  • noonespecial 10y ago
    Wish this jumped higher in the thread. I mounted a cheap digital projector and a web cam pointed down over a white melamine table in my workshop thanks to Bret's "Seeing Spaces" talk. Just being able to record and play back what happened on the table has changed the way I work on things. A commercial version of this project would be huge.
    • ninjamayo 10y ago
      Wish more people were thinking like Bret Victor. I 've been working with visualisation systems for more than 16 years and never seen anything like his software. The tool that he uses to easily construct charting within a few minutes is genius
• Keyframe 10y ago
  In filmmaking, there's a space for a relatively small and potentially cheap(er) hybrid manual/motion control grip unit. Something between a panther dolly (no tracks), a crane and a milo motion control with a stabilised head. If you're into robotics, this is your space. Companies have started to work on these issues, but part at a time (like DJI's Ronin). It's not enough though. Imagine a giant (3-5m reach) monitor arm that can be operated manually, but that can also remember the moves and repeat them. All of that on a mobile base that can do the same, along with a stabilisation head that can do a pitch/roll/yaw. Must be usable with and without power.
  • thenomad 10y ago
    Not entirely sure how you'd make one of these, but I can confirm: if you can make an affordable one, there is at least some demand.
• cheriot 10y ago
  It's not my industry, but I've been thinking about my health habits and a WaPo article made me realize I don't even know what a healthy weight range to target is[1]. BMI ignores bone structure and muscle and the most popular/affordable body fat estimations are +-10%. Is there something else out there to help make an individualized weight goal? Or any other health goal? [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearly-half-of-americas-overweight-people-dont-realize-theyre-overweight/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearl...
  • jonex 10y ago
    Tape measure and formulas is better than both weight and BMI. And while the errors can be large for some, you won't mistakenly think you are fit at 35% nor fat at 10% using them. There's actually not very much good knowledge out there on exactly what levels are optimal for health. It's mainly based on epidemiological research. However, as long as you aren't below 10-12 % BF (ca. 84 cm waist) there is probably no danger going down. If you are going towards 25% BF and above(ca 98 cm waist) you probably should see over your habits. If you want to keep it simple, just set some random measurement in-between those numbers as a limit and start dieting when above. I don't think the big issue for regular people is that they have tried measuring themselves but by random chance got an inaccurately low estimate, rather that they haven't really tried measuring or does not succeed in losing fat. The latter is sad as losing fat is mostly a solved issue, but the misinformation is so high that it's hard to get on the right track. If someone could solve the information problem they'd be a public health hero! For people into body-building or serious fitness, the issue of estimating fat is a bigger one. Some people go for DEXA scans, but they are quite expensive and takes time. Something doable in your home, but more accurate than tape measure or callipers, especially for tracking variations, would be the ideal.
• cake93 10y ago
  AR/VR visualization of 3D and 4D microscopy data (multicolor 3D video, as well as 3D point clouds over time) for biological research. Look for "lattice light sheet microscopy" or "superresolution microscopy" such as (3D)-STORM or STED. These techniques are adopted at a high pace. Groups spent $ 500,000 and often more on the hardware. They can produce terabytes of data within days, but we hardly have any tools to view and interact with it. (And the people are overwhelmed with the analysis.) Imagine a holographic video of living cell (potentially in near real time) where you can zoom by grabbing the hologram.
  • waleedka 10y ago
    I'm intrigued! How do you interact with these images right now? Do you display it on screen and rotate it with the mouse? Can you elaborate a bit more about how would a VR/AR solution add value here other than being a fancier solution?
    • cake93 10y ago
      Manipulation with the mouse if you're lucky. Often this would involve Matlab, or some specialized software. But in many cases we don't even have this and people use Fiji to scroll through the z-dimension with a slider. For presentations people often render a movie with Matlab, investing hours to get it right. With AR, you could take a movie by filming with a virtual camera in your hand. Augmented Reality would add the most value. Some examples: + intuitive exploration of the data (imagine learning about a plant by scrolling through cross-sections) + intuitive manipulation of the perspective (the mouse 3D rotation thing is really tricky) + collaborative viewing + annotation of objects (eg. tracing a filament through 3D by following it with the finger) + avoid occlusion by just zooming and moving in + be able to point at things in a 3D image It would bring much more natural ways to interact with the data. Essentially scaling up your molecular structure 10^6 to 10^7-fold so you can explore it as you'd explore a sculpture.
  • kiliankoe 10y ago
    A friend just did his diploma thesis on this. He built a system where you use a tablet device in your hand to push through 3D space visualizing the layers. I couldn't possibly describe it well enough, but I'll forward him a link to this thread and see if he answers.
• athollywood 10y ago
  The oil and gas industry is ripe with potential start ups. Here are a few that come to mind: 1. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be individually set up and programmed. Each technician does things a slightly different way, and the end result is a different set of automation and measurement logic at each facility. 2) Fiber optic DATS (distributed acoustic and temperature sensing) data handling and interpretation. This is a fairly new type of technology in which a fiber optic line is installed in the wellbore. The fiber optic line basically acts as a 15,000' strand of thermometers and microphones placed every 3'. The data from one installation is on the order of terabytes per hour. Oil and gas service companies that offer this service don't know how to handle this amount of data. The problem could probably be solved with S3 or something. 3) Drilling optimization. Create a software suite that utilizes ML/AI to help drilling engineers figure out the best way to drill a well is. It's a perfect ML/AI application. Lots and lots of training data available, easily defined input and output parameters, etc. Drilling engineering is full of hard, non-linear problems and humans are just really bad at it. The only way to be good at it is to drill lots and lots of wells and then listen to your gut.
  • pbnjay 10y ago
    Are you in this industry? Where could I learn more about #2? Sounds like something up my alley...
    • athollywood 10y ago
      I am. Google "fiber optic DAS" and you will find quite a lot. http://www.aogr.com/magazine/cover-story/fiber-optic-sensors-creating-new-possibilities-for-optimizing-fracturing http://www.aogr.com/magazine/cover-story/fiber-optic-sensors...
      • pbnjay 10y ago
        Yeah I found a few articles but not a whole lot of specifics. You're suggesting something like this box? http://www.optasense.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/FiberOpticAug14.pdf http://www.optasense.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/FiberOpt... I feel like it'd be really hard to break into this field without some data to play with. Catch-22... If you have access/desire to share some data like this I'd love to chat more (email in bio). Sounds like an interesting problem.
• ajepst 10y ago
  All the ballroom dance competitions use this old, disliked software to organize and run the events. The guy who wrote it isn't interested in making improvements, (and it can certainly use improvements) and is happy living off the income from people's per event usage rights. I am sure if something modern and regularly updated came out, it would get a lot of uptake. Thing is, the portion of it that runs during the event needs to be able to run offline since venues don't always have reliable internet, and that also means you would be going to at least the first few events for support.. And your tests better be good, since time is of the essence if some does go wrong mid event. I thought about it, and decided I was not interested in dealing with all that when my job pays pretty well. Still, it's a real opportunity.
  • matthewbauer 10y ago
    Is this the software you are talking about: http://www.douglassassociates.com/ http://www.douglassassociates.com/ ? It looks like it's offered for free now. The thing with this kind of software, is it must be "good enough" for the task.
    • timpark 10y ago
      It looks like you have to pay "to have more than 250 entries [I don't know what's typical], to sign up for web page creation options, and to receive technical support". And here they ask for credit card details over http... http://www.douglassassociates.com/online_registration.htm http://www.douglassassociates.com/online_registration.htm
      • ajepst 10y ago
        Typical is often larger than 250, and not having things like heat lists up online before the event would make people think you are not running things seriously, whether your event is over 250 or not. I hadn't looked at this web site, and haven't personally used the product. If this website is at all indicative of the user friendliness and modernity of the product itself, I can see why the event organizers complain.
  • deleted 10y ago
• Kaizyn 10y ago
  In the IT industry, finding good startup ideas is a hard problem.
  • jv22222 10y ago
    We've got you covered at https://nugget.one https://nugget.one :)
    • yellowapple 10y ago
      Neat idea, but I ain't exactly keen on paying $50/month for "typical Craigslist job listing as a service"
• NurAzhar 10y ago
  Uber for boat in Singapore please Hard to find boat from pier to ship Also cost prohibitive alot of unnecessary middle man
  • NIL8 10y ago
    Interesting. I bet this would be useful all over the world. I wonder if there's anything like this available anywhere else. The longer I think on it, the better it sounds. The biggest hurdle would probably be organized crime. It might sound crazy, but most ports are infested with deeply rooted criminals who are involved with even the most mundane aspects of the import/export arena. Of course, even organized crime can be disrupted with the right tech.
• weewooweewoo 10y ago
  Strippers, but for emotional labor.
• braindead_in 10y ago
  We are an human powered audio/video transcription service and have lots of training data that can be used for training a speech recognition system. An ASR-as-a-Service in the cloud kind of platform where we can use our data to continuously train and improve the models would be very useful for us.
  • buckshee 10y ago
    >human powered audio/video transcription service Mind sharing the name? I have friends doing ASR in college and they may be interested in your company. Though since their focus is on research/publishing papers, they may stick to standard datasets. But knowing about a new data source is always welcome. Thanks.
    • braindead_in 10y ago
      https://scribie.com https://scribie.com Email is in my profile as well.
• huherto 10y ago
  Uber for cooks. People cook food in their homes. You select the food from several cooks in your area in an app, drive to their house and pick the food. I imagine a housewife/househusband that is already cooking for her/his family to prepare more portions. Snap a photo, a description, and price. It can be extra income for something that she/him is already doing. People would use the product because it is convenient, saves times and they get more food variety.
  • Namrog84 10y ago
    I don't remember where or what but I remember this idea being discussed a few months ago on HN and there were quite a few reasons this is unlikely to happen. Because safety of properly cooked food and human consumption and other reasons. If you could stay relatively small and under radar. And get lucky enough for nothing bad to happen long enough to make billions like Uber. Then maybe have chance to pull off and get proper legal support/lobbyists
  • CodeWriter23 10y ago
    https://www.josephine.com https://www.josephine.com
  • ktaylor 10y ago
    There are a ton of regulations around preparing food for sale. They vary from state to state. There are cottage laws popping up in some states that allow certain foods to be prepared without heavy regulation, mainly for food categories that are more self-stable and don't easily spoil (E.G. turn deadly) such as baked breads, candy, etc. Instead of "selling" the food, though, maybe the structure could be a food club or other value swap.
  • qwerunf 10y ago
    umi.kitchen
  • yellowapple 10y ago
    This would be great for my stepdad. He has a tendency to cook enough of a single dish to feed himself for months (for example: buying a turkey after Thanksgiving, then making and freezing months' worth of turkey soup). Perhaps instead of packing his freezer full of soup, he could sell it to people on the Internet?
• Gruselbauer 10y ago
  I work for a small high end cosmetics business in the European Union. That particular industry has a lot of compliance and documentation rules imposed on it by Brussels. My predecessor in the line sadly pushed using Apple's Filemaker for that. It's not even that bad in the latest version and certainly offers some advantages over similar solutions but the guy was horribly in over his head. I'm talking fifty fields in a table having near identical names, undocumented... everything, no clear UI design paradigms, needlessly complicated UX and storing PDF as binary data in tables by the thousands. But I feel like I'm stuck with repairing his shit because there's not a nice and clean solution anywhere in sight. I thought of Wiki systems but the actual data entry will be done by people who would be completely put off by any kind of syntax/markup whatsoever. I'm neither good enough a Web developer to roll something similar myself nor can I dream of creating something like an entire documentation system. I think the problem might apply to other smaller businesses in the EU and especially Germany, too. Lots of docu to have ready in the unlikely but not impossible case of an inspection. For the cosmetics industry it'd need to be able to track ingredients, lots of external evaluation docu, internal procedures and so on. While at the same time it would need to be usable by people who are far removed from tech literate.
  • lucaspiller 10y ago
    You could take a look at Jira. I understand most people reading this are probably cringing right now, but the cause of that and what makes Jira appropriate is just how customisable it is. You can setup custom fields, validations, workflows.
    • kpil 10y ago
      While this is probably not a too bad idea, I just can't stop myself lamenting over the customisability of Jira. Before going bananas with Jira, either be very strict or use separate instances. I currently work at in a relatively large organisation where all teams of various crafts and trades - not only development - share one Jira instance, since Jira is obviously what 'Agile' teams use. Let's say that not all teams are equally equipped for analysis and generalisation. Although there is supposedly some control process, there are now several hundreds of custom fields, many duplicates of the standard fields, and duplicates and triples or more of many custom fields. The contents of them all are like the dwtf meme: True, False, FileNotFound.
• treehau5 10y ago
  Not sure, but if it involves automating more jobs away, wank off.
  • vinay427 10y ago
    I don't understand this idea that everyone needs jobs, all of the time. Ideas are not created so that jobs can be created, and workers on a societal level don't work so they have jobs. They work so the business operates and serves society. Why not develop ideas and businesses that provide value to all of society and provide benefits such as a basic income that compensate for the fewer workers needed?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • treehau5 10y ago
      > Why not develop ideas and businesses that provide value to all of society and provide benefits such as a basic income that compensate for the fewer workers needed? Because this is a pipe dream that ignores the decades long of suffering it will take to reach that state, if ever.
      • vinay427 10y ago
        Certainly, but automation seems inevitable at this point because it actually is beneficial to most of society, in terms of productivity. I don't think becoming less automated to save jobs is any less of a pipe dream.
        • treehau5 10y ago
          > I don't think becoming less automated to save jobs is any less of a pipe dream. It may seem inevitable. Until you have an entire generation of the work force put out of work. Then the only thing that will be inevitable will be civil war. We always need to have work for people to do. It's fundamental to our nature. It's the modern expression of hunter/gathering.
• mcgrill 10y ago
  Anything that has to do with mining engineering and the use of software is just ripe for startups, getting the industry to adopt thought is a different story.
  • gimili 10y ago
    What are the biggest challanges for the mining engineering industry?
    • DanBC 10y ago
      Safety critical equipment needs safety critical software. You also need to provide machines and software for cheaper than a human life. Human life has a distressingly low value in several mining industries.
      • gimili 10y ago
        So you see the biggest challenges in the machines and execution of the work, rather than in the planning?
• lucaspiller 10y ago
  Surprised nobody has mentioned the elephant in our industry yet: recruiters and recruitment companies. I'm not talking about those employed by big companies, but those who are independent. For the last year and a bit I've been contracting with a company, and the recruiter who found me has fees of around 10% per day of my work, which they bill the company. They found me via LinkedIn, sent me a couple of emails, arranged a Skype call between me and the company, and sent me a bit of paperwork. Not bad for €10k.
  • agentgt 10y ago
    I'm the founder of a recruiting software company (SnapHop) and I will tell the recruiting industry like the real estate industry is actually shockingly difficult to disrupt. This is in part because recruiting is basically sales. Except your not selling a simple widget but a massive change. A career change for many is filled with as much trepidation as public speaking (I'll find the source shortly). The other problem similar to health care is regulation and compliance but mainly it is because the industry is a very human industry despite all the big-data machine learning promises. Getting rid of recruiting is like getting rid of sales. The big players in the industry are pretty much equivalent to google and facebook -> indeed and linkedin. The problem is you can only make so much money on advertising so they are trying to automate recruiting but still rely heavily on a service based approach (that is you still need humans). This is because advertising exacerbates the signal to noise ratio. When google enters the industry (which I believe they just did recently) expect linkedin and indeed to become even more service based (ie highly efficient super recruiting firms). Consequently cutting edge recruiting software has now become more focused on marketing automation which is what my company does (albeit we are more focused on the traditional inbound aka websites instead of the annoying email nagware you have seen). That is giving recruiters better tools to do their job. That being said my recent idea is instead of giving recruiters (or corp talent acquisition marketing) sales automation what if we give individual candidates that software? That is give the candidates drip campaigns and automated sales replies and beautiful personal career portfolio websites. That is allow smart candidates to sell to recruiters and company at scale. I haven't figured out the monetization for it or the actual demand but I think it would be interesting and potential disruptive empowering candidates.
• danschumann 10y ago
  All these ideas are wrong, because they are cash grabs. Money will never satisfy you. Find a startup you love by looking back to your best memories(10 years ago or more) of creating something and seek to give people that experience. Then, even if you fail financially, you'll still have more great memories, 10 years from now.
  • RoboticWater 10y ago
    I fail to see how industry problems ripe for technical solutions equate to cash grabs. Problems are essentially the basis of every startup (if we generalize a little), and I can assure you that engineers can be passionate about solving a problem. I also don't really understand what you mean by giving people the experience of something you were creating in the past. What does that mean? As advice it seems exceptionally vague; something an writing teacher might tell me to write about, but not solid advice for founding a startup.
  • johnloeber 10y ago
    Downvoted because your comment is only tenuously connected to the subject: which problems in your industry could be solved by a startup? We're talking about problems that need solutions, not the worthwhileness of the financial rewards from problem-solving, an abstraction and question that is wholly irrelevant to the topic at hand.
• richard___ 10y ago
  A meal prep service for bodybuilders. The hardest part of bodybuilding is eating right. Something that is affordable, nutritious, and calorie dense would be extremely valuable. There is no meal delivery service I know of that satisfies the last criterion. $10 should get you at least 1000 healthy calories
  • joatmon-snoo 10y ago
    Something like Blue Apron?
  • littledude 10y ago
    https://www.katyhearnfit.com/Meals https://www.katyhearnfit.com/Meals http://www.iconmeals.com/ http://www.iconmeals.com/
  • _raoulcousins 10y ago
    Each Blue Apron meal is supposed to be for two. Can you just eat the whole thing yourself, or is it a problem of macros + price with the existing meal prep?
  • crystalPalace 10y ago
    Have you considered Soylent or one of its many derivatives? Some such as Joylent are a little cheaper while others have a wider variety of flavors and there are even keto options like Ketolent and Keto Chow.
• ommunist 10y ago
  Too many startups are trying to disrupt the industry, thus creating the problem, that cannot be solved by one more startup. Its the same problem with, say, capitalism. You cannot solve it by organising one more political party. I am not saying capitalism is bad. Its a problem.
• Too 10y ago
  Software development tools/IDE have come a long way but are nothing compared to what they could be. Things like static analysis, syntax/context aware diff/merge, visualization of variable changes while debugging, visualizations in general, cross language understanding, instant compilation, reverse debugging, data store integration, remote debugging, hot reloading, dependency management, cross platform compatibility, documentation integration, design for async. List could go on forever. It is somewhat "possible" to get a subset of the features above today but it always feels more like proof of concept rather than a complete product and you can never get all of them in one environment. The problem is that there are so many free tools that are "good enough" so it becomes quite a luxury to pay for the last mile. Barrier to entry is very large because of this and because it is a very big and complex problem space. Would love to see some competition here, only serious actors today are intellij and VS.
• agentgt 10y ago
  I'm not in the industry but I would really love a better way of growing your own food indoors while minimizing as much space but growing enough to support two people a day. Basically it is either build your own large messy setup or buy a complete novel piece of crap that will barely support a single meal... aka aerogarden. It would be nice to have basically a large self contained opaque cabinet with drawers of growing food. Basically I want a food growing appliance with plumbing and electrical hookups. I would easily be willing to spend a couple grand on something like that.
  • gluggymug 10y ago
    Lentils sprouts can grow in a bowl. No electricity needed. I have grown a few batches over the past week or so. Tastes pretty good. https://sproutpeople.org/growing-green-lentil-sprouts/ https://sproutpeople.org/growing-green-lentil-sprouts/
  • kaa2102 10y ago
    I attended a Washington Post Millennial startup event (inGENuitY) last year that featured several companies like this. http://wapo.st/1TvsnAv http://wapo.st/1TvsnAv
• kapauldo 10y ago
  This is the best thread I've ever read on HN. It's like going to a conference without the time and cost spend. How about a product that does this thread once a week. Half therapy half happy hour.
  • ThomPete 10y ago
    I started the original thread last year:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 and the discussion was so valuable and resulted in this essay https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-47ee63bb3511#.7gt7sglel https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4... We been talking about doing it monthly. And I have been talking with a few people about creating a conference around it. No pitches, no ted-lets save the world speaks. Just problems and people who are looking for problems to solve.
    • mathgeek 10y ago
      > No pitches, no ted-lets save the world speaks. Just problems and people who are looking for problems to solve. What ideas have you come up with to efficiently match up the problems with the solvers? Seems like pitches would still be involved somehow.
      • ThomPete 10y ago
        I am thinking that pitches are for solutions. So I don't think that would be a problem. The problems would be conversations.
    • vit05 10y ago
      this topic reminds me the time I worked for GE. I was continues looking for something to use on Kaizen.
      • ThomPete 10y ago
        I am pretty sure if you did exit interviews with people at GE before they went on retirement you would be flooded with problems and insights.
• NPMaxwell 10y ago
  As specific organs reduce functioning, some seniors living at home need to revise their recipes to avoid complex collections of foods just as TIAs and other problems reduce their ability to deal with the challenges. To-go food does not work. For some families, hospital-style food may mimic the diet they are accustomed to, but for immigrants, traditional hospital food may be horrific. Older people tend to rely on a very limited set of dishes, so that custom tailoring recipes may be cost effective. There are dietitian-run food delivery services, but not ones that create meals from clients' recipes. Affluent market tends to live away from their parents. The pain point is my co-worker telling me, "Food is killing my dad, and there is nothing I can do about it unless I quit this job and move home, which would be disastrous for my spouse and kids. As far as I can tell, I have to know how to solve the problem and just sit here, 3,000 miles away, and watch him die." I think this market would pay a premium.
  • terrib1e 10y ago
    I completely agree. I think that one of the big problems, aside from someone cooking a family recipe while also modifying it slightly so its diet appropriate, is somehow going beyond just making and delivering this food. My grandfather is 89, his wife is 17 years younger than him so she still cooks for him and makes sure hes eating. On the flipside, once my grandfather died on the other side of the family, my grandmother fell to pieces and alzheimer's rapidly set in. Is there somehow a cost effective way of creating these dishes either at the client's house or maybe delivering the meal and providing an hour of genuine conversation? I mean I guess it'd be a specialized home health aide at that point or something. I guess just sticking with the family recipe modified for dietary needs is the smart way to start off. You could follow this up with partnering with old age communities/nursing homes and providing this custom service en masse.
    • pastullo 10y ago
      Same exact story on my grandparents. Once the healty one is gone, the other one sees a drastic reduction in quality of life as well as life expectancy. The cost incourred for at-home help with a dedicated easter european colf were huge. Might still be a couple of decades away but i can totally see a model where you rent a house robot that takes care of cooking, personal cleaning and limited interaction (no need to have super intelligent AI when chatting to a 80 years old man with Alzheimer)
• JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  I do embedded Linux porting. The big job is writing drivers and building the device tree. This would be so much simpler if schematics could be annotated with scrapable clues about pin connections and device parameters (e.g. device tree fragments). Its all derivable from the schematic and chip specs, but that part could be automated almost completely. It would put me out of a job, but better than shooting myself in the head next time I have to face 40 hours of slogging through data sheets.
  • paraplegic 10y ago
    Manufacturers are starting to produce register maps in the form of SVD's (an xml doc?). Would starting with this not be a good start in producing the FDT?
  • jsudhams 10y ago
    Will the requester typically provide the datasheets?
    • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Nope. But fortunately most chips have widely available datasheets. Except Chinese knockoffs which can involve lots of sleuthing and black-box testing. Had to write a camera driver for a clone that had spotty support (a poor copy of a better device), took a month to get it right.
• tbrooks 10y ago
  I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent. This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry. The main problem is this: You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company meeting. What do you do? You can either: 1) Find a speaker yourself by searching Google and sifting through the mess of results 2) Call a speaker's bureau and get raked over the coals on price 3) ??? Ideally, there would be a marketplace for speakers. Where you would be able to search for talent that fit your criteria (available these dates, for this price, talks about these things, is well-regarded, etc.) and book them online. Nothing like this exists.
  • paraplegic 10y ago
    Careful, you might get 'Clintons'.
    • roshan_arhsim 10y ago
      and then loose them to THE TRUMP :P
  • whysonot 10y ago
    tbrooks I'd love to learn more about this -- could I get in touch?
    • tbrooks 10y ago
      sure. my email is my username at google's mail service.
  • mooreds 10y ago
    If you have contacts in the industry, you could use something like sharetribe to see if you can build a marketplace: https://www.sharetribe.com/ https://www.sharetribe.com/ It is super easy to get going with their hosted service. (Not an employee, just a satisfied user.) Of course that turns this from a technical problem to a marketing and sales problem, which may be less appealing.
• woogiewonka 10y ago
  Vehicle purchaseing. I despise having to negotiate a lower price when both parties know what the vehicle is actually worth, what incentives are available and that the salesperson is bullshiting the buyer. My soul dies a little every time I have to buy another car. I wish someone would put dealerships out of business somehow.
• OliverJones 10y ago
  Antibotnet -- software products and hardware gizmos to detect when IoT gizmos get pwned, recruited into botnets, and then the botnets are activated to attack KrebsOnSecurity or somebody. This stuff should be priced for home and small office use. "BEEEP" Why is your laser printer's ethernet port issuing tons of SYN requests? Unplug that printer! Factory reset it! Grow it into carrier-grade implementations.
• bobosha 10y ago
  Enterprise passwords/keys sharing with an audit trail, non-repudiation, expiration and all that jazz. Most (all?) companies I know, including ours have challenges sharing such info. Current solution is mostly to use google drive or dropbox in most businesses I know.
  • BjoernKW 10y ago
    What's wrong with Active Directory and 1Password's team solution (for services that don't support Active Directory: https://1password.com/teams/ https://1password.com/teams/ )?
  • gentleteblor 10y ago
    Are these passwords for individual use (in SaaS apps for example) or are they passwords to enterprise assets (databases, document stores etc). I've used Azure Key Vault quite a bit and it might be a good solution to the latter scenario.
    • bobosha 10y ago
      Those seem MS specific, something lightweight, dropbox-ish/slack-ish easy-to-use app for enterprise security sharing.
      • gentleteblor 10y ago
        Key Vault is an MS service for sure, but you can use it for anything as it has rest api. It's not as friendly as drobox/slack but it's far more secure.
• ramuta 10y ago
  Not a problem in industry, but rather in society: people rapidly losing jobs due to automation We all know why this is happening. One way to try to "solve" this problem is fighting the change (Luddites), but this doesn't work. Also if people don't have enough income, they stop spending - who's going to buy products and services anymore? Another possible solution would be that companies which automate most of it's work are owned by the community in which they operate. Let's take banks for example. Most of the jobs in banking system can and will be automated. Imagine a country/state that has three banks - each of them is owned by a third of the population (shareholders). When a bank makes profit, each of the shareholders gets dividends out of it. The same example can be applied to other industries and in total people would get (in a form of dividends) the Universal Basic Income (which everybody is talking about these days). Don't get me wrong, this is not communism. Companies would not be government owned, there would still be competition and private companies would still exist. Anyway, there are also other ways to tackle the problem mentioned at the beginning. As Brexit and US elections showed us, it's starting to affect many people and needs to be addressed asap.
  • gluggymug 10y ago
    My joke solution is everyone tries to get into politics as a profession. You can't automate politics. It will either achieve UBI or create a hell on earth.
    • ramuta 10y ago
      Nice one :)
• Old_Thrashbarg 10y ago
  My sibling was an architect in NYC for a couple years. He found it very difficult to keep on top of the different regulations which are amended occasionally. They come in books, PDFs, old janky online tools. We're working on a startup to bring all together into a modern search engine. It's called UpCodes. There's a lot of space in the area of construction compliance that needs improving.
• probolsky 10y ago
  I recently had to reserve six hotel ballrooms/conf. rooms for focus groups. Hotel sales offices suck. They are not responsive, sometimes taking days to respond, they have old technology (if any). They require signatures on multiple documents (almost none use online forms). For some inexplicable reason sales and catering managers all have assistants, who by the way, cannot actually do anything or give you any information, they are just clerks to take info. It was a coordination nightmare to set up all six locations and dates. There is great opportunity here to automate and streamline this process.
• ausrname1 10y ago
  Sales. It's crazy that selling products requires the build-out of entire sales, marketing, and support organizations when most companies could be well served by an Uber for Sales.
• mrdlin 10y ago
  sdfg
• ajo_LODR_IO 10y ago
  Checkout https://www.lodr.io https://www.lodr.io. We focus on loading files into RedShift. The data processing engine is built on a serverless backend for faster data loads at better prices. You don't have define schema, data types etc. Drop file, transform (optional), and load.