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Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?

191 points by aman-pro 9y ago

1. Which industry do you work in? 2. What are the biggest problems stopping your industry from growing? 3. Can something be done about it?

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
Higher education. Where to start? Tenure is a huge cost to the university and not every professor is both an amazing researcher and an amazing teacher. So you have a chunk of the budget spent on old researchers while poorly paid adjuncts fill in for undergraduate classes. Not sure if fixable. Politics runs everything. Broken clock Ayn Rand was at least somewhat right in Atlas Shrugged when she speculated that bringing about the end of money would usher in an age of pull. That's exactly how higher ed works: unless you can justify your work with student evaluations and big $$$ research grants, politics runs a lot of decisions. Not sure if ever fixable. No two American universities are alike. Colleges within universities have major differences too. Good luck getting any real traction consolidating IT services. Everyone has different needs and cut-outs for their work. Higher education is a hydra. It cannot be fixed or reformed at the drop of the hat or with the use of an app. Abandon simple solutions, all ye who enter here.
thearn4 9y ago
1. Aerospace 2.1 Access to energy / energy density of fuels (batteries included). This is the case across a wide range of industries and problem areas of course, not just transportation. But incremental optimizations in efficiency have lead to squeezing more performance out of the margins, but no Moore's-law type growth will ever happen without some kind of energy breakthrough. 2.2 Going forward, tightly coupled systems will be the norm. The traditional tube-and-wing aircraft with bolted on nacelles is a bit of a dead end for civil aviation. Systems to enable a more complex design workflow (e.g. graph based dataflow with accurate gradients) will be more paramount. 3. Research into the next generation of energy storage materials, and improved large-scale gradient-based numerical optimization algorithms.
vivekd 9y ago
1. Legal 2. Excessive costs, lack of performance among professionals 3. Change in attitude seems to be the biggest factor. If lawyers stop being about fighting and competing and persuading and more about tackling problems, getting to the truth and finding solutions, we can have a much better chance of succeeding. There is a lot of opportunity for automation that no one seems to want to get involved in. A good example is document discovery which has been largely automated. Other areas that could be automated include divorce. For example, in my jurisdiction what each partner is entitled to on divorce in terms of child support and alimony and division of property are set. There is some room to argue about custodial arrangements but not very much. Given this - there is absolutely no reason to have many years of contentious divorce suits. If there was someone way of just entering the information into a computer and informing both couples of what they are entitled to and then working from there - I believe we would be much better off, because, although I haven't done alot of divorce suits, but in my limited experience it seems to me that lawyers certainly have a large role in exacerbating them and needlessly.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ruairidhwm 9y ago
  Currently a lawyer who is also a programmer and does a lot of legal tech stuff. Some of us are tackling the automation side of things and many lawyers really do want to solve problems. A big issue is the billable hour but I see that disappearing :) Email is in my bio so feel free to ping me if you want to chat about it!
  - fright 9y ago
    In almost every case, the lawyers are the problem not the solution.
throwaway7645 9y ago
Exploding Complexity. It can take years to become an expert in a tiny little nook of my field. Knowing how to use the software and the theory behind it is very challenging.
vijayr 9y ago
There are some resources that might be of interest to you (no affiliation) Ideas: http://www.oppsdaily.com/ http://www.oppsdaily.com/ https://nugget.one/ https://nugget.one/ Already done successfully https://sidehustleschool.com/ https://sidehustleschool.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses
- jv22222 9y ago
  Thanks vijayr FYI it's https://nugget.one/daily https://nugget.one/daily - for the free daily startup idea :)
- cdiamand 9y ago
  Thanks for the mention Vijayr! I'd also add https://flippa.com https://flippa.com to this list. It's interesting to see which businesses are being put up for sale.
- Network2020 9y ago
  https://www.springwise.com/ https://www.springwise.com/
malthaus 9y ago
1. Banking 2. Product complexity, legacy IT & culture and regulation 3. Provide regulated banking services as a lean platform / utility, let others play on top (3) is not easy to execute and no, blockchain is not the answer
vadym909 9y ago
1. Jobs/Work 2. Most people don't like their jobs but suck it up. The 9-5 grind, climb-ladder, can't switch careers, lack of meaning, social pressure to have job. Getting laid off, searching new job, financial downsides of being unemployed 3. Restructure the job model/market (flexible choices, live comfortably, security) Unengaged workers- Gallup poll on American workforce trends http://www.gallup.com/reports/199961/state-american-workplace-report-2017 http://www.gallup.com/reports/199961/state-american-workplac...
Jtsummers 9y ago
1. Embedded (safety and criitical systems) 2. Knowledge sharing within companies/organizations. Formal methods (primarily their absence). Effective use of simulations in design, development, and V&V efforts. Requirements traceability (this is mundane and seems bureaucratic, but it's critical here). 3. Yes, to everything. For the first, break down information silos and project fiefdoms. Allow for greater flexibility for staff to move across project boundaries so knowledge can be shared more equitably, and people can see other teams work (learn both good and bad things here). Training. Make it a recurring event. Not the crap training many organizations do. Have a seminar series where people come in and present on something, not always directly related to work. Encourage people to write up their lessons learned, and perform and publish post mortems on projects. Take the approach of avoiding blame, focus on correctable errors and faults along the way (these are primarily process faults, not technical ones; where technical they're typically design and not implementation errors). Formal methods and simulations are much easier to get started with today than ever. I'm not even talking about making a full-blown simulation of the final system, just high level "is this protocol sound" models. Presently working on radios. I don't need to implement a simulation of every detail of the protocol, I just need to know things like: If we add this new message, that must be sent so often, can it actually get broadcast at the correct frequency within the physical constraints of the radio? This turned out to be NO on one project I saw (not worked on), but not discovered until it was implemented (several man-months wasted). A message was supposed to be sent out every X time slots, containing N bytes of data. Each slot allowed you to send MAX size. Other messages also had to be sent out, say every X4 slots with size M. N+M > MAX, meant something wasn't sent. Both were mandatory, by design the protocol couldn't function. Another similar issue, though requiring a more complete simulation/model, was that one of the processors handling some of the messages simply wasn't fast enough. It was required to (worst-case) process N messages within X microseconds, but could actually only process ~N0.75 messages. Admittedly, this was worst case behavior, but by the system's design (protocol requirements, selected hardware, selected data bus, selected program design) it could not achieve the required performance. The more complete the simulation, though, the better off you are. Technical solutions already exist, it's primarily an issue of finding good case studies or getting an amenable manager to sign off on trying it to demonstrate the cost savings (versus the typical approaches, which in my experience are often significantly late and errorful). Also being at the right stage in a project. Being at the maintenance end, constructing these models/simulations is harder than when you're taking on a novel project. But, simulations also aid V&V efforts. If you can construct a full(er) simulation of the radio network, your V&V team can start creating test cases, procedures, and models and verifying that they're reasonable. From a protocol perspective, this is relatively easy on our radios, setting aside timing. So ignore time (as a strict concept) and instead focus on time slots. Create a simulation where each tick corresponds to one time slot, let computation run as long as needed. At the end, you'll see what should show up from the radios given some inputs. Run these through your data analysis tools to exercise them, and when you have functioning radios you can use these tools to create simulated network peers (pre-generated network data played back to the radio being tested). For requirements traceability, just stop using Word and Excel. Use an actual requirements database. I know DOORS sucks, but it's infinitely better than Word and Excel.
malodyets 9y ago
1. Which industry do you work in? In the publishing industry (where I have worked since 1997), the transition from print-only to print-plus-digital that began around 1999 and really got underway after Amazon released the Kindle in 2007 has finished. Now we have an industry in which print and digital co-exist (at different levels – 50/50 for fiction, but more like 80/20 for non-fiction, and even less of digital for more complex product types like Bibles). Currently the growth area is audiobooks, led (of course) by Audible. 2. What are the biggest problems stopping your industry from growing? Publishers have not really solved these problems: (a) How to distribute very small publications and receive very small payments? We're still reliant on credit cards for payments, which pushes us to a smallest payment size of about $1.99 or so. (b) How to increase discoverability? Most publishers are reluctant to post all of their content in a web-searchable and social-shareable form (for somewhat obvious reasons). However, this means that it's hard for them to draw direct traffic to their books. (c) How to reduce reliance on the behemoth of online retailing? As physical bookstores have died away, publishers have recognized that they are too reliant on one distributor, which is a dangerous position to be in (as that retailer has shown itself very ready to use monopsony powers to bully their suppliers). Most publishers have direct-to-consumer selling operations. But (a) and (b) and other factors mean that they find it extremely difficult to draw traffic to their sites. 3. Can something be done about it? I have been working on some of these problems in my business (http://blackearthgroup.com http://blackearthgroup.com). Here is a sketch outline of how I would encourage publishers to solve these problems: (a) Micropayments are needed, and to do that we need an online currency that can be used to buy content without going through the credit card processing network. Publishers should invest in the development of an online token that they would support on their sites. Customers could then purchase a supply of tokens and use them on publishers' sites to buy content. There are a couple of projects like this in the works. The simplest approach would be to create a coin based on the Ethereum network, and then support that coin for all purchases. (The hardest part of this is probably that the value of the coin would not be completely stable, because Ethereum is not, which means that publishers would have to either adjust their token prices regularly, or would have to live with variability in revenues to sales – this problem is solvable, but it requires a lot of capital to create a value stabilization mechanism.) (b) Publishers should put all their content online in excerpt chunks using non-discoverable public URLs, then submit it all to the search engines, and start sharing excerpts through social channels. It is true that some of the content would be given away, but that would be limited because each excerpt chunk would not be linked to the others in the same publication – access to one would not grant access to all. Using full-content search and sharing is one of the best ways for them to draw more organic traffic to their own sites. (They'll need to invest in better discovery mechanisms on their sites, too.) (c) Publishers have a real chance of building a customer base in their own content niches, if they invest in developing a content discovery and purchase experience that is significantly better in that niche than what customers experience on Amazon. (Cross-posted to my blog: http://blackearthgroup.com/2017/04/20/what-are-the-greatest-problems-facing-the-publishing-industry/ http://blackearthgroup.com/2017/04/20/what-are-the-greatest-... .)
bsvalley 9y ago
1. Software 2. Hiring Process 3. Replace meaningless whiteboarding interviews AND silly notepad algorithm questions, with a live coding interview on a laptop and a real development environment. Companies would be surprised how fast and efficient the hiring process would be. They would stop eliminating a bunch of great candidates by running relevant technical interviews and not silly CS academic stuff. I can spend 3 month memorizing 500 algorithm solutions and nail all your 45min technical interviews. I would get an offer, a kick ass package and I would join your team. Then, on my first day I'd ask for help from my colleagues because I can't even setup my development environment. I'd write buggy code that doesn't integrate well and wouldn't be able to understand how to design a system. All I'd know is how to write text in a notepad and how to flip a linked list on a whiteboard. But hey... I'm smart! And now I'm rich :)
- sdflkd 9y ago
  If your company doesn't ask system design questions they deserve their fate. :)
chollida1 9y ago
Intersection of trading and data mining. I've said this a few times but we're going through a growth period like AAA video games have over the past 20 years. I used to be that 2 guys could make a video game, then it went to 10, then 50, now its around 200 from what I've last heard. Hedge funds are going through a similar shift. It used to be that one person could manage data cleaning, and algo generation for a fund. Then cleaning got split out into its own job. Then the number of data streams exploded growing by a couple orders of magnitude. Then the data types diverged so that each new data stream needs its own special cleaning, and normalization and even data storage, ie some data isn't suitable for a sql or non sql database storage, like satellite images. Nowadays a typical algo fund might make use of 100 different algos for trading, each of which has 20 different inputs, some real time, some updated irregularly. It takes those signals and weights them to come up with a trading signal, which then gets mixed with a portfolio balancing signals and risk signals. It can be tough to disentangle each individual signal from the algos themselves so even things like detecting if a signal still has alpha generating abilities is tough. You can have 10 people just back testing signals and monitoring risk levels. And the growth of data and data sources isn't slowing down. This is good if you are one of the larger players, see Virtu buying out competitor KCG, who previously ate competitor Knight Capital, yes that fund with the huge blowup, but not so great news if you want to remain a small, person wise, fund. Not sure how to run a quant fund anymore with only 4 people. Not sure anything an be done about.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  I think here is an idea isn't unique to Quants/finance: curated datasets. Hosted data-sets that are fully cleaned, verified and kept up to date. You pay a fee for the feed, which essentially covers initial and on-going curation. Fees would probably be based on usage (dev/test/commercial etc) but also the realistic market value of curation. There's a mile of difference between a data-set that's been fed through a few cleaners and is 99% right, and one that is thoroughly checked, 99.99% right, and still updated as such with little delay. The former is the "one-man dev looking for easy passive income", the latter is the "quality datasets taken seriously".
  - 9y ago
throwaway2016a 9y ago
I may be reading between the lines too much and I apologize if I am... But every few months (weeks?) I see a post by a founder-type essentially trying to mine the Hacker News collective brains for startup ideas. It doesn't work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. The idea of a savior who comes in and solving the major problems of an industry they have never worked in is not a myth but close to one. (Elon Musk being a notable exception with cars and space flight... but he has the capital to attract domain experts to fill in the gaps) I'd point out the problems in my industry except I am actively working to solve them :) With that said. Don't let a "know-it-all" on HN (myself included) tell you what to do. If you want to tackle a hard problem in an industry you don't have experience in, please do. You might be the next Elon Musk, I don't know you so I don't know. If that wasn't your goal with this question... again I apologize.
- notalaser 9y ago
  > The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. Aww, yisss. Case in point, EDA and, in particular, hardware description languages and tools. Every discussion I've had with someone trying to get into this has been so cringe-worthy that I'm actively avoiding now. Every self-professed hardware hacker thinks they have the solution that's going to end all this painful Verilog kerfuffle and yet they're so, so far from getting it. Like the folks who thing the biggest problem with Verilog and VHDL is that they're so alien that it's hard to get software developers productive with them. Lack of electronics knowledge is what prevents most software developers from being productive in Verilog. A "better" language won't help. Paying attention in their Electronics or Systems classes is going to be ten times more helpful than a Scala/Haskell/whatever-is-fashionable hardware description language. Or the people who think that development tools are what's holding FPGAs back and that FPGAs would be everywhere, were it not for how hard it is to program them. Trying to explain them that FPGAs are pretty slow gets impossibly difficult as soon as the words "Intel" and "softcore" are mentioned. Not that there aren't a lot of things to improve in FPGA development tools, or in hardware description languages (which is why you see so much work being done on increasingly higher-level synthesis tools). But unless the number of millions of dollars you're willing to invest is not at least half the number of years you've been studying high-speed IC design, chances are you're as far removed from having a serious answer to all these problems as you are removed from being a modest person. /rant
severus 9y ago
1. Public Transport. 2. Funding/Capacity. 3. More money.
- nkoren 9y ago
  Hi, I'm both a public transport planner and a tech founder (www.podaris.com). I disagree with your 2nd and 3rd points. Funding and capacity limitations are indeed the cause of problems, but they're not root causes. They're symptomatic of broken political systems, broken business models, and a moribund industry that often delivers shockingly poor value for money. Similarly, more money is a solution, but it's not necessarily a good solution, if the majority of that money will be lost due to graft, mistakes, and inefficiencies. (McKinsey estimates that around $1 Trillion dollars is wasted every year, across all classes of infrastructure.[1]) (Note: this assessment has a lot of regional variance. It is mostly true in most of America, mostly false in Singapore, and has various levels of applicability in between.) Anyhow, before simply throwing more money at the problem, I'd recommend taking a look at how the politics, business models, and industry workflows can be shaken up a bit. 1: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/infrastructure-productivity http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infr...
- franciscop 9y ago
  3. Automation? Depends on the transport it could be 5 years away (trains/similar) or 20-30 years away (buses/similar). Of course the trains/similar is more of a people issue than technical (;
  - siscia 9y ago
    New metro lines are usually completely automatic here in (I guess) Europe.
  - dflock 9y ago
    For trains, automation already happened - in the 80's. London's DLR and Vancouver's skytrain are examples of mostly automated, completely driverless, metro systems - built in the 80's. Afaik, the Vancouver skytrain still uses the original OS/2 software to run.
jv0010 9y ago
Mobile phone repairs - lack of education and the ability to access quality replacement parts. You might think that there's no shortage of phone Repairer's out there and your right but you can bet that 90% of them are self taught or eventually taught by someone. Considering the amount of important information we store in phones and the price of the devices it has now become more important to ensure that your phone repairer knows what they are doing and of course has a reliable supplier
- gech 9y ago
  Phone manufacturers have an definite interest in stepping on your right to repair.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Might be easier to focus on certain models, given the multitude of models out there?
benzor 9y ago
I work in the games industry. There are plenty of problems to go around, but I'll pick just one: Discoverability In the "good old days" where 2 people could make a video game, odds are that just shipping something guaranteed you'd make money. But that's no the case anymore now that 1000+ apps come out every day on iOS / Google Play. Of course most of those are crap. But you could be making a great game that caters well to a particular audience or niche, and yet you might still fail just because no one can find it or really just be aware of its existence. The "simple" answer to this is marketing. Hustle your way to some visibility, partner up with some publishers or some platforms holders, and get as many eyeballs in front of your game as possible. However this effort is very close to being "zero-sum." Either you win and get your promo art banner at the top of the app store, or someone else does, but you can't both get it. It's less obvious when it comes to PR and having articles or game review written about you, but it's still there: with so much noise now on the internet, it's hard to generate a meaningful signal. The harder solution is being tackled by the app stores themselves. Steam, iOS, etc. have all been improving the way games are presented in their stores. There's more focus on specific genre features, more flash sales, more suggestions based on what you already play. It's a decent effort but I don't think it's enough yet. What can we do about it? Not sure. Algorithms that try to discover what you might like based on your previous purchases are nice and all, but most of my favourite gaming experiences were surprises that came out of genres I didn't expect (e.g. Rocket League), so this can only go so far.
- faitswulff 9y ago
  I would say that discoverability is a problem that games share with pretty much every form of media in the internet age. I've been thinking that one possible solution is to use less technology - organize local meetups and user tests, build a local community. BitBash in Chicago is an example of this, albeit on an annual basis: https://bitbashchicago.com/ https://bitbashchicago.com/
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    FWIW, it was an issue with books before the internet was big. So many novels are written each year. It's long been difficult to know how to find novels that you might like outside of the bigger works.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
1. Capital Equipment Control Systems 2. Seamless, lossless, low-cost interoperability 3. Doubtful. Many companies profit by providing custom products and services to address the problem.
woud420 9y ago
1) Advertising 2) A lot. Publishers relying on clickbait to generate money. Advertisers creating invasive ads with autoplay sound and video. Ignoring do-not-track requests as part of the industry (even if some technology providers respect DNT, it seems like a lot don't). Malware. A lot of useless metrics. Bandwidth usage. Etc... 3) Micro-payments vs delivering content only when an ad has been seen? Validating content delivered through exchanges. A better way to anonymize data used for tracking? Smaller ads. Honestly, I'm not too sure, there's probably a lot that can be done but I feel the industry did too little too late.
- Mendenhall 9y ago
  I always wonder if there is a way to directly (micro)pay people to watch the ads and cut out middle man so to speak.
- mxvzr 9y ago
  5+ years of experience in adtech, on the advertisers' side mostly. By far the largest surprise for me was the amount of efforts that went into denying payouts to the publishers. That went anywhere from designing terms that reduces the likelihood of payouts to straight up fraud (ie. double accounting, scrubbing conversions, ...). Ultimately I think a lot has to do with greed: publishers simply expect too high of a payout for these clicks, and advertisers do not want to see the traffic go somewhere else so they align with these expectations. They are then caught in this unsustainable price war with competitors and resort to fraud to keep going. IMO the #1 issue with this industry is one of credibility.
BuuQu9hu 9y ago
(1) I write code. (2) Nobody knows how to write code. (3) Probably fucking not!
CJefferson 9y ago
Academia. I'm going to pick on something specific: * Reproducibility -- running code months or years later, on another machine. Current tools, like VMs tend to be too heavy-weight. Docker is too hard to set up. The main problem with these various tools is that exploration is slow -- Often I'll take an experiment, tweak it a few dozen times, then finally get the code for a paper. At that point I don't want to package it up, I want to be able to "freeze" where my last execution.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  This sounds like a job for NixOS[1]! Specify a basic build environment for your lab, and then write per-paper or per-project build configurations. Once you've frozen/committed the configuration, you have a reproducible, deterministic build, and can run it over and over again at leisure. [1] -- https://nixos.org/nix/about.html https://nixos.org/nix/about.html
- lambdamichael 9y ago
  Authorea (www.authorea.com) supports including data/code in articles. There's even some in-article iPython support.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    How likely are my pages to still work in 20 years?
- onuralp 9y ago
  You might be interested in this - "computational reproducibility using Continuous Integration to produce verifiable end-to-end runs of scientific analysis": https://greenelab.github.io/continuous_analysis/ https://greenelab.github.io/continuous_analysis/
HockeyPlayer 9y ago
I run a quant/hft trading group. We need to know what the margin impact of our position will be. We use a tool from CME called PC-SPAN. The various factors that impact margin change during the day as prices change. I'd pay for a SAAS where I upload a position and get lots of useful margin reports back. We have built some of this but it is a distraction.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  Would you mind if I got in contact with you about this?
petermonsson 9y ago
1. Electronics/semiconductors 2. Moore's law is loosing stream and complexity is exploding. Turn around times are increasing in everything. This includes runtime for all of our software tools as well as physical processes such as getting chips back from the fab. Vendors are not keeping up. Productivity is suffering. 3. SystemVerilog is not really at the right abstraction level and still has many of the problems that face Verilog. It is sort of what C++ is to C and what I need is more the equivalent to rust.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Look at Caisson HDL. You think that's in right ballpark? http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.232.644 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.232....
- iamwil 9y ago
  I saw in some other thread that every programmer looks at making a better verilog, when having a better understanding of electronics would help them be more productive.
  - krupan 9y ago
    That's true, but those who do have a good understanding of electronics still want better tools than Verilog.
cyanoacry 9y ago
1. Rockets 2. Cost of launch locks out potential customers and limits R&D uses. Global launch cadence is slow; getting into orbit is a multi-year adventure. 3. Yes, we're working on reusable rockets. However, this only goes so far. Personally, I think that more money needs to be put into non-rocket modes of space travel, so that there's some competition. The fundamental problem is that it takes so much energy (and, with rockets, so much mass fraction optimization) to get to space, so it's difficult to engineer things with physical margin. If you could build a rocket like a car (just toss some more steel in the frame and call it a day, with no need for the obsessive mass savings), getting to space would be a bit easier. If you had a power source that doesn't shake and bake its surroundings, getting to space would be a lot easier.
- return0 9y ago
  What problem do rockets solve?
  - tricolon 9y ago
    Problem: Gravity makes it hard to get into orbit. Solution: Rockets.
    - return0 9y ago
      i can't imagine there 's unlimited demand for cheap rockets. it's not like everyone can send a satellite in order.
      - mxvzr 9y ago
        Cheap rockets will lead to cheaper satellites. Take a look at the development of cubesats [1]. It's a new "paradigm" for LEO sats: rather than develop a massive and/or complex sat with a lifetime spanning decades, costing years & millions of dollars, you can now make a simpler (no station keeping ability other than using drag, lifetime so low that radiation hardening isn't worth it)/cheaper/lighter sat that you'll replace in a couple of years. See also these two SpaceX applications to the FCC from 2016 & 2017 [2][3] for respectively ~4000 and ~7000 satellites. For context, there is currently about ~1000 operational satellites, with about half of these in LEO. Finally consider the Ardusat project [4] from a couple of years ago (the premise was to send an arduino in space and let kickstarter backers run their code on it). The project was successful and allowed the founders to later raise money for a company [5] (Nanosatisfi, renamed Spire) operating a fleet of cubesats. Basically any entity with ~100k to spend will be able to send up their own space junk. Now would be a good time to figure out how to treat the kessler syndrome. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat 2. https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2016111500118&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/repor... 3. https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2017030100027&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/repor... 4. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-arduino-experiment-in-space https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-... 5. https://spire.com/ https://spire.com/
DanBC 9y ago
1) Patient safety 2) Massive underfunding from central and local government; entrenched ways of working; incorrectly defensive working; dysfunctional cheerleading of incorrect approaches 3) Yes. Improve efficiency. Move to better ways of serious incident analysis. Challenge people who cheerlead incorrect approaches. Push for more funding, especially using Spend-to-Save data.
Mz 9y ago
Not a single industry per se, but a major social problem offering potentially multiple business opportunities: Homelessness is on the rise nationwide in part due to a serious lack of genuinely affordable housing. Among other things, in the 1960s and 70s, we tore down a lot of SROs. The Baby Boom generation was an anomaly. The unprecedented wealth of their parents was due to WW2. Yet, expectations from that era still shape housing policy and infrastructure, much to our detriment. You do not necessarily need to be a construction company to play a role in addressing this issue. Another very serious problem is the lack of financing mechanisms for housing alternatives. For example, co-housing projects in the US tend to be self financed because we do not have financial products that fit them. This actively undermines their ability to add affordable housing to the system, a purpose they successfully serve in other countries, from what I have read. There are, no doubt, many other things one could do to work on this issue.
RivieraKid 9y ago
No one mentioning healthcare? I think there's a massive opportunity to lower costs and improve user experience in every area. I wish Apple used their pile of cash to invest in a big vertically integrated healthcare service - a chain of hospitals, in-house-developed software throughout, improve user experience, integration and tech on every level. Basically healthcare rethought from the ground-up with Silicon Valley consumer-oriented mentality. Yes, extremely daring, but they're in a unique position to pull that off.
- fright 9y ago
  The healthcare industry almost always looks better from an outside perspective, but once you're on the inside you become just another part of the problem. Lowering costs is a good example, but once you're inside you realize that the entire industry has been built from the ground up to create high profits and gains, and trying to change that leads to a quick exit. So once most people are on the inside they just go along with it and play ball because it's the safe and profitable thing to do. Everyone wants change with healthcare, but short of the industry collapsing and being re-built, I don't see way that it's going to happen, though I'd love to be wrong.
  - RivieraKid 9y ago
    That's why I think Apple should give it a shot. They are big enough to basically rebuild healthcare, create an integrated user-focused product including a chain of hospitals, clinics, web and mobile apps, health smartwatches, DNA sequencing, maybe even research.
    - sjg007 9y ago
      The only thing that will change health care is single payer.
AlexAMEEE 9y ago
1. Sports betting 2. Oligopoly[0] just a few companies who deliver live results. You would need a ton of cash upfront, to hire people who would watch the games and would press buttons in order to inform you about results so you could parse them and deliver live results which eventually would become a live API. But as you can see, there are people involved in this, who watch all those games, if you can manage to automate this, without requiring too many people, you are a rich man. Let's put in that way, almost everyone consumes their API if they are offline, we are offline. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  Seems like something that can be crowdsourced cheaply since so many people are watching the sports shows for free anyway.
  - legolas2412 9y ago
    Well, as there are comment threads on reddit and streaming websites, you just do some simple NLP.
  - AlexAMEEE 9y ago
    They are also betting and why shouldn't they publish results that would let them win even if that's not the correct result ? One could argue that the masses would always return the correct score but imagine 50 people debating about sports, there are 50 opinions and the truth somewhere in between. And therefore those people also called 'scouts' must be trained in order to accomplish the job.
- jpindar 9y ago
  At least some leagues already provide live feeds of scores and important plays. During NFL games I hang out on a certain irc channel and there's a bot that posts them.
return0 9y ago
It's a difficult problem, but food just takes too much of people's time. Something like a personalized service that brings you food according to your own nutritional schedule would be nice.
- jkchu 9y ago
  I feel that a lot of people receive a lot of joy from selecting good food from a variety of options. I think with the immense popularity of websites/apps like Yelp, people are even more picky eaters than ever before. I think this makes a personalized food service incredibly difficult to appease a wide net of people and tastes while considering things like costs and logistics. Of course the existence and popularity of something like Soylent goes against my assumptions. I imagine there are just people who value their time over enjoyment from food, as well as people who feel the opposite.
  - return0 9y ago
    Also fitness enthusiasts are an entire category
- pathsjs 9y ago
  I feel the opposite. There's no shortage of startups trying to serve you every kind of food on the planet quickly and cheaply, but more often than not the enjoyment is in actually going out and spending some time at the restaurant or preparing a nice dish on your own
- xvaier 9y ago
  GoodFood is a Canadian company that does something like this. https://makegoodfood.ca/en/home https://makegoodfood.ca/en/home
- miguelrochefort 9y ago
  - Don't eat for pleasure - Only drink water - Eat once a day - Eat the same thing every day (mostly) - Prepare all your meals once a week If you ignore weekly grocery shopping and meal prepping, I spend less than 1 hour a day thinking about food, preparing food and eating food.
ioddly 9y ago
1. Programming 2. I don't know if it's stopping the industry from growing, but existing communication tools (specifically chat, email) are a serious drain on attention and productivity. See http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html. 3. I'm working on it. Might be better tooling, might be educating people on how harmful they can be.
- saimiam 9y ago
  I take a contrarian view on the perniciousness of chat, email, and social media. I'm yet to face a situation when I had to get something done but a chat conversation got so much in the way that I missed my deadline. Yes, I spend way too much time on frivolous internet activities but when stuff needs to get done, it gets done. No, I cannot use my time any differently to magically become more productive and build myself a side hustle or teach myself Sanskrit or whatever. Just because I now read a hundred success stories doesn't mean I have emulate and chase after adding to corpus of human growth and knowledge with blind focus. It's ok to work enough for a living and not impose artificial expectations of extreme productivity on myself.
aabajian 9y ago
Don't have time right now to go into detail, but in radiology the biggest problem is rising volumes with lower reimbursement. I addressed this in another thread, but it's an arms race between vendors to maximize radiologist throughput via tools such as dictaphones, templates, computer-aided diagnoses, and now, machine learning.
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  "but in radiology the biggest problem is rising volumes with lower reimbursement" Huh? So x-rays have become plentiful and cheap due to competition-driven innovation? How is that a problem?
nicostouch 9y ago
bitrot. nuff said.
AznHisoka 9y ago
Go to Upwork.com, find a category and see if you find any patterns in what people are requesting, especially if it involves something manual and tedious.
carlmungz 9y ago
1. Training & Education 2. Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements in AI & machine learning to train their workforce 3. Yes but I think it'll require younger incumbents 'eating the lunch' of more established companies for this to change
- tuyguntn 9y ago
  > Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements in AI & machine learning to train their workforce trying to use AI & ML is ok, but why they should use newer web technologies? web technologies are changed so frequently and outdated, its bit scary to jump in to new web tech.
  - carlmungz 9y ago
    A sizeable chunk (not sure on figures) of training courses are still produced using Flash. If it's not Flash, they are built using a Dreamweaver-esque authoring tool that spits out HTML & CSS. https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework is the only major open-source web framework.
ideonexus 9y ago
The Office of Educational Technology produced a report on Educational Software, what the biggest problems are and where the greatest opportunities are for solving them. It's a great read with lots of suggestions if you want to learn about a field, public education, that I personally feel is still severely behind the curve when it comes to the Information Revolution: https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/ https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/ I highlighted passages of note here: http://mxplx.com/Reference/id=2090 http://mxplx.com/Reference/id=2090 It's a great opportunity in a field that, despite budget cuts and under-funding, still has millions of dollars to put into software that could meet the needs of school districts across the country. Most of what's out there now is sorely lacking, leaving teachers and schools to use a patchwork of solutions to meet their needs.
pascalxus 9y ago
Here's some problems I've personally encountered: 1. Software Engineer 2. It's difficult to get remote debugging and remote syncing working right. We've all been there. It literally takes hours to set up, if you don't have precise instructions. PhpStorm is pretty good, but still takes quite a bit of head scratching to install when your doing remote debugging. 3. Getting an app to run locally usually takes way too much work. And, it seems Perl IDEs/debugging tools aren't as good as they should be. We're still using the command line debug tools for Perl, and can't even set a breakpoint before that line has been executed.
- iamwil 9y ago
  When you say remote, do you mean a remote server? Or do you mean debugging on an iPhone from your dev laptop?
  - pascalxus 9y ago
    i mean from a remote server. Lots of development is set up to only run from a remote server and it's too much work to get it working on a localhost.
rafark 9y ago
Outdated technology that leads to outdated systems.

191 points by aman-pro 9y ago

1. Which industry do you work in? 2. What are the biggest problems stopping your industry from growing? 3. Can something be done about it?

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago

Higher education. Where to start? Tenure is a huge cost to the university and not every professor is both an amazing researcher and an amazing teacher. So you have a chunk of the budget spent on old researchers while poorly paid adjuncts fill in for undergraduate classes. Not sure if fixable. Politics runs everything. Broken clock Ayn Rand was at least somewhat right in Atlas Shrugged when she speculated that bringing about the end of money would usher in an age of pull. That's exactly how higher ed works: unless you can justify your work with student evaluations and big $$$ research grants, politics runs a lot of decisions. Not sure if ever fixable. No two American universities are alike. Colleges within universities have major differences too. Good luck getting any real traction consolidating IT services. Everyone has different needs and cut-outs for their work. Higher education is a hydra. It cannot be fixed or reformed at the drop of the hat or with the use of an app. Abandon simple solutions, all ye who enter here.

thearn4 9y ago

1. Aerospace 2.1 Access to energy / energy density of fuels (batteries included). This is the case across a wide range of industries and problem areas of course, not just transportation. But incremental optimizations in efficiency have lead to squeezing more performance out of the margins, but no Moore's-law type growth will ever happen without some kind of energy breakthrough. 2.2 Going forward, tightly coupled systems will be the norm. The traditional tube-and-wing aircraft with bolted on nacelles is a bit of a dead end for civil aviation. Systems to enable a more complex design workflow (e.g. graph based dataflow with accurate gradients) will be more paramount. 3. Research into the next generation of energy storage materials, and improved large-scale gradient-based numerical optimization algorithms.

vivekd 9y ago

1. Legal 2. Excessive costs, lack of performance among professionals 3. Change in attitude seems to be the biggest factor. If lawyers stop being about fighting and competing and persuading and more about tackling problems, getting to the truth and finding solutions, we can have a much better chance of succeeding. There is a lot of opportunity for automation that no one seems to want to get involved in. A good example is document discovery which has been largely automated. Other areas that could be automated include divorce. For example, in my jurisdiction what each partner is entitled to on divorce in terms of child support and alimony and division of property are set. There is some room to argue about custodial arrangements but not very much. Given this - there is absolutely no reason to have many years of contentious divorce suits. If there was someone way of just entering the information into a computer and informing both couples of what they are entitled to and then working from there - I believe we would be much better off, because, although I haven't done alot of divorce suits, but in my limited experience it seems to me that lawyers certainly have a large role in exacerbating them and needlessly.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ruairidhwm 9y ago
Currently a lawyer who is also a programmer and does a lot of legal tech stuff. Some of us are tackling the automation side of things and many lawyers really do want to solve problems. A big issue is the billable hour but I see that disappearing :) Email is in my bio so feel free to ping me if you want to chat about it!
- fright 9y ago
  In almost every case, the lawyers are the problem not the solution.

throwaway7645 9y ago

Exploding Complexity. It can take years to become an expert in a tiny little nook of my field. Knowing how to use the software and the theory behind it is very challenging.

vijayr 9y ago

There are some resources that might be of interest to you (no affiliation) Ideas: http://www.oppsdaily.com/ http://www.oppsdaily.com/ https://nugget.one/ https://nugget.one/ Already done successfully https://sidehustleschool.com/ https://sidehustleschool.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses

jv22222 9y ago
Thanks vijayr FYI it's https://nugget.one/daily https://nugget.one/daily - for the free daily startup idea :)
cdiamand 9y ago
Thanks for the mention Vijayr! I'd also add https://flippa.com https://flippa.com to this list. It's interesting to see which businesses are being put up for sale.
Network2020 9y ago
https://www.springwise.com/ https://www.springwise.com/

malthaus 9y ago

1. Banking 2. Product complexity, legacy IT & culture and regulation 3. Provide regulated banking services as a lean platform / utility, let others play on top (3) is not easy to execute and no, blockchain is not the answer

vadym909 9y ago

1. Jobs/Work 2. Most people don't like their jobs but suck it up. The 9-5 grind, climb-ladder, can't switch careers, lack of meaning, social pressure to have job. Getting laid off, searching new job, financial downsides of being unemployed 3. Restructure the job model/market (flexible choices, live comfortably, security) Unengaged workers- Gallup poll on American workforce trends http://www.gallup.com/reports/199961/state-american-workplace-report-2017 http://www.gallup.com/reports/199961/state-american-workplac...

Jtsummers 9y ago

1. Embedded (safety and criitical systems) 2. Knowledge sharing within companies/organizations. Formal methods (primarily their absence). Effective use of simulations in design, development, and V&V efforts. Requirements traceability (this is mundane and seems bureaucratic, but it's critical here). 3. Yes, to everything. For the first, break down information silos and project fiefdoms. Allow for greater flexibility for staff to move across project boundaries so knowledge can be shared more equitably, and people can see other teams work (learn both good and bad things here). Training. Make it a recurring event. Not the crap training many organizations do. Have a seminar series where people come in and present on something, not always directly related to work. Encourage people to write up their lessons learned, and perform and publish post mortems on projects. Take the approach of avoiding blame, focus on correctable errors and faults along the way (these are primarily process faults, not technical ones; where technical they're typically design and not implementation errors). Formal methods and simulations are much easier to get started with today than ever. I'm not even talking about making a full-blown simulation of the final system, just high level "is this protocol sound" models. Presently working on radios. I don't need to implement a simulation of every detail of the protocol, I just need to know things like: If we add this new message, that must be sent so often, can it actually get broadcast at the correct frequency within the physical constraints of the radio? This turned out to be NO on one project I saw (not worked on), but not discovered until it was implemented (several man-months wasted). A message was supposed to be sent out every X time slots, containing N bytes of data. Each slot allowed you to send MAX size. Other messages also had to be sent out, say every X4 slots with size M. N+M > MAX, meant something wasn't sent. Both were mandatory, by design the protocol couldn't function. Another similar issue, though requiring a more complete simulation/model, was that one of the processors handling some of the messages simply wasn't fast enough. It was required to (worst-case) process N messages within X microseconds, but could actually only process ~N0.75 messages. Admittedly, this was worst case behavior, but by the system's design (protocol requirements, selected hardware, selected data bus, selected program design) it could not achieve the required performance. The more complete the simulation, though, the better off you are. Technical solutions already exist, it's primarily an issue of finding good case studies or getting an amenable manager to sign off on trying it to demonstrate the cost savings (versus the typical approaches, which in my experience are often significantly late and errorful). Also being at the right stage in a project. Being at the maintenance end, constructing these models/simulations is harder than when you're taking on a novel project. But, simulations also aid V&V efforts. If you can construct a full(er) simulation of the radio network, your V&V team can start creating test cases, procedures, and models and verifying that they're reasonable. From a protocol perspective, this is relatively easy on our radios, setting aside timing. So ignore time (as a strict concept) and instead focus on time slots. Create a simulation where each tick corresponds to one time slot, let computation run as long as needed. At the end, you'll see what should show up from the radios given some inputs. Run these through your data analysis tools to exercise them, and when you have functioning radios you can use these tools to create simulated network peers (pre-generated network data played back to the radio being tested). For requirements traceability, just stop using Word and Excel. Use an actual requirements database. I know DOORS sucks, but it's infinitely better than Word and Excel.

malodyets 9y ago

1. Which industry do you work in? In the publishing industry (where I have worked since 1997), the transition from print-only to print-plus-digital that began around 1999 and really got underway after Amazon released the Kindle in 2007 has finished. Now we have an industry in which print and digital co-exist (at different levels – 50/50 for fiction, but more like 80/20 for non-fiction, and even less of digital for more complex product types like Bibles). Currently the growth area is audiobooks, led (of course) by Audible. 2. What are the biggest problems stopping your industry from growing? Publishers have not really solved these problems: (a) How to distribute very small publications and receive very small payments? We're still reliant on credit cards for payments, which pushes us to a smallest payment size of about $1.99 or so. (b) How to increase discoverability? Most publishers are reluctant to post all of their content in a web-searchable and social-shareable form (for somewhat obvious reasons). However, this means that it's hard for them to draw direct traffic to their books. (c) How to reduce reliance on the behemoth of online retailing? As physical bookstores have died away, publishers have recognized that they are too reliant on one distributor, which is a dangerous position to be in (as that retailer has shown itself very ready to use monopsony powers to bully their suppliers). Most publishers have direct-to-consumer selling operations. But (a) and (b) and other factors mean that they find it extremely difficult to draw traffic to their sites. 3. Can something be done about it? I have been working on some of these problems in my business (http://blackearthgroup.com http://blackearthgroup.com). Here is a sketch outline of how I would encourage publishers to solve these problems: (a) Micropayments are needed, and to do that we need an online currency that can be used to buy content without going through the credit card processing network. Publishers should invest in the development of an online token that they would support on their sites. Customers could then purchase a supply of tokens and use them on publishers' sites to buy content. There are a couple of projects like this in the works. The simplest approach would be to create a coin based on the Ethereum network, and then support that coin for all purchases. (The hardest part of this is probably that the value of the coin would not be completely stable, because Ethereum is not, which means that publishers would have to either adjust their token prices regularly, or would have to live with variability in revenues to sales – this problem is solvable, but it requires a lot of capital to create a value stabilization mechanism.) (b) Publishers should put all their content online in excerpt chunks using non-discoverable public URLs, then submit it all to the search engines, and start sharing excerpts through social channels. It is true that some of the content would be given away, but that would be limited because each excerpt chunk would not be linked to the others in the same publication – access to one would not grant access to all. Using full-content search and sharing is one of the best ways for them to draw more organic traffic to their own sites. (They'll need to invest in better discovery mechanisms on their sites, too.) (c) Publishers have a real chance of building a customer base in their own content niches, if they invest in developing a content discovery and purchase experience that is significantly better in that niche than what customers experience on Amazon. (Cross-posted to my blog: http://blackearthgroup.com/2017/04/20/what-are-the-greatest-problems-facing-the-publishing-industry/ http://blackearthgroup.com/2017/04/20/what-are-the-greatest-... .)

bsvalley 9y ago

1. Software 2. Hiring Process 3. Replace meaningless whiteboarding interviews AND silly notepad algorithm questions, with a live coding interview on a laptop and a real development environment. Companies would be surprised how fast and efficient the hiring process would be. They would stop eliminating a bunch of great candidates by running relevant technical interviews and not silly CS academic stuff. I can spend 3 month memorizing 500 algorithm solutions and nail all your 45min technical interviews. I would get an offer, a kick ass package and I would join your team. Then, on my first day I'd ask for help from my colleagues because I can't even setup my development environment. I'd write buggy code that doesn't integrate well and wouldn't be able to understand how to design a system. All I'd know is how to write text in a notepad and how to flip a linked list on a whiteboard. But hey... I'm smart! And now I'm rich :)

sdflkd 9y ago
If your company doesn't ask system design questions they deserve their fate. :)

chollida1 9y ago

Intersection of trading and data mining. I've said this a few times but we're going through a growth period like AAA video games have over the past 20 years. I used to be that 2 guys could make a video game, then it went to 10, then 50, now its around 200 from what I've last heard. Hedge funds are going through a similar shift. It used to be that one person could manage data cleaning, and algo generation for a fund. Then cleaning got split out into its own job. Then the number of data streams exploded growing by a couple orders of magnitude. Then the data types diverged so that each new data stream needs its own special cleaning, and normalization and even data storage, ie some data isn't suitable for a sql or non sql database storage, like satellite images. Nowadays a typical algo fund might make use of 100 different algos for trading, each of which has 20 different inputs, some real time, some updated irregularly. It takes those signals and weights them to come up with a trading signal, which then gets mixed with a portfolio balancing signals and risk signals. It can be tough to disentangle each individual signal from the algos themselves so even things like detecting if a signal still has alpha generating abilities is tough. You can have 10 people just back testing signals and monitoring risk levels. And the growth of data and data sources isn't slowing down. This is good if you are one of the larger players, see Virtu buying out competitor KCG, who previously ate competitor Knight Capital, yes that fund with the huge blowup, but not so great news if you want to remain a small, person wise, fund. Not sure how to run a quant fund anymore with only 4 people. Not sure anything an be done about.

Chris2048 9y ago
I think here is an idea isn't unique to Quants/finance: curated datasets. Hosted data-sets that are fully cleaned, verified and kept up to date. You pay a fee for the feed, which essentially covers initial and on-going curation. Fees would probably be based on usage (dev/test/commercial etc) but also the realistic market value of curation. There's a mile of difference between a data-set that's been fed through a few cleaners and is 99% right, and one that is thoroughly checked, 99.99% right, and still updated as such with little delay. The former is the "one-man dev looking for easy passive income", the latter is the "quality datasets taken seriously".
- 9y ago

throwaway2016a 9y ago

I may be reading between the lines too much and I apologize if I am... But every few months (weeks?) I see a post by a founder-type essentially trying to mine the Hacker News collective brains for startup ideas. It doesn't work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. The idea of a savior who comes in and solving the major problems of an industry they have never worked in is not a myth but close to one. (Elon Musk being a notable exception with cars and space flight... but he has the capital to attract domain experts to fill in the gaps) I'd point out the problems in my industry except I am actively working to solve them :) With that said. Don't let a "know-it-all" on HN (myself included) tell you what to do. If you want to tackle a hard problem in an industry you don't have experience in, please do. You might be the next Elon Musk, I don't know you so I don't know. If that wasn't your goal with this question... again I apologize.

notalaser 9y ago
> The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. Aww, yisss. Case in point, EDA and, in particular, hardware description languages and tools. Every discussion I've had with someone trying to get into this has been so cringe-worthy that I'm actively avoiding now. Every self-professed hardware hacker thinks they have the solution that's going to end all this painful Verilog kerfuffle and yet they're so, so far from getting it. Like the folks who thing the biggest problem with Verilog and VHDL is that they're so alien that it's hard to get software developers productive with them. Lack of electronics knowledge is what prevents most software developers from being productive in Verilog. A "better" language won't help. Paying attention in their Electronics or Systems classes is going to be ten times more helpful than a Scala/Haskell/whatever-is-fashionable hardware description language. Or the people who think that development tools are what's holding FPGAs back and that FPGAs would be everywhere, were it not for how hard it is to program them. Trying to explain them that FPGAs are pretty slow gets impossibly difficult as soon as the words "Intel" and "softcore" are mentioned. Not that there aren't a lot of things to improve in FPGA development tools, or in hardware description languages (which is why you see so much work being done on increasingly higher-level synthesis tools). But unless the number of millions of dollars you're willing to invest is not at least half the number of years you've been studying high-speed IC design, chances are you're as far removed from having a serious answer to all these problems as you are removed from being a modest person. /rant

severus 9y ago

1. Public Transport. 2. Funding/Capacity. 3. More money.

nkoren 9y ago
Hi, I'm both a public transport planner and a tech founder (www.podaris.com). I disagree with your 2nd and 3rd points. Funding and capacity limitations are indeed the cause of problems, but they're not root causes. They're symptomatic of broken political systems, broken business models, and a moribund industry that often delivers shockingly poor value for money. Similarly, more money is a solution, but it's not necessarily a good solution, if the majority of that money will be lost due to graft, mistakes, and inefficiencies. (McKinsey estimates that around $1 Trillion dollars is wasted every year, across all classes of infrastructure.[1]) (Note: this assessment has a lot of regional variance. It is mostly true in most of America, mostly false in Singapore, and has various levels of applicability in between.) Anyhow, before simply throwing more money at the problem, I'd recommend taking a look at how the politics, business models, and industry workflows can be shaken up a bit. 1: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/infrastructure-productivity http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infr...
franciscop 9y ago
3. Automation? Depends on the transport it could be 5 years away (trains/similar) or 20-30 years away (buses/similar). Of course the trains/similar is more of a people issue than technical (;
- siscia 9y ago
  New metro lines are usually completely automatic here in (I guess) Europe.
- dflock 9y ago
  For trains, automation already happened - in the 80's. London's DLR and Vancouver's skytrain are examples of mostly automated, completely driverless, metro systems - built in the 80's. Afaik, the Vancouver skytrain still uses the original OS/2 software to run.

jv0010 9y ago

Mobile phone repairs - lack of education and the ability to access quality replacement parts. You might think that there's no shortage of phone Repairer's out there and your right but you can bet that 90% of them are self taught or eventually taught by someone. Considering the amount of important information we store in phones and the price of the devices it has now become more important to ensure that your phone repairer knows what they are doing and of course has a reliable supplier

gech 9y ago
Phone manufacturers have an definite interest in stepping on your right to repair.
Chris2048 9y ago
Might be easier to focus on certain models, given the multitude of models out there?

benzor 9y ago

I work in the games industry. There are plenty of problems to go around, but I'll pick just one: Discoverability In the "good old days" where 2 people could make a video game, odds are that just shipping something guaranteed you'd make money. But that's no the case anymore now that 1000+ apps come out every day on iOS / Google Play. Of course most of those are crap. But you could be making a great game that caters well to a particular audience or niche, and yet you might still fail just because no one can find it or really just be aware of its existence. The "simple" answer to this is marketing. Hustle your way to some visibility, partner up with some publishers or some platforms holders, and get as many eyeballs in front of your game as possible. However this effort is very close to being "zero-sum." Either you win and get your promo art banner at the top of the app store, or someone else does, but you can't both get it. It's less obvious when it comes to PR and having articles or game review written about you, but it's still there: with so much noise now on the internet, it's hard to generate a meaningful signal. The harder solution is being tackled by the app stores themselves. Steam, iOS, etc. have all been improving the way games are presented in their stores. There's more focus on specific genre features, more flash sales, more suggestions based on what you already play. It's a decent effort but I don't think it's enough yet. What can we do about it? Not sure. Algorithms that try to discover what you might like based on your previous purchases are nice and all, but most of my favourite gaming experiences were surprises that came out of genres I didn't expect (e.g. Rocket League), so this can only go so far.

faitswulff 9y ago
I would say that discoverability is a problem that games share with pretty much every form of media in the internet age. I've been thinking that one possible solution is to use less technology - organize local meetups and user tests, build a local community. BitBash in Chicago is an example of this, albeit on an annual basis: https://bitbashchicago.com/ https://bitbashchicago.com/
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  FWIW, it was an issue with books before the internet was big. So many novels are written each year. It's long been difficult to know how to find novels that you might like outside of the bigger works.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

1. Capital Equipment Control Systems 2. Seamless, lossless, low-cost interoperability 3. Doubtful. Many companies profit by providing custom products and services to address the problem.

woud420 9y ago

1) Advertising 2) A lot. Publishers relying on clickbait to generate money. Advertisers creating invasive ads with autoplay sound and video. Ignoring do-not-track requests as part of the industry (even if some technology providers respect DNT, it seems like a lot don't). Malware. A lot of useless metrics. Bandwidth usage. Etc... 3) Micro-payments vs delivering content only when an ad has been seen? Validating content delivered through exchanges. A better way to anonymize data used for tracking? Smaller ads. Honestly, I'm not too sure, there's probably a lot that can be done but I feel the industry did too little too late.

Mendenhall 9y ago
I always wonder if there is a way to directly (micro)pay people to watch the ads and cut out middle man so to speak.
mxvzr 9y ago
5+ years of experience in adtech, on the advertisers' side mostly. By far the largest surprise for me was the amount of efforts that went into denying payouts to the publishers. That went anywhere from designing terms that reduces the likelihood of payouts to straight up fraud (ie. double accounting, scrubbing conversions, ...). Ultimately I think a lot has to do with greed: publishers simply expect too high of a payout for these clicks, and advertisers do not want to see the traffic go somewhere else so they align with these expectations. They are then caught in this unsustainable price war with competitors and resort to fraud to keep going. IMO the #1 issue with this industry is one of credibility.

BuuQu9hu 9y ago

(1) I write code. (2) Nobody knows how to write code. (3) Probably fucking not!

CJefferson 9y ago

Academia. I'm going to pick on something specific: * Reproducibility -- running code months or years later, on another machine. Current tools, like VMs tend to be too heavy-weight. Docker is too hard to set up. The main problem with these various tools is that exploration is slow -- Often I'll take an experiment, tweak it a few dozen times, then finally get the code for a paper. At that point I don't want to package it up, I want to be able to "freeze" where my last execution.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
This sounds like a job for NixOS[1]! Specify a basic build environment for your lab, and then write per-paper or per-project build configurations. Once you've frozen/committed the configuration, you have a reproducible, deterministic build, and can run it over and over again at leisure. [1] -- https://nixos.org/nix/about.html https://nixos.org/nix/about.html
lambdamichael 9y ago
Authorea (www.authorea.com) supports including data/code in articles. There's even some in-article iPython support.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  How likely are my pages to still work in 20 years?
onuralp 9y ago
You might be interested in this - "computational reproducibility using Continuous Integration to produce verifiable end-to-end runs of scientific analysis": https://greenelab.github.io/continuous_analysis/ https://greenelab.github.io/continuous_analysis/

HockeyPlayer 9y ago

I run a quant/hft trading group. We need to know what the margin impact of our position will be. We use a tool from CME called PC-SPAN. The various factors that impact margin change during the day as prices change. I'd pay for a SAAS where I upload a position and get lots of useful margin reports back. We have built some of this but it is a distraction.

BoorishBears 9y ago
Would you mind if I got in contact with you about this?

petermonsson 9y ago

1. Electronics/semiconductors 2. Moore's law is loosing stream and complexity is exploding. Turn around times are increasing in everything. This includes runtime for all of our software tools as well as physical processes such as getting chips back from the fab. Vendors are not keeping up. Productivity is suffering. 3. SystemVerilog is not really at the right abstraction level and still has many of the problems that face Verilog. It is sort of what C++ is to C and what I need is more the equivalent to rust.

nickpsecurity 9y ago
Look at Caisson HDL. You think that's in right ballpark? http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.232.644 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.232....
iamwil 9y ago
I saw in some other thread that every programmer looks at making a better verilog, when having a better understanding of electronics would help them be more productive.
- krupan 9y ago
  That's true, but those who do have a good understanding of electronics still want better tools than Verilog.

cyanoacry 9y ago

1. Rockets 2. Cost of launch locks out potential customers and limits R&D uses. Global launch cadence is slow; getting into orbit is a multi-year adventure. 3. Yes, we're working on reusable rockets. However, this only goes so far. Personally, I think that more money needs to be put into non-rocket modes of space travel, so that there's some competition. The fundamental problem is that it takes so much energy (and, with rockets, so much mass fraction optimization) to get to space, so it's difficult to engineer things with physical margin. If you could build a rocket like a car (just toss some more steel in the frame and call it a day, with no need for the obsessive mass savings), getting to space would be a bit easier. If you had a power source that doesn't shake and bake its surroundings, getting to space would be a lot easier.

return0 9y ago
What problem do rockets solve?
- tricolon 9y ago
  Problem: Gravity makes it hard to get into orbit. Solution: Rockets.
  - return0 9y ago
    i can't imagine there 's unlimited demand for cheap rockets. it's not like everyone can send a satellite in order.
    - mxvzr 9y ago
      Cheap rockets will lead to cheaper satellites. Take a look at the development of cubesats [1]. It's a new "paradigm" for LEO sats: rather than develop a massive and/or complex sat with a lifetime spanning decades, costing years & millions of dollars, you can now make a simpler (no station keeping ability other than using drag, lifetime so low that radiation hardening isn't worth it)/cheaper/lighter sat that you'll replace in a couple of years. See also these two SpaceX applications to the FCC from 2016 & 2017 [2][3] for respectively ~4000 and ~7000 satellites. For context, there is currently about ~1000 operational satellites, with about half of these in LEO. Finally consider the Ardusat project [4] from a couple of years ago (the premise was to send an arduino in space and let kickstarter backers run their code on it). The project was successful and allowed the founders to later raise money for a company [5] (Nanosatisfi, renamed Spire) operating a fleet of cubesats. Basically any entity with ~100k to spend will be able to send up their own space junk. Now would be a good time to figure out how to treat the kessler syndrome. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat 2. https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2016111500118&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/repor... 3. https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2017030100027&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/repor... 4. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-arduino-experiment-in-space https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-... 5. https://spire.com/ https://spire.com/

DanBC 9y ago

1) Patient safety 2) Massive underfunding from central and local government; entrenched ways of working; incorrectly defensive working; dysfunctional cheerleading of incorrect approaches 3) Yes. Improve efficiency. Move to better ways of serious incident analysis. Challenge people who cheerlead incorrect approaches. Push for more funding, especially using Spend-to-Save data.

Mz 9y ago

Not a single industry per se, but a major social problem offering potentially multiple business opportunities: Homelessness is on the rise nationwide in part due to a serious lack of genuinely affordable housing. Among other things, in the 1960s and 70s, we tore down a lot of SROs. The Baby Boom generation was an anomaly. The unprecedented wealth of their parents was due to WW2. Yet, expectations from that era still shape housing policy and infrastructure, much to our detriment. You do not necessarily need to be a construction company to play a role in addressing this issue. Another very serious problem is the lack of financing mechanisms for housing alternatives. For example, co-housing projects in the US tend to be self financed because we do not have financial products that fit them. This actively undermines their ability to add affordable housing to the system, a purpose they successfully serve in other countries, from what I have read. There are, no doubt, many other things one could do to work on this issue.

RivieraKid 9y ago

No one mentioning healthcare? I think there's a massive opportunity to lower costs and improve user experience in every area. I wish Apple used their pile of cash to invest in a big vertically integrated healthcare service - a chain of hospitals, in-house-developed software throughout, improve user experience, integration and tech on every level. Basically healthcare rethought from the ground-up with Silicon Valley consumer-oriented mentality. Yes, extremely daring, but they're in a unique position to pull that off.

fright 9y ago
The healthcare industry almost always looks better from an outside perspective, but once you're on the inside you become just another part of the problem. Lowering costs is a good example, but once you're inside you realize that the entire industry has been built from the ground up to create high profits and gains, and trying to change that leads to a quick exit. So once most people are on the inside they just go along with it and play ball because it's the safe and profitable thing to do. Everyone wants change with healthcare, but short of the industry collapsing and being re-built, I don't see way that it's going to happen, though I'd love to be wrong.
- RivieraKid 9y ago
  That's why I think Apple should give it a shot. They are big enough to basically rebuild healthcare, create an integrated user-focused product including a chain of hospitals, clinics, web and mobile apps, health smartwatches, DNA sequencing, maybe even research.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    The only thing that will change health care is single payer.

AlexAMEEE 9y ago

1. Sports betting 2. Oligopoly[0] just a few companies who deliver live results. You would need a ton of cash upfront, to hire people who would watch the games and would press buttons in order to inform you about results so you could parse them and deliver live results which eventually would become a live API. But as you can see, there are people involved in this, who watch all those games, if you can manage to automate this, without requiring too many people, you are a rich man. Let's put in that way, almost everyone consumes their API if they are offline, we are offline. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

omarchowdhury 9y ago
Seems like something that can be crowdsourced cheaply since so many people are watching the sports shows for free anyway.
- legolas2412 9y ago
  Well, as there are comment threads on reddit and streaming websites, you just do some simple NLP.
- AlexAMEEE 9y ago
  They are also betting and why shouldn't they publish results that would let them win even if that's not the correct result ? One could argue that the masses would always return the correct score but imagine 50 people debating about sports, there are 50 opinions and the truth somewhere in between. And therefore those people also called 'scouts' must be trained in order to accomplish the job.
jpindar 9y ago
At least some leagues already provide live feeds of scores and important plays. During NFL games I hang out on a certain irc channel and there's a bot that posts them.

return0 9y ago

It's a difficult problem, but food just takes too much of people's time. Something like a personalized service that brings you food according to your own nutritional schedule would be nice.

jkchu 9y ago
I feel that a lot of people receive a lot of joy from selecting good food from a variety of options. I think with the immense popularity of websites/apps like Yelp, people are even more picky eaters than ever before. I think this makes a personalized food service incredibly difficult to appease a wide net of people and tastes while considering things like costs and logistics. Of course the existence and popularity of something like Soylent goes against my assumptions. I imagine there are just people who value their time over enjoyment from food, as well as people who feel the opposite.
- return0 9y ago
  Also fitness enthusiasts are an entire category
pathsjs 9y ago
I feel the opposite. There's no shortage of startups trying to serve you every kind of food on the planet quickly and cheaply, but more often than not the enjoyment is in actually going out and spending some time at the restaurant or preparing a nice dish on your own
xvaier 9y ago
GoodFood is a Canadian company that does something like this. https://makegoodfood.ca/en/home https://makegoodfood.ca/en/home
miguelrochefort 9y ago
- Don't eat for pleasure - Only drink water - Eat once a day - Eat the same thing every day (mostly) - Prepare all your meals once a week If you ignore weekly grocery shopping and meal prepping, I spend less than 1 hour a day thinking about food, preparing food and eating food.

ioddly 9y ago

1. Programming 2. I don't know if it's stopping the industry from growing, but existing communication tools (specifically chat, email) are a serious drain on attention and productivity. See http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html. 3. I'm working on it. Might be better tooling, might be educating people on how harmful they can be.

saimiam 9y ago
I take a contrarian view on the perniciousness of chat, email, and social media. I'm yet to face a situation when I had to get something done but a chat conversation got so much in the way that I missed my deadline. Yes, I spend way too much time on frivolous internet activities but when stuff needs to get done, it gets done. No, I cannot use my time any differently to magically become more productive and build myself a side hustle or teach myself Sanskrit or whatever. Just because I now read a hundred success stories doesn't mean I have emulate and chase after adding to corpus of human growth and knowledge with blind focus. It's ok to work enough for a living and not impose artificial expectations of extreme productivity on myself.

aabajian 9y ago

Don't have time right now to go into detail, but in radiology the biggest problem is rising volumes with lower reimbursement. I addressed this in another thread, but it's an arms race between vendors to maximize radiologist throughput via tools such as dictaphones, templates, computer-aided diagnoses, and now, machine learning.

rahimnathwani 9y ago
"but in radiology the biggest problem is rising volumes with lower reimbursement" Huh? So x-rays have become plentiful and cheap due to competition-driven innovation? How is that a problem?

nicostouch 9y ago

bitrot. nuff said.

AznHisoka 9y ago

Go to Upwork.com, find a category and see if you find any patterns in what people are requesting, especially if it involves something manual and tedious.

carlmungz 9y ago

1. Training & Education 2. Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements in AI & machine learning to train their workforce 3. Yes but I think it'll require younger incumbents 'eating the lunch' of more established companies for this to change

tuyguntn 9y ago
> Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements in AI & machine learning to train their workforce trying to use AI & ML is ok, but why they should use newer web technologies? web technologies are changed so frequently and outdated, its bit scary to jump in to new web tech.
- carlmungz 9y ago
  A sizeable chunk (not sure on figures) of training courses are still produced using Flash. If it's not Flash, they are built using a Dreamweaver-esque authoring tool that spits out HTML & CSS. https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework is the only major open-source web framework.

ideonexus 9y ago

The Office of Educational Technology produced a report on Educational Software, what the biggest problems are and where the greatest opportunities are for solving them. It's a great read with lots of suggestions if you want to learn about a field, public education, that I personally feel is still severely behind the curve when it comes to the Information Revolution: https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/ https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/ I highlighted passages of note here: http://mxplx.com/Reference/id=2090 http://mxplx.com/Reference/id=2090 It's a great opportunity in a field that, despite budget cuts and under-funding, still has millions of dollars to put into software that could meet the needs of school districts across the country. Most of what's out there now is sorely lacking, leaving teachers and schools to use a patchwork of solutions to meet their needs.

pascalxus 9y ago

Here's some problems I've personally encountered: 1. Software Engineer 2. It's difficult to get remote debugging and remote syncing working right. We've all been there. It literally takes hours to set up, if you don't have precise instructions. PhpStorm is pretty good, but still takes quite a bit of head scratching to install when your doing remote debugging. 3. Getting an app to run locally usually takes way too much work. And, it seems Perl IDEs/debugging tools aren't as good as they should be. We're still using the command line debug tools for Perl, and can't even set a breakpoint before that line has been executed.

iamwil 9y ago
When you say remote, do you mean a remote server? Or do you mean debugging on an iPhone from your dev laptop?
- pascalxus 9y ago
  i mean from a remote server. Lots of development is set up to only run from a remote server and it's too much work to get it working on a localhost.

rafark 9y ago

Outdated technology that leads to outdated systems.