5 ms·

Ask HN: How hard is your problem?

31 points by aaronblohowiak 18y ago

Are you solving new problems (3d scene construction from mono audio recordings), applying existing techniques to a new problem space (social network for dog walkers), or trying to one-up the competition (bill your clients online for small businesses ?) It seems like popular programming and most startups focus the latter two problem sets. Focus on the latter two problem sets may be a "safer bet", but is far less satisfying as an engineer. Where is the interesting computer science work being done in the first problem set? Are you doing it? Do you wish you were?

brianlash 18y ago
I think most technical folks' occupancy of your latter two problem sets isn't so much for lack of interest in new, hairy-scary problems. It's for want of the necessary tools to do so. On the flip side, it's my guess a lot of hackers consider themselves new-problem-solvers-in-training. A 22 year old computer guy may not be solving the clean water and efficient energy problems of the world, but could conceivably have aspirations to do so when his or her talent is matched with the right street savvy, is matched with the right entrepreneurial network, is matched with the right funding opportunities, and so on. So in a lot of cases it's a question of "when," not "whether." And if it's people breaking new ground in computer work you're after, you've got to make sure you're in the right ballpark; Plenty of universities are doing remarkable things in CS, but again, it's usually older entrepreneurs (with money and know-how) who get their hands on new tech through the technology commercialization centers. Which is to say that new problems are being solved (in CS, too), just in different territories and in different ways than we hear about in mainstream tech news.
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  What kind of tooling is lacking? Your point about being in-training is an interesting one, particularly for the readers of this site. Where do you find out about the remarkable things that people are doing in CS? Also, are you suggesting that most interesting new CS work comes out of universities? If so, does that mean "If you want to solve problems, go to grad school. if you want to make money, start a me-too business?"
  - brianlash 18y ago
    Where do you find out about the remarkable things that people are doing in CS? Good question. I'd start in the pages of Technology Review.
  - scott_s 18y ago
    Check out the ACM publications: http://www.acm.org/publications http://www.acm.org/publications The Queue has decent stuff, but the real meat is looking at conference proceedings.
- mooneater 18y ago
  Going out on a limb a little, I would say in most areas (aside from the few that always seem to be in the headlines around here), no-one has really bothered applying even the basic insights of CS, math, and engineering. There are just so many "backwater" areas of the business and science worlds, ripe for optimization, and not enough CS types with strong fundamental skills, attacking them. I guess they are all concentrated in the "hot" companies and focussed on the "hot" areas instead. =) I was very surprised when I realized this. It was kinda akin to learning Santa wasn't real (edit: but in reverse!) Its hard to see these opportunities from the surface, I guess they are like deep water fish - so hitch a ride with a submarine =p and start with one based on the contacts you have.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
johns 18y ago
I disagree with your assertion that the safer bets are less satisfying. If my users like and use my app over our competitors', that's more satisfying to me than building something challenging that no one uses or likes. If you're working on something in a crowded market, designing your product to stand out/work better than the rest can be just as challenging (and satisfying) as writing something technologically complicated.
mooneater 18y ago
Interesting work seems to flow naturally from interesting data sets. Start by seeking the data.
- boredguy8 18y ago
  Interesting work makes boring data sets appear interesting. Start by seeking interpretations.
  - marcus 18y ago
    Actually some of the most seminal work in machine learning and statistics for example was done on the most boring datasets, for example read Fishers work on classifying Iris sub-species.
    - mooneater 18y ago
      I doubt Fischer found the Iris dataset boring.
SwellJoe 18y ago
We're doing a bit of both, with the known and quantifiable (web hosting management) supporting our pioneer efforts to be part of a new and almost entirely unsettled territory (cloud computing). I wouldn't necessarily recommend it over other tactics, but it's what fit our business and our existing codebase--we launched based on an old and well-established Open Source project and the existing code greatly directed our first couple of years in operation. But, we also know that becoming a leader in a well-established field, full of well-funded competitors, is not necessarily a trivial endeavor. So, while we think our hosting management products will be a nice source of revenue for years to come, it's the combination of those tools with cutting edge stuff in the virtualization space that will allow us to lead rather than follow (because no matter how good your products are in an established market, you'll probably always be playing catch up in the mind of the market). I also think you're underestimating the amount of interesting work that can be found underlying seemingly mundane tasks. I've found that data analysis and visualization can be a really interesting and fun pursuit within systems management software, and it's an area that brings tears of joy to customers (seriously, people wet themselves over graphs and charts...if you also add export to Excel or CSV, there will be fainting). Regardless of all of that, you have to solve problems that customers want solved. If you're doing that, the harder problems are better, if you are willing and able to solve them faster than your competitors. But, if you are starting a business rather than a research project, you need to make your decisions based on what people want rather than what you want to work on. You cannot start from "here's a cool technology, let's figure out a way to sell it", at least not generally. You must start from, "Here is a market that is being poorly served, and I can serve this market well." If you can fit, "by building interesting and cutting edge technologies" into that sentence without breaking it, then you've got yourself a winner.
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  I'm looking forward to seeing the new virtualmin support xen. I have been trying to make more interesting out of the apparently mundane; reimplementing the google charting api internally cause we needed to make charts, and even some good ol' csv exports (interestingly, csv export formats that are useful for biz people are not the formats i would prefer as a programmer.. the more you know..) further, I'm focusing on trying to learn the best tools for the job -- picking up vim finally, trying to grok sed/awk, bash scripting where appropriate.. even perl is sneaking into my head. make stuff that people want is a great mantra. i suppose i got into programming because it was a process of discovery and a process of invention. keeping it that way seems to require intention.
LPTS 18y ago
We are going to create a 21rst century patient facing medical experience. The experience of going to a pharmacy sucks, and is obsolete. The entire medical industry is complacent in allowing 100 billion in unnecessary medical costs because of non-adherence to medications. The doctors don't consider it their job to make their patients adhere. The pharmacist maybe talks to you for a few minutes and hands you a sheet of medical and legal jargon that says, on page 3, how important it is to take medicine. The drug companies also fail to ensure adherence. Yet patients don't know enough to care. None of these people have stepped up to the plate. So we're gonna do it, and when we solve the problem, we can start upending all the parts of the patient facing medical experience where bad decisions and stupid compromises have been calcified into the shitty experience that anyone who has had a sick family member knows all to well. We are not exactly a web start up though. We must design some actual stuff people will use too. The computer science part of our project is that all this adherence stuff can actually reduce to a flow of information problem given a few assumptions and the right way of conceptualizing the problem from a psychological and brain science standpoint. The computer science forms the informational backbone along which we can build a medical experience that doesn't suck and isn't full of compromises that suck for the patient. From a computer science point of view, we are applying existing techniques to a new problem, but from the point of view of the medical establishment, we are solving a currently unsolved problem of huge proportions. Information about your medication is some of the most important information you encounter, because it directly influences how long you live and how well you live. Edward Tufte is an old man now, and the pharmacies are still basically acting like it's 1952 in the way they present this vital information.
- maxklein 18y ago
  You are of course aware that there is strong legislation in force protecting pharmacists and that industry? And that people are not allowed to decide on their own medication?
  - LPTS 18y ago
    I know how the system works, yeah.
- 18y ago
dejb 18y ago
I agree that solving 'new' problems is a lot of fun. This can cause problem if you try to turn more mundane problems into interesting ones by making your code cover substantiatlly more general cases than is necessary. This is what has happened to me sometimes. I guess you could consider the optimisation problem of how to finish your 'less than new' problem most effectively as a potentially interesting meta-problem.
cousin_it 18y ago
I'm solving a newish problem, posed (but not yet solved) by MS Photosynth: build an immersive, 3D-like experience from photos. But then again, I'm not a startup, but a one man nonprofit/research thing, releasing my code under the GPL. http://openphotovr.org http://openphotovr.org My next project is definitely gonna be a for-profit in some other area. Still deciding where exactly.
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  Scene reconstruction is an interesting problem domain. Your manual stitching of photos is a great example of crowd-sourcing. Kick it up a notch and get the machine to do that for you =D
jfornear 18y ago
For fun about a month ago I actually bought the domain letsmakepuppies.com to make a social network for dog breeders with a subtle dating aspect for humans. I thought it was a cute idea, but then I saw a sticker that read, "Please don't breed or buy when pets in the shelters die."
swombat 18y ago
Problem toughness is not only defined by technical difficulty. Most programmers (myself included) tend to focus on that, but the toughness has many other components, such as the number of users, their fickleness, the strength of the competition, etc. I wrote an article about this some time ago on my blog: http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/02/11/how-tough-is-your-project/ http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/02/11/how-tough-is-your-p...
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
ecuzzillo 18y ago
Yeah, we're doing it. We make humanoid robots. http://www.anybots.com http://www.anybots.com
- icky 18y ago
  And the winner of "Startup most likely to accidentally eradicate human life" is...
  - jbenz 18y ago
    Don't worry. I'm sure Will Smith will be there to save us. Anybots looks super awesome, by the way. I can't imagine you'll have too hard a time recruiting a young product designer. Seems like a dream job.
ericb 18y ago
I'm working on a hosted load testing solution. I would say it is challenging compared to many of my ideas since I have to basically build both a website, and a load testing tool, but not in the difficult-computer-science-problem category. The site is: http://testomatix.com http://testomatix.com I'm getting there, but I am behind schedule. I struggle with whether I should release before I've added reporting in, or if I should wait. If folks are interested, the website has a mailing list signup.
- apgwoz 18y ago
  I tried to sign up, but got an error... System Error * Oops! It looks like there was an error.
  - ericb 18y ago
    Doh! Sorry... That's down at the moment. It's the join the mailing list on the right that does work or you can email me at ebeland on gmail. I should have been more clear on that, sorry. I'm connecting the load tool to the site, currently, although more still needs to be done.
iron_ball 18y ago
I make Flash brochureware! ...no, it is not satisfying.
- emmett 18y ago
  You should apply to Justin.tv! We have nice hard flash problems here...
brlewis 18y ago
I'm making photo sharing work the way it should have worked five years ago, using programming techniques I learned twenty years ago. I'm enjoying it immensely and wouldn't trade it.
Prrometheus 18y ago
Tipjoy is confronting a hard problem, but not in the technology space. They are trying to create a useful convenient payment mechanism without running afoul of finance laws. I don't envy them. There's a reason why all banks are the same, and basically the same as they were decades ago.
bjclark 18y ago
That's what she said.
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  You could have said NP-Hard if you wanted to go for the cheap thrill but remain on topic.
wheels 18y ago
We are. Actually I think more startups are than you're assuming. There are two reasons that this is not obvious: - Usually a good solution to a hard problem looks easy to users. - Simple problems get a lot harder when they're forced to scale. Just keeping things from flying apart at the hinges often involves significant optimization and engineering problems.
nelud 18y ago
I'm wokring on local climate model. But one question that bothers me - how will i sell it?... May be i should change direction, i wonder...
engtech 18y ago
The title had me at a/s/l

brianlash 18y ago

I think most technical folks' occupancy of your latter two problem sets isn't so much for lack of interest in new, hairy-scary problems. It's for want of the necessary tools to do so. On the flip side, it's my guess a lot of hackers consider themselves new-problem-solvers-in-training. A 22 year old computer guy may not be solving the clean water and efficient energy problems of the world, but could conceivably have aspirations to do so when his or her talent is matched with the right street savvy, is matched with the right entrepreneurial network, is matched with the right funding opportunities, and so on. So in a lot of cases it's a question of "when," not "whether." And if it's people breaking new ground in computer work you're after, you've got to make sure you're in the right ballpark; Plenty of universities are doing remarkable things in CS, but again, it's usually older entrepreneurs (with money and know-how) who get their hands on new tech through the technology commercialization centers. Which is to say that new problems are being solved (in CS, too), just in different territories and in different ways than we hear about in mainstream tech news.

aaronblohowiak 18y ago
What kind of tooling is lacking? Your point about being in-training is an interesting one, particularly for the readers of this site. Where do you find out about the remarkable things that people are doing in CS? Also, are you suggesting that most interesting new CS work comes out of universities? If so, does that mean "If you want to solve problems, go to grad school. if you want to make money, start a me-too business?"
- brianlash 18y ago
  Where do you find out about the remarkable things that people are doing in CS? Good question. I'd start in the pages of Technology Review.
- scott_s 18y ago
  Check out the ACM publications: http://www.acm.org/publications http://www.acm.org/publications The Queue has decent stuff, but the real meat is looking at conference proceedings.
mooneater 18y ago
Going out on a limb a little, I would say in most areas (aside from the few that always seem to be in the headlines around here), no-one has really bothered applying even the basic insights of CS, math, and engineering. There are just so many "backwater" areas of the business and science worlds, ripe for optimization, and not enough CS types with strong fundamental skills, attacking them. I guess they are all concentrated in the "hot" companies and focussed on the "hot" areas instead. =) I was very surprised when I realized this. It was kinda akin to learning Santa wasn't real (edit: but in reverse!) Its hard to see these opportunities from the surface, I guess they are like deep water fish - so hitch a ride with a submarine =p and start with one based on the contacts you have.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

johns 18y ago

I disagree with your assertion that the safer bets are less satisfying. If my users like and use my app over our competitors', that's more satisfying to me than building something challenging that no one uses or likes. If you're working on something in a crowded market, designing your product to stand out/work better than the rest can be just as challenging (and satisfying) as writing something technologically complicated.

mooneater 18y ago

Interesting work seems to flow naturally from interesting data sets. Start by seeking the data.

boredguy8 18y ago
Interesting work makes boring data sets appear interesting. Start by seeking interpretations.
- marcus 18y ago
  Actually some of the most seminal work in machine learning and statistics for example was done on the most boring datasets, for example read Fishers work on classifying Iris sub-species.
  - mooneater 18y ago
    I doubt Fischer found the Iris dataset boring.

SwellJoe 18y ago

We're doing a bit of both, with the known and quantifiable (web hosting management) supporting our pioneer efforts to be part of a new and almost entirely unsettled territory (cloud computing). I wouldn't necessarily recommend it over other tactics, but it's what fit our business and our existing codebase--we launched based on an old and well-established Open Source project and the existing code greatly directed our first couple of years in operation. But, we also know that becoming a leader in a well-established field, full of well-funded competitors, is not necessarily a trivial endeavor. So, while we think our hosting management products will be a nice source of revenue for years to come, it's the combination of those tools with cutting edge stuff in the virtualization space that will allow us to lead rather than follow (because no matter how good your products are in an established market, you'll probably always be playing catch up in the mind of the market). I also think you're underestimating the amount of interesting work that can be found underlying seemingly mundane tasks. I've found that data analysis and visualization can be a really interesting and fun pursuit within systems management software, and it's an area that brings tears of joy to customers (seriously, people wet themselves over graphs and charts...if you also add export to Excel or CSV, there will be fainting). Regardless of all of that, you have to solve problems that customers want solved. If you're doing that, the harder problems are better, if you are willing and able to solve them faster than your competitors. But, if you are starting a business rather than a research project, you need to make your decisions based on what people want rather than what you want to work on. You cannot start from "here's a cool technology, let's figure out a way to sell it", at least not generally. You must start from, "Here is a market that is being poorly served, and I can serve this market well." If you can fit, "by building interesting and cutting edge technologies" into that sentence without breaking it, then you've got yourself a winner.

aaronblohowiak 18y ago
I'm looking forward to seeing the new virtualmin support xen. I have been trying to make more interesting out of the apparently mundane; reimplementing the google charting api internally cause we needed to make charts, and even some good ol' csv exports (interestingly, csv export formats that are useful for biz people are not the formats i would prefer as a programmer.. the more you know..) further, I'm focusing on trying to learn the best tools for the job -- picking up vim finally, trying to grok sed/awk, bash scripting where appropriate.. even perl is sneaking into my head. make stuff that people want is a great mantra. i suppose i got into programming because it was a process of discovery and a process of invention. keeping it that way seems to require intention.

LPTS 18y ago

We are going to create a 21rst century patient facing medical experience. The experience of going to a pharmacy sucks, and is obsolete. The entire medical industry is complacent in allowing 100 billion in unnecessary medical costs because of non-adherence to medications. The doctors don't consider it their job to make their patients adhere. The pharmacist maybe talks to you for a few minutes and hands you a sheet of medical and legal jargon that says, on page 3, how important it is to take medicine. The drug companies also fail to ensure adherence. Yet patients don't know enough to care. None of these people have stepped up to the plate. So we're gonna do it, and when we solve the problem, we can start upending all the parts of the patient facing medical experience where bad decisions and stupid compromises have been calcified into the shitty experience that anyone who has had a sick family member knows all to well. We are not exactly a web start up though. We must design some actual stuff people will use too. The computer science part of our project is that all this adherence stuff can actually reduce to a flow of information problem given a few assumptions and the right way of conceptualizing the problem from a psychological and brain science standpoint. The computer science forms the informational backbone along which we can build a medical experience that doesn't suck and isn't full of compromises that suck for the patient. From a computer science point of view, we are applying existing techniques to a new problem, but from the point of view of the medical establishment, we are solving a currently unsolved problem of huge proportions. Information about your medication is some of the most important information you encounter, because it directly influences how long you live and how well you live. Edward Tufte is an old man now, and the pharmacies are still basically acting like it's 1952 in the way they present this vital information.

maxklein 18y ago
You are of course aware that there is strong legislation in force protecting pharmacists and that industry? And that people are not allowed to decide on their own medication?
- LPTS 18y ago
  I know how the system works, yeah.
18y ago

dejb 18y ago

I agree that solving 'new' problems is a lot of fun. This can cause problem if you try to turn more mundane problems into interesting ones by making your code cover substantiatlly more general cases than is necessary. This is what has happened to me sometimes. I guess you could consider the optimisation problem of how to finish your 'less than new' problem most effectively as a potentially interesting meta-problem.

cousin_it 18y ago

I'm solving a newish problem, posed (but not yet solved) by MS Photosynth: build an immersive, 3D-like experience from photos. But then again, I'm not a startup, but a one man nonprofit/research thing, releasing my code under the GPL. http://openphotovr.org http://openphotovr.org My next project is definitely gonna be a for-profit in some other area. Still deciding where exactly.

aaronblohowiak 18y ago
Scene reconstruction is an interesting problem domain. Your manual stitching of photos is a great example of crowd-sourcing. Kick it up a notch and get the machine to do that for you =D

jfornear 18y ago

For fun about a month ago I actually bought the domain letsmakepuppies.com to make a social network for dog breeders with a subtle dating aspect for humans. I thought it was a cute idea, but then I saw a sticker that read, "Please don't breed or buy when pets in the shelters die."

swombat 18y ago

Problem toughness is not only defined by technical difficulty. Most programmers (myself included) tend to focus on that, but the toughness has many other components, such as the number of users, their fickleness, the strength of the competition, etc. I wrote an article about this some time ago on my blog: http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/02/11/how-tough-is-your-project/ http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/02/11/how-tough-is-your-p...

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

ecuzzillo 18y ago

Yeah, we're doing it. We make humanoid robots. http://www.anybots.com http://www.anybots.com

icky 18y ago
And the winner of "Startup most likely to accidentally eradicate human life" is...
- jbenz 18y ago
  Don't worry. I'm sure Will Smith will be there to save us. Anybots looks super awesome, by the way. I can't imagine you'll have too hard a time recruiting a young product designer. Seems like a dream job.

ericb 18y ago

I'm working on a hosted load testing solution. I would say it is challenging compared to many of my ideas since I have to basically build both a website, and a load testing tool, but not in the difficult-computer-science-problem category. The site is: http://testomatix.com http://testomatix.com I'm getting there, but I am behind schedule. I struggle with whether I should release before I've added reporting in, or if I should wait. If folks are interested, the website has a mailing list signup.

apgwoz 18y ago
I tried to sign up, but got an error... System Error * Oops! It looks like there was an error.
- ericb 18y ago
  Doh! Sorry... That's down at the moment. It's the join the mailing list on the right that does work or you can email me at ebeland on gmail. I should have been more clear on that, sorry. I'm connecting the load tool to the site, currently, although more still needs to be done.

iron_ball 18y ago

I make Flash brochureware! ...no, it is not satisfying.

emmett 18y ago
You should apply to Justin.tv! We have nice hard flash problems here...

brlewis 18y ago

I'm making photo sharing work the way it should have worked five years ago, using programming techniques I learned twenty years ago. I'm enjoying it immensely and wouldn't trade it.

Prrometheus 18y ago

Tipjoy is confronting a hard problem, but not in the technology space. They are trying to create a useful convenient payment mechanism without running afoul of finance laws. I don't envy them. There's a reason why all banks are the same, and basically the same as they were decades ago.

bjclark 18y ago

That's what she said.

aaronblohowiak 18y ago
You could have said NP-Hard if you wanted to go for the cheap thrill but remain on topic.

wheels 18y ago

We are. Actually I think more startups are than you're assuming. There are two reasons that this is not obvious: - Usually a good solution to a hard problem looks easy to users. - Simple problems get a lot harder when they're forced to scale. Just keeping things from flying apart at the hinges often involves significant optimization and engineering problems.

nelud 18y ago

I'm wokring on local climate model. But one question that bothers me - how will i sell it?... May be i should change direction, i wonder...

engtech 18y ago

The title had me at a/s/l