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> Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter.

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• eagsalazar2 6y ago
  There are still millions of ideas. You just need to look around a little more and massive problems (opportunities) are everywhere. In my job (tech leadership consulting, dev, etc) we deep dive on a new company/industry every few weeks when kicking off new projects and it seems like every niche industry or business has like 50 grotesque inefficiencies and incumbent crappy solutions providers just waiting for someone with the right design and software skills to come by, make the investment, and grab the business. If you are lacking in inspiration, go work for a consulting company for a year and your idea bucket will be full to overflowing.
  • aaron-lebo 6y ago
    This was originally in response to your parent, but gonna attach it to your comment instead, cause you're right. I don't believe we've found the low-hanging fruit at all, it's still all over the place. There are hundreds of pieces of software and hardware that are expensive, or unintuitive, or user-hostile, many are all of the above. HN complains every day about bad software. Is this really the best we've got? There's just no way. What it does take is people willing to take a step off the usual treadmill and getting their talent and ability sucked into large companies and willing to take a risk to build their own stuff. That ability is there, the will is not. Some people have 30,000 HN comments. You're telling me 10k of those detailed thoughtful comments aren't absorbing time that can be put into building better stuff? Hardware is thousands of times more powerful and cheaper than it was 20 years ago. Software is likewise more capable, or at the very least, libraries are way more abundant.. Say what you want about new languages, but I'll take the option of Rust, Nim, Go, Clojure, etc, than what existed 15 years ago any day. Not that that stuff was bad, but today you have the option, and it's fucking cheap to build. Why aren't we building? Why do we act like we need millions of dollars in funding to do stuff you can do in your underwear? Do we really believe all the good ideas are gone or have been executed well? That seems crazy to me. I just think we're lacking imagination and we've adopted a woe is me attitude (I know I struggle with this all the time). That's just software, where greenfield stuff is cheaper than anything in the world, where implementing your thoughts is a matter of sitting down. If you've worked in any business, you know of the inefficiencies within, and if you've worked in a big one, you really know about them. There is so much low hanging fruit! Just about any product you can pick up in your house, any regular process you go through, there's a major opportunity to look at that and think about how that can be done better and cheaper and more reliably. What's more, that's about the easiest thing to do, because it's just working off what already exists. Sorry if I'm not more specific, but there's gonna be people looing back in ten or twenty or two years and wondering how so many people missed x or y or z, which in retrospect is so obvious.
    • catmanjan 6y ago
      I think its a case of diminishing returns - yes there is sucky legacy software everywhere, but the ROI was much greater when introducing software in a space where there was none, or the incumbent system hasn't met growing needs.
      • Hypx 6y ago
        Agreed. We're not finding something as big as the Internet again. Smartphones more or less look like the same across generations now. Innovation seems to be much more gradual than it use to be.
    • badpun 6y ago
      I work in big business (a large bank) and see gross inefficiencies. I also see vendors aggressively trying to sell us solutions to these inefficiencies. I.e. the solutions already exist and creating them may not be the hard part - the hard part is to get companies to adopt them, given how disruptive a rollout of many of these solution is.
  • jasonv 6y ago
    I’ve gone to doctors the last couple of years for minor, but not-small maladies and they have no treatments. Even in medicine there are common problems that plague big portions of our populations but no one wants to solve. I’m guessing it might be the same in the industries commonly discussed here. They may not be businesses, but they could certainly be features.
    • krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
      I'm not sure if treating lots of minor maladies is a good idea. I'd think that there's a certain threshold of severity, below which treatment is riskier than just leaving it be, and that a lot of the "unsolved problems" you're talking about are things that don't meet that threshold. One of the reasons the US spends so much on healthcare is that we have an ideology of "treatment at all costs"[0] when doing nothing is often the right solution. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/american-health-care-spending/590623/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/america...
      • adrianN 6y ago
        I don't know. There are minor maladies that don't need treatment because they get better on their own after some minor suffering, but there are a lot more minor maladies that over time only get worse. For example anything related to bad joints, or arteriosclerosis. Any effect of aging.
      • jasonv 6y ago
        I generally agree with you. But in the way that our defense budget is a significant portion of our federal budget, leaving many other state and federal needs un-fund-able, I'd suggest that there's a similar ratio of "elephant" medical research areas starving us of solutions to maladies that may be deserving of treatment.
  • Hypx 6y ago
    I'm not sure confident those inefficiencies are as easy to solve as you think. I've work on several projects where the goal was to overhaul a really old webapp. The end result usually ends up being at at the same level of performance as the original design. Worse, management often demands a vast increase in features, which makes the product slower, not faster. Not to say we don't find big performance gains here and there. But the trend does seem to be heading towards optimization and not revolutionary improvements.
    • thu2111 6y ago
      True, but revolutionary improvements are almost by definition so rare they don't form a trend. And revolutionary improvement is never what people really want regardless of what they may say. Here's my story about revolutionary improvement in business software. I've spent the last five years or so in the "enterprise blockchain" space. This term has been progressively diluted over the years; a typical enterprise blockchain deployment has no blocks or chains. Even so the nub of the concept remains. There are hashes, signatures, transactions etc. Why did the business world go so crazy about blockchains? Because it sounded like revolutionary change. These executives mostly don't care about cryptocurrencies or payments, but they cared a lot about the idea of peer to peer business processes. Simply moving structured information between organisations is by no means a solved problem and worse, it's one that very rarely gets attention from the wider software industry. There was EDI in the 1980s. Then nothing for a long time until XML came along, and a whole bunch of inter-firm protocols were "upgraded" to use XML. Then nothing until blockchain. This is one reason why you so often hear of business processes that still use fax machines, or emailing PDFs/excel files around. IT works well for sharing inside the organisation and pretty terribly between it. Here's what the conventional pre-blockchain approach to inter-org business process improvement looks like: 1. Identify a shared business process problem. 2. Create a consortium or shared for-profit venture to implement it, get the most likely customers to buy in. This can easily take years because the customers are likely to be competitors. 3. Hope that this consortium somehow manages to get lucky and hires competent tech people, because sure as hell the firms that want the software don't have them. This step often goes wrong. 4. Hope that somehow this group creates a usable, reliable product that actually solves their business need. This step also often goes wrong and the newly birthed software firm produces something too far from the real problem. 5. Hope that the original members of the consortium actually do the work to start using the solution they paid for. This often takes years. 6. Finally hope that they never get hacked, that your controlling government doesn't end up in a fight with theirs that would mean they can't store your data, hope they don't become dominated by one competitor in the group or grind to a halt due to having a captive market i.e. no incentives to improve anything. Inevitably some of these things happen. Classic example: SWIFT. But there are many others. So the idea that firms could just connect directly to each other in an agile manner with interoperable apps seemed like a promise of revolutionary change. Execs like that, it makes them seem bold and visionary. In practice what you see in these projects is very similar. They don't work in an open source manner, they still create new software firms or non-profit orgs via shared investments. The main difference is that step 5 gets more expensive because now the participants are expected to do some IT work themselves to run P2P nodes. But by the time they reach step 5 the executives are exhausted and just want a low-risk point-and-click hosted experience. Their own IT departments can't handle anything that doesn't look exactly like what they're used to and nobody in charge has enough technical knowledge to argue with them. Plus the executives have ticked the "we are innovative" box and don't want to control their own data anymore, they just want to cut a cheque and have someone else do the work. So the theoretically revolutionary shift to p2p business processes ends up being P2P in name only. One company ends up writing the software, hosting the nodes and generally just being a conventional SaaS business. I've come to the conclusion that there won't be any revolutionary steps forward in the business software space, ever, because in the end businesses outside the tech sector have virtually no tolerance for technology risk. They don't understand it, don't want it and really wish the whole concept of "innovation" (read: risky tech projects) would go away.
  • FowlSoft2013 6y ago
    Agreed, I joined a consulting company earlier in the year for this exact purpose. I believe technologist have to be more willing to get out of their comfort zone in order to apply their skills to underserved industries. It's a risk and a great outcome isn't guaranteed but they have to be taken at some point.
• adrianN 6y ago
  I think we're still really far from using the potential of software. Just look how terribly inefficient and error-prone most processes in, for example, hospitals or government agencies still are. There might be no more quicksorts to discover, but there is still plenty of work to do, most of it fairly trivial.
  • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    >most of it fairly trivial Medical and government are the 2 examples I would think of as the least trivial places to work in. There is nothing to be discovered or invented in these sections. We all know what they need, its just close to impossible to get over the political hurdles to actually do it.
    • adrianN 6y ago
      I meant that the technology needed is fairly trivial. Building something that actually helps is of course a different thing.
    • CobrastanJorji 6y ago
      There's plenty to invent even there, even in the theoretical mathematical areas! There are all sorts of interesting ideas around provably correct elections implemented via things like zero knowledge proofs or calculations from various sorts of private keys. Can I give you some sort of receipt when you vote that can't be used to figure out who you voted for but can be used to determine that your vote was tallied correctly? Quite possibly!
    • didericis 6y ago
      Clearly there’s at least one major discovery waiting for someone: how to jump those hurdles
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
• sdffdsfdsfsddsf 6y ago
  What new technologies would you propose to look at?
• juststeve 6y ago
  preach
• moosey 6y ago
  I believe the next advancements not to be technological. A combination of neuroscience and cognitive psychology can alter the human fabric of society in various directions. For an example of this, we can look at media produced in the United States and look at it as a cognitive psychology experiment that attempts to foment rage, which short circuits not just logical thought, but also the ability to feel compassion for others (emotions are powerful and deep in our psychology - compassion and empathy is a highly advanced mental activity, involving complicated parts of the prefrontal cortex). This is one of the reasons that I think advertising and news media that takes advantage of high arousal emotions should be immediately outlawed as psychological experimentation, and that education should teach people how emotions can be used against them, and how to manage them effectively. The first lesson of this teaching would be that all decisions, even economic ones (and ESPECIALLY economic ones) are made emotionally.