15 ms·

Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

• axegon_ 6y ago
  A real popular one would be QR codes. They were initially created to track manufacturing processes in the automotive industry. And you know how it is these days...
  • deanebarker 6y ago
    I feel like QR codes failed as a general UI tool. I get annoyed whenever I have to deal with one. They wee HUGE about 10 years ago. Now, not so much.
    • jclem 6y ago
      I don’t know about other places, but they’re getting a lot of use in NYC right now as a method for viewing restaurant menus for outdoor dining.
      • carlmr 6y ago
        Same in Germany. Also for payment with WeChat in China.
        • akritrime 6y ago
          It is big for payments in India too.
      • nwsm 6y ago
        They also inspired similar usage for looking up a profile/resource in Snapchat, Spotify, Venmo, etc.
      • social_quotient 6y ago
        Here (Austin) it’s used in movie theaters that had seat food ordering and I gotta say thee execution is flawless now that the camera has a built in QR. I think if QR could start over again and have support from the camera without the user needing to figure an app to use/get etc. things might have been different.
      • frogpelt 6y ago
        I went to a restaurant the other day and it had one of those Coke Freestyle soda machines. There was a QR code on the screen which I scanned with my phone. This opened a website with drink choices. I put my cup under the dispenser and pushed the Barq's Root Beer button on the website on my phone which dispensed the drink from the machine.
    • 3np 6y ago
      In Paris, most restaurants I visited recently have now done away with paper menus due to COVID and instead have QR codes on each table for the menus. Also Japan, being one of the earliest adopters, is still big on QR codes. And of course anything involving mobile and cryptocurrency transactions. And mobile payments in most of South and South East Asia.
    • mcintyre1994 6y ago
      I find them pretty easy to deal with now, they used to be annoying when you needed a specific app to scan them though.
    • fakedang 6y ago
      I love QR codes, mostly because they are in-app now, and not restricted to one app or one company. The convenience is too good.
    • nacs 6y ago
      Apple is coming out with it's own version soon that should be popular (at least with iOS people): https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/18/ios-14-leak-apple-qr-codes/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/18/ios-14-leak-apple-qr-co...
    • psychanarch 6y ago
      I agreed with this take until 2020 and subsequent shutdowns of varying levels occurred in my U.S. state (Oregon) due to Covid-19. There are several eateries in my city utilizing them to great effect for menus and ordering as they have pivoted to outdoor and no-touch dining. And now that I have finally embraced them on this level, I notice and use them more: flyers around town, links to video tutorials on products I have purchased, local printed media, etc.
    • vekker 6y ago
      Really? I think they are quite a success, especially for making payments easy, for example
    • cik 6y ago
      That depends on where you are. Here every billboard and its cousin have a QR code. So does the beer at the local gas station.
    • chansiky 6y ago
      How so? They are effectively a `<link/>` IRL. I would say the UX is pretty good. I don't know how much easier it can get than pulling out your camera then taking a picture using the camera app.
    • parliament32 6y ago
      Their use has exploded since Covid in dense cities: I regularly have to use them to fill out pre-screening forms for facilities ("do you have symptoms X or have been in contact..."), see restaurant menus, pay bills (receipt at a restaurant has a QR code printed on the bottom, link to an online checkout on your phone, so you don't have to handle the POS machine), etc.
  • mabbo 6y ago
    My wife said to me yesterday "How do I use a QR Code?". Keep in mind, she's a civil engineer and one of the smartest people I know. I said "In what context?" because really, I didn't know either. "I have to scan this QR code if I go to my office. It's apparently posted at the door, and will let them know I've been there, for contact tracing." After a lot of playing around, we finally found out her phone's camera could automatically read QR codes. When we did, the QR code in question was a URL to a website with a form, requiring her to enter all her information. Not a fan of QR codes.
    • frogpelt 6y ago
      It sounds like you aren't a fan of the way this QR code was used. I went to a restaurant the other day and it had one of those Coke Freestyle soda machines. There was a QR code on the screen which I scanned with my phone. This opened a website with drink choices. I put my cup under the dispenser and pushed the Barq's Root Beer button on the website on my phone which dispensed the drink from the machine. I was impressed.
      • jevgeni 6y ago
        Wouldn’t pressing a button on a machine be easier?
        • gingerlime 6y ago
          Normally I would completely agree, but perhaps in covid times it can prevent people from leaving germs on the buttons??
          • jevgeni 6y ago
            You’re right.
        • LexGray 6y ago
          It seems the perfect COVID-19 option. Completely touchless and fast. I was playing with a DMV kiosk and it took about half a second to recognize a key press.
  • otachack 6y ago
    QR codes are amazing and yet untapped, in my opinion. They're like barcodes but: - amount of data can vary from small to large - error correction They don't have to just hold URLs and can contain raw information that custom programs can read. I love their use in it for virtual currencies as public/private addresses b/c it simplifies them for users. Venmo also picked it up not too long ago to easily pay/request to people you may not have friended which is useful for street vendors. Someone posted an example here about contact tracing and how it just leads to a web form to fill details in. Ideally, if we had our shit together, there can be some standard contact tracing format for QR and use programs to scan the data in to auto fill and submit your details to.
  • wenc 6y ago
    I really like Apple's implementation of an animated secure QR code [1] for migrating data from one device to another. It looks like undulating point cloud, and it has no formal name (but is described in 2 Apple patents as an "invisible optical label") [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/301563/what-is-the-technology-used-in-ios-11-settings-migration-moving-blue-dots-par https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/301563/what-is-the...
• nojito 6y ago
  Hospitality and Healthcare Some of the "top" hospitals in the US are downright miserable to go to as a patient.
• nicbou 6y ago
  Kanban comes from the automotive industry, and works really well in the tech industry. The Toyota Production System is a brilliant set of principles and practices that fit well in most industries. Toyota sent engineers to optimize street kitchens some years ago. ISO 9001 was implemented in manufacturing, and is quite popular in many circles of hell.
  • calpaterson 6y ago
    When I researched this I found that automotive Kanban bore absolutely no relationship to the computing industry's Kanban. Shigeo Shingo's book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0915299178/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0915299178/) is particularly emphatic that Kanban was a was for repeatable industrial processes and not, for example, for knowledge work. Automotive Kanban is not a "Todo"/"doing"/"done" board, by his account anyway. The tickets sat on individual work items and moved around the factory. It was about limiting the number of unfinished work items (which take up space and can be a sign that something is out of control).
    • js8 6y ago
      IMHO Kanban in the computing industry is an analogue of typical task scheduling algorithm on the CPU. Instead of planning the work ahead, you have a work queue and you work each item from it until either the work itself becomes blocked, or (if you're timeboxing/preempting) a fixed period of time expires. But more generally to the poster's question - like the example above, I think there is a lot in the project management space that was already solved by computer scientists. :-)
    • webmaven 6y ago
      > It was about limiting the number of unfinished work items (which take up space and can be a sign that something is out of control). As it happens, limiting unfinished work items (aka WIP) boosts software development productivity as well. The space being taken up is mental, but is also a bad sign of things spinning out of control.
      • muzani 6y ago
• RobertoG 6y ago
  Maybe control version? From software to a lot of other information industries. Also, not an industry, but I think that some mathematicians use category theory to translate insights from one domain to other. (Trying the recipe itself here to find a meta-recipe) I think an insight itself from category theory to a more general recipe could be: don't try to move "laterally" to other industry, but go first "up" from a specific solution to a more general interpretation, and see what more you can solve "down" from there.
  • fakedang 6y ago
    I don't think this is valid. Which other field is there where you can revert changes to a previous version? Certainly not hardware manufacturing.
    • antoinealb 6y ago
      Most domains where you produce knowledge as your main output would work. Version control is integrated in Office for example.
    • jskdvsksnb 6y ago
      Versioning schematics and manuals is actually a great place for version control in manufacturing. One of my first projects out of school was a web app where our engineers could document the assembly steps for a given sub-assenbly, then string those sub-assemblies together into a manual for a specific product. The sub-assembly instructions would be revision controlled, and products would be revision controlled. The model was conceptually similar to git submodules.
    • kroltan 6y ago
      I don't recall exactly, but there was some legal authority (I think it was a U.S. state?) That uses Git for versioning laws, using pull requests as a way of usefully visualizing changes.
• m463 6y ago
  I wonder about that stuff too and sometimes I think some problems are really like: https://xkcd.com/530/ https://xkcd.com/530/ I suspect a big one is "regular" engineering vs software engineering. Regular engineering has schedules and (apart from the apple campus) can put up a building in a predictable amount of time. Also testing and maintenance and more.
  • Zigurd 6y ago
    Software creation has the characteristic that if you are doing the same thing over and over you are doing it wrong. Construction and manufacturing are much about doing the same thing the same way every time. This is why a lot of techniques do not translate well to/from software and other disciplines.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      And considering nearly every construction process is behind time and over budget, the premise itself is flawed.
    • danielovichdk 6y ago
      I would argue that 90% of all software share the same premise.
• tsjq 6y ago
  Space & rocket science research needed some speciality materials research, and led to heart valves replacement materials.
• zupatol 6y ago
  The black-scholes model for pricing options had a big impact on the financial industry, and the big breakthrough for solving the equation was to realize it could be turned into the heat equation that already had a solution. If I remember well, the insight came to Robert Merton, an economist who had also studied engineering mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model
  • calpaterson 6y ago
    "Big impact" is understating it. It's caused at least one financial crisis when Scholes and Merton's hedge fund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management) went boom in the late nineties. Since then the assumptions present in Black-Scholes and similar pricing models have caused considerable chaos elsewhere in finance. One of those things that perhaps it would have been better that they had not invented. Professionally it was great for the inventors though: they won the Nobel Prize at the time.
    • dkural 6y ago
      The Ito calculus being applicable for solving Black-Scholes might be a better example for the original question :) I am not sure it's better if that was not invented - the question of option pricing doesn't go away, it's a fundamental need for real businesses producing commodities that need to hedge real risk around the weather, or selling into cyclical industries etc. LTCM (& it's failure) has as much to do with getting so big as to present a systemic risk to the entire financial sector, and over-leverage. No matter what formula they use to price their options, those two factors make for a dangerous combination. There is a perverse incentive to become "too big to fail", because if you truly reach that, the gains stay private whereas the losses are inevitably socialized to prevent taking down the whole system.
    • jevgeni 6y ago
      Financial crises are what financial model assumptions become when they grow up.
    • 6y ago
• faizshah 6y ago
  If you look in the field of network analysis there’s several camps of researchers, namely: physicists, sociologists, mathematicians and computer scientists all solving the same problems but from different domains with different terms and drawing from different prior work. They all interestingly converge in the sub field of community detection or graph clustering.
  • azepoi 6y ago
    for me it was learning differential equations. From mechanical systems, chemical reactions, electrical circuits, ecological systems, control systems, epidemiology...
• azepoi 6y ago
  Have you seen the 1978 series "Connections" from James Burke? History of science and technology is full of these.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  Natural selection led to evolutionary optimization algorithms Statistical mechanics to boltzmann machines, ising model to perceptron
  • saeranv 6y ago
    I was thinking of two more in this vein, but I'm not actually sure about the history of their derivation, so I'll pose them as questions: Was simulated annealing inspired by actual annealing (heating and slowly cooling metal/glass to toughen it)? Or did they just name it annealing after discovering it? What is the relationship between thermodynamic/statistical entropy and Shannon's information theory entropy (E = -p lg(p))?
    • cblconfederate 6y ago
      there are a lot of applications of physical theories in other sciences. annealing is just a descriptive name though. Shannons information entropy is a generalization of thermodynamic entropy.
      • saeranv 6y ago
        Brilliant! I've always wondered the relationship between these two.
• friendlybus 6y ago
  Where do you draw the line? Econophysics takes the natural science physics and tries to solve economic problems with it. There's also some application in the finance sector.
• rsecora 6y ago
  Duck tape: Originally came from the thought that seals on ammo boxes would cost soldiers precious time on the battlefield. Today it's used for seal and repair in everyday life.
• DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  Breath of knowledge is certainly useful. I'm sure there's a lot of redundant work across domains in universities, but here's a somewhat humorous example of someone recreating the trapezoidal method of approximating the area under a curve. They needed it in a medical context, and anyone who has done Calc 2 would tell you "that's an integral". It shows 402 citations on Google Scholar. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18129095207210817294&hl=en&as_sdt=0,16 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18129095207210817... https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscovery-of-calculus-in-1994-what-should-have-happened-to-that-paper https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...
  • jryb 6y ago
    It's worth noting that some academics cite that paper as a joke, I'm not sure how many genuine citations there are.
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  Frances Arnold, 2018 Nobel laureate for Chemistry, pioneered the use of directed evolution, which she conceived as an iterative lab process, to create enzymes with improved and/or novel functions, e.g. bacteria that produce the biofuel isobutanol. FRANCES H. ARNOLD Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/frances-arnold https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/fr... Exploring protein fitness landscapes by directed evolution https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997618/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997618/
  • vikramkr 6y ago
    That's not really an unrelated field - thats just bioengineering and synthetic biology. Thats one of the more chemistry related chemistry novels in recent times actually, since the lack of a biology nobel has led to so many biology breakthroughs getting shoved into chemistry instead that its become a bit of a running joke. This year is no exception with CRISPR being looped under chemistry even though it woupd make the most sense under a separate new bio nobel.
    • wombatmobile 6y ago
      Yes, it is bioengineering. What Arnold brought to synthetic biology is an engineer's approach to iterative process. Rather than designing a new enzyme at the molecular level, Arnold constructed a process that would yield the design for her.
      • vikramkr 6y ago
        Yes - but that's not interdisciplinary in the way you think it is. Designing a new enzyme at the molecular level is basically still not a thing that humans have figured out how to do. Her approach was revolutionary in the same way that the invention of a telescope was revolutionary to physics. You could try and say it was some grand synthesis of optics and astronomy, but that's a hell of a stretch, they're both physics. Evolution is just biology, and directed evolution is bioengineering. If you wanted to claim that Arnold invented modern bioengineering and laid the framework for synthetic biology, I could buy that. Just like the telescope laid the foundation for modern astronomy. But saying it's a perspective from an unrelated field doesn't make sense when it's one of the foundational defining cornerstones of this field.
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  Paul Bach-y-Rita used a grid of electrodes to stimulate the tongue, enabling a form of vision in blind people. Seeing With The Tongue – Paul Bach-Y-Rita – http://antonyhall.net/blog/seeing-with-the-tongue-paul-bach-y-rita/ http://antonyhall.net/blog/seeing-with-the-tongue-paul-bach-...
• darksaints 6y ago
  It's a good question. It can be quite infuriating to watch people build inferior monstrosities to solve problems that have well known and efficient solutions. I see examples everywhere of engineers trying to design custom algorithms for problems that can be trivially solved using linear programming or constraint programming. Not that custom algorithms can't beat generalized solvers...just that you aren't likely going by to be the person that designs it when you're a mid level engineer on a time budget and haven't researched any related work. Beyond that, I think cross breeding some insights from other fields could bring some efficiency improvements to problems that are squarely in the domain of computer science. OS scheduling, for example, has plenty of related people/materials scheduling parallels in the Operations Research field, and possibly some in Auction Theory as well. Same for load balancing (e.g. The Min Cost Multi-Commodity Flow problem).
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  Ada Lovelace developed general purpose computer programming from her understanding of the encoding method implemented by the Jacquard loom. https://www.irenebrination.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/2016/03/ada-lovelace.html https://www.irenebrination.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/201...
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  Hedy Lamarr developed frequency-hopping, the forerunner of spread-spectrum communications used in WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth, to control torpedoes in a way that avoided jamming by the Nazis, from her understanding of George Antheil's symphonic use of pianola rolls to synchronise multiple player pianos. https://www.wired.com/2011/08/0811hedy-lamar-george-antheil-torpedo-patent/ https://www.wired.com/2011/08/0811hedy-lamar-george-antheil-...
• aaron695 6y ago
  I'm not sure your question is correct given your premise. Is the breadth of knowledge related to cross domain discoveries? I would say bringing narrow skills like management or IT or marketing to a company is what you want to aim for. I'm not convinced cross domain issues exist at rates higher than internal domain issues. I think they are orders of magnitude lower.
• yboris 6y ago
  A Hospital Races To Learn Lessons Of Ferrari Pit Stop https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116346916169622261 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116346916169622261 Knowledge from pit stop procedures improves speed and decreases accidents in hospital settings.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Well, one classic is "Tai's formula is the Trapezoidal rule" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7677819/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7677819/
• cbanek 6y ago
  Medical MRIs came out of the technology for radio astronomy: https://armaghplanet.com/astronomy-magnetic-resonance-imaging.html https://armaghplanet.com/astronomy-magnetic-resonance-imagin...
• donquichotte 6y ago
  A bit late to the party, but: Statistics and Robotics, Statistics and Digital Communications. Many filters in Robotics (Kalman Filter, Particle Filter) and many concepts in digital communication (Modulation Schemes, Filters, ...) are firmly rooted in statistics and require a decent applied understanding of the area.
• teleforce 6y ago
  Contrary to popular belief problems solved in unrelated domains are very common in invention and innovation but people just hate to admit them, hopefully in the near future someone can honestly write a book on it. One of the most prolific scientists Albert Einstein had his single most productive year while working as a patent officer (Annus Mirabilis). I strongly suspect that he learned quite a lot from many patent applications, journal papers and books that he was required to read during his daily job, thus getting excellent and novel ideas from seemingly unrelated patents and discoveries. The classic modern example (sorry for the oxymoron terminology) is how a patented signal processing technique of radio astronomy research by CSIRO solved the wireless multi-path propagation problem that enabled wireless revolution from WiFi to 4G/5G. CSIRO's patent leads to the wireless OFDM invention that allows for much higher communication bandwidth especially on wireless environment where unmitigated multi-path interference is a deal breaker. But of course wireless people just hate to admit it [1]. [1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-government-invented-wifi-and-sued-its-way-to-430-million/2/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-g...
  • DarthGhandi 6y ago
    There's a fair bit of disagreement about how much CSIRO actually achieved rather than simply being the first to patent. The Wikipedia page is probably a better source than ars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO#802.11_patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO#802.11_patent
• linguistbreaker 6y ago
  Graph theory - organic chemistry
• tshoaib 6y ago
  Not completely unrelated fields but the Chen-Simons theory is a quantum field theory named after mathematicians Shiing-Shen Chern and James Simons(founder of Renaissance Technologies) who introduced the Chern-Simons form.
• tsumnia 6y ago
  Zachary's Karate Club [1] was one of the early social networking approaches for identifying an eventual split in organization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary%27s_karate_club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary%27s_karate_club
• aronpye 6y ago
  Second order differential equations, they seem to pop up everywhere. Particularly relevant to classical mechanics. Also gives rise to the metal model of second order consequences of actions. The concept of bootstrapping. How to start something from nothing that eventually becomes self sustaining. Compound interest and exponential growth. Particularly relevant to investing as well as the personal ‘growth’ mentality. The natural exponent that was discovered from compound interest is everywhere in mathematics and physics.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• adwww 6y ago
  The approach to safety in the aviation industry is all about learning from mistakes. Whereas in Healthcare it is often more about winning an inevitable legal battle. There have been a few efforts recently to try and apply aviation safety lessons to healthcare. Interesting story on it here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02x3vwh https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02x3vwh
• webmaven 6y ago
  This may not be specific enough, but Elon Musk seems to have brought a software-engineering-like perspective to both SpaceX and Tesla, although the latter hasn't been an unqualified success in all respects, applying rapid iteration to a product and process while the process is running at scale has caused occasional blips: https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-depot-shit-used-to-1844999285 https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-de... We sometimes refer to software systems as held together with spit and baling wire, but it's never literally true. Others have noted the general influence in the opposite direction of the Toyota Production System on software engineering methodologies (most notably in that family of processes labeled "Lean"), but it is pretty clear Tesla could have stood to take a bit more direct influence from TPS on their assembly line. We haven't seen anything like that at SpaceX (despite much armchair prognostication), but then, even as they ramp up production and launches, each rocket is still somewhat a bespoke product, and no one is going to get in trouble for holding up the production schedule when a problem is noted. Each rocket is still very much a pet, rather than cattle. It remains to be seen if the pace of iteration will slack off (or start conforming to a more regular punctuated cadence) as SpaceX continues to ramp up their capacity.
• smegcicle 6y ago
  Bee waggle dance found to be analogous to a 2d projection from a 6D flag manifold, complete with explanation of how the dance changes between a figure 8 shape to a round shape at a certain indicated distance- not much of a problem solved though, perhaps bringing more questions than answers... https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/quantum-honeybees https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/quantum-honeyb...
• webmaven 6y ago
  I'm not sure if it is possible to pinpoint the specific point of crossover, but the analysis of crowd dynamics owes a lot to the study of fluid dynamics, and the counterintuitive insight that placing an obstacle like a column in front of an exit can smooth out and speed the outflow of people by adding some turbulence (preventing the jams that can crush people) is one specific example that I recall.