8 ms·

Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to

Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I was talking to my physio today (doing fine thanks for asking), and she was fed up about having to prove that a client had not paid her - manually matching payments into her bank account with appointments etc. It wasted an hour of her time or more. Now the heart of that is 5 lines of python. It could be written by anyone after a days "starting from zero" coding experience. But actually solving that in real world is a mess of just trying to access the data - it's her data and she only wants to see her bits. But the level of effort is ridiculous. Anyway my point is that solving problems like software for doctor's offices is not the point - that's just building another silo. A doctor who has (secure) access to a industry wide common open data layer can do all the work to run their office themselves. In short we are trying to solve the wrong problem - usually because proprietary code is not a profitable as proprietary data
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  > usually because proprietary code is not a[s] profitable as proprietary data Bingo. This is why Google et al. would never sell your data; they just keep it for themselves and merely sell to advertisers the ability to precisely target you (“pick a demographic down to the shampoo brand and we can target your ads to it”). But those advertisers (or anyone else) will never see a single iota of your data. It’s simply too valuable.
  - datameta 5y ago
    In a weird kafkaesque way this makes me feel better about my data.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Now when you click an ad, the advertiser knows which shampoo brand you use. Next, when you click an ad, the advertiser knows which medical problems you have (because that's where they targeted their ad at). Google has a data leak, and nobody seems to care about it.
      - datameta 5y ago
        Luckily I haven't clicked an ad in a decade!
      - mbrodersen 5y ago
        Easy. Don’t click ads.
        kyleee 5y ago
        And beyond that, block them ruthlessly without a second thought
- fma 5y ago
  Sounds like she just needs to sign up for something like Square where your customers set an appointment, order services and pay and invoice. They can even be asked to pay before hand. Square is not the only player doing service appointment payments.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    The reason that people don't do the "obvious" thing is rarely that they're ignorant or stupid. Best not to assume that you know all the relevant context.
    - fma 5y ago
      Why do you assume this is the obvious thing? Maybe you shouldn't assume till you know all the relevant context? I have a brick and mortar small business that takes appointments, have monthly recurring services and did not use Square appointments. We did everything manually to handle calendar appointments, invoice, charging for payments. Found out after a few months the time is not worth the savings and rather just get a service like Square. I thought maybe his client was the same and was trying to help. But hey maybe Square was very obvious for your brick and mortar service based business and I'm one of the few "ignorant and stupid one".
  - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    That's very much not my point. What you are describing is the square development team taking their representation of a client, an invoice, a payment event and so on, and then they guess a feature like match up invoices and develop it and write a gui and hide it somewhere and... But we (society) should have a standard representation of a calendar event, standard access to bank accounts and so on so that all she needs to go is write five lines Once the data is free we won't need proprietary co e
bumby 5y ago
Man, I sure am glad Curtis and the Wright brothers didn't take this stance after Lord Kelvin claimed "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" before they proved him wrong less than 20 years later. Or NASA when Lee Deforest claimed flight to the moon was impossible "regardless of all future advances." Or when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Etc. etc.
- hirvi74 5y ago
  > when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Not to be pedantic, but was Einstein incorrect at that time/in the future? Were there any actual indications that nuclear energy would be obtainable at that time? Einstein didn't seem to say, "Obtaining nuclear energy is absolutely impossible, and can never be achieved." All he said was that there is not the _slightest indication_. I am sorry if this comes off as being semantical, but I just want to make sure I am not misinterpreting you or what Einstein said. As for the other points, yes. Those were great examples.
  - bumby 5y ago
    I guess it's hard to tell without over-parsing his words, but you bring up an important distinction. It may be fair to read it as a scientist essentially saying "we have no evidence it's possible." But as I read it, the addition of "ever" came across as saying he thought it was an unsolvable problem rather than one that had yet to come upon a solution.
  - gpsx 5y ago
    I assume this statement was made not long after Einstein discovered the equivalence between mass and energy, so it's understandable it may not have been obvious at the time that we could generate power that way.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Ok, so libquote says this was stated at 1934, what is after the discovery of Uranium fission and that it emits neutrons that could start further fissions. The quote is of course completely out of context, and looks a lot like something one throws at annoyingly overeagle people. Also, I imagine the context for saying it only existed because nuclear fission seemed perfectly plausible and just over the horizon. It was technically correct, nobody could imagine a Manhattan Project at that time, and it wasn't obvious that it was even possible, but there was a clear possibility.
bob1029 5y ago
We're doing this kind of thing in banking right now. Would like to attack medical and insurance next.
pasabagi 5y ago
I think with lawyers, the problem is basically GUIs. Because most computer users, even very high-skilled computer users like lawyers, are used to consuming software in the form of GUIs, you tend to get these kind of all-encompassing WYSIWYG programs like Word, with mysterious internals, and an endless labyrinth of useful tricks that lawyers tend to know, which are in one way amazing, but in another way essentially limited by the imaginations of the programmers, because they're monolithic and basically inflexible. This is basically an education / culture problem. I'm sure in two hundred years, people will recognize that 'sort' or 'uniq' is really elemental functionality like a saw or a hammer, and baking it all into one giant saw-hammer-sanding machine that's really only good for making tables, and occasionally eats your cat, is just not the way to go. Until that point, I don't think that some plucky new startup is going to magic away all the problems. I mean, obviously there are some crazy low-hanging fruit out there, but the fundamental issue starts with how people are using computers in the first place.
Existenceblinks 5y ago
And many times, better solution is not to use software at all. People don't need to leave Excel or Wordpress at all. I don't even think using paper is a problem. They have pros and cons. "solution looking for problems" is actually accurate, ironically.
smt88 5y ago
Most people in software seem to create interesting technology that sells ads, so your sarcastic examples sound a lot better to me. I'm currently building a company that is replacing Excel at some of the biggest commercial real estate firms, which is "impossible" by your standards.
- ie21 5y ago
  Honestly curious, why is it better for them then Excel? What is the value proposition? Thanks.
nickjj 5y ago
Indeed, there's lots of great problems to solve in this space. If anyone is interested I recorded a 90 minute podcast with a lead developer + ops engineer who created a custom electronic medical record system for an Ophthalmology clinic (eye care). It's at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/99-a-custom-electronic-medical-record-system-for-an-ophthalmology-clinic https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/99-a-custom-electron... We talked all about using Rails to help consolidate 9 separate 3rd party solutions into a monolithic server rendered Rails app that the clinic uses internally to manage all of their patients. We also chatted about transitioning from Elastic Beanstalk to self managed EC2 instances to using Kubernetes with EKS.
endisneigh 5y ago
What a defeatist mindset lol
reureu 5y ago
> Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Please please please go into these areas with humility. Having worked for health tech companies in SF for a decade, I've seen so many people come from Google/Facebook/Mozilla/Ticketmaster/eBay to healthcare in order to "disrupt" and "fix" it. Their disruption or fixes are many times illegal, impractical, vaporware, or completely ignore industry standards and so can't speak the same language as all the other tools in the ecosystem. It generally doesn't end well if you don't deeply partner with stakeholders and domain experts.
- bloodyplonker22 5y ago
  I heard some woman with a fake deep voice is on trial now.
  - reureu 5y ago
    I haven't been following that situation, I'm too focused on getting my insurance company to pay to sequence my poop.
    - cutemonster 5y ago
      > insurance company to pay to sequence my poop. What's that about?
      - reureu 5y ago
        uBiome— you’d send fecal samples to them and they’d sequence and tell you what bacteria you have. They claimed to have clinical value and started billing insurance, before eventually being raided and shut down for something along the lines of insurance fraud.
        cutemonster 5y ago
        Aha, such odd behavior by them
  - 5y ago
andrepd 5y ago
The problem is that advertising or finance companies can outbid public classrooms and students 10000:1. It's the sad reality: in the current system finding ever more sophisticated ways to get people to buy more crap is very profitable, helping underprivileged students succeed is not.
- q-big 5y ago
  If you seriously want to target classrooms (selling to the education sector is hard), target elite schools rather than poor public classrooms with underprivileged students. This way, at least potentially money could be made.
treeman79 5y ago
Hippa compliance... Development is a nightmare
- vangelis 5y ago
  Thankfully we only have to worry about HIPAA.
- Spivak 5y ago
  HIPAA isn’t really that bad. If you’re following normal good security practices at your company you’re probably at the point where becoming complaint is more about implementing a bunch of small mostly meaningless changes to your infra and documenting stuff than some fundamental change to your architecture.
ummwhat 5y ago
Those are the types of problems which I describe as "solving the problem is half the problem". Anyone can easily write the fixes to these sorts of problems. They don't because the real complication isn't the surface level obstacle.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
The parent comment does not actually define any specific problem. "Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? "Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech holes!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? "Work on software to revolutionise public classrooms!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? Let us know when can provide even a single answer to any of these questions. As other commenters point out, answering them means actually talking the people who will be using the software, or working in their shoes in these industries, before anyone starts programming anything.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  Those are a set of questions with many answers - each answer might be a totally different business. If there was only one answer then all the software would be written already.
xwdv 5y ago
Why? Because I don’t give a damn I’m just here to write code and make piles of money and interesting tech makes it less dull.
philipswood 5y ago
Interesting definition of "interesting" you're using there. I don't think he was necessarily saying that you should sacrifice yourself to your own idea of the pointless "greater noble good". Build a stamp database, an app to record baseball cards, automatically conjugate latin verbs, make a recipe database that can give you a list of what can be made with a given set of ingredients, make a 3d anatomical viewer based on the BodyPart3D database, make a catalog of open source projects for a given combination of JavaScript technologies, make a periodic table that shows the 3D orbital structure of the atom involved, calculate and visualise knitting patterns, simulate an H-Bomb or global thermonuclear war... Do it in Golang, write it in Rust or Haskell or PHP, or with a shell script if you have to... Run it on baremetal, on a VM, in a unikernel, deploy it in a k8s cluster, or nomad, or docker-compose or host it on a microcontroller if that fits... But for a change focus on the problem and not the tools.
- xfer 5y ago
  Tools are also problems for some people, they don't exist magically. If nobody cared about tools we would be writing machine code.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

I was talking to my physio today (doing fine thanks for asking), and she was fed up about having to prove that a client had not paid her - manually matching payments into her bank account with appointments etc. It wasted an hour of her time or more. Now the heart of that is 5 lines of python. It could be written by anyone after a days "starting from zero" coding experience. But actually solving that in real world is a mess of just trying to access the data - it's her data and she only wants to see her bits. But the level of effort is ridiculous. Anyway my point is that solving problems like software for doctor's offices is not the point - that's just building another silo. A doctor who has (secure) access to a industry wide common open data layer can do all the work to run their office themselves. In short we are trying to solve the wrong problem - usually because proprietary code is not a profitable as proprietary data

MontyCarloHall 5y ago
> usually because proprietary code is not a[s] profitable as proprietary data Bingo. This is why Google et al. would never sell your data; they just keep it for themselves and merely sell to advertisers the ability to precisely target you (“pick a demographic down to the shampoo brand and we can target your ads to it”). But those advertisers (or anyone else) will never see a single iota of your data. It’s simply too valuable.
- datameta 5y ago
  In a weird kafkaesque way this makes me feel better about my data.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Now when you click an ad, the advertiser knows which shampoo brand you use. Next, when you click an ad, the advertiser knows which medical problems you have (because that's where they targeted their ad at). Google has a data leak, and nobody seems to care about it.
    - datameta 5y ago
      Luckily I haven't clicked an ad in a decade!
    - mbrodersen 5y ago
      Easy. Don’t click ads.
      - kyleee 5y ago
        And beyond that, block them ruthlessly without a second thought
fma 5y ago
Sounds like she just needs to sign up for something like Square where your customers set an appointment, order services and pay and invoice. They can even be asked to pay before hand. Square is not the only player doing service appointment payments.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  The reason that people don't do the "obvious" thing is rarely that they're ignorant or stupid. Best not to assume that you know all the relevant context.
  - fma 5y ago
    Why do you assume this is the obvious thing? Maybe you shouldn't assume till you know all the relevant context? I have a brick and mortar small business that takes appointments, have monthly recurring services and did not use Square appointments. We did everything manually to handle calendar appointments, invoice, charging for payments. Found out after a few months the time is not worth the savings and rather just get a service like Square. I thought maybe his client was the same and was trying to help. But hey maybe Square was very obvious for your brick and mortar service based business and I'm one of the few "ignorant and stupid one".
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  That's very much not my point. What you are describing is the square development team taking their representation of a client, an invoice, a payment event and so on, and then they guess a feature like match up invoices and develop it and write a gui and hide it somewhere and... But we (society) should have a standard representation of a calendar event, standard access to bank accounts and so on so that all she needs to go is write five lines Once the data is free we won't need proprietary co e

bumby 5y ago

Man, I sure am glad Curtis and the Wright brothers didn't take this stance after Lord Kelvin claimed "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" before they proved him wrong less than 20 years later. Or NASA when Lee Deforest claimed flight to the moon was impossible "regardless of all future advances." Or when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Etc. etc.

hirvi74 5y ago
> when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Not to be pedantic, but was Einstein incorrect at that time/in the future? Were there any actual indications that nuclear energy would be obtainable at that time? Einstein didn't seem to say, "Obtaining nuclear energy is absolutely impossible, and can never be achieved." All he said was that there is not the _slightest indication_. I am sorry if this comes off as being semantical, but I just want to make sure I am not misinterpreting you or what Einstein said. As for the other points, yes. Those were great examples.
- bumby 5y ago
  I guess it's hard to tell without over-parsing his words, but you bring up an important distinction. It may be fair to read it as a scientist essentially saying "we have no evidence it's possible." But as I read it, the addition of "ever" came across as saying he thought it was an unsolvable problem rather than one that had yet to come upon a solution.
- gpsx 5y ago
  I assume this statement was made not long after Einstein discovered the equivalence between mass and energy, so it's understandable it may not have been obvious at the time that we could generate power that way.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Ok, so libquote says this was stated at 1934, what is after the discovery of Uranium fission and that it emits neutrons that could start further fissions. The quote is of course completely out of context, and looks a lot like something one throws at annoyingly overeagle people. Also, I imagine the context for saying it only existed because nuclear fission seemed perfectly plausible and just over the horizon. It was technically correct, nobody could imagine a Manhattan Project at that time, and it wasn't obvious that it was even possible, but there was a clear possibility.

bob1029 5y ago

We're doing this kind of thing in banking right now. Would like to attack medical and insurance next.

pasabagi 5y ago

I think with lawyers, the problem is basically GUIs. Because most computer users, even very high-skilled computer users like lawyers, are used to consuming software in the form of GUIs, you tend to get these kind of all-encompassing WYSIWYG programs like Word, with mysterious internals, and an endless labyrinth of useful tricks that lawyers tend to know, which are in one way amazing, but in another way essentially limited by the imaginations of the programmers, because they're monolithic and basically inflexible. This is basically an education / culture problem. I'm sure in two hundred years, people will recognize that 'sort' or 'uniq' is really elemental functionality like a saw or a hammer, and baking it all into one giant saw-hammer-sanding machine that's really only good for making tables, and occasionally eats your cat, is just not the way to go. Until that point, I don't think that some plucky new startup is going to magic away all the problems. I mean, obviously there are some crazy low-hanging fruit out there, but the fundamental issue starts with how people are using computers in the first place.

Existenceblinks 5y ago

And many times, better solution is not to use software at all. People don't need to leave Excel or Wordpress at all. I don't even think using paper is a problem. They have pros and cons. "solution looking for problems" is actually accurate, ironically.

smt88 5y ago

Most people in software seem to create interesting technology that sells ads, so your sarcastic examples sound a lot better to me. I'm currently building a company that is replacing Excel at some of the biggest commercial real estate firms, which is "impossible" by your standards.

ie21 5y ago
Honestly curious, why is it better for them then Excel? What is the value proposition? Thanks.

nickjj 5y ago

Indeed, there's lots of great problems to solve in this space. If anyone is interested I recorded a 90 minute podcast with a lead developer + ops engineer who created a custom electronic medical record system for an Ophthalmology clinic (eye care). It's at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/99-a-custom-electronic-medical-record-system-for-an-ophthalmology-clinic https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/99-a-custom-electron... We talked all about using Rails to help consolidate 9 separate 3rd party solutions into a monolithic server rendered Rails app that the clinic uses internally to manage all of their patients. We also chatted about transitioning from Elastic Beanstalk to self managed EC2 instances to using Kubernetes with EKS.

endisneigh 5y ago

What a defeatist mindset lol

reureu 5y ago

> Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Please please please go into these areas with humility. Having worked for health tech companies in SF for a decade, I've seen so many people come from Google/Facebook/Mozilla/Ticketmaster/eBay to healthcare in order to "disrupt" and "fix" it. Their disruption or fixes are many times illegal, impractical, vaporware, or completely ignore industry standards and so can't speak the same language as all the other tools in the ecosystem. It generally doesn't end well if you don't deeply partner with stakeholders and domain experts.

bloodyplonker22 5y ago
I heard some woman with a fake deep voice is on trial now.
- reureu 5y ago
  I haven't been following that situation, I'm too focused on getting my insurance company to pay to sequence my poop.
  - cutemonster 5y ago
    > insurance company to pay to sequence my poop. What's that about?
    - reureu 5y ago
      uBiome— you’d send fecal samples to them and they’d sequence and tell you what bacteria you have. They claimed to have clinical value and started billing insurance, before eventually being raided and shut down for something along the lines of insurance fraud.
      - cutemonster 5y ago
        Aha, such odd behavior by them
- 5y ago

andrepd 5y ago

The problem is that advertising or finance companies can outbid public classrooms and students 10000:1. It's the sad reality: in the current system finding ever more sophisticated ways to get people to buy more crap is very profitable, helping underprivileged students succeed is not.

q-big 5y ago
If you seriously want to target classrooms (selling to the education sector is hard), target elite schools rather than poor public classrooms with underprivileged students. This way, at least potentially money could be made.

treeman79 5y ago

Hippa compliance... Development is a nightmare

vangelis 5y ago
Thankfully we only have to worry about HIPAA.
Spivak 5y ago
HIPAA isn’t really that bad. If you’re following normal good security practices at your company you’re probably at the point where becoming complaint is more about implementing a bunch of small mostly meaningless changes to your infra and documenting stuff than some fundamental change to your architecture.

ummwhat 5y ago

Those are the types of problems which I describe as "solving the problem is half the problem". Anyone can easily write the fixes to these sorts of problems. They don't because the real complication isn't the surface level obstacle.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

The parent comment does not actually define any specific problem. "Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? "Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech holes!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? "Work on software to revolutionise public classrooms!" A problem that needs to be solved is _____________? Let us know when can provide even a single answer to any of these questions. As other commenters point out, answering them means actually talking the people who will be using the software, or working in their shoes in these industries, before anyone starts programming anything.

LegitShady 5y ago
Those are a set of questions with many answers - each answer might be a totally different business. If there was only one answer then all the software would be written already.

xwdv 5y ago

Why? Because I don’t give a damn I’m just here to write code and make piles of money and interesting tech makes it less dull.

philipswood 5y ago

Interesting definition of "interesting" you're using there. I don't think he was necessarily saying that you should sacrifice yourself to your own idea of the pointless "greater noble good". Build a stamp database, an app to record baseball cards, automatically conjugate latin verbs, make a recipe database that can give you a list of what can be made with a given set of ingredients, make a 3d anatomical viewer based on the BodyPart3D database, make a catalog of open source projects for a given combination of JavaScript technologies, make a periodic table that shows the 3D orbital structure of the atom involved, calculate and visualise knitting patterns, simulate an H-Bomb or global thermonuclear war... Do it in Golang, write it in Rust or Haskell or PHP, or with a shell script if you have to... Run it on baremetal, on a VM, in a unikernel, deploy it in a k8s cluster, or nomad, or docker-compose or host it on a microcontroller if that fits... But for a change focus on the problem and not the tools.

xfer 5y ago
Tools are also problems for some people, they don't exist magically. If nobody cared about tools we would be writing machine code.