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

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

#101

Post by nickpsecurity »

petermonsson wrote: post #65

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

Look at Caisson HDL. You think that's in right ballpark?

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.232....

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

#102

Post by fright »

RivieraKid wrote: post #82

No one mentioning healthcare? I think there's a massive opportunity to lower costs and improve user experience in every area. I wish Apple used their pile of cash to invest in a big vertically integrated healthcare service - a chain of hospitals, in-house-developed software throughout, improve user experience, integration and tech on every level. Basically healthcare rethought from the ground-up with Silicon Valley c…

The healthcare industry almost always looks better from an outside perspective, but once you're on the inside you become just another part of the problem.

Lowering costs is a good example, but once you're inside you realize that the entire industry has been built from the ground up to create high profits and gains, and trying to change that leads to a quick exit. So once most people are on the inside they just go along with it and play ball because it's the safe and profitable thing to do.

Everyone wants change with healthcare, but short of the industry collapsing and being re-built, I don't see way that it's going to happen, though I'd love to be wrong.

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

#103

Post by aabajian »

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

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

#104

Post by personjerry »

geofft wrote: post #95
personjerry wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you understood the site? You don't give them money or anything.

I am pretty sure you are misunderstanding the comment. The comment is not "By signing up for Quantopian, you pay a membership fee to Quantopian, which is run by large trading firms." The comment is "Large trading firms make money by being the counterparty of day traders making mistakes." When you mess up - which isn't just losing USD, it is underperforming the market's usually-positive return - there is someone out t…

Okay... but on Quantopian you just write algorithms, you don't have to invest your own money. You don't mess up and lose USD, you don't pay a membership fee.

The site's owners decide to invest with the best algorithms on the site, and you get a portion of the returns if they choose yours.

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

#105

Post by dragonwriter »

geofft wrote: post #95
personjerry wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you understood the site? You don't give them money or anything.

I am pretty sure you are misunderstanding the comment. The comment is not "By signing up for Quantopian, you pay a membership fee to Quantopian, which is run by large trading firms." The comment is "Large trading firms make money by being the counterparty of day traders making mistakes." When you mess up - which isn't just losing USD, it is underperforming the market's usually-positive return - there is someone out t…

> When you mess up - which isn't just losing USD, it is underperforming the market's usually-positive return - there is someone out there on the other side of the trade who is buying what you sold and selling what you bought. When you underperform the market, they overperform the market by exactly as much.

If I trade profitably but making below market returns, the notional someone else who is taking the opposite sides of my trades is not outperforming the market by as much as I am underperforming, they are losing money and, thereby, underperforming even worse than I am.

There's obviously people in the market overperforming, but it's not someone taking the opposite of my positions that is doing it.

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

#106

Post by RivieraKid »

fright wrote: post #102
RivieraKid wrote: post #82

No one mentioning healthcare? I think there's a massive opportunity to lower costs and improve user experience in every area. I wish Apple used their pile of cash to invest in a big vertically integrated healthcare service - a chain of hospitals, in-house-developed software throughout, improve user experience, integration and tech on every level. Basically healthcare rethought from the ground-up with Silicon Valley c…

The healthcare industry almost always looks better from an outside perspective, but once you're on the inside you become just another part of the problem. Lowering costs is a good example, but once you're inside you realize that the entire industry has been built from the ground up to create high profits and gains, and trying to change that leads to a quick exit. So once most people are on the inside they just go alo…

That's why I think Apple should give it a shot. They are big enough to basically rebuild healthcare, create an integrated user-focused product including a chain of hospitals, clinics, web and mobile apps, health smartwatches, DNA sequencing, maybe even research.

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

#107

Post by omarchowdhury »

AlexAMEEE wrote: post #83

1. Sports betting 2. Oligopoly[0] just a few companies who deliver live results. You would need a ton of cash upfront, to hire people who would watch the games and would press buttons in order to inform you about results so you could parse them and deliver live results which eventually would become a live API. But as you can see, there are people involved in this, who watch all those games, if you can manage to autom…

Seems like something that can be crowdsourced cheaply since so many people are watching the sports shows for free anyway.

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

#108

Post by gluggymug »

notalaser wrote: post #34
throwaway2016a wrote: post #3

I may be reading between the lines too much and I apologize if I am... But every few months (weeks?) I see a post by a founder-type essentially trying to mine the Hacker News collective brains for startup ideas. It doesn't work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. The idea of a savior who comes in and solving the major problems of an industry they have never work…

> The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. Aww, yisss. Case in point, EDA and, in particular, hardware description languages and tools. Every discussion I've had with someone trying to get into this has been so cringe-worthy that I'm actively avoiding now. Every self-professed hardware hacker thinks they have the solution that's going to end all this painful Verilog kerfuffle…

>Lack of electronics knowledge is what prevents most software developers from being productive in Verilog. A "better" language won't help.

I am working in the FPGA industry. I definitely agree with you.

But possibly I am a little too close to the current industry and way we do things. There's new applications around the corner that need innovative ideas. The innocent fresh perspective could be the seed for something. I am sure if any real decent improvements were started by a SW person, the big companies like Intel would be eating it up.

It funny how people on HN were raving about Altera & Intel recently because word on the FPGA street was that Intel weren't happy with the acquisition. Xilinx has had 14nm FPGAs for a long time while Altera's are nowhere to be seen still. Everyone's expectations of a Xeon with Altera FPGA on the same die are years away I am betting.

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

#109

Post by mxvzr »

return0 wrote: post #91
tricolon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem: Gravity makes it hard to get into orbit. Solution: Rockets.

i can't imagine there 's unlimited demand for cheap rockets. it's not like everyone can send a satellite in order.

Cheap rockets will lead to cheaper satellites.

Take a look at the development of cubesats [1]. It's a new "paradigm" for LEO sats: rather than develop a massive and/or complex sat with a lifetime spanning decades, costing years & millions of dollars, you can now make a simpler (no station keeping ability other than using drag, lifetime so low that radiation hardening isn't worth it)/cheaper/lighter sat that you'll replace in a couple of years.

See also these two SpaceX applications to the FCC from 2016 & 2017 [2][3] for respectively ~4000 and ~7000 satellites. For context, there is currently about ~1000 operational satellites, with about half of these in LEO.

Finally consider the Ardusat project [4] from a couple of years ago (the premise was to send an arduino in space and let kickstarter backers run their code on it). The project was successful and allowed the founders to later raise money for a company [5] (Nanosatisfi, renamed Spire) operating a fleet of cubesats.

Basically any entity with ~100k to spend will be able to send up their own space junk. Now would be a good time to figure out how to treat the kessler syndrome.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat

2. https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/repor...

3. https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/repor...

4. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-...

5. https://spire.com/

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

#110

Post by planteen »

notalaser wrote: post #34
throwaway2016a wrote: post #3

I may be reading between the lines too much and I apologize if I am... But every few months (weeks?) I see a post by a founder-type essentially trying to mine the Hacker News collective brains for startup ideas. It doesn't work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. The idea of a savior who comes in and solving the major problems of an industry they have never work…

> The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. Aww, yisss. Case in point, EDA and, in particular, hardware description languages and tools. Every discussion I've had with someone trying to get into this has been so cringe-worthy that I'm actively avoiding now. Every self-professed hardware hacker thinks they have the solution that's going to end all this painful Verilog kerfuffle…

Agreed. I have worked with FPGAs at multiple companies, both on the logic side and on the software side interfacing with them. Verilog and VHDL are not the problem. The problems I have seen, over and over are:

1. Improper clock domain crossing

2. Improper timing constraints

I have never used ASIC quality verification tools. But to me a free tool from Xilinx/Altera like valgrind or clang sanitizer would be huge for FPGAs.

Or even just a way to "diff" two bitstreams, one that is "bad" and one that is "good" that were from the same source to see what makes the bad FPGA bad would be huge. I mean bad in the sense that some probabilistic/annealing algorithm used during FPGA synthesis on a net with an incorrect timing constraint lead to a FPGA that doesn't work as intended.

I went from logic to doing software. Can't say I miss the FPGA world. Seems so much easier to get software right.

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