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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?

#111

Post by CJefferson »

lambdamichael wrote: post #58
CJefferson wrote: post #53

Academia. I'm going to pick on something specific: * Reproducibility -- running code months or years later, on another machine. Current tools, like VMs tend to be too heavy-weight. Docker is too hard to set up. The main problem with these various tools is that exploration is slow -- Often I'll take an experiment, tweak it a few dozen times, then finally get the code for a paper. At that point I don't want to package…

Authorea (www.authorea.com) supports including data/code in articles. There's even some in-article iPython support.

How likely are my pages to still work in 20 years?

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

#113

Post by jaredklewis »

kelvin0 wrote: post #80
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…

I'm not quite sure what your point is. Is it that the OP seems too 'sneaky' for your taste and you'd prefer them coming right out and asking startup ideas/problems to work on? In any case, what's wrong with trying to probe your peers for ideas and possible brainstorm? If you don't want to participate, simply do not comment, no? I am a genuinely curious individual, and these are the questions I also like to ask, and n…

I don't think anyone is against the OP asking for startup ideas and then profiting from one of them. HN, in my experience, is a very capitalistic place where members find the idea of profiting with software to be quite exciting.

I interpreted it more as a warning that these discussions are not a good way to get startup ideas. Startups need domain experts to understand what the market will pay for, making connections, and so on.

Say somone in the pharmaceutical industry posts about their problems ordering medicines. It's a fine problem, but the point is that the OP is not in a good position to solve it, as he or she is likely lacking industry experience and contacts.

The ideas you come up with yourself are more likely to be the ones you do have the experience and connections to work on.

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

#114

Post by Mz »

kelvin0 wrote: post #80
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…

I'm not quite sure what your point is. Is it that the OP seems too 'sneaky' for your taste and you'd prefer them coming right out and asking startup ideas/problems to work on? In any case, what's wrong with trying to probe your peers for ideas and possible brainstorm? If you don't want to participate, simply do not comment, no? I am a genuinely curious individual, and these are the questions I also like to ask, and n…

I felt his point was along the lines of "If a startup is like a marriage, then posting a question like this is kind of like trying to hookup at a bar. It might be fun, but the odds are poor that it will lead to a serious, committed endeavor."

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

#115

Post by tropo »

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…

This time around I found myself wondering if it might be automated, like "Who is hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?".

The title needs to say something like "April 2017" or "May 2017" though.

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

#116

Post by sean2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #105
geofft wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 side…

Counter position is hard to define in a large market, so take a market with two stocks A and B. You buy shares of A from counter-position-inc who moves that money into B (possibly buying the shares you just dumped).

Over a time period A goes up 5% B goes up 10%. You sell your shares in A (profitably) but under performed the average market returns by 2.5%. counter-position-inc sells its shares in B, over performing the market average by 2.5%.

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

#117

Post by AznHisoka »

amelius wrote: post #47
personjerry wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of companies like Atlassian and Gitlab?

Those companies are running platforms. Not really a fair comparison. Besides, I'm not literally saying there is no money in development tools. I'm saying that it's a difficult market.

almost everything is a difficult market these days. at least with developers, you know where they hang out. try marketing a SaaS to farmers or construction companies online.

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

#119

Post by sjg007 »

atemerev wrote: post #85
Chris2048 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think here is an idea isn't unique to Quants/finance: curated datasets. Hosted data-sets that are fully cleaned, verified and kept up to date. You pay a fee for the feed, which essentially covers initial and on-going curation. Fees would probably be based on usage (dev/test/commercial etc) but also the realistic market value of curation. There's a mile of difference between a data-set that's been fed through a few…

Algo trading is about having the edge. The edge is something you have and other people don't. Enjoy your feature engineering. (Meaning: selling the same curated data product to many customers undermines its value. Overpricing it and selling only to the selected few, on the other hand...)

Seems like neural networks would have some advantage here...

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

#120

Post by sjg007 »

RivieraKid wrote: post #106
fright wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only thing that will change health care is single payer.
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