Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 158 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#111

Post by steveklabnik »

steveklabnik wrote: post #11

I live in Pittsburgh. We have a huge lack of talent at the moment. There are tons of startups with funding that are looking to hire people, but a huge lack of skilled people around. We've got companies paying $1,000 bonuses to anyone who can get a hire. It's crazy. I'm not sure how to properly attract and keep talent in the city.

Ouch, why all the massive downvotes to everyone responding here? It's a real problem, and several local founders, VCs, and even the local incubator are all trying to come up with new ways of fostering entrepreneurship around these parts. Pittsburgh is undergoing a bit of a tech renaissance, or at least we'd like to think we are. That's hard to pull of without great developers.

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#112

Post by runT1ME »

hooande wrote: post #102
edw519 wrote: post #6

Enterprise software sucks. We don't talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entert…

Enterprise software sucks because corporations have little incentive to improve it and it's almost impossible for a startup to gain a foothold in terms of sales and adoption. There are so many smart hackers and the problems are so obvious...if they could have been solved with better software, it would have been done long ago. If you try to make any kind of software that competes even tangentially with SAP, Oracle, et…

And...and... MySql didn't get anywhere competing with Oralce or SAP dammnit!

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#113

Post by georgecmu »

steveklabnik wrote: post #111
steveklabnik wrote: post #11

I live in Pittsburgh. We have a huge lack of talent at the moment. There are tons of startups with funding that are looking to hire people, but a huge lack of skilled people around. We've got companies paying $1,000 bonuses to anyone who can get a hire. It's crazy. I'm not sure how to properly attract and keep talent in the city.

Ouch, why all the massive downvotes to everyone responding here? It's a real problem, and several local founders, VCs, and even the local incubator are all trying to come up with new ways of fostering entrepreneurship around these parts. Pittsburgh is undergoing a bit of a tech renaissance, or at least we'd like to think we are. That's hard to pull of without great developers.

There's been quite a few robotics start-ups coming up in the past few years (a new CMU spin-off was announced literally two days ago). It's amazing that with all the university talent in the area, it's still so hard to find qualified people.

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#114

Post by pingswept »

Mechanical CAD software like Solidworks and PCB layout software like PADS is expensive and sold through resellers. I can't compare prices between different vendors without giving them my contact information, which results spam.

There are a few semi-exceptions (Sketchup for mechanical CAD and Eagle for PCB layout) but neither is strong competition for the market leaders.

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#115

Post by philwelch »

orangecat wrote: post #94
mechanician wrote: post #28

The airport check-in security process.

I wish, although it seems fixing that requires convincing several million people that that terrorists are not actually hiding in every shadow. But somewhat related: fix baggage handling. There's no reason you should have to wait half an hour to get your bags after you get off the plane. Take care of that problem and people will be more willing to check their bags, which in turn will make boarding and exiting much smo…

On the contrary--if you increase baggage fees, you could reduce the amount of baggage (making it easier to handle) and have more $-per-bag to spend on your fast baggage handling system.

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#116

Post by philwelch »

keefe wrote: post #39
CytokineStorm wrote: post #14

Someone needs to prove that P != NP. Want to understand why that's important? Read this: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the...

it's also extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to prove. This is a problem for researchers, not people looking for ideas for startups.

OTOH, if you prove that P = NP, you can probably make huge windfalls of money, and some of it may even be legitimate!

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#117

Post by pingswept »

The industrial automation world (Allen-Bradley, Siemens, Mitsubishi, Fanuc, and so forth) has missed the arrival of the internet. Uniformly, their software is terrible-- ActiveX controls and weak, homegrown webservers, if they even support TCP/IP. Trying to build modern web interfaces that have to talk to hardware feels like inventing time-travel (but it's a one-way trip, 15 years back).

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#118

Post by steveklabnik »

georgecmu wrote: post #113
steveklabnik wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch, why all the massive downvotes to everyone responding here? It's a real problem, and several local founders, VCs, and even the local incubator are all trying to come up with new ways of fostering entrepreneurship around these parts. Pittsburgh is undergoing a bit of a tech renaissance, or at least we'd like to think we are. That's hard to pull of without great developers.

There's been quite a few robotics start-ups coming up in the past few years (a new CMU spin-off was announced literally two days ago). It's amazing that with all the university talent in the area, it's still so hard to find qualified people.

Lots of the CMU guys just want to go into research. If not, they end up going into a robotics spinoff that only does government contract work.

Re: Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

#120

Post by trafficlight »

j_baker wrote: post #76

A couple of things: 1. Everyone I know has a few CRT TVs they want to get rid of. I don't know how to solve this, but surely there's a startup idea in here somewhere. 2. This thread establishes that there is a problem figuring out what problems need to be solved, otherwise it wouldn't exist (maybe that one was too easy though).

In my area at least, it costs me money to recycle CRTs as well as a lot of other electronics. I'm just not going to pay $25 to throw something away. If this was free, or even if the cost was built into the front end purchase price, I would absolutely recycle old monitors and parts.
Post reply on HN