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Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#111

Post by simon_acca »

rayiner wrote: post #6

Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required. Probably half the video conferences I’ve tried to participate in in the last year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in, dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no account creation, registration, or sof…

I have been using jitsi for the past year or so and the experience is pretty much what you describe.

https://meet.jit.si

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#112

Post by BerislavLopac »

kodablah wrote: post #8
hashkb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you talking about Heroku?

No. Some of my quotes: "set up on on the cloud (or set of servers) of my choice", "being cloud-independent", "not [...] marry myself to a cloud vendor", etc.

You know why you can fill your car's tank on any petrol station? Because all the different players -- pump vendors, car makers, oil companies etc -- are using the same standards for the size of nozzle, fuel composition etc. They have concluded that standardisation is in their interest, as opposed to locking the customers in.

In software there are no such standards, or rather there are too many standards, and new ones are being released every day. Currently there is no clear incentive for vendors to standardise, and it's quite possible there will never be, it's early to tell.

What you're describing currently requires enormous resources, and no single company can pull that off -- even Google is struggling with keeping both back-end stability and front-end simplicity (I'm currently working on a new GCP tool which just got into beta, so I can see it firsthand). Standardisation allows many different vendors to focus only on a part of the whole supply chain, while with the cloud you have single vendors trying to cover everything under one roof.

It would be great if we could combine Digital Ocean's droplets with Google's BigQuery with Amazon's RDS, all through a simple front-end UI -- but the nozzle size is not standardised, and I wonder if it will ever be...

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#114

Post by kakwa_ »

kichuku wrote: post #74

I am a network engineer for a medium size company (I have worked for very large enterprises too) and there a a lot of opportunities for startups in network engineering. 1)Simple network automation platform that works for "My" custom environment, simply and effortlessly and also it should not break any existing network. (I don't mean like HP Network Automation) 2) Network diagram software - Seriously, any experienced…

for 2) did you try yEd? https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#115

Post by nulagrithom »

Will someone please convince the trucking industry that "communicating" by swapping text files over FTP in an absolutely incomprehinsible, proprietary format is simply no way to live?

Especially with the recent push by the fed to put electronic logging systems in every truck, this system is absolutely ripe for disruption. Downside is you'll be fighting entrenched companies like IBM for ground.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#116

Post by nulagrithom »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #113

I want to see a good identity and user manager SaaS oriented towards smaller customers. There used to be Stormpath, which was pretty amazing, but they got bought by Okta, which is less friendly to small teams and more enterprise oriented.

Doesn't auth0 fill this role?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#117

Post by billconan »

Semkas wrote: post #29

I do some illustration and have noticed on twitter how much every illustrator who gets some experience with 3d-tools likes to use 3d modelling to create block-outs for scenes they want to draw. By creating a simple scene out of blocks and shapes you can make your perspective work while drawing a lot easier. A tool that could be really populair would be something that makes making 3d mock-ups easier for 2d artstists w…

I think both photoshop and manga studio can do it.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#118

Post by awmartin »

kodablah wrote: post #4

I'll take a startup in a box. I want Kubernetes, Elastic, Kibana, FileBeat, Prometheus, Consul, Grafana, databases, HTTP gateways, etc all set up on on the cloud (or set of servers) of my choice and a dashboard that lets me add users (e.g. like a modern Webmin/cPanel+WHM) and make minor config changes if I don't want to run these myself. I want those things HA and I want stable hostnames for them (e.g. Consul DNS on…

Take a look at Cloud Foundry, especially the Container Runtime.

The Application Runtime (CFAR) is like an OSS Heroku, installable on AWS, GCP, Azure, vSphere, and OpenStack. Then just push your app and scale it out. It was first built as an enterprise Heroku competitor, and the commercial flavors power a bunch of big companies’ infrastructures. It even uses the same “buildpack” model that Heroku uses to provide language and framework dependencies.

The Container Runtime (CFCR) packages k8s in a way to make it easier to deploy, maintain, and scale, and it also deploys and manages the health of the underlying VMs. It originated in collaboration with Google.

Source: I’m a Cloud Foundry Foundation project lead.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#119

Post by jgamman »

Thriptic wrote: post #84

Software development infrastructure in a box plus strong training materials / guidance for scientists. Increasing numbers of scientists are writing code without any formal CS training, and the outputs are predictably awful and unreliable. It is very common to find no testing, no acceptance criteria, no version control, no formal planning, no code review, no style guide being employed, sparse commenting, fragmented de…

i can't see a business model - the scientist is already paying with their time to get something working that is just good enough for publication. all the problems you describe are down the road and scientists kick that to 'industry'. unless your 'right way' is also easier to boot, why would they add to their time?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#120

Post by nelsontkq »

Thriptic wrote: post #84

Software development infrastructure in a box plus strong training materials / guidance for scientists. Increasing numbers of scientists are writing code without any formal CS training, and the outputs are predictably awful and unreliable. It is very common to find no testing, no acceptance criteria, no version control, no formal planning, no code review, no style guide being employed, sparse commenting, fragmented de…

Ironic that scientists are not conducting any testing.
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