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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?

#121

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

This sounds like a job for NixOS[1]! Specify a basic build environment for your lab, and then write per-paper or per-project build configurations. Once you've frozen/committed the configuration, you have a reproducible, deterministic build, and can run it over and over again at leisure.

[1] -- https://nixos.org/nix/about.html

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

#122

Post by infinite8s »

Chris2048 wrote: post #41
chollida1 wrote: post #2

Intersection of trading and data mining. I've said this a few times but we're going through a growth period like AAA video games have over the past 20 years. I used to be that 2 guys could make a video game, then it went to 10, then 50, now its around 200 from what I've last heard. Hedge funds are going through a similar shift. It used to be that one person could manage data cleaning, and algo generation for a fund.…

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…

That's been around for 20 years, and comes with it's own hardware platform (the Bloomberg terminal).

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

#123

Post by thedudemabry »

mysterydip wrote: post #59
malodyets wrote: post #50

1. Which industry do you work in? In the publishing industry (where I have worked since 1997), the transition from print-only to print-plus-digital that began around 1999 and really got underway after Amazon released the Kindle in 2007 has finished. Now we have an industry in which print and digital co-exist (at different levels – 50/50 for fiction, but more like 80/20 for non-fiction, and even less of digital for mo…

It seems to me that there could exist a paypal-like system for micropayments. Maybe there already is and I don't know about it? Getting a critical mass would be necessary, a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. If there was a service that went something like this: - pay a flat fee of $x to deposit any amount up to $y - pay nothing to transfer - pay $x to withdraw up to $y You are incentivized to deposit more to make it…

I agree that it would be neat, but I fear that the reason only big banks and credit card processors have attempted to dabble in this space is because you've just described a bank. Building one of those carries a whole host of regulations, even if the goal is a very simple, limited set of interactions.

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

#124

Post by legolas2412 »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #107
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.

Well, as there are comment threads on reddit and streaming websites, you just do some simple NLP.

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

#125

Post by rahimnathwani »

aabajian wrote: post #103

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.

"but in radiology the biggest problem is rising volumes with lower reimbursement"

Huh? So x-rays have become plentiful and cheap due to competition-driven innovation? How is that a problem?

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

#126

Post by saimiam »

ioddly wrote: post #94

1. Programming 2. I don't know if it's stopping the industry from growing, but existing communication tools (specifically chat, email) are a serious drain on attention and productivity. See http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html . 3. I'm working on it. Might be better tooling, might be educating people on how harmful they can be.

I take a contrarian view on the perniciousness of chat, email, and social media. I'm yet to face a situation when I had to get something done but a chat conversation got so much in the way that I missed my deadline.

Yes, I spend way too much time on frivolous internet activities but when stuff needs to get done, it gets done.

No, I cannot use my time any differently to magically become more productive and build myself a side hustle or teach myself Sanskrit or whatever. Just because I now read a hundred success stories doesn't mean I have emulate and chase after adding to corpus of human growth and knowledge with blind focus.

It's ok to work enough for a living and not impose artificial expectations of extreme productivity on myself.

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

#127

Post by pathsjs »

return0 wrote: post #84

It's a difficult problem, but food just takes too much of people's time. Something like a personalized service that brings you food according to your own nutritional schedule would be nice.

I feel the opposite. There's no shortage of startups trying to serve you every kind of food on the planet quickly and cheaply, but more often than not the enjoyment is in actually going out and spending some time at the restaurant or preparing a nice dish on your own

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

#128

Post by carlmungz »

1. Training & Education

2. Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements in AI & machine learning to train their workforce

3. Yes but I think it'll require younger incumbents 'eating the lunch' of more established companies for this to change

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

#129

Post by Chris2048 »

Chris2048 wrote: post #96
atemerev wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

But this is algo trading specifically, the scope for curated datasets is larger. Plus, what stops anyone building on top of a dataset? If this isn't dive ebay value do any third parties add? A dataset sold to many customers doesn't undermine the price charged by the seller, as there would be no competitive advantage by not using it either.

s/"dive ebay"/"done, what"/

And to clarify the last point:

If a create a dataset for $100 I could sell it to one person for $120, or 6 for $20 - I make the same even if the value to each individual client is reduced; on the other hand, the value to each client versus* making their own is (120-100=) $20 in the first case, but (120-20=) $100 in the second, so fewer clients are likely to "roll their own" competing datasets.

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

#130

Post by tuyguntn »

carlmungz wrote: post #128

1. Training & Education 2. Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements in AI & machine learning to train their workforce 3. Yes but I think it'll require younger incumbents 'eating the lunch' of more established companies for this to change

> Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements in AI & machine learning to train their workforce

trying to use AI & ML is ok, but why they should use newer web technologies? web technologies are changed so frequently and outdated, its bit scary to jump in to new web tech.

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