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

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131–140 of 152 posts

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

#131
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best startups are ones that have solved a pain point you yourself have experience. Yet there is zero money in writing development tools :(

Have you heard of companies like Atlassian and Gitlab?

Is GitLab well funded?

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

#132

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 web technologies are changed so frequently and outdated, its bit scary to jump in to new web tech.

A sizeable chunk (not sure on figures) of training courses are still produced using Flash. If it's not Flash, they are built using a Dreamweaver-esque authoring tool that spits out HTML & CSS. https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework is the only major open-source web framework.

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

#133
post #109
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> Cheap rockets will lead to cheaper satellites.

Indeed, however there's a limited capacity for satellites.

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

#134
post #37

There are some resources that might be of interest to you (no affiliation) Ideas: http://www.oppsdaily.com/ https://nugget.one/ Already done successfully https://sidehustleschool.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses

https://www.springwise.com/

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

#135
The Office of Educational Technology produced a report on Educational Software, what the biggest problems are and where the greatest opportunities are for solving them. It's a great read with lots of suggestions if you want to learn about a field, public education, that I personally feel is still severely behind the curve when it comes to the Information Revolution:

https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/

I highlighted passages of note here:

http://mxplx.com/Reference/id=2090

It's a great opportunity in a field that, despite budget cuts and under-funding, still has millions of dollars to put into software that could meet the needs of school districts across the country. Most of what's out there now is sorely lacking, leaving teachers and schools to use a patchwork of solutions to meet their needs.

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

#136
post #4

1. Public Transport. 2. Funding/Capacity. 3. More money.

3. Automation? Depends on the transport it could be 5 years away (trains/similar) or 20-30 years away (buses/similar). Of course the trains/similar is more of a people issue than technical (;

For trains, automation already happened - in the 80's. London's DLR and Vancouver's skytrain are examples of mostly automated, completely driverless, metro systems - built in the 80's.

Afaik, the Vancouver skytrain still uses the original OS/2 software to run.

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

#137

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…

You've got to understand, entrepreneurs are desparate for hard problems that are legally solvable. There's a vast oversupply of talent with initiative, relative to the number of problems. I don't blame him for trying to find hard problems to solve.

I think, what you are trying to say is that it takes a great deal of domain expertise to fully appreciate and understand those problems. But, you've got to start somewhere. We don't need millions of entrepreneurs trying to build even more meaningless social/gaming apps.

He might need to work in that industry to get enough knowledge to learn about the problem, but, you gotta start somewhere.

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

#138
post #8

Mobile phone repairs - lack of education and the ability to access quality replacement parts. You might think that there's no shortage of phone Repairer's out there and your right but you can bet that 90% of them are self taught or eventually taught by someone. Considering the amount of important information we store in phones and the price of the devices it has now become more important to ensure that your phone rep…

Might be easier to focus on certain models, given the multitude of models out there?

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

#139
Here's some problems I've personally encountered: 1. Software Engineer 2. It's difficult to get remote debugging and remote syncing working right. We've all been there. It literally takes hours to set up, if you don't have precise instructions. PhpStorm is pretty good, but still takes quite a bit of head scratching to install when your doing remote debugging. 3. Getting an app to run locally usually takes way too much work.

And, it seems Perl IDEs/debugging tools aren't as good as they should be. We're still using the command line debug tools for Perl, and can't even set a breakpoint before that line has been executed.

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

#140

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…

Regarding micro-payments, isn't this really a consumer problem that can't be solved easily?

What 60 year old romance novel reading knitting enthusiast will take the time to understand micropayments? They would just say "pass" and go find something else to read.

There has to be a demand for micropayments to have a problem to solve, right?

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