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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 253 posts

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

#171

Post by rb808 »

warriormonk5 wrote: post #168
rb808 wrote: post #92

I'm on the board of my condo building's HOA which has a number of things that would be helpful. * We pay $200/mo for a basic website with forum, some billing things, some file storage and other stuff I never use. It looks like it was written 20 years ago. (If someone can recommend something already out there that would be helpful) * Doorman accepts dozens of package deliveries each day which get sent email and tracke…

What exactly does that website do?

Website for residents

Forum

Document storage

maintains emails lists

Track who's paid

+ more I don't really use it

There are a bunch here

https://www.capterra.com/hoa-software/

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

#172

Post by fiatjaf »

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.

I'm working on https://github.com/fiatjaf/accountd.xyz, which is basically a universal association of profiles (identified by a username) with accounts on "silos" like twitter, github, trello and email addresses in general. You can use it either for user login or to post-association of accounts with profiles. There's no documentation, but you can see it working on https://sitios.xyz/ and https://sitios.xyz/trello.

Do you think it is interesting somehow?

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

#173

Post by dchuk »

nulagrithom wrote: post #133
dchuk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the trucking (telematics) industry. I've dealt with a decent amount of ftp file transfers, but most stuff I've seen has been some sort of API based (SOAP, REST, etc). Can you give a few more specific examples? Are you in the industry now? Working at a carrier?

I work in intermodal. Whenever one of our larger customers wants to give us a load to move, we use X12 EDI. This is standard throughout at least the intermodal industry, though from what I gather that may also be true of over-the-road as well. An example 204 EDI (Load Tender) looks like this: ISA*01*0000000000*01*0000000000*ZZ*ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO*ZZ*123456789012345*101127*1719*U*00400*000003438*0*P*> GS*SM*4405197800*999…

Thanks for the reply! That certainly does look like a pain in the ass. Being on the telematics side specifically, we deal less with EDI stuff, but I'm sure down the road I will have to, and I agree that a structured API would be much better.

If you don't mind me asking, what ELD are you running? My company specifically builds one of those, amongst the rest of the productivity suite necessary for a driver to do their work.

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

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

nulagrithom wrote: post #133
dchuk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the trucking (telematics) industry. I've dealt with a decent amount of ftp file transfers, but most stuff I've seen has been some sort of API based (SOAP, REST, etc). Can you give a few more specific examples? Are you in the industry now? Working at a carrier?

I work in intermodal. Whenever one of our larger customers wants to give us a load to move, we use X12 EDI. This is standard throughout at least the intermodal industry, though from what I gather that may also be true of over-the-road as well. An example 204 EDI (Load Tender) looks like this: ISA*01*0000000000*01*0000000000*ZZ*ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO*ZZ*123456789012345*101127*1719*U*00400*000003438*0*P*> GS*SM*4405197800*999…

> I wish everything was REST,

REST and X12 EDI are orthogonal features: REST can use any format for resource representation, and X12 EDI formats are a data representation.

X12 EDI can be used in a REST way (one of the two mechanisms in healthcare standard operating rules for certain HIPAA-mandated X12 transaction is RESTish—the HTTP+MIME method—though there is also a SOAP method.)

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

#176

Post by kaicianflone »

Thriptic wrote: post #78
hunter23 wrote: post #18

I work in health tech. Here are some problems: * Helping patients select the right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or through referrals. The problem is that Yelp has little correlation to quality of care. It's very difficult for patients to evaluate a doctor - usually what they end up doing is evaluating the customer service aspect of the doctor (did they speak to me nicely, did they make me wait for an appoin…

> Helping patients select the right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or through referrals. The problem is that Yelp has little correlation to quality of care. It's very difficult for patients to evaluate a doctor - usually what they end up doing is evaluating the customer service aspect of the doctor (did they speak to me nicely, did they make me wait for an appointment, etc.) but no one is able to evaluate doc…

I am also in healthcare tech and also worked with the idea of a doctor rating system focused specifically on using doctor procedure/diagnosis billing data and PQRS. We abandoned the idea due to lack of data for each healthcare field (cardiology, radiology, oncology, etc.) and hospitals not wanting to participate.

However, I have looked into incentivized, distributed platforms such as wings.ai or golem.network and believe that this could be applied to healthcare. If patients were incentivized on going to the doctor for a copy of the CPT/DGX codes on their bill and survey information around PQRS you would have a lot of useful data. This data could be used not only to provide a rating system of doctors, but also price comparison on CPT/RVU across the United States and the ability to provide PQRS data for doctors. Its an all in one, decentralized, healthcare platform for patients, doctors, and insurance providers.

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

#177

Post by javiramos »

The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The process is so painful.

Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases work via a [Quote > PO > Pro Forma Invoice > Final Invoice > Payment > Receipt] process.

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

#178

Post by riezebos »

herlitzj wrote: post #39
sdiq wrote: post #22

I work in the humanitarian field in a poor country ravaged by war and famine. We have a number of humanitarian actors currently working in this country and no one actually has access to accurate population statistics. Well, none exists. The last census was conducted in 1975. I believe someone could use technology to get a much better estimate of the population. One thing that always springs to my mind is the possibil…

How much penetration do cell phones have into a lot of these countries? May be a way to tease out a rough population from cell phone use statistics.

What I can tell you from my experience in the Gambia is that there many people have cellphones (not smartphones), but most have 2 or 3 because provider have lower rates when calling to the same provider, so one phone for Qcell, one phone for Africell,... Not sure if it's like that in many other places, there is a lot of tourism on the coast and returning tourists often bring their old phones to give to the locals.

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

#179

Post by kaicianflone »

austenallred wrote: post #67

This is a really simple but basic one. Market size might not be billions of dollars, but a basic learning management system along the lines of Teachable/Udemy that allows for code with built-in testing would be used overnight by a dozen code bootcamps and would pull a lot of people out of the other platforms. Maybe it's just a feature, not a full product, but it makes any "learn to code" MOOC unusable.

Stephen Grider on Udemy uses Jest to create automated tests for his JS and React courses that you can run while you watch and code his videos.

Jest and Mocha both have a watch feature that will test a file each time it is saved for "continuous testing", much like using Gulp watch or any type of dev live server environment.

Also Jest features Snapshot testing which will take a picture of a UI and test all changes made to the UI, as well as alerting you in tests if the UI has changed. I could see this being used in bootcamps as well.

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

#180

Post by hackerews »

fermienrico wrote: post #33
SteveNuts wrote: post #3

Open hardware and software for PLCs for manufacturing.

Along with this, we need a better way to program robots. I program Fanuc i200D and that whole industry makes my blood boil. Want more than 200 variables in your program? Shell out $10k. High level programming language to program robots with safety in mind would be amazing. RoboDK is the only one that is doing this and they still suck.

Does the Fanuc need to be constantly reprogrammed? Or is it a rare occurrence?
Post reply on HN