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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?

#21

Post by woud420 »

1) Advertising

2) A lot. Publishers relying on clickbait to generate money. Advertisers creating invasive ads with autoplay sound and video. Ignoring do-not-track requests as part of the industry (even if some technology providers respect DNT, it seems like a lot don't). Malware. A lot of useless metrics. Bandwidth usage. Etc...

3) Micro-payments vs delivering content only when an ad has been seen? Validating content delivered through exchanges. A better way to anonymize data used for tracking? Smaller ads. Honestly, I'm not too sure, there's probably a lot that can be done but I feel the industry did too little too late.

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

#23

Post by throwaway2016a »

Mendenhall wrote: post #19
throwaway2016a wrote: post #3

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…

I almost asked a question like this last week with no interest in a startup. I find because of the level of expertise on HN that a topic of this sort helps round out my overall knowledge of what is going on in some of these industries etc. I am not even a programmer but I find very useful actionable information in such threads. Just my 2 cents.

Academically I enjoy these posts too.

This was intended as (unsolicited, granted) advice to the person asking the questions to examine their goals. If they know they are fighting an up hill battle going in, hopefully they will be better prepared for the fight they are in for. Doing a startup is difficult even when you are a domain expert.

If the interest was purely academic... carry on :)

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

#24

Post by codingdave »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #3

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…

It doesn't have to be a hard problem that you solve. Sometimes solving easy, but tedious, problems is a worthwhile goal, too. Really, most industry pains are solved with CRUD apps attached to some workflow. So you might be right that the "best startups" come from your own pains... but some completely adequate lifestyle companies come from just asking around and solving small problems. And there is nothing wrong with that.

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

#25

Post by startupdiscuss »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
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.…

The tools still exist to be a one man shop though. Get yourself an Interactive Brokers account, learn pyalgo, and off you go.

I would caution people not to believe it is that simple to actually make money like this.

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

#26

Post by toomuchtodo »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #25
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools still exist to be a one man shop though. Get yourself an Interactive Brokers account, learn pyalgo, and off you go.

I would caution people not to believe it is that simple to actually make money like this.

Agreed. It's a quick way to go broke if you don't know what you're doing.

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

#27

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

Higher education. Where to start?

Tenure is a huge cost to the university and not every professor is both an amazing researcher and an amazing teacher. So you have a chunk of the budget spent on old researchers while poorly paid adjuncts fill in for undergraduate classes. Not sure if fixable.

Politics runs everything. Broken clock Ayn Rand was at least somewhat right in Atlas Shrugged when she speculated that bringing about the end of money would usher in an age of pull. That's exactly how higher ed works: unless you can justify your work with student evaluations and big $$$ research grants, politics runs a lot of decisions. Not sure if ever fixable.

No two American universities are alike. Colleges within universities have major differences too. Good luck getting any real traction consolidating IT services. Everyone has different needs and cut-outs for their work.

Higher education is a hydra. It cannot be fixed or reformed at the drop of the hat or with the use of an app.

Abandon simple solutions, all ye who enter here.

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

#28

Post by michaelgrosner2 »

personjerry wrote: post #18
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.…

https://www.quantopian.com/home

That's a great way to give your hard-earned money to large trading firms.

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

#29

Post by throwaway2016a »

codingdave wrote: post #24
throwaway2016a wrote: post #3

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…

It doesn't have to be a hard problem that you solve. Sometimes solving easy, but tedious, problems is a worthwhile goal, too. Really, most industry pains are solved with CRUD apps attached to some workflow. So you might be right that the "best startups" come from your own pains... but some completely adequate lifestyle companies come from just asking around and solving small problems. And there is nothing wrong with…

Nothing wrong with that.

I find that for those problems sometimes you don't even need to write a single line of code. Changing the process or the way people think about the problem can be sufficient.

Although I imagine if you drew a venn diagram with easy & important & unsolved then the intersection will be relatively tiny. And from a business defensibility standpoint the barrier of entry may be too low.

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

#30

Post by thearn4 »

1. Aerospace

2.1 Access to energy / energy density of fuels (batteries included). This is the case across a wide range of industries and problem areas of course, not just transportation. But incremental optimizations in efficiency have lead to squeezing more performance out of the margins, but no Moore's-law type growth will ever happen without some kind of energy breakthrough.

2.2 Going forward, tightly coupled systems will be the norm. The traditional tube-and-wing aircraft with bolted on nacelles is a bit of a dead end for civil aviation. Systems to enable a more complex design workflow (e.g. graph based dataflow with accurate gradients) will be more paramount.

3. Research into the next generation of energy storage materials, and improved large-scale gradient-based numerical optimization algorithms.

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