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Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#31

Post by calpaterson »

nicbou wrote: post #7

Kanban comes from the automotive industry, and works really well in the tech industry. The Toyota Production System is a brilliant set of principles and practices that fit well in most industries. Toyota sent engineers to optimize street kitchens some years ago. ISO 9001 was implemented in manufacturing, and is quite popular in many circles of hell.

When I researched this I found that automotive Kanban bore absolutely no relationship to the computing industry's Kanban.

Shigeo Shingo's book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0915299178/) is particularly emphatic that Kanban was a was for repeatable industrial processes and not, for example, for knowledge work.

Automotive Kanban is not a "Todo"/"doing"/"done" board, by his account anyway. The tickets sat on individual work items and moved around the factory. It was about limiting the number of unfinished work items (which take up space and can be a sign that something is out of control).

Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#32

Post by vekker »

deanebarker wrote: post #4
axegon_ wrote: post #2

A real popular one would be QR codes. They were initially created to track manufacturing processes in the automotive industry. And you know how it is these days...

I feel like QR codes failed as a general UI tool. I get annoyed whenever I have to deal with one. They wee HUGE about 10 years ago. Now, not so much.

Really? I think they are quite a success, especially for making payments easy, for example

Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#33

Post by frogpelt »

jclem wrote: post #5
deanebarker wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like QR codes failed as a general UI tool. I get annoyed whenever I have to deal with one. They wee HUGE about 10 years ago. Now, not so much.

I don’t know about other places, but they’re getting a lot of use in NYC right now as a method for viewing restaurant menus for outdoor dining.

I went to a restaurant the other day and it had one of those Coke Freestyle soda machines. There was a QR code on the screen which I scanned with my phone. This opened a website with drink choices. I put my cup under the dispenser and pushed the Barq's Root Beer button on the website on my phone which dispensed the drink from the machine.

Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#34

Post by calpaterson »

zupatol wrote: post #14

The black-scholes model for pricing options had a big impact on the financial industry, and the big breakthrough for solving the equation was to realize it could be turned into the heat equation that already had a solution. If I remember well, the insight came to Robert Merton, an economist who had also studied engineering mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model

"Big impact" is understating it. It's caused at least one financial crisis when Scholes and Merton's hedge fund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management) went boom in the late nineties.

Since then the assumptions present in Black-Scholes and similar pricing models have caused considerable chaos elsewhere in finance. One of those things that perhaps it would have been better that they had not invented. Professionally it was great for the inventors though: they won the Nobel Prize at the time.

Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#35

Post by cik »

deanebarker wrote: post #4
axegon_ wrote: post #2

A real popular one would be QR codes. They were initially created to track manufacturing processes in the automotive industry. And you know how it is these days...

I feel like QR codes failed as a general UI tool. I get annoyed whenever I have to deal with one. They wee HUGE about 10 years ago. Now, not so much.

That depends on where you are. Here every billboard and its cousin have a QR code. So does the beer at the local gas station.

Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#36

Post by kroltan »

fakedang wrote: post #24
RobertoG wrote: post #8

Maybe control version? From software to a lot of other information industries. Also, not an industry, but I think that some mathematicians use category theory to translate insights from one domain to other. (Trying the recipe itself here to find a meta-recipe) I think an insight itself from category theory to a more general recipe could be: don't try to move "laterally" to other industry, but go first "up" from a spe…

I don't think this is valid. Which other field is there where you can revert changes to a previous version? Certainly not hardware manufacturing.

I don't recall exactly, but there was some legal authority (I think it was a U.S. state?) That uses Git for versioning laws, using pull requests as a way of usefully visualizing changes.

Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#37

Post by dkural »

calpaterson wrote: post #34
zupatol wrote: post #14

The black-scholes model for pricing options had a big impact on the financial industry, and the big breakthrough for solving the equation was to realize it could be turned into the heat equation that already had a solution. If I remember well, the insight came to Robert Merton, an economist who had also studied engineering mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model

"Big impact" is understating it. It's caused at least one financial crisis when Scholes and Merton's hedge fund ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management ) went boom in the late nineties. Since then the assumptions present in Black-Scholes and similar pricing models have caused considerable chaos elsewhere in finance. One of those things that perhaps it would have been better that they had not inve…

The Ito calculus being applicable for solving Black-Scholes might be a better example for the original question :)

I am not sure it's better if that was not invented - the question of option pricing doesn't go away, it's a fundamental need for real businesses producing commodities that need to hedge real risk around the weather, or selling into cyclical industries etc.

LTCM (& it's failure) has as much to do with getting so big as to present a systemic risk to the entire financial sector, and over-leverage. No matter what formula they use to price their options, those two factors make for a dangerous combination. There is a perverse incentive to become "too big to fail", because if you truly reach that, the gains stay private whereas the losses are inevitably socialized to prevent taking down the whole system.

Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#38

Post by wombatmobile »

Frances Arnold, 2018 Nobel laureate for Chemistry, pioneered the use of directed evolution, which she conceived as an iterative lab process, to create enzymes with improved and/or novel functions, e.g. bacteria that produce the biofuel isobutanol.

FRANCES H. ARNOLD Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018

https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/fr...

Exploring protein fitness landscapes by directed evolution

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997618/

Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?

#39

Post by Zigurd »

nicbou wrote: post #7

Kanban comes from the automotive industry, and works really well in the tech industry. The Toyota Production System is a brilliant set of principles and practices that fit well in most industries. Toyota sent engineers to optimize street kitchens some years ago. ISO 9001 was implemented in manufacturing, and is quite popular in many circles of hell.

Patterns taken from manufacturing do not always translate well to software. Kanban is a notable exception. The "pull" model of kanban fits well with the Agile approach to late resource allocation to tasks. Kanban, while it was born in the repeating process world of manufacturing, translates well to the non-repeating, yet iterative nature of software projects.
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