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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?

#41

Post by js8 »

calpaterson wrote: post #31
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…

IMHO Kanban in the computing industry is an analogue of typical task scheduling algorithm on the CPU. Instead of planning the work ahead, you have a work queue and you work each item from it until either the work itself becomes blocked, or (if you're timeboxing/preempting) a fixed period of time expires.

But more generally to the poster's question - like the example above, I think there is a lot in the project management space that was already solved by computer scientists. :-)

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

#42

Post by Zigurd »

m463 wrote: post #9

I wonder about that stuff too and sometimes I think some problems are really like: https://xkcd.com/530/ I suspect a big one is "regular" engineering vs software engineering. Regular engineering has schedules and (apart from the apple campus) can put up a building in a predictable amount of time. Also testing and maintenance and more.

Software creation has the characteristic that if you are doing the same thing over and over you are doing it wrong. Construction and manufacturing are much about doing the same thing the same way every time. This is why a lot of techniques do not translate well to/from software and other disciplines.

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

#43

Post by jryb »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #29

Breath of knowledge is certainly useful. I'm sure there's a lot of redundant work across domains in universities, but here's a somewhat humorous example of someone recreating the trapezoidal method of approximating the area under a curve. They needed it in a medical context, and anyone who has done Calc 2 would tell you "that's an integral". It shows 402 citations on Google Scholar. https://scholar.google.com/scholar…

It's worth noting that some academics cite that paper as a joke, I'm not sure how many genuine citations there are.

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

#44

Post by vikramkr »

wombatmobile wrote: post #38

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 h…

That's not really an unrelated field - thats just bioengineering and synthetic biology. Thats one of the more chemistry related chemistry novels in recent times actually, since the lack of a biology nobel has led to so many biology breakthroughs getting shoved into chemistry instead that its become a bit of a running joke. This year is no exception with CRISPR being looped under chemistry even though it woupd make the most sense under a separate new bio nobel.

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

#45

Post by jevgeni »

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…

Financial crises are what financial model assumptions become when they grow up.

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

#46

Post by darksaints »

It's a good question. It can be quite infuriating to watch people build inferior monstrosities to solve problems that have well known and efficient solutions. I see examples everywhere of engineers trying to design custom algorithms for problems that can be trivially solved using linear programming or constraint programming. Not that custom algorithms can't beat generalized solvers...just that you aren't likely going by to be the person that designs it when you're a mid level engineer on a time budget and haven't researched any related work.

Beyond that, I think cross breeding some insights from other fields could bring some efficiency improvements to problems that are squarely in the domain of computer science. OS scheduling, for example, has plenty of related people/materials scheduling parallels in the Operations Research field, and possibly some in Auction Theory as well. Same for load balancing (e.g. The Min Cost Multi-Commodity Flow problem).

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

#48

Post by chansiky »

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.

How so? They are effectively a `` IRL. I would say the UX is pretty good. I don't know how much easier it can get than pulling out your camera then taking a picture using the camera app.

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

#49

Post by otachack »

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...

QR codes are amazing and yet untapped, in my opinion. They're like barcodes but:

- amount of data can vary from small to large - error correction

They don't have to just hold URLs and can contain raw information that custom programs can read. I love their use in it for virtual currencies as public/private addresses b/c it simplifies them for users. Venmo also picked it up not too long ago to easily pay/request to people you may not have friended which is useful for street vendors.

Someone posted an example here about contact tracing and how it just leads to a web form to fill details in. Ideally, if we had our shit together, there can be some standard contact tracing format for QR and use programs to scan the data in to auto fill and submit your details to.

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

#50

Post by jevgeni »

frogpelt wrote: post #30
mabbo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife said to me yesterday "How do I use a QR Code?". Keep in mind, she's a civil engineer and one of the smartest people I know. I said "In what context?" because really, I didn't know either. "I have to scan this QR code if I go to my office. It's apparently posted at the door, and will let them know I've been there, for contact tracing." After a lot of playing around, we finally found out her phone's camera coul…

It sounds like you aren't a fan of the way this QR code was used. 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. I was impress…

Wouldn’t pressing a button on a machine be easier?
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