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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?

#51

Post by Mendenhall »

woud420 wrote: post #21

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…

I always wonder if there is a way to directly (micro)pay people to watch the ads and cut out middle man so to speak.

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

#52

Post by bsvalley »

1. Software

2. Hiring Process

3. Replace meaningless whiteboarding interviews AND silly notepad algorithm questions, with a live coding interview on a laptop and a real development environment.

Companies would be surprised how fast and efficient the hiring process would be. They would stop eliminating a bunch of great candidates by running relevant technical interviews and not silly CS academic stuff. I can spend 3 month memorizing 500 algorithm solutions and nail all your 45min technical interviews. I would get an offer, a kick ass package and I would join your team. Then, on my first day I'd ask for help from my colleagues because I can't even setup my development environment. I'd write buggy code that doesn't integrate well and wouldn't be able to understand how to design a system. All I'd know is how to write text in a notepad and how to flip a linked list on a whiteboard.

But hey... I'm smart! And now I'm rich :)

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

#53

Post by CJefferson »

Academia. I'm going to pick on something specific:

* Reproducibility -- running code months or years later, on another machine.

Current tools, like VMs tend to be too heavy-weight. Docker is too hard to set up.

The main problem with these various tools is that exploration is slow -- Often I'll take an experiment, tweak it a few dozen times, then finally get the code for a paper. At that point I don't want to package it up, I want to be able to "freeze" where my last execution.

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

#54

Post by iamwil »

Chris2048 wrote: post #41
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.…

I think here is an idea isn't unique to Quants/finance: curated datasets. Hosted data-sets that are fully cleaned, verified and kept up to date. You pay a fee for the feed, which essentially covers initial and on-going curation. Fees would probably be based on usage (dev/test/commercial etc) but also the realistic market value of curation. There's a mile of difference between a data-set that's been fed through a few…

What sort of datasets do quants and finance need? For finance, I imagine it has to be both accurate and realtime for it to be of any value?

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

#55

Post by jamesrcole »

faitswulff wrote: post #33
benzor wrote: post #10

I work in the games industry. There are plenty of problems to go around, but I'll pick just one: Discoverability In the "good old days" where 2 people could make a video game, odds are that just shipping something guaranteed you'd make money. But that's no the case anymore now that 1000+ apps come out every day on iOS / Google Play. Of course most of those are crap. But you could be making a great game that caters we…

I would say that discoverability is a problem that games share with pretty much every form of media in the internet age. I've been thinking that one possible solution is to use less technology - organize local meetups and user tests, build a local community. BitBash in Chicago is an example of this, albeit on an annual basis: https://bitbashchicago.com/

FWIW, it was an issue with books before the internet was big. So many novels are written each year. It's long been difficult to know how to find novels that you might like outside of the bigger works.

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

#56

Post by osullivj »

iamwil wrote: post #54
Chris2048 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think here is an idea isn't unique to Quants/finance: curated datasets. Hosted data-sets that are fully cleaned, verified and kept up to date. You pay a fee for the feed, which essentially covers initial and on-going curation. Fees would probably be based on usage (dev/test/commercial etc) but also the realistic market value of curation. There's a mile of difference between a data-set that's been fed through a few…

What sort of datasets do quants and finance need? For finance, I imagine it has to be both accurate and realtime for it to be of any value?

Accurate yes. Realtime not necessarily. EOD risk doesn't need real time market data.

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

#57

Post by siscia »

franciscop wrote: post #11
severus wrote: 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 (;

New metro lines are usually completely automatic here in (I guess) Europe.

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

#58

Post by lambdamichael »

CJefferson wrote: post #53

Academia. I'm going to pick on something specific: * Reproducibility -- running code months or years later, on another machine. Current tools, like VMs tend to be too heavy-weight. Docker is too hard to set up. The main problem with these various tools is that exploration is slow -- Often I'll take an experiment, tweak it a few dozen times, then finally get the code for a paper. At that point I don't want to package…

Authorea (www.authorea.com) supports including data/code in articles. There's even some in-article iPython support.

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

#59

Post by mysterydip »

malodyets wrote: post #50

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…

It seems to me that there could exist a paypal-like system for micropayments. Maybe there already is and I don't know about it? Getting a critical mass would be necessary, a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. If there was a service that went something like this:

- pay a flat fee of $x to deposit any amount up to $y

- pay nothing to transfer - pay $x to withdraw up to $y

You are incentivized to deposit more to make it worthwhile, fees don't eat into your per transaction revenue, and you're incentivized to wait for at least $y to cash out for maximum benefit. The company can invest that $ in the meantime and earn a low yield on a money market.

I'm sure if it were that easy it would already be done, but it makes sense to me.

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

#60

Post by hackerews »

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.

I enjoy these posts as well. Love to learn about other industries.
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