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

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

#501

Post by kiliankoe »

cake93 wrote: post #372

AR/VR visualization of 3D and 4D microscopy data (multicolor 3D video, as well as 3D point clouds over time) for biological research. Look for "lattice light sheet microscopy" or "superresolution microscopy" such as (3D)-STORM or STED. These techniques are adopted at a high pace. Groups spent $ 500,000 and often more on the hardware. They can produce terabytes of data within days, but we hardly have any tools to view…

A friend just did his diploma thesis on this. He built a system where you use a tablet device in your hand to push through 3D space visualizing the layers. I couldn't possibly describe it well enough, but I'll forward him a link to this thread and see if he answers.

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

#502

Post by nihonde »

DINKDINK wrote: post #473
mvc wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably smart to bring one to court with you but maybe not required for drawing up a standard will where the few assets you own should just go to your next of kin

Lawyers write human readable code that's compiled and run by a judge or interfacing APIs (institutions such as financial ones) Your advice is akin to saying "hey you inexperienced coder, write some production ready code but don't test it and when the only time it needs to run, give it a try. Hope you don't screw it up! When there's another coder in the room who can claim 'oh no he meant to set my financial variable 1…

This analogy falls apart pretty quickly. You can't compile legal work product and no one is accountable if it doesn't run, unless you're at the point where malpractice comes into play. Malpractice is really, really hard to prove, though.

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

#503

Post by tea_merchant »

athollywood wrote: post #383

The oil and gas industry is ripe with potential start ups. Here are a few that come to mind: 1. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be individually set up and program…

@athollywood, I work in Energy research, is there an email I could reach you on?

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

#504

Post by oblio »

daveguy wrote: post #454
rhizome wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://wordperfect.com My impression is that the legal industry is most of the reason why WP is still being used.

Word Perfect is the vi of word processors . I still program in vi.

You most likely program in vim or another vi successor. Possibly with a ton of configuration settings and plugins that weren't around in vi. Big difference.

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

#505

Post by zo1 »

mysterypie wrote: post #498
jupiter90000 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a tech department of a rather large law services organization. There was a desire to maintain certain inefficiencies so that more hours could be billed to clients. If it could be done in 25% of the time, that's 75% less they could bill clients for 'attorney time spent.' See how well pitching 'do it faster and make less' goes over.

Can't they still bill whatever they want? If 10 hours of proofreading, form filling, photocopying, and filing would be billed for $1500 (10 hours x $150 an hour), couldn't they still charge $1500 if the software took 80 milliseconds to do the same job? Oh, the clients expect an itemized bill? Simple, the above charges would be "10 legal intern equivalent hours @ $150/hour". If a client questions it, the lawyer can ex…

I think the problem is one of mindset. From my perspective, even looking at accountants. Their industry and the clients they serve think that they are selling their "time", and not a service by itself. So, reducing the time it takes the lawyer/accountant to do something simply means less time being billed. It does not mean that they can now charge "more" for the time, as the cost per unit of that expert's time appears to be fixed by some other mechanism. Like seniority and years of experience, and not efficiency.

Perhaps bringing it back to a development perspective might shine some more light on it for us. Imagine you're a freelance developer and you've now developed (or bought) a fancy piece of software that allows you to do plenty of code-generation and reduce the amount of menial database layer code that needs to be written. You're now say 1.5x more efficient at delivering a product. What are you to do then? I doubt many clients would agree to a once-off fee for usage of your fancy code generation tool, even if you phrase it as saving "4 intern developer hours", and charge appropriately. There is also probably a cap on the hourly rate they're willing to pay you. Either that, or you change to a per-deliverable or product pricing model.

Sometimes change does need to be slow.

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

#506

Post by JonoBB »

daveguy wrote: post #463
tacostakohashi wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here seems to be that users/customers insist on customizing any such app to death. Personally, I think the optimal ticket system would have this data for each ticket: * A unique, prefixed ticket # (JIRA gets this right) * An assignee (like an email To:) * A reporter (like an email From:) * A one-line summary (like an email Subject:) * A multi-line body (like an email body, but ideally with markdown) * Att…

The app you seek is Asana. www.asana.com I'm not associated with them, but I have used them successfully for months at a time (better than most productivity software). The reason is it is well integrated and similar to email.

Asana's start up time is just ridiculously slow. Probably the slowest webapp I've ever used. Also, you can't assign more than one person to a ticket, which is a pretty big limitation

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

#507

Post by kpil »

sitkack wrote: post #478
stult wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I'm a lawyer and a product owner at a big accounting firm, so I'm pretty well positioned to discuss this topic. I have half a dozen solid startup ideas that I'm tempted to take and start running with right now. Documentation management alone is in desperate need of innovation. I build toy apps in my spare time that cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks, just withi…

> cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks Doesn't this take money away from your firm? It is only when firms are competing on cost, time or client recognized quality that they will institute better workflows via software.

Ha, never thought about it but I guess it's problematic to compete on cost in a scenario where the clients often need the best advice they can get...

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

#508

Post by cake93 »

waleedka wrote: post #387
cake93 wrote: post #372

AR/VR visualization of 3D and 4D microscopy data (multicolor 3D video, as well as 3D point clouds over time) for biological research. Look for "lattice light sheet microscopy" or "superresolution microscopy" such as (3D)-STORM or STED. These techniques are adopted at a high pace. Groups spent $ 500,000 and often more on the hardware. They can produce terabytes of data within days, but we hardly have any tools to view…

I'm intrigued! How do you interact with these images right now? Do you display it on screen and rotate it with the mouse? Can you elaborate a bit more about how would a VR/AR solution add value here other than being a fancier solution?

Manipulation with the mouse if you're lucky. Often this would involve Matlab, or some specialized software. But in many cases we don't even have this and people use Fiji to scroll through the z-dimension with a slider.

For presentations people often render a movie with Matlab, investing hours to get it right. With AR, you could take a movie by filming with a virtual camera in your hand.

Augmented Reality would add the most value. Some examples:

+ intuitive exploration of the data (imagine learning about a plant by scrolling through cross-sections)

+ intuitive manipulation of the perspective (the mouse 3D rotation thing is really tricky)

+ collaborative viewing

+ annotation of objects (eg. tracing a filament through 3D by following it with the finger)

+ avoid occlusion by just zooming and moving in

+ be able to point at things in a 3D image

It would bring much more natural ways to interact with the data. Essentially scaling up your molecular structure 10^6 to 10^7-fold so you can explore it as you'd explore a sculpture.

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

#509

Post by morgante »

zo1 wrote: post #505
mysterypie wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't they still bill whatever they want? If 10 hours of proofreading, form filling, photocopying, and filing would be billed for $1500 (10 hours x $150 an hour), couldn't they still charge $1500 if the software took 80 milliseconds to do the same job? Oh, the clients expect an itemized bill? Simple, the above charges would be "10 legal intern equivalent hours @ $150/hour". If a client questions it, the lawyer can ex…

I think the problem is one of mindset. From my perspective, even looking at accountants. Their industry and the clients they serve think that they are selling their "time", and not a service by itself. So, reducing the time it takes the lawyer/accountant to do something simply means less time being billed. It does not mean that they can now charge "more" for the time, as the cost per unit of that expert's time appear…

Exactly. The legal industry predominantly uses hourly billing and making up "equivalent hours" would be extremely unethical.

It's part of why I encourage everyone I know (particularly developers) to switch from hourly to fixed-price billing. Any efficiencies you gain should belong to you, not the customer. (There's also the fact that I find a lot more people are willing to pay $10k for X than $250/hr for 40 hours.)

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

#510

Post by contingencies »

verisimilidude wrote: post #395
contingencies wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I read, US homes are the second largest in the world, after Australia. In Asia, many people live in apartments and that space is unavailable / non-negotiable. In addition, microwaves are not nearly so widely used.

And yet, every tiny apartment I visited in Korea and Japan had a toaster oven. The toaster oven is an incredibly useful and versatile tool that can stand in for bigger appliances, like full-sized ovens, in pinched spaces.

Cool handle. Koreans all worship the US, so they are a bad sample.
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