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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?

#531

Post by dgudkov »

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

On a smaller scale my EasyMorph might be of help. It's a lightweight ETL and you can do with it way more than with data preparation tools http://easymorph.com

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

#532

Post by cake93 »

bicubic wrote: post #516
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…

Do you know where I could source some sample data? I'm developing a VR data visualization system but not in this particular context, could certainly look into it.

[follow up]

For Light Sheet 3D video of developing fly embryo take a look here: http://www.digital-embryo.org/ They have movies and also downloads of the raw data and Matlab pipline for analysis.

Notice that this was published in 2012. Fresh data doesn't get published before the analysis is done and the paper written..

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

#533

Post by joshvm »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #371
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #85

Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.

There isn't a combination of laser scanning and/or structured light projection scanning that can accomplish this? Or is it a speed/quality control issue of the output?

Triangulation laser scanning is about the closest you get in terms of accuracy. It can work on virtually any surface, including specularly reflective ones (I've worked on bespoke systems for the steel industry). It's accurate down to microns, but the usual problem is the field of view sucks - either you go further away and sacrifice resolution or you go really close and accept that you need to move the scanner (or object) around a lot. For small things, it's fine. You put your doodad on a turntable. For cars, forget it.

Stereo structured light is great, but doesn't work on specularly reflective objects. You've seen those amazing depth maps from the guys at Middlebury? Wonder how they get perfect ground truth on motorbike cowls that are essentially mirrors? Well they have to spray paint them grey so that you can see the light. The next problem is that you're limited by the resolution of the projector (so I guess if you own a cinema, yay!) and the cameras. Then you have to do all the inter-image code matching which sounds trivial in the papers, but in practice a lot harder (and since you don't get codes at all pixels you need to interpolate, etc, etc).

There are handheld scanners like the Creaform which work pretty well on small things, but I don't know what the accuracy is like.

The ultimate system would probably be a high-resolution, high-accuracy, scanned LIDAR system. Then you lose the problems with scanning ranges/depth of field, but you accept massively higher cost and possibly a much longer scan time for accurate systems.

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

#534

Post by zodiac »

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…

> Can't they still bill whatever they want?

I think contracts (between law firms and their clients) use hours worked because they don't know upfront how complicated cases will be, how long it will take etc. It's not just for "understandable pricing". Your "bill whatever they want" suggestion is basically saying that at the end, the law firm can quote whatever price they want, and the client agrees up front to pay that.

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

#535

Post by pbhjpbhj »

contingencies wrote: post #64
Jtsummers wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you want, then, is more akin to a sandwich press rather than a toaster. Or perhaps a toaster oven. Mechanically, it's not impossible, but the design of a toaster (spring loaded release, heating elements on either side) can't be altered much without turning it into one of those two things (or a poor imitation of them).

Seems a tortured equation: perhaps a vertical sandwich press without the press! I was thinking it may be possible to change the spring to another form of vertical linear actuator (eg. stepper motor driven) and giving it more controlled movement, also smarter with proximity/LOS-style sensors. Perhaps the top cover could also expand and contract. The very fact there's a spring-loaded release shows this is old tech. The…

Would an ordinary stepper motor cope with the temperatures? Our cheap toaster has a handle that lifts (so isn't limited by spring return); and the socket off switch is the backup for when you need to jam a form in to reach to get your crumpet out.

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

#536

Post by agentgt »

lucaspiller wrote: post #462

Surprised nobody has mentioned the elephant in our industry yet: recruiters and recruitment companies. I'm not talking about those employed by big companies, but those who are independent. For the last year and a bit I've been contracting with a company, and the recruiter who found me has fees of around 10% per day of my work, which they bill the company. They found me via LinkedIn, sent me a couple of emails, arrang…

I'm the founder of a recruiting software company (SnapHop) and I will tell the recruiting industry like the real estate industry is actually shockingly difficult to disrupt. This is in part because recruiting is basically sales. Except your not selling a simple widget but a massive change. A career change for many is filled with as much trepidation as public speaking (I'll find the source shortly).

The other problem similar to health care is regulation and compliance but mainly it is because the industry is a very human industry despite all the big-data machine learning promises. Getting rid of recruiting is like getting rid of sales.

The big players in the industry are pretty much equivalent to google and facebook -> indeed and linkedin. The problem is you can only make so much money on advertising so they are trying to automate recruiting but still rely heavily on a service based approach (that is you still need humans). This is because advertising exacerbates the signal to noise ratio.

When google enters the industry (which I believe they just did recently) expect linkedin and indeed to become even more service based (ie highly efficient super recruiting firms).

Consequently cutting edge recruiting software has now become more focused on marketing automation which is what my company does (albeit we are more focused on the traditional inbound aka websites instead of the annoying email nagware you have seen). That is giving recruiters better tools to do their job.

That being said my recent idea is instead of giving recruiters (or corp talent acquisition marketing) sales automation what if we give individual candidates that software? That is give the candidates drip campaigns and automated sales replies and beautiful personal career portfolio websites. That is allow smart candidates to sell to recruiters and company at scale.

I haven't figured out the monetization for it or the actual demand but I think it would be interesting and potential disruptive empowering candidates.

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

#537

Post by zodiac »

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…

But most judges are making subjective decisions and not just "running code". The US constitution is law; can you compile it into code such that a computer could tell you whether a particular piece of legislation was unconstitutional? If you could, why hasn't such a computer replaced most of the US Supreme Court?

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

#538

Post by pbhjpbhj »

biztos wrote: post #204
weaksauce wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair there shouldn't be any voltage inside the toaster basket area when the toast has popped up. Unless they did something stupid when designing the toaster. And you can always unplug it before sticking utensils in there.

I've had the same thing happen with toasters, and at least as of a few years ago it was completely possible for a piece of toast (of just the wrong size) to get stuck such that it not only didn't pop up, the toaster didn't turn off. So the toast starts to burn, you grab a knife, what could possibly go wrong? This happened pretty regularly as it was a European toaster designed for perfectly uniform extruded wonder-"to…

Don't you just turn it off at the wall... if you don't have completely useless wall sockets.

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

#539

Post by Retric »

briandear wrote: post #526
morgante wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The problem with fixed price as a developer is that rarely are requirements exactly understood or detailed enough to actually be able to bid the job. "Export to PDF" ok.. no problem -- that then turns into: "can you add page numbers? Can you support A4 - and US letter sizes?" And you have scope creep-- one more little thing isn't reasonable to say no to, however it quickly becomes a death by a thousand paper cuts. Ok…

You can pass some, but not all efficiency gains on for a net win. Windows would cost billions if Microsoft only had one customer.

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

#540

Post by 6stringmerc »

fudged71 wrote: post #242
6stringmerc wrote: post #134

A monthly subscription service for a fee of $5 - $10 where every month I get a new kind of quirky instrument (shaker, wind, wood block and stick, whistle, triangle, or other noise maker) as a surprise by mail. The point of the service in the music industry is to inspire new sounds and the device can either be kept or given away to somebody without a lot of second thought. Getting stuck is a big problem. Also in music…

This would be fantastic for educators as well!

Now that you mention it, I think the idea might be inspired by what Dolly Parton does with her reading program. A child can sign up and the program will send them books for free. Considering music and arts funding don't seem to be high priorities in modern US systems (my perspective, could be wrong) having a low-cost or charitable music version sounds like it fits nicely too.

Honestly I'm pulling up memories now of watching other people's kids over the years playing with various music stuff I've handed over (Korg Monotron synths were the biggest hit) and those are really pleasant to recall!

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