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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?

#71

Post by Jtsummers »

roymurdock wrote: post #66
Jtsummers wrote: post #48

1. Embedded (safety and criitical systems) 2. Knowledge sharing within companies/organizations. Formal methods (primarily their absence). Effective use of simulations in design, development, and V&V efforts. Requirements traceability (this is mundane and seems bureaucratic, but it's critical here). 3. Yes, to everything. For the first, break down information silos and project fiefdoms. Allow for greater flexibility f…

Surprised not to see the classic IoT security/connectivity combo here. Perhaps you're working on systems that are too deeply embedded to make use of (or allow for) connectivity.

Too old. These are for avionics systems that aren't going to change any time soon, and we're on the maintenance end so even if new systems come along we aren't building them.

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

#72

Post by mxvzr »

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…

5+ years of experience in adtech, on the advertisers' side mostly. By far the largest surprise for me was the amount of efforts that went into denying payouts to the publishers. That went anywhere from designing terms that reduces the likelihood of payouts to straight up fraud (ie. double accounting, scrubbing conversions, ...). Ultimately I think a lot has to do with greed: publishers simply expect too high of a payout for these clicks, and advertisers do not want to see the traffic go somewhere else so they align with these expectations. They are then caught in this unsustainable price war with competitors and resort to fraud to keep going. IMO the #1 issue with this industry is one of credibility.

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

#73

Post by bigtimeidiot »

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…

>It doesn't work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced.

This is a natural extension of "startup founder" becoming a an aspirational occupation for kids fresh out of college. Who needs real-world experience? Disrupt!

Technology is a tool to to aid your expertise.

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

#74

Post by erik »

egypturnash wrote: post #63
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 make comics, put 'em on the web for free, and occasionally print books. I was gonna say I have pretty much the same problem as you do. And hell, you and I are competing for the same resource: people's time and attention to give to our little package of artistic effort. So far the solution in comics seems to be "oh i know i'll make another damn portal, or another damn hosting site", which I'm pretty meh on.

I've seen several attempts to do the same thing with games. Introduce another site, or another portal, and hope to drive discoverability through it. But the audience has no incentive to visit your portal.

In games, Steam and the app stores are so critical because they have a massive audience that already have accounts that can make payments with minimum friction.

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

#75

Post by return0 »

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…

There's nothing wrong with fishing for problems. You can learn more about the problem at hand later.

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

#76

Post by pjc50 »

notalaser wrote: post #34
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…

> The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced. Aww, yisss. Case in point, EDA and, in particular, hardware description languages and tools. Every discussion I've had with someone trying to get into this has been so cringe-worthy that I'm actively avoiding now. Every self-professed hardware hacker thinks they have the solution that's going to end all this painful Verilog kerfuffle…

Heh :) I've been in an EDA startup, done FPGA work, and I even have a tiny corner of silicon on a shipping IC. I have a draft for a "better verilog" sitting in a text file. Verilog and VHDL are stuck in the FORTRAN77 era.

I've no intention of taking it further than that, because the industry is extremely conservative and there's no money in programming languages.

(I agree that the FPGA-silver-bullet people are annoying. And that people need to realise that FPGA is not programming. But perhaps the tools could help a bit more with that.)

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

#77

Post by RivieraKid »

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 don't fully agree with this argument. Yes, an advantage of focusing on problems that matter you is that you understand them the best and that it's probably more fun.

But on average, it'll be something that a bunch of other people tried or are trying to solve, so there will be more competition. A typical example is that most start-ups seem to focus on the end consumer despite the fact (well, assumption) that there's more opportunity in focusing on problems that companies have.

I think there's a lot of value of tackling non-IT problems with SV/startup/tech way of thinking. SpaceX might be an example of that - iterative development, openness, company culture, etc.

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

#78

Post by onuralp »

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…

You might be interested in this - "computational reproducibility using Continuous Integration to produce verifiable end-to-end runs of scientific analysis": https://greenelab.github.io/continuous_analysis/

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

#79

Post by Mz »

Not a single industry per se, but a major social problem offering potentially multiple business opportunities:

Homelessness is on the rise nationwide in part due to a serious lack of genuinely affordable housing. Among other things, in the 1960s and 70s, we tore down a lot of SROs. The Baby Boom generation was an anomaly. The unprecedented wealth of their parents was due to WW2. Yet, expectations from that era still shape housing policy and infrastructure, much to our detriment.

You do not necessarily need to be a construction company to play a role in addressing this issue. Another very serious problem is the lack of financing mechanisms for housing alternatives. For example, co-housing projects in the US tend to be self financed because we do not have financial products that fit them. This actively undermines their ability to add affordable housing to the system, a purpose they successfully serve in other countries, from what I have read.

There are, no doubt, many other things one could do to work on this issue.

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

#80

Post by kelvin0 »

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'm not quite sure what your point is. Is it that the OP seems too 'sneaky' for your taste and you'd prefer them coming right out and asking startup ideas/problems to work on?

In any case, what's wrong with trying to probe your peers for ideas and possible brainstorm? If you don't want to participate, simply do not comment, no?

I am a genuinely curious individual, and these are the questions I also like to ask, and not always because I want to profit immediately from them.

I'd be curious to get more of your feedback regarding this.

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