Contrary to popular belief problems solved in unrelated domains are very common in invention and innovation but people just hate to admit them, hopefully in the near future someone can honestly write a book on it. One of the most prolific scientists Albert Einstein had his single most productive year while working as a patent officer (Annus Mirabilis). I strongly suspect that he learned quite a lot from many patent a…
Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
71–80 of 94 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#72Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#73Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#74The concept of bootstrapping. How to start something from nothing that eventually becomes self sustaining.
Compound interest and exponential growth. Particularly relevant to investing as well as the personal ‘growth’ mentality. The natural exponent that was discovered from compound interest is everywhere in mathematics and physics.
Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#75Kanban 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…
As it happens, limiting unfinished work items (aka WIP) boosts software development productivity as well. The space being taken up is mental, but is also a bad sign of things spinning out of control.
Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#76The 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…
For about a decade, as I flew a lot, I met a lot of mid level executives at all sorts of companies. I routinely asked them to describe if their company used any derivative products, and which, and why. I was astounded to learn pretty much everyone did, from pricing plastics, to dealing with international trade variations, to getting financing for projects.
There is a reason the derivatives market has a notional value of ~1 quadrillion, and it's not because the people using them are all idiots. Quite the contrary, this value is there because it adds value across every sector of the world economy, and business the world over voluntarily use these products because they deem it in their best interests, which almost universally is because it lowers costs and/or volatility.
This [1] claimed 94% of the world's biggest companies used derivatives, and this was in 2009. I'd expect more and more of them to use derivatives over time as more products get priced.
All this followed from the ideas in Black-Scholes, for pricing certain contracts, ideas which were later developed to handle all sorts of products. Before this, people did a lot of the pricing mostly by guesswork, making it much harder to design and use all these volatility reducing products.
[1] https://derivsource.com/2009/04/23/over-94-of-the-worlds-lar...
Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#77The 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…
I think you're off base on this. The ensuing financial mishaps just made the model better, but the creation of Black-Scholes brought us from 0% to 90% of the way to where we are today, where modern derivatives insure product price swings for almost everything across the world. Since then, a patch-work of model changes have brought us closer to perfect pricing through the realization that many markets have higher kurtosis.
Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#78The 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…
Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#79Earlier 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…
Re: Ask HN: What are some problems solved in unrelated domains?
#80A 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...
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/301563/what-is-the...