Earlier quoted context omitted.
What problem do rockets solve?
Problem: Gravity makes it hard to get into orbit. Solution: Rockets.
i can't imagine there 's unlimited demand for cheap rockets. it's not like everyone can send a satellite in order.
Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
91–100 of 152 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#921. Rockets 2. Cost of launch locks out potential customers and limits R&D uses. Global launch cadence is slow; getting into orbit is a multi-year adventure. 3. Yes, we're working on reusable rockets. However, this only goes so far. Personally, I think that more money needs to be put into non-rocket modes of space travel, so that there's some competition. The fundamental problem is that it takes so much energy (and, w…
What problem do rockets solve?
They enable access to trillions of dollars of metals and minerals. Shorter term they enable better data collection
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#931. Legal 2. Excessive costs, lack of performance among professionals 3. Change in attitude seems to be the biggest factor. If lawyers stop being about fighting and competing and persuading and more about tackling problems, getting to the truth and finding solutions, we can have a much better chance of succeeding. There is a lot of opportunity for automation that no one seems to want to get involved in. A good example…
Currently a lawyer who is also a programmer and does a lot of legal tech stuff. Some of us are tackling the automation side of things and many lawyers really do want to solve problems. A big issue is the billable hour but I see that disappearing :)
Email is in my bio so feel free to ping me if you want to chat about it!
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#941. Programming
2. I don't know if it's stopping the industry from growing, but existing communication tools (specifically chat, email) are a serious drain on attention and productivity. See http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html.
3. I'm working on it. Might be better tooling, might be educating people on how harmful they can be.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great way to give your hard-earned money to large trading firms.
Are you sure you understood the site? You don't give them money or anything.
I am pretty sure you are misunderstanding the comment.
The comment is not "By signing up for Quantopian, you pay a membership fee to Quantopian, which is run by large trading firms."
The comment is "Large trading firms make money by being the counterparty of day traders making mistakes." When you mess up - which isn't just losing USD, it is underperforming the market's usually-positive return - there is someone out there on the other side of the trade who is buying what you sold and selling what you bought. When you underperform the market, they overperform the market by exactly as much.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#96Earlier 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…
Algo trading is about having the edge. The edge is something you have and other people don't. Enjoy your feature engineering. (Meaning: selling the same curated data product to many customers undermines its value. Overpricing it and selling only to the selected few, on the other hand...)
But this is algo trading specifically, the scope for curated datasets is larger.
Plus, what stops anyone building on top of a dataset? If this isn't dive ebay value do any third parties add?
A dataset sold to many customers doesn't undermine the price charged by the seller, as there would be no competitive advantage by not using it either.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#97Intersection 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.…
Do you recommend any open-source tool/stack for complex event processing?
Akka has had a lot of success.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#98I 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 idea of solving any problems for an industry that you haven't worked in for at least a couple of years is ludicrous.
I'm sure there have been examples of this happening a few times, but it's almost always the exception rather than the rule.
This is especially true when it comes to high level problems in most industries. In most cases there are a few hundred or more smaller issues that add up to create the bigger high level problems, and those issues are almost never even considered when the startups try to disrupt the industry.
Every industry, no matter how small is going to have issues the derive from third parties and outside players that can't be solved by a twist of the business model.
There are a lot of old timers using very old dos era applications in their day to day business, and if you really spend time with them and learn their business you'll learn there is almost always a very valid reason that they haven't switched the latest greatest web-app software that startup founders tend to think can solve all of their problems.
The moral of the story is, founders need to stop trying to swoop in and disrupt industries where they don't even have a clue of the real pain points, and their SaaS solution would just be a new coat of paint on on old issue that isn't solved.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#99Earlier 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?
Yes where are these data sets ?
Re: Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry?
#1001. Legal 2. Excessive costs, lack of performance among professionals 3. Change in attitude seems to be the biggest factor. If lawyers stop being about fighting and competing and persuading and more about tackling problems, getting to the truth and finding solutions, we can have a much better chance of succeeding. There is a lot of opportunity for automation that no one seems to want to get involved in. A good example…
Currently a lawyer who is also a programmer and does a lot of legal tech stuff. Some of us are tackling the automation side of things and many lawyers really do want to solve problems. A big issue is the billable hour but I see that disappearing :) Email is in my bio so feel free to ping me if you want to chat about it!
In almost every case, the lawyers are the problem not the solution.