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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?

#91

Post by rb808 »

rayiner wrote: post #6

Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required. Probably half the video conferences I’ve tried to participate in in the last year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in, dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no account creation, registration, or sof…

I also want a screen for the audio/video conference to show where the sound is coming from, so we can mute that one guy who doesn't turn his mike off and is heavy breathing on the call.

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

#92

Post by rb808 »

I'm on the board of my condo building's HOA which has a number of things that would be helpful.

* We pay $200/mo for a basic website with forum, some billing things, some file storage and other stuff I never use. It looks like it was written 20 years ago. (If someone can recommend something already out there that would be helpful)

* Doorman accepts dozens of package deliveries each day which get sent email and tracked in above system when picked up. Needs to write apt number on box and have its own tracking system

* I have to approve lots of expenses not knowing what fixing the hvac unit should cost

* we're getting screwed by insurance company - I have no idea if our policy is good or not

* Insurance claims for damage is a huge s* show

* Energy management is horrible, we dont know where our electricity is going or how we can cut down

* Contractors are unreliable - I want to know who is blacklisted from neighbouring buildings because they suck

* How do our expenses compare to others? I have no idea.

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

#93

Post by basch »

ctrl+f "construction" = 0 results.

https://angel.co/construction

small construction companies are still in the stone age. plangrid and submittal exchange exist but not much else is popular.

textura is owned by oracle, and everything else is owned by trimble and autodesk.

theres a plethera of attempts at field document management, and timecards, but 0 great medium-large business size erps. procore is like half an erp without an accounting system.

there is a huge untapped thirst for something that "just works" regarding labor productivity tracking and document management.

construction is one of the places where I think an enterprise blockchain could actually apply better than a traditional database. imagine a construction project with one blockchain, and every general contractor, sub, and vendor participating. shares, payments, todo, gantt charts, drawings, the model itself. they can all access the database from whatever supported client their firm uses (think email clients all working with each other) but on the backend working on one shared distributed database. I think you could turn down the bad actor security a bit, similar to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-microsoft-...

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

#94

Post by kowdermeister »

kodablah wrote: post #23
kowdermeister wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe start small to test your startup idea and then you don't need a military grade server setup ready for WW3. :)

Depends on if, by "start small", you mean small effort or small money. Having those things I mentioned shouldn't be expensive, but are huge effort. I want to start small, but if I can't do something as simple as delegate SSH access or search my logs, I can't even test my idea. What I'm talking about is meant to increase the ability to start small for those of us w/out dedicated ops teams.

My point is that you don't need an ops team or lots of ops to being with. A single server can do miracles for a good period of time.

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

#95

Post by cloogshicer »

austenallred wrote: post #67

This is a really simple but basic one. Market size might not be billions of dollars, but a basic learning management system along the lines of Teachable/Udemy that allows for code with built-in testing would be used overnight by a dozen code bootcamps and would pull a lot of people out of the other platforms. Maybe it's just a feature, not a full product, but it makes any "learn to code" MOOC unusable.

What exactly do you mean when you say testing? Like being able to write unit/integration tests? Or testing whether or not the submitted code fulfils some requirements/assignment?

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

#96

Post by AutoEngineer »

Working for a German Big four Car OEM. We need the following for measurement data and we simply have no solution (except matlab, which is not good enough).

We want to plot big data (up to terabytes). Columns should be selectable by gui and nameable. The Data then should be be added to database with an ID. Everything should be usable without use of a scripting language.

Right now the terabytes of data have to be loaded in to ram just to see the first few lines and determine what the columns stand for. Now I know that there are editors that can load data partially but these have to be reinstalled which requires admin rights etc. This is a huge burden in a big company! The process of simply plotting, selecting and storing data takes a huge amount of time. The solution should be web based because no admin rights are availabe.

Often I am impressed how many tools and hacks exist simply to get one thing done: visualize measurement data. Excel is not enough because even the import of dot vs comma vs tab etc takes too much time and everytime has to be relearned. Engineers have to plot the data sometimes every few months and then you have a new excel version that autocorrects measurement data to dates or whatever.

In my opinion this would solve an obscene amount of work. Right now every engineer is hacking together some scripts that are extremely inflexible. When just csv-type data has to be handled.

Edit: this also applies to smaller amounts of data of megabytes. How can we plot them more robust than excel and then select x and y axis? I am pretty sure that we would love to buy a product that solves these issues.

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

#97

Post by fermienrico »

snerbles wrote: post #75
SteveNuts wrote: post #3

Open hardware and software for PLCs for manufacturing.

The PLC/robotics/industrial automation space is often ten to twenty years behind in software best practices, with things like source control being completely alien to many vendors. Documentation can also be hard to come by, buried behind layers of paywalls and service agreements. Of course, installations are usually expected to function for ten to twenty years at a minimum...an order of magnitude greater than anythin…

No one is saying to use the latest javascript framework for programming robots.

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

#98

Post by daxfohl »

kodablah wrote: post #4

I'll take a startup in a box. I want Kubernetes, Elastic, Kibana, FileBeat, Prometheus, Consul, Grafana, databases, HTTP gateways, etc all set up on on the cloud (or set of servers) of my choice and a dashboard that lets me add users (e.g. like a modern Webmin/cPanel+WHM) and make minor config changes if I don't want to run these myself. I want those things HA and I want stable hostnames for them (e.g. Consul DNS on…

re k8s: https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/honestly-i-cant-stand-k8s-48...

But ultimately all these arguments converge to: something that beats k8s's suckiness is a potential startup.

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

#100

Post by canadianwriter »

awshepard wrote: post #85
raleigh_user wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by this? As in, people hate doing marketing or they don't understand how to advertise? Plus, a mistake can cost valuable data? Where are you losing data?

Not OP, but worked in the field for a time. Trafficking usually means configuring your ad in the campaign management system. What are your targeting parameters, what are your tracking tags, uploading the ad itself, entering in lots of custom information that while conceptually similar across ad platforms usually has different names and often has to be manually entered. A lot of platforms do offer APIs of some sort to…

What this guy said. It's a very manual process.
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