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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?

#671

Post by enraged_camel »

daveguy wrote: post #463
tacostakohashi wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here seems to be that users/customers insist on customizing any such app to death. Personally, I think the optimal ticket system would have this data for each ticket: * A unique, prefixed ticket # (JIRA gets this right) * An assignee (like an email To:) * A reporter (like an email From:) * A one-line summary (like an email Subject:) * A multi-line body (like an email body, but ideally with markdown) * Att…

The app you seek is Asana. www.asana.com I'm not associated with them, but I have used them successfully for months at a time (better than most productivity software). The reason is it is well integrated and similar to email.

Asana is pretty bad. It takes forever to load, which sucks when people send you URLs to tasks/projects and you have to open them individually and wait almost 10 seconds for each to open.

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

#672

Post by seehafer »

rbcgerard wrote: post #569
Joof wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I didnt have to risk becoming a lawyer, I'd love to combine some legal education with my programming and machine learning skills.

I always thought there should be a one year masters of law program - no path to practicing, but gives you the frameworks and knowledge to be a good consumer of law

There is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Studies_in_Law

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

#673

Post by bsder »

ajepst wrote: post #391

All the ballroom dance competitions use this old, disliked software to organize and run the events. The guy who wrote it isn't interested in making improvements, (and it can certainly use improvements) and is happy living off the income from people's per event usage rights. I am sure if something modern and regularly updated came out, it would get a lot of uptake. Thing is, the portion of it that runs during the even…

Holy crap. I've danced with Liz (she's an amazing dancer--I was not an amazing leader--she was very gracious).

Geez. Small world.

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

#674

Post by roundthecorner »

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…

Take a look at Apache Merton's architecture. They seem to have dealt with a number of inherent issues in the problem putting together data processing pipelines of open source components and ensuring they work together. The project is active but incubating right now.

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

#675

Post by bsder »

ajepst wrote: post #391

All the ballroom dance competitions use this old, disliked software to organize and run the events. The guy who wrote it isn't interested in making improvements, (and it can certainly use improvements) and is happy living off the income from people's per event usage rights. I am sure if something modern and regularly updated came out, it would get a lot of uptake. Thing is, the portion of it that runs during the even…

> I am sure if something modern and regularly updated came out, it would get a lot of uptake.

Would it? See, here's a dirty little secret: people can't deal with change.

Any change made to the software means people have to learn something new. And that results in tech support.

I once had a very nice chat with the CEO of a CNC company and asked him why certain features weren't implemented since his hardware was clearly capable of it. He was quite blunt that a single new feature added about 30% to his tech support budget for almost 3 years, and his tech support budget was almost 1/3 of his annual budget.

So, he simply will not add a feature until it results in an expected 500K in increased revenue or he has to fend off a competitor.

> Still, it's a real opportunity.

Is it? Actually?

And do you know ballroom competitions well enough to get all the corner cases correct? The Douglasses have been to a LOT of competitions and probably wrote this because they got tired of the grief caused by badly run competitions.

How many ballroom competitions exist (So, this is less that $1,000,000 per year in revenue MAX. And, this software is already in place with people know how to use it.

Your revenue will likely be $10-20K per year for a long while unless you completely displace this. And they can always drop their prices and block you out if they feel like it. And your tech support costs will be quite high.

I suspect the Douglasses made this same calculation and that's why they aren't improving it. It's just not worth the money.

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

#676

Post by cake93 »

billconan wrote: post #628
cake93 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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..

Is this volumetric data?

Yes.

These are images taken by confocal microscopy, where you focus a laser scanning microscope on a plane and only see that. Then you move the focus plane up by a bit and take the next picture.

Super-resolution microscopy such as STORM, STED or PALM on the other hand will give you coordinates.

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

#677

Post by mgkimsal »

terrib1e wrote: post #607
lucaspiller wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently found a department for the company I'm working for needs help as they have literally reached the limits of Excel. They have a sheet with around 30 rows and 150 columns, and they have 100 of these sheets (in a single Excel file). Some parts use formulas, but usually when somebody needs to change something they need to go through every single sheet. The issue is now when they try to add new data Excel won…

I work in the healthcare industry. Basically we ARE the industry nowadays, and we use excel and word to keep everything "organized". There are some half-ass designed software,websites, and databases that are used as well, but it's amazing how a multi-billion dollar company can rely on this level of technology. I think they get these bids to run state government programs, and have absolutely no plan in place. And for…

"it literally sickens me."

Goo thing you're in healthcare...

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

#678

Post by sorenvrist »

morgante wrote: post #453
tmsam wrote: post #235

A family member is a lawyer in the Worker's Comp, SS, and Family Law space. THE software for lawyers in this space is called A1 Law. It solves a lot of real problems lawyers in that space have (form letter generation, calendar integration, case management)... but it's so slow to use new technologies. They advertise PalmOS integration. My family member has to have their own server in a closet running the server versio…

I would strongly encourage people to think twice about trying to sell software to lawyers. It's a Sisyphean task. They are, as a rule, extremely anti-technology and conservative. At a previous startup, we had built software which was saving customers many hours a week—yet it was still an uphill battle to get paying approval. If even after all the warnings in this thread you really want to build legal software, focus…

> In general, law and media are two of the worst fields for technology

Could you expand on the "media" part?

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

#679

Post by alixaxel »

jefftk wrote: post #303
jsingleton18 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We solved RegEx and can guarantee worst-case linear time matching for any number of expressions. We should talk! www.watchful.io

guarantee worst-case linear time matching for any number of expressions Or you could just use RE2: https://github.com/google/re2/wiki/WhyRE2 It's open source, and match time is linear in the length of the input string. (Disclosure: I work at Google on a different open source project)

RE2 is great! I first discovered it while building namegrep.com and after benchmarking it against PCRE I never looked back. :)

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

#680

Post by funnyfacts365 »

contingencies wrote: post #511
q3r3qr3q wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then he will complain that his normal sized slices don't toast efficiently enough in one of those.

Others have complained if the slot is too big for the piece, the piece falls one side and gets toasted in one part and not in another part. That's other people's feedback, not mine. Some toasters have wire meshes that close in on the bread to hold it vertical, but they tend to leave marks.

Those marks can be a real problem... How will your stomach handle seeing the marks after you chewing the bread? /s
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