Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 176 posts

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#11

Post by Ididntdothis »

When I was contractor I did a lot of niche apps for small businesses. I think it comes down to your ability to sell. I suck at it so not much success for me. But there is a ton of opportunity if you are willing to talk to people about their needs and then go out to sell. You won’t be the next unicorn but you can make decent money and it’s fun working with small business owners.

Add: I often saved them countless hours with some simple Excel VBA or running a loop over a database table. Really simple stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#12

Post by travisjungroth »

howardhughes wrote: post #7
yarper wrote: post #5

If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage. Also maintenance & repair operations (a whole lot of dirty fingerprints going on there).

> If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage Apart from writing full blown avionics systems for engine/flight control - what are you suggesting?

Not obviously, but it could be. Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane. Maybe software could help with those.

Edit: my reply was to the original comment which was something like "how is this a software problem?"

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#13

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

I've started looking at software to help with residential construction tasks, i.e. the construction of a single-family house.

My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#14

Post by dwrodri »

There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because PIs aren’t investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to innovate.

Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs that were assigning research assistants to manually count cells in images, and manually sweeping through images to find stills that were in focus.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#15

Post by technics256 »

dwrodri wrote: post #14

There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because PIs aren’t investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to innovate. Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs…

I'm a consultant and work in AI and cloud stuff - do these lab instruments have cameras or ways to feed the images into an ai model? I can see about creating something basic for you.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#17

Post by quaquaqua1 »

dwrodri wrote: post #14

There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because PIs aren’t investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to innovate. Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs…

Interesting problem. If that sort of thing is able to be solved with a few raspis, open mpi, and some ML libraries then cool. But if it's more complex than that, basically it's an MA thesis in itself :)

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#18

Post by travisjungroth »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #6

Was just reading a long list of complaints about poor software quality from a variety of industries' vendors. Might be some good opportunities in there. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_th...

That thread is gold. Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#19

Post by rcarmo »

peter-m80 wrote: post #10

Lawyers and justice

This. So MUCH this. Legal-related software is mostly souped-up search engines, there is so much to be done here.

Many legal professionals are barely computer-literate, of course (and that is a big issue) but many are increasingly savvy and feel constrained by various proprietary solutions.

(Edit: typo and further commentary)

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#20

Post by IggleSniggle »

quaquaqua1 wrote: post #17
dwrodri wrote: post #14

There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because PIs aren’t investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to innovate. Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs…

Interesting problem. If that sort of thing is able to be solved with a few raspis, open mpi, and some ML libraries then cool. But if it's more complex than that, basically it's an MA thesis in itself :)

Even with a few raspis, open mpi, and some ML libraries, can probably be an MA thesis.
Post reply on HN