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Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

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

#111

Post by jasonlhy »

dhruvkar wrote: post #65
frequentnapper wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is having access to these niche fields and knowing enough to be able to create something useful.

agreed, a lot of it is niche knowledge that you could only gain by working in such a field or having close access to a company. Consulting within a niche is one way to do this.

I would say the biggest challenge of this kind of field is it is so big so no one actually know everything. The rule also varies between countries. For example, the construction rule in England may be different from the rule in the US

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

#114

Post by basch »

dhruvkar wrote: post #36

Construction is a big field, and there are many niche industries within it. I work in natural stone. There are several different types of companies just in this niche. Usually the flow of product is: quarries -> factories -> distributors (us) -> fabricators -> kitchen and bath shops -> end user There are maybe 5-7 major pieces of software for the first four stages. "Under-served" is an understatement. Similarly, ther…

And there are a couple big exit paths. Autodesk, Trimble, Oracle, Nemetschek, RIB and for more specialized software InEight. If Procore stays independent, and goes from innovator to incumbent, they may start to absorb new combing competitors as well (like Instagram and whatsapp, were hedges against market share loss.) CMiC, IFS, Oracle Axonex and Trimble Viewpoint (including Spectrum) can't be ignored.

If you're looking for ideas, look for things those companies don't do, or largely do with legacy components to their suites. Up and comers include Revitzto, Katerra, Alice, BuildSafe, Rhumbix, BioSite

The other thing construction doesn't do is edi. Compared to logistics, all POs between firms accounting systems are pdfs and data entry. Interoperable accounting systems will be a huge paradigm shift, where blockchain could be more than a buzzword.

The real future in BIM is around things like Autodesk Plasma and Forge. https://www.aecmag.com/technology-mainmenu-35/1821-beyond-re...

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

#115

Post by seoulsubway »

twiclo wrote: post #108
hermitcrab wrote: post #96

Most software is written by men for men. Try writing something aimed at women.

What does that even mean? Do you want developers to put flowers over their UIs?

It's a sexist making a sexist comment attempting to brigade some sort of emotion from anyone that reads it.

Nothing is made for men. It's made for users. Even something as manly as a razorblade for shaving facial hair is used by women too.

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

#116

Post by ereinertsen »

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…

The Broad Institute has assembled a really talented and growing team of engineers and data scientists in an effort to accelerate science: https://www.broadinstitute.org/data-sciences-platform (DSP).

They develop open-source platforms that are inspired by and seek to solve problems lived firsthand by collaborators (such as myself) and the greater scientific community.

The Broad has created an environment and provided resources to enable engineers to do great work. The DSP feels like a blend between tech company and academic research institution. The people I've interacted with are technically superb (and also nice).

If you are interested in contributing to the intersection of life science and compute, would strongly recommend you check them out.

This may be off topic if you consider above to not be sufficiently "blue collar", but biomedicine in general (from the entire spectrum of basic science all the way to care delivery) is in dire need of smart computational folks.

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

#117

Post by kls »

gumby wrote: post #66

Agriculture. There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what they think ag needs. Most of them fail. Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are NOT dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don’t have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run corpor…

--all know how to weld

I had to laugh at this as it took me back. I grew up on a citrus farm, raised by my grandparents. My grandfather knew how to stick and MIG weld but did not know how to TIG weld. As more and more parts where being created in non iron based metals, he bought a TIG welder and made me learn how to TIG weld as he did not want to learn anything new at that stage in his life. That is also how I learned how to rebuild automatic transmissions, anyways it's amazing how many times knowing how to weld has come in useful over the years.

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

#118

Post by kls »

Swtrz wrote: post #112

Most law enforcement applications are the same : a monolithic crud .net client connecting to a version of sql server and each one is god awful. They need strong saas apps, Im tired of managing them.

I pick up contracts from a law enforcement software vendor and can confirm that most of the software in the industry is abominable. When I picked up the contract their system was a win32 C/C++ GUI, communicating to a custom built geo server. I felt like I was back in the late 80's early 90's doing development again. Anyways I modernized their stack to web and mobile tech and people in the industry think their are wizards of dark magic. It's amazing how behind the times that industry is.

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

#119

Post by kls »

jtolmar wrote: post #46
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but it's too hard to sell to the government for a small startup. The RFP process is so long and brutal, and most of the time you need to have a man on the inside and basically go through that process as a formality because you are already guaranteed the contract.

What about the RFP process itself then? Can a company make it easier for startups to sell to the government?

you would be better off just making an American Indian, female, midget your CEO so you can short circuit the process. If you think that is a joke, it's not, each one of those items scores high points in the RFP process and sets you ahead of the pack. That is the problem with a software solution for it and that is that it is innately a human process. A combination of who you know and who you are. The rest is just fluff on paper.
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