131–140 of 176 posts
(plug: at Commure - developer.commure.com, we are one of them, but that's independent of the larger point).
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.
The LIF is a binary blob wrapped in an XML structure. There has been some good work done by the people Open Microscopy Environment building some Java libraries for parsing these files, but to be quite frank I'm a bit rough around the edges when it comes to working with Java and all the computer vision stuff I know is in Python and C++.
If you're serious about this offer, then I can look into getting you some samples (if you can't easily find them yourself). But full disclosure, I don't think any PI or lab that I know of would be able to afford GPU compute hours, but most of them have access to a cluster, so if you can deliver a JAR (or a Docker container) I could demonstrate how they could quickly deploy that themselves on their own hardware.
Healthcare - which affects all of us and is 18% of GDP - is by far the most underserved by software. It is a bad version of the 90's for doctors, nurses, patients and everyone else. There are a number of firms that are trying to make this better. (plug: at Commure - developer.commure.com, we are one of them, but that's independent of the larger point).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fluf…
Sure, you can get some points for diversity, but in the end, diversity only gets a few small contracts here and there while the establishment rakes in the Lion's share.
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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?
It's a broken process; you keep chasing various people to add their input, you end up with "RFP for Client A version 2 version C with input from Frank version 3.xlsx"
I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps the existing SaaS/online solutions are too intrusive to setup, or people don't want that stuff in the cloud. Whatever reason it is, the current process is broken.
Generally RFPs have to be easy for the buyer; the vendor is kind of supposed to bend over backward anyway, especially at this point of the sales process.
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?
The women I know tend to have different creatives hobbies than men's creative hobbies (think crocheting vs woodworking). I'm willing to be there are more woodworking CAD programs than equivalent programs for crocheting in the market.
There are fishing lure design applications. Can you think of something similar for a more feminine hobby?
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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.
The images are z-stacks[1] and the images are in a proprietary format called LIF (Leica Image Format). The images are taken from this camera[2]. I was actually doing some of my own research into doing this, but as I mentioned it appears that Leica has put very little effort into making the output of their hardware easy to work with. The LIF is a binary blob wrapped in an XML structure. There has been some good work d…
I can take a Stab, but the file format and Java stuff could be a problem. Let's see
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…
>Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain. I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something
That would be all of them. Spreadsheets always end up running a business, because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is inevitably expressed in numbers.
Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain. I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something
> industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets That would be all of them . Spreadsheets always end up running a business, because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is inevitably expressed in numbers. Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom…
That's not untrue, but perhaps too reductive a view on business, as it ignores "soft" market factors like being primarily risk-oriented vs revenue-oriented, the company's reputation, leadership vision, employee fitness to perform, technical debt, etc.
Yes, they all boil down to more or less revenue, profit and growth, but if you only ever look at the spreadsheets, you'll be divorced from reality.
> Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
A major selling point for custom software beyond the simple Excel-like CRUD variants is its adoption of sectoral or company assumptions and goals. Yes, that introduces rigidity, but not all rigidity is bad. Most if not all sectors have standards and regulations to comply with, as well as market constraints.
I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business, whereas bad rigidity is due to leaky abstractions or poorly bounded contexts. The latter indicates the product is maladapted to day-to-day business operations.