There's a lot of software you could build to help grassroots mobilization efforts. However, there's not a lot of money in that business.
Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?
171–176 of 176 posts
Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?
#172Healthcare - 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).
Commure looks fascinating, I was hoping something like this existed! I work in publicly-funded mental health/social services. Our programs use 5 different EHRs, then we have to interact with 4 more supplied by county funders for billing and compliance. It's a real Tower of Babel shitstorm to transfer data between systems in the absence of interoperability standards like FHIR. As you note, the current fragmented state…
Thank you, glad to hear you say that - you certainly have a wonderfully colorful way of describing the problem we are trying to fix!
Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Convince regulators that advanced control techniques can be used on flight software (model-based predictive control, optimal control, etc.) We know how to do these, maybe not as safe as we can with simpler methods today, but convincing the public and regulators will always be the challenge in aviation/aerospace. Probably the only realistic (software related) method in today's world without a materials/battery improve…
So I don't know the first thing about aircraft control, but I'm a control engineer by training. What control scheme do aircraft use today? I always thought it was a form of MPC (well GPC = generalized predictive control) with a state estimator like a linear Kalman filter.
Are you familiar with DO-178? Basically outputs have to be deterministic.. so you can't really use advanced control techniques.
I haven't worked on flight control (but control on specific aircraft systems, which are at the same level), and they're all basically PID control thrown together.
Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I learned programming in order to do my job more effectively while I was employed as a research assistant in a university neuroscience lab. At some point I realized that programmers in industry get paid 10x more (not an exaggeration, literally 10x) so I left after a couple years. I enjoyed my time there a lot, I was building tools to help very smart and motivated people solve cool science problems. My users sat acros…
Out of curiosity - what are the typical tools that you built? I am in industry but sometimes have a crisis of meaning. I would not be able to sit next to researches but was wondering if there is a gap in open source tools that I (or someone else) could help to cover.
I did work in three areas: image processing, control systems, and bioinformatics.
The image processing was pretty simple. Object identification and cell counting, mostly. There are already good open-source tools to do this kind of thing, so my contribution was mostly integrating those tools into the lab's workflows to make people more efficient.
I wrote some simple embedded code and MATLAB programs to create a better user interface for one of our custom-built microscopes. The users could specify the types of scans they wanted at a higher level and the system would automatically gather the data, then present the results and let the user re-run with adjusted parameters.
The bioinformatics thing was the coolest and most ambitious project, although we only partially realized our goal in the time I was there. It helps automate some of the more tedious and easy-to-screw-up bits of planning cloning/transgenic experiments.
Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I don't know the first thing about aircraft control, but I'm a control engineer by training. What control scheme do aircraft use today? I always thought it was a form of MPC (well GPC = generalized predictive control) with a state estimator like a linear Kalman filter.
Are you familiar with DO-178? Basically outputs have to be deterministic.. so you can't really use advanced control techniques. I haven't worked on flight control (but control on specific aircraft systems, which are at the same level), and they're all basically PID control thrown together.
Ah no, aircraft control is outside of my province, so this is new knowledge.
Advanced control can be deterministic -- through parameterization. Explicit MPC [1] does this. It pre-computes the quadratic optimization problem offline, so all the solutions are enumerated and stored, and are verifiable. However, as far as I know no one has implemented this commercially.
Interesting that it's all PID. Not surprised though because PID is tried-and-true (but even so, has a lot of tiny nuances which takes years to understand).
[1] https://www.mathworks.com/help/mpc/explicit-mpc-design.html
Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you familiar with DO-178? Basically outputs have to be deterministic.. so you can't really use advanced control techniques. I haven't worked on flight control (but control on specific aircraft systems, which are at the same level), and they're all basically PID control thrown together.
Ah no, aircraft control is outside of my province, so this is new knowledge. Advanced control can be deterministic -- through parameterization. Explicit MPC [1] does this. It pre-computes the quadratic optimization problem offline, so all the solutions are enumerated and stored, and are verifiable. However, as far as I know no one has implemented this commercially. Interesting that it's all PID. Not surprised though…
Thanks for the link, I was not familiar. I'm not sure if any current commercial systems use these methods.
I know the defense industry uses a lot of advanced techniques because they're their own regulators.