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

Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 117 posts

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

#61

Post by cdevs »

yazr wrote: post #49
cdevs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a sql to elasticsearch mapping tool I feel I should of released. Eleasticsearch is in desperate need of many tools we take for granted in sql land, like a command line client you can easily punch in queries on the fly because trying to write multi line json into the commandline curl is death so I'm forced to install kibana.

Can you give a few more examples ? I am interested because writing these support tools IS effort+time+focus but not usually a technical problem.

Mostly emulating what phpMyAdmin can do, the time spent for a elasticsearch beginner trying to figure out how to clear a index without losing or having to rebuild their mapping is insane, basically the answer is just don't and just copy your mapping but if something could easily extract that and say flush index then awesome. Creating mappings is a nightmare if you don't remember what types they have and it would be insanely simple to do the phpMyAdmin style of create table where you type in a "column" name and then use the drop down for the type "string, date, geo point".

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

#63

Post by featherverse »

Curious. About 1 week ago I saw a post on reddit that asked "What product would you pay $20,000 for?" I thought that was odd, typically that's not how you plan a business, you find something or create something of value and then you sell it. You don't start from how much you want to earn and then look for ways to earn that much.

Now here's a similar post, what would you pay "$10,000/yr" for.

You can label me a skeptic, but I wouldn't buy anything from anyone who's primary motivation for starting their business is to make X amount of dollars in Y timeframe.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

#64

Post by featherverse »

cdevs wrote: post #57
notadoc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I have no direct experience with salesforce but I have heard numerous people discuss similar things as either consultant centric services or outright business models. Is this that common?

Honestly leaving salesforce is a piece of cake if it weren't for the ecosystem of other tools and integrations. A few years back I did a simple export of all our salesforce data and made a demo of a salesforce clone and if that wasn't good enough it was easy to import into sugar crm. 1 out of 40 salesman complained it wasn't exactly the same so they stayed and went full force with plugins and now it's a web of plugin…

I think it's a two step process. First, install SuiteCRM, second, replace all those salesforce plugins with a single SuiteCRM developer who can craft custom plugins.

This has the added benefit that you can then sell those SuiteCRM plugins to other businesses.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

#65

Post by vram22 »

bgia wrote: post #43

Extracting data from PDF in a reliable way.

Extracting at least text from PDFs is not always 100% perfect, due to inherent issues with the PDF format (partly because it is a graphic format, and does not have a one-to-one mapping to text, also maybe because of some weird decisions they made). I both read about this and was told about this by a key person at a PDF software product company, whose product I researched and then used in a project. The product was xpdf (a C library, it also had binaries or EXEs), from Glyph and Cog. I was contracted by a client to research PDF libraries for extraction of text from PDF; found and evaluated a few, then recommended xpdf to the client, and used it in the project. That is how I know this.

The only guaranteed way to get 100% accurate text from PDF is ... to not do it :) Instead, get the text from the same source that is used to generate the PDF. Obviously, that will not always be possible, but when it is, it is the better solution.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

#66

Post by ellius »

I do fraud investigations for a bank. We spend an insane amount on labor costs because all of our transactional data resides in different systems. Want to review credit card data? Go pull system X. Want to review wire transfers? Go pull system Y. Etc etc. some of these things have to be separated out of necessity (e.g. card data is stored in a particular way due to regulations), but I would easily pay 10k / y to be able to get a complete view of customer transaction activity from a single place. We'd save millions in labor costs if someone could pull it off correctly.
Post reply on HN