
Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your industry? - aman-pro
1. Which industry do you work in?<p>2. What are the biggest problems stopping your industry from growing?<p>3. Can something be done about it?
======
throwaway2016a
I may be reading between the lines too much and I apologize if I am...

But every few months (weeks?) I see a post by a founder-type essentially
trying to mine the Hacker News collective brains for startup ideas. It doesn't
work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself
have experienced.

The idea of a savior who comes in and solving the major problems of an
industry they have never worked in is not a myth but close to one. (Elon Musk
being a notable exception with cars and space flight... but he has the capital
to attract domain experts to fill in the gaps)

I'd point out the problems in my industry except I am actively working to
solve them :)

With that said. Don't let a "know-it-all" on HN (myself included) tell you
what to do. If you want to tackle a hard problem in an industry you don't have
experience in, please do. You might be the next Elon Musk, I don't know you so
I don't know.

If that wasn't your goal with this question... again I apologize.

~~~
notalaser
> The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have
> experienced.

Aww, yisss. Case in point, EDA and, in particular, hardware description
languages and tools. Every discussion I've had with someone trying to get into
this has been so cringe-worthy that I'm actively avoiding now. Every self-
professed hardware hacker thinks they have the solution that's going to end
all this painful Verilog kerfuffle and yet they're so, _so_ far from getting
it.

Like the folks who thing the biggest problem with Verilog and VHDL is that
they're so alien that it's hard to get software developers productive with
them. _Lack of electronics knowledge_ is what prevents most software
developers from being productive in Verilog. A "better" language won't help.
Paying attention in their Electronics or Systems classes is going to be ten
times more helpful than a Scala/Haskell/whatever-is-fashionable hardware
description language.

Or the people who think that development tools are what's holding FPGAs back
and that FPGAs would be everywhere, were it not for how hard it is to program
them. Trying to explain them that FPGAs are pretty slow gets impossibly
difficult as soon as the words "Intel" and "softcore" are mentioned.

Not that there aren't _a lot_ of things to improve in FPGA development tools,
or in hardware description languages (which is why you see so much work being
done on increasingly higher-level synthesis tools). But unless the number of
millions of dollars you're willing to invest is not at least half the number
of years you've been studying high-speed IC design, chances are you're as far
removed from having a serious answer to all these problems as you are removed
from being a modest person.

/rant

~~~
throwaway2016a
Lol. Funny you should say that.

My wife was an Electrical Engineering major and when I started dating her I
saw the Verilog and actually tried to improve it. Although my approach was
more a better IDE and emulator than reinventing the language.

I didn't get far. The domain knowledge of electronics needed was too much for
me to deal with and still do my own coursework.

------
chollida1
Intersection of trading and data mining.

I've said this a few times but we're going through a growth period like AAA
video games have over the past 20 years.

I used to be that 2 guys could make a video game, then it went to 10, then 50,
now its around 200 from what I've last heard.

Hedge funds are going through a similar shift.

It used to be that one person could manage data cleaning, and algo generation
for a fund.

Then cleaning got split out into its own job.

Then the number of data streams exploded growing by a couple orders of
magnitude.

Then the data types diverged so that each new data stream needs its own
special cleaning, and normalization and even data storage, ie some data isn't
suitable for a sql or non sql database storage, like satellite images.

Nowadays a typical algo fund might make use of 100 different algos for
trading, each of which has 20 different inputs, some real time, some updated
irregularly.

It takes those signals and weights them to come up with a trading signal,
which then gets mixed with a portfolio balancing signals and risk signals.

It can be tough to disentangle each individual signal from the algos
themselves so even things like detecting if a signal still has alpha
generating abilities is tough.

You can have 10 people just back testing signals and monitoring risk levels.

And the growth of data and data sources isn't slowing down.

This is good if you are one of the larger players, see Virtu buying out
competitor KCG, who previously ate competitor Knight Capital, yes that fund
with the huge blowup, but not so great news if you want to remain a small,
person wise, fund.

Not sure how to run a quant fund anymore with only 4 people. Not sure anything
an be done about.

~~~
Chris2048
I think here is an idea isn't unique to Quants/finance: curated datasets.

Hosted data-sets that are fully cleaned, verified and kept up to date. You pay
a fee for the feed, which essentially covers initial and on-going curation.
Fees would probably be based on usage (dev/test/commercial etc) but also the
realistic market value of curation.

There's a mile of difference between a data-set that's been fed through a few
cleaners and is 99% right, and one that is thoroughly checked, 99.99% right,
and still updated as such with little delay. The former is the "one-man dev
looking for easy passive income", the latter is the "quality datasets taken
seriously".

~~~
atemerev
Algo trading is about having the edge.

The edge is something you have and other people don't.

Enjoy your feature engineering.

(Meaning: selling the same curated data product to many customers undermines
its value. Overpricing it and selling only to the selected few, on the other
hand...)

~~~
Chris2048
But this is algo trading specifically, the scope for curated datasets is
larger.

Plus, what stops anyone building on top of a dataset? If this isn't dive ebay
value do any third parties add?

A dataset sold to many customers doesn't undermine the price charged by the
seller, as there would be no competitive advantage by not using it either.

~~~
Chris2048
_s /"dive ebay"/"done, what"/

And to clarify the last point:

If a create a dataset for $100 I could sell it to one person for $120, or 6
for $20 - I make the same even if the value to each individual client is
reduced; on the other hand, the value to each client _versus* making their own
is (120-100=) $20 in the first case, but (120-20=) $100 in the second, so
fewer clients are likely to "roll their own" competing datasets.

------
benzor
I work in the games industry. There are plenty of problems to go around, but
I'll pick just one:

Discoverability

In the "good old days" where 2 people could make a video game, odds are that
just shipping something guaranteed you'd make money. But that's no the case
anymore now that 1000+ apps come out every day on iOS / Google Play. Of course
most of those are crap. But you could be making a great game that caters well
to a particular audience or niche, and yet you might still fail just because
no one can find it or really just be aware of its existence.

The "simple" answer to this is marketing. Hustle your way to some visibility,
partner up with some publishers or some platforms holders, and get as many
eyeballs in front of your game as possible. However this effort is very close
to being "zero-sum." Either you win and get your promo art banner at the top
of the app store, or someone else does, but you can't both get it. It's less
obvious when it comes to PR and having articles or game review written about
you, but it's still there: with so much noise now on the internet, it's hard
to generate a meaningful signal.

The harder solution is being tackled by the app stores themselves. Steam, iOS,
etc. have all been improving the way games are presented in their stores.
There's more focus on specific genre features, more flash sales, more
suggestions based on what you already play. It's a decent effort but I don't
think it's enough yet.

What can we do about it? Not sure. Algorithms that try to discover what you
might like based on your previous purchases are nice and all, but most of my
favourite gaming experiences were surprises that came out of genres I didn't
expect (e.g. Rocket League), so this can only go so far.

~~~
faitswulff
I would say that discoverability is a problem that games share with pretty
much every form of media in the internet age. I've been thinking that one
possible solution is to use _less_ technology - organize local meetups and
user tests, build a local community. BitBash in Chicago is an example of this,
albeit on an annual basis:
[https://bitbashchicago.com/](https://bitbashchicago.com/)

~~~
jamesrcole
FWIW, it was an issue with books before the internet was big. So many novels
are written each year. It's long been difficult to know how to find novels
that you might like outside of the bigger works.

------
vivekd
1\. Legal

2\. Excessive costs, lack of performance among professionals

3\. Change in attitude seems to be the biggest factor. If lawyers stop being
about fighting and competing and persuading and more about tackling problems,
getting to the truth and finding solutions, we can have a much better chance
of succeeding.

There is a lot of opportunity for automation that no one seems to want to get
involved in. A good example is document discovery which has been largely
automated.

Other areas that could be automated include divorce. For example, in my
jurisdiction what each partner is entitled to on divorce in terms of child
support and alimony and division of property are set. There is some room to
argue about custodial arrangements but not very much.

Given this - there is absolutely no reason to have many years of contentious
divorce suits. If there was someone way of just entering the information into
a computer and informing both couples of what they are entitled to and then
working from there - I believe we would be much better off, because, although
I haven't done alot of divorce suits, but in my limited experience it seems to
me that lawyers certainly have a large role in exacerbating them and
needlessly.

~~~
ruairidhwm
Currently a lawyer who is also a programmer and does a lot of legal tech
stuff. Some of us are tackling the automation side of things and many lawyers
really do want to solve problems. A big issue is the billable hour but I see
that disappearing :)

Email is in my bio so feel free to ping me if you want to chat about it!

~~~
fright
In almost every case, the lawyers are the problem not the solution.

------
vijayr
There are some resources that might be of interest to you (no affiliation)

Ideas: [http://www.oppsdaily.com/](http://www.oppsdaily.com/)

[https://nugget.one/](https://nugget.one/)

Already done successfully

[https://sidehustleschool.com/](https://sidehustleschool.com/)

[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses)

~~~
cdiamand
Thanks for the mention Vijayr!

I'd also add [https://flippa.com](https://flippa.com) to this list.

It's interesting to see which businesses are being put up for sale.

------
rm_-rf_slash
Higher education. Where to start?

Tenure is a huge cost to the university and not every professor is both an
amazing researcher and an amazing teacher. So you have a chunk of the budget
spent on old researchers while poorly paid adjuncts fill in for undergraduate
classes. Not sure if fixable.

Politics runs everything. Broken clock Ayn Rand was at least somewhat right in
_Atlas Shrugged_ when she speculated that bringing about the end of money
would usher in an age of pull. That's exactly how higher ed works: unless you
can justify your work with student evaluations and big $$$ research grants,
politics runs a lot of decisions. Not sure if ever fixable.

No two American universities are alike. Colleges within universities have
major differences too. Good luck getting any real traction consolidating IT
services. Everyone has different needs and cut-outs for their work.

Higher education is a hydra. It cannot be fixed or reformed at the drop of the
hat or with the use of an app.

Abandon simple solutions, all ye who enter here.

------
Mz
Not a single industry per se, but a major social problem offering potentially
multiple business opportunities:

Homelessness is on the rise nationwide in part due to a serious lack of
genuinely affordable housing. Among other things, in the 1960s and 70s, we
tore down a lot of SROs. The Baby Boom generation was an anomaly. The
unprecedented wealth of their parents was due to WW2. Yet, expectations from
that era still shape housing policy and infrastructure, much to our detriment.

You do not necessarily need to be a construction company to play a role in
addressing this issue. Another very serious problem is the lack of financing
mechanisms for housing alternatives. For example, co-housing projects in the
US tend to be self financed because we do not have financial products that fit
them. This actively undermines their ability to add affordable housing to the
system, a purpose they successfully serve in other countries, from what I have
read.

There are, no doubt, many other things one could do to work on this issue.

------
jv0010
Mobile phone repairs - lack of education and the ability to access quality
replacement parts.

You might think that there's no shortage of phone Repairer's out there and
your right but you can bet that 90% of them are self taught or eventually
taught by someone.

Considering the amount of important information we store in phones and the
price of the devices it has now become more important to ensure that your
phone repairer knows what they are doing and of course has a reliable supplier

~~~
gech
Phone manufacturers have an definite interest in stepping on your right to
repair.

------
CJefferson
Academia. I'm going to pick on something specific:

* Reproducibility -- running code months or years later, on another machine.

Current tools, like VMs tend to be too heavy-weight. Docker is too hard to set
up.

The main problem with these various tools is that exploration is slow -- Often
I'll take an experiment, tweak it a few dozen times, then finally get the code
for a paper. At that point I don't want to package it up, I want to be able to
"freeze" where my last execution.

~~~
lambdamichael
Authorea (www.authorea.com) supports including data/code in articles. There's
even some in-article iPython support.

~~~
CJefferson
How likely are my pages to still work in 20 years?

------
vadym909
1\. Jobs/Work

2\. Most people don't like their jobs but suck it up. The 9-5 grind, climb-
ladder, can't switch careers, lack of meaning, social pressure to have job.
Getting laid off, searching new job, financial downsides of being unemployed

3\. Restructure the job model/market (flexible choices, live comfortably,
security)

Unengaged workers- Gallup poll on American workforce trends
[http://www.gallup.com/reports/199961/state-american-
workplac...](http://www.gallup.com/reports/199961/state-american-workplace-
report-2017)

------
HockeyPlayer
I run a quant/hft trading group. We need to know what the margin impact of our
position will be. We use a tool from CME called PC-SPAN. The various factors
that impact margin change during the day as prices change. I'd pay for a SAAS
where I upload a position and get lots of useful margin reports back. We have
built some of this but it is a distraction.

~~~
BoorishBears
Would you mind if I got in contact with you about this?

------
thearn4
1\. Aerospace

2.1 Access to energy / energy density of fuels (batteries included). This is
the case across a wide range of industries and problem areas of course, not
just transportation. But incremental optimizations in efficiency have lead to
squeezing more performance out of the margins, but no Moore's-law type growth
will ever happen without some kind of energy breakthrough.

2.2 Going forward, tightly coupled systems will be the norm. The traditional
tube-and-wing aircraft with bolted on nacelles is a bit of a dead end for
civil aviation. Systems to enable a more complex design workflow (e.g. graph
based dataflow with accurate gradients) will be more paramount.

3\. Research into the next generation of energy storage materials, and
improved large-scale gradient-based numerical optimization algorithms.

------
AznHisoka
Go to Upwork.com, find a category and see if you find any patterns in what
people are requesting, especially if it involves something manual and tedious.

------
AlexAMEEE
1\. Sports betting

2\. Oligopoly[0] just a few companies who deliver live results.

You would need a ton of cash upfront, to hire people who would watch the games
and would press buttons in order to inform you about results so you could
parse them and deliver live results which eventually would become a live API.

But as you can see, there are people involved in this, who watch all those
games, if you can manage to automate this, without requiring too many people,
you are a rich man.

Let's put in that way, almost everyone consumes their API if they are offline,
we are offline.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly)

~~~
omarchowdhury
Seems like something that can be crowdsourced cheaply since so many people are
watching the sports shows for free anyway.

~~~
AlexAMEEE
They are also betting and why shouldn't they publish results that would let
them win even if that's not the correct result ?

One could argue that the masses would always return the correct score but
imagine 50 people debating about sports, there are 50 opinions and the truth
somewhere in between.

And therefore those people also called 'scouts' must be trained in order to
accomplish the job.

------
petermonsson
1\. Electronics/semiconductors 2\. Moore's law is loosing stream and
complexity is exploding. Turn around times are increasing in everything. This
includes runtime for all of our software tools as well as physical processes
such as getting chips back from the fab. Vendors are not keeping up.
Productivity is suffering.

3\. SystemVerilog is not really at the right abstraction level and still has
many of the problems that face Verilog. It is sort of what C++ is to C and
what I need is more the equivalent to rust.

~~~
iamwil
I saw in some other thread that every programmer looks at making a better
verilog, when having a better understanding of electronics would help them be
more productive.

~~~
krupan
That's true, but those who do have a good understanding of electronics still
want better tools than Verilog.

------
ioddly
1\. Programming

2\. I don't know if it's stopping the industry from growing, but existing
communication tools (specifically chat, email) are a serious drain on
attention and productivity. See
[http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html).

3\. I'm working on it. Might be better tooling, might be educating people on
how harmful they can be.

~~~
saimiam
I take a contrarian view on the perniciousness of chat, email, and social
media. I'm yet to face a situation when I had to get something done but a chat
conversation got so much in the way that I missed my deadline.

Yes, I spend way too much time on frivolous internet activities but when stuff
needs to get done, it gets done.

No, I cannot use my time any differently to magically become more productive
and build myself a side hustle or teach myself Sanskrit or whatever. Just
because I now read a hundred success stories doesn't mean I have emulate and
chase after adding to corpus of human growth and knowledge with blind focus.

It's ok to work enough for a living and not impose artificial expectations of
extreme productivity on myself.

------
return0
It's a difficult problem, but food just takes too much of people's time.
Something like a personalized service that brings you food according to your
own nutritional schedule would be nice.

~~~
jkchu
I feel that a lot of people receive a lot of joy from selecting good food from
a variety of options. I think with the immense popularity of websites/apps
like Yelp, people are even more picky eaters than ever before. I think this
makes a personalized food service incredibly difficult to appease a wide net
of people and tastes while considering things like costs and logistics.

Of course the existence and popularity of something like Soylent goes against
my assumptions. I imagine there are just people who value their time over
enjoyment from food, as well as people who feel the opposite.

~~~
return0
Also fitness enthusiasts are an entire category

------
cyanoacry
1\. Rockets

2\. Cost of launch locks out potential customers and limits R&D uses. Global
launch cadence is slow; getting into orbit is a multi-year adventure.

3\. Yes, we're working on reusable rockets.

However, this only goes so far. Personally, I think that more money needs to
be put into non-rocket modes of space travel, so that there's some
competition. The fundamental problem is that it takes so much energy (and,
with rockets, so much mass fraction optimization) to get to space, so it's
difficult to engineer things with physical margin.

If you could build a rocket like a car (just toss some more steel in the frame
and call it a day, with no need for the obsessive mass savings), getting to
space would be a bit easier. If you had a power source that doesn't shake and
bake its surroundings, getting to space would be a lot easier.

~~~
return0
What problem do rockets solve?

~~~
tricolon
Problem: Gravity makes it hard to get into orbit.

Solution: Rockets.

~~~
return0
i can't imagine there 's unlimited demand for cheap rockets. it's not like
everyone can send a satellite in order.

~~~
mxvzr
Cheap rockets will lead to cheaper satellites.

Take a look at the development of cubesats [1]. It's a new "paradigm" for LEO
sats: rather than develop a massive and/or complex sat with a lifetime
spanning decades, costing years & millions of dollars, you can now make a
simpler (no station keeping ability other than using drag, lifetime so low
that radiation hardening isn't worth it)/cheaper/lighter sat that you'll
replace in a couple of years.

See also these two SpaceX applications to the FCC from 2016 & 2017 [2][3] for
respectively ~4000 and ~7000 satellites. For context, there is currently about
~1000 operational satellites, with about half of these in LEO.

Finally consider the Ardusat project [4] from a couple of years ago (the
premise was to send an arduino in space and let kickstarter backers run their
code on it). The project was successful and allowed the founders to later
raise money for a company [5] (Nanosatisfi, renamed Spire) operating a fleet
of cubesats.

Basically any entity with ~100k to spend will be able to send up their own
space junk. Now would be a good time to figure out how to treat the kessler
syndrome.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat)

2\. [https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-
bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/repor...](https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-
bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2016111500118&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number)

3\. [https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-
bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/repor...](https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-
bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2017030100027&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number)

4\. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-
your-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-arduino-
experiment-in-space)

5\. [https://spire.com/](https://spire.com/)

~~~
return0
> Cheap rockets will lead to cheaper satellites.

Indeed, however there's a limited capacity for satellites.

------
woud420
1) Advertising

2) A lot. Publishers relying on clickbait to generate money. Advertisers
creating invasive ads with autoplay sound and video. Ignoring do-not-track
requests as part of the industry (even if some technology providers respect
DNT, it seems like a lot don't). Malware. A lot of useless metrics. Bandwidth
usage. Etc...

3) Micro-payments vs delivering content only when an ad has been seen?
Validating content delivered through exchanges. A better way to anonymize data
used for tracking? Smaller ads. Honestly, I'm not too sure, there's probably a
lot that can be done but I feel the industry did too little too late.

~~~
mxvzr
5+ years of experience in adtech, on the advertisers' side mostly. By far the
largest surprise for me was the amount of efforts that went into denying
payouts to the publishers. That went anywhere from designing terms that
reduces the likelihood of payouts to straight up fraud (ie. double accounting,
scrubbing conversions, ...). Ultimately I think a lot has to do with greed:
publishers simply expect too high of a payout for these clicks, and
advertisers do not want to see the traffic go somewhere else so they align
with these expectations. They are then caught in this unsustainable price war
with competitors and resort to fraud to keep going. IMO the #1 issue with this
industry is one of credibility.

------
RivieraKid
No one mentioning healthcare?

I think there's a massive opportunity to lower costs and improve user
experience in every area. I wish Apple used their pile of cash to invest in a
_big_ vertically integrated healthcare service - a chain of hospitals, in-
house-developed software throughout, improve user experience, integration and
tech on every level. Basically healthcare rethought from the ground-up with
Silicon Valley consumer-oriented mentality. Yes, extremely daring, but they're
in a unique position to pull that off.

~~~
fright
The healthcare industry almost always looks better from an outside
perspective, but once you're on the inside you become just another part of the
problem.

Lowering costs is a good example, but once you're inside you realize that the
entire industry has been built from the ground up to create high profits and
gains, and trying to change that leads to a quick exit. So once most people
are on the inside they just go along with it and play ball because it's the
safe and profitable thing to do.

Everyone wants change with healthcare, but short of the industry collapsing
and being re-built, I don't see way that it's going to happen, though I'd love
to be wrong.

~~~
RivieraKid
That's why I think Apple should give it a shot. They are big enough to
basically rebuild healthcare, create an integrated user-focused product
including a chain of hospitals, clinics, web and mobile apps, health
smartwatches, DNA sequencing, maybe even research.

~~~
sjg007
The only thing that will change health care is single payer.

------
malthaus
1\. Banking

2\. Product complexity, legacy IT & culture and regulation

3\. Provide regulated banking services as a lean platform / utility, let
others play on top

(3) is not easy to execute and no, blockchain is not the answer

------
ideonexus
The Office of Educational Technology produced a report on Educational
Software, what the biggest problems are and where the greatest opportunities
are for solving them. It's a great read with lots of suggestions if you want
to learn about a field, public education, that I personally feel is still
severely behind the curve when it comes to the Information Revolution:

[https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/](https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/)

I highlighted passages of note here:

[http://mxplx.com/Reference/id=2090](http://mxplx.com/Reference/id=2090)

It's a great opportunity in a field that, despite budget cuts and under-
funding, still has millions of dollars to put into software that could meet
the needs of school districts across the country. Most of what's out there now
is sorely lacking, leaving teachers and schools to use a patchwork of
solutions to meet their needs.

------
bsvalley
1\. Software

2\. Hiring Process

3\. Replace meaningless whiteboarding interviews AND silly notepad algorithm
questions, with a live coding interview on a laptop and a real development
environment.

Companies would be surprised how fast and efficient the hiring process would
be. They would stop eliminating a bunch of great candidates by running
relevant technical interviews and not silly CS academic stuff. I can spend 3
month memorizing 500 algorithm solutions and nail all your 45min technical
interviews. I would get an offer, a kick ass package and I would join your
team. Then, on my first day I'd ask for help from my colleagues because I
can't even setup my development environment. I'd write buggy code that doesn't
integrate well and wouldn't be able to understand how to design a system. All
I'd know is how to write text in a notepad and how to flip a linked list on a
whiteboard.

But hey... I'm smart! And now I'm rich :)

~~~
sdflkd
If your company doesn't ask system design questions they deserve their fate.
:)

------
carlmungz
1\. Training & Education

2\. Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements
in AI & machine learning to train their workforce

3\. Yes but I think it'll require younger incumbents 'eating the lunch' of
more established companies for this to change

~~~
tuyguntn
> Not enough companies want to use newer web technologies and advancements in
> AI & machine learning to train their workforce

trying to use AI & ML is ok, but why they should use newer web technologies?
web technologies are changed so frequently and outdated, its bit scary to jump
in to new web tech.

~~~
carlmungz
A sizeable chunk (not sure on figures) of training courses are still produced
using Flash. If it's not Flash, they are built using a Dreamweaver-esque
authoring tool that spits out HTML & CSS.
[https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework](https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework)
is the only major open-source web framework.

------
pascalxus
Here's some problems I've personally encountered: 1\. Software Engineer 2\.
It's difficult to get remote debugging and remote syncing working right. We've
all been there. It literally takes hours to set up, if you don't have precise
instructions. PhpStorm is pretty good, but still takes quite a bit of head
scratching to install when your doing remote debugging. 3\. Getting an app to
run locally usually takes way too much work.

And, it seems Perl IDEs/debugging tools aren't as good as they should be.
We're still using the command line debug tools for Perl, and can't even set a
breakpoint before that line has been executed.

~~~
iamwil
When you say remote, do you mean a remote server? Or do you mean debugging on
an iPhone from your dev laptop?

~~~
pascalxus
i mean from a remote server. Lots of development is set up to only run from a
remote server and it's too much work to get it working on a localhost.

------
throwaway7645
Exploding Complexity. It can take years to become an expert in a tiny little
nook of my field. Knowing how to use the software and the theory behind it is
very challenging.

------
11thEarlOfMar
1\. Capital Equipment Control Systems

2\. Seamless, lossless, low-cost interoperability

3\. Doubtful. Many companies profit by providing custom products and services
to address the problem.

------
aabajian
Don't have time right now to go into detail, but in radiology the biggest
problem is rising volumes with lower reimbursement. I addressed this in
another thread, but it's an arms race between vendors to maximize radiologist
throughput via tools such as dictaphones, templates, computer-aided diagnoses,
and now, machine learning.

~~~
rahimnathwani
"but in radiology the biggest problem is rising volumes with lower
reimbursement"

Huh? So x-rays have become plentiful and cheap due to competition-driven
innovation? How is that a problem?

------
DanBC
1) Patient safety

2) Massive underfunding from central and local government; entrenched ways of
working; incorrectly defensive working; dysfunctional cheerleading of
incorrect approaches

3) Yes. Improve efficiency. Move to better ways of serious incident analysis.
Challenge people who cheerlead incorrect approaches. Push for more funding,
especially using Spend-to-Save data.

------
severus
1\. Public Transport.

2\. Funding/Capacity.

3\. More money.

~~~
franciscop
3\. Automation? Depends on the transport it could be 5 years away
(trains/similar) or 20-30 years away (buses/similar). Of course the
trains/similar is more of a people issue than technical (;

~~~
dflock
For trains, automation already happened - in the 80's. London's DLR and
Vancouver's skytrain are examples of mostly automated, completely driverless,
metro systems - built in the 80's.

Afaik, the Vancouver skytrain still uses the original OS/2 software to run.

------
rafark
Outdated technology that leads to outdated systems.

------
malodyets
1\. Which industry do you work in?

In the publishing industry (where I have worked since 1997), the transition
from print-only to print-plus-digital that began around 1999 and really got
underway after Amazon released the Kindle in 2007 has finished. Now we have an
industry in which print and digital co-exist (at different levels – 50/50 for
fiction, but more like 80/20 for non-fiction, and even less of digital for
more complex product types like Bibles). Currently the growth area is
audiobooks, led (of course) by Audible.

2\. What are the biggest problems stopping your industry from growing?

Publishers have not really solved these problems:

(a) How to distribute very small publications and receive very small payments?
We're still reliant on credit cards for payments, which pushes us to a
smallest payment size of about $1.99 or so.

(b) How to increase discoverability? Most publishers are reluctant to post all
of their content in a web-searchable and social-shareable form (for somewhat
obvious reasons). However, this means that it's hard for them to draw direct
traffic to their books.

(c) How to reduce reliance on the behemoth of online retailing? As physical
bookstores have died away, publishers have recognized that they are too
reliant on one distributor, which is a dangerous position to be in (as that
retailer has shown itself very ready to use monopsony powers to bully their
suppliers). Most publishers have direct-to-consumer selling operations. But
(a) and (b) and other factors mean that they find it extremely difficult to
draw traffic to their sites.

3\. Can something be done about it?

I have been working on some of these problems in my business
([http://blackearthgroup.com](http://blackearthgroup.com)). Here is a sketch
outline of how I would encourage publishers to solve these problems:

(a) Micropayments are needed, and to do that we need an online currency that
can be used to buy content without going through the credit card processing
network. Publishers should invest in the development of an online token that
they would support on their sites. Customers could then purchase a supply of
tokens and use them on publishers' sites to buy content. There are a couple of
projects like this in the works. The simplest approach would be to create a
coin based on the Ethereum network, and then support that coin for all
purchases. (The hardest part of this is probably that the value of the coin
would not be completely stable, because Ethereum is not, which means that
publishers would have to either adjust their token prices regularly, or would
have to live with variability in revenues to sales – this problem is solvable,
but it requires a lot of capital to create a value stabilization mechanism.)

(b) Publishers should put all their content online in excerpt chunks using
non-discoverable public URLs, then submit it all to the search engines, and
start sharing excerpts through social channels. It is true that some of the
content would be given away, but that would be limited because each excerpt
chunk would not be linked to the others in the same publication – access to
one would not grant access to all. Using full-content search and sharing is
one of the best ways for them to draw more organic traffic to their own sites.
(They'll need to invest in better discovery mechanisms on their sites, too.)

(c) Publishers have a real chance of building a customer base in their own
content niches, if they invest in developing a content discovery and purchase
experience that is significantly better in that niche than what customers
experience on Amazon.

(Cross-posted to my blog: [http://blackearthgroup.com/2017/04/20/what-are-the-
greatest-...](http://blackearthgroup.com/2017/04/20/what-are-the-greatest-
problems-facing-the-publishing-industry/) .)

~~~
mysterydip
It seems to me that there could exist a paypal-like system for micropayments.
Maybe there already is and I don't know about it? Getting a critical mass
would be necessary, a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. If there was a service
that went something like this:

\- pay a flat fee of $x to deposit any amount up to $y

\- pay nothing to transfer <$1 to another user (really just shifting numbers
in a spreadsheet)

\- pay $x to withdraw up to $y

You are incentivized to deposit more to make it worthwhile, fees don't eat
into your per transaction revenue, and you're incentivized to wait for at
least $y to cash out for maximum benefit. The company can invest that $ in the
meantime and earn a low yield on a money market.

I'm sure if it were that easy it would already be done, but it makes sense to
me.

~~~
thedudemabry
I agree that it would be neat, but I fear that the reason only big banks and
credit card processors have attempted to dabble in this space is because
you've just described a bank. Building one of those carries a whole host of
regulations, even if the goal is a very simple, limited set of interactions.

~~~
jpindar
It works for Virtual Worlds though. At this very moment I am dancing at a
party in InWorldz, and I just tipped the dj with Inworldz dollars that I
previously purchased with USD. If she wants to withdraw the money as USD she
can.

------
Jtsummers
1\. Embedded (safety and criitical systems)

2\. Knowledge sharing within companies/organizations. Formal methods
(primarily their absence). Effective use of simulations in design,
development, and V&V efforts. Requirements traceability (this is mundane and
seems bureaucratic, but it's critical here).

3\. Yes, to everything.

For the first, break down information silos and project fiefdoms. Allow for
greater flexibility for staff to move across project boundaries so knowledge
can be shared more equitably, and people can see other teams work (learn both
good and bad things here). Training. Make it a recurring event. Not the crap
training many organizations do. Have a seminar series where people come in and
present on something, not always directly related to work. Encourage people to
write up their lessons learned, and perform and publish post mortems on
projects. Take the approach of avoiding blame, focus on correctable errors and
faults along the way (these are primarily process faults, not technical ones;
where technical they're typically design and not implementation errors).

Formal methods and simulations are much easier to get started with today than
ever. I'm not even talking about making a full-blown simulation of the final
system, just high level "is this protocol sound" models. Presently working on
radios. I don't need to implement a simulation of every detail of the
protocol, I just need to know things like: If we add this new message, that
must be sent so often, can it actually get broadcast at the correct frequency
within the physical constraints of the radio? This turned out to be _NO_ on
one project I saw (not worked on), but not discovered until it was implemented
(several man-months wasted). A message was supposed to be sent out every X
time slots, containing N bytes of data. Each slot allowed you to send MAX
size. Other messages also had to be sent out, say every X _4 slots with size
M. N+M > MAX, meant something wasn't sent. Both were mandatory, by design the
protocol couldn't function. Another similar issue, though requiring a more
complete simulation/model, was that one of the processors handling some of the
messages simply wasn't fast enough. It was required to (worst-case) process N
messages within X microseconds, but could actually only process ~N_0.75
messages. Admittedly, this was worst case behavior, but by the system's design
(protocol requirements, selected hardware, selected data bus, selected program
design) it could not achieve the required performance.

The more complete the simulation, though, the better off you are. Technical
solutions already exist, it's primarily an issue of finding good case studies
or getting an amenable manager to sign off on trying it to demonstrate the
cost savings (versus the typical approaches, which in my experience are often
significantly late and errorful). Also being at the right stage in a project.
Being at the maintenance end, constructing these models/simulations is harder
than when you're taking on a novel project.

But, simulations also aid V&V efforts. If you can construct a full(er)
simulation of the radio network, your V&V team can start creating test cases,
procedures, and models and verifying that they're reasonable. From a protocol
perspective, this is relatively easy on our radios, setting aside timing. So
ignore time (as a strict concept) and instead focus on time slots. Create a
simulation where each tick corresponds to one time slot, let computation run
as long as needed. At the end, you'll see what _should_ show up from the
radios given some inputs. Run these through your data analysis tools to
exercise them, and when you have functioning radios you can use these tools to
create simulated network peers (pre-generated network data played back to the
radio being tested).

For requirements traceability, just stop using Word and Excel. Use an actual
requirements database. I know DOORS sucks, but it's infinitely better than
Word and Excel.

~~~
roymurdock
Surprised not to see the classic IoT security/connectivity combo here. Perhaps
you're working on systems that are too deeply embedded to make use of (or
allow for) connectivity.

~~~
Jtsummers
Too old. These are for avionics systems that aren't going to change any time
soon, and we're on the maintenance end so even if new systems come along we
aren't building them.

------
nicostouch
bitrot. nuff said.

