Pharma love when governments are on the hook for their outlandish prices. It's why there's a revolving door between public and private...to smooth deals like these.
If the government wasn’t allowed to hire from private, it would be starved of talent. That would be a great scheme to hobble any agency you don’t like.
You can cut it more finely but I think you still run into the same issue. The best candidates to run an agency that regulates a particular industry are going to highly overlap with the best candidates to be leaders in that industry, because they have knowledge and experience over how that industry works.
Sort of like how many top law students choose between clerking at federal court and joining big law, or do one after the other. And people who become judges often did both. If you ban people who worked in private practice from being a clerk or judge, you would have a lower quality judiciary.
Ultimately, I think you end up with the B team trying to regulate the A team.
Honestly, $3 million for a tailor made (needs to be customized for every patient individually) single shot cure that saves a person's life is pretty reasonable.
The median lifetime earnings for an American is about $1.7 million though. For a mother, a father, and the patient, it might be worth it.
Can you describe the incentive structure that makes sure Australians require less drugs in general? That's the bigger picture. Getting a discount on something you shouldn't need in the first place is not a win.
Thank you, now I realize where I've had this feeling before!
Working with AI-generated code to add new features feels like working with Dreamweaver-generated code, which was also unpleasant. It's not written the same way a human would write it, isn't written with ease of modification in mind, etc.
Agreed. Yes, we have national security interests in having the capability to build airplanes, etc., but there must be a way to maintain that capability without permanently giving one company and its executives the right to mismanage unlimited amounts of money. Maybe some more flexible mechanism that can handle networks of smaller companies achieving the same end result.
If you consider it national interest, why as the biggest shareholder and bagholder do you not have board members that veto actions that are profitable but bad for national interest?
No it's the other way around. The Boeing we have today is the result of mergers. For example McDonnell Douglas that built the f-18 amongst other things was acquired in 1996.
They merged the companies, but outsourced component manufacturing to the lowest bidder and didn’t bother to check the lowest bidder was actually delivering what was needed.
The popular story is when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in the late 90's, Boeing's engineering-driven culture was replaced with the more financialization-driven culture from McDonnell execs.
The 737-MAX saga was kinda the culmination of when profit-motivated shortcuts bump up against realities of engineering safety margins. I'm sure everyone has their campfire variation on this, tons has been written about it.
So yeah on the financial shenanery, but more culture/people-in-charge than conglomeration-megacorp per-se.
I stopped the job application process to a well known car maker as a software engineer about a decade ago because the application, to the best of my memory at this time, included an arbitration clause that seemed to me to be very broad. Because of that arbitration clause I have not considered applying to them for more than a decade.
Although there are other things we can do, like simplify regulations for truly small businesses so people have a chance to start something without needing legal expertise, lots of paperwork, etc.
One of the other factors preventing people from starting small businesses is lack of affordable health insurance. They can buy coverage through state exchanges but those are still more expensive that group health plans offered by large employers.
Starting a small business is hard in some European countries but not others. Here in Sweden it is trivial. In e.g. Malta and I believe Poland it is hard.
Personally I am not sure any of this discussion is relevant to Europe, especially not as a whole.
I think about this a lot. It should be really beneficial to have a progressive legal system for corporations where laws become more strict based on size or revenue.
> I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.
Profitable software-based ideas are increasingly difficult to find. Thousands of people are exploring every niche and trying to start startups in them, which is great, but competition is fierce and unexplored niches are shrinking.
And of course, it's still not straightforward even if you find a relatively unexplored niche. Most people I see who have attempted startups had extensive family support or personal wealth from exits as an employee of a company that had an IPO.
People say this but I don’t buy it at all. If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago. The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
I think there are probably several hundred HN readers who would be happy to tackle those problems. Boring is probably not the issue, but obscure is, assuming these problems exist. If they're difficult to discover that the problem exists, that's a challenge. Further, if the problems exist but are highly unique in each case, there may be a reason it's solved in a one-off way by Excel or scripts rather than a scalable product. The use of Excel isn't inherently ripe for disruption. There are plenty of problems to be solved that just can't be solved profitably. It would be no better than solving a problem that someone has but is unwilling to pay for.
Your comment reminded me of a cool little project I found a few years ago re: niche problems and smaller solutions - the target demo being soldiers who (very generally) have some disposable income to spend on a small app that can improve their professional QoL was kind of genius imo.
There was (still is, though the website is now dead) a really cool website/app that a fmr Air Force soldier made called AFI SWiM[0] that extracted 'Shall, Will and Must' references from Air Force publications which blew up in popularity among the target demo. The dev recently(ish) wrote a blog post[1] how it surprised him to see the app[2] had gotten around ~20k downloads, though I am unsure if the app was always priced at $1.99 (which would be just under $40k).
I like the idea of developing a problem solver for a niche market, though finding and monetizing it definitely is pretty tough.
Imagine if this app was B2B instead of B2C, or if it pivots to B2B in the future, or if it's acquired. Imagine also future passive income with little maintenance. And his project seemed like a side project written over a few months.
Still risky, but the expected value is comparable to a stint at a salaried job IMO, once you find a decent market opportunity. Not to mention the qualitative value of self-employment, and that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs.
We can play this game all day, but the fact is somebody put a ton of work into a project and made about what they could have made in a month at a FAANG.
Not really. FAANG people have to show up to get that salary. It's not apples to apples to compare this to salary because the app was built once then continued to make money without additional work.
Salary requires constant effort and work. I will take working 60 - 80 hours for a week to make $40k over working 320 hours to make the same.
Imagine investing the FAANG money into dividend ETFs and living off those in a few years.
> that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs
You aren’t seriously comparing the risk of self-employment to the risk of being layed off by one of the most stable companies of the world during a downturn after a 15 year bullrun, are you?
50% of those places are using excel and outdated tech because they have 0 budget to spend on tech no matter how good the replacement (in fact even if it is cheaper, approving the alternative is too painful a process), "their problem" is not that nobody had solved their actual problem but trying to convince someone upstairs to approve spend on an alternative solution.
Big sample size issue here. I don't know why anyone would want to share that they have a profitable one person business, as it only invites competition. The people actually doing that are almost certainly going to keep it a secret.
If you know of some boring, obscure market niches that are also likely to be profitable, meaning the cost of customer acquisition is easily less than the profit per customer, and is scalably solved with a software product, please either share with HN readers, or at least offer to sell them to us.
They say ideas are worth nothing, but not to me. If you really have some good ideas (see definition above), I would be interested in buying them at a reasonable price.
Here's one that I have dealt with personally: paying taxes as an American that lives abroad (and wants to use the foreign income exclusion) is a nightmare filled with misinformation and tedium.
I don't know if this is actually a market worth pursuing, but I do know that I paid some company $500 to fill in a form for me and help figure out the process. They probably spent an hour or two on my case.
With the increase of dual citizens, digital nomads, etc. this seems like a growing market to me.
I too used Greenback once. The truth is that if one has a relatively simple situation, e.g. salaried employee, then it is entirely realistic to do this oneself. With more complexity (other types of income like interest, capital gains,...) it can be more time consuming, but still doable.
I am not a professional, so seek and pay for professional advice, if that is what you need. I've been doing my own taxes as an American living abroad for ~a decade. If anyone is in a similar situation and has questions, feel free to pm me. Because financial/tax advice from strangers with no professional credentials on the Internet is always a good idea. :p
> If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago.
Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.
2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.
I used to work in internal IT at a Fortune 500 working with different departments in the company to turn Excel spreadsheets and Access97 tools into web apps with real databases. The problem is that the companies/departments where this is the case all have their own workflows and business processes, and 99% of the time are completely unwilling to consider change. It'll be really challenging to develop software that can be sold to multiple companies even when they ostensibly do the same thing.
I’ll add to that: in many industries/domains the incumbents are benefiting from the status quo and have no interest in upending it, while others have accepted some of these as “hard facts”[0].
I’m working on one such problem in the healthcare space, as an outsider. In early stages, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere.
>their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
And the problems were so important that somebody, anybody, stepped up to the plate with a digital solution as soon as it was barely possible.
Sometimes you have to admire that effort to a greater degree than a more technically advanced alternative.
I'm sure some of these are ripe for transition to a truly more effective approach in every way but often there is no fooling them trying to provide anything less.
And disruption itself can be the enemy in some things like this.
There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.
Any hints on how to even begin looking into this? There's a plethora of content on starting SaaS projects but can't say I've ever come across any for hardware.
That's gonna depend on your skills and what you think is interesting to pursue. Generally speaking you'll want to learn how to, at a minimum, model stuff and 3d print it, and how to design PCBs. I strongly suggest FreeCAD and KiCad for those tasks respectively.
I like making hardware and SW that goes with it... I'm just not sure how you validate the market need for something like that and what hw more exactly to build. I feel there is already so much stuff...
I haven't read this elsewhere so it may be non-validated but you shouldn't imagine customers of a product as entirely captured nor cohesive. Inside of the customer pool are going to be people who are displeased with the product for sometimes disparate reasons but not enough to find a different product because this one is "good enough".
To make this example very simple, a product may produce orange widgets. It's good enough for most people but one group wishes it made a more yellow widget while another group wishes it made a more red widget. The orange widget isn't the ideal case, it's a compromise to serve the most people.
If someone came in and made a product that produces very yellow widgets and focuses on the yellow widget market, you could serve those people very well despite being having a smaller pool.
In other words, your product doesn't need to go toe-to-toe with the orange widget product that has a revenue of $1B, you only need to pick off the yellow widget people to get a revenue of, lets say, $10M and you are eating very well.
I also think the opportunity to build small but helpful gadgets is bigger than finding the perfect SaaS idea. But it’s still not exactly easy to come up with something new. Whenever I see an ingenius product I think to myself „This was obvious, why haven’t I thought of that?“, but oh well.
There's probably an S curve on this, right? At some point the super high level languages and frameworks that we use to conveniently create software quickly at the cost of poor efficiency, would have to peak, right?
Only if there's a moderate amount of effort put into optimization. Without it, it's easy to use bad algorithms or bad implementations and there is no limit on slowness.
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