Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? - <AUTHOR> This has been done two other times before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638 (2016), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 (2015)
Both threads generated a lot of really interesting discussion, and I was curious what the discussion would sound like if this were asked again in 2018. <comment><USER3> I'll take a startup in a box. I want Kubernetes, Elastic, Kibana, FileBeat, Prometheus, Consul, Grafana, databases, HTTP gateways, etc all set up on on the cloud (or set of servers) of my choice and a dashboard that lets me add users (e.g. like a modern Webmin/cPanel+WHM) and make minor config changes if I don't want to run these myself. I want those things HA and I want stable hostnames for them (e.g. Consul DNS on every box). Then I want an empty app template where I can provide a few things: commands to build my app (including dependencies), a systemd conf for start/stop of my app, a config value to tell you where the logs will be, a config value to tell you how to consume metrics from me (e.g. a local HTTP path for prometheus), etc. I feel like we're close with Helm and Kubernetes but I'll be damned if coordinating and setting all of this stuff up HA, getting notified of failures, getting notified when I need to add more servers, being cloud-independent, etc isn't an extreme burden to entry.

I want to write code and deploy, not spend most of my time on ops or marry myself to a cloud vendor. I started my company as the only tech person and I feel like I have to be more admin than dev even though I'm doing the same thing as everyone else.

<comment><USER4> I don't think for a _startup_ you need K8s and most of the things you have outlined! Maybe for a late-stage startup, but then you are already doing something so a generic slap-it-there solution might not be the best idea.

You are describing a large-scale setup boilerplate, far away from what I'd call a startup in a box. Slap in a simple server like my own project [1] or no server at all until product-market fit, and then but only then start scaling.

[1] [https://serverjs.io/](https://serverjs.io/)

<comment><USER3> Of course you don't "need" them. However, I don't believe I'm describing a large scale boilerplate. You can get this with a few servers and a couple hundred a month these days. Heck, you can do it on a laptop w/ minikube probably (though obviously not ok to do in prod, just goes to show the costs are not the problem here). Sure it's easy to run an app. But it's not easy to admin it as you grow (even though you are not yet "big" and still may be only one or two people).

<comment><USER5> Who will troubleshoot when shit hits the fan?

It seems to me that you are introducing technical debt from day one because it's cool.

<comment><USER6> What technical debt?

<comment><USER7> The kind of technical debt otherwise known as premature optimisation. If you don't even know yet that your app has to scale - and in which way - <USER2> for that contingency is a waste of resources.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't qualify that as a premature optimisation. Kubernetes is de facto standard of running applications now and you get all the benefits for almost free. Premature optimisation in this case would be over provisioning - throwing more servers than you need.

<comment><USER8> K8s is "de facto standard" already? When did that happen? No doubt that K8s has a great future and I personally like it a lot as well. But to call it a standard requirement itself is premature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do B2B sales (specifically, customer support for consumer-facing businesses), and I'd pay ~$1,000/mo for a service that solves this problem:

 _Which warm intros should I ask for?_ There are ~1,000 companies in my ideal customer profile. I've got ~500 friends who I'd feel comfortable asking for warm intros, and say these friends each have ~500 friends. After deduplicating, that's ~100,000 second-degree connections, some of whom are decision-makers at companies I'd like to sell to.

I'd want someone to go through my LinkedIn/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc., and tell me something along the lines of: "Ben might know decision-makers at Companies A, B, C, D, and E." And, conversely, I'd like to know all the possible warm introductions that could lead me to Company A (e.g. "Ben, Max, and Jennifer could possibly introduce you to Alice, Bob, and Cameron at Company A").

All of this information is available to me; it's just a total O(N^2) pain to clean and aggregate it. Like, I can certainly spend an hour listening to podcasts and looking through Ben's LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends, Instagram followers - and seeing if any of them are COOs at CPG brands. But I'll run out of podcasts eventually, and then it's not a very high-leverage use of my time to repeat that process for Max, Jennifer, Nate, Christy, et al.

<comment><USER10> You have 500 friends?

<comment><USER11> I have about 20-30 people I still stay in contact with and it's super tough to schedule activities as it is. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A next generation internal / corporate portal. Everyplace I have worked at had either a really bad implementation of an internal portal or had a bunch of wiki pages clubbed together. It was incredibly difficult to get even basic info, such as where is the conference room, who works in the security team, what is the expense policy, so on a so forth. In my current multi billion dollar company, when I am meeting with someone new, I have to actually go to LinkedIn to understand what they do in the company and in what is their focus area.

<comment><USER13> I agree. I think if you could branch off what stripe has done with their 'home' feature, you'd have a real business on your hands. [https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home](https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Software development infrastructure in a box plus strong training materials / guidance for scientists. Increasing numbers of scientists are writing code without any formal CS training, and the outputs are predictably awful and unreliable. It is very common to find no testing, no acceptance criteria, no version control, no formal planning, no code review, no style guide being employed, sparse commenting, fragmented development environments / dependency hell etc. People frequently know that what they are doing is suboptimal, but it is hard to convince them that they should put in the work to use industry best practices for a variety of reasons.

If someone could create a product (probably infrastructure plus a Python IDE) which made doing things the "right way" easy for these users, and which would provide case studies or tutorials to show them WHY doing things correctly is beneficial using analogies to good lab behavior, it would be hugely valuable.

<comment><USER15> i can't see a business model - the scientist is already paying with their time to get something working that is just good enough for publication. all the problems you describe are down the road and scientists kick that to 'industry'. unless your 'right way' is also easier to boot, why would they add to their time?

<comment><USER14> I think that is indeed the perception, but that the time savings would actually be quite pronounced if people did things correctly. I've seen many projects get immediately bogged down by bugs / feature creep / lack of planning and end up taking far longer than if people had done things correctly. Also, many labs hand off code bases when post docs or students leave, creating chaos for the next person that is tasked with working on them.

As an example, I wrote a proof of concept script to show that we could automate some basic image analysis in my lab three years ago. That was immediately grabbed by an investigator and put into production without any further thought. Because it was a proof of concept script, it was of course very buggy and required substantial feature addition. This was added without any thought for design etc. Fast forward to today and this code base is a sprawling shit show which is being rewritten for the THIRD TIME. Each time has ended in failure because people failed to observe basic best practice, and this attempt will likely fail too. That is an ENORMOUS waste of investigator time. Another project I can think of involved a model which had a 10,000 line function. No one could trust what was being outputted by the thing, so they eventually abandoned it. That's hundreds of investigator hours down the drain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I work in the humanitarian field in a poor country ravaged by war and famine. We have a number of humanitarian actors currently working in this country and no one actually has access to accurate population statistics. Well, none exists. The last census was conducted in 1975. I believe someone could use technology to get a much better estimate of the population. One thing that always springs to my mind is the possibility of using aerial imagery. It doesn't have to be exactly that, though.

I think this need, a real need that is, can potentially make millions for the enterprising type, here.

Why don't I try the same, you might ask. But, while I have some ideas, I am may not be able to raise the resources needed, at the moment.

<comment><USER17> How much penetration do cell phones have into a lot of these countries? May be a way to tease out a rough population from cell phone use statistics.

<comment><USER18> What I can tell you from my experience in the Gambia is that there many people have cellphones (not smartphones), but most have 2 or 3 because provider have lower rates when calling to the same provider, so one phone for Qcell, one phone for Africell,... Not sure if it's like that in many other places, there is a lot of tourism on the coast and returning tourists often bring their old phones to give to the locals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required. Probably half the video conferences I've tried to participate in in the last year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in, dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no account creation, registration, or software install required, get an extrwmely high quality low latency (comparable to FaceTime) voice/video conference.

<comment><USER20> I have been using jitsi for the past year or so and the experience is pretty much what you describe.

[https://meet.jit.si](https://meet.jit.si)

<comment><USER21> I used to use this in my company and while joining and creating meetings is pretty painless the audio/video quality was pretty crap. Perhaps they have improved in the three years since I've used it.

<comment><USER22> It's pretty good now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Working for a German Big four Car OEM. We need the following for measurement data and we simply have no solution (except matlab, which is not good enough).

We want to plot big data (up to terabytes). Columns should be selectable by gui and nameable. The Data then should be be added to database with an ID. Everything should be usable without use of a scripting language.

Right now the terabytes of data have to be loaded in to ram just to see the first few lines and determine what the columns stand for. Now I know that there are editors that can load data partially but these have to be reinstalled which requires admin rights etc. This is a huge burden in a big company! The process of simply plotting, selecting and storing data takes a huge amount of time. The solution should be web based because no admin rights are availabe.

Often I am impressed how many tools and hacks exist simply to get one thing done: visualize measurement data. Excel is not enough because even the import of dot vs comma vs tab etc takes too much time and everytime has to be relearned. Engineers have to plot the data sometimes every few months and then you have a new excel version that autocorrects measurement data to dates or whatever.

In my opinion this would solve an obscene amount of work. Right now every engineer is hacking together some scripts that are extremely inflexible. When just csv-type data has to be handled.

Edit: this also applies to smaller amounts of data of megabytes. How can we plot them more robust than excel and then select x and y axis? I am pretty sure that we would love to buy a product that solves these issues.

<comment><USER24> If I am understanding your problem correctly, I did that for a large American automotive electronics supplier back in the 1990s - though back then 30-40 megabytes of data was pretty big. We trained a bunch of American and Japanese engineers on how to do that, but I don't remember any Europeans.

I think I have an email address in my profile; feel free to send me something. I am fairly certain that your needs can be satisfied with existing Unix tools. Then again, the reason I worked on the problem in the 1990s was to free up engineer time so they could do more valuable things. A gui and other tools could be worth paying for if the bosses have that mindset.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for your answer. Currently engineers can:

a) try to plot their data alone and spend time on hacking the stuff together. This takes time as the guys doing it aren't accustomed doing it daily. This happens accross all kind of divisions.

b) ask another team (with data scientists) for their support. Maybe the engineer has to write a ticket, or the person who should be doing it has other tasks, is in vacation, not willing, not replying to the request etc.

Either way hours are easily spent on solving this seemingly simple task. The amount of time spent is simply staggering.

Unix would also be my personal choice. But getting the right to put a unix machine into the network for a single user is extremely difficult. Windows, Internet Explorer and temporary admin rights are the work environment that almost everyone has to use. That's why I think a web based solutions is the only viable option.

<comment><USER25> I work in a similar space and one of the tools that might solve your problem is exploratory.io.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I do some illustration and have noticed on twitter how much every illustrator who gets some experience with 3d-tools likes to use 3d modelling to create block-outs for scenes they want to draw. By creating a simple scene out of blocks and shapes you can make your perspective work while drawing a lot easier. A tool that could be really populair would be something that makes making 3d mock-ups easier for 2d artstists without 3d experience.

<comment><USER27> You can give [https://3dc.io](https://3dc.io) a shot. Disclosure: developer here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am a network engineer for a medium size company (I have worked for very large enterprises too) and there a a lot of opportunities for startups in network engineering.

1)Simple network automation platform that works for "My" custom environment, simply and effortlessly and also it should not break any existing network. (I don't mean like HP Network Automation)

2) Network diagram software - Seriously, any experienced network engineer will agree that this one needs a lot of disruption. Visio is very expensive and even then it is a pain to use. And Lucidchart or Cacoo or draw.io or other online tools too have their flaws/drawbacks.

3)Network monitoring tools - It is a pity that CA Spectrum, which is a ugly and non user-friendly tool, in my opinion, is among the most used network monitoring software. Network monitoring tools are bread and butter of NOC (Network Operation Center) teams.

4) Network devices configuration management tool and Change and topology visualization tool - Netbrain seemed promising in the start. But it seems to do too many things and has still room for improvement.

It is high time that more and more programmers should start building and contributing in network engineering field. There are numerous tools for each and every function. But there is lot of room for improvement in making those tools more elegant, easier to use and more reliable.

Yes, there is Software Defined Networking (SDN) where the vendors (Cisco, Silverpeak, Riverbed etc) themselves provide a nice visual dashboard. But the current "non-SDN" devices are going to stay for quite some time. And also why do we need to depend on one vendor and hence the Vendor provided dashboard? There will always be customers who would want vendor agnostic architecture and common tools to manage the infrastructure.

Note: A lot of the current tools (especially the ones I have mentioned above) do work very well and are used by large enterprises for a reason. But Tesla did disrupt the market of cars in its own way when reliable Toyotas and fast Ferraris already existed.

<comment><USER29> I'm not a network engineer, rather a security-focused guy, and I'm also very interested in this topic because the basis for a secure network is a well managed network without any unknown/undocumented assets (network equipment incl. layer 2 as well as network participants). Few months ago I attended a talk of Ivan Pepelnjak, the author of a network engineering blog called ipspace. He talked a lot on network automation and enumerated some success story. I remember he talked about people setting up several data centers in a relatively short amount of time by using a lot of network automation / configuration management.

[http://blog.ipspace.net/2018/03/presentation-and-video- real-...](http://blog.ipspace.net/2018/03/presentation-and-video-real- life.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A tool for managing software development that doesn't suck. Especially if your developers are doing a lot of small projects, that while too small to have their own sprint or their own kanbanboard are too big to fit into a single card on Trello.

Possibly something that mixes business and process models into it, but again, something simple where you attach a single bpmn drawing and maybe an architectural sketch to the process. Add time management, deadlines and maybe a tie in to the web services of an ESDH system and it might even work for task management in case working.

Everything is build for theoretical approaches. Like we do SCRUM, but really, we're doing scrumish things. We have an odd schedule, we work on multiple projects at once, depending on what resources are available and what has higher priority, sometimes something breaks and then we're all doing operations rather than development, sometimes the mayor has a direct request and so on. I think we've tried all the tools from atlassian to trello and nothing fits, it's all too textbook for a messy place like ours and often I think we should go back to postits and a fucking excel schedule but I really don't want to ever print an excel sheet ever again.

Interestingly I do a lot of networking with other managers in the public set for, and everyone had this problem, not just in digitization. There isn't a single efficient tool for managing your workforce in the public sector.

There are excellent tools, don't get me wrong, but we can't have our workers spend hours on them because we can't sell those hours to anyone.

<comment><USER31> What you're saying here really resonates, and it's something that we, at Atlassian, have heard from many of our users. The Jira team has been hard at work on a brand new project type that aims to give teams running "scrumish" the perfect opportunity to build a board and workflow that will truly fit any style of work (even work with an odd schedule, multiple projects at once, and that requires a mixture between operations and dev!).

We've gotten a lot of feedback that often times the strict structures of scrum and kanban are overly burdensome, yet teams still want and need some basic guardrails (as well as the ability to modify their processes on the fly). Our Product team is still testing and iterating on this new project type quite a bit, and if you're up for it, we'd love to give you an early demo and get your honest thoughts and feedback.

If you're interested, please shoot me an email and we'll find some time for a demo: email@example.com

Jake

Jira PMM @ Atlassian

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm on the board of my condo building's HOA which has a number of things that would be helpful.

* We pay $200/mo for a basic website with forum, some billing things, some file storage and other stuff I never use. It looks like it was written 20 years ago. (If someone can recommend something already out there that would be helpful)

* Doorman accepts dozens of package deliveries each day which get sent email and tracked in above system when picked up. Needs to write apt number on box and have its own tracking system

* I have to approve lots of expenses not knowing what fixing the hvac unit should cost

* we're getting screwed by insurance company - I have no idea if our policy is good or not

* Insurance claims for damage is a huge s __* show

* Energy management is horrible, we dont know where our electricity is going or how we can cut down

* Contractors are unreliable - I want to know who is blacklisted from neighbouring buildings because they suck

* How do our expenses compare to others? I have no idea.

<comment><USER33> What exactly does that website do?

<comment><USER32> Website for residents

Forum

Document storage

maintains emails lists

Track who's paid

\+ more I don't really use it

There are a bunch here

[https://www.capterra.com/hoa-software/](https://www.capterra.com/hoa- software/)

<comment><USER34> I don't know much about hoa's but this sounds like something that would work with a common stack like WordPress + Stripe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I work in health tech. Here are some problems: * Helping patients select the right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or through referrals. The problem is that Yelp has little correlation to quality of care. It's very difficult for patients to evaluate a doctor - usually what they end up doing is evaluating the customer service aspect of the doctor (did they speak to me nicely, did they make me wait for an appointment, etc.) but no one is able to evaluate doctors based on the quality of care. * Helping doctors and patients estimate costs - Neither doctors or patients understand costs. it is very routine for a doctor to suggest getting a lab test from X place because they have experience working with the center. They have no idea that for your specific insurance plan this will cost you 2x another place and so you with an unhappy patient who blames their doctor for ripping them off. There should be tools to patients and doctors estimate costs. * Helping patient select a health care plan from their employer or a marketplace - most patients have no idea what health care plan they are best on. However, theoretically if you have their history of claims and some guess on their future behavior, you should be able to tell them which health care plan makes the most sense for them * Helping patients manage their chronic conditions. Most people are very lax about managing their health conditions, they skip appointments, choose brand names over generics, ignore refills, etc. Technology should be able to nudge them in the right direction and help them optimize on quality and costs. * Building technology that encourages health behavior - A majority of the diseases attacking Americans are caused by lifestyle issues (diet, stress, drugs, exercise). If you could build technology solutions that help nudge people to healthier behavior, you would make solve a billion dollar problem for insurance companies; they would love to reduce the risk pool of their patients. This is a tough battle because even people who care about health are inundated with false information (think Dr. Oz or anti-vaxxers or people who insist every person in the world is a celiac and should go gluten free).

As you can see the bulk of the problems in the health care industry is understanding how to navigate the huge mess of the US healthcare system. A longer term solution is for us to build a single payer system and incentivize patient care over patient procedures but I doubt that will happen.

<comment><USER14> > Helping patients select the right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or > through referrals. The problem is that Yelp has little correlation to > quality of care. It's very difficult for patients to evaluate a doctor - > usually what they end up doing is evaluating the customer service aspect of > the doctor (did they speak to me nicely, did they make me wait for an > appointment, etc.) but no one is able to evaluate doctors based on the > quality of care.

We actually explored this for a startup idea. The problem is that it is difficult to find a group of people who can do the evaluations in a truthful and holistic way:

* Hospitals will never want to give out outcome data because outcome data will be used against them for ratings by people who don't understand it (for example, some community hospital in Montana may be rated higher than Mass General because of case complexity issues). Or worse, it will be used by people who DO understand it :D

* We explored having doctors rate other doctors in a variety of ways (which I think would reflect the "truest" measure of quality). Residents and fellows could rate attendings, but they might not know how attendings in their hospital compare to attendings in most other hospitals. Additionally, attendings or hospitals might apply pressure to these groups to provide good ratings. Specialists could rate other specialists in their field, but then you might see collusion, false negative reviews, or retaliation. How you would avoid these problems is not immediately clear to me.

* As you point out, patients are really only able to evaluate bedside manner and not quality of care.

One way we thought about it is having a rating system which would have public profiles for physicians and anonynmous reviews from other physicians and members of the care team. Ratings coming from other physicians in the specialty and providers at their institutions would be weighted more than ratings from other physicians. The highest rated physicians would also have more weight within their specialty than an average rated physician. You could bootstrap the system by asking specialists to provide the names of the top X people in their field. These people would automatically be rated highly.

Patients could log in and provide comments about patient experience; hospitals could log in and provide outcome data if they wanted.

I am not entirely sure how you would really monetize it. It's the equivalent of the dating app problem; the better you are at matching, the less money you make as users exit the platform. I do agree that it would be great if osmeone could solve this problem though.

> Helping doctors and patients estimate costs - Neither doctors or patients > understand costs. it is very routine for a doctor to suggest getting a lab > test from X place because they have experience working with the center. They > have no idea that for your specific insurance plan this will cost you 2x > another place and so you with an unhappy patient who blames their doctor for > ripping them off. There should be tools to patients and doctors estimate > costs.

We had a startup that came at this in an indirect way. We were trying to make it easier for labs and other providers to perform eligibility checks and facilitate prior auths in real time. Our proposed solution would have involved running the check during ordering, and then having the phlebotomist or lab tech at the hospital doing the sample collection contact the doctor and inform them that something would or would not be covered by insurance. The provider could then talk to the patient about out of pocket costs etc. I think this actually could have worked; our team imploded before we could prototype it however :(

While I like the other ideas, glhf trying to get people to practice lifestyle management or be adherent to a treatment regimen XD

<comment><USER36> As a frequent patient, I see such incredible need for "disruption" in healthcare, both in terms of transparency/ empowering the patient, and in terms of cost suppression. However, anyone who tackles this space has to be aware that there are some _huge_ entrenched interests who like the current inefficiencies and cost opacity very much, thank you. Breaking into this space would be 1 part technical know-how to 10 parts legal jujitsu.

As an example, look upon the bloodied corpse of the failed startup Remedy, which was actually doing something really good -- helping users find billing errors and getting money back for them on bad charges. But incredible amounts of pushback stymied them:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/40483774/remedy-wanted-to-cut- pe...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40483774/remedy-wanted-to-cut-peoples- medical-bills-but-the-health-care-system-wouldnt-let-it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Journalism needs a WYSIWYG editor for stylized content -- content that is more visually diverse/interesting than the linear text+image+embed format, but not SO so custom/new as to truly require a developer to build it.

<comment><USER38> What is a good live example of this stylized content?

<comment><USER39> Not op but The New York Times has some interesting layout options available to their writers and editors. You can see a small sampling of it in [https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a- digita...](https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digital- first-newsroom-f1cb8367fc21) which is written by one of the developers of their new news room text editor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> We run background checks, and there is definitely a space for public record aggregation.

We directly interface with those interested in the results of the check, and there is an overwhelming amount of work in building integrations with schools, applicant tracking systems, hospitals, public records, courts...

We spend most of our time building XML and JSON parsers to cram their data into our models.

If there was a company that provided a single interface to this data, you could write your own ticket. I know we aren't the only company in this space with this issue.

<comment><USER41> Interesting problem to solve - guess the pain will be when all the data sources change their endpoints and everything sort of breaks. At least that's been my experience with aggregating public economic data feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What is the current state of the art in financial modelling in corporate finance departments?

I used to be a management consultant. We often built financial models of company operations or parts of their value chain, and then looked at the change from process improvement, restructuring or bolting on new business lines. Everything was done in Excel. For the annual strategic planning and budgeting cycle, large companies used expensive proprietary systems to aggregate divisional financial plans.

I now work for a big bank, building out a Jupyter-based data science and machine learning platform. We have hooks in to SDLC with code reviews, commit history, and all the good stuff that software engineers nowadays take for granted.

So what if Finance departments dropped Excel and instead used our dev tools and methodologies? I'm genuinely curious if any companies are doing this, or if any startups are building such solutions.

<comment><USER43> The cost of achieving new tool literacy is very high. What does this degree of rigor really add?

Many spreadsheets are used as disposable report tools to support management level business decision making. While there are exceptions, in general perhaps they are more like one off report-generation shell scripts than unit operations in a larger business process. This distinction is significant, because rigor adds more value on automating processes than one-off reports, owing to increased lifecycle complexity.

At the management level, time is gold. These are people who have enough money, lots of responsibilities, and no time. They already have a tool that works. You would be essentially asking them to waste their most valuable resource investing in a new tool that may disappear tomorrow without a strong/clear ROI.

I don't doubt you could get some customers for such a product, but I'm skeptical it's going to change the paradigm. Platform-for-everything businesses (Google, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) tend to have a large minimum snowball size.

I see things developing differently: an open source financial gateway will become the standard accounting interface to many businesses as trade moves toward greater transparency, predictability, speed and automation, and we see features like arbitrary asset settlement, multi-hop transactions, banking automation and multicurrency accounting becoming standard. Accounting departments will begin to thin out as forms on such a system become input to generate figures and reports previously generated manually. It will probably be hosted. We see a little of this now with cloud accounting systems, but I'd wager it will go a lot further with Germany's _Industry 4.0_ vision and a similar result in China. Supply chains will be the driver, there's just so much fat to trim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Technology adoption. I'm not necessarily talking about change management (although that could be a feature), but technology adoption in the broader sense. For example: if I'm a Health IT executive, how can I ensure the adoption of say, Kubernetes is the right path for my organization? I may have 20+ stakeholders, from actual practitioners, to finance pushing me in various directions. It's almost like there's space for adoption assurance, or some type of 3rd party integrator that sits in front of the bleeding edge of technology and helps dinosaur industries move faster through adoption. A layer that could understand my IT footprint, and recommend tools/improvements/etc. Like CreditKarma, but for IT.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is a really simple but basic one. Market size might not be billions of dollars, but a basic learning management system along the lines of Teachable/Udemy that allows for code with built-in testing would be used overnight by a dozen code bootcamps and would pull a lot of people out of the other platforms.

Maybe it's just a feature, not a full product, but it makes any "learn to code" MOOC unusable.

<comment><USER46> Stephen Grider on Udemy uses Jest to create automated tests for his JS and React courses that you can run while you watch and code his videos.

Jest and Mocha both have a watch feature that will test a file each time it is saved for "continuous testing", much like using Gulp watch or any type of dev live server environment.

Also Jest features Snapshot testing which will take a picture of a UI and test all changes made to the UI, as well as alerting you in tests if the UI has changed. I could see this being used in bootcamps as well.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, I just want that built into the LMS itself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The process is so painful.

Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases work via a [Quote > PO > Pro Forma Invoice > Final Invoice > Payment > Receipt] process.

<comment><USER48> Add government red tape on top of this and it can take a week or more to get a COTS part ordered from a vendor that sells all of their stuff online. Heaven help you if the vendor isn't in the approved vendor list, that's another week to get all the compliance paperwork to them and get signed. It's agonizing when you need something quick but still need to go through all the hoops because the item is technically government property.

<comment><USER49> I was working on a solution addressing this problem during my undergrad inside our university incubator (in India). Although I left it due to unavoidable reasons. But do you think the problem is big enough to worth exploring again?

<comment><USER50> The problem grows in scale as organizations grow in size or spending increases and is applicable across most industries.

The biggest challenge is finding a solution that fits workflow needs, has the necessary features, and is user friendly enough that the solution will actually be adopted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> In healthcare billing with patient insurance companies, hospitals and doctors are contractually prohibited (and sometimes illegal) from sharing how much they get paid per procedure unit (RVU) from insurance co's. However, if you are a third party for the hospitals and have access to the billing info of a metropolitan area you could create some kind of price comparison system for all of the hospitals.

</comment><comment><USER51> Will someone _please_ convince the trucking industry that "communicating" by swapping text files over FTP in an absolutely incomprehinsible, proprietary format is simply no way to live?

Especially with the recent push by the fed to put electronic logging systems in every truck, this system is absolutely ripe for disruption. Downside is you'll be fighting entrenched companies like IBM for ground.

<comment><USER52> I work in the trucking (telematics) industry. I've dealt with a decent amount of ftp file transfers, but most stuff I've seen has been some sort of API based (SOAP, REST, etc).

Can you give a few more specific examples? Are you in the industry now? Working at a carrier?

<comment><USER51> I work in intermodal. Whenever one of our larger customers wants to give us a load to move, we use X12 EDI. This is standard throughout at least the intermodal industry, though from what I gather that may also be true of over- the-road as well.

An example 204 EDI (Load Tender) looks like this:

        ISA*01*0000000000*01*0000000000*ZZ*ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO*ZZ*123456789012345*101127*1719*U*00400*000003438*0*P*>
        GS*SM*4405197800*999999999*20111219*1747*2100*X*004010
        ST*204*0001
        B2**XXXX**9999955559**PP
        B2A*04
        L11*NONPRIMARY*OK
        MS3*XXXX*B**M
        NTE**FROZEN GOODS SET TO -10d F
        N1*PF*XYZ CORP*9*9995555500000
        N3*31875 SOLON RD
        N4*SOLON*OH*44139
        N7**NONE*********FF****5300
        S5*1*CL*27800*L*2444*CA*1016*E
        L11*9999001947*DO
        L11*9999670098*CR
        L11*9999001866*DO
        L11*9999669887*CR
        G62*69*20111218
        N1*SH*XYZ CORP*9*9991555550000
        N2*TERMINAL FREEZER
        N3*5555 TERMINAL RD
        N4*CLEVELAND*OH*44023
        S5*2*PU*3042*L*312*CA*146*E
        L11*9999001866*DO
        L11*9999595358*PO
        L11*9999669887*CR
        G62*70*20090728
        N1*ST*1 EDI SOURCE*93*9990055555
        N3*31875 SOLON RD
        N4*SOLON*OH*44139
        OID*9999669887*99999595358**PC*312*L*3042*E*146
        L5**FREIGHT
        email@example.com
        S5*3*CU*24758*L*2132*CA*870*E
        L11*9999001947*DO
        L11*9999008881*PO
        L11*9999670098*CR
        G62*70*20111218
        N1*ST*1 EDI SOURCE*93*9990055555
        N3*55555 5TH AVE
        N4*MAYFIELD*OH*44244
        OID*9999670098*999608881**PC*2132*L*24758*E*870
        L5**FREIGHT
        email@example.com
        L3*27800*G*******1016*E*2444*L
        SE*46*0001
        GE*1*2100
        IEA*1*000002104

I haven't proper parsed it, but I believe that's going from Cleveland to Mayfield. One of those L11 segments is probably a reference number. There's no MS1 segment so it's likely over the road? Anyway, it's not exactly descriptive or even human readable...

A reply accepting a load looks like this:

        ISA*01*0000000000*01*0000000000*ZZ*ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO*ZZ*123456789012345*101127*1719*U*00400*000003438*0*P*>
        GS*GF*4405197800*999999999*20111219*1742*000000003*X*004010
        ST*990*000000003
        B1*XXXX*9999919860*20111218*A
        N9*CN*9999919860
        SE*4*000000003
        GE*1*000000003
        IEA*1*000000003

These are commonly exchanged as text files over FTP sites.

Some of our more forward-thinking, larger customers are considering moving to AS2, which I believe is sent over HTTP vs FTP. A cursory Google search doesn't really turn up any clear examples on AS2, which doesn't exactly comfort me, but at least there's an RFC[0] for it, whereas for the X12 spec you have to pay[1] to see certain parts of it.

Not that anyone follows the "spec" anyway. We code special handling for every single one of our customer's EDI transmissions.

I wish everything was REST, or at least JSON. That would be 10x easier. Instead we spend weeks going back and forth on silly things like what a 07 means in the ATS segment, or what character to use for line endings (wish I was kidding -- we've been blocked for two months on the line ending character).

What's more is with the ELDs in all our trucks, customers are increasingly wanting GPS updates. I'd love to offer them a streaming socket with GPS data -- it's completely feasible considering our ELD backend. Instead everyone is wondering how we can send updates in 15 minutes increments over FTP, especially when these transactions are often batched in 5 minute loops on both ends in the first place.

It kills me a little. We could be doing so much more. I can't believe we aren't pushing for _real time_. I can't believe five to fifteen minute batching loops are acceptable.

[0]: [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4130.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4130.txt) [1]: [http://www.x12.org/x12-work-products/x12-edi- standards.cfm](http://www.x12.org/x12-work-products/x12-edi-standards.cfm)

<comment><USER52> Thanks for the reply! That certainly does look like a pain in the ass. Being on the telematics side specifically, we deal less with EDI stuff, but I'm sure down the road I will have to, and I agree that a structured API would be much better.

If you don't mind me asking, what ELD are you running? My company specifically builds one of those, amongst the rest of the productivity suite necessary for a driver to do their work.

<comment><USER51> We started out using XRS. We run almost 100% independent contractors. Started out putting our own tablets in all the trucks. We discovered drivers can run up _enormous_ data bills when they figure out how to circumvent the MDM... It apparently was also a pain to physically install XRS (I don't know the details of that). We also have nearly 50% turnover per year. The whole situation was really untenable.

We've since switched to GeoTab and a BYOD model. The GeoTab devices are a lot cheaper, so a contractor walking away with one isn't that big of an issue. Rollout was much smoother this time.

<comment><USER52> I would really like to pick your brain a bit more if possible. We directly compete with both XRS and GeoTab, so getting insight into your fleet's decision making process would be super helpful if you're willing.

Also could potentially talk about our ELD offering (amongst a bunch of other stuff) if you're interested.

darrin [at] platformscience.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Well, I guess journalism needs a way to be profitable again, and creators in general need a way to sell their work without requiring long term subscriptions or ads. But given the many, many companies who've tried to fix this issue (by allowing users to pay for certain bits of content via microtransactions or bundling subscriptions together ala Blendle), I'm not sure what the answer would be.

I also feel game development needs a way for creators to commission help with various aspects of the process too. Oh sure, there's the odd forum where you can pay for graphics assets or music, but what if your problems are code related? Or game design based? It's a lot harder to request that sort of thing online, let alone find a way to pay for it. Where can I say, hire a level designer or game programmer independently of a studio?

As far as I can tell, nowhere, which makes it awfully hard when I'm stuck and just need a bit of help to finish a mostly complete project.

Anyone who solves that would get a lot of my money, I'll say that much.

<comment><USER34> What you describe were by far my favorite kind of jobs on Upwork. People who have a idea what they are doing but stuck with individual questions.

Upwork is by far not optimal but you can easily find talent for quick questions there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Secure internet for people who travel frequently or work from coffee shops. Filter the "free" internet connection through a TOR router and protect your network/browsing.

<comment><USER55> Anything wrong with just using a VPN?

<comment><USER54> No, not at all. I view it similar to the classic Dropbox discussion. There were existing alternatives, but Dropbox took off because "it just worked" without having to use FTP and Linux. In this case, you eliminate the VPN step, by linking the router to your devices and using that single device to connect.

Secondly, with VPN, I first have to connect to the open network in order to activate the VPN. I also need to do it for each device I want to connect (phone, computer, tablet).

<comment><USER56> [https://www.expressvpn.com/](https://www.expressvpn.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> A huge problem with CRMs is the lack of staff engagement. A company will spend $30 million to customize their Salesforce workflow (or their SAP workflow, or any other workflow or CRM tool) but the staff will hate it and so the investment seems wasted. That's why Natural Language Processing seems like it could be a win for this space. A salesperson should be able to write a quick text message on their phone, and that message should be parsed by an NLP script and then put into Salesforce. The promise of this idea, as well as the problems, I detailed here:

[https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy- Steps/dp/09...](https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy- Steps/dp/0998997617/)

</comment><comment><USER58> just wrote a blog post on this exact topic for the biopharma industry: [https://newbio.tech/blog/bio_charts.html](https://newbio.tech/blog/bio_charts.html)

its a $600B industry that is in decline because its traditional R&D engine is sputtering out, and big pharma has been amazingly acquisitive the last five years to replace off-patent blockbuster drugs (more IPOs and big M&A than software the last 5 years despite getting 1/5 of venture funding)

tons of really interesting new tech for startups to explore: synthetic biology, cell and gene therapy, bioelectronic medicine, many many others

</comment><comment><USER59> Not necessarily an idea for a startup, but I want a Chrome plugin that changes the click behavior of an email address. If I click on the domain part of the email address, I want it to open that domain's website on a new tab.

</comment><comment><USER60> Digital marketing and programmatic advertising - TRAFFICKING. Everyone hates it. It's 100% required but no one has solved the issue. It can eat up so much time and if you make a mistake can cost valueable data.

<comment><USER61> What do you mean by this? As in, people hate doing marketing or they don't understand how to advertise? Plus, a mistake can cost valuable data? Where are you losing data?

<comment><USER62> Not OP, but worked in the field for a time. Trafficking usually means configuring your ad in the campaign management system. What are your targeting parameters, what are your tracking tags, uploading the ad itself, entering in lots of custom information that while conceptually similar across ad platforms usually has different names and often has to be manually entered. A lot of platforms do offer APIs of some sort to help with bulk campaign/ad creation, but there's often no "one stop shop" to be able to set up a google campaign and facebook campaign at the same time. There are some companies working on this, I think usually referred to as (or in conjunction with) "marketing automation".

A mistake can mean - misconfiguring your target (wasting money on ads that won't give you an ROI), misconfiguring your 3rd party tracking (letting data like conversions go unaccounted for, or not having your auditing tags setup, meaning you show ads to fraudulent users that you otherwise wouldn't have to pay for), etc.

<comment><USER63> Another ad guy here. The problem is best practice on one platform doesn't equal best practice on the other. Additionally, there are many ad formats that don't overlap on multiple platforms. Even GDN vs FB is a huge disparity. I would be interested in the product though if one existed.

Alternatively, one place to manage creatives and language as well as targeting for each campaign might be helpful as we use google sheets, excel and Trello for this now.

<comment><USER64> Do large agencies have systems for this? Or is everyone using Excel?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> An app for installing and maintaining mixed fleets of lora/sigfox/... IoT sensors.

When installing these at scale in existing buildings you have to be able to send out local workforce to properly install and activate thousands of sensors, as well as maintain them afterwards, without prior training. It's one of those things that sounds easy on the surface but is riddled with complexity, like how to register which sensor is installed where in a foolproof way, or how to easily locate faulty sensors for replacement.

<comment><USER66> what's the market for this? how many people are installing iot fleets?

<comment><USER65> The price of sensors is dropping and starting to reach the point where cost of retrofitting buildings is outweighed by savings in more efficient building use. That trend is going to cause most buildings to be retrofitted. You can do things like occupancy detection of every workplace which are very valuable to building managers.

There's plenty of competition in people selling the sensors, providing connectivity, or doing data analysis, but I'm not aware of any solutions for installing the damn things which aren't tied to a vendor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I am working on content AI platform (preadr). Preadr brings to you Internet's finest stories/content. It is a content discovery platform that helps you discover quality content that is relevant to you.

The Problem

There are currently three main ways we discover an ever-growing amount of content on the web: news, social networks, and search. There is a fourth category that is missing: relevance—a break from the noise on the Internet to discover what's relevant to us.

News delivers what's happening in the world right now. Social networks let us know what's happening with our friends. Search is great at finding the needle in the haystack. But how do we discover things from around the web that are new and relevant to us?

Incentives on existing platforms are such that new and entertaining content wins. We need a better system that can filter the signal out of the noise.

The Solution

We're building Preadr to tackle the relevance problem and bring forward quality content. A platform that helps you discover most relevant content based on your interests, for both, leisure as well as learning.

Every day we analyze an ever-growing amount of new links and create a storyline of the most relevant ones. We curate content from the most trusted sources on the internet and let our algorithms do their work to filter the relevant from the non-relevant. Since quality is not limited by the format of content, we offer a mix of different formats i.e. articles, videos, podcasts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER68> ctrl+f "construction" = 0 results.

[https://angel.co/construction](https://angel.co/construction)

small construction companies are still in the stone age. plangrid and submittal exchange exist but not much else is popular.

textura is owned by oracle, and everything else is owned by trimble and autodesk.

theres a plethera of attempts at field document management, and timecards, but 0 great medium-large business size erps. procore is like half an erp without an accounting system.

there is a huge untapped thirst for something that "just works" regarding labor productivity tracking and document management.

construction is one of the places where I think an enterprise blockchain could actually apply better than a traditional database. imagine a construction project with one blockchain, and every general contractor, sub, and vendor participating. shares, payments, todo, gantt charts, drawings, the model itself. they can all access the database from whatever supported client their firm uses (think email clients all working with each other) but on the backend working on one shared distributed database. I think you could turn down the bad actor security a bit, similar to [https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/blog/announcing-microsoft-...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/blog/announcing-microsoft-s-coco-framework-for-enterprise-blockchain- networks/)

<comment><USER69> Engineer behind REBIM here. I've spent the last one and half years developing an AEC SaaS platform that includes

* A project-based document management system that has baked-in version control.

* Issue and Task trackers.

* Soft realtime features such as notifications when models are converted, when anyone comments on an issue or task you've logged and a realtime chat system.

* A browser-based model viewer with the ability to:

* Federate multiple models from various project disciplines into one scene.

* Take screenshots of the scene, mark them up and log issues and tasks on model assets with the marked up screenshots straight away.

* Associate documents with model objects.

* Hold conversations on model objects.

* Store / review feeds from the built counterparts of modelled assets.

Video tutorials: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8xrkI2ZaSm-5s_aJnnGpeA/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8xrkI2ZaSm-5s_aJnnGpeA/videos)

API documentation: [https://app.rebim.co/static/docs/index.html](https://app.rebim.co/static/docs/index.html)

Intro for small to medium sized design studios: [https://rebim.co](https://rebim.co)

Intro for enterprise customers: [http://rebimenterprise.com/](http://rebimenterprise.com/)

We've only just started beta testing this February but you're welcome to sign up for an account at [https://app.rebim.co](https://app.rebim.co)

I can be reached on lukebrooks [at] azurelope [dot] com if you need any assistance and we would also love to hear your thoughts on REBIM if you have any suggestions for improvements!

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Some sort of enabler for content. I work in content marketing (not click bait shit but helping b2b companies tell their story without hiring a full design/marketing/dev team).

Our process and system is super efficient recording video + sending notifications to team members to edit, add captions, strip audio for your podcast, set up your podcast, set up your alexa flash briefing, etc.

But it takes hours to do all of this if youre on your own and thats ONLY if you know how to do it all. Content is the black box most have no idea how to do. If you don't pay our agency to do it for you you are kind of out of luck.

We sell a book on our process now and sell about 50 copies a week. These people are validated and want to learn how to do it, and are willing to pay to learn.

It only makes sense to build the platform that automates this process for these people and offer it to them. They've already paid to learn. Might as well offer the platform to do it.

<comment><USER70> I would love to check out the book. Can you mention it here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Patch distribution for games. Every desktop game does its own thing, with its own CDN, incompatible with other engines.

<comment><USER72> I don't really see a market for that. Most desktop games these days are handled by store fronts like Steam, GOG, itch.io, Origin or the Blizzard Launcher that already handle updates for you. But it's certainly an interesting topic and itch wrote about it a while ago: [https://amos.me/blog/2017/efficient-game- updates/](https://amos.me/blog/2017/efficient-game-updates/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> From a technical side of things: \- data management \- faster analytics software \- test and learn optimisation \- faster model deployment

From a business side of things: \- loyalty program/rewards \- pricing optimization \- financial services to underserved customers including entrepreneurs, families, millennials, freelancers, etc.

<comment><USER73> im creating something for loyalty rewards but most small businesses seem apathetic, too busy for anything new

<comment><USER41> Yes, that's typically the case for small businesses. You'll find much better luck mid-market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Open hardware and software for PLCs for manufacturing.

<comment><USER75> Along with this, we need a better way to program robots. I program Fanuc i200D and that whole industry makes my blood boil. Want more than 200 variables in your program? Shell out $10k.

High level programming language to program robots with safety in mind would be amazing. RoboDK is the only one that is doing this and they still suck.

<comment><USER76> If you have arrays why don't you implement a turing machine and compiler to turing machine so that you can have more variables without shelling out? Or some other model of computation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I want to see a good identity and user manager SaaS oriented towards smaller customers. There used to be Stormpath, which was pretty amazing, but they got bought by Okta, which is less friendly to small teams and more enterprise oriented.

<comment><USER78> I'm working on [https://github.com/fiatjaf/accountd.xyz](https://github.com/fiatjaf/accountd.xyz), which is basically a universal association of profiles (identified by a username) with accounts on "silos" like twitter, github, trello and email addresses in general. You can use it either for user login or to post- association of accounts with profiles. There's no documentation, but you can see it working on [https://sitios.xyz/](https://sitios.xyz/) and [https://sitios.xyz/trello](https://sitios.xyz/trello).

Do you think it is interesting somehow?

<comment><USER77> This is not quite what I had in mind, but it's quite interesting. One recommendation: don't use a username, that approach has a number of flaws you can easily avoid here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I work as a fitness instructor and I want to have an holistic control panel to monitor my customers health and program, I want them to speak to each others and share. I want them to see their historic datas too

<comment><USER49> Healthifyme is doing something on similar lines but there are based out of India right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> A startup in the multi media field would basically be tooling creators. Innovation in the sense of just creating things easier to use, a jackknife agency that can develop specific tools per department.

</comment><comment><USER81> Replacement for - Login with Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER82> The music industry as a whole. Who owns what song, what percentage, what role (writer, publisher), who recorded it, who collects for which industry, who collects mechanical royalties, performance royalties, would I make more money with ascap, bmi, sesac or gmr? How about this publisher, vs this other one? Tell me how often the music I own is played on radio, spotify, etc. Was my royalty here calculated correctly?

</comment><comment><USER83> Modular template based responsive html email builder with version control, comments and approvals.

Our marketing department sends 10+ campaigns/week, each goes through multiple changes and compliance approval. It's very time consuming, especially when someone needs to touch the code.

<comment><USER84> This looks interesting. Is there any solution that you are already using?

> especially when someone needs to touch the code

Do you not generally touch the code? Is some kind of WYSIWYG editor used to create an email or is the code human written?

<comment><USER83> Right now using an in-house app to make edits to emails initially built in dream weaver.

So, html email template (no unlined css) > merge word content in dreamweaver > upload to custom web app > app uses premailer to in-line the specified css > make changes to the content via ckeditor (which messes up the html in many cases) > export in pardot-ready format.

The app versions the content changes and allows comments as well easy email tests. We do 20+ revisions per campaign so that's a necessity.

This was built 5 years ago and still works but getting inadequate for the complexity of responsive emails.

I've looked at this: [https://beefree.io/](https://beefree.io/) but it does not allow the creation of custom content modules. So looking into building a new version of our own, again.

It's a pain but nothing compared to debugging email markup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> A new operating system that allows peripherals like network cards, monitors, sata disks, bluetooth, speakers, fmri scanners, etc. to be used interchangeably between machines, locally and over the net.

Edit: I'm in the computing industry. Have you heard of it?

<comment><USER86> There's Plan9.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> API Management and Api gateways for regulated industries like banking, finance government etc. With an eye on governance, IAM, auditing etc.

All solutions out there are horrible....

<comment><USER88> I work on product at TIBCO. Mashery plays in the broader API Management space, but we haven't traditionally targeted banking/govt/heavily-regulated verticals. From Day 0, Mashery has been a multi-tenant SaaS with locally deployable federated gateway and many buyers in these verticals get jittery about SaaS, multi-tenancy, etc.

However, that SaaS-led model is changing fast and we'd love to hear about your pain with single-tenant, on-prem solutions available today. Would you be open to a no-strings-attached chat? mashery-pm<at>tibco<dot>com

<comment><USER87> Sure, no problem.

I will write an email tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Out-of-wallet challenge questions or knowledge based authentication for developing countries. There is a lot of money to be made there. LOTS OF MONEY.

<comment><USER90> Could you expand a little bit?

I'm from Venezuela, it is not a developing country right now. But it may be in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Half-joke, but a real problem: quality documentation for AWS. I'd pay good money for this.

<comment><USER92> that's called hiring a consultant... just sayin

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> A messaging/texting device with a long battery life and decent keyboard.

<comment><USER93> Try a Blackberry or Nokia device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> In my industries, all of them.

<comment><USER73> for example...</comment></comment>


One hour of exercise a week can prevent depression - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171003093953.htm <comment><USER2> Has anyone else noticed the odd "coincidence" that depression is associated with -depressive- states such as

\- sitting around and not exercising \- keeping to oneself and not socializing and helping others \- repeating negative talk outloud \- aimlessness and laziness to formulating a meaningful life purpose

Could it be that this "depression" is really a diagnosis of:

\- sitting around and not doing something for others and the world?

We act like there's an abstract or canonical "depression"... but really it is our interpretation of a person's outward expression, action, and contribution.

<comment><USER3> I think you need to distinguish between depressed mood and Major Depressive Disorder, as well as other mood disorders.

You may be right if you were only talking about the former. However, MDD, BPAD etc. are serious stuff.

Source: I'm a doctor and have seen serious depression.

<comment><USER2> How do you, as a doctor, reconcile that there is no test/falsifiable criteria for depression?

You may be able to identify "major depression" but how many times is it just a case of "lack of meaningful purpose" and just "bad decisions" that are compensated for with drugs that may do more harm than good?

<comment><USER3> Sorry for the late reply. I usually get notified of children comments.

I don't even know where to begin answering this. There are criteria for MDD. Everyone's case is different and complex. There is always a judgement call to be made. There are tools such as the K10 that go a way to making an objective assessment but I actually find the difference between MDD and "feeling down" pretty obvious. Like most of medicine, it's pattern recognition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Though one hour of exercise looks easy, I think that once one is depressed, its difficult to break from the inertia of brooding over life and going to exercise. Here is where a solid family/friends support system comes to play, and is of paramount importance.

</comment><comment><USER5> I mean, that's a lot of exercise...</comment>


Turtleocracy - <AUTHOR> https://www.notion.so/Turtleocracy-47a6df7692bf4e95a39504a73a50a295 <comment><USER3> This seems like an overly-complex derivation of Isaiah Berlin's concept of _The Hedgehog and the Fox_ :

 _Berlin...divides writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce and Philip Warren Anderson)._

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

<comment><USER4> Is the Hedgehog and the Fox just an overly-complex (but more concrete) derivation of monism vs pluralism?

<comment><USER5> I have to think of: "there are two types of people in the world - those who divide the world up into two types of people, and those that don't"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought this would be fluff, but this is a genuinely interesting schema for modelling research-type organizations that I haven't seen before. (If you think it's "just X", the page does spend some time clearly compare-and- contrasting with anything you might think to analogize it to. It's not quite any existing thing.) It probably _is_ consultingware of some form, but I don't mind scavenging insight from a predatory situation if there's some there to be taken.

One thing I would like to see, though, is a list of historical evidence that this paradigm does better than the standard academic "publish papers to gain notoriety" paradigm. Turtleocracy _has_ been tried before, I'm sure, even if by accident—there are only so many relationship graphs a small set of humans can end up in. I'm pretty sure some private research organizations work[ed] like this?

But I'd like an analysis of how much their working-like-this contributed to their success or lack thereof. It'd be interesting to contrast different private research institutions, e.g. {Bell Labs, RCA Labs, maybe Oak Ridge?} on their comparative Turtleocracy-ness vs their comparative "throughput" in pumping out new foundational knowledge (which I assume is the goal here.)

<comment><USER7> Yes, right, Turtleocracy is partly modeled on PARC, Bell Labs, etc. But I don't begin to know how to answer this question about "how much their working- like-this contributed to their success or lack thereof" \-- are you an organizational sociologist? If you have some methodological ideas here, I'd love to hear them.

I'm not sure where people are getting the consultingware idea. We don't have any consulting relationships with businesses at all. Guess our copy is misleading somewhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah yes another shot at the kind of people vulnerable to the "organizations aligning themselves around a detached yet critically objective outsider while enabling them with their expertise and ideas and crediting them with the outcome, no hard skills required, just your own innate passion and curiosity !" fantasy.

</comment><comment><USER9> This reads as coming from the disgruntled perspective of a 'turtle' who resents the strong opinions of 'rabbits' and the lack of experimentalism of 'birds'. Little consideration is given to the value of the other animals except as an inferior contrast to the turtles. An optimal solution would not be a 'Turtleocracy' (tyranny of turtles) but a balanced ecosystem where different strengths are given their due, and no group has tyranny over another.

<comment><USER10> From the first linked page[1]:

> Most organizations should not be turtleocracies. It depends on what your > organization wants to do, and whether it's never been done before.

> 1\. When you must _do_ things well, in the standard way, you need experts. > You can put them together into an _expert bureaucracy,_ a _consultancy,_ > etc.

> 2\. When _most things can go poorly_ , but you hope _some things_ work out, > you can use people with ideas and energy without needing turtles. You can > put them together into a _do-ocracy_ or _startup ecosystem_.

> 3\. But, when you must _do things well_ , in a way that's never been done > before, you need "takeless" people, without strong ideas, who will slowly > experiment over years. You can put them together into a Turtleocracy.

1: [https://www.notion.so/Is-Turtleocracy-Right-for-Your- Organiz...](https://www.notion.so/Is-Turtleocracy-Right-for-Your- Organization-b94b794aa04d41e4b25f3560025253c7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why do we have to zoomorphize concepts like this? Scrum had it, with the chickens and pigs. To me, it just muddies the understanding of the thing, because you have to remember some story or joke about the origin of the specific zoomorphization. It's also really hard to get people to take the process seriously when the process treats itself like a children's story.

<comment><USER12> Everything is a metaphor, you probably prefer inanimate metaphors (like channels, pipes, scripts, keys, libraries, etc.) But metaphors involving animals being considered more childish and less serious is purely due to your cultural milieu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This model doesn't seem too far removed from academia; at least in the "ideal" sense, ignoring the realities of attracting funding and academic politics. The turtle would go from PhD student to tenured professors; rabbits might be undergrads or non-academic faculty staff; birds might be people like librarians and lab techs.

<comment><USER14> I don't think that even works in the ideal -- academics in my experience are something like 45% rabbits and 45% birds, with a small cadre of turtles who manage to survive the politics and bs of academia because their research output is just so strong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What even is this? Why does it seem to lead to a paid $2000 course? [0] What is the goal, and who is involved? It seems very high minded and deep on the surface, but what are the expected outcomes and timelines of this, system?

[0] [https://www.notion.so/HS101-Deluxe-9c92efe621a04d2886e2986ce...](https://www.notion.so/HS101-Deluxe-9c92efe621a04d2886e2986cec1ea1bd)

<comment><USER8> It's called a coaching scam

<comment><USER16> It's also called "management consulting." An article was on the top of HN the other day where the George Washington University was getting some, and apparently in that case the top decision-makers were treated to Disneyland Resort. What is this group offering compared to that?

<comment><USER15> On the surface it sounds like they are offering access to a network of connected and wealthy individuals with a hint that you might get paid to do research on one of their questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> All those words, and it never answers the most pressing question: is this philosophy turtley enough for the Turtle Club?

</comment><comment><USER18> Is Notion affiliated with Somalia in some way? Or are companies just picking TLDs out of a hat at this point?

</comment><comment><USER19> I love notion as a tool but it seems like one of those things people will be crying about in a few years if we continue to put all this valuable information solely in their hands. (yes i know you can export but it doesn't preserve the awesome format they have which is really the point)

<comment><USER20> Really? Browsing through this site a bit completely turned me off Notion... like, the page is so slow to load, as if the rendering was happening on the client side, not the server side... Can't they just generate & cache the HTML and serve it?

Edit: they also hijack Ctrl-click which I consider extra shitty and non-user- friendly.

<comment> munk-a They _also_ hijack the arrow keys, which is basically heresy.

<comment><USER19> I agree the web interface is absolutely horrible. I use the desktop app. They allow you to export html from there and preserve the nested document structure (the main feature imo). I've seen writeups about people building nocode apps on notion so I think their idea might be to create an ecosystem where they can ignore respected conventions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know it's likely not the intent, but this reads a little like raison d'être for McKinsey.

<comment><USER22> the wolveocracy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Someone's very annoyed with Twitter's tendency to produce "hot takes"..

</comment><comment><USER24> These mental models can be an interesting perspective, but please take them with a grain of salt. The more branding, marketing, cute names, and emojies applied to a mental model, the more you should be suspicious.

This "Turtleocracy" model might help bring some insight or inspiration in certain challenging environments, but be careful about assuming you're in a "Turtleocracy" or stereotyping people into "Rabbit" or "Bird". It's tempting to reach for these systems and stereotypes when you're in conflict with someone because it gives you a sense of having the upper hand. Ironically, doing so will turn you into the very person this article warns about in the section about Tyranny of People with "Takes". Always be on the look out for signs that you're wrong or that you've misunderstood the situation.

In my experience, it's healthy to have a variety of different models and perspectives through which you can view situations. It's not healthy, however, to try to force every situation to fit your favorite mental model. When you all have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Don't be that guy.

<comment><USER7> Strongly agree!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Blank page...

[http://archive.is/ly6T4](http://archive.is/ly6T4)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi, I'm one of the creators of turtleocracy. I'll be responding to questions below.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just imagine what a corrupted group of turtle + rabbit + bird could achieve in such an organization.

<comment><USER7> Yes, for sure. This is a known weakness, mentioned on the page. We hope to test ways to make turtleocracy robust against sociopathic conspiracies and fake turtles over the next year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow, first Notion article i've seen here, that platform is so great, i'm so happy :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this can be rephrased in terms of walruses, carpenters and oysters

</comment><comment><USER28> To continue with the example, many times turtles when slowly crossing the highway of innovation get run over by the trucks of disruption that they did not see when they started to cross the highway.

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://www.notion.so/Fundraising-c5092becfe074069b8252fb866...](https://www.notion.so/Fundraising-c5092becfe074069b8252fb866aaa30a) <\- tl;dr it's a startup teaching stuff to other people/companies/startups.

</comment><comment><USER16> Now we finally have an organizational philosophy centered around listless bureaucrats.

Actually, we already have a lot of those. Highly conservative organizations that ascribe a very low probability of success to any particular effort are common and arise on their own without any coaching required. All it takes is a few failed projects in the professional history of the leaders, whether at that organization or elsewhere. Unless your leadership is full of 20-somethings who have never seen an idea not work out, a far more important problem is avoiding the scenario where nobody wants to takes risks because the benefits go to the company but the failure would be pinned on them.

</comment><comment><USER30> A bit off topic, but is there a name for this trend to put emoji everywhere? I have some trouble to read like that. There is a kind of Madeleine de Proust though, it feel like children book: [https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/d1/e5/8cd1e583de4c89bf09c4275b2...](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/d1/e5/8cd1e583de4c89bf09c4275b2b9571fc --rebus-books-teachers-toolbox.jpg)

<comment><USER19> I think it's a marketing trend. The emojis seem like a soft universal language to help people who don't speak English grok broken google translations.

Hoping to hear the name for this trend as it's a very interesting one indeed. Done well it seems like this is definitely the new wave as we continue to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator. Done poorly, well I've done this and will just tell you the results are about as bad as you'd expect.

<comment><USER15> The language component hasn't occurred to me, but suddenly makes sense. I once supported a customer for whom Google Translate wasn't helping much, so we resorted to a combination of screenshots, boxes, arrows, and emojis and it ended well :)

<comment><USER31> However in most usages, there is no actual language benefit -- I doubt the animal emojis will actually help understanding of this article for any non- english speaker.

In fact, I doubt you could really express anything beyond the simplest concepts with emojis in a language-agnostic fashion.

Actually I'll go a step further: the idea of emoji as a language agnostic writing system is dumb. It's equivalent to pictograms, and like Chinese, will only become useful when you have a massive set of them, and you assign multiple layers of meaning for particular combinations that eventually take you down the path of culture-specific language anyways.

<comment><USER15> Bummer you're being downvoted, though I don't totally agree with what you said - I think it makes sense.

I think the emojis in theory could aid in machine translation - that is - <USER2> the machine translation has some ambiguity, maybe the emoji could help, then again, I bet animal names and the concepts that an emoji can convey are the easy part of translation, so I guess I've convinced myself you probably are right.

With that said, I do think that they could still act as visual aids and assist memory/retention, at least for some folks, though I'll admit at this point I'm trying to create a justification for the sake of doing it.

<comment><USER31> Really there's only one real usecase for emojis.. to add flair. ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻

They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's what they do best, and it's not at all clear to me that we need to pretend they can do anything more -- fun is sufficient justification for their existence.

The only real problem is that most emoji character sets don't properly optimize for that. They pretend they're far too important to simply be fun, and they instead become fairly ugly "realistic" depictions of whatever they're representing. ASCII art is somehow still dramatically more appealing, despite (or perhaps because of) emojis having much more freedom. Or actually more likely, it's because the only people who get to draw this stuff are the BigCo's, and they are not.. fun.

I mean hell, the most basic ASCII emoji (smiley :) is still better than Apple's emoji

<comment><USER15> I don't think of things as so fixed. I think anything that is "for X" can become "for Y" if it's used creatively enough, so we'll see :)

<comment><USER31> I'm not thinking of it as "fixed" so much as written languages do most other potential jobs better/clearer/faster than emojis. It's not sufficiently complex/composable enough to pose as a real challenger for expression.

Any useful utility for emoji will be at best _in addition to_ written language, not in replacement of it.

And the major blocker is definitely the lack of composability; you have a very strict and very limited set of options to work with (and without composition, the rule "limitation breeds creativity" doesn't apply), so I have little hope for significant creativity to appear

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was sort of wondering if it was going to be about or related to Yurtle the Turtle

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_Stories#%E2%80%9CYertle_the_Turtle%E2%80%9D)</comment>


Tuples in Swift - <AUTHOR> http://koreyhinton.com/blog/ios/tuples-in-swift.html

<comment><USER2> >Swift tuples store 2 values and each...

I believe it's zero or more values, with two or more being typical, but definitely not limited to two.</comment>


Wisconsin farmers forced to dump milk as coronavirus slams fragile dairy economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.jsonline.com/5108609002 <comment><USER2> This happens in many countries, farmers are paid very low prices and many times it's just not worth the cost of transporting it, crazy i know. Since cows need to be milked daily you can store up until some point and after that you dump it. A solution is to make cheese out of it that has more added value and stores better, but takes work and infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER3> And yet my local market still has no milk.

I wish they would sell it to me instead of dumping it.</comment>


Melting aluminum - <AUTHOR> http://ericlippert.com/2014/09/12/melting-aluminum/ <comment><USER2> Great article, I love his detailed explanations of _why_ he does things the way he does them (the boots without laces, the natural fibers) when it comes to safety.

Don't be fooled by the low-tech appearance, this guy is top notch, he's been doing a ton of research and has quite a bit of experience. You don't set this up the first time out of the gate like this and if you plan on doing any aluminum casting yourself this would be a great starting point.

I also like how he evaluates what he's done, notices what could be improved and makes notes to do those things better next time. That's how you get to where he's gotten in the first place. There are other aluminum melting tutorials out there that make me cringe.

If anybody is wondering why concrete can explode when heated rapidly, concrete will always contain a percentage of water and when you heat that up faster than the steam can escape from the material it will cause a steam explosion.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it. Indeed, I did a lot of research on home foundry setups and tool building before I started this project, and I am deliberately going slowly and carefully.

<comment><USER4> This was a wonderful post, thank you for taking the time to share it!

One question—I thought aluminum was really reactive with oxygen, and normally ever piece of it we see is coated with a thin film of the oxide. Does this present any special issues when heating it up to melt it?

<comment><USER5> I'm guessing the oxide is not a problem, it'll just float and you scoop it up. What I'd like to know is if more oxidation is taking place while the aluminum is being heated and when it is in liquid state. Heat should accelerate the process, right? And we need a shielding gas to keep the oxygen away while welding aluminum.

      > Twenty minutes later I have melted enough sprues and ingots that the
      > crucible is almost completely full. I take the lid off, skim the dross — the
      > bits of aluminum oxide and impurities that float — off the top and put it
      > in the ingot tray to cool; this will be trash. (Trying to recover aluminum
      > from aluminum oxide is not really worth it when aluminum is so plentiful.)

<comment><USER3> Correct; the oxide is not a problem. There's not much of it, it melts at a much higher temperature than the pure metal, and it floats, so you just scoop it off before you pour.

Whether oxidation or reduction is taking place during the melting process is determined by the amount of oxygen arriving via the air blast; too much oxygen and you get a hot oxidizing atmosphere, which oxidizes both my iron crucible and the top of the melt. Too little oxygen and you can actually get a reducing atmosphere, the furnace runs a bit colder, less heat escapes through the flue. So it's a tricky balance to strike and I'm still fine-tuning it.

I add potassium chloride and sodium carbonate to flux the melt and remove dissolved hydrogen; the KCl helps keep more aluminum oxide from forming apparently, though some home foundry sites report that they don't see a difference if they skip that step. Both chemicals are cheap, so I'm not too concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an excellent article, and shows why you need to do all the fussy finicky things that you need to.

It touches on two stories of personal interest to me. First, my maternal grandfather spent a fair amount of his time in a silver mine in the blacksmith shop. This was a small enough mine that mining was done with picks, shovels and the like. They would wear out, and need to go to the blacksmith shop to be refurbished. We had an old open coal forge that had been used by the previous owner sitting unused in one of our sheds. Grandpa came by one day to fix up one of his pickaxes. The forge had a blower powered by a hand crank. He first scooped the coal out from the hole in the middle of the bottom of the body of the forge. Then took a coffee can, placed it over the hole, and packed coal around the can, and sprayed water on it. He had me turn the crank as he lit the coal, gently at first, then stronger.

Once the heat was up, he began heating the tip of the axe. As he heated, he told stories of how you heat, then cool the tool. Too much heat could burn the tool. And when to take it out to shape the tool on the anvil. And how there was different types of quenching--water, oil. Depending on what the tool was to be used for.

The other story is that my brother (now retired) was a professional welder and instrument maker. He made instruments for telescopes. As a gift, he once gave me a pair of dice made of aluminum. Not particularly fancy, but he noted that the trick with aluminum is that it will suddenly melt on you without turning red.

<comment><USER7> _without turning red._

Metal light emission depends almost entirely on blackbody radiation [0] which depends only on temperature. Aluminum melts at lower temperatures than iron and that's why iron glows before it melts and aluminum doesn't.

Blackbody radiation is also the principal source of sunlight (and all starlight). It was one of the first physical phenomena that required the quantum theory of energy to explain.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black- body_radiation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation)

<comment><USER3> Indeed, though the iron crucible I use gets hot enough to be red hot. Whether the molten aluminum has a faint red glow about it or not I cannot say; I don't usually melt it at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course, having a bucket of sand handy to put fires out does raise the question as to what would make the sand burn (at least if you are in the habit of reading _Things I Won 't Work With_):

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php)

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone interested in the topic should check out the Gingery series on building your own workshop from scrap, which is all based on aluminium casting

<comment><USER10> One of the big drawbacks for me is the scraping, it's tedious and thankless. I guess that's why older people do it more, they learned patience.

<comment><USER11> What is scraping?

<comment><USER3> Many parts of machine tools like lathes need to be as flat as possible, because if the surface of the tool is not flat then that error is transferred to the object you are tooling. To get, say, a lathe bed flat, you buy or make a reference flat surface, paint the lathe bed blue, and then rub the surfaces together. The parts where the blue rubs off are the high parts. You take a scraper -- basically a modified chisel that takes off a thin layer of metal -- and scrape down the high parts. Wipe off the paint, repeat until there are no more high spots. It is very tedious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lionel Oliver has put together a great resource for this kind of thing for others who are interested [1]. When I was in high school I built a foundry (basically a stack of bricks with a draft hole and a place to put a small cast iron pot). I used it to melt aluminum and make castings in sand, and it was tons of fun. Looking back, I had no concept of safety at all but amazingly I didn't burn down our chicken coop, which is where it was built. The fuel I used to melt the aluminum was leftover lumber from our house remodel that I cut into cubes, and I had an old double squirrel cage blower set up to provide the draft.

1\. backyardmetalcasting.com

</comment><comment><USER13> That reminds me of the legendary Nils Provos and his blacksmithing ambitions: [http://www.wired.com/2013/02/provos/](http://www.wired.com/2013/02/provos/)

His videos: [https://www.youtube.com/user/mintwart](https://www.youtube.com/user/mintwart)

</comment><comment><USER14> If people find this interesting they might also like the myfordboy channel on youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/user/myfordboy](https://www.youtube.com/user/myfordboy)

There's tons of material in there on machining and especially metal casting at home.

<comment><USER15> Also tubalcain (google it).

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I watched all those youtube channels for quite a long time before deciding to build a foundry; there is excellent stuff out there! The Gingery books are really very good _for books_ , but for a lot of these tasks it is so much more clear to watch someone do the work.

<comment><USER14> Have you looked into ironworking at all? I think building a bloomery furnace might be something you'd find interesting.

Some sites:

[http://iron.wlu.edu/](http://iron.wlu.edu/)

[http://www.wealdeniron.org.uk/](http://www.wealdeniron.org.uk/)

[http://findsandfeatures.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/iron-ore- re...](http://findsandfeatures.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/iron-ore-reduction-in- a-bloomery-furnace/)

<comment><USER3> I'm going to try to get good at working aluminum before I move on to iron; that's a whole other level. Fortunately I have some friends who are master ironworkers so I will go to them for advice should I eventually get there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice article. As an unsafe counter-point, a few years ago I came home to my (then) 16 year-old son in the backyard tending to a pit he'd dug, full of a blazing stack of sticks that he was stoking with my leaf blower... sparks flying everywhere. He used this to first melt pennies, then my wife's aluminum cake pans. When I arrived he didn't have a shirt on, because he didn't want to burn his clothes. Ah, youth!

<comment><USER11> I used to collect old discarded car batteries, pull out the lead cells, and melt them down over the kitchen stove, and then pour them into glasses of water to make 'jewelry'.

<comment><USER17> I did the same, but made lead sinkers for hand-line fishing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just read the entire series (seems he was inspired in the summer of 2012, and recently returned to this backyard project). I found it really engrossing, and as he wrote in his first post, the spirit of hacking with tools outside the metaphorical software application.

</comment><comment><USER19> Suggestion for next time - long sleeves. If a hot spatter lands on your arm, you could flinch and drop the crucible. And now you have a bigger problem.

</comment><comment><USER20> I used to play knights & merchant as a kid so I was able to understand it :)

Why aluminium? Low temp, high availability?

<comment><USER3> Exactly. It is extremely inexpensive -- the majority of the aluminum I melt I found abandoned on the side of the road -- it melts at only 1200 degrees F which is an easy charcoal fire. It is easy to machine, doesn't corrode, is hard enough to build interesting things, and lightweight.

<comment><USER5> Have you considered or tried melting steel though?

<comment><USER3> As I mentioned in another comment, ironworking requires taking things to the next level in a pretty serious way if you want to cast it. Iron melts at 2800 degrees, you need ceramic crucibles, it is heavy, and so on. I'm not going to even consider iron until I have a lot more experience working with aluminum.

That said, I do have some friends who are experts at working iron, so if I do decide to take it up, I'll have a lot of good advisors.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will online anonymity win out? - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/will-online-anonymity-win-out/

<comment><USER2> How likely is it that the UK (for instance) will try to ban Tor after the election later this year?</comment>