Aww, yisss. Case in point, EDA and, in particular, hardware description languages and tools. Every discussion I've had with someone trying to get into this has been so cringe-worthy that I'm actively avoiding now. Every self-professed hardware hacker thinks they have the solution that's going to end all this painful Verilog kerfuffle and yet they're so, so far from getting it.
Like the folks who thing the biggest problem with Verilog and VHDL is that they're so alien that it's hard to get software developers productive with them. Lack of electronics knowledge is what prevents most software developers from being productive in Verilog. A "better" language won't help. Paying attention in their Electronics or Systems classes is going to be ten times more helpful than a Scala/Haskell/whatever-is-fashionable hardware description language.
Or the people who think that development tools are what's holding FPGAs back and that FPGAs would be everywhere, were it not for how hard it is to program them. Trying to explain them that FPGAs are pretty slow gets impossibly difficult as soon as the words "Intel" and "softcore" are mentioned.
Not that there aren't a lot of things to improve in FPGA development tools, or in hardware description languages (which is why you see so much work being done on increasingly higher-level synthesis tools). But unless the number of millions of dollars you're willing to invest is not at least half the number of years you've been studying high-speed IC design, chances are you're as far removed from having a serious answer to all these problems as you are removed from being a modest person.
/rant
My wife was an Electrical Engineering major and when I started dating her I saw the Verilog and actually tried to improve it. Although my approach was more a better IDE and emulator than reinventing the language.
I didn't get far. The domain knowledge of electronics needed was too much for me to deal with and still do my own coursework.
I am working in the FPGA industry. I definitely agree with you.
But possibly I am a little too close to the current industry and way we do things. There's new applications around the corner that need innovative ideas. The innocent fresh perspective could be the seed for something. I am sure if any real decent improvements were started by a SW person, the big companies like Intel would be eating it up.
It funny how people on HN were raving about Altera & Intel recently because word on the FPGA street was that Intel weren't happy with the acquisition. Xilinx has had 14nm FPGAs for a long time while Altera's are nowhere to be seen still. Everyone's expectations of a Xeon with Altera FPGA on the same die are years away I am betting.
1. Improper clock domain crossing
2. Improper timing constraints
I have never used ASIC quality verification tools. But to me a free tool from Xilinx/Altera like valgrind or clang sanitizer would be huge for FPGAs.
Or even just a way to "diff" two bitstreams, one that is "bad" and one that is "good" that were from the same source to see what makes the bad FPGA bad would be huge. I mean bad in the sense that some probabilistic/annealing algorithm used during FPGA synthesis on a net with an incorrect timing constraint lead to a FPGA that doesn't work as intended.
I went from logic to doing software. Can't say I miss the FPGA world. Seems so much easier to get software right.
I've no intention of taking it further than that, because the industry is extremely conservative and there's no money in programming languages.
(I agree that the FPGA-silver-bullet people are annoying. And that people need to realise that FPGA is not programming. But perhaps the tools could help a bit more with that.)
I find Verilog quite intuitive as is, but the tools are rather crude. I.e. until recently Altera's Quartus felt like a hack some students put together in their spare time - missing basic IDE features, interface bugs that get in the way, poor programmer support on Linux and so on.
This is especially true when it comes to high level problems in most industries. In most cases there are a few hundred or more smaller issues that add up to create the bigger high level problems, and those issues are almost never even considered when the startups try to disrupt the industry.
Every industry, no matter how small is going to have issues the derive from third parties and outside players that can't be solved by a twist of the business model.
There are a lot of old timers using very old dos era applications in their day to day business, and if you really spend time with them and learn their business you'll learn there is almost always a very valid reason that they haven't switched the latest greatest web-app software that startup founders tend to think can solve all of their problems.
The moral of the story is, founders need to stop trying to swoop in and disrupt industries where they don't even have a clue of the real pain points, and their SaaS solution would just be a new coat of paint on on old issue that isn't solved.
This was intended as (unsolicited, granted) advice to the person asking the questions to examine their goals. If they know they are fighting an up hill battle going in, hopefully they will be better prepared for the fight they are in for. Doing a startup is difficult even when you are a domain expert.
If the interest was purely academic... carry on :)
Also, as I said in a comment the other day on a different post [1] I do think that under the right circumstances not being an "insider" in an industry is an asset not a negative.
I find that for those problems sometimes you don't even need to write a single line of code. Changing the process or the way people think about the problem can be sufficient.
Although I imagine if you drew a venn diagram with easy & important & unsolved then the intersection will be relatively tiny. And from a business defensibility standpoint the barrier of entry may be too low.
Yet there is zero money in writing development tools :(
The tricky part is that to monetize, you either need to master enterprise sales (which means that the product will take on some PHB-pleasing features that developers despise so they can get through procurement departments), or you need to be acquired by a big company looking to round out their developer tools offerings.
Besides, I'm not literally saying there is no money in development tools. I'm saying that it's a difficult market.
If you write development tools that save other people time, there is plenty of money in that.
In any case, what's wrong with trying to probe your peers for ideas and possible brainstorm? If you don't want to participate, simply do not comment, no?
I am a genuinely curious individual, and these are the questions I also like to ask, and not always because I want to profit immediately from them.
I'd be curious to get more of your feedback regarding this.
I interpreted it more as a warning that these discussions are not a good way to get startup ideas. Startups need domain experts to understand what the market will pay for, making connections, and so on.
Say somone in the pharmaceutical industry posts about their problems ordering medicines. It's a fine problem, but the point is that the OP is not in a good position to solve it, as he or she is likely lacking industry experience and contacts.
The ideas you come up with yourself are more likely to be the ones you do have the experience and connections to work on.
I think Bezos would be a much better example than Musk. Musk is in the process of nudging the car industry a bit (or so SV tends to want to make the rest of the world believe); Bezos basically obliterated small-scale retail as we knew it.
But it does a lot of harm to the person asking the question if they make a life changing decision based on it without being prepared going in.
I just wanted to offer some advice to the person asking the question so if that was their goal and that is what their intentions are then they can go in perhaps a little bit more prepared.
But on average, it'll be something that a bunch of other people tried or are trying to solve, so there will be more competition. A typical example is that most start-ups seem to focus on the end consumer despite the fact (well, assumption) that there's more opportunity in focusing on problems that companies have.
I think there's a lot of value of tackling non-IT problems with SV/startup/tech way of thinking. SpaceX might be an example of that - iterative development, openness, company culture, etc.
I think, what you are trying to say is that it takes a great deal of domain expertise to fully appreciate and understand those problems. But, you've got to start somewhere. We don't need millions of entrepreneurs trying to build even more meaningless social/gaming apps.
He might need to work in that industry to get enough knowledge to learn about the problem, but, you gotta start somewhere.
The title needs to say something like "April 2017" or "May 2017" though.
This is a natural extension of "startup founder" becoming a an aspirational occupation for kids fresh out of college. Who needs real-world experience? Disrupt!
Technology is a tool to to aid your expertise.
But every few months (weeks?) I see a post by a founder-type essentially trying to mine the Hacker News collective brains for startup ideas. It doesn't work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced.
The idea of a savior who comes in and solving the major problems of an industry they have never worked in is not a myth but close to one. (Elon Musk being a notable exception with cars and space flight... but he has the capital to attract domain experts to fill in the gaps)
I'd point out the problems in my industry except I am actively working to solve them :)
With that said. Don't let a "know-it-all" on HN (myself included) tell you what to do. If you want to tackle a hard problem in an industry you don't have experience in, please do. You might be the next Elon Musk, I don't know you so I don't know.
If that wasn't your goal with this question... again I apologize.