A list of 1 way to get rich in the construction industry | Hacker News Reader

A list of 1 way to get rich in the construction industry

woobius.com

57 pointsswombat22 comments

This is a nice idea, and would be useful to those in this particular niche (such as myself), but it is a small market if you just look at the architects. Also, it is more complicated a task now as most of the industry that is forward thinking (and thus potential customers) are using BIM (building information modeling), primarily Autodesk's Revit.

So to make it a vastly bigger market, to include all the construction participants including architects, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, you would need to make the app access the BIM model and be able to attach data to it. Revit has an SDK, so with a great deal of difficult work, an app could be made. Of course, a launch date around 2010 may be the best plan given the largest reduction in Construction that I've ever seen recently.

Update: I just realized that there is a growing movement in the construction industry called Integrated Project Delivery which is basically lean management applied to construction and involves the intense collaboration of all parties in construction. To that end, there are now a growing number of online BIM integrators where different participants can share in real-time their different BIM applications. So the iPhone app may be much easier than I thought if you can access into the online BIM data, say, with a REST api.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Project_Delivery

The availability of inexpensive hardware and AJAX is a powerful enabler once again, combined with high speed mobile networking. Publish all of these applications you propose as web applications, with a "tablet" mode -- actually several "tablet" modes each tailored to different screen form factors.

The economics of the US construction industry as a whole involve freaking huge numbers! Very low-cost applications (don't forget corporate licensing) that become a "must have" can make someone a billionaire.

(And yes, there are industries where certain mobile apps have become "must haves." ePocrates was one such app in the old Palm days. Don't know if it's still that way, though.)

Another way: own your own heavy equipment, and charge an hourly rental fee.

I live on a yacht, and when I need to get it on land I rent a crane (with operator) for the job. Price: $1000 an hour.

I'm seriously considering buying a big crane and renting it out....

true. a lot of time is wasted on the job site just waiting for people, for pieces to come in, to unload, to measure where they're put etc etc etc before the machinery is actually used to erect, say, a steel column. And that is not counting "human" factors like breakfasts on site and extended lunches off site and early day offs on fridays. Your machinery will actually wear and tear for only a fraction of the rental time.

Why did you change the title of the article to something entirely different, unrelated, and nonsensical? I wish there were a special type of flag for when people do that.

Actually, the suggestion came from authentic on the IRC channel:

[15:09] < authentic> for HN i would recommend a title of "A List of 1 Way to Get Rich in the Construction Industry (iPhone)"

I thought it was a brilliant title for submitting it to HN, and even considered changing the title of it to this article altogether, on the blog itself. However, I decided to keep the original title on the blog and use this title for submitting to HN. As one of the authors of the post, I feel I can allow myself the artistic freedom to pick a suitable title for submitting the article to HN. In practice, it seems the title definitely did what it was supposed to do, so I consider it a good move.

Oh, and it is related. I certainly feel that building out the tool mentioned in the article could provide a profitable business to someone. At the moment, we're busy with another part of the construction pie, but if no one else does it within a couple of years, we'll probably have a look at it ourselves. Hence the "way to get rich" part of things. The "List of 1 way" part if obviously poking some fun...

It just feels like the title is misleading for the purpose of getting clicks.

That's why I didn't vote. I felt like the candidates were just campaigning and running commercials to win votes.

He's poking fun at all the "X ways to Y" posts.

Yeah, it's called the "don't vote it up" flag.

That's not enough for semi-link bait.

I agree, if the people voting the article up are dimwits who vote things up without reading them. You're smart. You wouldn't have voted it up. But clearly a bunch of dimwits did - it's a sign of bad voting rather than bad submission. The voting system is meant to weed out bad submissions.

Well, actually the article isn't a bad one. It's just misappropriately titled. That's why I would like a special flag so a mod could fix it, though I guess maybe that's too infrequent to warrant a feature.

I disagree. This is a very good change. The real title ("snagging smartphones") isn't good. In fact, it's almost entirely meaningless, and has nothing else going for it other than alliteration. This one is better.

Regarding frequency, I actually think this happens pretty often. However, I think each time is a judgement call, and we have a flag link already. After all, if we were not meant to editorialize from time to time, Paul Graham could have the yc news script take the title of the web site.

Not necessarily. A lot of sites don't put the article title in the html title unfortunately. Most do, but enough don't that you have to have that feature there.

Also, lots of them put extraneous crap after it, like the website's name and some descriptive text.

I feel like flag is the nuclear option, when what's called for here is a surgical strike. I probably think too much about this stuff though.

I'm a bit disappointed in you guys. Not one person has read the article and thought of another industry that these ideas could be applied to?

hmmm... what about taking the Android Maps app (http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-on-android-m...) and enhancing it to create a 3D model of a particular building?

Ready access to information should be a huge boon to people on the ground. I remember a friend of mine who did HVAC work on large scale projects once told me about mistakes in plans where electrical conduit and ducts would intersect. Sometimes the electricians would get there first, so the people doing the ducts would put a little detour around the conduit!

    ____  ____
    ___ \/ ___
       \__/

This could really screw with the airflow to rooms fed by that particular duct. (I'm sure we've all been in office buildings with little climate control "quirks" like that.) Better communications might prevent mistakes like this from becoming physical reality. (Of course, more competent use of CAD software would prevent mistakes like this in the first place.)

my electrician friend tells me that electricians, HVAC, plumbing and other dudes sometimes get the same set of drawings, so each of them think in their heads "okay I'm gonna put my stuff here" and conflict happens. this essentially happens because the general contractor or a sub contractor hires everyone in parallel to each other, and while the same drawing is sent to each, none of them talk to each other to "plan" the actual deployment. This will likely change when more and more people jump on the BIM wagon, and move the conflict stage to 3D model space rather than on the site.

This whole problem is being solved with BIM and Integrated Project Delivery where all the systems are modeled in 3d well in advance of construction thus resolving all the 3d conflicts ahead of time.

Communication between groups could also be used to resolve such conflicts in real-time. Even with BIM and Integrated Project Delivery, there will always be errors in plans for large projects. The ability to clarify these as soon as possible (ideally before any mistakes have become physical reality) will save people money.

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