Ask HN: What's the most undervalued idea in your field?

I work in the QSR space, which are mostly franchised stores (there are some company-owned stores) that are franchised/leased by someone (or sometimes a partnership).

They are all pretty much the same: you buy into the franchise agreement for some amount of money and you supply some percentage of the assets and the company supplies the rest. Whatever that is or however it's broken up is determined by the franchise agreement. They all look pretty cookie-cutter, except for Chick-fil-A's.

As far as I can tell Chick-fil-A is doing that the best and no one is doing it like them. Their franchisee agreement is vastly different than anything I've seen - they treat it more like a partnership rather than someone/some group buying the rights from a company. I'm very surprised other companies haven't taken on this model.

Systolic array computing - most transistors in any given computer are just waiting, only a tiny fraction of memory is in use at any given instant.

It's possible to use them far more efficiently, thus getting better performance.

As a software developer the single most important thing is speed of iteration. If you can test an idea 10x faster than the next guy then you can fail nine times out of ten and yet still remain equally productive.

This sounds like common sense but I almost never see this practiced and it’s not forgiving of human behavior. Iterating faster means doing these things that I almost never see software developers do:

* measure things

* abandoning reliance upon popular conventions as determined by measurements

* reduce build/compile times

* abandon reliance of dependencies for slimmer home grown solutions

* use test automation to identify regression, and keep test automation fast (less than 30 seconds total run time)

* prefer WebSockets over http

* exchanging code vanity checks for more functional assessments

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The benefits of iterating faster include:

* dramatically faster defect resolution

* increased learning and more time for investigating alternatives

* lower risk of regression, as determined by sanity checks and automation like lint rules and test automation

* a given software team becomes more productive with fewer developers

* developers become more focused on their work due to loss of interruptions/distractions from frequent periodic delays

One of the great realizations I had in business: Many tech companies in price-sensitive markets with high running costs (physical offices, many employees, VC-funded, so they need to have high margins) can be disrupted by providing the same product at a lower cost and keeping your startup lean.You can keep your startup lean by building the product yourself if you're a techie and/or hiring devs from cheaper countries like India. Here's another little secret: You don't need much marketing in price-sensitive markets.

The only thing left is just a matter of time before you disrupt.

P.S. The majority of markets are price-sensitive ;)

The "Do it for you" concept means that people use tools to achieve a certain goal, so providing them with the result directly is much better than giving them a tool. For example, those who buy servers are actually not looking for servers.

The inversion of authority in distributed & decentralized systems, from data-centric to agent-centric.