Can the folks on HN guide me on how to learn and master linear programming and create a consulting career out of it?
I've been exposed to linear programming slightly at work and I find this to be powerful technique to solve a lot of problems that are currently written with generic software programming with better results. I feel there is good opportunity to create a consulting career/business out of it, though having the knowledge and expertise is necessary and there aren't lot of good resources on the internet to learn.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit out there in the world of decisions that get made manually today. If you can do a globally optimal MIP solver, cool, I guess. But often you don't have time to run it, and an immediately calculated and configurable greedy solution is good too. Find a domain space with one archetypal decision that gets solved by many different companies on repeat and just solve that one problem.
The ones that already have software answers are the hard sells.
LP or ILP? There is a significant difference since for non-discrete problem Linear Programming is shockingly efficient and in no way can be considered a brute force technique.
edit: What would be a technique you consider non-brute force in discrete problems?
