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Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

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Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

#131

Post by DennisP »

There are several startups attempting practical nuclear fusion, including:

Helion - has investment from ycombinator, attempting D-D/D-He3 fusion, which would produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation.

General Fusion - D-T fusion, but with a clever design that pretty much solves material issues caused by hard neutron radiation. Fusion happens in a spinning vat of molten lead, compressing plasmas with acoustic shock waves from steam-driven pistons. Jeff Bezos is an investor.

Tri-Alpha - the biggest of the fusion startups, quite secretive, with about 30 Ph.Ds, 150 employees, and over $150 million invested. Investors include Goldman Sachs and Paul Allen. Attempting boron fusion, which would produce less than 1% of its energy as neutron radiation.

LPP - the smallest, only about $4 million invested, but might not need more to complete its experiments. Also attempting boron fusion, from a reactor that fits in a small room. About to start a new round of experiments using a reactor core carved from solid tungsten, which they think will boost output dramatically by removing plasma impurities.

Those are the ones that I know have funding. EMC2, the polywell company, is looking for investors now that Navy funding has ended. Non-startups working on alternative fusion include:

Lockheed - this has gotten a lot of press

Sandia - repurposing the Z-machine to attempt net-gain fusion, after simulations showed they could hit breakeven with their existing machine, and 100x to 1000x gain with a 2-3x increase in input power. Very cheap since the Z-machine already existed, and things were going well last I heard.

UW's dynomak project - the most conventional of all these, similar to tokamak but does away with big external superconductors, which makes the reactor ten times smaller and cheaper. Needs $10 million to test whether the idea will scale.

Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

#134

Post by clockwork_189 »

politegoose wrote: post #65
clockwork_189 wrote: post #63

MetricWire ( https://metricwire.com/ ). We are building a platform that enhances the workflow of clinical trials thus making it easier, faster and cheaper on drug companies and safer for the participants involved. We help the researchers using the data collected from the trial to adapt the future stages of the trial thus helping avoid serious adverse effects or making them known to researchers in real time if they ar…

can you expand on the technical r&d involved? Sounds like a pretty normal user interface & data sharing problem.

In a way it is. So basically our platform allows users to create studies and structure the entire workflow of a trial(in a lot of these they are multi-staged so there are multiple steps that need to be designed). Now after this done, they can follow this workflow on our platform when they are conducting their trial in house. Now for parts where a doctor/researcher is not present(like drug/medication/treatment application), we have a mobile and web app that lets users answer questions/file serious adverse events if they face any, etc.

Now here is the cool part, the above is just the surface. Our team is really passionate about data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence and its applications in real world. So we do something called adaptive clinical trials where we run analytical models on the data that comes in and can forecast when the trajectory of a trial needs to be altered. This means you can catch any serious reactions to drugs, faster.

All in all, to answer the main question, our solution helps keep the costs of clinical trials low and reduces error rate. Being able to run these trials fast and keeping the costs low, allows not only for drugs to get out to the market faster, but also helps reduce the costs of drugs(due to the reduction of costs to process).

I also only explained the application of our tech in clinical trials, but our software is so flexible that it can be applied to any industry such as Consumer Insights, Depression analysis studies, etc.

Not sure if I adequately answered your question.

Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

#135

Post by pataphysician »

Tachyus - Predictive analytics for the oil & gas industry. They offer solutions for production optimization in cyclic steaming, steamflooding, CO2-flooding, waterflooding, pump optimization, workover prioritization, and shale fracking.

http://www.tachyus.com

Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

#138

Post by multiklout »

kzhahou wrote: post #129
multiklout wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not? Why do you feel that way?

It's not solving difficult problems in algorithms, systems engineering, hardware, ML, AI, etc. Nothing wrong with that. But using today's technology in web and mobile to build a highly-usable customer experience, is not what OP meant by hard technical problems.

I'd like to correct you on that, Oscar is not just a pretty design smacked on-top of an insurance company. It's the entire insurance stack redesigned from the ground up.

Algorithms and ML are all heavily used in analyzing member data to improve the lives of people.

We're engineering systems that give us real-time feedback on the insurance system as a whole, rather than the usual "30-60 days". Building a claims system from scratch is not an easy feat.

If you'd like to learn more about what we're doing i'd be happy to demo it for you.

Don't be fooled by our pretty and simplified website. It's all of the hard engineering efforts that you don't see that make the simplified experience possible. :)

Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

#139

Post by ninetax »

bresc wrote: post #94
zeit_geist wrote: post #9

A super incomplete list: Databases: - PipelineDB - Snowflake (Computing) Internet of Things / Communications: - Helium Robotics: - Pneubotics - Kuka, namely the research department Autonomous Systems / "Self Driving Car" et al.: - Kiva - Anki Computer-Vision / VR based: - Jaunt - Oculus VR (especially the 'research' department) Agriculture: - Blueriver http://www.bluerivert.com (there are many more super-interesting…

Any hints on where I would be able to find more in the Agriculture category?

A few off the top of my head:

  - Trimble
  - Granular
  - Farm Logs
  - The Climate Corporation
I work at Climate, and we work on some pretty cool science based projects to help farmers make better decisions.

We are hiring for a variety of positions you can check out here: http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=JobL...

If you (or anyone) is interested in a role on the remote sensing team (satellite/drone suff) or the Climatology team, you can reach out to me directly at skhalsa@climate.com

Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

#140

Post by MichaelCrawford »

DennisP wrote: post #131

There are several startups attempting practical nuclear fusion, including: Helion - has investment from ycombinator, attempting D-D/D-He3 fusion, which would produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation. General Fusion - D-T fusion, but with a clever design that pretty much solves material issues caused by hard neutron radiation. Fusion happens in a spinning vat of molten lead, compressing plasmas with acoustic…

Pardon, I think you meant to say:

http://www.helionenergy.com/

http://www.generalfusion.com/

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/

http://emc2fusion.org/

http://www.lockheed.com/

http://www.sandia.gov/

http://www.washington.edu/

I'll send you my bill in the mail.

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