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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?

#171

Post by tmostak »

dsl wrote: post #153
tmostak wrote: post #120

MapD ( http://www.mapd.com ) is building a hyper-interactive big data analytics and visualization platform running on multiple GPUs/CPUs. We basically do every performance trick in the book (like compiling our queries via LLVM and caching hot data on the GPU) to do this. The end result is the ability to scan billions of rows of data in milliseconds at rates greater than 2 terabytes/second per server when running on 8…

Where did your cofounder go? Why is half your company non-engineering (per your team photos)? Tech looks good, company looks shaky.

Actually all of our team codes, we just wear other hats at times. Our Director of Business Development has a PhD in GPU algorithm acceleration and I (the ceo) coded the original version of MapD and still play full-time engineer as much as possible. I can see why one might get the impression you got from the website though - perhaps we should add a bit more background on ourselves.

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

#172

Post by bostik »

chetanahuja wrote: post #169
bostik wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with the encouragement: please, please put the technical details into a blog post and publish it on HN. This is the kind of stuff I've always[tm] been interested about. > umpteen middle-boxes on the internet who won't let it through. That's all you need to know to explain the lack of industry adoption of SCTP. Heh, I've dealt with IPSec. You don't have to convince me on the futility of getting new protoco…

Now, as for "turnkey service"... I would guess you're positing yourself as the platform provider. You need to control the server endpoints to work with multi-homing; you'll have to provide and maintain the mobile app libraries, along with best practices documentation and aids for debugging; you probably want to provide a patch for wireshark (dissector); and then there's the security to think about. That's just off th…

> TCP does a woeful job

Not just TCP. Network operators are guilty too. There are the network side megalith buffers that are trying hard to "optimise" TCP transfers and just murder latency. Then, precisely because TCP is a stateful protocol and clients have the retransmission logic built in, the operators also have the option of applying something like RED at the earliest sign of network congestion. False positive or not.

(Note: I have a friend who works on the other side of the table and runs a team of engineers responsible for installing new mobile network equipment in the field. The use of mobile networks grows faster than the operators and their contractors can add capacity. Which means the situation is unlikely to improve soon.)

As you mentioned earlier, UDP at least has the distinction of being used in real-time and streaming protocols => operators and network gear are more reluctanct to mess with it. If you think you can get away with it, you could also assign multiple ports to any single session and apply at-least-once logic to the transmission - or to put it in layman's terms: blast and spam the network, in order to get even a single datagram out without excess delay. Do that often enough and you can expect the operators to crack down on it, though...

As for work: thanks :-)

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

#174

Post by apurvadave »

I work in the data analytics space, so I'll focus there since many of the other answers give a good, broad set of companies to consider.

* Trifacta (http://www.trifacta.com/) are dealing with the very grungy problem of data transformation. Their approach is heavily UX-centric, with built-in predictive capabilities that learn what you are doing as you try to transform disparate data sets to meet your needs.

* Segment (http://www.segment.com) acts as a data router, allowing you to implement significantly less data plumbing in your application while allowing you to deliver your data to many different analytics tools.

* Jut (http://www.jut.io) is a full-stack approach to building a hub for streaming data. They take any operations data (logs, metrics, alerts, events) as inputs, manage storage and analysis, and have creating a framework for streaming visualizations as well. Technologies include an in-browser, retargetable compiler, a streaming analytics layer, storage (elastic search and cassandra), A d3-based visualization framework designed for 3rd party add-ons, and a simpler way to manage large-scale data called hybrid SaaS. (disclosure: I work here.)

* Databricks (http://www.databricks.com) has implemented apache Spark as a service.

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

#175

Post by auganov »

hoodoof wrote: post #40
damnusername wrote: post #6

I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined: "For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken. I…

Where has this concept of "world changing is important, and a business must be of real value to mankind" come from in recent years? Who gives a shit how incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a business? Since when did this become some sort of measure of the worth of a tech company? Sounds like misguided hippy shit to me. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't set out to…

Wasn't putting "a computer on every desk and in every home" Microsoft's mission?

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

#176

Post by andycjw »

josh2600 wrote: post #52

Terminal.com is writing next generation virtualization. This includes live-migration without hypervisors (already in production) and live-resizing (also in production). I think we'd like to think we're working on the ugly bits of infrastructure people don't care about. This includes a distributed file system optimized for speed and storing machine state like Github, software defined networking for IP migration across…

I just heard of Terminal.com right here, and trying it out for a spin, but it looks like the disk performance is really low, is this expected for lower tier or trial instances?

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

#177

Post by mtae »

gojomo wrote: post #148
mtae wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not true. Palantir along with HBGary and Berico Technologies authored the report suggesting an 'offensive' campaign. [1] They did apologize for this and as you say, disclaimed involvement or interest in such a plan. [2] [1] https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...

The slide deck provides no support for ~adamnemecek's claim that the Palantir CEO himself proposed the plan. And the CEO's unequivocal statements afterwards suggest that if there wasn't a bright-line inside Palantir against offensive operations before 2011, there has been since. But also, the branding of the presentation does not reliably indicate the origin of the specifically offensive bullet points (most notably t…

Have you read the entire Salon article you linked to?

"So apparently, if Palantir’s new version is to be believed, a 26-year-old engineer went off on his own and — without any supervision or direction — participated in the development of odious smear campaigns intended for two of the nation’s deepest-pocket organizations (Bank of America and the Chamber), potential clients which the emails repeatedly emphasize would be very lucrative. I’ll leave it to others to decide how credible that version is, but I will note that several facts undermine it: ..."

"The leaders at the very top of Palantir were aware of the Team Themis work, though the details of what was being proposed by Barr may well have escaped their notice."

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