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Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#231

Post by chx »

JamesBarney wrote: post #154

A marketplace for specialized micro-consulting(30 minutes to an hour). I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions while they were still coming up to speed. The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the…

Long ago I offered a paid answer service for Drupal StackExchange questions via the drupal.org services list and never got anyone asking for the service. Just a data point.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#232

Post by lordnacho »

weavie wrote: post #209
BillinghamJ wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds more like a malnutrition issue no? If all you were eating is bacon and nothing else.

But does anecdotally disprove the pure calories in, calories out rule.

I'm not sure it does. He said he weighed 340 pounds when he did this. His daily break even calories might be well above 4K. IIRC 2500 is recommended for the average male, who certainly does not weigh 340 pounds.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#233

Post by koliber »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #187
aabajian wrote: post #151

The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts: 1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule. 2. The vast majority of calories…

Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly. Your second and third points however are scientifically supported, but do not confuse this with "obesity is complicated." It is not ho…

First of, congratulations for losing significant weight, albeit in a non-conventional way. Eating two pounds of bacon a day takes a lot of determination.

I am glad it worked for you. However, most people need to start with a basic rule and go from there.

I think it is mainly calories in / calories out. While there seems to be evidence that the source of calories and diet composition do play some role in weight loss, that is what I would call "expert mode".

You can't exercise away a bad diet. One hour of very hard cardio, can burn up to 1,000 calories, depending on your weight and exercise intensity. A big mac meal with a medium drink and fries is more or less that as well. Exercise is great, and is an excellent supplement to a diet, but if you don't watch what you eat, it will be difficult to exercise away the extra calories.

The base rule is you have to watch what you eat. You can play with the composition, but concentrate on the calories. I can not say this enough. If you have extra pounds that you want to lose, and you have not yet found a way to do it, stay away from gimmicks.

Losing weight involves eating less, not eating more.

Regarding different types of calories, it's important to note that fats, proteins, sugars, and carbohydrates are digested in different ways. If you ingest 500 calories worth of sugar your body will be able to use almost all of that for its energy needs. Meanwhile, digesting protein is more complicated, and your body will be able to extract fewer of those 500 calories for its own needs.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#234

Post by Brajeshwar »

asenna wrote: post #210
Brajeshwar wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same thoughts for the Contract Economy for quite a while. I'm on a "Startup break", and started a Service Firm. While working with clients, we realized the need to serve a rather underserved section of projects, which are high enough for individual freelancers or even a small team but too low for established agencies - the $100,000 to $1M projects. We're experimenting with some of our clients and their conn…

Could you elaborate a bit on this. Looking at the site, I'm not sure how this is different from a traditional Consulting firm.

Our Service/Consulting firm's core focus is UI/UX Designs, and Frontend Engineering. We tend to get quite a bit of incoming work that are not in our core focus. We started working with other partners. We either know these partners or are introduced to us. We interview them, talked to them, worked with them (vetting them).

Our clients know that they can go on a vacation while we work on their projects. They wanted that same experience while working with the partners that we introduced. So, we end up handling the client's project and make sure it gets done via these partners.

Work Sigma is borne out of this patterns, and process that we followed. We want to grow this, formalize it, and be able to provide a good service to clients and make them happy. One of the marketing taglines that we tossed around our team is, "Agency in the Cloud".

btw, A friend told me there is something similar at UpWork - https://www.upwork.com/pro/. This is nice - the market is tested and proven.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#235

Post by mathias_awkward »

alpb wrote: post #212
fnord123 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. Citation, please.

Watch "Food Inc" where this has been discussed in detail. http://dailyburn.com/life/health/diet-truth-calories-countin...

How is that scientific though? Anyone can write an blog article :/

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#236

Post by csbartus »

Devices as designers

Sooner or later (IoT, AR, VR) we will have to let devices (AI) to assembly the final user interface.

I imagine something like this: we designers / developers / UI architects are creating plenty of interconnectable components describing our idea of a product covering all scenarios and use cases.

Then the device will asemmbly the final UI based on the individual user, and the device capability.

For example a watch will display something different than a large digital billboard on a skyscraper.

And everyone of us will see a different design each time we look at a display, based on our individual digital history (Data mining).

The point is predetermined design must be advanced to on-demand, context based, liquid design. We let the big picture be assembled by third party, we focus only to smaller components.

Something like

http://metamn.io/beat/tomorrowww/

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#237

Post by Findeton »

I'm going to say the obvious: VR. Really, there will be an explosion in VR sells and when it happens it will be too late to be there. I don't think it's going to be a fluff this time, we just need the right killer application and I know what's going to be.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#238

Post by _98fj »

Sunset wrote: post #228
_98fj wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a technology problem. Every tried to get a law passed?

What about a unified interface which takes into account each sub-jurisdiction's arcane rules and gives you advice how to handle things? Of course you would be paying to keep the product up to date with local laws.

That sounds like a good idea, but don't underestimate just how complex law and tax is in each country. You need hundreds of lawyers to sift through this. There are so many law and accounting consultants for a reason.

I once met an SAP-contractor who was paid 5 digit amounts for implementing 1000 loc modules that was required because a tiny paragraph of some pension-law in a single country was updated.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#239

Post by sah2ed »

xorcist wrote: post #215
JamesBarney wrote: post #154

A marketplace for specialized micro-consulting(30 minutes to an hour). I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions while they were still coming up to speed. The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the…

Wouldn't reading a book about React before they started working with it be preferrable? That's something I've seen getting much worse over the past decade with the proliferation of frameworks. What you call "getting up to speed" is tempting to call "playing with". People work with tools that they have no knowledge of. Learning on the job is good, but I think one should have at least an idea of how the tools are suppo…

> Wouldn't reading a book about React before they started working with it be preferrable?

Great in theory but difficult in practice. Developers rarely ever have the luxury to pick up a book as a means of getting up to speed when there exists online resources like Google and StackOverflow where you can easily find posts that answer your query string(s) verbatim.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#240

Post by pkroll »

alpb wrote: post #212
fnord123 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. Citation, please.

Watch "Food Inc" where this has been discussed in detail. http://dailyburn.com/life/health/diet-truth-calories-countin...

The beginning of the article linked says "if you usually consume 2,500 calories a day and then cut back to 1,600 calories, you’re going to lose weight from that 900-calorie daily deficit — even if all you ate was potato chips. But you won’t be healthy and you most likely won’t be able to keep the pounds off."
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