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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?

#361

Post by tnmrnis »

hmate9 wrote: post #273
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…

To everyone saying "calories in vs calories out" is not the golden rule: it simply is. Your body obeys the laws of physics. If you consume less energy than you use then your body will be forced to use up its stored energy.

"Calories in vs calories out" is not wrong. It's just a small part of a much bigger picture.

If you go into a caloric deficit your body will give a hormonal response. This response determines if your body will start using your fat reserves, your muscles or will just shut down. This hormonal response is dependent not only on how much you eat, but also on what you eat.

Eating a diet low in carbs enables your body to use up stored fat more easily and will leave you less hungry then a low fat diet. This makes it MUCH easier to stick to your diet.

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

#363

Post by Tepix »

messel wrote: post #328
DiabloD3 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is keeper, I'm at 350+ ideal weight around 230-240lbs (6'7") and looking for something to shake up my consumption that makes sense. I regularly exercise (20hrs/week low-medium impact) but eat fast foods

How did you calculate your ideal weight? Isn't it more around 210lbs?

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

#364

Post by sureshn »

I see an opportunity for a continuous delivery platform , if you notice on stackshare people use Jira(trello) , github , gitter(slack) and travis/jenkins for their work , so much of context switching happens navigating(working) the tools. The idea here is to build one platform which will have all of this in Tabs and available to the teams in a hosted manner. So when one delivers code , the next tab he should be able to see a CI build kicked off and the following tab a docker container which is ready to host the built new code commit for QA.

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

#365

Post by adventured »

mslot wrote: post #352

I always think there are huge opportunities for growth in intra-EU trade. It's a market with over 500M people and a $17 trillion GDP. While the EU has taken away a lot of trade barriers, language and unfamiliar regulations remain a huge barrier, but also a huge potential for growth. If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult fo…

To what extent does the EU need to substantially consolidate language further to become more effective? There are two dozen major languages spoken in the EU. Nearly half of the EU can't communicate well with the other half because they share no common language. How do you get the EU to pursue a standardization of language, such that ~95% of people in the EU are fluent in at least one EU-wide common language (whether Spanish, English or other)?

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

#366

Post by DanBC »

thecupisblue wrote: post #324
DanBC wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, but in an unhelpful way. We've been telling fat people to eat fewer calories for many years, and we're not seeing fewer fat people. It reduces a complex problem into a simplistic slogan that's then used by many people to hate and judge fat people. "You're fat, just eat less stupid fatty". It ignores gut microbiome. Here's a story about a bug that makes it harder to gain weight: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/he…

> we're not seeing fewer fat people Yeah, because they mostly don't do it. The things you're focusing on are _mostly_ micro and not macro, for 99.999% of obese individuals, CICO would help them lose weight. There are exceptions to every rule tho.

> CICO would help them lose weight

The whole point is that it doesn't help them lose weight because it's unsustainable. Fat people can't manage to do that for more than a few weeks.

The rigid focus on the least useful fact (CICO) means that you're failing to give any useful, usable, information.

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

#367

Post by Wintamute »

sureshn wrote: post #364

I see an opportunity for a continuous delivery platform , if you notice on stackshare people use Jira(trello) , github , gitter(slack) and travis/jenkins for their work , so much of context switching happens navigating(working) the tools. The idea here is to build one platform which will have all of this in Tabs and available to the teams in a hosted manner. So when one delivers code , the next tab he should be able…

Does that really add that much more value over and above essentially the same setup except the tabs are implemented by your browser on different web pages?

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

#368

Post by ginger_beer_m »

ilaksh wrote: post #5

Doesn't seem like that many groups have really both studied the existing AGI research _and_ are seriously trying to apply the latest NN developments like GANs to (virtually) embodied AGI.

No group studies AI because it's an unproductive use of research time, and also it's hard to write proposals to raise funding when the goal is ambiguously defined.

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

#369

Post by adventured »

This won't be popular on HN: start aggressively patenting anything and everything you can around CRISPR. It's dirt cheap to work with both Cas9 and Cpf1.

Figure out how to use CRISPR to insert or edit genes that we already know help to make some people practically bullet proof when it comes to cholesterol and common cardiovascular problems. Patent everything you can around using CRISPR to fight high cholesterol (the drug market for that is truly massively). Move fast, right now, while most of the pharma giants are asleep at the wheel (most of big pharma is a minimum of five years behind the curve, they always try to buy their way out of it after the fact).

Congratulations, you're now a billionaire.

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

#370

Post by mrweasel »

mslot wrote: post #352

I always think there are huge opportunities for growth in intra-EU trade. It's a market with over 500M people and a $17 trillion GDP. While the EU has taken away a lot of trade barriers, language and unfamiliar regulations remain a huge barrier, but also a huge potential for growth. If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult fo…

You could most likely make a decent living just handling VAT calculations and registration for companies.
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