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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?

#431

Post by [deleted] »

bambax wrote: post #271
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…

> 2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates. Yes. Sugar is the enemy. It's ironic that so many substances are regulated or flat-out prohibited and not sugar or sodas. HFCS should be outlawed, and sodas regulated like alcohol (no sales to minors, bulk sales limited, etc.) Also, the obsession with fats and the whole industry of low-fat food needs to be dealt with, as, obviously, when the proportion of fa…

[deleted]

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

#432

Post by [deleted] »

bambax wrote: post #271
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…

> 2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates. Yes. Sugar is the enemy. It's ironic that so many substances are regulated or flat-out prohibited and not sugar or sodas. HFCS should be outlawed, and sodas regulated like alcohol (no sales to minors, bulk sales limited, etc.) Also, the obsession with fats and the whole industry of low-fat food needs to be dealt with, as, obviously, when the proportion of fa…

[deleted]

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

#433

Post by Lordarminius »

iUsedToCode wrote: post #299
sytelus wrote: post #207

Hackers rarely think of politics as playing field for startups, so in my mind this one of the biggest untapped opportunity right now. People from both sides are going nuts over Trump politics. That means tons of eyeballs and attention that would be available for the right startups for next 4 years. Things like BuzzFeed and DailyXYZ are going to make a massive killing in terms of ad revenue. At this stage still the re…

I'm doing exactly this, spreading the opportunity to legally own a firearm in Poland ( https://braterstwo.eu ). It's a Wordpress plugin, php scripts and a bit of legal stuff (creating a NGO, bank account with automatic payment identifications, etc). It allows lots of people (thousands now) to obtain a permit. Poland has the lowest quantity of firearms in the whole Europe (and one of the lowest in the world). Taking t…

Poland has the lowest quantity of firearms in Europe and you want to change that? A bit strange yes?

I don't think private firearms are very useful for international conflicts like Ukraine/Russia or to defeat terrorist attacks.

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

#434

Post by smudgymcscmudge »

mxstbr wrote: post #164
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…

I've started offering a service like this[0] for React apps. The response so far has been really good, people love it! It's exactly how you say it is, by spending some time identifying the biggest issues and then spending an hour with the team I can get them to rally around some easy fixes that'll be valuable for the business long-term. Developers love it as their bosses finally understand the value of refactoring, a…

That looks like a valuable service, but it is slightly different from the micro-consulting the parent mentioned. From your perspective, do you think there would be value in a service that offers this consulting thirty minutes at a time?

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

#435

Post by chrishacken »

dpatru wrote: post #419
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…

I recently found Dr John McDougal on YouTube who has the solution to obesity based on history, current societies, and science. There seem to be two rules: 1) Base your diet around starchy vegetables (potato, wheat, oats, rice, corn, etc). 2) avoid fats, especially refined fats, and protein. 3) salt and sugar are not health foods, but are allowed to help you stick with rules 1 and 2. People, and societies, that eat li…

I would love to see some research on #2.

As someone who works out daily; the point at which I was in the best shape of my life was when I was consuming large amounts of fats. Peanut butter, olive oil, etc. I also find it really really hard to believe that protein would cause obesity; I've heard the exact opposite.

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

#436

Post by bpicolo »

chrishacken wrote: post #435
dpatru wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently found Dr John McDougal on YouTube who has the solution to obesity based on history, current societies, and science. There seem to be two rules: 1) Base your diet around starchy vegetables (potato, wheat, oats, rice, corn, etc). 2) avoid fats, especially refined fats, and protein. 3) salt and sugar are not health foods, but are allowed to help you stick with rules 1 and 2. People, and societies, that eat li…

I would love to see some research on #2. As someone who works out daily; the point at which I was in the best shape of my life was when I was consuming large amounts of fats. Peanut butter, olive oil, etc. I also find it really really hard to believe that protein would cause obesity; I've heard the exact opposite.

Yeah that sounds totally adverse to conventional wisdom, which is part of the problem. There's somebody out there trying to sell literally every diet.

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

#438

Post by narag »

csl wrote: post #394
narag wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the opportunity could be creating a company that solves these problems for other companies.

So, a consultancy company then? Which we all know only scales with the number of employees. Most people in Europe use Gmail, right? So they must already have figured out this stuff.

So, a consultancy company then?

No.

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

#439

Post by dmoo »

ddoran wrote: post #409
adventured wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is, it's Amazon. They're closing in on $20 billion in European sales, growing at double digits, with something like 50,000 employees. If you look at what they're doing in Europe, Amazon is getting more aggressive by the year in terms of expanding and investing there.

And a small European country like Ireland doesn't get its own Amazon store so they have to rely on Amazon.co.uk, where everything is priced in Sterling (not Euro). Irish customers can't avail of Amazon Prime, shipping times take longer etc. A federated Amazon.eu with a continent-wide distribution network may help. Goods priced in Euro certainly would.

which is ironic, given the size of Amazon investment in Ireland.

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/amazon-dublin-dat...

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

#440

Post by jokoon »

sah2ed wrote: post #412
jokoon wrote: post #167

A binary, pre-parsed version of HTML with its smartphone browser. Maybe with python scripting? Anyway something that would make the web on phones great.

On a philosophical level, what you are asking for is what Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was designed to solve except that this will leave us with a web much broken than how we started.

Broken, why?
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