Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 1001 posts

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

#441

Post by CuriouslyC »

delecti wrote: post #415
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…

You've provided almost no information, but at 340 lbs it's possible your TDEE was more than 4000 calories/day, meaning it's possible you went on a reduced calorie diet with your bacon strategy. Without more information, your anecdote is useless, and even with more information it's still just an anecdote. Also, Paleo, like any similar structured diet, is just a trick to get you to ingest fewer calories. And I'm going…

While not the OP, there is research demonstrating that the blood glucose and insulin response to various carbohydrate sources is highly specific to the individual. In the study I'm thinking of, some people were given cookies, others were given bananas (among other things). The responses weren't consistent at all.

As for calories in/out being a simplification, while it is mostly true, the tricky bit is that calories out actually varies wildly with the foods you eat. Your body's hormonal milieu changes very significantly with what you eat, and that has a massive impact on your biochemistry. Additionally, the microbes in your gut have certain food preferences, and they can metabolize a significant fraction of the calories you eat. Thus, hormonal shifts and rate of microbial metabolism can spike your "calories out" far above what would be predicted by BMR and activity level (and the reverse is unfortunately true as well).

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

#442

Post by Crespyl »

AznHisoka wrote: post #376
jandrewrogers wrote: post #20

Here are a few, and I frequently have these conversations with VCs, albeit biased toward areas I work in: - Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem…

Can you clarify what you mean by behavior analytics and why companies eould find that useful?

Think Hari Seldon/psychohistory.

Predicting mid to long-term trends and demographic shifts far enough ahead of time to make investments.

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

#443

Post by CuriouslyC »

fnord123 wrote: post #197
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…

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

It isn't so much that calories in/out is false, as the equation of "calories eaten - (activity + bmr) = weight change" that is false. The food you eat has a massive impact on your biochemistry (and thus your metabolic rate), and microbial metabolism also varies significantly depending on the substrate you provide them.

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

#444

Post by bpicolo »

johnlbevan2 wrote: post #428

Hundreds of restaurants in the same geographic area will be purchasing ingredients from a variety of different suppliers, based on their need. If they clubbed together with other local businesses to source common ingredients they could benefit from economies of scale; i.e. instead of 100 restaurants each buying 200 onions, there'd be a bulk order for 20,000 onions; meaning 1 lorry to deliver direct from the supplier(…

This is the reason distributors already exist. Almost all restaurants buy almost all of their ingredients through food distributors (or on occasion just the local Costco).

Not saying that there's not room to grow in this area, but it's definitely not the case that restaurants are buying straight from a bunch of individual suppliers, minus restaurants aiming for hyper-local or small batch ingredients.

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

#445

Post by LeanderK »

Easy, personal access to cloud computing. I have a macbook and am pretty satisfied with it. But a problem is, that in order to learn data-science/deep learning i need a beefy GPU/CPU and everything else. I could buy a desktop, but i am a student and not much at home, also in the age of cloud computing this seems silly. Also the upfront investment for a student is not negligible.

I want really easy, flexible instances that are super, super simple to activate. Something like click website -> click start GPU with tensorflow preinstalled -> upload & run my python.

Ideally per minute-billing and super, super simple to set-up and ssh into.

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

#446

Post by gingerbread-man »

panic wrote: post #287
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…

- know how your congressman votes on each of the vote If anyone from Facebook is reading, this would be a great feature for the site. Imagine following your representatives and getting their votes automatically in your newsfeed.

It would make a great plugin for national news sites, though their internal software teams could build this feature pretty quickly themselves.

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

#447

Post by CuriouslyC »

xorcist wrote: post #218
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…

Energy in, energy out sounds pretty basic to me. I would be interested to know where you think your energy intake comes from, unless it is from food? Or is it just the caloric measurement you think is irrelevant for human energy intake? While obviously imperfect, I'm skeptical it could be an order of magnitude off for example.

The problem here is people equate calories in/calories out with the equation "calories eaten - (calories burned from activity + basal metabolism) = weight loss". While energy in/out dictating weight loss is basically true on a biochemical level, that equation is false because your biochemistry undergoes massive changes as a result of what you eat, and gut bacterial metabolism also depends on the substrate provided.

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

#448

Post by CuriouslyC »

xorcist wrote: post #218
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…

Energy in, energy out sounds pretty basic to me. I would be interested to know where you think your energy intake comes from, unless it is from food? Or is it just the caloric measurement you think is irrelevant for human energy intake? While obviously imperfect, I'm skeptical it could be an order of magnitude off for example.

The problem here is people equate calories in/calories out with the equation "calories eaten - (calories burned from activity + basal metabolism) = weight loss". While energy in/out dictating weight loss is basically true on a biochemical level, that equation is false because your biochemistry undergoes massive changes as a result of what you eat, and gut bacterial metabolism also depends on the substrate provided.

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

#449

Post by cmenge »

adventured wrote: post #365
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…

Agreed. English might be a de-facto standard to some extent and many people use it if they have to. But the truth is, people are lazy and most people find it easy to communicate in their mother tongue and tedious to communicate in English.

Look at what happened to facebook when they started offering localized versions, their growth suddenly exploded over here.

I believe this will take a long time, and it certainly is a major barrier.

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

#450

Post by CuriouslyC »

gambiting wrote: post #222
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…

I think it's really obvious that you can eat even 5000 calories a day, and under certain circumstances, not gain weight. However, if you eat 1000 calories or less, it's impossible not to lose weight. Unless you know someone who can synthesize energy to live and move out of thin air......

That lethargy you feel when you diet is your body's metabolism slowing, and it also results in you being less active. If your metabolism totally crashed and as a result you felt so bad you didn't do much other than sit around, you might not lose weight on a 1k cal diet.
Post reply on HN