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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?

#51

Post by pas »

hoodoof wrote: post #48
matt4077 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exactly because all these startups pretend to be "changing the world" that they become measured by these promises. And obviously most come up short. But that doesn't need to be a bad thing. Paying lip service to "real" progress, especially when it concerns poverty/environment/democracy etc, may actually lead to actual progress down the road.

Where has this need come from for startups to feel illegitimate unless they are changing the world, giving back to the community, bringing world peace blah blah

Well, if you start pitching this to everybody and their mom too, people will start to measure you up based on this.

At first it was pretty rational to present yourself in a way that gets you that 15 minutes. Now, I don't know, but HN is full of startups trying to revolutionize something instead of incrementally "disrupting" a set of incumbents.

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

#52

Post by josh2600 »

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 metal, and other abstractions for making devops easier.

We're looking for people who want to think about hard computer science problems like managing stateful systems more intelligently (think auto-failure detection and recovery and less I/O intensive WAN replication strategies).

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

#53

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Visidraft is working on making Augmented Reality actually deliver on the promises of presence on mobile devices at the consumer level and give 6 degrees of freedom around virtual objects in the real world context.

We have to make Large scale Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) easily computable across existing mobile devices to bring consumers hyper-precise (cm precision) geo-reference. This is actually super hard but also pretty awesome.

Yes we are hiring. Specifically CV experts.

[1]http://www.visidraft.com

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_m...

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom

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

#54

Post by quaunaut »

damnusername wrote: post #18
quaunaut wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like at least in this thread, you're forcing a square peg in a round hole. It's asking for technically challenging startups- there are plenty of startups doing amazing, world-changing work that isn't technically challenging, but more socially challenging.

You are probably correct. I just get a little frustrated sometimes. Sorry :)

No worries. It's easy to get disillusioned when the tools to surround yourself with better options aren't very well developed.

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

#55

Post by spiritplumber »

cipher0 wrote: post #31
spiritplumber wrote: post #29

We were working on autonomous stuff, but had to move onto simpler things because people weren't buying. http://robots-everywhere.com/portfolio/navcom_ai/ (2007)

This reflects your current status I presume? http://robots-everywhere.com/re_site/

Yeah. Was trying to not link that coz I don't want to spamvertise.

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

#57

Post by capkutay »

WebAction is working on some complex problems from a data management aspect (continuous queries on streaming, distributed in-memory data). From a front-end dev aspect, we're working on efficient rendering, modular and re-usable UI components and frameworks.

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

#58

Post by fh973 »

hoodoof wrote: post #49
fh973 wrote: post #39

Quobyte. We're building a fault-tolerant scalable distributed storage system for POSIX files, block and object storage. Lots of challenges around distributed systems, architecture and concurrency. Development is in Berlin, Germany, and we're hiring. http://www.quobyte.com

What's the revenue plan for a business like that?

Software licenses.

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

#59

Post by hglaser »

Periscope (https://www.periscope.io/) is a data visualization tool that automatically and transparently syncs customer data into a huge multitenant data cache that runs queries ~ 150X faster than customers' own databases.

In the long run, it is a data tool that will eliminate the need for data warehouses.

It turns out the hard problem is not running the queries fast, but keeping the cache accurate and up-to-date. Our cache coherence service is probably the piece of code we're most proud of.

And, yes, we're hiring in SF. :) Reach out to me, harry@periscope.io

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

#60

Post by joelrunyon »

hglaser wrote: post #59

Periscope ( https://www.periscope.io/ ) is a data visualization tool that automatically and transparently syncs customer data into a huge multitenant data cache that runs queries ~ 150X faster than customers' own databases. In the long run, it is a data tool that will eliminate the need for data warehouses. It turns out the hard problem is not running the queries fast, but keeping the cache accurate and up-to-date. O…

For a second, I thought this was the streaming video platform that Twitter just bought.
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