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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?

#61

Post by kzhahou »

multiklout wrote: post #36

Oscar Health in NYC is fixing the health insurance industry by building a tech and data driven insurance company from the ground up. It's an extremely complex, highly regulated industry that is in need of fixing. There are many startups that try to address pieces of the broken health care system, but Oscar is the only startup trying to solve it by doing it all. Engineering talent from Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Spotif…

No doubt health insurance is hard problem, but it's not technically hard. OP asked for examples of company's pushing the limits of advanced technology, and Oscar is not one.

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

#63

Post by clockwork_189 »

MetricWire (https://metricwire.com/).

We are building a platform that enhances the workflow of clinical trials thus making it easier, faster and cheaper on drug companies and safer for the participants involved. We help the researchers using the data collected from the trial to adapt the future stages of the trial thus helping avoid serious adverse effects or making them known to researchers in real time if they are occurring at present.

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

#65

Post by politegoose »

clockwork_189 wrote: post #63

MetricWire ( https://metricwire.com/ ). We are building a platform that enhances the workflow of clinical trials thus making it easier, faster and cheaper on drug companies and safer for the participants involved. We help the researchers using the data collected from the trial to adapt the future stages of the trial thus helping avoid serious adverse effects or making them known to researchers in real time if they ar…

can you expand on the technical r&d involved? Sounds like a pretty normal user interface & data sharing problem.

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

#66

Post by pron »

At Parallel Universe we are working on a full server-side stack (distributed in-memory storage, through the database, and all the way to the communication layer) that is mechanically-sympathetic with modern hardware architecture (most current software architectures actually fight the hardware).

Most of our projects are free software, and yes, we are hiring.

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

#67

Post by joelrunyon »

damnusername wrote: post #6

I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined: "For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken. I…

I think a lot of startups are solving important problems that might not be obvious.

Any Musk startup - Tesla (electric vs. oil consumption), SpaceX (building space "colonies"), SolarCity (alternate energy), Paypal (payments).

You also have Uber (limiting cars on the street & oil consumption), AirBnb (better utilization of current buildings rather than building additional hotels). Even stuff like meerkat, etc could potentially be used in lieu of expensive meetings across country (further travel & ancillary costs).

I do agree that "change the world" is an overprevalent mission statement & too broad to be useful, but many are solving problems in a way that might not be obvious at first.

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

#68

Post by araes »

hoodoof wrote: post #40
damnusername wrote: post #6

I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined: "For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken. I…

Where has this concept of "world changing is important, and a business must be of real value to mankind" come from in recent years? Who gives a shit how incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a business? Since when did this become some sort of measure of the worth of a tech company? Sounds like misguided hippy shit to me. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't set out to…

Take heart, and don't lose too much cynicism. People feel like they have to include all this "hippy shit" because of the exact reason this question was asked - "if only I could find a good company who's mission I believe in!"

Too many companies making incremental BS apps or IT pipeline tech that delivers cat pictures 0.1 ms faster. And both groups ("we're bringing Utopia to Earth", "we'd mug you for cash") are still doin it cause it looks like it makes money, or people advise them they need to say these things to make money, or it'll get chicks / dudes, whatever - no matter what they say out loud. "Silicon Valley" is pretty spot on in that regard.

It's just a pendelum swing. In a little while we'll be back to "greed is good" while we help people 'connect' with high school friends they never actually liked.

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

#69

Post by pavlov »

joelrunyon wrote: post #67
damnusername wrote: post #6

I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined: "For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken. I…

I think a lot of startups are solving important problems that might not be obvious. Any Musk startup - Tesla (electric vs. oil consumption), SpaceX (building space "colonies"), SolarCity (alternate energy), Paypal (payments). You also have Uber (limiting cars on the street & oil consumption), AirBnb (better utilization of current buildings rather than building additional hotels). Even stuff like meerkat, etc could po…

If Meerkat is a productivity enhancer, then surely Yo is one as well - when people don't have to write text messages, it saves time for something else.

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

#70

Post by lmeyerov »

At Graphistry, we are powering nextgen visual analysis through real-time GPU clusters that stream right into your browser. For example, we cracked a botnet a couple days ago using it. Visually exploring millions of data points in real-time is a hard problem for both infoviz design (hairballs!) and high performance programming (1000 node GPU clusters), but unblocks some of the biggest industries (finding criminals, avoiding economic meltdown, datacenter rootcause analysis, ...).

And yes, we're looking for the right data viz folks to help us harness all this performance and help data analysts make sense of it all.

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