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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?

#821

Post by conductr »

jsymolon wrote: post #735
pdq wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will improve the medical industry in the US dramatically is transparent pricing. When both consumers and providers have no idea how much the product or service they are using actually costs, there is no way to control costs (ie competition, delaying the service, using an alternative product/service, etc). Thus our prices have spiraled out of control. For example, delivering a baby is an incredibly common procedu…

> there is no incentive to price shop, Again there is NO single item that will solve the "healthcare" issue. Voodoo Free Market ... You don't price shop. Your OB/GYN has admitting privileges to 1-2 hospitals in the area. You go to the one that your OB/GYN is AT and is closest to you. When the Anaesthesiologist trainee fucks up your epidural, you're going to whip out your phone to call another ? Not fucking likely. Yo…

Yes and no. Outpatient procedures could and should be price shopped. Do you have a relationship with the lady who draws your blood? The MRI tech? Not usually, or not a strong enough one that would cause changing providers a high friction experience.

Birth is a perfect example to make your point of an existing, usually long term, relationship because of the typical women's health regimen. More usual however is you finding you need a procedure (maybe soon but not emergency), you then ask for a referral to a specialist or ask friends and do google searches to try to get a sense that the specialist isn't a quack. You could price shop at that point. Instead, the system is built upon referrals and kickbacks. Although, kickbacks are illegal now so they form physician groups which is basically a kickback in the form of profit sharing.

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

#822

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

SQL2219 wrote: post #758
mgav wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be able to produce more water than a single city requires: Charleston, SC uses 50 million gallons of water per day* For reference, that's about 75 Olympic size pools (at 660,000 gallons per). * source: https://sc.water.usgs.gov/infodata/wateruse.html

Well I wasn't thinking about pulling up to a US city, more like Chad, Somalia, etc. They'd be thrilled with 1 gallon per head per day.

How is an aircraft carrier going to get to Chad?

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

#823

Post by cromulent »

wenc wrote: post #488
Kiro wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. That's an extreme statement you definitely need to provide source for. I read a lot of scientific journals on the subject and have never heard anything like that.

It is technically not incorrect, but incomplete. We know there is conservation of mass and energy in nature. Any chemical engineer can write mass and energy balance equations that represent this conservation. Calories in = Calories out is an simplified form of a more complex energy balance equation that looks something like this: (Enthalpy in) - (Enthalpy out) + (Heat/Energy crossing boundary) - (Work) = (Change in I…

According to this paper, this is not true. The weight is exhaled as CO2.

http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257

>> Most people believed that fat is converted to energy or heat, which violates the law of conservation of mass. We suspect this misconception is caused by the “energy in/energy out” mantra and the focus on energy production in university biochemistry courses.

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

#824

Post by VLM »

LeanderK wrote: post #445

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…

So you want rollapp to add some kind of python IDE. Could happen. Works well enough with emacs. Price is not too ridiculous. You'd have to work top down and given some sort of python IDE you'd need to install your tensorflow stuff.

Going bottom up a lot of people for a very long time (decade+ now) have been using services like linode as a personal server, here's your ubuntu install now now put "whatever" on it and run it remotely.

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

#826

Post by dreamfactory2 »

whitepoplar wrote: post #457

Physical space for lounging, socializing, and working. I live in NYC and there's still a striking lack of space that facilitates people getting out of their apartments and doing "whatever." Starbucks popularized the concept of the "third space" (the first two being housing + workplace) and I think there's so much room to improve upon this.

Doesn't this describe most modern hotel lounges?

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

#827

Post by webmaven »

splintercell wrote: post #686
webmaven wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Firearms] may become extremely useful in times of civil unrest Not really: * There is always someone with a bigger gun * There is always someone who wants to steal your gun/ammo * There is always a bigger gang that wants to steal your gun If your solution is to join up with others to make your gang the biggest/best armed and enforcing a monopoly on the use of violence, congratulations, you've either reinvented War…

Literally none of these arguments are valid in case of the actual civil unrest situations which happen, whether it's LA riots of 1992 or Somalia. Clearly if you're planning to hold a big cache of firearms, then that becomes an incentive for other gangs to go after you, but most of the time, there are plenty of unarmed people out there which present an easier target. The aim of firearm ownership at the time of civil u…

> by owning firearms you become a bigger target than an unarmed household

That's overstating my argument.

Let me boil it down further (at the risk of some nuance being lost): Firearms are useful, but not extremely useful.

1) Firearms are not a panacea, and there are plenty of other tools that are at least as important, and a few that are more important. Lack of clean water is a lot more likely to kill you than lack of a firearm.

2) Rather than focusing on personal defense where everyone needs one or more firearms, a better approach is community defense, which at the Dunbar Limit (~ a small village) scale requires at most 1/3 of the firearms, so the resources that the other 2/3 would represent can be spent on other things.

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

#828

Post by SQL2219 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #822
SQL2219 wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I wasn't thinking about pulling up to a US city, more like Chad, Somalia, etc. They'd be thrilled with 1 gallon per head per day.

How is an aircraft carrier going to get to Chad?

parachute?

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

#829

Post by jventura »

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'm curious if anything related with teaching CS or how to program would be appelative to people? Something like 1:1 teaching/mentoring..

I teach CS (programming, web development, distributed systems) on a local university, but have been thinking if there would be people interested in having 1:1 access to someone with development and teaching experience, for 30 minutes or 1h..

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

#830

Post by LouisSayers »

pjc50 wrote: post #311
LouisSayers wrote: post #293

This is a bit broad, but essentially there are issues that we have in society that end up costing tax payers, and individuals a lot of money, or are simply really inefficient. Education is one such thing, but you could also branch out into other issues such as theft, health care, environmental issues. You can see that there are certain companies that are helping to tackle these issues in various roundabout ways, but…

> Education [...] health care, environmental issues. All of those are public goods/tragedy of the commons issues operating in highly political regulated environments. Very difficult for a startup to make a difference there in a way that can make a return. Theft on the other hand is gradually being diminished by technology: the same omnisurveillance of always-on IoT devices makes it easier to remote-brick them or find…

The barriers in place are reasons why they're good areas to innovate.

It may be difficult, but that's all part of the game.

Also on theft - not everything is an iPhone, and I don't believe tracking is very prevalent just yet. There's plenty of opportunity here that's currently left untouched. I'm less thinking about petty crime and more about burglaries / theft of high value goods (boats, cars etc).

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