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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?

#891

Post by ende »

None of these are all that flashy, but one could probably find a nice niche:

- Most bars/restaurants still use Aloha for point of sale system. Surely someone can update this concept.

- A kitchen inventory system that doesn't rely on manual data entry, but rather barcode readers and electronic weight sensors to maintain an up to date kitchen inventory.

- In biotech, the state of off-the-shelf LIMS (laboratory information management systems) is pitiful. Granted, it's a tough problem to generalize, but every solution out there is clunky.

- A UI builder platform for non-frontend-devs to create interfaces to REST APIs through drag-and-drop form elements.

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

#892

Post by repsilat »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #139
marmaduke wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't these addressed by CGAL? Or you mean, you'd want database primitives using CGAL?

Unfortunately CGAL is not suitable, and yes you do need to support it in the underlying representation and database. The litmus test for a suitable computational geometry engine is the ability to do arbitrary ellipsoid computational geometry at something like one part per trillion error, and the ability to compute intersections of very complex polygons on that surface quickly. On that last point, you can execute an e…

Any chance you could give an example use-case or three? Sounds fascinating -- I use PostGIS and find it to be slower than I'd like day to day, but it sounds like your uses demand a lot more precision than I have call for.

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

#894

Post by omarchowdhury »

joeax wrote: post #736
shaunrussell wrote: post #709

Replacing real estate agents and brokers. Most of the value they provide can be replaced by (or already is) technology. The only thing keeping them afloat is regulation.

Disrupting that industry would be tough. Zillow came close, but the industry in general is so protective that anything perceived as a minor threat is blackballed. My bro-in-law RE agent bashes Zillow all the time. I think baby steps are essential. A good first step is a broker-licensed startup with self-serve/AI agents. Why do I need an agent to look at houses when I can just find a house myself? The listing side can…

Would the unique value proposition for the buyer to use this new service be that they would get a rebate on purchasing this house through this new service?

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

#895

Post by developer2 »

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…

This just stinks of another way to abuse the talent. If you want to pay someone below-market rates to fix your business's problems, there are already a multitude of race-to-the-bottom "contracting" sites to suit your needs.

Real consulting at market (or even above-market) prices exist for a reason. The kind of people who will spend hours setting up a consult, to only officially charge for 30 minutes, are exactly the kind of people you don't want working for you, for any period of time. You get what you pay for.

I can't for the life of me imagine what an apparently legitimate "micro-consulting" gig would look like, where the talent being hired isn't being asked to overperform for the amount of billing time being requested.

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

#896

Post by dang »

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…

> Fucking Christ people, you have a relationship with your Doctor.

No doubt, but please don't fulminate here.

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

#897

Post by dang »

psychometry wrote: post #559

I don't empathize with their needs because the aging boomer population is responsible for most of modern society's woes, most recently Trump and Brexit.

Please don't make uncharitable generalizations about groups of people in HN comments. That's both unsubstantive and uncivil.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13579158 and marked it off-topic.

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

#898

Post by networked »

saddestcatever wrote: post #841
andrepd wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just a café?

That's the idea - but most cafes (at least in Boston) can't handle that sort of volume - you're going to get stink eyes if you settle in for more than an hour or two. Wish it was more welcomed (as I've seen more common in Europe / small towns) to be welcome as long as they have seats.

Anti-cafes [1] sidestep this conflict by charging their visitors by the minute and offering unlimited tea, coffee and sweets while they stay there. It is, or it recently was, a hot non-technical business to run in many post-Soviet big cities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-caf%C3%A9

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

#899

Post by therealmarv »

vlad_p wrote: post #875
therealmarv wrote: post #294

Note taking done right. Android, iOS, Desktop, Markdown & HTML, easy flat file format, Web clipper, offline and do this all without wasting whitespace (no doc editor like Evernote) and good sync and instant search results. <- NO ONE is doing this! Closest is maybe Google Keep (seriously it's good at some points I'm mentioning).

> do this all without wasting whitespace (no doc editor like Evernote) What do you mean by this? Do you just mean a raw HTML/markdown editor and a rendered view?

I mean that notes (at least for me) tend to be short. What I don't like is that many note taking systems think that a note needs to be edited like e.g. an Email or Word document (the Evernote approach). So when I see e.g. 10 notes I want to see the most of the content of the 10 notes very good and when I go into one note I don't want to see a whole big word processor with one blank sheet. Google Keep is doing a good job there, also not bad is e.g. Tiddlywiki.

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

#900

Post by sureshn »

sytse wrote: post #858
wolfgang42 wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab is doing this. They currently have: - Issue tracking (jira) - Issue kanban (trello) - Git repository - Chat, via bundled Mattermost (gitter/slack) - CI (jenkins) - Docker registry Plus, they're planning on adding even more features. We have a self-hosted instance at work and I use it for pretty much everything other than email and actually writing code.

Thanks, this is exactly what we're doing. The complete scope is detailed on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope By the way, we see Mattermost as an alternative for Slack but not for Gitter. One is team chat and the other is 'project' chat with different requirements.

This is excellent to hear all this awesome work being done by gitLab. I was even more impressed by them recently when they admitted the production data loss and restore (such humility is rare these days). one wonders why they shouldn't rebrand and give a more apt name, at the outset you wont know they offer so much
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