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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?

#971

Post by sytelus »

iUsedToCode wrote: post #299
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…

I'm doing exactly this, spreading the opportunity to legally own a firearm in Poland ( https://braterstwo.eu ). It's a Wordpress plugin, php scripts and a bit of legal stuff (creating a NGO, bank account with automatic payment identifications, etc). It allows lots of people (thousands now) to obtain a permit. Poland has the lowest quantity of firearms in the whole Europe (and one of the lowest in the world). Taking t…

Looks like you are driven by "coolness of legally owning a firearm". Let me show you what's not cool about owning a firearm: http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2016/06/visualizing-gun-...

For every person you encourage to get firarm, there is a fixed likelyhood that firearm would be used to kill someone innocent. It might be interesting to estimate how many innocent people have to die so you can consider yourself "cool" again. If you are data oriented person and make data based decision, you should be fairly happy with your country's choice. I'm not saying there should be blanket ban. There are certainly situations like you are getting death threats and things like that where you should be allowed to own a firearm however if you adopt US like model, too many innocent lives would be at stack to justify it in any possible way. Civilian firearms used to be mildly effective to fight wars in 1940s. In modern ware fare they are useless.

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

#972

Post by homakov »

lorenzhs wrote: post #258
legohead wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything 2FA related to cell phone networks needs to die. You are relying on the security of the cell carrier, which is not a safe bet.

Yep, but it's still better than not using a second factor at all. It all heavily depends on your threat model. I don't think Yubikeys scale to the general population, carrying around something on your keyring is a hard sell for many. (But if you've got your PGP private keys on it, too, etc, it's a fantastic tool/toy for nerds!)

There is a middle ground truefactor.io

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

#973

Post by homakov »

Tepix wrote: post #646
TulliusCicero wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that the people who are actually aware and concerned about security updates (or lack thereof) are the technologically literate who upgrade to a new phone fairly frequently. The target market that you want to secure is generally either unaware of or apathetic towards security concerns (until they get hit).

But the people who are knowledgeable also give recommendations to their friends and family who want something that just works. If you can buy a 1-2 year old phone for $100-$200 (without contract) and pay an extra $10 per year to receive security updates, that's a pretty good deal.

My recommendations to use full disk encryption etc go ignored.

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

#974

Post by afarrell »

bra-ket wrote: post #120

Build cheaper houses

Someone tried to do this in Boston by hiring Maine residents to build the components and then shipping the components down to be put in place. The permit was rejected in part because it was taking away local jobs and in part because it would change the character of the neighborhood.

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

#975

Post by LauraRoeder »

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 is exactly what Clarity provides - https://clarity.fm/

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

#976

Post by narag »

dx034 wrote: post #909
narag wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That language is already English. Most young people can at least read and write basic English.

But that's a political problem. After the UK quits, only Ireland has English as their native language. While it's easiest to use English across the EU, it's not really desired to have a trade language that is different from all major languages spoken. And in addition to that, even though most young people can communicate well in English doesn't mean they want to shop in an English store. You need to have a very good…

I disagree it's a political problem. Or in other words, it's only a problem if you put politics in it.

Let me tell you an old story. I'm spanish. We had in the late 90's a mail list about the Delphi programming environment. Delphi was made by Borland, a private company that had translated the IDE to French and German.

At a certain moment there was a vocal group in the list that very insistently demanded that everybody made a petition to Borland to create a Spanish translation of the IDE (the manuals had already been translated). I didn't care, not only because I had already read every manual when Delphi was released, before they were translated, but also because I believed that any pro should know enough English to move around, instead of depending on the ones that had already done the job.

I tried to stay away from the discusion until a friend tried to force my hand very publicly with the argument that Spanish was no less important than English in culture or number of speakers or quality programmers... the political problem!

So I had to answer the obvious: English was not only important to communicate with English speakers. I can talk with people from Sweden, Russia, Poland, Greece... instead of learning a dozen languages. It's not a matter of what should be, it's a matter of what is!

And that was twenty years ago. Today my teen son has no problem chatting in Minecraft with people all around the world.

About shopping in an English store, they do. Google Translate works great if there's a problem. There is that musical instruments shop that everybody uses and another of bikes, both in Germany. People are used to the English words for that stuff anyway. The difficult thing, even in local shops is hearing many terms translated. What is a "flanger" called in Spanish? No idea. Or a "chorus", etc. We just used that as is. Household stuff are in local stores, no need to shop them online.

Anyway, if you look a little above, you'll see my comment that I think it would be a good idea to create a company that help other companies to operate in a multinational space. I was thinking more on taxes and regulations, but of course decent translations would be nice to have.

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

#978

Post by iUsedToCode »

sytelus wrote: post #971
iUsedToCode wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing exactly this, spreading the opportunity to legally own a firearm in Poland ( https://braterstwo.eu ). It's a Wordpress plugin, php scripts and a bit of legal stuff (creating a NGO, bank account with automatic payment identifications, etc). It allows lots of people (thousands now) to obtain a permit. Poland has the lowest quantity of firearms in the whole Europe (and one of the lowest in the world). Taking t…

Looks like you are driven by "coolness of legally owning a firearm". Let me show you what's not cool about owning a firearm: http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2016/06/visualizing-gun-... For every person you encourage to get firarm, there is a fixed likelyhood that firearm would be used to kill someone innocent. It might be interesting to estimate how many innocent people have to die so you can consider yourself "c…

I accept the risk that some people will die doing something they like, like driving a sports car, skydiving, eating lots of red meat or shooting a gun. It's just life. People die from all things.

US model is fucked beyond recognition and nobody wants to import it. I'm rather talking about the German or French model. Both of those countries have about 10-15 times the number of guns than poland (used for hunting, sports, and so on).

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

#979

Post by iUsedToCode »

Lordarminius wrote: post #433
iUsedToCode wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing exactly this, spreading the opportunity to legally own a firearm in Poland ( https://braterstwo.eu ). It's a Wordpress plugin, php scripts and a bit of legal stuff (creating a NGO, bank account with automatic payment identifications, etc). It allows lots of people (thousands now) to obtain a permit. Poland has the lowest quantity of firearms in the whole Europe (and one of the lowest in the world). Taking t…

Poland has the lowest quantity of firearms in Europe and you want to change that? A bit strange yes? I don't think private firearms are very useful for international conflicts like Ukraine/Russia or to defeat terrorist attacks.

I might have chosen wrong arguments, i agree. Most of the people get permits for sports or just collecting. We're not creating another Army or militia. I don't believe that a couple thousands of gun owners, with no disicpline or logistics could change the outcome of any conflict. But having a permit helps with the attitude of readiness and self sufficiency.

The times are right, because many people are researching guns now due to external factors. It's a growing market for such NGO as mine (even though i don't profit off it).

Plus, take into account that US has a very messed up situation with guns, laws and relations between groups of people. Nobody's trying to copy that over here, we have better role models.

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

#980

Post by iUsedToCode »

webmaven wrote: post #606
91bananas wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but they may become extremely useful in times of civil unrest if that were to happen.

> [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…

I'm not into the 'zombie apocalypse' type scenarios, but you can't be serious in thinking that hammers are as efective as a shotgun.

Plus, note that we only make it easier to get a permit if you're a sane, law-abiding adult.

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