Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups? • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by watwut » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

arkh wrote: post #270

Draiken wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "calories in, calories out" idea is dangerously wrong. I have problems with my weight and my wife is anorexic. We live day-to-day with the fight against obesity (for years) and that's hardly a rule, much less golden. The only constant I see on this whole food/nutrition industry is how little information is accurate. Millions of diets and nutrition "experts" saying whatever they hear works without testing anythin…

> This "calories in, calories out" idea is dangerously wrong. You don't see a lot of overweight people in famine prone areas. Calories out - calories in = your weight curve. That's the easy part for losing weight. Sport does not burn a lot of calories. So it is better to cut on the intake. Which is the hard part: food can be a comfort drug which is easily available. Worse when your entourage is full of overweight peo…

People in famine prone areas are considerably more sicker and live shorter (even when they don't die from famine) then western overweight people. Being overweight is healthier then living there.

Also, famine makes you passive, tired and well, less bright. There is a reason why famine prone areas dont produce tech hubs and nobel prize winners.

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

#512

Post by kbart » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

pawadu wrote: post #427

adventured wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what extent does the EU need to substantially consolidate language further to become more effective? There are two dozen major languages spoken in the EU. Nearly half of the EU can't communicate well with the other half because they share no common language. How do you get the EU to pursue a standardization of language, such that ~95% of people in the EU are fluent in at least one EU-wide common language (whether…

Beside the old generation from the former eastern block (who studied Russian instead of English) pretty much everyone speaks enough English to communicate. I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by.

"I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by."

Only if you travel along established tourist routes. Go to a local marketplace or try to ask for directions in a smaller town and you will find it hard in many EU countries. Yes, in Northern countries even most elders speak English fluently, but in South I have had many situations where finding a single English speaking person was a challenge (notably in Greece and Italy).

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

#513

Post by revelation » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #307

Sholmesy wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's more complicated than this, but in terms of a general rule calories in/out is pretty darn accurate. Saying it is 'dangerously wrong', is dangerously wrong.

It's true, but in an unhelpful way. We've been telling fat people to eat fewer calories for many years, and we're not seeing fewer fat people. It reduces a complex problem into a simplistic slogan that's then used by many people to hate and judge fat people. "You're fat, just eat less stupid fatty". It ignores gut microbiome. Here's a story about a bug that makes it harder to gain weight: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/he…

We've been telling people lots of things and haven't seen [insert expected improvement from awareness campaign].

The matter of fact is that telling people about things they do wrong tends to not be very effective in general. It's not an indictment of a particular topic.

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

#514

Post by maroonblazer » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #415

DiabloD3 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly. Your second and third points however are scientifically supported, but do not confuse this with "obesity is complicated." It is not ho…

You've provided almost no information, but at 340 lbs it's possible your TDEE was more than 4000 calories/day, meaning it's possible you went on a reduced calorie diet with your bacon strategy. Without more information, your anecdote is useless, and even with more information it's still just an anecdote. Also, Paleo, like any similar structured diet, is just a trick to get you to ingest fewer calories. And I'm going…

Robert Lustig[0] and Gary Taubes[1] are excellent places to start to understand that obesity is not simply about 'calories in/calories out'. Lustig has a now-infamous talk that surveys the research.[2]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lustig [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Taubes [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

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

#515

Post by OpenDrapery » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #215

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…

Wouldn't reading a book about React before they started working with it be preferrable? That's something I've seen getting much worse over the past decade with the proliferation of frameworks. What you call "getting up to speed" is tempting to call "playing with". People work with tools that they have no knowledge of. Learning on the job is good, but I think one should have at least an idea of how the tools are suppo…

Throwaway, prototype, proof of concept, spike, playing around, whatever you want to call it. In many (most?) businesses, they never get thrown away. They form the basis of the product.

In other words, the thing that makes software so unique and valuable, is the very thing that most organizations don't take advantage of. They think that if you throw it away, you are scrapping something akin to physical materials.

Shame, really.

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

#516

Post by DanBC » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:44 PM UTC

kj01a wrote: post #496

Draiken wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "calories in, calories out" idea is dangerously wrong. I have problems with my weight and my wife is anorexic. We live day-to-day with the fight against obesity (for years) and that's hardly a rule, much less golden. The only constant I see on this whole food/nutrition industry is how little information is accurate. Millions of diets and nutrition "experts" saying whatever they hear works without testing anythin…

Either thermodynamics is wrong, or you are undisciplined. Which do you think is more likely?

Imagine we study you for a year. We put you in a box, we control your food intake; we strictly monitor the amount of exercise you get.

The first six months you stay the weight you are now. We then introduce a single change: we put you on antipsychotic medication. Nothing else changes: you're eating the same type of food and in the same quantities.

You will gain weight.

Is that because thermodynamics is broken? No.

Is it because you're "undisciplined"? No.

Is it because the antipsychotic medication is full of delicious calories? No.

It's because your carbohydrate pathwathway has been altered, and you now process carbs differently to how you used to.

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

#517

Post by z3t4 » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:48 PM UTC

bostik wrote: post #70

jandrewrogers wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An IoT database requires the intersection of three software capabilities in a single platform, which have varying degrees of accessibility (the technology exists in principle) and none are available in open source currently. - An exabyte-scale storage engine. Nothing too exotic here technically and a few companies have built them, but the design needs to address continuous data corruption, continuous hardware failure…

A friend is working on an IoT problem with two of your three capabilities: storage and analytics. He has voiced similar concerns. (To be fair, he gripes constantly that nothing exists which would work for him, within the budgetary and timing constraints.) His company provides sensor systems for civil engineering projects. A single large bridge can have sensor packs every 50m or so - per beam. The amount of sensor dat…

Instead of storing the data and then analyzing it, make it into a stream! eg: collect | analyze | report

During development or if you want to store the raw data you can split the stream. eg: collect | tee >(store) >(anotherAnalyzer) | analyze | report

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

#518

Post by vegabook » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:48 PM UTC

sah2ed wrote: post #422

vegabook wrote: post #381

taking on the Bloomberg terminal. They've got over 300 000 subscribers each paying circa 2000 USD every month. That's 600 million dollars of revenue per month. They're running a labyrinthine functionality on a 1970s System/360-style interface (command line at top of screen). He hires an absolute army of "reps" who's sole job is to try to help subscribers to find functionality, through an interface that is best descri…

Surely, Money.Net [0] is a first step? It was founded by a former top executive at Bloomberg: Morgan Downey. [0] https://www.money.net/

hey I hadn't seen that. I will check them out. However personally am sceptical of the "full frontal" approach (ie multi asset class etc) because you'll just never be as good as bloomberg, or even a fraction as good, on functionality, if you spread yourself that thin. I prefer a beachhead approach.

[EDIT] appears very buggy on Linux via JRE on my big 4k monitor

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

#519

Post by bshimmin » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:50 PM UTC

jimmoores wrote: post #375

bshimmin wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was fascinated to see how much bacon 4000 calories really is. A quick Google suggests about ten rashers, which, I guess, spread over a day wouldn't seem all that bad (in comparison with, say, Michael Phelps' reputed diet - he really put the "eating" into "competing"...). Still, that's a pretty epic diet, and could be very popular in developer circles. You should maybe consider patenting it.

It's a lot more than 10 rashers. It's about 1kg or 2lbs of bacon (around 100 rashers). Completely nuts to eat that much, if nothing else, the amount of salt consumed would be enormous.

Oh no, I think you're right! DiabloD3, can you confirm this and horrify us with how many rashers of bacon you were getting through in a day?

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

#520

Post by hexhex » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 2:52 PM UTC

aabajian wrote: post #151

The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts: 1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule. 2. The vast majority of calories…

I don't think that's a problem that is solvable with technology. It's a social problem. Less social inequality and better education, taxes on unhealthy food, less working hours. That would be necessary to tackle the problem. Obesity is just a symptom.

I love the SV mindset: Let's not get to the reasons of something, let's just build an app and everything will be good.