71–80 of 158 posts
As it turns out, humans are really bad at answering questions about what they need. Often if they knew they needed it, we would be competing to provide the best solution for it. This is the difference between inductive and deductive analysis. Deductive would be tasking a student with applying pattern matching to a known domain to find an expected result. Inductive analysis is when you don't actually know if there's a…
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Nah. Sure, even if you don't suffer from aging you'd still occasionally get diseases, and eventually one would be fatal, but your medical expenses per year would be far less than they are today.
Ok then, how about this. Obesity is a growing cause of illness. Removing aging is unlikely to affect that, arguably it could compound the problem.
Enterprise software sucks. We don't talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entert…
Another trend I noted after sitting in on a VC pitch: Look where people use Excel as some sort of database/process management system because an existing app isn't there or just sucks. That probably spells out opportunity. The world's most used database isn't Oracle or MySQL, it's Microsoft Excel...
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And all of this needs software. And most of what they have sucks. I mean really sucks. That's because Enterprise Software is actually an arbiter of controlling people through controlling workflow. It's solidified corporate politics! Entrenched interests within a company don't want to optimize the company's bottom line. They want to optimize to further their own interests. I once posted about a transatlantic E3 line t…
The way to fix this is through highly granular free market economics. Let a company set standards and empower multiple groups to compete to those standards. This sounds good to hackers like us who work at small companies, but it's actually fairly dangerous for a big company to do this. One of the groups might risk the company (rather than just themselves) in order to make largish profits. An extreme example of this:…
We need to eliminate packaging waste. My laundry detergent ran out, so I had to go get some more. Why am I throwing this big plastic jug back into the recycling loop? Why can't I just take it back to the store and fill it up again? I could use the same jug for years and years and years. How many of those jugs do you think are just going into landfills every day? I saw a link recently to a "bring your own container" t…
That sounds less like giving people what they want and more like giving people what you think they ought to have.
Correction: some people want this. Some people want to wear hair shirts of inconvenience in order to impress some narrow circle of like-minded friends with how environmentally-friendly they are. But there's a limited number of hair-shirt people out there, and there's already massive competition for their dollars.
1. Everyone I know has a few CRT TVs they want to get rid of. I don't know how to solve this, but surely there's a startup idea in here somewhere.
2. This thread establishes that there is a problem figuring out what problems need to be solved, otherwise it wouldn't exist (maybe that one was too easy though).
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Ok then, how about this. Obesity is a growing cause of illness. Removing aging is unlikely to affect that, arguably it could compound the problem.
Potentially, although I'd expect that a person with the health of an obese 30 year old would still have lower medical expenses than a non-obese 60 year old. At any rate, obesity is a relatively easy problem compared to aging. (Step 1: stop subsidizing corn syrup...)
I'm not sure it is as easily fixable as your comment suggests - I'd argue it is as non-trivial as stopping aging.
Healthcare is expensive.
And it will continue to be until we institute severe rationing, or cure aging. I vote for the second.
a) Have a quite sudden and very severe overpopulation problem, or
b) Are forced to ration babies.
Both of these are pretty damn dystopic.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to live forever, but not necessarily at the cost of having everyone else live forever too.
Enterprise software sucks. We don't talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entert…
So in that sense, most enterprise software is good. It just depends on whose definition of good you're going with.