Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After the end of the startup era

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 304 posts

Re: After the end of the startup era

#181

Post by DamonHD »

username223 wrote: post #128
DamonHD wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic fligh…

> having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year) I.e. one (or one thousandth, given his carbon footprint) less Zuckerberg? I could get behind that. Heck, I supported NPG back when I thought humanity had a chance.

Remember that rich westerners have a far higher per-capita footprint than the rest of the planet, eg the top 10% has about 50% of the total carbon footprint for example...

Re: After the end of the startup era

#182

Post by DamonHD »

tertius wrote: post #150
username223 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year) I.e. one (or one thousandth, given his carbon footprint) less Zuckerberg? I could get behind that. Heck, I supported NPG back when I thought humanity had a chance.

We'll even out at about 10bil. Then this won't be a problem.

Indeed: if a few hundred million westerners made a real effort to curtail frivolous footprint then that 10b may happen with a lower-than-current total footprint.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#183

Post by DangleWaggle »

graycat wrote: post #69
trhway wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we start to stick AI on a business. And like with uber/airbnb where an app became the business, we'll see unicorns where the AI will become the business.

AI is some applied math. But as applied math goes, AI is only a tiny fraction, nearly absurdly narrow, and not very impressive. There's a lot more good applied math to be brought forward to exploit the recent fantastic hardware.

Can you give some examples of applied math sub fields that haven't been exploited to their fullest? I'm genuinely interested.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#184

Post by Liron »

Liron wrote: post #17

I'm not sure comparing the YC batches is convincing evidence. Off the top of my head, Coinbase (YC S12) is the 2017 analogue of a company that is "poised to dominate its industry", already valued at $1B+.

Another poised-to-dominate unicorn is Flexport (YC W14).

Re: After the end of the startup era

#185

Post by avip »

rdtsc wrote: post #42

I look at it from another end - I feel there is a sort of an app fatigue. Maybe it is jut me. I used to be excited about Uber-like things, note taking apps, DropBox, coupon sites, review sites. Installed some of them, used them, then kind of stopped. Someone at work would say "you should try this new thing, totally cool" and I'd be inclined to do it, but now would pass it probably. Extrapolating scientifically from t…

Dude you're just growing up that's all. You'll find the sandbox is also not as fun as it used to be.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#186

Post by vladislav »

This article is using false assumptions about AI to back up its narrative.

"AI doesn’t just require top-tier talent; that talent is all but useless without mountains of the right kind of data. And who has essentially all of the best data? That’s right: the abovementioned Big Five, plus their Chinese counterparts Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu."

Making the next quantum leaps in AI is not a question of data advantages.

1) We have just seen the world's best Go-playing AI trained completely from self-play, without access to any labeled data nor hand-engineering, trained on a few machines. This happened at Google, but could have easily been done by a small startup.

https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2017/10/20/go...

2) Even the pioneers of deep learning are now strongly pushing back on the methodology that lots of labeled data is required to solve AI problems.

Geoffrey Hinton: "I don't think it's how the brain works. We clearly don't need all the labeled data."

https://www.axios.com/ai-pioneer-advocates-starting-over-248...

In a nutshell, the biggest challenge of pushing AI forward is tackling unsupervised learning, not having "better data".

Re: After the end of the startup era

#187

Post by KGIII »

curun1r wrote: post #60
wuliwong wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking for the past year or two that we are hitting a bit of an inflection point. Previously, it seems the hardware developments moved somewhat linearly PC -> internet -> mobile but now it seems like there is all of a sudden significant overlap. Multiple new disruptive hardware technologies with significant, potential consumer applications are emerging simultaneously. I might be just drawing arbitrary lin…

Your problem may be that you're using hindsight to see the PC, internet and mobile eras and using somewhat irrational exuberance to view the current "disruptions." It's a pretty good bet that not all of them will pan out or have the kind of pervasive impact on society that you're predicting and that 20 years from now, again with hindsight, you'll see the 1 landscape-altering technology that defined the current era an…

I have to wonder if some of that growth was related to Moore's Law? Namely, the number of transistors grew and the use of them grew linearly with them in a sort of 'if you build it, they will come' fashion?

Now, as I understand it, growth has slowed outside of the labs and Moore's Law appears to no longer be valid. So, there will likely still be growth, but the growth will be more rare, difficult, and expensive?

Like your VR example, we've often had great predictions of the future and so very few of them actually pan out as expected.

I don't know, it's just a thought I've pondered.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#188

Post by quadrangle »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #6

This just sounds like unwarranted negativity to me. There will always be innovation.

I don't think the takeaway is that innovation will slow down. The point of the article is that the large, powerful companies that we have now are on top of the game, understand technology, networking, internet, and there's no big new shift where they'll lose to startups.

Innovation will continue and Alphabet and Amazon etc. will remain dominant and powerful, controlling and doing much of the innovation.

Startups had whole new markets to enter in the past where big corporations were not prepared to go. Now, any potential new markets aren't wide open for small startups and the big corporations are ready to jump in and dominate. It's not the same.

End of widespread startup success ≠ end of innovation (but it will mean some types of innovation are stifled or don't happen)

Re: After the end of the startup era

#189

Post by atomashpolskiy »

abakker wrote: post #38
karmakaze wrote: post #2

So the premise is that the startup era is ending: > ...because we’ve all lived through back-to-back massive worldwide hardware revolutions — the growth of the Internet, and the adoption of smartphones — we erroneously think another one is around the corner, and once again, a few kids in a garage can write a little software to take advantage of it. [...] But there is no such revolution en route... Then it says: > It i…

Notice how there is an incredibly alignment between the problems in VR/AR, Drones, Self Driving Cars, and IoT? They require solving problems in 3D space in the real world either reacting or simulating. hmm...might we solve some of these problems with AI? I am not a software developer, but these problems are very conceptually similar, and it seems we're all waiting on software/compute capabilities to leverage all of t…

Given this combination of technologies, I'd say we're waiting for robot warfare :)

Re: After the end of the startup era

#190

Post by ilamont »

komali2 wrote: post #48

>IoT devices [are] hard to prototype, generally low-margin, expensive to bring to market, and very expensive to scale. Just ask Fitbit. Or Jawbone. Or Juicero. Or HTC. I feel like this is the public's idea of "iot," while I've learned after a year of working for an iot stack provider that the real "internet of things" explosion is found in places nobody looks except the procurement guys - the stadium lights, the refr…

Exactly. Google "Industrial IoT" or "Industrie 4.0" and it's pretty clear that some major changes are happening with IoT, far away from consumer gadgetry like Nest and an IP-enabled light bulb.
Post reply on HN