111–120 of 470 posts
A side-story related to firefighting, from Wikipedia's History of firefighting: "The first ever Roman fire brigade of which we have any substantial history was created by Marcus Licinius Crassus. He was born into a wealthy Roman family around the year 115 BC, and acquired an enormous fortune through (in the words of Plutarch) "fire and rapine." One of his most lucrative schemes took advantage of the fact that Rome ha…
Hey HN! I'm a software developer at YC and the author of this post. This post is actually a bit of an experiment. We're trying to find better ways to get prospective startup founders (which includes many of us in the HN community) in contact with problems that really ought to be solved. We have lots of different ideas for ways to do that, but a list of ideas seemed like an easy one to try out first. Please let me kno…
Your approach flies in the face of the "scratch your own itch" piece of advice and I think it's time to move that advice to the trash can. There are lots of non-technical domains that could benefit from the application of technology and if we only going around fixing problems we run into, we are going to miss out on some great ideas. Might I suggest that rather than thinking about this as "I want to build a company t…
I actually started an Ask: HN thread a while back asking. "What problems in your industry could be a potential startup?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007
what I learned from it ended up in this essay:
https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...
One of the most interesting things is how hard it is for "us" to focus on the problem and not immediately jump to the solution.
Today I always ask for problems rather than ideas it's much more useful and allow many more people to participate.
I will commit to doing the “Social Network for Children” if YC puts me in the next batch; this is not a random offer, I have thought about this before and have a solid idea of how to merge the parent’s role in oversight and the child’s right to privacy. If YC has a baseline to reach before considering an app for this topic, please let me know. Thanks!
I've thought about it a lot. For a while, I had a somewhat social, mostly private family and friends web site, and then everyone had all these kids, and the ideas started to percolate. I never took the time to think through all the implications of safely granting access, giving the children some room to breathe, while keeping the parents at arm's length. Definitely an interesting challenge. I think of the fun post-pa…
A side-story related to firefighting, from Wikipedia's History of firefighting: "The first ever Roman fire brigade of which we have any substantial history was created by Marcus Licinius Crassus. He was born into a wealthy Roman family around the year 115 BC, and acquired an enormous fortune through (in the words of Plutarch) "fire and rapine." One of his most lucrative schemes took advantage of the fact that Rome ha…
Maybe this could work as a B2G route, like the guys making the firefighting helicopters selling to CalFire. But yeah, this smells like they are trying to find a way to privatize firefighting, which is not cool (pardon the pun)
I imagine that a firefighting startup would not actually replace the operations of fire departments, they would simply sell products to fire departments.
One example of that is Active911: https://www.active911.com/ They sell a product that allows notifications to be pushed through multiple communication methods, and allows coordination of first response.
"Ideas" is a broad concept. Those are not product definitions explaining it's characteristics, what problem they solve and how the are bein monetized in detail. Those are just paragraphs talking about markets with potential money. I have a really great concept I had a week ago, and I'm now writing a detailed document about it. I'm currently employed and I plan to kickstart it by means of some contact in a group chat…
`Accounts Receivables as a Service` Does invoice factoring not exist in the US? It's a fairly run of the mill concept in the UK, and it's nothing like debt collection.
I can only assume that they are looking for some sort of automated turk that would call and call and call until the check is cut. Like a nag bot.
And/or, instead of high factor costs, my guess is they want this <1% of the receivable amount.
I've thought about the firefighting idea as well, especially after the recent Sonoma and Napa fire. Sprinkler systems for indoor fires are not that uncommon now. Why aren't there sprinkler/fire retardant systems for the perimeter/external part of a house? In a wildfire, I can't imagine a better way to fight the fire from spreading through a neighborhood than a system that auto-deploys when it senses smoke on the peri…
This is naive. A bushfire is huge, hot, and fast-moving, consuming entire trees in seconds. Your mains-pressure water sprinkler will not deter an onrushing wall of flame in the least... and worse, an automated system would take water away from where it's needed.
Even with all the fire retardant sprayed onto massive wildfires from the sky, we're unable to stop them. Why wouldn't a different approach work?
If you read about the Napa fires, some neighborhoods in Santa Rosa were entirely burned to the ground not because of a wall of gushing fire, but because some embers from further away landed on dried up brush and leaves and started the fire in that area.
There are hundreds of startup ideas in the Yellow Pages trending section: https://www.yellowpages.com/san-francisco-ca/trends/1
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to build this. Can you send an email to the address in my profile? I would love to talk to you for 5 minutes about it if you have time.
Having come into software from creative fields, I wonder how this could be done. Blockchain? I would talk/share my experiences with you. If you are asking enough questions, I might help.