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

Startup Ideas

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 470 posts

Re: Startup Ideas

#231

Post by jakobegger »

lytol wrote: post #149
wonderous wrote: post #88

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 was a senior engineer at a startup that evolved into this space – basically, we started as a browser for kids and slowly started adding more "social" features. I thought I'd add a few notes in case you (or someone else) goes down this road: - Monetization is hard. As much as parents vocally _desire_ a safe space for their kids online, it doesn't translate to their wallet. If you end up going for more indirect reven…

If your product depends on parent supervision, it's not going to work. As a parent, the last thing I want to do is spend more time looking after my kids!

If you work on a kid product, make sure that kids can use it on their own, without supervision.

Re: Startup Ideas

#232

Post by ssijak »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #201
ukulele wrote: post #81

> AI for communicating with dogs This is borderline satire. You don't need some crazy new idea to do a startup. You need to execute well on something people want, and if you're out looking for ideas, your best bet is probably to enter an existing market and cater to a subset of it better than others are doing.

"It's like Facebook, but for dogs."

What about me? https://imgur.com/gallery/Yqgy8

Re: Startup Ideas

#233

Post by ahussain »

I honestly cannot tell if some of these ideas are real or just parodies of silicon valley, "avocado toast" tech culture: - AI for Communicating with Dogs - Baby Bidet - AR Debt Collector - Buyer’s Remorse Insurance

Are these really the most pressing problems start-ups could be solving right now? What about issues like cost of housing in cities, urban transport, infrastructure in the developing world, fixing 'fake news', new (non-ads) business models for the web, modern banking, helping refugees and displaced persons, more energy efficient air-conditioning, voice-to-voice language translation, collective decision making tools, reducing air pollution...

Re: Startup Ideas

#234

Post by davemel37 »

was_boring wrote: post #219
arkades wrote: post #205

Re Smart Bathroom: Every time I hear about all-knowing toilets, I continue to feel it’s putting the cart way ahead of the horse. There’s a rule in medicine: don’t order a test whose outcome doesn’t change your decision. That’s not about cost-savings, it’s about avoiding false positives that make no sense in clinical context but raise flags that must be chased down. This sort of thing is literally promising to just co…

> “More data” is not inherently good. Without a framework of information for interpretation of that data, it will do far more harm than good. I'm glad people are saying this. I'm in a constant fight at work with people who want "more data." What ends up happening most of the time is it's ignored or people do not interpret it correctly because they don't have the ability or context to do it (doing stats wrong for inst…

Have them read Chapter 5 of this book. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

"Using experts in a variety of fields as test subjects, experimental psychologists have examined the relationship between the amount of information available to the experts, the accuracy of judgments they make based on this information, and the experts’ confidence in the accuracy of these judgments."

"Key findings from this research are: • Once an experienced analyst has the minimum information necessary to make an informed judgment, obtaining additional information generally does not improve the accuracy of his or her estimates. Additional information does, however, lead the analyst to become more confident in the judgment, to the point of overconfidence. • Experienced analysts have an imperfect understanding of what information they actually use in making judgments. They are unaware of the extent to which their judgments are determined by a few dominant factors, rather than by the systematic integration of all available information. Analysts actually use much less of the available information than they think they do."

Re: Startup Ideas

#236

Post by taurath »

kcorbitt wrote: post #2

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…

I am probably in the minority here, but it seems that the impetus of most of the problems on this list is what would possibly make the most money, written as if that is the measuring stick of the most societally useful startup.

The top 5 problems in my city are more on the level of affordable housing, homelessness, drug use, over-incarceration and mental healthcare. I can't help but feel like we have enough gadgets and data, and there are enough products to buy out there for every single income level. As long as we are only solving small problems and doing arbitrage or rent-taking it feels like making a better society is the last thing on anyone's mind.

Re: Startup Ideas

#237

Post by mynegation »

arkades wrote: post #229
mynegation wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is (pretty horrible) joke: "If violence does not solve the problem, you are not using enough of it". It may be the case with data. Put another way, we may be in the uncanny valley of data. There is definitely an issue of under-diagnosis for many diseases. More data may not help initially but once we are over the critical mass in the amount of data and sophistication of ML algorithms trained on it, it will get o…

We have a much bigger problem with overdiagnosis than underdiagnosis, and the latter is not likely to be solved with this sort of scattershot data collection. The former is very likely to be inflamed. The difference is that you actually hear about the Diagnosis X That Was Missed, but you never hear about That Simple Blood Test That Should Never Have Been Drawn but that Showed Positive for a Marker Common In Disease B…

Not sure how this proves me wrong. What it does prove is that analysis of data should not be left (entirely) to humans, who are inherently flaky. Dark irony of this situation is that _more_ data from additional test had a chance of saving the patient.

The way it should have worked: based on previous labeled examples, computer system should have noticed the uptrend in potassium and flag this client for blood gas, and then make classification based on available and _additional_ data.

Re: Startup Ideas

#238

Post by schoen »

blizkreeg wrote: post #144
schoen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, some people in the recent fires were able to save their homes with a garden hose (!) depending on the intensity of the fire in their area, particularly when the fire was spread by flying embers. That's not unusual in wildfires, though only some fraction of buildings can be saved this way.

I'd argue some fraction is enough. It still represents millions saved in damages.

Yeah, I think it could be a very valuable precaution!

Re: Startup Ideas

#239

Post by Waterluvian »

ahussain wrote: post #233

I honestly cannot tell if some of these ideas are real or just parodies of silicon valley, "avocado toast" tech culture: - AI for Communicating with Dogs - Baby Bidet - AR Debt Collector - Buyer’s Remorse Insurance Are these really the most pressing problems start-ups could be solving right now? What about issues like cost of housing in cities, urban transport, infrastructure in the developing world, fixing 'fake new…

Those problems aren't sexy and can't get anyone rich quick.

Re: Startup Ideas

#240

Post by mcdowall »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #200
jsonne wrote: post #118

No offense to Mr Friedman, but almost everyone that works in marketing and tech has had the adwords for billboards idea, or tv or radio for that matter. I once upon a time played with an adwords for trade magazines idea that went nowhere. This is one of those things where almost every single entrenched player has incentives to keep this from becoming the reality, and outside owning the inventory outright I don't thin…

Google in the past had Adwords for magazine and radio ads built into the product. It wasn't a bad idea, it failed because the timing was completely wrong. In those days, online advertising was super cheap and print/radio was expensive. We performance advertising guys were making $50 in profit on a $10 online ad buy. Print was so worthless at the time there was the saying: What is the difference between buying print a…

I’ve worked on this in London recently, presenting my working concept (and months of data in tableau by location behind it) at a few events. The industry is a few years off it, particularly the physical tech, which would require digital screens to be hooked up to an ad server of sorts (that doesn’t really exist programmatically either) and then serving custom ad formats (non IAB format) in real-time (taking in variable factors that could effect the demographic and/or volume of eyeballs). Measurement of the eyeballs and said demographic is the gap, though that’s more than currently exists in the Out of home market right now(nothing!).

It has legs, you just need serious commitment from an owner of inventory (physical boards), which are controlled by 3 or 4 organisations.

Post reply on HN