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Startup Ideas

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Startup Ideas

#421

Post by arkades »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #379
arkades wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hadn’t worked in precisely that field and seen how easily we gave out data sharing agreements to partners, ... But I did. No, I use the word “trivial” knowingly.

To partners, sure. What sort of partners ? If I start a company and show up at the door, would they just give me the datasets ? Would those data sets be in useful formats ? if you are seriously telling me those data sets are easy to get, let's talk because I know what to do with them.

There’s usually a spot in every insurance company that considers itself the “innovation center.” Basically, if you incur no costs to them beyond getting you the data, and give them a free trial run on your product, you’ll get your data-sharing agreement.

The data for insurers is in the form of Billings (which come with Diagnosis codes!), which follows a federally-standardized format (check out the Medicare website) and you can get a sample of 5% of Medicare subscribers’ data off the Medicare site without any hoops to jump through.

I want to say, “if you actually know what to do with it, PM me and we can talk details,” but the fact that you don’t already know about this sort of low-hanging fruit suggests you’re from outside the hc sector looking in.

Re: Startup Ideas

#422

Post by randycupertino »

kls wrote: post #298
taurath wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Drugs are easy, but you would have to be able to run books to fix it, maybe in Vegas. You set up a site where you post pictures and a bio of the drug addict. People then place wagers on how long you think they will stay clean and build odds based on that. Said drug abuser gets a cut of the house at 3 months, 6 months and a year and has to submit to drug tests during that period. This cut allows them to rebuild their…

This would be a great TV show.

Re: Startup Ideas

#423

Post by dkersten »

ng-user wrote: post #53
mark242 wrote: post #34

> Social Network for Children Counterpoint-- this should not be built. Kids already have a social network, it's called the playground at school. Having children engage with their friends outside of school time is a fine goal, but there are plenty of existing after-school activities that encourage this interaction. These activities also don't put the undue stress of having to decipher typed language, nuance, and other…

Not to mention, how would you limit it to children only? Talk about pedo heaven.

Some online games-for-kids don't allow freeform text, so the game can control what kind of communication is allowed. Others are very heavily moderated.

You could also require parents to identify themselves, I guess, similar to how some financial/banking apps do? Not fool proof, but would raise the barrier for predators to enter.

Re: Startup Ideas

#424

Post by dkersten »

zanny wrote: post #145
nasirmaziz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social Media sites ironically isolate humans and the needed natural interactions. Bad Idea! This will indoctrinate children at a very early stage. The social medium for children should be schools, playgrounds, community events, and other collective activities etc.

So legitimate question. If the social medium of children should be physical, why should adults be virtual? Or more generally why are adults who are supposed to be mature and capable of rational decision abandoning physical interaction for addictive social media?

Part of it is that children are highly suggestible. They're also still mentally developing and learning. Therefore, they are at risk of not developing proper social skills and are more likely to get addicted (possibly at the expense of physical activities). But your point is still valid and both of those things are, for sure, problems for adults too. One would hope that adults are, at least, less suggestible (hope, but in reality, it seems lots of adults are pretty gullible and suggestible too, at least in some things).

Re: Startup Ideas

#426

Post by SamReidHughes »

baxtr wrote: post #282

This list is so Silicon Valley cliche. I wish they started addressing the real problems of this planet, like overpopulation, climate change, droughts, you name it. But hey, why not help dogs talk

I'm waiting for your list of startup ideas to address these issues.

Re: Startup Ideas

#427

Post by canes123456 »

ahussain wrote: post #313
canes123456 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like any of these ideas but dismissing only the most pressing problems is a silly way to judge ideas. It is easy to pick apart ideas, look: - cost of housing in cities: Convince home owners to vote against their own self interest. Not a great business idea - urban transport: Everyone else is trying to do this. Self driving cars might solve this - Infrastucture in the developing world: Hard for outsiders to ac…

> dismissing only the most pressing problems is a silly way to judge ideas You are correct, but if you don't judge ideas on this metric then you risk becoming irrelevant to the vast majority of people, and you are not taken seriously when you say things like "we are going to revolutionize the world" And yes, it is easy to pick apart those ideas, but that's exactly why more people (especially those who consider themse…

Whatever you think about Facebook, it is not irrelevant to the vast majority of people. What was the pressing issue it was solving? Even the personal computer was not solving a pressing issue at the time. New products create the demand for it and the influence of it only makes sense in retrospect. There are not many solutions that are both achievable and solve obviously huge problems. If there were clear ways to solve these problems, tons of people will have already done it. We solve huge problems by first solving small ones and laddering up.

Re: Startup Ideas

#428

Post by Tomis02 »

This is what happens when you'd like to save the world (and earn the big money and fame) but you unfortunately took the path of a CS degree (or worse, just software/business school) and are incapable of solving real hard problems, so you bet on the unlikely success of an useless startup. People have been sharing visions and ideas of the future for at least one hundred years, such as infinite lifespans, telepathy, artificial food, searching for life throughout the galaxy, time travel, neural implants, artificial limbs and organs, and so on. Unfortunately, since all that has been done already, the only way a new startup can succeed is by inventing a (semi-)automatic baby bidet or having adwords for outdoors.

Call me cynical but I believe that 99.999% of the startups are huge waste of time (probably their only benefit is siphoning some money from the financial industry and redistributing it to the rest of society) and a vast proportion of software developers (maybe even the majority) would be much better suited working in a different scientific field where they could actually help do something useful for humanity.

Re: Startup Ideas

#429

Post by blackkettle »

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…

Moreover, the whole 'smart bathroom' thing has already been pretty much solved in Japan - and more or less keeping in mind the principle that you describe. You can get your temperature, get a warm seat, turn on some ambient music to mask your own, more personal music, flush, bidet, whatever all in most toilets in your average department store.

You can get more complex offerings that do perform some more complicated tests if you really want to.

The 'bath room' itself is also typically a single, self contained unit, often in some kind of mold, and including the shower, accoutrements, and bath in a full space designed to get wet and save/share the clean water in the bath.

The 'bath room' usually has a waterproof, electronic control panel which allows you to set timers for filling the bath, set an ambient temperature to keep it at, set the preferred level of water, set different default temperatures for the shower and bath, and typically also access all these features from other places like the kitchen where a companion panel is installed. This is typical of your average house - I just described my wife's parents' place, which was built 10 years ago.

The whole design thing is completely solved there, and why that approach has not been adopted across the U.S. and Europe by now is completely beyond me.

But the killer thing there would be to bring the Japanese approach to the US and Europe and plug in some better smart access features. Or go to Japan and plug them in there, where the infrastructure and demand is already in place [well, Google is probably on it already but...]

Re: Startup Ideas

#430

Post by spatulon »

aptwebapps wrote: post #406
mino wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking forward to see this thread here next week: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/

This is really strange, but on Chrome, and only on Chrome and not in incognito mode, that redirects to https://www.apple.com/ . I wonder if it returned a 301 at one time.

It's nothing to do with the browser — the same thing happens in Firefox. The site redirects to Apple when the referrer is HN.
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