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Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
61–70 of 81 posts
Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious what you think the shortfalls are of all the existing tools that attempt to do this. Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Jira, to name a few.
I was a little vague in my original statement because I think there's a lot of areas of improvement across the board, but I was specifically thinking of the virtual meeting when I wrote that answer. There's no denying that something gets lost on a Zoom/WebEx/other conference call - attendees are distracted, miscommunications happen, and people have to be assertive to get their message across. This can be overcome by…
Without going full VR I still think a dedicated piece of hardware might be the way to go to normalize across everyone's setups and preferences. Maybe a big ass tablet (or around the size of the Surface Studio) with networked persistent whiteboarding / kanban boarding / alert-messaging software could be an MVP. Those are the main things that I wish were improved after ~4 years working with distributed teams. Informational meetings per se I haven't really had problems with, google hangouts/meet or GoToMeeting have worked out well enough. I'm not sure how we'll ever solve the "conversations that only happen because your desk is next to mine" problem without VR though.
Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
#63A relational/lang mixed access/excel platform. Looking for enough funding to work on this (just to cover life expenses US1000/month)
might be worth taking a look at - http://blog.querystorm.com/index.php/2018/04/04/whynow/
Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
#64Teacher collaboration tool to open source lesson plans. Create a platform like facebook or github for teachers to collaborate on planning an entire unit. At the moment each teacher does it alone or maybe a department may get together and create some content. But there are thousands of schools tens of thousands of teachers, all of them building lessons and delivering them. Build in testing. assignments. progress. etc.
Take a look at - https://www.chalk.com
Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s what “insurance” actually is— protection against unforeseen financial loses. The current idea of “insurance” is more of a health plan than a financial protection scheme. Car insurance doesn’t pay oil changes because that’s a normal part of owning a car and thus should be budgeted for, but a crash isn’t — this insurance exists to make someone whole after a covered loss.
There's a really great writeup on this in "catastrophic care", a book I'd recommend on this topic. Rather than "insurance", a better model is that "you'll need to spend a lot with p approaching 1, for some years of your life". So allocating each person a lifetime fixed pool of money (through the tax system) might be a good way to force some cost discipline onto the system, while still ensuring coverage and access are…
'I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's precisely the conversation we need to be having.'
This is only a thing in the US.
In the countries with sane public health systems, they have zero problem saying "Look, we've got this much money to spend, we think this way of spending it gets the most bang (roughly speaking, QALY's) for buck, so if you want more coverage hit up the private insurance market" [1].
And you know what, those private insurance markets work great because they actually have to provide meaningful value beyond the public system in order for consumers to bother using them.
As a vaguely relevant side note: Goddam it's difficult for me not to get angry about the diabolical state of the health system in the US and I don't even live there. There should be marches on the streets about this. You could radically improve the lives of the vast majority of 300 million people without spending an extra cent of government money on health if you just stopped being so goddam dumb about it [2].
[1] For instance, here is the website of the public pharmaceutical supplier in my country-- NZ-- who've hired lots of phys and maths grads I know: https://www.pharmac.govt.nz/about/your-guide-to-pharmac/fact....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
#66Collaboration/Project software designed with distributed teams in mind first.
I'm actually exploring this idea right now. It's been an issue I've been facing in my day job and think it is only going to become more pervasive as more teams start to work remotely.
If anyone is currently experiencing this issue, I would absolutely love to talk to you! I only have a really rudimentary site up right now at http://hallwayapp.com if anyone is even remotely curious (no pun intended).
Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a really great writeup on this in "catastrophic care", a book I'd recommend on this topic. Rather than "insurance", a better model is that "you'll need to spend a lot with p approaching 1, for some years of your life". So allocating each person a lifetime fixed pool of money (through the tax system) might be a good way to force some cost discipline onto the system, while still ensuring coverage and access are…
'I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's precisely the conversation we need to be having.' This is only a thing in the US. In the countries with sane public health systems, they have zero problem saying "Look, we've got this much money to spend, we think this way of spending it gets the most bang (roughly spe…
When Obamacare was being debated, the UK was accused of having "death panels", which were basically this: deciding that it was uneconomical to provide certain types of care to certain types of patients where the QALYs achieved would be minimal and excessively expensive.
But that is "communist" and so Americans as a whole could never agree to it. They'd rather squeeze every last day out of someone rich, even with a low or negative quality of life impact, and let the poor die early.
I don't live there and it makes me mad too. It fails the Rawlsian test of ethics (veil of ignorance), which I think is a good way to decide on political issues.
Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
#68A relational/lang mixed access/excel platform. Looking for enough funding to work on this (just to cover life expenses US1000/month)
Check out airtable.io; they are the closest I've seen to achieving this and I've been watching this space for a decade.
(It's my dream to build something here too.)
Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a little vague in my original statement because I think there's a lot of areas of improvement across the board, but I was specifically thinking of the virtual meeting when I wrote that answer. There's no denying that something gets lost on a Zoom/WebEx/other conference call - attendees are distracted, miscommunications happen, and people have to be assertive to get their message across. This can be overcome by…
Without going full VR I still think a dedicated piece of hardware might be the way to go to normalize across everyone's setups and preferences. Maybe a big ass tablet (or around the size of the Surface Studio) with networked persistent whiteboarding / kanban boarding / alert-messaging software could be an MVP. Those are the main things that I wish were improved after ~4 years working with distributed teams. Informati…
> "conversations that only happen because your desk is next to mine" problem
I think part of a solution to that problem is more deliberate communication. Water cooler talk, informal office conversations, whatever you want to call those, while occasionally helpful they can also lead to the creation of information silos between the people participating in these conversations.
The constraint of not having the opportunity to engage in this kind of conversations might actually be beneficial. Distributed teams force you to communicate more efficiently and more purposefully.