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

Startups I Want to Fund

startupandrew.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 167 posts

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#91

Post by xrd »

NoIWont wrote: post #64
whamlastxmas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be devil's advocate: The worst possible outcome of using more air conditioning is more pollution. Pollution (on a global scale) and the associated potential climate change are considered pretty first-world (rich white dude) problems. Pollution on a local scale is definitely more legitimate, but that's overwhelmingly due to combustion engines (cars) and not power generation, which doesn't typically happen in city c…

Hmmm, Air Conditioners are heat pumps as are fridges. Pumping heat rather than generating it comes in at roughly 1/4 the energy budget. An innovative "Air Conditioner" that could store the usually dumped heat for later use (Say in preheating water for a hot tap to lower costs of heating) would probably be extremely popular if it was a decent product otherwise (Cheap, durable, easy to install). Effectively what is nee…

Burning Man attendees, and others before them, have made some innovative ac units called swamp coolers.

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#92

Post by andrewflnr »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #31
zackmorris wrote: post #20

I just want to second Andrew's list. I'm a developer with probably 1/100 as much money as he has, but this is the first list I've seen in a long time that mentions specific low-hanging fruit that has the potential to actually improve lives (vs the mostly vacuous or profit-oriented areas I've seen in other lists). I look at problems in the world as a series of solutions built from first principles. So if you want a di…

Start with the routers. Build a better home router. Sort of like Ubiquiti kind of is doing. Build one that does - local caching and P2P sharing of media / photos etc this gives ISPs a genuine incentive to use it - if routers can build a mesh network (or at least not push back to ISP core) for 20/30 % traffic will that be savings? - Router acts as first responder to bot nets / malware from within the house Another goo…

What I've been told is that ISPs could easily stop most ddos attacks now, but simply don't give even the tiniest crap about it. Also, they tend not to like p2p, so I don't think you can sell this to ISPs.

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#93

Post by neumann »

Beefin wrote: post #78

I'm surprised there is no mention of healthcare...

definitely lot of opportunities there, but a big factor is regulation. Most people who haven't been exposed to the healthcare market are understandably cautious about funding a start-up in a highly regulated field.

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#94

Post by andrewflnr »

Jun8 wrote: post #9

Some ideas: 1. Social Silo-busters: Couple the evils of the garden walled social network approach with posts on how hard is it to make friends later in life, add a pinch of all that useless time spent in the car commuting (scraping the bottom of Spotify or Audible) and you arrive at: ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity, e.g. through limited range (100m) FM transmitters (one cheap way would be to use…

Giving drivers the ability to actually talk to each other, instead of just making gestures (of mutual loneliness and longing, of course). What could go wrong?

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#96

Post by exabrial »

kjksf wrote: post #47
exabrial wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think hydrogen should get a huge push because it completes a zero impact ecosystem. If the hydrogen is powered from solar/wind, then fuel cells process that into heat for homes, electricity for lights, and purified water for drinking.

Hydrogen is not economical for most use cases. For example if you have solar/wind energy, you can transfer it very efficiently over existing power grid to provide energy for heating or lights. Transmission losses in power lines are 8-15% so the efficiency is 85%+ ( https://blog.schneider-electric.com/energy-management-energy... ) If you do the same via hydrogen, you have to convert solar energy into hydrogen. That co…

Great points, but don't lose the trees in the forest: This isn't about efficiency, it's about convenience. Fueling a car for 400miles in 2m is acceptable at 16% efficiency if the energy wasted is "free". That's not possible with battery technology.

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#97

Post by desireco42 »

amdelamar wrote: post #40
desireco42 wrote: post #2

Ha. Package manager, I was thinking how we should have a single package manager that would just do it's think no matter the language, and you can just plug in new languages and it would know how to handle them (resolve dependecies etc). I think it would be worthwhile project.

If its a cross-platform CLI it would be fantastic. Combine brew, chocolatey, yum, apt-get, snap, docker, git... you name it. Surely there is someone on this already?

Nope. But it is really low hanging fruit. I really would hate to learn another set of commands.

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#98

Post by shafyy »

Jun8 wrote: post #9

Some ideas: 1. Social Silo-busters: Couple the evils of the garden walled social network approach with posts on how hard is it to make friends later in life, add a pinch of all that useless time spent in the car commuting (scraping the bottom of Spotify or Audible) and you arrive at: ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity, e.g. through limited range (100m) FM transmitters (one cheap way would be to use…

Screens to order at restaurants is one of the shittiest ideas ever. Got handed an iPad with a menu on it recently at a restaurant in LA. Took me about 5x longer to get an overview of what they have than a normal paper menu.

Sometimes, paper > screen.

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#99

Post by wp381640 »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #55
madrox wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty sick burn, and you may be being generous. Nothing in this list is a new idea. People have been trying and failing at open app stores for years. Same with touch OS. If "What does the internet-native version of the WSJ or The Economist look like?" constitutes a sleeper market, he may need to get out more.

Are you guys reading the same list as me? How would you categorize the following as a "rich white guy problem"? "Air conditioning – As more people in hot climates enter the middle class, and as climate change accelerates, the demand for air conditioning will explode. What innovation is possible here?"

Air conditioning is an energy problem. There is no magic bullet to cooling 15+ cubic meters of air from 30+ degrees to 23 degrees

Re: Startups I Want to Fund

#100

Post by mdorazio »

wp381640 wrote: post #99
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you guys reading the same list as me? How would you categorize the following as a "rich white guy problem"? "Air conditioning – As more people in hot climates enter the middle class, and as climate change accelerates, the demand for air conditioning will explode. What innovation is possible here?"

Air conditioning is an energy problem. There is no magic bullet to cooling 15+ cubic meters of air from 30+ degrees to 23 degrees

No one is asking for a magic bullet. People are asking for something better than the expensive, marginally efficient, and failure-prone compressor-based AC units that dominate the market now. There are alternatives out there that have yet to reach market-ready status, but could have a big impact - things like magnetocaloric cooling (BASF has a prototype [1]) and thermoacoustic heat engines [2], both of which have higher energy efficiency and potentially longer service life than compressor-based units.

[1] https://www.basf.com/en/company/news-and-media/magazine/reso...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoacoustic_heat_engine

Post reply on HN