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

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 437 posts

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#161

Post by ericd »

I think personal health monitoring is probably the most important thing on that list. The thing that excited me the most when smartphones started becoming popular was the prospect that they could coordinate data collection from a number of sensors always collecting data - basic ones like Nike+, but perhaps also sensors measuring sleep, taking periodic bloodwork, etc. At the same time, perhaps you could automatically monitor personal behavior such as foods eaten.

Personal diagnostics would be an important use of that, but I think more importantly, with a very large public dataset of basic biometric data correlated with behavior data and medical results across a significant portion of the population, we could stop treating human health studies as bespoke one-offs put on at great expense and start treating them as data mining problems. You could begin to spot correlations between behaviors and results that are unintuitive given conventional wisdom. I think that the resulting burst of discoveries would be on par with any of history's great scientific revolutions.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#162

Post by tintin »

jballanc wrote: post #76

Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine The Newcomen Eng…

I think you are right.

I don't agree with PG when he is talking about Apple. "None of them are run by product visionaries" is simply not true. Steve Jobs had great respect for companies like Sony because there are product visionary companies. Sony, IBM, Philips, and a lot of others, all companies that gave us great products we now are using every day. But it took years to get there.

E-ink for example was created in 1997 and is still in development. But we all know e-readers. A great example of a visionary product imho.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#163

Post by rdl »

There's a clear search engine improvement which I'd love, and my friends would love, but I think it's not yet technically possible. (the tech to do it exists, but it's a big engineering challenge to actually build it in an economically viable way).

A way to search (public, private) documents without leaking ANY information (beyond possibly "I did a search") to the operator. DDG's "trust us" security policy doesn't really go far enough. A mix-net anonymizing your query is the best option now, but it's insufficient. Just knowing someone in the world is searching for a specific piece of information is itself highly actionable in some contexts.

USG and other highly security conscious entities accomplish this by having the full search corpus onsite and running the searches on their own hardware. There's Google Enterprise (which was the most red-headed stepchild product I've ever seen from Google) too, and there are commercial ways to buy the crawl and run an engine on top of it, but this isn't really something even Fortune 500 companies do.

Basically, either a permanent "personal google appliance", potentially hosted in the cloud using some tricks, or a way to spontaneously instantiate a google each time you want to do a search.

Probably the way to do this is to write some interesting sci fi novel featuring the dangers of public search leaking, and also wait for some interesting prosecutions which use search data as evidence.

You could actually still do advertising this way, too; just requires some tricks.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#164

Post by rdl »

ericd wrote: post #161

I think personal health monitoring is probably the most important thing on that list. The thing that excited me the most when smartphones started becoming popular was the prospect that they could coordinate data collection from a number of sensors always collecting data - basic ones like Nike+, but perhaps also sensors measuring sleep, taking periodic bloodwork, etc. At the same time, perhaps you could automatically…

Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) proposed this a few years ago as a way to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Being able to "tivo rewind real life" would be pretty amazing -- watch a bunch of things passively, record data, notice a spike in mortality, then find the common factors and stop the new plague (or the kids who found a Cobalt-60 source, or the pump infected with Cholera).

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#166

Post by RachelF »

Gatsky wrote: post #110
repos wrote: post #6

Preventative Diagnostics as Paul describes in #7 will really be the future - it's barbaric that we can only make a diagnosis when the disease has already manifested (in most cases). There are a few players in this space (Scanadu comes to mind), but it's seems like nano biosensors and the like are still very new technologies. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not optimistic. I think pg's discussion of automatic diagnosis is a bit ill-informed. For example, the recent trial that showed screening CT scans reduce mortality in lung cancer cost 250 million dollars to run. Even then, nobody is sure if it is even a cost effective measure. It is difficult and costly to produce a screening test. It also takes many years to validate. Then there is the problem of what to do with…

For insurance companies early detection of chronic illness can lead to a longer lifespan when old, which costs them more. Better you die fast after a certain age?

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#167

Post by rdl »

ghshephard wrote: post #139
samstave wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are decades of precedent against how much people will pay for email. Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email? Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees. Thats the problem with enterprise scaling vs cloud/startup scaling. They are inverse; The enterprise wants the cost per unit to go down when scalin…

"Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email? Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees." Yes, I certainly do believe that any American corporation with 150K employees spends significantly more than $7.5mm/year on their messaging system. These systems actually get _more_ expensive as they grow larger - Disaster R…

Lockheed is a horrible example too because they have extensive classified operations (their support costs for email within classified projects probably exceed 7.5mm alone), and because Lockheed IS&GS is a major contractor for outsourced IT services.

I think the Gartner figure was something on the order of $500-1000/yr per employee for messaging in large high tech businesses. A lot of that is IT staff, and all the other systems for security and compliance. Email is one of the big apps within enterprise.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#168

Post by chmike »

This is now my favorite essay of Paul Graham because it shares my thoughts.

The only thing I feel less comfortable with is that it emphasis financial value over a useful contribution to mankind. In my view the later is more relevant than a goal to become the richest person of the cemetery.

I guess this is a kind of perception distortion one gets when the main variables considered on a day to day basis are ROI, wealth, influence power, etc.

I'm aware that wealth provides a significant leverage to contribute to mankind's good, but it is easy to forget about this relevant next step by solely focusing on increasing one's wealth.

Open source is one example showing the difference and it also proves that we don't need to be a billionaire to significantly contribute to mankind's good.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#169

Post by Elepsis »

intended wrote: post #98
SkyMarshal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting idea. I think the most intractable part is that many people believe what they want to believe. They gravitate to a world view for various reasons, backfit it to the data, rationalize the cherrypicking of supporting data and discarding of refuting data, integrate it into their id or ego, fight tooth and nail to protect it, and happily accept the political dis/misinformation you're referring to. I'd imagine…

Yup, psych has been looking at this intently for a while - I think cognitive has been doing work looking into this. There was an article on this a while back on HN as well - why walmart knew someones daughter was pregnant before her dad did. (forbes, after taking it from wired iirc) Its based on the fact that peoples habits (in regards to shopping) are ingrained, and that there are only a few times in life when those…

It was Target and the New York Times Magazine, for what it's worth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#170

Post by olalonde »

rdl wrote: post #163

There's a clear search engine improvement which I'd love, and my friends would love, but I think it's not yet technically possible. (the tech to do it exists, but it's a big engineering challenge to actually build it in an economically viable way). A way to search (public, private) documents without leaking ANY information (beyond possibly "I did a search") to the operator. DDG's "trust us" security policy doesn't re…

While there may be a niche for your idea, it is common knowledge that the average Joe simply doesn't care enough about privacy.
Post reply on HN