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

191–200 of 437 posts

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#191

Post by lars »

samstave wrote: post #107
tomwalsham wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…

The breakthrough in your comm analogy will come with the translation of thought to word. We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation, then send that to the recipient. This will be wired-telepathy - the recipient will get a message which they can receive any way they choose; visually (email - they read it) audio playback, or thought-injection.…

> We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation

Since this thread is presumably being read by entrepreneurs making bets on the future of technology, it needs to be said that this will never happen with the current imaging technology. Brainwaves implies EEG, and the research in this field strongly suggests that it is information theoretically impossible to extract this information through the electrical activity on the scalp.

For this vision to become reality we need a new imaging device that has both the temporal resolution of an EEG, and a spatial resolution that probably needs to be better than an MRI.

In summary: Certain things are impossible. I can say with certainty that no algorithmic improvement will allow this to work using an EEG. I don't know whether it is physically possible to create a non invasive imaging device that allows such a signal to be detected reliably, but it certainly does not exist today, and it seems like a leap of faith to assume that it definitely will exist at some point in the future.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#192

Post by nl »

Gatsky wrote: post #144
nl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the case for all cancers though? I live in Australia, and we are indoctrinated to check your skin for moles that maybe cancerous . There are claims that the high rate of early detection leads to higher survival rates[1]. My understanding is that early detection of bowel, breast and prostate cancer is relatively easy and produces good outcomes too. There are radical ways to do early detection (sub dermal compu…

Not sure what you are arguing here... if you are arguing that screening for cancer can be useful and saves lives, then I agree with you! If you are arguing that a start up could have come up with a screening program for bowel cancer for example, then I don't agree with you for the stated reasons. Also: Prostate cancer screening is not recommended ( http://www.cancer.org.au/File/PolicyPublications/Position_st... ) Bre…

pg was talking about something different however

See, I don't think he was. "Ongoing diagnosis* doesn't have to mean new tests if you can make the existing tests radically cheaper and easier. Given that existing behaviour is always hard to modify it would seem sensible to try and piggyback on existing behaviour.

Toilets with cancer sensors that would check for bowel cancer everytime you go would be as about as "ongoing" as diagnosis can get.

Maybe toothbrushes could be modified to check for viruses in saliva.

I'm sure there are other easy tests that could be done if you have blood. There are obvious ways that could be integrated into everyday life (for women, anyway).

I've read some studies that showed dogs could be trained to smell cancer. Maybe people would pay to have their clothes sniffed (!) when they have them sent to the laundry.

I've previously suggested (on HN) the idea of payment companies partnering with food outlets and exercise software vendors to log the calories you are buying. That's a good input into diagnosis software too...

I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas - look for low hanging fruit and you can do radically better than the status quo.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#193

Post by tomjen3 »

tintin wrote: post #162
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 1…

The key is 'gave'. Past tense.

I think a lot more start-up people would fear (or even care about) Microsoft if Bill Gates was still running it. The same goes for the rest of the companies you mention.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#194

Post by ksec »

momoro wrote: post #186

Re: "5. The Next Steve Jobs" / "None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them." Jack Dorsey.

JD is very good, but sorry to say he is not even close to being next SJ.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#195

Post by robot »

So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup.

I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it.

I thought about this before, and I think building a hardware startup like Apple, or a systems software company like Microsoft is an order of magnitude harder than when they were founded. Let us take Apple. When Apple was founded, there was an ocean of people that did not have a PC in their homes. Big, uncharted market. When you hear Don Valentine (Apple's investor from Seqoia) talk about it, you can see how they did not care about anything but the market. Do we have that kind of market today? Maybe. At the moment everyone is occupied with their ipads, phones, and PCs.

Technology. Today the hardware is so complex, that it can be only competed with by largest companies in the world. It is not a coincidence that it is only Samsung that can compete with Apple in mobile devices. Take a Texas Instruments or Qualcomm chipset, you will face a complexity barrier at every corner. We won't hear you saying things like, my co-founder designed a chip so efficient, it will be a game changer. Anyone remember the JoJo Pad before the ipad was released?

So what could be done? I think it comes down to playing on the above two variables. For a new hardware/systems startup, it must target uncharted territory, i.e. introduce (mobile) computers to an area of use where it has never been tried before, and make sure everyone in the world needs it. (Like that thermometer startup, except find a wider use case) Use existing cutting edge technology, and build your new technology upon them (e.g. I would probably start with a top notch chipset + android + add new, hard-to-replicate technology.)

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#196

Post by tomjen3 »

dsrguru wrote: post #176
rblion wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The conscious revolution is just beginning, our species is very young, and the stars are still far away.

Yeah but until we invest as much time, money, and effort into defense against weapons and customized microorganisms as we do into their creation, we're running the risk of this young species (and maybe a lot of the other ones) disappearing very, very soon.

Oh please. Humanity is pretty much the definition of a species that should, in all probability, have died out on a multitude of occasions over the years and I am not just talking about the world wars and Nuclear Bombs, but things like the plagues, Spanish flu and all the rest of the diseases; the host of predators for which we are no match at all (a standard monkey is stronger than all but the best trained humans), the environment we inhabited (today that is not much of an issue) when we left Africa (why do you think we left? Properly because stronger tribes where pushing us further and further away and the alternative was dead on the shore), when we left the jungle, when we went to Siberia (again almost certainly pushed by stronger tribes) and when we went to Europe (same reason) where we had to fight the Neanderthals. Basically humanity has been on the winning sides of terrible odds since we started out. Don't forget that we nearly didn't make it in Africa (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-human...).

No wonder we love and underdog -- there is no greater under dog than humanity.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#197

Post by mjwalshe »

tomwalsham wrote: post #86
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…

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…

Yes anyone who says that "email isn't a messaging protocol" has probably been smoking to many of those funny Jazz cigarettes.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#198

Post by dwerew45234sdf »

robot wrote: post #195

So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup. I realize it sounds prepost…

100% agree with you.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#199

Post by xaver »

aptwebapps wrote: post #21

The last graph of #6 is great. I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it. More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation?…

You should check out Robin Hanson's idea of 'futarchy' here: http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#200

Post by chmike »

akrymski wrote: post #190

We're a YC company (www.post.fm) working on one of those ideas - email. We've encountered lots of headwinds as PG mentions, and we've managed to stay strong to our beliefs by keeping the team small and focused, and using our product ourselves to constantly remind us that what we're working on is better than Gmail. It's not been easy admittedly, we didn't come up with some small idea that could grow into an email repl…

I'm also working on the email problem but on a different aspect. If, as PG suggest, you consider a new protocol, is there a way to share this work so others may build on it and contribute to push this big snow ball or do you plan to make it a proprietary technology ?

I fully agree that SMTP is broken. It is so obvious when examining DKIM.

Post reply on HN