Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#311

Post by lars » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:27 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #231

lars wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 imp…

Your judgment that present technology is inadequate is based on the assumption that computers need to learn to read the human thoughts. What about the inverse, that the humans learn how to think in a way that a computer understands? That will be much easier, as humans learn much better than computers, and also much safer - I will have complete control over which of my thoughts the computer can detect and interpret.

The human learning to adapt to the machine has been the way EEG-based brain computer interfaces have been made for a couple of decades. Using machine learning to adapt the machine to the human is a much more recent development.

It is possible today to make EEG controlled devices. They typically differentiate between a small number of real or imagined movements in the user. This is awesome, because it can allow severely paralyzed people to communicate, control a wheelchair. etc. Nevertheless, the algorithms used to do this are perfectly useless when it comes to distinguishing whatever words the user is internally vocalizing.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

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Post by icebraining » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:33 PM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #69

Replace email and replace search are two signs that Google is failing at its core strengths, and I agree with this. They have made many mistakes in the past few years and there is a definite opportunity in taking them head on in both of these markets. with number 6, if you are going to break it up for cores you may as well break it up for computers and put it on the network. Hence MapReduce, etc. with #7, our bodies…

our bodies are very good at telling us when something is wrong with warning signs

No, not really. It does warn you, but in many cases way too late, and then you lose the opportunity of fixing the problem with a fast, cheap and safe procedure. If you want to save money, early diagnosing is key.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

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Post by antidaily » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:38 PM UTC

I want a pause button. For my life.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#314

Post by armandososa » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:42 PM UTC

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 this is a good thread to recommend Andy Kessler's book "How We Got Here" which can be downloaded from here (http://akessler.blogs.com/andy_kessler/2005/04/hwgh.html). It's a parallel history between economy and technology evolution up from the steam engine genesis.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#315

Post by chmike » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:51 PM UTC

akrymski wrote: post #207

chmike wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're not creating a new protocol. Sure SMTP and MIME are quite awful, but the network effects if these standards are so vast that even Google couldn't make a dent with Wave. IMO a new protocol is something that can come later, we've explored that, but only an email service in a leadership position can make those sorts of changes to the standard thus forcing others to implement them. At the end of the day there can a…

It all depends on the problem one is trying to solve. Since you are addressing the user experience, then indeed, the protocol is not in your way. It is, for the problem I'm trying to solve. Note that the barrier of network effect can be reduced by providing a gateway between the two communication domains (i.e. Facebook). I've subscribed to www.post.fm so I should be informed of your progress.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#316

Post by Nervetattoo » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:51 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #11

rmassie wrote: post #9

The thing about replacing e-mail is that is isn't just a todo list, for many people it's just a receipt box - the thing I keep all my notifications that I bought stuff from amazon. For others, it's still the primary means of business communication. My work e-mail is largely about communications, with a todo element to it and unfortunately some file storage too. My "home" e-mail is completely different. It's where I g…

> for many people it's just a receipt box There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable cat…

A replacement for email should be a lot smarter and I think what pg hints at is pretty much the same as you're saying here, but broader. If I receive an invitation to something, it should end up in my calendar and whatever gadget I have on me should notify me and ask me if i wanted to participate.

If i receive a receipt it should be stored and analysed. For example if the item had a 30 day guarantee it should ask me before that if I am satisfied with it.

If i receive a shipment notice it should automatically tell me on the day it arrives and alert me when I'm in proximity of the post office that I need to pick it up.

Actually I would want almost all of my emails to be read solely by a computer so that all of these emails I didn't even see. I don't need to see that I've bought something — I know that! I need to be told when its in my post box though, or if its a license key I need my computer to pop up a question if I should apply that license.

So a good startup idea here would be something that took your email, filtered it and just removed all of the receipts/etc messages from your view, while keeping it neatly organized somewhere else for the future.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#317

Post by Agathos » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:52 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #182

yurylifshits wrote: post #180

Let's add one more 8. Replace prisons Prisons do not make criminals back into normal people. Prisons are expensive. Prisons are a big market. Prisons stay the same for the last few centuries. What is a better way to punish and a better way to bring criminals back to civil life?

Don't all governments have a monopoly over their country's prisons?

Monopsony might be the better word here.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

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Post by eftpotrm » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:52 PM UTC

ahoyhere wrote: post #301

eftpotrm wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. One of the core problems the world faces going forwards is resource supply - water, food, fuel. It's long been predicted that the next large-scale war will be over water supplies; there are already a number of simmering conflicts that go back to access to water. Why are we running out of resources? Significantly, because there's too many people for the resources we have. Why do we have too many people? Explosive…

OLPC has been such a failure because it was designed without understanding or respect for the situation the people live in. I agree with you about medicines etc. being bandages and education being the most important thing. But I think when you veer into "universities" and "cheap computers" that things become sketchy. Replacing universities doesn't help the developing world, not really, because the education would hav…

The reason replacing univeristies will help the developing world (and why I still argue for cheap computers tailored for the needs of the developing world) is that it makes access to aducation that much easier. Yes they need primary rather than tertiary education, but tertiary's the easier market to start deploying in so use it as a beach-head and work down.

At present, why don't they get education? Is it that they don't want it? Aside from a few communities actively holding back education, by and large they know the benefit and want education. The present model doesn't work for them though; the communities are frequently rural and some distance from the provision of education, the families are operating in the subsistence economy and can't afford to release the children to education.

Technology can help attack this from two fronts. One, it enables distance learning at the time of the student's convenience. Education need not be directly opposed to family responsibilities this way, the two can be more easily dovetailed. Education can also more easily be tailored to individual needs; by removing the need for geographic concentration to provide the required training, more appripriate education can be delivered.

Two, education is a (potentially fundable) need on such a scale as to enable transformational economic change society-wide. So much of the economic disadvantage is down to lack of information and poor access to markets from the impoverished communities. An infrastructure to enable distance learning on a whole-society scale is just as able to provide general community information and revolutionise access to markets. Think eBay's had a tranformational effect on some businesses? Wait until you see what the same thing could do to third-world subsistence farmers.

Transform education through technology-based distance learning. The easiest starting point for that is tertiary education in the west, which shows high demand but poor utilisation of possible technological effects coupled with high costs from the incumbents. Then use that infrastructure to achieve the really transformational change, by educating the third-world poor.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#319

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 7:05 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #238

stcredzero wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloated frameworks, and software with many layers (some quite unnecessary) were facilitated by increasing clock-speeds - but at least it's possible to get rid of them. Also, work has been done on JS JIT compilation. Server languages are getting faster too. It's instructive to note how much more compact alternative operating systems have been made compared to the mainstream ones. Full fledged BeOS systems used to weig…

RPi is the antitheses of bloat removal, it is desired because it brings enough horsepower to shift "what you want"+"the everyday bloat that needs", in a small package. Things like ddwrt on a netgear router are anti-bloat. Usable networked Linux in a 4MB image with 8MB RAM.

From the standpoint of embedded devices, this is true. By desktop OS standards, not as much.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#320

Post by pnathan » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 7:09 PM UTC

hkarthik wrote: post #82

There's a definite opportunity to build a competitor to Apple and reach the hackers first: building a better PC for hackers to create new software built on Open Source and Web technologies. The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of d…

Agreed. My next laptop is going to be a Linux one, and I'm going to pay for a high-quality hardware system... I can only hope the drivers are high quality.

I'd pay $2250 for a high-quality Linux laptop (roughly the price of my OSX laptop). :-)