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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#321

Post by asnyder »

Intel has pretty good automatic parallelization (https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=...) in their latest C++ compiler, but it's $1000+. I remember at a php conference they simply compiled php with their compiler versus gcc, and everything ran significantly faster in various benchmarks.

For a while I was working on automatic parallelization, and wrote plans, white papers, etc. but at some point was introduced to the current methods of automatic parallelization and saw that there are some pretty good solutions out there right now such as Intel's C++ compiler.

Ideally, everything would be compiled with something along those lines at which point the baseline for everything else would take advantage of multiple cores, at least in the simple to advanced cases without additional direction from the programmer.

After all, so long as you're not eval'ing you know the entire scope of the program and you can link things up as parallel independent queues. It requires more storage during compilation, and likely longer compilation times, but the performance result can be dramatic.

It's disconcerting that something like Intel's apparently wonderful automatic parallelization C++ compiler isn't more popular, even though it's demonstrably better performance-wise than anything else I've seen.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#322

Post by kaybe »

lutorm wrote: post #268
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows what robots will be made of far out in the future, and remember that humans have to be fed for at least a decade before they can do much of anything. Also, earth isn't losing any material as far as I know but I admittedly know very little about physics and chemistry. Can metals degrade into a lower kind of unrecoverable state like energy can?

If you have an unlimited supply of energy, you can pretty much recover whatever. The only elements hopelessly lost are those that involve nuclear reactions.

Even then it's just a question of energy. You can do a lot with a particle accelerator.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#323

Post by unimpressive »

tomwalsham wrote: post #149
nl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's here, but not how you think: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ Do you know any hacker who knows about Raspberry Pi and isn't planning on buying one? Radically undercutting existing platforms in price, but with comparable functionality enables totally new uses for general purpose computing devices. That's how to take on the Mac/PC business - not by hitting it head on.

rπ is a great project, but it's hardly out of left field. There have been plugins for years, at seriously affordable prices. You can buy a netbook for $100 these days and run Windows/Linux on it happily. rπ is interesting because of its positioning as a learning platform equivalent to the BBC Micro which nurtured David Braben and many of the other backers. Not because it holds some magical quality over Gumstix, Beagl…

I once walked into the Arduino IRC and asked if it could run maxima. The response was that I'd be lucky to get it to run Linux. The arduino costs more than $25. Everything you listed there costs more than the utility value it has for most people.

For $25 a pop you can do innovative prototypes on the kids-allowance cheap. The size is an extra bonus. There is no end to the number of ~$50 projects I've thought up that consist of a pi and peripherals. To say that those other projects you mention are somehow comparable is ridiculous. They all cost multiples more money than the pi.

The pi is really going to speak to my demographic: Teens in their basement who have no money to spend on flashy prototyping equipment. But have tons of ideas they want to try out.

EDIT: And continuing, for doing a "production run" having multiples lower production costs is a serious advantage for cash strapped endeavors. Not sure if the pi foundation will let you order enough to do that though.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#324

Post by fauigerzigerk »

paulhauggis wrote: post #274
marvin wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a lot of people disagree with you, but I agree with this viewpoint. That the Luddite fallacy will be a fallacy forever is a fallacy in itself. I've said this before, but I keep repeating my viewpoint. At some point, we will have automated too many of the "useful" things to do for there to be enough work in the private sector for everyone. There are only so many cars, houses, gadgets and foods humanity n…

"We will have to find some sort of tax system that makes it possible for those who can't participate in the elite to also live their lives" Rather than a tax system that gives them pretty much no incentive to get a job (if you were essentially paid to do whatever you wanted to do, would you want to get a job?), it would probably be better to have government enforced jobs (IE: you want money from the government, you n…

you want money from the government, you need to work for them until you find a regular job

So you're saying the government should hire all the unemployed? That sounds like a surefire way to make even more people unemployed in sectors that have to compete with the government's army of cheap laborers.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#325

Post by r7000 »

For a peak into a future with 'ongoing diagnosis' see the very cool Greg Egan short story Yeyuka:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/yeyuka.htm

"So why did you go into medicine?"

"Family expectations. It was either that or the law. Medicine seemed less arbitrary; nothing in the body can be overturned by an appeal to the High Court. What about you?"

I said, "I wanted to be in on the revolution. The one that was going to banish all disease."

"Ah, that one."

"I picked the wrong job, of course. I should have been a molecular biologist."

"Or a software engineer."

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#326

Post by diminish »

bane wrote: post #289
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…

Similar, but different story. In the 800s, looking for an immortality elixir, man discovers a solid black chemical explosive. In time (around 1132), this finds itself as an early propellant in ranged missiles. Later it uses in other applications: mining, firearms, entertainment, bombs and myriad others. But the use as missile propellant remains. Looking for similar, but more powerful propellants for these missiles (t…

As of 2012, start-ups with over 1 billion growth potential appears to revolve around services or products offered to a large portion of the society or companies and which can generate 10 to 100 USD per person ( employee or individual) per year such as Search(ads), emails, education, showbiz, healthcare. Here are some additions; cheaper fuel, integrated software-as-a-service(kill salesforce or gapps), faster travel, space travel, home robots/ai, and better science.

In some cases there is a need for someone to open a new market. If Apple or Google had build a home robot with few basic functions, wouldn't a lot of people buy it and then it would open a new market?

More ambitious things to kill;

- Kill the "house"; since the days of the community cave a house has been human shelter #1; nowadays there might be better alternatives to an owned house.

- Kill the "state" or "a better citizenship"; provide the same things the state provides, leaner and cheaper.

- Kill the capital investment; create an automatic investor which selects virtually existing start-ups based on instant financial metrics.

- Kill the "company";

- Kill "democracy"; a better voting system

- Kill placental reproduction or sexual production; 9 months are too much.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#327

Post by kvh »

Alex3917 wrote: post #7

The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. - No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online. - Even when you can access…

This is something I've been thinking about seriously, building an "academic-level" search engine. I have the IR/NLP background. If anyone is interested discussing/collaborating, ping me!

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#328

Post by revorad »

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…

Combining a better user interface with algorithms seems like the obvious angle of attack. But I think there might be a better one.

Automate the whole thing. Get rid of the interface.

You know those virtual assistant services people use to manage their mundane emails? Imagine if you automated all of that.

It sounds like a ridiculous idea. How can I allow a machine to reply for me?

But I would start with the simplest mundane use cases. If you can automate complete handling of even a small percentage of a busy user's emails, they will be delighted. On your end, you don't have to literally automate it on day one. You can semi-automate it with some human help and over time use the data to reduce the human input.

Over time as the user got more comfortable, they might not mind automating more of their emails.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#329

Post by wcarss »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #232
jakejake wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frightening part is the idea that you would be trying to disrupt seemingly invincible tech companies like google, which would be an insane business plan for a startup looking for a $50k kickstart investment. But, I remember when google was first released. I thought the search engine market was already full with yahoo and alta vista dominating at the time. Who knew?!

Google offered to sell to Alta Vista (for somewhere in the 1-2 million range) if I recall correctly and they were turned down. Sometimes the giants don't see change coming.

It was $1,000,000 to Excite, not Alta Vista.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#330

Post by xavi »

I enjoyed this essay very much, but I think that presenting Apple as a hardware company ("the company that creates the next wave of hardware...", "If a new company led boldly into the future of hardware...") won't help to find the next Steve Jobs. Apple products success is based on the perfect combination of well-designed hardware and software. I think the next Steve Jobs will need the same holistic approach to product design.
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