Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#391

Post by bergie » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 3:19 PM UTC

hkarthik wrote: post #217

tesseract wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would buy into this new system? OK, so you really just want to target hackers first and then move into the consumer space once you have some traction. But consumers are starting to move away from laptops and toward things like smartphones and tablets. Apple is moving in…

> Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would buy into this new system? I don't know if it's a large number yet, but it's growing and you can see the cracks sprouting. Most of the hardware outside of Apple's really sucks, and Apple's software ecosystem and the way they run things turns a lot of people off.…

Text input is the biggest problem of post-PC. While it may eventually get solved, I'm exploring ways to make non-text-based programming productive: http://noflojs.org

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#392

Post by bergie » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 3:31 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #382

tomjen3 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can solve that problem, you have will have done the world an amazing service, outperforming even Norman Borlaug, and the idea is certainly ambitious in its scope. One question though: how would you go about doing it?

Let's study history and see how Europe and America got wealthy and try to do that.

One big deal in Africa is logistics. The railways of the colonized era were designed from quickly moving raw materials to ports. And the new Chinese-built roads are no different.

The end result is that trucking food between cities and villages not that far away from each other is crazy slow, dangerous, and profitable. Not much differently from trans-Pacific trade some 100-150 years ago.

If somebody would come up with a transport solution that wouldn't require massive infrastructure investments (for which there is no money), and which would be safer and faster than current trucks, Africa could start changing very quickly. And there would probably be a decent profit in that.

Where to start? Could locally-produced, solar-powered small airships do the thing?

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#393

Post by rbarooah » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 4:10 PM UTC

hkarthik wrote: post #217

tesseract wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would buy into this new system? OK, so you really just want to target hackers first and then move into the consumer space once you have some traction. But consumers are starting to move away from laptops and toward things like smartphones and tablets. Apple is moving in…

> Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would buy into this new system? I don't know if it's a large number yet, but it's growing and you can see the cracks sprouting. Most of the hardware outside of Apple's really sucks, and Apple's software ecosystem and the way they run things turns a lot of people off.…

What's wrong with running Linux on Apple hardware?

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#394

Post by Egregore » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 5:06 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #248

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…

Killer app for email is idiot-proof cryptographic signatures and cryptography. It's baffling to me that a squiggle on a bit of paper is more trustworthy than a properly implemented cryptographic signature.

There is ResoMail which does it, and it seems it's not very popular.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#395

Post by mmealling » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

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…

> - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.

That's because of the business model around funded research. Academic research funding is driven by a limited number of funding agencies being bombarded by huge numbers of proposals. One of the key metrics they use is how many peer reviewed journals has the author been accepted by. Those journals make money by charging access fees and by being semi-trusted gate keepers. Journals WANT it to be hard to access them online since they view the Internet publishing paradigm as a threat.

People have been trying to disrupt that business model since the mid 90s.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#396

Post by Androsynth » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

pmjordan wrote: post #373

Androsynth wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not not about language or political views. I was referring to culture and values.

Language tends to be very strongly intertwined with culture as the main means for conveying said culture. So I'm curious in what way you feel culturally closer to Germany. (disclaimer: I have spent about 80% of my life in Austria and about 18% in Britain, speak both languages but identify much more strongly with British culture)

But the English language is mostly a germanic language, and the British people have mostly germanic DNA. Contrasting Austria and Britain is not that big of a divide. A better contrast would be between Britian/Germany/Austria and one of the latin countries, or a slavic country, etc.

When the US was founded, there were essentially two separate civilizations within the countries borders. This was true until one annihilated the other during the US civil war, but it was never assimilated until the last few decades. This means there is a major cultural divide that still exists.

I would say that the North took more of the Anglo-Saxon protestant values than the South. Hard-working, industrious, religious but-not-overtly-so.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#397

Post by ajju » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 7:00 PM UTC

miguelos wrote: post #386

ajju wrote: post #4

If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" This is critical. I have tried it the other way, and struggled for these very reasons. I think the way to use these big ideas i…

Let me disagree. Unless you plan to discover new ideas by mistake, you absolutely need a vision, and then find the way to get there. If you start from the bottom (bottom-up), you'll constantly compromise technically, as lots of things are not yet possible to do. If you start from the top (top-down), you'll "know" that it's possible to accomplish, and you'll only have to find out how to do it. You have far more chance…

Let us say your goal is building a search engine.

Clearly, you have to "know" that it's possible to accomplish and then find out how to do it. I don't think even PG was disagreeing with that.

When he says "don't have a blueprint", he is saying don't presuppose you know how to get from where you are to replacing Google as the de facto search tool. Instead, just make progress. It seems you agree with that.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#398

Post by rmc » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 7:20 PM UTC

bergie wrote: post #392

rmc wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's study history and see how Europe and America got wealthy and try to do that.

One big deal in Africa is logistics. The railways of the colonized era were designed from quickly moving raw materials to ports. And the new Chinese-built roads are no different. The end result is that trucking food between cities and villages not that far away from each other is crazy slow, dangerous, and profitable. Not much differently from trans-Pacific trade some 100-150 years ago. If somebody would come up with…

Airships? How did Europe go from crappy roads to good roads? Not with airships.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#399

Post by jtheory » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 7:41 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #356

Androsynth wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about the 'Kill the state' idea for a while. It just makes sense. I have more in common with the average person in Germany than I do with the average person in Kansas or Alabama (not necessarily politically, but culturally). With online communities and instantaneous worldwide communication, I am also more closely in touch with my global counterparts than a significant portion of people in my own co…

>It just makes sense. I have more in common with the average person in Germany than I do with the average person in Kansas or Alabama Unless you socialize, talk to your family and take your entertainment in German, I struggle to imagine what you mean.

No, this works for me as well.

Not Germany specifically, but I left the US for France. I don't mesh with the culture 100%, but... more so than I did in the US, except for little localized pockets there. Just for starters, religion plays a far smaller/quieter role here; no one cares that I'm an atheist. When I come back to the US, it's just so obvious and... loud, and everywhere. It grates incredibly.

I certainly talk with my family frequently, though just between parents & siblings we're already split across both US coasts, the Netherlands, and (me in) France. My in-laws are in Malaysia & the US; we also talk regularly, and try to see everyone in person at least once a year.

But I never, never forget about state borders. I don't have that option; they don't let me. My wife is Malaysian; I'm American (as is our daughter), we reside in France and my employer is in the UK. We have to file tax returns in both US & France, and have wasted weeks of our lives doing paperwork and waiting in line in embassies and other government offices (sometimes forced to stay in hotels to be near an embassy in the morning... we don't live near one!) sorting out all of the incredibly stupid details.

My wife needs a visa for flights to the US, or Canada (and was once ejected from Canada because she had a US-bound flight with a Canadian stopover, and hadn't realized that mattered. Yup, it really does.

The hoops you have to jump through to emigrate to a country -- like she did to the US, and we both did to France -- are horrible, with uncertain outcomes, and often poorly documented.

I'll stop the rant, but I'd really, really love any progress away from current states.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#400

Post by aaronf » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 8:23 PM UTC

How do you "just say you're building todo-list software" and not get laughed out of the room? Investors say the space is too crowded, and engineers joke about it being one of their first classroom assignments. And even if you're making traction on the vision to replace the inbox, Y-Combinator's partners will turn you down.