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

New Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 407 posts

Re: New Requests for Startups

#71

Post by randall »

atonse wrote: post #68

While I've always felt a strong attraction to YCombinator (especially the cameraderie that comes from being a part of it) and been very inspired to apply, I can't help but feel that I am in a phase of life that's simply not a good fit for YC, or at least the narrative that's pushed. I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child. Are there YC founders in t…

I had a pregnant wife and a kid at home when I went through YC last January. Another friend of mine had 3 kids and a wife he had to leave home.

Realistically YC doesn't care what stage of life you're in, they just want you in Mountain View for 3 months so you can significantly improve the chances of your company growing large. It's difficult to make it work, but I promise for me it was totally worth it.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#72

Post by aresant »

GuiA wrote: post #27
aresant wrote: post #9

I loved seeing VR on this list as an Oculus enthusiast. The http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus , http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/ , and https://developer.oculusvr.com/ are jam packed with excited hackers cranking out their projects and with the Oculus Connect conference coming up I'd love to see some of this talent pointed towards Y-Combinator

VR can be so much more than what Oculus and its associated acts are about. In fact, they cast a shadow over it that will probably be harmful to it in the long run. The Oculus acquisition by Facebook is possibly the worst thing that could have happened to VR. With the Rift, Oculus had the opportunity to chart a brand new low cost platform accessible to millions, and be the next IBM/Microsoft/Apple/etc of their day. Th…

I completely agreed with you in the weeks following the Facebook acquisition.

BUT in the months now following my opinion has changed.

There remains a vibrant and resilient ecosystem of devs working on amazing homebrew stuff that everybody on day-one predicted would close up shop.

But since a lot of the work is unity based, the end platform almost doesn't matter and people realize that.

Oculus will start out as the PC enthusiast / high-res experience and FB gives them the dry powder to actually get the hardware out the door.

But in the long-ball view EVERY smart phone, console, etc etc etc will be capable of VR and it's largely thanks to the preliminary oculus effort and their inclusive structure of opening the platform to small devs.

Think about MineCraft as an example.

Brilliant concept, single dev (then small team), and now basically universal adoption that is completely device and platform agnostic

And of course large studios will throw huge budgets against the VR platform, and maybe Oculus isn't the long-term leader but they are wholly responsible for the coming renaissance!

Re: New Requests for Startups

#73

Post by seiji »

walterbell wrote: post #69

Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI? We need business models which support partially-open graphs, e.g. object IDs and some metadata are open, some metadata is closed via API. Open metadata can be cached offline and standardizes models within a vertical market, driving demand for paid metadata. API revenue grows as the open graph grows. Semi-open knowledge graphs reduce the cost of ad…

Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI?

Anything resembling OpenCog or Freebase isn't AI—it's just a database with clever retrieval through traversal hierarchies.

The world does need better ways to analyze data sets, but conflating information retrieval with self-directed AI is misapplying the term "intelligence."

Re: New Requests for Startups

#74

Post by foobarqux »

> The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.

That's not because saving is complex or low-yielding, it is because middle class non-disposable expenditures have gone up. (see Elizabeth Warren)

Re: New Requests for Startups

#75

Post by danielweber »

foobarqux wrote: post #70

>This seems to us like something software should help solve. We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds (in a normal account or a retirement account), do some customization around individual stocks, and otherwise set it and forget it. This exists already, there are a ton of discount brokers with very competitive pricing.

That whole paragraph was bizarre. Yeah, lots of people are doing things wrong, but there is a competitive industry of index funds and ETFs out there. I'm sure they could be squeezed a little bit more, but not much.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#76

Post by sillysaurus3 »

seiji wrote: post #63
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far off is singularity? It seems like the question can be rephrased as, "At any point in history, have humans been able to advance technology in a substantial way simply because they wanted to, rather than by stumbling upon a way to do it?" Most technology is incremental. Take flight, for example. The glider had already been around for a substantial amount of time before the Wright brothers solved the "control pr…

In fact, there's no clear way to even define AI, It's easy to define, but the term has been stolen by people wanting more media attention for less work. AI is just "what we are" without all the squishy parts. AI ("hard" AI, AGI) is a fully thinking, doing, feeling software system implemented in non-biology. I've suspected that AI is fundamentally impossible to implement on a Von Neumann architecture. Balderdash. We h…

We haven't discovered any computation problem that our universal computing architecture can't compute because... universal. It's not "universal \ things-that-can-generate-thoughts." Universal simulation machines can simulate things... universally.

And yet, the Game of Life is completely deterministic and is the opposite of real life in pretty much every way, even with the new advances. Quantum may change this.

There are certainly problems which are tractable only on quantum computers. Shor's algorithm is of course the classic example. Saying that Von Neumann architecture is a universal problem solver is a rejection of the idea that quantum computing allows any new problems to be solved, but we have evidence that that's not the case.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#77

Post by tim333 »

taigeair wrote: post #7

How far off is singularity? Seems like quite an interesting topic.

Depends a bit how you define it. I quite like (output of stuff)/(hours of human labor required) going infinite which should happen when robots can build better robots without us. Unlike the 'singularity' in most of the literature that one is actually a singularity in the math sense. 2040?

Re: New Requests for Startups

#78

Post by foobarqux »

Most "blue sky" innovations have come from the state sector (either universities, publicly funded research institutes or majority state-funded private companies). They are commercialized by private companies afterward.

Why does YC think that it will be different now?

Re: New Requests for Startups

#79

Post by ealloc »

I'm surprised no one has commented yet on the first couple of these - Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design.

These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' the problem).

In addition, the people with the skills necessary to make progress are going to be advanced researchers with PhDs, who are good enough to remain in academia if they wish or who have already developed a proven-enough idea through their research career that they don't need Y-combinator-style money.

I am not trying to be a downer on the idea, contrarily I hope there can be success. Really I am fishing for anyone with a good perspective (or an answer) to these points.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#80

Post by danielweber »

wmeredith wrote: post #18

I liked this line: "the government is a very large customer with very bad software." It could also be written like this: the government is a very bad customer with very large software.

There was a company advertising on HN's latest "who's hiring" about specifically improving government IT. They don't seem to respond to email, though.
Post reply on HN