New Requests for Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: New Requests for Startups

#151

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:09 PM UTC

nobodysfool wrote: post #111

frandroid wrote: post #58

It's a fantastic list; I'd like to comment on how some of the problems are already solved (outside the U.S.) or not cast properly. > Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable. That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United…

Look at the top causes of bankruptcy... #1 on that list is medical costs. To quote the article: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html "A study done at Harvard University indicates that this is the biggest cause of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies. One of the interesting caveats of this study shows that 78% of filers had some form of health insurance, thus bucking the myth that…

[deleted]

Re: New Requests for Startups

#152

Post by wellboy » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:09 PM UTC

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…

It doesn't matter what your situation is, it's the same with any investor. If you have strong traction or a strong track record, you will get investment, be it YC or someone else, no matter if you're a parent or not. Of course you have to have a scalable startup.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#153

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:09 PM UTC

foobarqux wrote: post #140

maxcan wrote: post #131

> We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds. Sorry, this is not the right problem in financial services. Companies like Vanguard are already doing a great job of this and the costs are extremely low. Its a commodity product with razor thin margins that actually serves the needs of its customers well. Maybe there's a marketing issue where they aren't educating enough p…

IPOs are sales problems, which require high touch interaction and networking. They are also dangerous to get wrong which is why companies pay high fees to do them. Remember too that Google got burnt by trying to avoid the sales process entirely.

[deleted]

Re: New Requests for Startups

#154

Post by theuri » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:10 PM UTC

maxcan wrote: post #131

> We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds. Sorry, this is not the right problem in financial services. Companies like Vanguard are already doing a great job of this and the costs are extremely low. Its a commodity product with razor thin margins that actually serves the needs of its customers well. Maybe there's a marketing issue where they aren't educating enough p…

Hey Max - Agreed - low cost index funds are a dime a dozen. Even "hot" startups like WealthFront / Betterment are a waste of money - you can spend a minute on the site, get their recommendation, hop over to Vanguard and carry it out yourself (and save thousands). Just send yourself a reminder to rebalance once a year and you're done. The biggest driver in building wealth, from our experience and that of working at Guide Financial, is using behavioral finance to automatically accumulate more assets over time - makes orders of magnitudes bigger impact than low costs/tax harvesting/etc

Re: New Requests for Startups

#155

Post by AndrewKemendo » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:11 PM UTC

zeratul wrote: post #133

S.A. is talking about general-purpose AI (position 2 in the RFS). This means processing natural language. There is a lot of progress but it's just slow so it's almost invisible. Also it's a very difficult field of science. Now you need to be proficient in AI, machine learning, computational linguistics, linguistic corpora research, cognitive sciences, statistics, and sometimes physics if the text changes over time. O…

I have stated this previously to the AGI community and think that the way to go is that QA recommendation engines will be the first killer app for AGI. Not recommendation like the ones you see now with the "others who bought...", but ones that look more like "concierge" QA services.

From what I understand from speaking with Selmer Bringsjord, Bloomberg has an outstanding internal QA system, so there is progress, the trouble is that it's all behind corporate firewalls.

There was a silly little online game that came out a few years ago called Akinator [1] that would "guess" a public personality and did so by "learning" based on user inputs - very naiive implementation of CTL but gets the gist of how you can implement a mock AI to get damn good results.

If you did a little delphi to stack the initial deck of results, say for a car buying QA recommendation service, I think you could have a pretty powerful tool that could be replicated across services.

[1]http://en.akinator.com/

Re: New Requests for Startups

#156

Post by bradleysmith » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:13 PM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #36

bradleysmith wrote: post #23

Was interested to see nothing mentioned about news & current events information startups. This seemed to be a re-occuring "problem worth solving" on YCombinator lists, and is notably absent.

Do you mean things like Flipboard, Circa, etc.? Not very surprising to see them absent on YC's list. Like the more recent waves of social networks, they don't offer much and just add to the noise. Who will remember these companies in 10, 20, 50 years? Most likely no one. Who will remember companies that solve problems related to healthcare, energy, food allocation? A lot more people. There's much to like about this l…

No, I didn't mean like Flipboard or Circa. I also wouldn't expect much support for these kinds of things.

I meant companies that are trying to change how news is consumed and produced, not those that prettify how it is presented for final consumption.

PG outlined the problem pretty clearly in 2008[0]. Perhaps you believe the news industry is healthy and functioning in delivering accurate current events to world citizens as it is. I do not believe that that is the case.

I was thinking of companies like Grasswire or non-profits like Ushahidi and Standby Task Force for this category. I'm sure there are others changing this space significantly.

[0]-http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html (item 3)

Re: New Requests for Startups

#157

Post by AndrewKemendo » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:14 PM UTC

I'm really glad to see AR on the list, we are excited to be at the inflection point of that medium.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#158

Post by ealloc » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:16 PM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #130

ealloc wrote: post #79

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' t…

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). This is a pure example of the AI Effect[1]. Academia has been extremely successful with AI Rese…

Interesting link, but I still feel AI hasn't had much success: Do we really have much more today that A* search, neural nets with backpropagation, and HMMs/SVM/etc, which were all developed in the 1960s? The successes of AI that I see (eg OCR/speech recognition and Chess/Jeopardy) use these same old algorithms with only marginal improvements and more CPU. There have been no new major techniques or insights. I'm not an expert though, correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#159

Post by ChuckMcM » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:16 PM UTC

akkartik wrote: post #32

> What comes after programming languages? I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided: "We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and…

That has got to be one of the most awesome mission statements I've read in a long time. Clear, directed, actionable, all good things.

FWIW I think you are exactly right, it made me sad that Google expected people to be 'useless' for anywhere from 6 to 9 months of their early employment as they tried to get their head around the code base and tools. Having the ability to eliminate that spin up time would probably triple their productivity numbers.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#160

Post by brandonb » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 6:16 PM UTC

nobodysfool wrote: post #111

frandroid wrote: post #58

It's a fantastic list; I'd like to comment on how some of the problems are already solved (outside the U.S.) or not cast properly. > Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable. That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United…

Look at the top causes of bankruptcy... #1 on that list is medical costs. To quote the article: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html "A study done at Harvard University indicates that this is the biggest cause of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies. One of the interesting caveats of this study shows that 78% of filers had some form of health insurance, thus bucking the myth that…

Note the Harvard study is from 2010. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) passed in 2010, started going into effect in 2014, and bans lifetime caps on health insurance payouts. The intent was to address exactly that problem--medical bankruptcies.

So the big policy change the parent asks for has already happened, and the U.S. will gain universal insurance coverage over the next couple years.

If we want to see healthcare costs drop in cost beyond that policy change, it's almost certainly going to need to be driven by technology in some way.