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New Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

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Re: New Requests for Startups

#161

Post by rcarrigan87 »

saosebastiao wrote: post #143

I think you really shortchanged the section on transportation by only focusing on personal transportation. The real opportunities are in commercial transportation and logistics. The US spends more on truck logistics every year than the market cap of the top 5 global car manufacturers combined. And the trucking industry is only 50% of the total logistics contribution to US GDP. Even a mildly successful startup in a ti…

It seems like driverless trucks are likely to come to market as a precursor to mass consumer adoption. Trucking as we know it will be deeply changed.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#162

Post by ionforce »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #155
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…

For anyone else that wasn't sure, AGI means "artificial general intelligence".

Re: New Requests for Startups

#163

Post by edawerd »

It's interesting to see the progression of YC's RFS over the years. The ideas behind the new RFS seem to driven by fundamental problems of society, not just market opportunity.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#165

Post by georgemcbay »

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…

"That would wipe out most people's debts."

Yeah, but people being is debt is great for the part of the financial services industry that they owe money to, often with ridiculous and crippling interest rates (compare to the interest rates these players get from the government when they borrow, which is essentially 0% -- which is nice, for them). This is especially true when it comes to student debt, which can't ever be discharged. And these companies have a ton of political power (money begets power begets money).

Which all is to say I agree with frandroid. The root problem here is our political system is almost completely broken due to lobbying and lack of meaningful campaign finance laws and the best way to actually fix some of the issues listed here is fixing those core government/policy problems, but those problems aren't technical in nature and won't be fixed with a Ruby on Rails app.

Software may be eating the world, but if your only options for government leadership are (to put it in South Park terms) a "turd" or a "douche", both of which are controlled by big money whose interests are at odds with the overall populace then there are a lot of core problems that there will never be a software fix for (short of the call for better AI going really well and having a benevolent SkyNet take over).

Re: New Requests for Startups

#166

Post by joshpadnick »

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…

This is a great point. I am always struck by how there are so many times where, if I could sit down with the original program author for 5 - 10 minutes, I could understand more from that interactive back-and-forth than several hours of reading code in solitude.

This tells me it's not that understanding how that code works is intellectually difficult; rather it's discovering how it works is time-consuming.

It would be amazing if you could "interact" with the code about its structure and intent the same way you might interact with its author.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#167

Post by zanny »

S4M wrote: post #102
foobarqux wrote: post #62

> what comes after programming languages Isn't this like asking what comes after spoken language? Arguably the answer is nothing because language is what structured thought is.

Not really. IMHO programming languages should become more and more expressive to the point of being as closed as possible to spoken language, in a distant future.

Spoken language makes no sense. Maybe you just mean expressive, but the last thing I want is a programming language anything like the spoken word, because at least English is a colossal mess of inconsistent jibberish.

I've always been interested if someone ever tried to make a sensible spoken word - use all the enunciable syllables of the human voice (go read wikipedia on all the sounds you can make that are defined by one of the 26 English letters) with combinatorial and sensible word structure and straightforward sentence structure.

And the, ironically, best way to define something like that would be like how you define a programming language.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#168

Post by nerfhammer »

> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.

There already several startups in the "personal saving" space largely based on index funds, though some of them have large minimums. Complex schemes may not be worth the effort for those with only a few bucks to spare:

https://www.wealthfront.com/

https://www.betterment.com/

https://www.futureadvisor.com/

It would be cool if Vanguard had an API so we could do the same thing open-source rather than incurring the extra management fees from these companies which are mostly based on Vanguard funds.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#169

Post by yaur »

> Celebrities now have direct relationships with their fans.

I have a side project where I am aggregating celebrity generated content and one of the things that surprised me, though it really shouldn't have, is how bad the underlying content is. New tools aren't really going to help here beyond creating an incentive for celebs to create better content.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#170

Post by rjanoch »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
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.

Ditto 'the enterprise'.

Yes at the surface. However, I think there are opportunities in enterprises at the lower levels or through guerrilla style tactics (e.g. Yammer). Through a combination of free and price points that allow individual or middle management authorization there are opportunities.
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