New Requests for Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: New Requests for Startups

#231

Post by bravura » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:07 PM UTC

zwegner wrote: post #191

bravura wrote: post #139

An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful. I'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one API for every enterprise SaaS: http://empiredata.co Empire is an API for accessing enterprise SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Apps, etc. It provides a uniform, data…

SaaSaaS? ...which of course leads to the general form, S(aaS)^n.

Alternately, it's an API of APIs.

We're hoping that S(aaS)^n = SaaSaaS for n >= 2, and we can prove by induction that ours is the last enterprise API you need to learn ;)

Re: New Requests for Startups

#232

Post by marze » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:11 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #145

hazz wrote: post #51

>Specifically, lightweight, short-distance personal transportation is something we’re interested in. Doesn't this already exist, in the form of the bicycle?

Not long ago a brilliant inventor, Dean Kamen, created a startup that tried to solve this. The product received considerable hype before launch. When Steve Jobs saw a prototype, he reportedly said: "This will change the way cities are designed." The final product -- Segway -- didn't, though. I'm not sure anyone is willing to try again soon.

Don't see your Jobs quote in this account, although there are many more skeptical quotes, such as "Jobs said he lived seven minutes from a grocery and wasn't sure he would use Ginger to get there."

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html

Re: New Requests for Startups

#233

Post by ryandrake » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:11 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #227

nostrademons wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, what would that look like?

I dunno. Looks a lot like basic income, but it isn't normaly tagerted at retirement. Or maybe ryandrake had a more "tax the rich" goal, with the usual set of problems. (It's usualy much better to solve the problem that people got rich exploiting [moraly or not], instead of simply taxing them.)

Don't know what it would look like, but for sure it would be ideal if it could be solved by the private sector without policy changes (i.e. taxes).

Re: New Requests for Startups

#234

Post by akkartik » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:12 PM UTC

dasmithii wrote: post #221

dasmithii wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With any improvement in programming language technology, we narrow the disparity between human and computer representations of logic. In it's simplest form, this is the premise of language designers. The biggest difficulty with current languages is their reliance on absolute determinacy. Programmers must express in exact form what computations ought be performs, and the languages possesses no intelligence in themselv…

The problem with analogy-based programming is the lack of determinacy. There are no guarantees when it comes to abstract, knowledge-based inference. And so many concepts in modern programming would have to be abandoned to make this shift. Unit tests, for instance, would lost value dramatically. In the end, an analogy-based approach seems inevitable though, especially once natural language-based inexact. grow popular.…

I'm not as confident as you, but yes I've been watching Escher development for some time.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#235

Post by reitanqild » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:15 PM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #211

randall wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My wife would kill me if I left her alone for 3 months with a baby whilst she was pregnant.

I guess for some families it depends a lot on how long they have been hungry, having to put off everything etc.

Not having money must be worse than beeing alone a few months?

Re: New Requests for Startups

#236

Post by lincolnq » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:22 PM UTC

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…

Startups create strong incentives to implement a simple solution to a severe problem.

"incentives" - because the founders can get rich if they succeed.

"implement" - because customers don't care about theoretical work, they care about solving the problem.

"simple solution" - because founders can't afford to design a complicated one.

"severe problem" - because the problem has to be bad enough for even a very simple solution to be worth paying for.

Now, to answer your question directly, why is there hope for startups even in highly technical fields where academia is slow and expensive? Because when people are laser-focused on solving specific problems like this, they occasionally make leaps of insight, either in terms of reframing problems to make them easier, applying newly available technology, or just thinking of a new idea on their own. Smart people can pick up skills surprisingly quickly when they're focused on solving problems.

Also, the incentives are strong enough that they can sometimes convince these skilled academics to quit/supplement their academic jobs with startup work.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#237

Post by lutorm » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:24 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #176

> We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million jobs. I still am curious about this one. Is there any startup that has successfully done this in recent history? Keep in mind, there is a big difference (IMO) between creating new jobs and shifting existing ones.

It's also somewhat in opposition to the robotics goal...

Re: New Requests for Startups

#238

Post by BadCookie » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:24 PM UTC

sama wrote: post #25

vishalzone2002 wrote: post #21

With less than a month left to the deadline, its really challenging to build a decent MVP with some traction in one of these fields. And I think that seem to be at least the minimum requirement to get into YC.

you certainly do NOT need an MVP to get into YC. lots of people get in with just a compelling idea. maybe i will write a blog post about this.

You should. I was under the apparently mistaken impression that people who get into YC at least have a functioning demo, and generally have users already. So when my friend and I were applying, we limited ourselves to ideas for which we could create a semi-functional demo in the few weeks before the application deadline. We ended up getting rejected because of the idea that we chose, and rightly so, but I wonder what ideas we would have come up with if we had not felt so time constrained. (I am glad that we were rejected because I don't think that we were ready to start a company yet, but I am curious anyway.)

[Edited for clarity.]

Re: New Requests for Startups

#239

Post by dkarapetyan » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:26 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…

We already have the tools to deliver software continuously and reliably. They are called containers and virtual machines. The problem as usual is not with the technology. If you look back we had SmallTalk virtual machines some time ago that you could pause, ship over the network, and pick up where you left off.

Reading is not the issue as well because most code is terrible and it doesn't matter how easy you make it to read the code I'm still going to waste my time reading it. So I'd say that the problem again lies elsewhere. Few people have the aesthetic sense to write elegant code. It doesn't matter how many tools and abstractions you throw at the problem there are still going to be people writing terrible code.

Writing and reading code or doing anything else with it is in many ways like art. It is also like science and craft and a bunch of other things that require creativity. Even with the accessibility of paints and all the accompanying technology we still don't have the likes of Michaelangelo and Picasso being any more prevalent than they were around the time those guys were alive. Literature is another good example. We teach everyone to read and write but it doesn't matter how much money or technology you throw at it (ebooks, libraries, etc.) we still don't have any more great writers than we did a century ago.

This is not a technology problem. It is a culture and human problem for which you are not likely to find a technical solution.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#240

Post by guynamedloren » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 8:31 PM UTC

Nicholas_C wrote: post #225

impendia wrote: post #114

Would somebody please disrupt the textbook publishing industry? http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susa... $264.39, for students that work part time jobs at $7.00 an hour (before taxes). Not only students are angry about this. Professors are angry, and authors are angry too. Bitter fights between professors and publishers are common. Everybody wants to see the big players in this industry fail .…

Is there no crowd sourced, open sourced textbook non-profit organization? Sort of like Wikipedia/Wikimedia but with textbooks. Ideally there would be a Wiki-like website with people constantly editing and revising and arguing over texts/chapters/paragraphs. A cursory Google search yields the site https://openstaxcollege.org/ , which appears to be supported by Rice University. This has open sourced texts, but not crow…

I'm trying to do this with Penflip (https://www.penflip.com). It's like GitHub, but for writing. Just like GitHub, there are public and private projects. Anybody can contribute to a public project by submitting a pull request. A big hurdle is that the concept of 'open source' is a bit foreign outside tech, but I think there is some potential.

Here's an open source Java book on Penflip: https://www.penflip.com/lynnlangit/tkp-lesson-plans