New Requests for Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: New Requests for Startups

#271

Post by Ologn » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:27 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #195

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 .…

It doesn't matter that a student can't afford their books on $7/hour. No one seriously expects a kid to make even a dent in the cost of his education anymore, because relative to cost of attendance (except at community colleges) kids in general just don't have the earning power. Cost of attendance at my state flagship is $24,000. Full time at minimum wage is $15,080. Any education worth that kind of money is hard eno…

I take classes at a decently ranked public school, and many of the students are not having tuition paid by scholarship or endowment. Their parents are certainly not paying the full ride - they may contribute a little, if anything. Students can't always get all the loans they would need, and it doesn't make financial sense to pile too much of that on. So plenty of people are paying out of their salaries. I do this and many of the people I speak with do this.

You talk about full-time classes and a full-time job. Actually some of my classmates are raising children or that sort of thing as well. But beyond that, you're correct that it is hard to take a hard STEM major full-time and also work full-time. It would be almost impossible to maintain a 4.0 or 3.9 or whatnot. The solution is obvious, don't take a full course load - take three classes a semester, or perhaps two, or perhaps one. It takes longer, but what is the alternative for those who can't afford full-time study?

If some 18 year old can't really afford full-time study...then don't do full-time study. Why make your parents shell out thousands they can't afford, as well as burdening yourself with enormous loans, for something you may very well not complete in four years. Some kids graduate and are not working - a lot nowadays. On this public school commuter campus, the smarter half of the CS major seniors I know have never heard of software version control, have no idea what git, Perforce, cvs etc. is. Most of our professors are good too - most of them understand their topics, and some are even good at explaining it. A dedicated person can get a lot out of the education, and then perhaps go get a Masters at a more prestigious school afterward if they want.

If people can't afford fulltime, don't go fulltime. Maybe the government should help more, maybe not, but if someone can't pay fulltime they should go parttime.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#272

Post by pyb » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:35 PM UTC

superzamp wrote: post #218

pyb wrote: post #106

Is it just me, or are these RFSes too vague to be inspiring or actionable. It looks like you perhaps had a good list of actual ideas, which you redacted to death ?

I think they're seeds for thought, nothing more.

Yes, it's just that we're used to more focused initiatives from YC.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#273

Post by bosco » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:37 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #104

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…

I also thought the Financial Services section was rather tame and un-disruptive. The problem is not that it's hard to find good ways to save and invest, although that is a true statement. The problem, at least for most people in the US, is that besides Social Security, "personal saving and investing" is currently the only available way to secure one's future/retirement. An additional, related problem is that the only…

A Roth IRA and a 401k are investment vehicles - stocks, bonds, funds are investments. I don't think you quite understand investing which is why Financial Services needs to be disrupted.

You claim it's all a scam but the market has been going up and up over the last 100 years. The scam lies with the advisors and products that charge high fees and are not transparent. Companies like Betterment and Wealthfront are changing the game buy making these fees transparent and putting you in a good diversified portfolio.

The second problem is that like you mentioned saving and investing is only available to people who can afford to save. This is the same thought that 85% of millennials who don't save feel but the reality is, you can. There is just no easy way to do it...yet

https://www.wellsfargo.com/press/2014/20140610_millennials http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/historical/djia1900.html

Re: New Requests for Startups

#274

Post by jjoonathan » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:42 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #99

hackerboos wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design If you want to advance these fields throw money at universities, not startups.

Are you implying that these fields are only pure science? I'm just curious.

No, but universities are (and always were) highly effective "startup accelerators" for science/engineering disciplines.

The thing YCombinator (and its ilk) did differently was to realize that software was atypical of science/engineering fields in that it didn't benefit as much from many of the services offered by universities, so you could strip out most of the "cruft" and form a "lean" university that was just as effective (more effective, in hindsight).

When you bring the focus back to science/engineering, suddenly the "cruft" doesn't seem so pointless. If you try to build an accelerator aimed at traditional science/engineering problems, you re-invent the university.

What is that "cruft"?

* Formal training and apprenticeships from experts in various fields

* Many-million-dollar macroscopic and microscopic fab facilities (shared but not specialized)

-- Fancy microscopes (optical, electron, etc)

-- Fancy spectrometers

-- Nanofab junk (mask writers, aligners, chemical benches, CVD machines, etc)

-- Chemistry junk (NMR machines, MS machines, Chromatography machines, etc)

-- Physics junk (telescopes, accelerators, etc)

-- Engineering junk ($50k oscilloscopes and logic probes, test machines, FPGAs, CAD/CAE software, expensive simulation software)

* ~$1MM-ish labs (highly specialized but shared less)

-- Strange chemicals, gasses, and the tools required to deal with them

-- Strange biologicals (animal lines, cell lines, specialty constructs, reagents)

-- Fume hoods, centrifuges, schlenk lines, etc

-- 3D printers, milling machines, highly specialized fabrication and diagnostic apparati that are custom-built and one-of-a-kind

* Library/journal access

* Connections to cheap labor (no comment)

* Connections to funding for both blue-sky research

* Connections to funding for seed-stage commercial prospects

YC specializes on the last bullet point and mixes in business training. It could certainly have something to offer to startups in science/engineering fields (especially if their ultimate product was software), but we shouldn't forget that it has relatively stiff competition once it starts wandering outside of its core competency into more traditional fields.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#275

Post by jblow » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:42 PM UTC

I am very happy to see this list.

I came to Demo Day in 2010 (as an investor) but left without investing in anything, because I was so demoralized by the way it seemed everyone was trying to start lame web sites doing relatively trivial things.

If Demo Day looked like the stuff on this list, I'd be banging down the door to get in again.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#276

Post by ac29 » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:44 PM UTC

Cyranix wrote: post #242

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 .…

It seems to me that the most powerful opportunity here would be not only to disrupt textbooks but also academic journals; in the process of tackling both areas as a unified problem of knowledge distribution, one might shorten the distance between the latest research and the established curriculum, as well as opening an avenue for better modes of teaching (as per the point made by `rcarrigan87).

I really like what PeerJ is doing in that space: https://peerj.com/

Really takes open access (which is great, but still expensive) to the next level. Very inexpensive publishing, and free preprints.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#277

Post by Rapzid » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:46 PM UTC

joshpadnick wrote: post #166

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…

It also doesn't help that very few projects bother documenting for developers. I believe some traditional UML tactics and other documentation could often not only help with on boarding developers but also lead to a realization of just how convoluted the structure is currently.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#278

Post by randomdata » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:46 PM UTC

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…

> That's because we dedicate most of our water and land resources to feeding cattle that we then eat.

As a farmer, I'm struggling to picture how we could change that land utilization in a significant way without technology to enable it. It's not quite as simple as consumer desires, although you are right that changing consumer habits changes the flow of money and where it is invested which would also spur on the necessary technology, presumably.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#279

Post by pinaceae » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:48 PM UTC

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…

neat, but SFDC alone is unbelievable ... as in i do not believe it. API limits, governors, etc. will all kill your fancy meta-api. working a lot with SFDC, an API on top of an API is simply performance hell.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#280

Post by gone35 » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 9:48 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…

Recall that today's dominant notion that the only startups worth f(o)unding are cynically-leveraged, hockey stick Internet frivolities is a relatively recent development [1] --blame pmarca et al. for that.

It isn't inconceivable, then, that today there ought to be enough liquidity and appetite for riskier, much less leveraged, longer-term growth modalities, as in the past.

[1] http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future