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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#141

Post by jakejake »

run4yourlives wrote: post #104

Does it bother anyone that "frightenly ambitious" begins with search and email? Seriously? This is the pinnacle of our contribution to mankind - building search engines and to-do lists? Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh, maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).

The frightening part is the idea that you would be trying to disrupt seemingly invincible tech companies like google, which would be an insane business plan for a startup looking for a $50k kickstart investment.

But, I remember when google was first released. I thought the search engine market was already full with yahoo and alta vista dominating at the time. Who knew?!

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#142

Post by stcredzero »

tesseract wrote: post #96
hkarthik wrote: post #82

There's a definite opportunity to build a competitor to Apple and reach the hackers first: building a better PC for hackers to create new software built on Open Source and Web technologies. The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of d…

Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would buy into this new system? OK, so you really just want to target hackers first and then move into the consumer space once you have some traction. But consumers are starting to move away from laptops and toward things like smartphones and tablets. Apple is moving in…

Better to figure out what is going to come after smartphones and tablets, and get there before Apple does.

I would figure out what the developing world needs the most and how they will be using computers and communications.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#143

Post by stcredzero »

6ren wrote: post #112

6. Bring Back Moore's Law hmmm, maybe developer cycles are more valuable than machine cycles really is getting out of sync with current conditions? I didn't connect stalled clock-speeds to the web being slow til reading this. One reason is that web-serving is usually embarrassingly parallel, as each client is independent. Some other causes are increased client-side JS; assembling many services (eg. amazon); increased…

Bloated frameworks, and software with many layers (some quite unnecessary) were facilitated by increasing clock-speeds - but at least it's possible to get rid of them. Also, work has been done on JS JIT compilation. Server languages are getting faster too.

It's instructive to note how much more compact alternative operating systems have been made compared to the mainstream ones. Full fledged BeOS systems used to weigh in at just a couple of hundred megabytes, with feature sets comparable to OS distributions taking several gigabytes. Also note that users of Symbolics Lisp machines used to be under the impression that the company had hundreds of programmers, and were amazed to learn that there were just 8.

A bit of bringing back Moore's Law could be done by getting rid of bloat. Perhaps the advent of the Raspberry Pi will allow this to happen.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#144

Post by Gatsky »

nl wrote: post #126
Gatsky wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not optimistic. I think pg's discussion of automatic diagnosis is a bit ill-informed. For example, the recent trial that showed screening CT scans reduce mortality in lung cancer cost 250 million dollars to run. Even then, nobody is sure if it is even a cost effective measure. It is difficult and costly to produce a screening test. It also takes many years to validate. Then there is the problem of what to do with…

Is that the case for all cancers though? I live in Australia, and we are indoctrinated to check your skin for moles that maybe cancerous . There are claims that the high rate of early detection leads to higher survival rates[1]. My understanding is that early detection of bowel, breast and prostate cancer is relatively easy and produces good outcomes too. There are radical ways to do early detection (sub dermal compu…

Not sure what you are arguing here... if you are arguing that screening for cancer can be useful and saves lives, then I agree with you!

If you are arguing that a start up could have come up with a screening program for bowel cancer for example, then I don't agree with you for the stated reasons.

Also: Prostate cancer screening is not recommended (http://www.cancer.org.au/File/PolicyPublications/Position_st...)

Breast cancer screening is not as useful as you would hope either. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2F14651858.CD001877.pub4) 2000 women need to be screened for 10 years to save 1 life, with 200 initial false positives requiring biopsy. Also, I see lots of people diagnosed with breast cancer despite having mammograms.

Radical ways to do early detection are fine, but you have to prove that it works and that requires a lot of people for a lot of years and a lot of money.

Building a toilet with a bowel cancer screening kit built in is a form of behavior modification to improve uptake, and that is a great area for start ups to get involved in. pg was talking about something different however.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#145

Post by repsilat »

Alex3917 wrote: post #7

The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. - No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online. - Even when you can access…

> It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.

We obviously need something better than the status quo here, but the status quo isn't as bad as it seems if you know how it works.

Quick hints: email the article author. They'll probably more than happy to send you an article and a quick summary worded for a lay audience (not to mention talking your ear off about their more recent work...) They're not worried about you not paying the publishers, they want to spread their work around.

Another trick is knowing people in academia. Maybe you have a friend who's doing graduate work, or lecturing. You could ask your old lecturers if you went to university and if the paper you're after is in their field. There are also communities like /r/scholar on Reddit, though I imagine some people are against that sort of thing.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#146

Post by stcredzero »

aptwebapps wrote: post #21

The last graph of #6 is great. I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it. More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation?…

This is the crux of the problem with our current political system, I think. It's not campaign finance, it's not religion, it's not disagreements about economics, foreign policy, security vs liberty (a lovely false dichotomy) or what have you. It is simply the fact that lies win and truth loses. Or, if that statement is not necessarily true, it is true in the current practice.

I think Eric Drexler had hopes like this for hypertext before the World Wide Web started to hit it big. However, "In every age, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same."

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#147

Post by stcredzero »

The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable.

Some might say that Amazon is already doing better than Samsung, HP, and Nokia.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#149

Post by tomwalsham »

nl wrote: post #121
hkarthik wrote: post #82

There's a definite opportunity to build a competitor to Apple and reach the hackers first: building a better PC for hackers to create new software built on Open Source and Web technologies. The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of d…

It's here, but not how you think: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ Do you know any hacker who knows about Raspberry Pi and isn't planning on buying one? Radically undercutting existing platforms in price, but with comparable functionality enables totally new uses for general purpose computing devices. That's how to take on the Mac/PC business - not by hitting it head on.

rπ is a great project, but it's hardly out of left field.

There have been plugins for years, at seriously affordable prices. You can buy a netbook for $100 these days and run Windows/Linux on it happily.

rπ is interesting because of its positioning as a learning platform equivalent to the BBC Micro which nurtured David Braben and many of the other backers. Not because it holds some magical quality over Gumstix, BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, CottonCandy, GuruPlug, DreamPlug, Arduino etc.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#150

Post by ra »

I love this:

"There's a scene in Being John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman. She says to him:

Here's the thing: If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.

That's what these ideas say to us..."

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