Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#261

Post by lutorm » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 3:53 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #196

dsrguru wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but until we invest as much time, money, and effort into defense against weapons and customized microorganisms as we do into their creation, we're running the risk of this young species (and maybe a lot of the other ones) disappearing very, very soon.

Oh please. Humanity is pretty much the definition of a species that should, in all probability, have died out on a multitude of occasions over the years and I am not just talking about the world wars and Nuclear Bombs, but things like the plagues, Spanish flu and all the rest of the diseases; the host of predators for which we are no match at all (a standard monkey is stronger than all but the best trained humans), t…

There is an amusing passage in "The Black Swan" about how a turkey would estimate its own life expectancy as Thanksgiving draws closer...

Don't confuse the fact that we've been lucky not to go extinct yet with evidence that we won't, especially when you being around to make that inference is conditional on said luck.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#262

Post by ahoyhere » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:00 PM UTC

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).

What about this?

"In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF

That's 54 jumbo jets a day.

I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#263

Post by joering2 » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:00 PM UTC

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…

> The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse,

Google, today, after all is a stock-holders company that is aimed to generate PROFITS, and maximize those. It should be kind of obvious that at some point they (as a company) will try to maximize cash coming in, and minimize going out (spent). Therefore, their product [search] is narrowed towards the ones who push the most obvious questions/search queries: what do they play in theatres, what car to buy, best lcd tv, pharmacy near me, etc. Thats probably 90% of search queries they getting. I say, as long as they work in this zone and make sure simple queries return the best results, they are winning - winning biggest chunk of market and smile on shareholders' faces.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#264

Post by charlieok » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:03 PM UTC

“GMail has become painfully slow. [2]”

“[2] This sentence originally read "GMail is painfully slow." Thanks to Paul Buchheit for the correction.”

heh :)

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#265

Post by lutorm » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:04 PM UTC

marvin wrote: post #226

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but "cleaning" is yet another word for artificial intelligence. I think you underestimate the power of economics. Can you imagine how many people are busy cleaning things? I find it amazing that the difference between tasks like washing cloths and cleaning toilets is so small for humans and so huge for machines. We've had washing machines forever, but we're still cleaning our toilets manually. And cleaning is jus…

It seems like a lot of people disagree with you, but I agree with this viewpoint. That the Luddite fallacy will be a fallacy forever is a fallacy in itself. I've said this before, but I keep repeating my viewpoint. At some point, we will have automated too many of the "useful" things to do for there to be enough work in the private sector for everyone. There are only so many cars, houses, gadgets and foods humanity n…

The really interesting question is whether this will further exacerbate inequalities or whether society will necessarily have to transition to a more "socialist" model if work no longer needs to be done.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#266

Post by lutorm » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:06 PM UTC

ahoyhere wrote: post #262

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).

What about this? "In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF That's 54 jumbo jets a day. I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.

They die because they can't afford clean water, so there's no money to be made in solving that problem. Capitalism does not have a heart.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#267

Post by kamaal » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:09 PM UTC

ahoyhere wrote: post #262

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).

What about this? "In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF That's 54 jumbo jets a day. I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.

I thought about this too!

Disease are a serious case.

But its shameful that at this stage in the evolution of human kind we have people dieing of hunger and malnutrition.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#268

Post by lutorm » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:09 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #257

tomp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually, far out into the future, the trends might actually reverse. Fundamentally, robots are made out of expensive stuff, metal, earth minerals. It can be recycled, but it's expensive, and not 100%. Humans, on the other hand, a pretty cheap, we run on carbon, oxygen and water. In the future, it might make sense for robots to do stuff they're best suited for (e.g. very hard, dangerous work in human-unfriendly con…

Who knows what robots will be made of far out in the future, and remember that humans have to be fed for at least a decade before they can do much of anything. Also, earth isn't losing any material as far as I know but I admittedly know very little about physics and chemistry. Can metals degrade into a lower kind of unrecoverable state like energy can?

If you have an unlimited supply of energy, you can pretty much recover whatever. The only elements hopelessly lost are those that involve nuclear reactions.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#269

Post by keithpeter » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:09 PM UTC

einhverfr wrote: post #72

As an amateur historian, I found the Colombus bit a bit interesting, and probably more on-point than Graham might have even known. Columbus, his backers, and his detractors all accepted that the world was round. What they disagreed about was how big it was, and how far it would be to Asia by sailing West. Everybody, pretty much, by that point knew that the world was literally round (and flat only in stories). This wa…

Thanks for the reference.

Of course, every sailor knew the Earth was round. Just take a morning off and watch the boats going out of a fishing harbour should your location allow this...

I found that pg quote useful as well, in a 'look for local advantage' way. Plan the next step based on how the weather and sea look today. Tomorrow it might be different.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#270

Post by waterside81 » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:10 PM UTC

These ideas, and the idea that they are frighteningly ambitious, clearly come from the personal experience of living in northern California and dealing with tech startups most of your time.

These are largely first world problems. Here are some ambitious ideas:

- distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore.

- synthetic food generation a la star trek

- desalination that is cheap enough for a farmer in Mozambique to do himself

There are more, lots more. People outside the valley bubble have real problems.