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New Requests for Startups

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Re: New Requests for Startups

#261

Post by evincarofautumn »

personlurking wrote: post #204
jey wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only works because there's a captive audience, and the publisher knows that they can get away with charging anything since the students feel they have no other choice but to buy a copy. Far more specialized textbooks with far smaller audiences are routinely available for much cheaper (e.g. http://amzn.to/1ByBDLG ). The right place to target reform would be professors. They should take a stand to write and use on…

Do you or does anyone know if there's any kind of existing market for pirated textbooks? I'm not a student but if music and films are pirated in large doses, it seems textbooks geared towards the same demographic would be popular.

Yes, textbook piracy is commonplace. When I was a student, I always pirated the textbooks that I could, using the student file sharing service at my university or the Pirate Bay. Eating food and saving my parents’ money were more important to me than having dead-tree copies of textbooks that I would use for ten weeks then never read again.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#262

Post by dkarapetyan »

akkartik wrote: post #255
dkarapetyan wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I didn't say we need to teach people to write elegant code. See my examples at http://akkartik.name/post/tracing-tests . I take this perverse joy in coming up with ugly code that is suited to its surroundings, and I'm extremely well-suited for programming because when it comes to code our aesthetics are like George Costanza's instincts ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposite ). I want programming to be like readi…

Good luck. I'm still not going to read terrible code no matter how easy it is. It took me a while to come to this realization but aesthetically unpleasant code is indicative of the author's abilities and without elevating the level of all programmers I don't see how making code easier to read is going to make much difference. Some tooling might make it easier/faster to come to the conclusion that some piece of software is not worth investing more time in but with enough experience that judgement is not hard to make. Note that LibreSSL was a fork and rewrite of OpenSSL. Even if it was easier to navigate OpenSSL it still would have been the correct decision to scrap large swaths of it because it was horrendous code, easy to read or not.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#263

Post by wukix »

akkartik wrote: post #258
wukix wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the founder a developer tools startup and I've thought a lot about the future of programming. To be honest, the developer tools market is extremely competitive ("everything must be free") and it is not for the faint of heart. That said, if anyone wants to chat sometime in the Bay Area about future dev tools and/or startups around them, I'd be happy to meet. (contact info at https://wukix.com/contact )

Hi Wes! I enjoyed your talk on Mocl at the Bay Area Lisp meetup last year.

Thanks! I hope there is another BALisp meetup soon. The recent Parallac thing was cool, although it clearly needed more Lisp :)

Re: New Requests for Startups

#264

Post by DSingularity »

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…

Emphasis on reading. In my experience writing good code or effecient writing/debugging of code only came after: 1. Learning to read the project code i.e. understanding idioms, structures, execution paths, project syntax+language 2. Learning to extrapolate i.e. anticipating answers or making good guesses for inevitable questions during code writing. Questions like where/when should I do this or where/when is this info I need actually available

Both those things literally only came after reading so much code! No shortcuts from the Dev environment (idea, docs) aside from navigation and search!

Re: New Requests for Startups

#265

Post by untilHellbanned »

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).

We're working on disrupting academic journals at Onarbor, https://onarbor.com

Re: New Requests for Startups

#266

Post by awongh »

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…

Could it also be that the structure and intent of the code is ambiguous even to the author? I often feel this way when reading code, and also writing code or explaining it to others....

Re: New Requests for Startups

#267

Post by saturdayplace »

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…

I just started a new job and have hopped into the first codebase I'll need to work with that I didn't write from scratch myself. I've just been pining for a way to browse through this code as easily as documents in a web browser. Maybe that's the wrong paradigm, but man, there's got to be a better way to read code that lends itself to understanding what's going on. Even though my IDE can "find usages" and I can set breakpoints and step through things, the breakpoints get hit so fast that it's hard to internalize things before hitting "play" again. But stopping for too long breaks the real-time nature of the system. Which I guess is too many words which essentially mean, "I've recently felt this pain, and I agree."

Re: New Requests for Startups

#268

Post by tlb »

jarek wrote: post #105
icebraining wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people with reduced mobility (e.g. my grandmothers) can't ride them, though. There's space for alternatives.

The bicycle is a 80/20 solution, but it's hard to make VC-level money in the business. Plus, a few more decades of high-tech short-distance personal transportation and we'll all look like in Wall-E and the bicycle will become 20/80.

Don't dismiss it out of hand. The world bicycle market is $70B/yr. A Silicon Valley company, Specialized, makes $500M/yr revenue. If you had the next thing that millions of people would commute short distances on, there's more than enough potential for VC.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#269

Post by ac29 »

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 came across this nice looking statistics textbook a couple years ago:

http://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php

Free online, <$10 in print. There is a high school level stats text book available as well. Its also not "crowd sourced", but the results seem solid.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#270

Post by ig1 »

ealloc wrote: post #158
saosebastiao wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' the problem). This is a pure example of the AI Effect[1]. Academia has been extremely successful with AI Rese…

Interesting link, but I still feel AI hasn't had much success: Do we really have much more today that A* search, neural nets with backpropagation, and HMMs/SVM/etc, which were all developed in the 1960s? The successes of AI that I see (eg OCR/speech recognition and Chess/Jeopardy) use these same old algorithms with only marginal improvements and more CPU. There have been no new major techniques or insights. I'm not a…

For a while Random Forest (2001) blew everything away, but more recently deep neural networks have been making huge progress. For example Google's work in image recognition: http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/building-deeper...
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