New Requests for Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: New Requests for Startups

#321

Post by sanderjd » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 12:46 AM UTC

mjn wrote: post #290

jjoonathan wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those systems tend to look like a "single-payer donkey with a free-market tail stuck on." The government decides the content of the basic packages, funds them for the poor, etc. If that sounds exactly like the ACA, you're correct, but you may have missed a very subtle and very important distinction -- take a closer look. Page 6 of http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/F... gives a very thorou…

A friend of mine ran across this in Switzerland. It has a nominally free-market system, but when he moved there, he ended up automatically enrolled in a plan without doing anything at all. He was remiss in reading and translating all his mail upon moving there, and after some months of inaction: 1) he was signed up to a default insurance plan; 2) which was partially subsidized based on his estimated income; and 3) he…

Is there a practical difference between being billed for a plan you were automatically signed up for and being assessed a tax fine?

Re: New Requests for Startups

#322

Post by bravura » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 12:50 AM UTC

pbiggar wrote: post #315

bravura wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the Services section in the docs: http://empiredata.com/doc/ We currently have integrations with Salesforce, Hubspot, Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, Zendesk, Mailchimp, Stripe, and CallRail. If there's another integration you need, feel free to email us: hello at empiredata dot co [edit: I have added the current and upcoming integrations on the home page: http://empiredata.co/#supported-platforms ]

You don't list Stripe on that page, FYI. Add Intercom and you have a customer.

@pbiggar Thanks for that catch. We updated the homepage.

I'll reach out to you over email because I'm curious about your intercom.io use-case.

I'm also going to try it on our webapp, so we can dogfood it.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#323

Post by sanderjd » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 12:51 AM UTC

impendia wrote: post #304

superuser2 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A large proportion of my students work part time jobs for 20+ hours a week. I don't really understand how they can afford tuition + room + board but need the $140 (less taxes) a week, but as it turns out this is very common. It made a big impression on me when a student walked in to turn in his homework wearing a Chick-Fil-A cap. Asking around, I learned that this is typical at the university where I teach. So, yes,…

It's pretty simple: grants and loans cover tuition, fees, housing, and very little else, so that $150/week from working part time is what students are living off of.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#324

Post by zo1 » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 12:52 AM UTC

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 .…

One thing that they did at my university about 5 years ago to disrupt just this. A group of ex-students (I think) setup a container outside the main entrance, across the street. There they bought old textbooks from students that just finished a subject, and then sold it back to the students using it the following year.

Obviously the books changed slightly. But they kept change lists, so you always knew if you had the latest info or not. Sometimes, even the lecturers did this. E.g. "If you have ed4, it's on page 400-403, otherwise it's page 389-392 on the latest edition, etc".

Re: New Requests for Startups

#325

Post by rwallace » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 12:55 AM UTC

avalaunch wrote: post #224

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.

I think it would have been a lot more interesting if they had requested startups that significantly reduced the average cost of living and/or moved us closer towards a world where not everyone has to have a job.

They did. Housing is the main component of cost of living in the developed world, but to a significant extent that's a problem of transportation, which was mentioned. In the US, housing, healthcare and college fees are the big three, and the latter two were explicitly mentioned.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#326

Post by mjn » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 1:03 AM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #321

mjn wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine ran across this in Switzerland. It has a nominally free-market system, but when he moved there, he ended up automatically enrolled in a plan without doing anything at all. He was remiss in reading and translating all his mail upon moving there, and after some months of inaction: 1) he was signed up to a default insurance plan; 2) which was partially subsidized based on his estimated income; and 3) he…

Is there a practical difference between being billed for a plan you were automatically signed up for and being assessed a tax fine?

Well, in the first case you're actually enrolled in a health-insurance plan, whereas in the second case you aren't. This solves many problems; for example, everyone who visits a doctor's office or hospital can be assumed to have insurance coverage, so those institutions aren't left with the mess of what to do with uninsured patients.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#327

Post by sedachv » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 1:05 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Backpropagation training wasn't introduced until 1986 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v323/n6088/pdf/323533a0...). SVMs weren't useful until the kernel trick was applied to them in 1992 (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=130385.130401). Feature learning wasn't an active area of research until the 2000s.

There have been huge improvements in algorithms since the 1960s. The only things around back then were a few speculative papers on analytic methods. The current state of the art in learning algorithms is a huge advance over just having some ideas about the mathematical properties of learning and a few analytic tricks in obscure papers.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#328

Post by ddlatham » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 1:09 AM UTC

ForrestN wrote: post #289

randomdata wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nece…

From someone who is not a farmer and doesn't know so much about this, for example could we grow vegetables and feed them to humans directly, rather than feeding grains to cattle?

I've been trying to feed vegetables to three small humans. Sometimes it works, but sometimes the humans seem to reject them and it fails.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#329

Post by Swizec » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 1:09 AM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #196

joshpadnick wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I always thought it would be cool to record audio the whole time the editor is open, and the programmer would just talk the whole time about his thought process. Then the audio would be broken up and indexed with the source code. So you could choose to hear what the author was saying right when he was working on a certain area of the code. (You'd normally turn it off, but if you're really stuck it might be a good las…

I do this with a notebook. When I'm coding I always jot down notes and thoughts. As long as you can remember the date when something was coded, you can see what I was thinking while writing it.

Has helped me figure out what the hell I'm doing many a time.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#330

Post by GuiA » Sat, Sep 13, 2014, 1:23 AM UTC

bradleysmith wrote: post #156

GuiA wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean things like Flipboard, Circa, etc.? Not very surprising to see them absent on YC's list. Like the more recent waves of social networks, they don't offer much and just add to the noise. Who will remember these companies in 10, 20, 50 years? Most likely no one. Who will remember companies that solve problems related to healthcare, energy, food allocation? A lot more people. There's much to like about this l…

No, I didn't mean like Flipboard or Circa. I also wouldn't expect much support for these kinds of things. I meant companies that are trying to change how news is consumed and produced, not those that prettify how it is presented for final consumption. PG outlined the problem pretty clearly in 2008[0]. Perhaps you believe the news industry is healthy and functioning in delivering accurate current events to world citiz…

Cool, I wasn't sure what you were talking about so your examples help.

I'm not sure that the news industry is healthy and functioning, but I do know that world citizens seem to be very happy living in a world of celebrity photos and memes and " listicles" these days. The fact that PG's examples are Perez Hilton and TechCrunch demonstrates that pretty well.

The only thing that has really changed news is that now everyone has a camera on their phone and can post footage of events on Twitter, Instagram, etc. That stuff does bubble up to the top when it happens- I'm not quite sure where we can go from here.

Put more cameraphones in the hands of oppressed citizens, sure. Besides that, I think the world of news is going to stay where it's been in the past couple years: ridiculously dumb websites for the masses (Buzzed et al.), sites with high quality content for extremely small niches (but a small niche of 10k people each paying $10 a year can easily support an independent journalists or two, so great), and cameraphone footage as primary sources for everything (which is wonderful- it's raised awareness tremendously in the recent years for things like police violence).