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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#61

Post by js2 »

[3] Roger Bannister is famous as the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes. But his world record only lasted 46 days. Once he showed it could be done, lots of others followed. Ten years later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a high school junior.

One of the great stories of the last 100 years. There are many recountings of it, but "The Perfect Mile" is as good as any. Supposedly it was claimed to be impossible, and that any person to break the 4 minute mile would likely die from the effort. Bannister also wrote his own book about it.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#62

Post by gonein60 »

nchuhoai wrote: post #58

Takeaway for me: Great ideas will change the world, but you never start with them in the first place

I always think back to Linus Torvalds's first email about starting linux.

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#63

Post by dgallagher »

ilaksh wrote: post #49
tobiasSoftware wrote: post #40

I have my own to add which I'll tackle if I ever get smart enough. Code is horrible right now. The problem is that code is written linearly, when in our minds it is a graph. It's usually a bad sign when our minds see things differently than our computers do. I think if we could properly abstract the concepts, and change both our linear list of functions and our unsorted list of files to a single graph structure, we c…

I just read an article today or yesterday about the reason that VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l or whatever. I think the reason that code is ASCII text is pretty much the same reason VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l. All they had was a terminal so it had to be ASCII. If you think about it, all information is structured and multidimensional. But people can only make one sound at a time, so information must be serialized to…

As you suggest, this is definately a legacy issue of being tied to the teat of a 1980's terminal. People still like to edit in simple editors.

I've viewed it as a Model-View-Controller problem, where everyone is attempting to merge the Model and View into one. Technically your editor should be worrying about the View. It can draw division however you configure it to. But when saving to a Model source file, that should be portable, without any (or very little) formatting embedded in it (e.g. MultiMarkdown).

You should be able to customize your editor, much like swapping out a CSS file on a website, and skin it to your desires.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#64

Post by chc »

mmphosis wrote: post #59

0. free internet - as in beer and as in liberty 1. a new search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ 2. replace email - with a todo list? - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk, my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices everywhere all being in sync 3. replace universities - yup, and recreate the free university of olde 4. internet drama - indie drama titles (movies/sh…

Huh? Free Internet is ipso facto not a business idea.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#65

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#66

Post by aptwebapps »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #35
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?…

Interesting idea. I think the most intractable part is that many people believe what they want to believe. They gravitate to a world view for various reasons, backfit it to the data, rationalize the cherrypicking of supporting data and discarding of refuting data, integrate it into their id or ego, fight tooth and nail to protect it, and happily accept the political dis/misinformation you're referring to. I'd imagine…

Yes, I agree. But these people do continue to be influenced by information in the public sphere, although they do tend to select sources that they agree with. They also were influenced when settling into their original positions.

I really don't think this general behavior will change, but it's not all or nothing, it's a matter of degress. I think everyone does this at least a little bit. Unfortunately, a lot of people do it a lot. If you can shave away at it a little bit at a time, it could have a large impact in the end.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#67

Post by aptwebapps »

chc wrote: post #64
mmphosis wrote: post #59

0. free internet - as in beer and as in liberty 1. a new search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ 2. replace email - with a todo list? - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk, my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices everywhere all being in sync 3. replace universities - yup, and recreate the free university of olde 4. internet drama - indie drama titles (movies/sh…

Huh? Free Internet is ipso facto not a business idea.

What about free email? Or free search engines? I'm not really suggesting that ad-supported Internet is a great idea, but it's at least a possibility.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#68

Post by sliverstorm »

dgallagher wrote: post #42
diego wrote: post #22

"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ? Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.

Rich people have the same number of seconds per day as poor people, except each second is worth more. Right now everyone is driving a black Model-T; there isn't a premium edition of email available, though one is certainly desired (personal assistants and secretaries currently fill this gap). If the cost of a premium email/task-list system is less than the dollars saved in time, and less than an assistant, people wil…

there isn't a premium edition of email available, though one is certainly desired (personal assistants and secretaries currently fill this gap)

I think you misunderstand. The premium edition of email is much like the premium edition of anything else- it's the email you don't have to use, the plane you don't have to fly, the car you don't have to drive, the food you don't have to cook. So I don't know that personal assistants and secretaries are "filling a gap" in the stop-gap sense, but rather they are the solution.

If you want to capitalize on it, do like a chauffeur company would do, but with email.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#69

Post by nikcub »

Replace email and replace search are two signs that Google is failing at its core strengths, and I agree with this. They have made many mistakes in the past few years and there is a definite opportunity in taking them head on in both of these markets.

with number 6, if you are going to break it up for cores you may as well break it up for computers and put it on the network. Hence MapReduce, etc.

with #7, our bodies are very good at telling us when something is wrong with warning signs. we can't afford health care as it is today, let alone with the system being clogged up with healthy people paranoid about possibly being ill.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#70

Post by tomfakes »

repos wrote: post #6

Preventative Diagnostics as Paul describes in #7 will really be the future - it's barbaric that we can only make a diagnosis when the disease has already manifested (in most cases). There are a few players in this space (Scanadu comes to mind), but it's seems like nano biosensors and the like are still very new technologies. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I look at medical diagnostics as though I'm looking at my production servers (a poor analogy in many ways, but lets go with it)

Watching charts on a production server, you see patterns over time - e.g you can see a weekend, or holiday quite easily. Keeping an eye on these, you can see when things start hitting bottlenecks and you need to do something to improve the situation.

When I get my bloodwork checked, its once a year - can you imagine checking in on your production servers just once a year?

I live in the Seattle area - Vitamin D deficiency is a huge (but not well known) problem in this area. I would pay real money to see a chart of my Vitamin D levels on a daily basis (without needing to draw blood!). I can then adjust my supplement dosage as needed.

I have a food allergy that is slow to flare up and slower to go away again - being able to check various levels of things in my system to track against food intake will help me find out exactly what foods cause what issues. The US food industry would pay a fortune to have this ability not be available!

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