Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups? What are some market segments / areas that are ready to be disrupted? If you're a VC, what are some problems you don't see a lot of startups trying to solve? |
Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups? What are some market segments / areas that are ready to be disrupted? If you're a VC, what are some problems you don't see a lot of startups trying to solve? |
the content is the best in the world. Total game changers. Just have to take the time and read
these guys are amazing
At the end of the day recruiting is all about matching the right candidate with the right job. Right candidate = one who has the skills and motivation (wanting to move up, work for specific types of companies). Right job = organization that is heading into that phase / requesting it.
I mean, there is a huge amount of investments that small and medium business all around the world do not do because they don't have enough scale to get a good ROI from them. And they most often lack that scale because there's a labor cost within that investment that doesn't vary with business size. If you reduced the non-elastic labor cost, you'd normally open up a market that grows exponentially with that cost reduction.
Now, there are all kinds of ways to go after this. In theory, that's the most obvious huge application of an AI, but there are simpler avenues for that, like standardizing things, mass-selling things that currently require personalization, creating high productivity tools, or just pushing some prices down and hoping for the best (what may be the greatest way to spend VC money).
You can see that there are certain companies that are helping to tackle these issues in various roundabout ways, but I believe that there is big opportunity here, and it's kind of easy to quantify these issues, which makes it easy to sell solutions.
Sorry if this sounds very broad and generic, but I promise if you sit on this idea, and take just a single societal issue, once you start to dig a bit deeper you'll see opportunities jump out.
All of those are public goods/tragedy of the commons issues operating in highly political regulated environments. Very difficult for a startup to make a difference there in a way that can make a return.
Theft on the other hand is gradually being diminished by technology: the same omnisurveillance of always-on IoT devices makes it easier to remote-brick them or find their location if they're stolen. The problem shifts to hacking and ransomware.
It may be difficult, but that's all part of the game.
Also on theft - not everything is an iPhone, and I don't believe tracking is very prevalent just yet. There's plenty of opportunity here that's currently left untouched. I'm less thinking about petty crime and more about burglaries / theft of high value goods (boats, cars etc).
Things that could expedite this:
Better affordable EDA tools (maybe even open source? startups that succeed and become self-sufficient would pay big bucks for customization and support). Especially for analog!
Some sort of business model which pays for masks, such as perhaps taking a percentage of the money in exchange for a MLM mask. This could be something that a mask work company does. Another related but orthogonal startup idea(albeit much harder than an app like snapchat)would be to develop a maskless lithography technique for cutting edge nodes, such as electron beam lithography.
Half of the energy used every day, worldwide, is used on transportation (cars, trains etc.). But is this energy well spent? I have seen first-hand, and so have you, that people spend their mornings unhappily commuting to work, school etc.
This needs to be changed, and given how fast technology has been advancing in recent years - change is coming sooner rather than later when it comes to transportation.
Great question by the way, have a look through YC's RFC list. https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar
https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/grants/fmpp
And I noticed all of the previous winners were other farmer's markets managers expanded their current market. It would be nice to see some new way of helping the underserved community get food.
So examples I've seen are ideas are mini markets at bus stops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar
I could see something that could be "attached" to a cell phone (via bluetooth or such), attached to a stick or such (like a metal detector) - would be useful. Sonar would probably be the cheapest way, but the power requirements would be fairly large (at least as much as what's needed for a fish-finder, I would imagine).
Hmm - gotta give some thought to this!
Hence why we're working on improving the blogging experience that hasn't changed and/or improved much in almost 2 decades.
Our "manifesto" explains it in full here: http://blogenhancement.com/?to=manifesto
"By wearing this standard ear-bud headphone, modified with a small piezoelectric sensor, the user can control their phone solely with their neural impulses. Point, click, drag, even type...all using only brainwaves.Think it...and it happens."
-- Geo-spatial -- Tax analysis -- Real property automation (a dozen different workflows) -- Permit automation and analysis(multiple workflows) -- Licensing automation and analysis
I might postulate that programmers have more of an aversion to chatbots than the general public. Presumably because we tried one of the famous general purpose ones at some point - then were disappointed when we failed to make it understand why humans cry and why it is something they could never do.
Many of these users are not that familiar with the WWW aspect of the Internet; Facebook and Whatsapps is really the Internet for them.
I could definitely see chatbots becoming advanced enough to handle "I'm locked out of my account and need some part of it reset" type questions within the next 3 - 5 years. I could even see it being superior to the current experience (right now there are significant delays after each thing I say to the customer service person, presumably because they're handling multiple chat windows simultaneously).
Genius!
> market segment - Non English speaking
1) Post-quantum encryption.
2) Desalination.
3) Storing kynetic energy.
4) Echo/acoustic mapping (inspired in bats) system for blind people.
5) Quantum computer chips operating at room temperature.
Thoughts?
Desalination itself isn't hard, keeping it affordable is.
Between ill-advised agricultural ventures in the past few decades and clumsy regulation here in the GCC, groundwater deposits are draining frighteningly fast. Desalination is just too expensive as it is since it's directly linked to hydrocarbon prices and deposits.
Phones are lasting longer and longer, the main reason to get a new one is no longer that it's too slow, it's the lack of updates. It's very wasteful.
The target market that you want to secure is generally either unaware of or apathetic towards security concerns (until they get hit).
If you can buy a 1-2 year old phone for $100-$200 (without contract) and pay an extra $10 per year to receive security updates, that's a pretty good deal.
There is a new generation of investors who are not interested in the 'old stock market' but who are instead looking for equity investment that can offer the efficiency, integrity and anonymity that cryptocurrency provides.
Also, stock markets are by far more efficient than bitcoin, especially when it comes to larger investments. A reason why algo traders are so widespread is because it's extremely cheap to buy/sell stocks if you're an institutional.
Most of the value they provide can be replaced by (or already is) technology. The only thing keeping them afloat is regulation.
Given the aggregators exist (in the UK, Zoopla & RightMove are our Zillow) that's where all the eyeballs are and how people find properties. You can then list your own property there.
Before I started Gitter, I nearly went into exactly this space, but there are a few negatives:
1. People are generally bad at sales 2. People are generally bad at negotiating 3. People are generally afraid of complex paperwork
Sure, the system can help with these things and maybe nobody has nailed this yet because there are a few companies trying in this space and nobody seems to be coming out on top.
I think baby steps are essential. A good first step is a broker-licensed startup with self-serve/AI agents. Why do I need an agent to look at houses when I can just find a house myself? The listing side can remote-unlock a house for me to look at. The buyer then keeps most of the commission.
- Infrastructure, these can also be called enablers. E.g. fiber accelerates Internet usage, AWS drastically accelerates SaaS businesses. Over time this acceleration will also happen in e.g. biotech and such introductions are to look for. If the infrastructure is missing, its likely gonna take some more time. Success stories in this category would be Spotify, Netflix and most apps.
- Accumulators is similar to a network effect. Information, money, users and customers are orbiting certain networks and companies. These instances are in their domains black holes and it's mostly a bad idea trying to restrain or compete. The opportunity is to harness the momentum. A success story in this category would be Buzzfeed.
- Automation, we are living in the golden age of automation. Essentially it's just to evaluate all repetitive tasks finding those with the highest value to the lowest investment.
Cloud computing is currently in the commoditization phase. The next step is aggregation.
There will be an opportunity for a company that successfully "abstracts away" the many different cloud providers, creating a single interface to a computing marketplace with supply spanning all providers.
There are a few companies trying to do this that I've seen. Can't remember the names offhand, but I know packet.net partners with one of them to sell their excess capacity.
2. Ketogenic diet cafeterias
3. Semantic programming + smart contracts + automated UI design
4. Social score (trust, reliability, predictability)
5. Mechanical Turk / AI powered object recognition
If you want to try, just keep on asking yourself if you are awake throughout the day. Try reading something, it's difficult to read something on dreams. Or try using electricity switches, they normally don't work in a dream. Sooner or later you would find while doing this that you are in a dream. From there, sky is literally the limit. Imagine whatever you want, fly across mountains, travel in spaceships, etc. till the time you wake up.
Charleston, SC uses 50 million gallons of water per day*
For reference, that's about 75 Olympic size pools (at 660,000 gallons per).
About your comment, imagine that the app can know my location, and pair me with a local expert, if the expert has to go to the other person home to fix their computer the price increases.
I want really easy, flexible instances that are super, super simple to activate. Something like click website -> click start GPU with tensorflow preinstalled -> upload & run my python.
Ideally per minute-billing and super, super simple to set-up and ssh into.
Going bottom up a lot of people for a very long time (decade+ now) have been using services like linode as a personal server, here's your ubuntu install now now put "whatever" on it and run it remotely.
However, and I have done some work in this space, perhaps providing simple-to-use services built on top of these and offering them to non-technical folks would be a good business model?
- Most bars/restaurants still use Aloha for point of sale system. Surely someone can update this concept.
- A kitchen inventory system that doesn't rely on manual data entry, but rather barcode readers and electronic weight sensors to maintain an up to date kitchen inventory.
- In biotech, the state of off-the-shelf LIMS (laboratory information management systems) is pitiful. Granted, it's a tough problem to generalize, but every solution out there is clunky.
- A UI builder platform for non-frontend-devs to create interfaces to REST APIs through drag-and-drop form elements.
Unfortunately we couldn't put in as much time back then. But I am thinking of picking up the project again. Any feedback would be appreciated.
^1 Sure there is hacks for getting Ruby running on them, but no native support
^2 Yes I know about Ironworker, from iron.io, but they're going a dockerized and up market and don't even display pricing any more. :(
Disclaimer: I don't work for MapD.
Of course you would be paying to keep the product up to date with local laws.
Is SIP [1] not open?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol
Imagine what would happen if we had the same issues with our phone lines. The last real open service we created as a humanity is email. At least SMTP still works.
Anyway something that would make the web on phones great.
I once met an SAP-contractor who was paid 5 digit amounts for implementing 1000 loc modules that was required because a tiny paragraph of some pension-law in a single country was updated.
I'm not sure what equivalent you could have for computer service to provide the same baseline of consumer trust; peek on craigslist and you'll find dozens of computer service postings for even a small town, and in large cities it gets even bigger. I agree that it's probably an area that could benefit from a loosely centralized provider, but adoption seems like it will be very difficult.
You need a TLC license, at least in NY. Insurance, exams and getting a car. Uber in NY requires TLC. Some other states in US are more relaxed.
BestBuy could extend their GeekSquad service by incorporating other vendors into the service line. Half of computer problems require physical touch of the computer. I guess what you wanted to do is to turn SuperUser on stackexchange into a paid subscription, allowing people to pay a few $$ to do remote help, and a platform for people to sell their computer help service.
Have you heard of IT certifications?, each vendor provides certifications based of their technologies, Microsoft has a lot of different certification programs.
If the client only wants to know the basic usage of a program, the service could pair it with another person not certified. If it's a company requiring for help or a developer in their home, he could request for "advanced service" and then a certified person could help in the specific field of the problem.
You can have a reputation system, with badges that determine how the person has being helpful, reviews from the clients etc.
Use blockchain
Uber shoes.
1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule.
2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates.
3. Carbohydrates activate addictive dopaminergic pathways (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/pdf/nih...)
People overeat because food is easy to access, and it provides a short-term, immediate chemical reward. External rewards often need to be introduced to break this vicious cycle. Hobbies, relationships, career achievements, etc. can function as alternative rewards. Perhaps there is a way for technology to provide short-term rewards in lieu of eating?
Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly.
Your second and third points however are scientifically supported, but do not confuse this with "obesity is complicated." It is not how many calories you eat, it is where they come from.
I used to weigh 340 pounds, I went strictly Paleo, did not increase caloric burn, did not decrease caloric intake in any meaningful way, hit 214 in a year, and then continued dropping; roughly 2000 calories a day and not a lot of exercise (was afraid of joint damage due to weighing so much).
Also, Paleo, like any similar structured diet, is just a trick to get you to ingest fewer calories.
And I'm going to piggy back on the [citation needed] about calories in/out being scientifically disproven.
[1] https://mytdee.com/#gender=male&yr=30&cm=182.9&kg=154.2&bfp=...
That's an extreme statement you definitely need to provide source for. I read a lot of scientific journals on the subject and have never heard anything like that.
While admitting the rest of this thread is bonkers, I'll explicitly list the formula you should follow right now (science is always evolving): Change in Body Stores = (Actual Calories In - Calories Not Absorbed) - (Resting Metabolic Rate + Thermic Effect of Eating + Physical Activity + Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)
This is the more nuanced formula of calories in, calories out. Changing one variable in that equation can have an effect on the rest of the equation, which is why it appears calories is not equal to calories out. You can read about each variable here: http://www.precisionnutrition.com/metabolic-damage.
I should note that this program is published in scientific journals: http://www.invent-journal.com/article/S2214-7829(16)30006-9/... http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11764-016-0582-z http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/osp4.98/abstract
However, if you eat 1000 calories or less, it's impossible not to lose weight. Unless you know someone who can synthesize energy to live and move out of thin air......
[Citation Needed]
You'd think that if it has been scientifically proven false, it'd be one of the biggest discoveries of the century - The Human Body, A Perpetual Motion Machine! Energy from Nothing!
Citation, please.
I had a soccer teammate in college do something similar. He was a central mid and was constantly getting beat by guys faster than him. He felt he was too fat and needed to drop a few pounds so he could compete better.
He went on what he called a "beer" diet. He would wake up and drink a beer to curb his appetite in the AM. Then at lunch, he would have a 12" subway sandwich, chips and pop. Once he got hungry again, he would drink another beer to curb his appetite until practice. After practice, he would have another beer. He would still drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated.
He dropped some 25lbs in like 45 days.
After he lost the weight, he realized that while he did lose the weight, he also suffered a ton of muscle loss. Before he was getting beat because he was slow, now he was getting beat because he was too weak to either fend off other players, or not strong enough to slow other players down, even though now he could keep up with them.
Afterwards he said he wouldn't do again, and started doing more weight training and interval cardio to maintain a healthier weight. After another six months, he said he finally found a happy median between being fast and being strong and stable on his feet.
I am glad it worked for you. However, most people need to start with a basic rule and go from there.
I think it is mainly calories in / calories out. While there seems to be evidence that the source of calories and diet composition do play some role in weight loss, that is what I would call "expert mode".
You can't exercise away a bad diet. One hour of very hard cardio, can burn up to 1,000 calories, depending on your weight and exercise intensity. A big mac meal with a medium drink and fries is more or less that as well. Exercise is great, and is an excellent supplement to a diet, but if you don't watch what you eat, it will be difficult to exercise away the extra calories.
The base rule is you have to watch what you eat. You can play with the composition, but concentrate on the calories. I can not say this enough. If you have extra pounds that you want to lose, and you have not yet found a way to do it, stay away from gimmicks.
Losing weight involves eating less, not eating more.
Regarding different types of calories, it's important to note that fats, proteins, sugars, and carbohydrates are digested in different ways. If you ingest 500 calories worth of sugar your body will be able to use almost all of that for its energy needs. Meanwhile, digesting protein is more complicated, and your body will be able to extract fewer of those 500 calories for its own needs.
Or is it just the caloric measurement you think is irrelevant for human energy intake? While obviously imperfect, I'm skeptical it could be an order of magnitude off for example.
Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.
It is not how many calories you eat, it is where they come from.
About the best we can do with current science is (a better worded version of): How many calories you consume is important, and so is the nature of those calories, and when you consume them. Also something in there about calories being reductive, and other things matter.
In fact you can (and man do) do much worse for advice than Michael Pollans' summary: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.[1]" - but "food" is doing extra work here and human health is not the only consideration.
Still, that's a pretty epic diet, and could be very popular in developer circles. You should maybe consider patenting it.
A human body is a mechanical system.
Fuel + air in --> Work done + waste out.
That's it. Any other argument is literally disputing the laws of thermodynamics.
That sounds like an extreme form of a ketogenic diet [1], or Atkins diet [2]. Very effective, but with only bacon you'll miss some important micronutrients.
The mystery would be if you gained weight over a long period of time while consuming food at a calorie deficit. People do make this argument against calorie counting...
The fundamental lesson of calories in calories out is that someone who wishes to lose weight should seek to reduce their calorie intake to a level where it happens. It probably isn't all that useful a lesson, estimating calories consumed is hard, as is reducing them.
Quite the opposite actually. See thermodynamics for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
No. If the laws of thermodynamics had been proven false, we would have heard of it.
I have problems with my weight and my wife is anorexic. We live day-to-day with the fight against obesity (for years) and that's hardly a rule, much less golden.
The only constant I see on this whole food/nutrition industry is how little information is accurate. Millions of diets and nutrition "experts" saying whatever they hear works without testing anything. The classic "worked for me, must work for everyone".
I agree the obesity problem is there to be solved, but don't oversimplify it to 3 bullet points. That's irresponsible to say the least.
I've since maintained (and gained more visible abs :D ) with careful tracking on MyFitnessPal. I also find that if I do not track and weigh the food I eat (I get lazy and just "eyeball" the weight), I very rapidly get out of practice and put on weight. It turns out humans are terrible measuring tools.
And the best part is this doesn't only work for me. Everyone I know who has followed me into methodically measuring food (sample size of 6 friends, and a couple has PCOS and one has hypothyroidism but is taking pills) has had their data analysed by me and the results agree with one another - CICO IS true. I should really write up the analyses one fine day.
of course it's not a simple addition. age, genetics and a lot of other factors come in.
what is dangerously wrong is thinking that changing your calorie intake is easy. it may be very difficult to gain or lose weight depending on which side you are, because changing the way you eat durably is freaking difficult.
You don't see a lot of overweight people in famine prone areas. Calories out - calories in = your weight curve. That's the easy part for losing weight.
Sport does not burn a lot of calories. So it is better to cut on the intake. Which is the hard part: food can be a comfort drug which is easily available. Worse when your entourage is full of overweight people as crab mentality can set-in and they'll try to sabotage your weight loss.
They ALWAYS say they did through calorie restriction.
I am shocked by the amount of effort going into fixing health problems post-hoc relative to efforts aimed at improving the foods we eat. In fact, we seem to be going backwards. The intellectual vanguard is pushing organic + non-GMO produce, heirloom foodstuffs, artisan food practices, and other regressive (if high-quality) patterns that won't encourage nutritional improvement for the majority of people.
We should be applying ourselves to improving food. It's completely overlooked because it's seen as a solved problem. I can completely understand why, but I think it's pretty clear, given the health problems in the west, that there is more to be done.
Yes, but I'd argue it's not a very helpful rule. As it has been said before, it's pretty much like saying that the golden rule to get rich is "money in vs. money out". Correct, but not very helpful.
Are you saying you need more specifics?
If you want to improve your financial position, either earn more money (get a side job, take a higher paying job with more responsibility), or spend less money (buy beans and rice in bulk, prepare your own meals, sell your luxury car to get rid of the payments and drive a paid-for beater, take public transit and read a book on your commute instead of driving a car).
Similarly, to lose unhealthy weight, either reduce calories in (stop drinking sweet sodas and eating candy bars, order 500-800 calorie items from appetizer menus instead of 2000 calorie entrees) or increase calories out (exercise, take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk instead of ride, lift weights to improve resting calorie burning.)
But it's hard to come up with specifics that apply to everyone, since everyone is different. That's why we just say the general rule, instead of assuming people have an expensive car to sell or go through a 2 liter of Coke a day.
Health and medicine startups are really difficult. Not impossible, but the forces are all stacked against you. I hope and pray some startups can succeed, but the system in the US is set up to perpetuate the broken healthcare system. Sometimes, I feel efficiency and health are almost not a goal.
I realize this is vague, but I've learned this lesson the hard way. I'm on year-3 of a health startup full-time. We actually moved overseas to trail the product in a single-payer nation. The single-payer system offers incentives generally aligned across all parties. In the US, many incentives are antagonistic, making it difficult to sell products. Please the insurer and you piss off the hospital. Please the hospital and you piss off the doctor. Lower costs and you piss off the hospital and doctor. Ect, etc.
It is easy to make products, but difficult to find buyers even when there is obvious value. Perhaps this will change with ACOs. Most successful startups in healthcare I've seen operate on the periphery or actually mold to ease the broken system itself (e.g., Castlight Health)
The problem is very much political with a move away from highways design focusing on strategic mobility, the movement of people and goods over long distances, to sustainable mobility, the movement of people over short distances (0-5 miles) and the provision of systematically safe infrastructure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aNtsWvNYKE
It's a really really hard political problem to solve as the impacts are measured in decades but the returns are huge.
From a technology point of view, the solution is the bicycle.
The key problem however always comes down to the perception that the roads are too dangerous and this is a political in nature usually requiring the re-allocation of road space from parking.
Yes. Sugar is the enemy. It's ironic that so many substances are regulated or flat-out prohibited and not sugar or sodas. HFCS should be outlawed, and sodas regulated like alcohol (no sales to minors, bulk sales limited, etc.)
Also, the obsession with fats and the whole industry of low-fat food needs to be dealt with, as, obviously, when the proportion of fat decreases, the proportions of the other components rise.
The problem is over-consumption of refined sugars. This is a problem because the results of sugar metabolism (particularly fructose) are highly reactive (which is why they are so easy to metabolize), and can mess up your biochemistry by reacting with proteins and other macromolecules. The phytochemicals in plant sugar sources seem to reduce the biochemical side reactions of sugar metabolism which is probably why the plants synthesize many of them in the first place.
Refined sugars tend to spike the concentration of sugar in your body, leading to more possibility for reactions. Secondly, without the phytochemical stabilizers, the incidence of side-reactions is greater.
The body is a complex system, we need to stop trying to analyze it as if it were linear and reducible.
The theory that the problem is sugar – and not fat – does line up pretty well with available evidence.
I'm not obese in the meaning that I am very unhealthy. I am mostly okay but I can definitely lose 15kg and feel much better (done it before).
But when I tried using some tech, what happened? Yes, sure, scour an app full of thousands of meals to say what exactly I am eating every time? Sure! (Especially having in mind it's not at all tuned to Bulgarian cuisine.) It's comical and it's so bad. Motivational reminder apps? Gosh, I want to smash the head of the people who thought this was a good idea. I guess they work for many others, definitely not for me and a whole large group of humans though. It's annoying and corny and nothing else.
If I can put a bracelet on my wrist and it can track my pulse, sleep and maybe scan my veins for the chemicals coursing through my body, and if I get a smartphone app that can photograph my food and do precise automatic calorie counting, then I am in. (Also if the bracelet can detect my workouts.)
Before that, forget it. It turns something that you should feel good about, into a series of awful menial chores. The current state of affairs is, as I mentioned in the start, straight out hilarious. The tech is primitive.
Can't speak to your calories comments, but I do think that hobbies and distractions and habits and apps can help move people in the right direction.
- How can I determine the best time to sleep?
- What food to eat before sleep?
- How can I be productive all the way until I fall asleep?
- Why no sleep drug without harsh side effects?
Just a few things I'd like to see research into...
See Apple and OPPO and Vivo.
The next (or after the next) Microsoft-Google-Apple-Facebook size tech company will be a healthcare company.
There is no reason access to healthcare can't be as streamlined and cheap as calling an Uber. In addition to diagnosis AI should be able to strip out nearly all of the administrative & clerical layer. Self driving vehicles + drones can reduce the need for large complex hospitals. All of this could not just be a convenience, but mandatory in a post-antibiotic world.
Because of regulatory issues, while this may be an American company, it would be available for Americans for quite some time.
So my question is why isnt obesity prevalent in this part of the world?
but how is this an untapped opportunity when there are already tons of products and companies trying to solve it? short of building an app that evaporates body fat?
some of these apps do work. i know a lot of people who had success counting calories with MyFitnessPal. but you cant force everybody to count calories. you cant force people to count their steps. so i just dont understand what opportunity you see here.
Yes, decreasing caloric intake can cause weight gain - I want to know what the most effective ones to cut are, and replace them with less potently delivered ones.
It is like that old joke about taking cold shower every morning for 100 years.
You know that cheesecake is not very good for you, but what is the alternative? You eat that celery stalk but where does it get you?
The best case scenario - raw food eating Jack Lalanne dead at 96. His death heavily shook my belief in healthy eating.
Worst case scenario his brother Norman Lalanne and everyones favorite Jeanne Clement neither of which were much for exercise and Jeanne indulged in smokes and chocolate.
Sure those are anecdotes but we do not have any healthy 150 year olds.
Obesity kills, but non-obesity kills just slightly slower. Slower I define as 10-70 years slower.
We need meaningful progress with other aspects of aging (telomere shortenings, cancers etc) before we can tackle obesity.
IMO the general aproach to maximize money is broken as it incentiveses crminal behavior (banks, volkswagen come to mind immediately). This problem would be really interesting to solve, but I don't think that's doable by a single startup as it is a political or social problem.
If you go into a caloric deficit your body will give a hormonal response. This response determines if your body will start using your fat reserves, your muscles or will just shut down. This hormonal response is dependent not only on how much you eat, but also on what you eat.
Eating a diet low in carbs enables your body to use up stored fat more easily and will leave you less hungry then a low fat diet. This makes it MUCH easier to stick to your diet.
The main cause of cardiovascular disease is hypertension, which is 100% treatable at very low cost and with very high safety. I haven't checked the numbers lately, but it's not too far off to note that only 50% of hypertension is diagnosed and only 50% of patients take their medications.
So, the lapse is not in medical science -- we know what to do -- but in healthcare delivery.
Yes people can exercise as its own thing too, but realistically it's way easier to get most people consistently exercising if it's something they're doing as a part of their regular daily activities.
Lot's of folks have rebutted with the various ways this is an oversimplification, I won't recap them here.
I will however add another overlooked factor that most folks don't know about: Our gut bacteria is responsible for a lot of pre-processing, and their efficiency varies a lot depending on the mix of strains you happen to have.
So, identical twins, with identical lifestyles and diets, can still have very different experiences with weight gain and loss.
Fortunately, this is actually something that (once the mechanisms are better understood) can be fixed quite simply with a fecal transplant.
Hobbies involving exercise may be an exception, but when you're already overweight, these often aren't so much "hobbies" as ordeals, and unlikely to function as any kind of reward.
As someone in the market, it'd help quite a bit if there were healthier and tasty alternatives. Unfortunately, the current offers seem to be expensive and hard to get (if you have to order a whole box over the 'net, forget it).
To be able to eat healthier requires weaning yourself off high salt/sugar foods to get reacclimitized to food that has those substances in proportions that we've evolved to handle.
That might be the best thing to do right now, for startups - how can you build technology such that it improves the science behind obesity research?
Secondly, exercise can help promote weight loss, but it seems to work best when combined with a lower calorie eating plan. If people don’t curb their calories, however, they likely need to exercise for long periods of time or at a high intensity to lose weight.
As someone who works out daily; the point at which I was in the best shape of my life was when I was consuming large amounts of fats. Peanut butter, olive oil, etc. I also find it really really hard to believe that protein would cause obesity; I've heard the exact opposite.
People have been posting similar studies of Indian and Asian countries, basing their recommendations for everyone off that subset of the population, and then completely discount that of traditional European, African, and American diets.
For some people eating is even more addictive than Facebook or Candy Crush.
We're currently developing a mobile app + clinician dashboard combo working towards a preventive health solution. Our main focus is diabetes right now but cardiovascular disease, prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes are all in our sights here early on.
Many of the apps functions revolve around simple dietary and exercise solutions to combat these illnesses. We also plan on using IBM's Watson to improve suggestions for the patient and the doctor.
We're still early, but check us out at https://kingfit.org
Props for using Shopify!
I love the SV mindset: Let's not get to the reasons of something, let's just build an app and everything will be good.
Please don't post uncharitable generalizations about entire groups here. It's just a rhetorical device and reliably degrades discussion.
Your comment would be just fine if you'd omitted that swipe.
To address a couple of the things you mentioned:
Better education: It's true -- when it comes to health and nutrition, there's a lot of misinformation out there and a general lack of knowledge of even the basics. Most people are not great at determining how many calories are in a meal, whether something is good for them, or even just remembering what they've eaten on a given day. There's a huge opportunity for technology to help people figure this stuff out and learn to make better choices (full disclosure: I work on an app in this space [1]).
Taxing unhealthy food: While we can't levy taxes, there are ways to provide similar incentives, for example by automatically giving people cash rebates when they purchase healthy food [2].
Can the tech industry solve obesity on its own? Maybe not. But I'd argue that trying to address what we can is a better option than throwing up our hands and saying it's a social problem.
Why not, for example, a drug that suppresses appetite? We have many already. Technology has an endless supply of solutions.
One thing people can do in a case like this is email us at hn@ycombinator.com to let us know that the top subthread has veered off-topic. We intervene when we see that but we need your help to see everything.
"Fats make you fat" is a flat-out lie.
The effects of carbs - especially carbs with plenty of refined sugar - are the developed world's number one health care expense. They don't just cause obesity and diabetes, they also create inflammation which leads to heart conditions, strokes, and other life-changing disorders.
Unfortunately the food labelling industry has been promoting falsehoods for most of its existence. Labelling carbs more clearly, licensing sodas and diet sodas to limit access, and starting health programs to educate the population about carb abuse would do more to improve public health than anything else.
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/michaelpellmanrowland/files/2...
I know there are a lot of HN readers who have used the Keto diet with considerable success, for example. And there are a good number of other diets that work for many people too whilst allowing an ad libitum approach to eating.
Sure, that's what I meant.
The obvious angle would be to prove efficacy and then try again to sell in the US (both my co-founder and I were both and raised in the US so we'd love to move back.) Another angle might be to try and sell in the UK or other single payer systems that are closer to home.
There are some emerging IOT products (like smart cups) that we plan on interfacing with that may aid in this process.
In short my answer is not yet. But interfacing with IOT health tracking products is a huge part of our platform.
But automating food intake logging sounds difficult…
The easiest diet is a diet filled with starchy vegetables and fruits. It fills you up insanely, it's low on calories, and is extremely hard to overconsume.
Try eating a cup of beans, try eating two cups of beans. Practically impossible to do at one sitting. Try eating 10 bananas, extremely hard to do all at once.
People just don't realize how much calorically dense foods they eat and how little their physical activity is.
Surely there's not an objective ideal weight for any particular person?
Humans are driven by biology, and psychology is only a thin abstraction on top of that. The amount of self-discipline any single individual can deploy is very limited. If that discipline threshold gets used up on other things, it's not going to be available for food and diet.
Consider on top of this that most of us have been socialized and trained for decades to prefer unhealthy options, and the already-steep incline of resisting the body's physically preferred options becomes treacherous.
Most fat people aren't fat becomes they're snarfing down platters that are meant to feed six in every sitting. They're fat because the foods they eat provide low nutrition and high calories, and candy bars aren't the only food with such a profile. Most packaged foods that you can buy at a regular, non-niche grocer are that way, even the ones that are touted as healthy. Food companies do this because they know people like foods with more calories more than they like foods with fewer calories, and they want you to buy their foods more often.
Technology got us into this mess by creating an easily-accessible supply of hyper-caloric foods, an amount of plenty that our bodies, built for scarcity, are not at all equipped to handle. Technology should be employed to fix it. Whether it's human-side or food-side, something needs to be developed that can blackhole the excess calories with no noticeable impact on the eating experience, either in taste or chemical reward.
The other alternative is to revert to a food supply where artificial contrivances such as candy and foods injected with sugars and other unnatural taste-improving formulations are very rare. This is not possible while we live in a society of abundance. It will only be possible if there is famine, hardship, war, etc. So it's not a good option.
"Just try harder" is never going to be a real answer to this problem, and the stats clearly bear that out. People hate being fat. They spend billions of dollars every year desperately trying to find someone who can fix it for them. We should try to address that in a reasonable way.
Caffeine.
Obese people often have a low socio-economic status [1]. If you are marginalized, eating may be an outlet for frustration. You won't buy special stuff to lose weight.
Everyone here was surprised when Trump got elected (except Peter Thiel). "Nerd nation" [2] is a huge bubble -- the majority of our society is different. The won't buy any drugs or apps.
[1] http://www.noo.org.uk/uploads/doc/vid_7929_Adult%20Socioeco%... [2] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advan...
It's not that obese people don't care or don't know, or that they enjoy living an unhealthy lifestyle. There's a lot of complex factors that are involved, but the basic factor is this: humans are evolved to strongly prefer high calorie foods, and we've made high-calorie foods available in unprecedented quantities while also requiring less physical energy expenditure than ever before. Our bodies don't know how to deal with that.
It's been thoroughly proven over the last 30 years that self-control can't be relied upon to prevent this. When you throw someone into a situation where all of their biological functions are pushing them toward acquiring a biological reward that is so abundant they have to actively avoid it, the options are very limited. That person is going to have a lot of difficulty refraining from acquiring the reward. That's true for everyone, and the issue is generally only avoided if your body has never learned the reward in the first place or if you've trained your body to forget the reward (and in both of these situations, as soon as your body learns to desire that reward, you're back at risk).
We need a solution that a) constrains the supply of hyper-caloric foods, which is not practical, because again, if it's available, good luck keeping it out of peoples' hands; or b) modifies either the foods or the consumers of said food so that the excessive calories are neutralized and the same neurological rewards are obtained.
[0] http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/05/02/what-the-60-billion-...
Here is an interesting article with an important take away: "In general, it seems that the more processed foods are the more they actually give us the number of calories we see on the box" https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-hidden-t...
So I guess eating processed food vs food that's hard to digest actually matters a decent bit if you're counting calories (10-15% of your calories is not insignificant - that's almost half of what you're trying to cut on a calorie restriction diet)
[1]http://www.peanut-institute.org/images/materials_10_19046826...
If I eat mainly sugar and starches I can easily wolf down 4000 calories a day. If I eat a low carb diet it's a struggle to eat 2000 calories a day, the feeling of hunger isn't the growl in my stomach but a kind of mild headache, and after a couple of days my cravings for sugar subsides. The idea that some foods are more "satiating" than others is important, and involves many factors from calorie density to palatability.
Our bodies also regulate our desires for energy input and output. If I am depressed, exhausted or do not get enough sleep I will crave carbohydrates. If I eat certain foods I will feel lethargic and be more inclined to sink into the couch for the evening.
"Eat less, move more" to lose weight is true, but not useful. How you encourage people to do that that is the domain of biology and psychology, not physics.
1.) You will underperform in work and life in general. You will be constantly tired, appear lazy to employer (practically speaking be lazy) and will make slower stupider decisions. You may end up weighting less, but will have hard time to keep up at work.
2.) Your body will adapt and become much more efficient in extracting calories from food - people who lost weight through fasting tend to gain weight very quick. Most of them can not keep the weight long term. That practically means you gain weight first time there is longer stressful period in work or life - when all your focus goes to project you are working on o family care or whatever.
3.) You do not eat just for calories - you need also various proteins, vitamins and what not. You are damaging your body by not giving it what it needs more then by being slightly overweight.
Yes, people who don't eat at all loose weight, but there is price to pay on their health and performance. It is true that western people tend to eat way more calories then necessary, but "just eat small portions till you have target weight" advice does not work long term.
TL;DR: Total energy in matters, but watching energy-to-vital-nutrient-ratios in one's food is a better way of ensuring the proper levels of both.
Edit: wording
The issue of course is that we use it in the context of different kinds of food and a simplistic assumption about how effective we are at converting a calorie in each into a burnable form.
2000 calories of energy from custard will be processed, stored and used differently than 2000 calories of energy from chicken.
If we really did eliminate the excess, nobody would be overweight.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manuf...
Also you're mixing up many different aspects. Feeling sleepy doesn't mean you're sleepy. Motivation is a different thing altogether.
So power through?
Getting sleepy is your brain telling you to preserve energy. Only sometimes it does that because something about the work itself bores, infuriates, disgusts, or otherwise upsets you.
That means getting "procrastination-sleepy" is your brain trying to prevent spending energy on the miniature emotional turmoil "breaking procrastination".
This is what you need to do. Do you need more specifics?
This is not complicated. The calories are listed on everything you eat. Eat fewer of them until you start losing weight.
You can eat more than you use and not gain weight if you are not metabolising the food efficiently, but you can't eat less than you use and not lose weight. The former is limited by how badly you are able to mess up your body, the latter is limited by the fundamental laws of physics.
If you're at a calorie deficit, you will lose weight no matter what you're eating or what state your body is in.
Some amount of bacon a lot less than that provides all the nutrition to be gained from any amount; anything further is just waste.
I can straight up eat sugar only too for a month and have the same weight loss results, also diabetes.
I totally agree that we shouldn't throw our hands up. However, the consequence is not to do just some stuff just because you know web development, but to think on a larger scale.
It seems like a big trend of our time that no one wants to do politics. With politics I don't mean being a bureaucrat, but to express your opinions and trying to change something on a normative level. Effective Altruism, tackling injustice by consuming "fair" products, social entrepreneurship: All these things seem to be just for soothing our consciences.
What we miss is to actually change something. The current political situation is the product of this individual politicising.
The first six months you stay the weight you are now. We then introduce a single change: we put you on antipsychotic medication. Nothing else changes: you're eating the same type of food and in the same quantities.
You will gain weight.
Is that because thermodynamics is broken? No.
Is it because you're "undisciplined"? No.
Is it because the antipsychotic medication is full of delicious calories? No.
It's because your carbohydrate pathwathway has been altered, and you now process carbs differently to how you used to.
Bodybuilders and martial artists do this all the time.
Calories in, calories out is indeed how it works, but people also need to realize that your body is not a static machine, it reacts to its environment. Restrict caloric intake too much and you hit a point where your body enters a 'starvation mode,' it holds back on as much work as it can and holds everything it doesn't use. If you have problems absorbing foods due to problems with your GI tract, you might find that you don't need to restrict too much before that happens because you weren't getting all the calories you thought you were before.
Of course, reducing calories will cause your body to change some of what it does even if you have no other issues, so for maximum benefit, you should pair it with exercise.
I've also restricted myself to 1500 calories a day for the past month or so and have lost about 10 lbs so far and am on track to lose a similar amount in a similar time as yourself. My wife did the same thing at the same time, it's not going anywhere near as smooth for her, but she has GI issues.
It reduces a complex problem into a simplistic slogan that's then used by many people to hate and judge fat people. "You're fat, just eat less stupid fatty".
It ignores gut microbiome. Here's a story about a bug that makes it harder to gain weight: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22458428 and another bit of research about people who are obese: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05...
It ignores "satiety". It ignores all the psycho-social stuff going on around food.
It ignores changed metabolic pathways (one of the reasons people who take antipsychotic medications are overweight is because of the changes to their metabolism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC487012/)
Yeah, because they mostly don't do it.
The things you're focusing on are _mostly_ micro and not macro, for 99.999% of obese individuals, CICO would help them lose weight. There are exceptions to every rule tho.
The whole point is that it doesn't help them lose weight because it's unsustainable. Fat people can't manage to do that for more than a few weeks.
The rigid focus on the least useful fact (CICO) means that you're failing to give any useful, usable, information.
What is the proposed alternative though? Most people need a general rule they can follow to help them (read: can't afford a nutritionist/doctor). If it's a willpower issue, then we need to solve that, but just saying "Oh eating less won't help me" is just as bad.
The matter of fact is that telling people about things they do wrong tends to not be very effective in general. It's not an indictment of a particular topic.
We know there is conservation of mass and energy in nature. Any chemical engineer can write mass and energy balance equations that represent this conservation.
Calories in = Calories out is an simplified form of a more complex energy balance equation that looks something like this:
(Enthalpy in) - (Enthalpy out) + (Heat/Energy crossing boundary) - (Work) = (Change in Internal Energy/Accumulation)
... plus a few more equations that represent component energy balances.
Calories in = Calories out makes some naive assumptions and neglects all the internal biochemical reactions, and hence presents a skewed picture of the thermodynamics.
(Enthalpy in) - (Enthalpy out) + (Heat/Energy crossing boundary) - (Work) - (Change in Internal Energy/Accumulation) = 0
But when you state it like you did, there's an implication that the left hand side are the causal factors and that(Change in internal energy/accumulation) is the effect coming out of those causal factors. The problem is that there are many people with deranged metabolisms where their bodies are hormonally imbalanced to increased internal energy accumulation, which then by necessity disrupt the rest of the equation by either raising food intake or reducing energy expenditure.
http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257
>> Most people believed that fat is converted to energy or heat, which violates the law of conservation of mass. We suspect this misconception is caused by the “energy in/energy out” mantra and the focus on energy production in university biochemistry courses.
The energy balance equation is a fundamental thermodynamic equation. It is inherently coupled with mass balance equations. If we didn't get this right, we wouldn't have been able to design chemical reactors all these years.
Unfortunately because enthalpy is a more abstract concept, it isn't very appealing to folks who like simplifications like calories in = calories out. It is, however, the correct concept.
Basically it says that the metabolic mechanism of fructose is different from other forms of nutrition. Our bodies have no good ways to break it down without harming ourselves. The long term effects of eating fructose are comparable to long term alcohol drinking. I assume nobody would say that calories from alcohol are the same as other food sources?
There is a huge amount of scientific literature (see summaries by Gary taubes, for example) that show that calorie counting is not the whole picture when it comes to health or obesity. It's also definitely not a golden rule.
Not to say it's not a useful diet method. Just that there are a lot of factors that go into "calories out"-- what calories are being used for energy and what are stored as fat. How fast are you burning calories? Hormones are a big part of that. You can see this very clearly in hyper/hypo thyroid patients.
Hormones only can not explain the percentage of overweight people in western countries. 50% of the population does not have hormones fucked up enough to not lose weight.
Also, famine makes you passive, tired and well, less bright. There is a reason why famine prone areas dont produce tech hubs and nobel prize winners.
There are other health problems due to this "extreme diet" but being overweight is not one. So if you want to lose weight do like them and eat less than what your body needs.
As for calories in/out being a simplification, while it is mostly true, the tricky bit is that calories out actually varies wildly with the foods you eat. Your body's hormonal milieu changes very significantly with what you eat, and that has a massive impact on your biochemistry. Additionally, the microbes in your gut have certain food preferences, and they can metabolize a significant fraction of the calories you eat. Thus, hormonal shifts and rate of microbial metabolism can spike your "calories out" far above what would be predicted by BMR and activity level (and the reverse is unfortunately true as well).
Since each person has a different gut microfauna, if we had a system to measure my gut and compute what foods would be good for me, we could design custom diets for each person.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lustig [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Taubes [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
It's free on Amazon Prime Video if anyone wants to watch it. I'm still only halfway through it though, so if he suddenly says we should just eat helium at the end I'm sorry. :P
I wouldn't classify as a trick per se but a awareness that manufacturers tend to pack processed foods with a lot more addictive items to sell more.
For example, a lot of food has added sugar under many different names. This was to add "taste" when everything went to "non" or "low" fat.
I see Paleo and its ilk to be a pull back from the processed food direction.
By that logic, I consider Paleo to be a trick. Not in the dishonest "deceive" sense, but rather in the card trick sense, or the "one neat trick" life-hack sense.
Like nutrition.
That's the problem. Lack of self control. Generally a result of psychological issues such as comfort eating or straight up food addiction. Doesn't change the fact that if those people were disciplined enough, they could still become healthy.
If you want to lose weight and you are not, eat less. If the amount you eat goes below say 1200 calories and you're still not losing weight, go to a doctor.
It's that simple.
The role of sugar (especially fructose) and carbohydrate intake in obesity is very important, and there's far more to it than that.
I think it'd be a lot more challenging for someone to be obese with the same caloric amount of avocados than cheetos, for example.
Plus, if something violated a law of thermodynamics, that law would have changed. And it hasn't.
This exactly why I mentioned consistent exercise. Exercise will speed up your metabolism as it causes the breakdown of muscle mass and other tissues which then need to be repaired and improved by your body. You can push exercise even further by buying into linear progression and training your body to rebuild itself in order to adapt to your training regimen.
>research shows that exercise is, for most people, counterproductive for weight loss because they wind up eating afterwards than the calories they burn
This is not an argument against my position. This is caused by a lack of discipline. Also, eating after exercise can be a good thing. The effects of a heavy weight lifting session will linger for several days and burn far more calories than the actual session itself. The muscle that was damaged during the training session needs high quality nutrients to be rebuilt. I, for one, usually eat a philly cheese steak or hamburger if I have a really intense training session because I know I need the fat and protein. People seem to think that exercise is a means to burn calories. It is not. Exercise is a means to an end. For some people, it's strength, for others it may be rock climbing. For others still, it may be for general health.
>Yes, exercise leads to general better health, but that's a very different goal from losing weight
My argument is that losing weight is a means to becoming healthy. You cannot become healthy without a well balanced diet AND consistent exercise. If your goal is simply to lose weight, exercise will aid you in that endeavor AS LONG AS your diet is in order.
Becoming healthy is not a diet. It's not going to the gym once a week. Becoming healthy is a lifestyle choice and not everyone has the foresight and discipline to do it. If someone doesn't have that discipline and self control, that's fine. Just done blame it on genetic issues or confusion. Say it like it is, you're(general you) just lazy. And that's OK.
The pill for men won't make it. My prediction is that we'll have some other non-hormonal contraception within the next 20-30 years, probably invented by a startup that wants to disrupt this billion dollar market.
From what I understand, "they" have already developed this, and trialed it. It worked great, but for many men it had certain undesirable side-effects, and for a very few the side-effects weren't good at all. But for most, it worked well.
The interesting thing? Almost all of the side-effects that were experienced by the men in the study all sounded exactly like the side-effects women experience when they are on "the pill"!
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the reason we don't have a male hormonal-based contraceptive is actually because men can't handle the changes and problems women have been dealing with for decades.
The whole thing is annoying because I've now seen the whole "lol boys can't handle what girls put themselves through on the pill" from print news, reddit, buzzfeed, my girlfriend's gynecologist, and now hacker news. It would be great if male contraception existed, and lots of men would be fine with the side effects, but permanent sterilization is a whole different ballgame as far as risk factors go.
It's also worth noting that the effects of current birth control on women are bad enough that a decent fraction of women can't use one or more methods. There's still substantial room for improvement on the side effects that women face.
The legal and regulatory system basically makes it a losing proposition to make a new contraceptive - you could give sugar pills to everyone and someone will have a bad reaction and the lawyers will sue you into bankruptcy.
And many more suffer from side effects that they don't even attribute anymore to hormonal contraceptives after years of intake.
Do you think that daily medication for half of the population is acceptable? Because if so, you could also argue that lots of people might benefit from taking happy pills every day.
Taking medication for every little uncomfort might be more accepted in the US, but it doesn't mean that this is a healthy view of the body and the world.
No need to mess with the entire hormone system.
But honestly since i dont use it anymore i feel better and more relaxed. Relevant stuff i dont forget and irrelevant stuff is irrelevant.
> Checkout "Notebooks 8" for iOS.
Might be good but misses several requirements :-)
What do you mean by this? Do you just mean a raw HTML/markdown editor and a rendered view?
Sooner or later (IoT, AR, VR) we will have to let devices (AI) to assembly the final user interface.
I imagine something like this: we designers / developers / UI architects are creating plenty of interconnectable components describing our idea of a product covering all scenarios and use cases.
Then the device will asemmbly the final UI based on the individual user, and the device capability.
For example a watch will display something different than a large digital billboard on a skyscraper.
And everyone of us will see a different design each time we look at a display, based on our individual digital history (Data mining).
The point is predetermined design must be advanced to on-demand, context based, liquid design. We let the big picture be assembled by third party, we focus only to smaller components.
Something like
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/1/community-organ...
This is because the advertising industry is in a bit of a decline at the moment, and it's likely than in a few years things like AdBlock will make many ad funded businesses (like media outlets) completely unsustainable. So if anyone finds a good alternative, it will probably make them rich.
Just... good luck finding said solution, given that we've tried ads, donations, subscriptions and microtransactions and found that all four have major problems as far as getting people to actually use them goes. Still, the opportunity is there for whatever miracle worker figures out a way to make content profitable again.
Figure out how to use CRISPR to insert or edit genes that we already know help to make some people practically bullet proof when it comes to cholesterol and common cardiovascular problems. Patent everything you can around using CRISPR to fight high cholesterol (the drug market for that is truly massively). Move fast, right now, while most of the pharma giants are asleep at the wheel (most of big pharma is a minimum of five years behind the curve, they always try to buy their way out of it after the fact).
Congratulations, you're now a billionaire.
Thanks for the recommendation though.
I'd love to know of a service that will write the test plans in Selenium or Ghost Inspector etc.
Cities help people connect (in a physical way), and help companies provide goods and services to them in a more efficient way.
However, cities today are maintained, operated, and enlarged based on legacy. I think there are huge inefficiencies, and yet it seems that trying to fix existing ones is a nightmare.
What about NEW ones instead?
I find this extremely interesting. We'll see.
There are definitely members looking on how it would to start a company based on solving cities' problems.
Specific problems:
1. Why is brick and mortar still so popular, and can any pain points with e-commerce be fixed?
2. E-commerce doesn't work well on cheap items where shipping cost is prohibitive. Different companies have tried to solve this in various ways, with Prime (losing money on cheaper sales in hopes they can reduce logistics cost and drive larger sales) or Jet (directly giving shipping savings for ordering multiple items at once). It will be difficult to compete with Prime, but there has to be an angle that works, Jet found one.
3. Simpler price comparison. I tried to build the feature I thought should exist at https://icanpriceit.com/ as a side project, but didn't spend the time to properly launch it. I hope some startup succeeds in that space, I've been watching https://wikibuy.com/ which is quite similar.
I think there's plenty of room to build the next Amazon or eBay. The fees they charge third party sellers have been going up over time, if a marketplace was willing to accept lower fees at first it could help early growth.
One thing I much prefer B&M shopping for is clothing. Sizing is so wildly variable across brands, and clothing such a tactile thing, that I cannot completely get away from physical storefronts.
The tech is mostly there, but I'm too lazy to put it altogether as I know that someone with access to more capital will also attack it, sooner or later, not just startup but IKEA, Airbnb, etc...
[0]: http://architecture.nd.edu/research-publications/dharma/
Edit: formatting
http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/computer-simulation-antib...
We live in the dark ages of startup capital investment, and it's as hard to get investment as it was to get an education in the 1400s: you had to be rich, privileged, then go to a center of University learning. Geographically speaking, it is as bad today. Today, you have to go to silicon valley (as in, physically drag your body there) or one of a few other major startup centers (which give much poorer results), then somehow network your way into getting introductions. it is like being a scientist in the fifteenth century. enormous privilege and very difficult to achieve, with no clear path. Disrupting these geographic facts of capital investment and access to the startup and equity culture and markets is massive - when this starts to change, it will completely change the face of the planet in every way, for everyone.
If you want to make the most massive disruption you can make in your lifetime, disrupt the geography of startup ecosystems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
AFAIK there's little to no innovation in this field aside from the occasional electronic voting machine, whose security may or may not be totally un-hackable.
In a day & age where the internet reaches every home, & there's a web browser in nearly everyone's pocket, it shouldn't be that difficult to effectively discern the will of the people. But we're still depending on manual polling, which as the recent US election has shown, is woefully inaccurate. Why are these still done on the phone? Why do people still have to physically go to a neighborhood voting location? Why are elected officials still allowed to make empty promises while campaigning with no follow-through once they're in office?
These are solvable problems which I'd imagine technology can indeed address.
Yet, computer security is hard. Like, holy shit, all the problems of physical security combined with all the problems of network security. Decentralized paper balloting limits things to just the relatively-well-understood physical side while limiting the scope for the damage of a breach. It turns out there are distinct advantages to this approach that justify it over something web-based.
Elected officials making empty promises is a social problem. Technology can't help us there.
I'm old enough that I now go to the doctor more frequently than I used to and it's a mess. A health insurance company that could reliably allow a user to change their address on a website would be competitive. Having all of your medical procedures and orders accessible through a simple CRUD app would be a threat to a lot of multi-billion dollar companies. It's still all done through phone calls and faxes and there are lots of mistakes and it's hugely inefficient. I went to the ER last year and got 5 different bills from different departments of the same hospital. The online payment portal doesn't work unless you call them to set it up. That's not the hospital network I usually go to - my usual provider is probably worse.
I'd pay a lot (probably more than I would for my laptop / car) for a tool that would help me breathe fresh air in the midst of a polluted environment.
Of course, a long term solution would involve actually reducing pollution, but there are enough of us suffering from a lack of fresh air, that a short-term solution would be greatly valuable.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/man-sells-bri...
Apple recently removed apps from Iranian developers who were circumventing restrictions by pretending to be from another country.
Millions of other developers can't participate in online markets we take for granted, unless someone facilitates it for them.
Building full fledged models / generations of popular cities and places and leasing them to film producers. Its cheaper for them to lease than it would be to hire full devs and designers to start from scratch..I know there is some 're-use' in place by these companies such as pixar and disney. Re-use is not what i am talking about though. I am talking about movies like transformers / godzilla / etc which need on point rendering of actual cities and places.
Just a thought I had the other day when reading how film companies were struggling with growing movie budgets and diminishing returns.
- Twitter w/out fake accounts.
- a marketplace that uses Facebook as a vehicle for engagement/promotion but which operates independently.
- Secure SMS for 2FA tokens
- Android w/out Play Services
- Schema-based email
- Stripe for the rest of the World
this is China
This is easy, I've done this for years. Install LineageOS without Google Apps, use F-Droid.
Check out CopperheadOS
If a couple thousand people all simultaneously buy into an "affordable dense-ish urban area", that action would make that area un-affordable, and subsequently create all the same displacement/gentrification/nimby problems that follow. Your Detroit example is a good one, the dense-ish urban area now costs around $300-400k, because people already did what you've suggested. Unless your moving into lower-density mostly-suburban-ish areas in Detroit, your not really saving any money anymore.
--
If your going to "Kickstarter" a city, let's make a brand new one. Find a bunch of empty land (greenfield or brownfield), and build a whole new dense city from scratch on it. This is easy/cheap to do compared to actual urban development (it's how all affordable suburban housing already starts), but just skip the suburb part and go straight from land to tall density, so there's no existing population to harm, no existing zoning issues to fight, no existing infrastructure problems to deal with. Go from nothing to 100% modern on day 1.
You could buy a bunch of land near say (picking a place at random) Hazelwood, Minnesota. Build your city with dense urban environment to start (enforce your own density rules, straight to 5+ story buildings). Fund an expension of light rail, and your just 30 minutes away from MSP airport by train, with direct flights daily to NYC, SFO, and SEA. And your already on I-35 freeway for freight.
There's such a shortage for affordable dense urban housing, that if you could provide affordable density with fast reliable transportation to existing cities (light rail to the closest major airport), your new city would likely fill up quickly, and help make these existing cities more affordable too.
When both consumers and providers have no idea how much the product or service they are using actually costs, there is no way to control costs (ie competition, delaying the service, using an alternative product/service, etc). Thus our prices have spiraled out of control.
For example, delivering a baby is an incredibly common procedure, known months in advance, but with opaque pricing paid by third parties, there is no incentive to price shop, nor is that straightforward for a consumer to do. The current average price of a routine delivery is over $8k [1].
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/costs-of-delivering-babies-va...
No. Heavens no. It's way more complex than this. This isn't even on the Top 10 list of reasons American healthcare is a shambles. And it does nothing to explain why healthcare is so much better in every other Western democracy -- even and especially in places where there's less transparency about pricing than in the US.
What will improve medicine in the US is putting everybody in the same risk pool. Every other solution is a losing bet. Stop foisting the old, the poor, the chronically ill, and veterans onto the government rolls while handing the low-risk middle over to for-profit corporations for milking.
The "free market" is a notoriously bad fit for healthcare, which is why no other country does it.
Again there is NO single item that will solve the "healthcare" issue. Voodoo Free Market ...
You don't price shop. Your OB/GYN has admitting privileges to 1-2 hospitals in the area. You go to the one that your OB/GYN is AT and is closest to you.
When the Anaesthesiologist trainee fucks up your epidural, you're going to whip out your phone to call another ? Not fucking likely. You're passed out at that point.
Fucking Christ people, you have a relationship with your Doctor.
"Come down to Joe's Oil, Tire and Baby Delivery Shop" $19.95 oil changes, $59.95 Baby deliveries. Additional charges may apply. (including emergency room access due to failed deliveries)
- Issue tracking (jira)
- Issue kanban (trello)
- Git repository
- Chat, via bundled Mattermost (gitter/slack)
- CI (jenkins)
- Docker registry
Plus, they're planning on adding even more features. We have a self-hosted instance at work and I use it for pretty much everything other than email and actually writing code.
By the way, we see Mattermost as an alternative for Slack but not for Gitter. One is team chat and the other is 'project' chat with different requirements.
Also, ballgame, I see what you did there.
1. There other forms of contraception, but all come with a significant risk of failure compared to the hormonal contraceptives. As a man I would like to have a reliable form of male contraceptive, but the current regulatory environment makes this impossible to sell.
* Ruby
* Rails
* Grape
* Go
* Redis
* Postgres
* QueueClassic
* GraphQL
* React with redux
* KVM
* Puppet
* Heroku
* AWS
Instead brands cater to certain demographics and their sizes are relative to the body types they try to attract. It's unlikely that a woman who regularly buys from NY&Company would expect something at Lane Bryant to fit them.
And tailoring/fashion add another layer of subjectivity. A pair of size 34 jeans are much tighter in Europe than the US, because that's de moda. And there's considerable variation between brands, depending on how they want you to look when you wear their stuff.
In the end, there's just no getting away from the fact that you'll need to try clothes on if you want a good fit.
"I'm a 12 in Brand X, but an 8 in Brand Y! I'll take Y!"
Also, it'll take a few seconds to pay via credit card, whereas converting the money on your account to bitcoins in the sellers account can easily take several hours.
>I think it'd be a lot more challenging for someone to be obese with the same caloric amount of avocados than cheetos, for example
As I've said elsewhere, the fact that some foods are more calorie dense than other is irrelevant.
And I was saying for the _same_ caloric amount, regardless of density. Never mind though, pretty clear you're a troll.
The current state of affairs is such that smart contracts are viable for things readily machine-verified. This does not apply to all things that might be promised by a politician today. This problem could be resolved by voting, but now we've reintroduced all the problems of politics and reinvented the Sierra Club / NRA / etc.
Additionally, it only matters if voter opinion is swayed by a failure to comply with the contract. At this moment in time, voters generally reserve the right to change their minds at any time and for any reason. It is possible that convincing voters to hang their votes entirely on a smart contract might prove challenging.
Birth is a perfect example to make your point of an existing, usually long term, relationship because of the typical women's health regimen. More usual however is you finding you need a procedure (maybe soon but not emergency), you then ask for a referral to a specialist or ask friends and do google searches to try to get a sense that the specialist isn't a quack. You could price shop at that point. Instead, the system is built upon referrals and kickbacks. Although, kickbacks are illegal now so they form physician groups which is basically a kickback in the form of profit sharing.
No doubt, but please don't fulminate here.
Yes. Like Amazon and Google, with their contact us for pricing.
I have projects that are 10 years old. The code isn't unusable, but I know I can do better. Sometimes adapting the old code just makes it ugly, hard to maintain, and error prone. So when it makes sense, I usually start fresh.
- I actually wasn't talking about the women's pill at all - you can tell this by reading the post you're replying to.
- But yes, inability to have sex is not a common side effect of the female pill. Which I suspect you also already know.
Have you considered reading the HN guidelines?
Sure it can do similar things to Slack/MatterMost, but that's not the intention of what we're trying to do with it.
I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions while they were still coming up to speed.
The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the most important architectural decisions. And these mistakes could be avoided with questions like "What issues will we run into?" "What patterns should we follow?" "What are good resources to get started?"
For instance I recently joined a project that was built by devs coming up to speed on React. And boy did they abuse Flux, they didn't build a store for every drop-down but it's pretty damn close. However I really think a React Guru could have steered them around this mistake with just 30 minutes of his time.
Obviously the biggest problem is ensuring quality without having to hike rates too much.
Users can contact our experts through chat and video/voice calls.
Do sign up for Fliffr and try it out, we're on both iOS and Android stores, or visit https://www.fliffr.com . And if you have any feedback I'd love to hear it.
I also find it kind of amusing that you're advertising esports advice from a woman who plays on a CS:GO team which can't even compete with a mediocre ESEA-IM team... she might be an absolutely amazing teacher and amazing person to work with, but she isn't good at the game, which really undermines your marketing strategy.
However, I am not sure how I should charge. Since you don't have enough people offering the same skills I promote and I presume very low to inexistent demand, there is no price correction at this stage, nor market to begin with :(.
It would be useful if somehow your app could suggest a recommended fee for a given skill.
It looks like a great idea though!
https://i.imgur.com/KAPuVPv.png
For example, idgaf their name, let alone their username on a service I dont even use yet. This screen that should tell me everything, tells me nothing.
Best of luck. Promising idea.
It's exactly how you say it is, by spending some time identifying the biggest issues and then spending an hour with the team I can get them to rally around some easy fixes that'll be valuable for the business long-term.
Developers love it as their bosses finally understand the value of refactoring, and managers love it because they get actionable tips that'll help the business.
Making this a general platform would require a lot of good curation, but nothing impossible. Now you got me thinking…
And "visionaries". May be it's just me, but my defenses go up whenever I read a profile with visionary in it.
The trouble here is that the guru or consultant who comes in needs to understand the context of the problem, which can't be done in 30 mins.
we have a lot of architecture consultant companies which provide these services already.
Am I doing anything wrong isn't happening in 30 mins. Am I doing anything wrong with React is more than 30 mins. Am I abusing Flux? That sounds doable. videoconference with a live dev plus codebase access.
In a previous career I walked hundreds of consultants thru connecting to the telco WAN and ISP network that employed me, and I can't help you with everything but in 30 minutes I can easily tell you what is wrong with your BGP configuration or your frame relay configuration or your MPLS/ATM connection. At least WRT connecting to that employer, at least WRT connecting 15 years ago. The consultants knew their client networks inside and out, I mostly told them "no do not redistribute via RIP RFC1918 address space to us" or "no you really don't want to send us a 0/0 route" or "you think we'll accept a route for a.b.c.d/27 and you're actually sending it correctly but you not having sent us a LOA means I'm filtering it right out" or "you might want to think about enabling md5 authentication because we have, as our welcome letter you obviously didn't read, clearly explained" and yeah people actually tried stuff like that. Also people with obvious peculiar ideas about how BGP works WRT priority of routes and load balancing and stuff. Could I tell these "network administrator consultants" how to set up MCSE server stuff, well, no, but I sure told a lot of them how to configure Cisco WAN interfaces and how BGP works (or doesn't work)...
You can do a lot in 30 minutes over a narrow enough specialty.
That's something I've seen getting much worse over the past decade with the proliferation of frameworks. What you call "getting up to speed" is tempting to call "playing with". People work with tools that they have no knowledge of. Learning on the job is good, but I think one should have at least an idea of how the tools are supposed to be used and how they are implemented before doing anything else than throwaways.
I don't know how to fix it really, it more of a cultural thing than a technical. Knowledge must somehow be cool and respected again. Or maybe I'm just getting old and this is really a faster way of building things. I just can't think of any other area where professionals jump to the next tool without even learning the one they use.
Great in theory but difficult in practice. Developers rarely ever have the luxury to pick up a book as a means of getting up to speed when there exists online resources like Google and StackOverflow where you can easily find posts that answer your query string(s) verbatim.
In other words, the thing that makes software so unique and valuable, is the very thing that most organizations don't take advantage of. They think that if you throw it away, you are scrapping something akin to physical materials.
Shame, really.
Problems like this tend to be consequence of team that does not tolerate dissent. E.g. either clique that stamps out dissenters as obviously stupid or dominant individual eager to bully anybody who does not conform to his favorite cool aid. Someone would say that "maybe we are going too far" otherwise.
Consultant wont be able to solve that one in 30 minutes.
We specialize in AWS and Google Cloud, and can help with simple LAMP/MEAN stacks all the way to complex multi-region microservice architectures using Terraform, containerization, Kubernetes and beyond.
I teach CS (programming, web development, distributed systems) on a local university, but have been thinking if there would be people interested in having 1:1 access to someone with development and teaching experience, for 30 minutes or 1h..
http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/02/16/google-h...
they shut it down.
Real consulting at market (or even above-market) prices exist for a reason. The kind of people who will spend hours setting up a consult, to only officially charge for 30 minutes, are exactly the kind of people you don't want working for you, for any period of time. You get what you pay for.
I can't for the life of me imagine what an apparently legitimate "micro-consulting" gig would look like, where the talent being hired isn't being asked to overperform for the amount of billing time being requested.
- Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem domain and tooling requirements.
- IoT database platforms, no one offers a credible solution for this currently. Everyone defines this in terms of what they can do, not in terms of what is required in practice. There are many VCs currently hunting for this product but the problem is one of fundamental tech; you can't solve it using open source backends.
- Also for IoT, ad hoc clusters of compute at the edge being able to cooperate for analytical applications. The future of large-scale data analytics is planetary scale federation for many applications. Significant tech gaps here.
- Remote sensing analytics. Drones and satellites are generating spectacular volumes of this data and no one can usefully analyze data of this type at scale. Today, companies wait weeks for a single analytic output on less than a terabyte of data.
- Population-scale behavioral analytics. Many startups claim to do this but none of them can actually work with relevant data at a scale that would deliver on it despite increasing availability of the necessary data.
- AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.
I heard someone from U of Chicago School of Economics make the case that Payday lenders should not exist. If you go to U of C you'd know they do exist and they're about 1/4 of a mile off campus if you just left and looked around.
EDIT: FYI, not all pro-Free Market economists believe in EMH, Austrians for instance, have criticized Chicago school for this ridiculous theory.
If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult for a company in Greece to sell in Denmark, which is a much shorter distance.
There is a notable lack of an open European marketplace along the lines of Alibaba. There are many challenges in making that model work for the EU, especially ~24 languages and big cultural differences, but the tech industry is in a good position to overcome such boundaries.
For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991.
For music, DAWs are not that bad and there's no single monopolist like Adobe, but VST system is stinky and stuck in times of Windows 95. People are buying hardware synths (which are just computers running software) only because software on these embedded computers runs reliably, but VSTs crash, freeze every time and require hardware license keys plugged into parallel port. Also, everything inside is complete black magic and every supplier of software pretends that there are super secret algorithms everywhere. Every oscillator and filter is super-secret and super-unique and there's no articles in the open how to design "decent" oscillator and filter. Medival times everywhere.
And these tools should be designed for users, not Entertainment Content Production Corporations.
Crytpo Currency: There is room for more disruption here. I suspect a currency that is both trackable and backed by a pool of commodities/currencies could be quite popular. Traceable would make theft risk reduced as money could effectively be returned if it is stolen and being backed/hedged by currencies/commodities would help with confidence.
Cargo: I'm surprised we haven't seen electric cargo ships. Even combine solar with sail as winds are favorable. This combined with auto-navigation (at least between ports) seems more easily achievable than cars yet technology is further behind.
Dockable Phone to PC (physical or even better if wireless dock): Surprised no-one has done this well yet. I can image whoever does this with really take ownership of the OS space. I always felt this could be the best route for Microsoft to re-enter the mobile space with force.
Basically, the strategy should be to follow the money (the demand) and to love what you do (be above average). This, it seems, the most probable way to get noticed, to get funding (for abilities) and to succeed. The markets are stochastic.
For example, if you ask yourself, how come that such piles of Java crap as Hadoop came to be so popular, the answer would be that the biotech industry has almost unlimited hot money that time and huge demand for big data processing tools, so even such poorly designed and implemented by amateurs crap would be a good-enough tool.
Suppose, I would like to make a similar tool, order of magnitude less wasteful, based on ideas from Plan9, Erlang, based on ZFS, etc, in other works, do it the right way, would I get any funding? No, because there is no real demand for quality solution when a crappy one is OK. There are exceptions, of course, how, for example, nginx became a well-crafted improvement over apache, but this is indeed an exception.
So, go to the valley and keep looking. There, it seems, no other way. The principle is that there must be a strong demand backed by big money (Wall Street investors), so even a half-backed result could be easily sold and re-used to return investments and even make some profit.
We live in a rapidly ageing society. Retirees are a large and wealthy demographic. Despite that, tech companies are absolutely woeful at designing products for older users. We don't empathise with their needs. We don't understand how poor eyesight, arthritis or cognitive difficulties can affect UX. There's a huge amount of pent-up demand and excellent opportunities for future growth.
I can think of few ideas right away:
- website that gives stories from other side
- activist website that uses better tactic than "getting signatures"
- know how your congressman votes on each of the vote
- automatic ratings generator for congressman
- news article that only comes from international press
- software for politicians: campaign management, voter management, political ad management etc
There are some very good reasons why startups flock to the bay area, including "lots of available talent" and "that's where the VCs are", but there are also problems with being in the bay area -- talent is considerably more expensive (due in part to the cost of housing) and visa issues (particularly under the current presidency) being the first two which come to mind.
If you can find some way to give non-San-Francisco startups the same advantages that San Francisco startups have -- better tools for remote workers, for example, so that companies can easily hire from anywhere rather than needing to be where the largest number of potential employees are found; or something to make VCs interested in investing in companies which aren't within a narrow radius of Sand Hill (since I've never dealt with VCs, I have no idea what such a solution would look like) -- then you'll create a huge amount of value for companies around the world and it should be easy to transfer some of that value into your pockets.
I think there's an opportunity to redefine the idea of an employee-owned company. A company with an employee stock pool of 100%-- not 10%-- with no opportunities for dilution, non-voting shares, takeovers, or other financial tricks. Early employees would get more stock, but it would curve gently according with the growth the of the company, so that later employees would also end up with a meaningful share.
The company's charter could be codified in plain English, in an easily accessible, version-controlled markdown file. The board would be made up of some combination of elected employees and outside advisers.
This company would be at a serious disadvantage to raise money. It would have to be able to survive on slow, steady growth rather than VC cash infusions. On the other hand, I suspect it would have a big hiring advantage. The trick would be to attract employees who highly value equity but don't want to become founders themselves.
I bet there's a business model out there that exploits both these facets.
I do agree that is a potentially exciting organization. I think there are some market analysis companies that have significant employee ownership and most profits are returned as dividends to make for a very cooperative atmosphere.
There are lots of great companies that are employee-owned (the Winco chain of grocery stores comes to mind), but I'm not aware of any in the tech startup world.
I'd love to know about market research companies with an employee-owned model! If you know of any specifically, let me know. Google doesn't seem to be of much help.
They've got over 300 000 subscribers each paying circa 2000 USD every month. That's 600 million dollars of revenue per month. They're running a labyrinthine functionality on a 1970s System/360-style interface (command line at top of screen). He hires an absolute army of "reps" who's sole job is to try to help subscribers to find functionality, through an interface that is best described as "arcane" and where there is no semblance whatsoever of a user-discoverable taxonomy of functionality. It's all just sort of "you gotta know where you want to go". Most people use 5% of the terminal's functionality (mainly messaging) but Bloomberg refuses to tier pricing. It's all or nothing. And with finance changing rapidly, the clients are axed to cut costs. Not to mention real suspicions of monopoly because bberg is increasingly competing with its own clients in order to maintain share.
This tyrannosaurus will be hard to take down frontally, but the beast is big enough and unwieldy enough that small nibbles here and there in specialized areas can be very attractive businesses.
Other tidbits:
* Bloomberg is stubbornly Windows only. No web, no Linux, no OSX no anything else except a bit of crippleware on mobile.
* Multiple Fortune 500 companies and banks would salivate at taking him on, which means a ready pool of very cash-rich potential buyers for your growing business if you get any traction, and that includes Bloomberg itself.
* Michael Bloomberg the man has not endeared himself to the current president so may be vulnerable.
Challenges:
* quant-style people who know what they're doing are very expensive. 200k USD plus per year.
* network-effects powerful in favour of bloomberg.
* once you're through the crusty user interface, assuming you found what you want (often with the help of a bloomberg "rep"), the actual functionality is often amazingly good.
But if there we're affordable headphones that are software programmable and act as an app store for noise cancellation algorithms, that would definetly reduce the price.
2. One of the ideal ways to recieve ecommerce packages is on your car's trunk. It's possible to build a smart lock for your car that enables the delivery guy to drop packages.
The hard part is making it cheap, making installation cheap, and designing a rapidly growing business model that grows rapidly.
3. Many restaurant use a combi-ovens to reheat frozen food with great results. Combi ovens are now starting to become cheap($300), most of them for the home.
But what about the workplace , where for some places, frozen food may be a good alternative to restaurant ordering(it may be cheaper, for example), but that will require an affordable multi-meal oven, which doesn't exist yet ?
4. Apache Isis is a great, rapid , domain driven framework for business app development. But it's quite complex. There may an opportunity in synmplifying it and introdcuing it to new users. Maybe in a service based form.
I think a smart signal processing/soundtech/AI hacker could create a software program that uses a computer's audio to destructively interfere with other sounds in a room. Say there is an annoying mechanical whine coming from outside your bedroom. You position the computer's microphone near your bed, then tell the program to start listening. The program learns the audio pattern of the whine, and then begins to emit an antiwhine that cancels it out.
Why? Well, the whole point of noise-cancellation is to create an interference pattern in your ear, that is as similar as possible to the noise in your ear.
The farther you get from your ear that becomes harder, because of the room's acoustics, because of latency, because of the fact your head is moving, etc. And we see that in the results of room level noise cancellation attempts in the past.
For me, the biggest untapped market potential is educational video games (which is why I work on supermathworld.com). The market literally doesn't exist. There are but a handful of educational products that could rightfully be called "games".
25 years ago I played educational games that look conceptually identical to the kind on supermathworld and mathbreakers. I built space stations, launched rockets, battled monsters, and even learned geography and critical reasoning skills to catch the elusive Carmen Sandiego.
Graphics and gaming capabilities were a bit different on the Apple IIe though :)
A friend of mine organizes a conference on educational games which sounds up your alley, check out: http://intentionalplaysummit.com/
- PCB prototyping. Board costs are way down but the 2-week turnound time kills a lot of nimbleness that could be gotten from a cheap in house rapid PCB prototyping machine. This has been tried without too much success (Othermill, LPKF, silver paint methods, etc.) imo. Isolation routing by copper ablation might even be a possibility.
- Oligonucleotide synthesis machine. This should be possible at the "hobbyist" level and would start bridging the gap to more accessible DIY bio.
- Resin 3D printing. Resin curing is one of the only methods where it's clean enough to not be hazardous, rapid and has the hope of consistent quality of 3D printing. There are some companies out there that are doing this already, of course, but I believe is still very ripe for innovation.
- DNA sequencing machines. Illumina still has a monopoly on whole genome sequencing. Even cheap genotyping at the consumer/hobbyist level would be a coup.
- Closed loop precision CNC machines. Right now most low-end hobbyist CNC machines are open loop. There's no reason, aside from NRE, that position feedback and other sensors couldn't be added to a host of CNC applications for low-cost CNC machines.
I haven't touched on some of the other electronics markets like pick and place machines that might be much more accessible with machine vision and other enabling technologies. With the DIY bio focused areas, a little infrastructure might enable other areas. For example, one step to solving the common cold might be tracking it's progress through a population, sequencing it as it crops up, seeing how it evolves and cataloging effective treatments. There's also microfluidics and "lab-on-a-chip" technology which seems like it's much more accessible now but it's not something I have a lot of familiarity with.
My opinion is that without open standards, free/libre software and free/libre hardware, all of these are almost a no-go from the start but I think that that opinion is in the minority.
While it's easy to say IoT, cryptocurrency, or whatever the latest buzzwords happen to be—there's ideas that have been floating around for years which are still viable, it's just that they're hard and require exceptional execution. In that sense, they are almost timeless until implemented correctly.
For example, another comment suggested marketplace/content discovery. That's been an unsolved problem for almost a decade now. Ads are another great example: they've been dishing out human misery for about the same length of time. People hate them, so they use ad blockers, and everyone loses. These aren't new problems or opportunities.
Seems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the VPS space.
For example, there are some medical trials indicating, and many folkloric claims, that eating a small but increasing amount of poison ivy, oak or sumac leaf each day will fairly quickly make your body cease to respond badly to contact with those plants.
A 30-day packet of capsules, with successively increasing dosages of urushiol (the irritant in those plants), would likely build up the body's ability to tolerate urushiol. It would make it much easier and safer for the average person to remedy their condition, since, the suggestion that one gather one's own poison oak and preparing it for ingestion appears fraught with peril and leaves most poison ivy victims aghast. Were such a remedy provided in a safe encapsulated form, their fears would abate.
This would be of enormous benefit to homeowners, campers, farmers, gardeners, tree-trimmers, and in short, nearly everyone who goes out into the woods or gardens in the summer. Believe me, this would fly off the shelves once word got around.
Poison ivy sucks.
See this link: http://www.haitiobserver.com/blog/the-magic-of-haitian-remed...
1) Free p2p money transfers / gateway to bitcoin or other crypto-currency so that it's more widely adopted
2) Better open bank accounts - allowing open transparent accounting for organizations and companies
3) Solve democracy - better analytical tools for mass discussion, arguments and decision making which will encourage use of facts and science, and discourage politics
4) Human-Machine interfaces - memory augmentation
5) Solve the common cold and influenza
6) Robotics - better batteries, finer motors and sensors - possibly through the usage of biological systems
7) Public access to satellites - realtime security monitoring, crops analytics and forecasting
8) Solve weather or create private air-conditioned jackets ;)
Anyway, it's description is..."pol.is brings AI & machine learning to participatory democracy. Scale up outreach in online consultation & get powerful insights that can shape and legitimize policy." It would be amazing if U.S. politics could be grounded in legitimate understanding of each other.
If they clubbed together with other local businesses to source common ingredients they could benefit from economies of scale; i.e. instead of 100 restaurants each buying 200 onions, there'd be a bulk order for 20,000 onions; meaning 1 lorry to deliver direct from the supplier(s) rather than multiple vans to cover each supplier/buyer combo.
i.e. Create a platform that would allow suppliers to list what they're selling, buyers to list their needs, and match these up with one another.
- Group similar suppliers or buyers together geographically to help improve the efficiency of individual orders by making them part of a larger collective order.
- Add filter options so that when buying people can specify certain criteria (e.g. "I only want potatoes from soil-association approved suppliers").
- Now people don't buy from suppliers, but rather buy from a service/pool.
- ...and people don't sell to buyers, but rather sell to the service/pool.
- This same model works regardless of supplier or buyer size; i.e. benefits both big and small (though the benefits to smaller companies are more significant as they start to get the benefits of scale that the larger ones have anyway).
I ask about industry problems, and the software that could solve those problems.
You can check it out here:
"I work in the microbiology field.
One of the things I have to do in the quality control department is to count the number of individual colonies that are streaked on a media. Most of the time the count can go up to the 1000's and the colonies are small and close together.
I would like software that can recognize the individual colonies, like a camera would detect faces, and would automatically count the number of colonies available. This would give more accurate readings for tests and cut down on time.
I would definitely pay for this software."
I know it's fashionable to hate on deep learning, but algorithm induction is literally what deep learning does.
Any chance you can elaborate on what you're talking about here?
[1] R. J. Solomonoff. A formal theory of inductive inference: Parts 1 and 2. Information and Control, 7:1--22 and 224--254, 1964.
[2] R. J. Solomonoff. Complexity-based induction systems: Comparisons and convergence theorems. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IT-24:422-432, 1978.
[3] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability
Such a question usually gets answers mostly comprised of work that is extremely boring at first glance. For example, create a system than halves the work to complete documentation for some sort of compliance with regulations.
Every one of these ideas just sounds incredibly interesting to work on. The type that gets a lot of really bright people together on a team (that I'd really want to be on too), yet they might not deliver a product, and possibly even less likely figure out how to monetize it.
Anyway, I'm not developing a friction-reducing product either, but worry about choosing something because it sounds like a rewarding, intellectual challenge.
I am co-founder of tensorflight.com. We do computer vision analytics of drone imagery. Interesting that you mention it, as I thought it's a somewhat obscure market. When we talk to investors in the valley 75%+ have to be educated about why what we do is a viable business.
Please get in touch at kozikow@tensorflight.com if you have any ideas!
Thanks in advance.
- An exabyte-scale storage engine. Nothing too exotic here technically and a few companies have built them, but the design needs to address continuous data corruption, continuous hardware failure, geo-federation, etc.
- A real-time database kernel that supports very high throughput for mixed workloads. A production kernel of this type doesn't currently exist though several people working in closed source databases understand the necessary computer science in principle; the academic literature is far behind the state-of-the-art. The ability to gracefully shift load and transients between servers under full load with many millions of writes per second is not trivial.
- Native discrete topology operators. Necessary for geospatial analytics, sensor coverages, etc. If you can do it natively in the database kernel, it makes the second requirement easier to achieve since you don't need secondary indexing generally.
Any solution even halfway toward the general solution would be viable. The value possible if you have such a system is hard to overestimate. Companies have paid half a million dollars for the output of a single analytic query on tens of trillions of IoT records; the differentiator was that it was possible to execute such a query at all.
It is extremely high-end and polymathic computer science, but serious valuable if you can make a credible dent in it. And unlike some advanced topics in computer science, there are no epic unsolved theoretical problems you have to solve, though some relevant computer science may be unpublished.
Three big missing features off the top of my head:
- Insufficiently correct and high precision computational geometry, which compounds with the iterative/recursive nature of many complex sensor analytics. Many people don't notice unless they ground truth their analytic process; I learned this the hard way. For many industries, 1% cumulative computational error is a catastrophic bug for analytics and the reality can be much worse in many common systems.
- Lack of first class tessellation types and operators. Once your data scientists have them, they'll wonder how they lived without them. Such things are completely useless for cartography and therefore don't exist in those platforms.
- High-performance computational geometry. This is particularly noticeable if you work with sensor coverages (like drone data). Your typical cartographic system has serious difficulty joining a few terabytes of complex polygons, but these are tiny data sets for many remote sensing sources. It literally takes weeks or months to run these types of queries. You can optimize this to be much faster but there was no pressing market need in cartography and cartographic systems aren't designed for scale-out generally.
Making Asimov's Psychohistory from Foundation a reality!
Predicting mid to long-term trends and demographic shifts far enough ahead of time to make investments.
> There are many VCs currently hunting for this product
Implies a difficult problem.
> algorithmic induction tech
Do you mean inference?
The US has a federal "interstate commerce clause" which means that individual states cannot regulate trade with other states. The federal government has all the control, which would be like the European Union having control.
Incidentally, Amazon is one such example. If I buy something on the German amazon.de the contract is formed with Amazon EU S.à r.l. in Luxemburg and the goods are often shipped from a Polish warehouse.
The difficulties companies face within the EU are largely language and culture related rather than legal.
One aspect of the problem is taxes and regulations, which for the most part has to be addressed politically. The different jurisdictions are a cause for friction, too.
The even more significant barrier however is the linguistic and cultural one. It's not sufficient to just translate a say English language website to French in order to start selling in France (and providing proper idiomatic translations for each of the main EU languages is difficult enough). There are cultural differences right down to which website designs are popular in any given EU country at a time. You often can tell where a website is 'located' just by looking at its design.
I think that, in the quest for a cheaper laptop, people won't care much that the product description isn't a grammatically perfect rendering of their local Norwegian subdialect. In fact, I bet a site that mandated English (I know, shudder all you want, but it's true) as the language for sellers would mop up here. Everybody 40 and younger (AKA "your target market") speaks/reads English flawlessly.
Taxes and regulations? Big problem. Totally agree with you. This is probably what's kept Amazon such a bit player in Europe.
Cultural and linguistic differences? Not a major issue.
Still, the language of commerce in a country for the most part is the official language of that country. I'm not sure as to what can be done about that.
I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by.
Look at what happened to facebook when they started offering localized versions, their growth suddenly exploded over here.
I believe this will take a long time, and it certainly is a major barrier.
Creative Suite has evolved leaps and bounds since 1991. It has even evolved leaps and bounds in the last 10 years alone. It's strange to me that someone who really uses Adobe's products would say such a thing. Creative Suite is the only one in the game because it's SO good that there isn't a chance for a competitor to step in. They are also constantly adding new tools to the suite at no additional cost.
As for DAWs, I happen to produce music and have used most of the major DAWs over the last 15 years, though I've settled on Ableton Live. I have zero problems with VSTs crashing, and I often run projects with 50+ VSTs running simultaneously. Stolen VSTs can have stability issues, of course. Hardware dongles are also fairly rare. Only a handful of companies use them, and they aren't really a problem at all as long as you aren't in the habit of stealing software. They typically install in the USB port, not the parallel port. Parallel port dongles were used by Steinberg and were phased out long ago.
I'm curious - what DAWs in particular have you used, and which VSTs are you having problems with?
As a designer I can tell you Serif is doing great things already. Affinity Designer is a solid Illustrator replacement, most of my printed work for clients comes out of that. People are excited about Affinity Photo and Publisher, which are Photoshop and InDesign replacements.
Not to mention UI/UX which is pretty much dominated by Sketch, with very few people using the Adobe equivalent (Xperience Design or whatever it's called).
The biggest issue is compatibility though: the vast majority of teams exchange files in .psd, .ai, .indd which are proprietary formats, so there's lots of reluctance to change and difficulties collaborating if someone uses a different thing. It's a bit like Microsoft Office versus all the other formats, open or not.
http://my.smithmicro.com/manga-studio-comic-illustration-sof...
I only know about guitar pedals, but aren't a good portion of these analog through and through?
http://www.rolandus.com/blog/2014/02/14/analog-circuit-behav...
A fun true-analog synth which is pretty fun for a reasonable price is the MicroBrute: https://www.arturia.com/products/hardware-synths/microbrute
(If anyone's interested, hit the second link in my profile.)
I lived in Taipei for a couple of years. The "third space" is super common there. People would hang out at coffee shops (loads and loads of coffee shops), get "afternoon tea" with friends, or go to a park or even a subway station lobby and socialize.
The Taipei metro even embraced it and set up specific places / spaces for shopping or socializing (that were dual purpose rather than simply being a corridor).
I feel like this is missing in the US, and genuinely miss wandering around with my backpack for a Saturday. It was a load of fun to head out for an early lunch, go find some random coffee shop to "work" (aka "surf the web and people watch"), then find a place for a beverage and maybe go see a movie or have dinner. Those days were genuinely the most fulfilling, especially when I'd run into random acquaintances.
Bringing it back, a river runs through downtown Austin with a great hike / bike trial along it. There aren't really many cafes (I can think of one) along about 10 miles of trail that are good "destinations" to wander toward while enjoying the scenery.
May be a bit early yet for this though. Would tend to displace other "hang-out" locations and businesses, so might be best to fit in with what's there (bars?), but offer something new and different (so people have an idea to anchor on rather than going entirely new concept).
Bakeries also fit this description in those neighborhoods.
I believe it's owned by a local bank, but I don't know if it makes money (or if it's intended to). Entry is free normally, sometimes there are non-free ticketed concerts and a cash bar.
I'd love to have an accessible chill out place I could go to just to get some work done, preferably with a good view of something. No music playing, just quiet and the ability to get a coffee and simple food if necessary.
Google Campus in London does this, but isn't that comfortable for long periods (plus it's absolutely packed).
I'm on a "Startup break", and started a Service Firm. While working with clients, we realized the need to serve a rather underserved section of projects, which are high enough for individual freelancers or even a small team but too low for established agencies - the $100,000 to $1M projects.
We're experimenting with some of our clients and their connections, to work with our service/marketplace where we manage the project end-to-end to make sure it is done, with other vetted teams of designers and developers. It is not 'cheap' but much more economical than traditional Agencies.
We're Beta Testing it with a small set of clients for now. For those curious, we have a sign-up page at http://www.worksigma.com/
Why do you think this is possible?
That's pretty much exactly what Toptal or other premium shops like Gigster do: vet remote developers to ensure high quality.
The idea that you can get great developers from India for rock-bottom rates is mostly a fallacy.
Want a better vetting quality? Look at previous work and read code. It doesn't scale unless you put more people at that but maybe somebody can think about an AI for that.
Yes, at rock-bottom rates(< $25/hr), it is. But >$25/hr starts becoming good money for local Indian developers and you can start comparing them to the good developers in the west (>$50/hr).
That's just my opinion having worked in the industry for a while and seen both sides of that market.
There could be could add battery storage to be used during the journey. They could include wind turbines to add further power generation.
Also ships can go slower. In my limited knowledge of boats every extra knot takes significantly extra fuel. If we were bringing multiple power sources 'slow' cargo may be viable. And the has to be other ways to increase this function.
And there is always hybrid. Not all power has to be renewable sources. A solution could start with supplementing diesel driven thrust with some lower cost green power. Given diesel is 70% of shipping operating cost that seems a potential option.
The problem is that safe disposal of nuclear fuel is nontrivial.
See some resources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
- https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/fuel_c...
You could probably even find some ingenious way to run the current through the containers stacked umderneath to route the power. They are made of metal.
https://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/atrix-4g-lapdock/
Microsoft has done this already but thanks to their poor marketing and crappy Windows phones, no one even knows about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/25/slow-shi...
We should be ensuring that our increasingly ageing population is housed, fed, warm, cared for, in touch with friends and relatives, free from pain and depression, has access to medication, and can live with dignity. The elderly should be actively involved in and by their communities.
One day you'll meet your rocking-chair, because that's where we're all heading. It's galling that start-ups and investors seek to service their young selves with apparently little vision regarding the future.
Who's disrupting nursing homes, or dementia care, or care home staffing, or toileting assistance, or end of life depressiom..?
There are certain near-future technologies like self-driving cars and robotic home care that could revolutionise the lives of the old. I think that's a given, but they have a relatively high barrier to entry.
At the other end of the scale there must be pure (or almost pure) software solutions that could help older peoples' lives also.
I've been thinking of Alexa-style AIs that actually perform useful tasks such as pre-screening scam phone calls, alerting the user about important emails, or proactively helping the user perform a bank transaction. This could be useful for everyone, but when an old person can barely read emails, never mind sort important ones from the scams and junk, I think it would be a godsend.
The devil is of course in the detail. As a high-level concept it all sounds great, but how would it actually work? I've been imagining a kind of "meta-OS" that sits on top of the OS and drives it on the user's behalf. Or perhaps it should be more like a netbook, with all the actual content kept in the cloud, and the AI as a thin client dedicated solely to allowing easy access to the data. There are a lot of possible way for this to work, and a huge number of problems to solve...
Seniors probably don't think about putting all their content in the cloud, don't think about inheritance of their online account, and don't think about their OS either.
Sounds like an opportunity?
Almost everything.
Here's an experiment you can try. Stay up for two nights in a row. Have a few drinks. Put on a pair of ear defenders, a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription and a pair of leather gardening gloves. Try to go about your daily life. You'll very quickly see plenty of industries that are ripe for disruption.
The man-made world is overwhelmingly designed by and for the not-yet-disabled. We build overly complex interfaces with too many options and too few affordances. This makes life difficult for everyone, but it can totally exclude people with impairments.
Nobody realised how awful smartphones were until the iPhone arrived. I think that most products and services are just as awful as a Windows Mobile phone circa 2005, but we have become inured to their awfulness. We're drowning in unnecessary complexity, in large part because we don't expect anything better.
Health issues begin to interfere increasingly with opportunities to make new friends--there are increasing numbers of activities that you simply can't do anymore. Isolation increasingly becomes a problem, and isolation is a serious health hazard for older people, affecting mental health and posing a hazard to physical health.
Platforms that make it easier for older people to stay in touch with one another, to meet new people safely, and to develop networks of trust and assistance could make a huge difference in the quality of people's lives.
It allows lots of people (thousands now) to obtain a permit. Poland has the lowest quantity of firearms in the whole Europe (and one of the lowest in the world). Taking the current mood around us now (terror attacks, war in Ukraine and possibly -- god I hope not -- other eastern countries) and the obvious coolness of legally owning a firearm i think it's a good initiative. Legal owners tend to be more law abiding and more self sufficient. We need role models like that, IMO.
I encourage more programmers to automate stuff that the state messes up. It's a lot of things!
PS. My NGO only helps lawful, sane adults. No felon, no person with mental illness and no kids can obtain a gun permit in Poland.
I don't think private firearms are very useful for international conflicts like Ukraine/Russia or to defeat terrorist attacks.
For every person you encourage to get firarm, there is a fixed likelyhood that firearm would be used to kill someone innocent. It might be interesting to estimate how many innocent people have to die so you can consider yourself "cool" again. If you are data oriented person and make data based decision, you should be fairly happy with your country's choice. I'm not saying there should be blanket ban. There are certainly situations like you are getting death threats and things like that where you should be allowed to own a firearm however if you adopt US like model, too many innocent lives would be at stack to justify it in any possible way. Civilian firearms used to be mildly effective to fight wars in 1940s. In modern ware fare they are useless.
If anyone from Facebook is reading, this would be a great feature for the site. Imagine following your representatives and getting their votes automatically in your newsfeed.
Actually, the opposite may be a better way.
Our representatives votes should be secret for the same reason that the people votes is secret: prevents the voter from being intimidated and from selling his/her vote.
Examples;
- CollAction [http://socialcoder.org/9dy]
- Fight Back Wisely [http://socialcoder.org/80s]
- Carpool Vote [http://socialcoder.org/8qv]
https://www.countable.us/ https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes
I believe they open sourced some of their software after the campaign too, although not all the sophisticated ad-targeting. The message seems to be that if you target enough misleading ads at underinformed floating voters, you can shift an election.
> - know how your congressman votes on each of the vote
See theyworkforyou.com for the UK, which I believe they're trying to generalise internationally.
> - news article that only comes from international press
This is an interesting one and potentially useful. You want to see press that's not targeted advertising to you. Actually making any money from it (or any media operation) is still hard though. The best way to make money from media is to sell out as hard as possible, which is bad for reporting.
In my opinion, tools for effective remote working are there. Github, Slack style communication, collaborative project management tools, CI tools in cloud. Design tools could be more collaborative, but it ain't a showstopper. Video conferencing still sucks now and then, but 50 years after the Mother of All Demos, it starts to be usable enough :)
I feel that it is something else, culture issue, that still makes teams that are physically in the same location, to perform more effectively. Fixing work culture to support remote work better is likely the key instead of tech and tools.
And money will follow: when VCs believe that remote teams and remote networking are as effective, they will invest everywhere.
1) bandwidth in many parts of the world is still not nearly good enough for high quality video
2) need good inexpensive remote whiteboarding tech. The MS surface TV looks good but too expensive to fit in everyone's remote office
3) initiating remote video should (either for screen sharing or video chat) be immediate, like 3 secs max, zero friction, not something you have to schedule or spend minutes setting up - just like turning your chair to talk to someone sitting next to you in an office
To take it even further, is work culture even broken? It seems to me like there's already quite a lot of remote work (at least in tech) for those who make it a top priority. I wonder if the fact that it isn't the default is because most people would rather not work that way? Aside from the obvious social benefit of face to face contact with your coworkers, I find the second order effects very valuable as well - the energy in the office helps keep my excitement about the projects we're working on so I enjoy my work more (and conversely the shared commiseration when the company hits a pitfall is nice too).
Plus the scalability of remote work is dependent on living somewhere where a lot fewer people want to live - if you live in, say, Manhattan and work remotely for an SF company, you're still taking up housing someone at a NY company could be living in. Some people value being near family or nature or something above all else, but generally (by definition) most people want to live where a lot of other people want to live.
So I wonder if the underlying solution is improving cities - something like the city project YC is running, or beating the NIMBYs in places like SF so the city can actually grow to support the startups it has and more, or maybe improving transit so people from further out can commute at least some of the time into cities, etc.
Solution to "frictionless" remote work / collaboration among teams (not just engineers) seems similar to interview problem. The target market may also be distinct (teams don't remote work, but remote interviews are common).
moocs might benefit too?
I have no idea. The answer might turn out to be a social question of redefining the concept of a "job", for all I know. If the answer was obvious, I'm sure it wouldn't be an untapped opportunity. ;-)
Successful businesses are built on the backs of relationships. Your product is important, your tech is somewhat important, but THE most important part of a building what many would call a "successful" business is the relationships you create.
It doesn't matter what you're trying to achieve -- convince people to buy your product, convince people to work for your company, convince VCs to give you money, convince Google to buy you -- all of these things may begin on the premise of merit, price, features, value, but they end up based on the relationships built between the people involved.
Deals are closed over drinks. People work for people they enjoy spending time with. VCs invest money in people they trust. Yes, all things in life have exceptions, but the longer you stay in business, the more you realize that businesses are run by people -- they are not opaque fact-driven entities -- and people are social creatures. The actual reason that people in San Francisco still cling to an age-old culture of doing business together in person instead of over Slack is because humans enjoy spending physical time around other humans. Maybe it's communication bandwidth, maybe it's something else, but until VR replaces physical intimacy, there is no perfect substitute.
If you want to succeed outside of San Francisco, begin building the relationships you need to do so. People can claim that Slack, Hangouts, and the phone match the effectiveness of physical presence, but try switching to a permanent long-distance relationship with your significant other. Good luck.
Corollary: It's probably time for a much wider adoption of bitcoin in tech. To transfer that value from halfway around the world to personal pockets capitalism style, we need crypto to become a primitive member of apps, markets and tech deals, and no longer a big deal.
Although it is against license, you technically can remote desktop to Bloomberg terminal from Linux machine.
Bloomerg monopoly is more result of data they have rather than the clunky terminal. You can buy just Bloomerg data and use any type of analytics tool you find suitable (e.g. Pandas, matlab). Data is often crippled compared to terminal, but combining multiple tricks (e.g. different Bloomberg data subscriptions) you can get very close to 100%. I used to have access to terminal and data in structured format and I spent 95% time looking at data in Pandas and other data analysis tools rather than terminal.
I'm not affiliated with Bloomberg in any way.
[EDIT] appears very buggy on Linux via JRE on my big 4k monitor
Is this related at all to how some were accused of paying the [SEC?] to get trade info nanoseconds before others and able to front-trade? (or whatever thats called)
Is the SEC the canonical source for trade information that every HF wants to trade on?
EDIT: https://www.quora.com/Where-do-the-Bloomberg-terminals-get-t...
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Anyone know where an historic data-set of say, tick history, could be had to fiddle with? Or is this literally only a purchasable item?
IMO the network effect is the biggest thing to break and that would need to begin with the buy-side. If Pension Manager XYZ with $N trillion AUM uses Bloomberg then you can be damn sure so does anyone wanting to do business with them.
There is a very strong desire to get a working competitor to Bloomberg to reduce costs. And replacements slowly seem to reach a maturity that make this possible.
But this is not work for a start up. You need a lot of capital to develop a product that works for all asset classes, and a huge network to enter the messaging sector.
I'm a little sceptical of first party content sensitive untargeted advertisement, but we'll see. I also think the people who would block ads would block these too.
See responses to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576611 where people say they will block ads anyway. It's not the tracking. It's not the bandwidth. It's just because it's easy to do.
Also, I can't help but be struck by the similarity of "mainframes -> PC -> cloud".
Pretty much all the evils in todays ads are a byproduct of the sellers controlling the ecosystem and focusing on their needs over the buyers.(i.e. selling impressions, focusing on pageviews, not reporting on viewability, monetizing data, etc...) This does two terrible things...this makes your ad placements ineffective for 90% of the legit advertisers and only viable to the bad actors selling pills and other spammy/predatory products.
If you want to really fix ads, you need to put the average buyer in the driver seat, you need to make your monetization accountable to your advertisers bottom line, and you need to collaborate on creative design to be beautiful within your site...
As long as publishers and sellers control the marketplace, we are doomed to have clickbait, fake news, ridiculous cookie tracking, and irrelevant ads.
There are a couple of drawbacks. First, it turns out that there's not much money to be made developing that software. Second, it turns out that running it is a lot of work, to the point that it's not worth it for most people. Third, most ad buyers don't want to juggle dozens of small publishers, they want centralization.
I would think this is the main contributor to why we have shitty ads. Everywhere.
Old Navy doesn't want to deal individually with a site that doesn't have 10,000,000 visits/month. So we end up needing an intermediary at the same scale as the big advertisers.
Not saying this can't work at some level, just that there are some big economic forces fighting against scaling a product like this.
However I don't see why this problem isn't been solved yet! Just ask what the website is about and serve only ads in the same space would be already a big win...
But there's at least a couple dozen providers now who have built WP specific infrastructure at all sorts of price tiers for consumers.
You've also got your SquareSpace/Wix/etc. Shopify. Traditional shared hosting is becoming less necessary in my mind for a lot of use cases because companies are specializing in areas where you would normally say 'just get a shared hosting plan.'
The biggest problem though to completely get rid of the shared hosting space is price. Digital Ocean works because the lack of customer service. Shared hosting needs to have a lot more customer service (or you get EIG). But at the $5/month price point, the economics of it are terrible. The way to get around it is specializing, reducing complexity and issues, which is exactly what I see happening.
I would think there's room for some middle ground, like DO, but with more sophisticated self service tools to deploy popular software, install OS patches, and so on. Tools that work for non technical people.
When EIG took over Bluehost the first thing they did was outsourced ALL tickets to India (Hari the CEO's parent's company) - Then he moved chats to India. Then he closed down tickets completely. Chats may eventually be on the chopping block. Then he moved sales to Tempe and promised everyone in Orem that their job wasn't going anywhere. Two months later he announced -- hey sorry I lied, we're all moving to Tempe. You can come w/ us if you move yourself, but here have 1 month pay for severance. I'm pretty sure I just heard that if you work for EIG and don't live in Houston, or Tempe you can count on your Brand closing and moving to one of those two places - they really want to consolidate everything in a bad way.
i envision a company -- where Each employee has a book of business, each employee is also an affiliate and can refer business 24/7 and get commissions for life off anyone they refer. Each employee acts more like an acct rep than actual CSR agent grinding out phone calls left and right. Customer's have a dedicated person they can reach out to with any concerns. There would be very generous ESOP plan, it would be setup a bit like maybe Winco Foods, etc... and other bonuses. Exec pay would be capped at 65x avg salaries. Surpluses left over go into bonus pools and activities for employees, etc..
You'd need to combine an ISP and MSP with an add-on like analytics and integrations.
Trouble is, then you're competing with AWS and GCE.
You have what amounts to bare metal through AWS, available by the hour. You can have that today, plus the ability to scale across geographies at the click of a button. Few colos can offer that.
The user experience of deploying a Python/Django code to production is so bad in my opinion that I started a shared hosting service focused only on that: https://prodmatic.com
Something that allowed me to just throw my site up with the ease of a common shared web host, but also allowed me to do Node with sane permissions etc., would be great.
However, it occurs to me this probably exists, and I just don't know about it.
Maybe that's the untapped opportunity - connecting people with the services that suit them?
I think Google has that cornered
I have 20TB of data that I would like to access about 1MB statistically per year (!!) only I don't know which of that 20TB its located. Sure there is AWS and then Glaciar but with my limited knowledge with AWS you need to spin a computer and then set the rules how those files are accessible and it already goes into tens or hundreds of bucks per month. Amazon Glaciar is too expensive to pull data out.
Perhaps I didn't do enough research. If you know company who allows me to cheaply store XX TB in cloud and charge me only per access to it, let me know please.
What do you mean by this?
Not saying that there's not room to grow in this area, but it's definitely not the case that restaurants are buying straight from a bunch of individual suppliers, minus restaurants aiming for hyper-local or small batch ingredients.
Been trying to do this on a smaller scale (pooling the needs of restaurants in foodparks), and it is horribly difficult. There are so many factors at play (demand changes day to day, spoilage, etc.) Even with software to automate the process, the delivery logistics would be too time consuming for your average restaurant owner to get into.
As you say there isn't much demand, but we are working on it. Thanks for your suggestion on recommending fees :)
I could see 30 minutes to an hour working out for e.g. a bespoke greenfield codebase setup, but I don't think restricting it to 30 minutes makes a lot of sense.
If you don't know enough to ask high quality questions, SO and Google won't help you.
If you're lucky, G will lead you to tuts and repos with useful code.
If you're not, you'll make a ton of stupid beginner mistake and be overdrawn on the technical debt account before you even start.
On another note: Are quarterly rental inspections a thing in the US? Never heard of that, why should my landlord care if I tidy up my apartment?
Actually, I think that this is the chink in Amazon's armor, the bare patch on Smaug's underside.
Only a few European countries have Amazon stores and the brand loyalty for them isn't strong. A single EU store would become quickly popular and has the potential to be bigger than Amazon, given that the EU is larger than the US in market size.
And this seems to work for FBA articles as well. But they can handle that due to their own logistic network. Parcels within Europe are still rather expensive, compared to a domestic Parcel. I can still send articles much cheaper from London to Inverness (Scotland) than to Brussels, even though Brussels is closer.
But that's probably just a function of the low B2C trade across borders, which leads to a sparse delivery network.
1) From interviewing a lot of producers and plugin developers, our findings show that there's a bit of a vicious cycle with pricing: most hobbyist producers aren't willing to shell out the money for plugins, so they opt to pirate them instead. The plugin developers lose out on a ton of sales, so they hike the prices up to make up for lost revenue. The hobbyist producers continue to see high prices and therefore continue to pirate plugins, and the cycle starts all over again. :)
2) Most paid plugins don't offer trial versions, and when they do, they're always crippled and DRMed in some form or another. When there's no trial, users don't want to make the leap of faith and buy the plugin, and when there is, the aforementioned crippling/DRM can be quite the hindrance.
We're shooting to make the user experience better on both of these fronts by offering a more modern marketplace - you still get a nice store to browse through and read about plugins, but one of EQIP's value adds is the ability to instantly demo the full version of any plugin on the spot right within your session (and our technology's secret sauce prevents anyone from getting their hands on either the plugin or the audio).
The next step in our gameplan is to offer bundled subscriptions for plugins; you might think of Splice's rent-to-own, which is a great offering, but the pricing model is on a per-plugin basis - we're looking at various tiers of affordable pricing for access to X number of plugins depending on the tier. This way, a producer can have unlimited access to several plugins they like for one low cost (and rent-to-own can easily be added to this, we're still working on the pricing for the time being).
I hope that was a helpful brief rundown! There's a lot more to it - if you'd like to chat, you're more than welcome to email me, my email's available at my personal website (also in my profile). :)
Our clients know that they can go on a vacation while we work on their projects. They wanted that same experience while working with the partners that we introduced. So, we end up handling the client's project and make sure it gets done via these partners.
Work Sigma is borne out of this patterns, and process that we followed. We want to grow this, formalize it, and be able to provide a good service to clients and make them happy. One of the marketing taglines that we tossed around our team is, "Agency in the Cloud".
btw, A friend told me there is something similar at UpWork - https://www.upwork.com/pro/. This is nice - the market is tested and proven.
This is the problem with NYC coffee shops. They're place to go talk with a friend for a bit or for a first date. They're not really places to casually hang out all day.
US model is fucked beyond recognition and nobody wants to import it. I'm rather talking about the German or French model. Both of those countries have about 10-15 times the number of guns than poland (used for hunting, sports, and so on).
Since no one wants to host the ad platform on their own, how do you think you will get your idea across? I think what you really meant is build a better ad platform, not self-hosting ad platform.
http://w3c.github.io/push-api/
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...
Most people in Europe use Gmail, right? So they must already have figured out this stuff.
The implication of a consultancy company is that their work is done ad-hoc and in a one-off fashion, requiring lots of work from the company which stupidly only scales with the number of employees.
Software that successfully automated away the most toilsome parts of the job, allowing a handful of people to support intra-EU between any of the 28 member countries would do quite well.
No.
I also have a lot of first-hand experience with this since I taught paid lessons in CS 1.6 way back in the day. Generally the market for lessons is full of mid-tier players who are very dedicated, but don't have the support necessary to improve (ie. a team of players as good as them or a proper coaching system). These players are almost all looking to go pro some day, and want to be able to break through to that level. Since the difference in skill between a Top 1% player and a Pro in CS:GO is so massive, any random competitive player won't be able to give good advice since they are at the same place as the client, and can't understand WHY things are done the way they are among the Pros.
It's worth noting that the Orbit Female CS:GO team isn't even all among the top 1% of players - they went 10-6 in ESEA-Open last season, which is the lowest level of competition which is even sanctioned. Any team that is dedicated and practices, even if they aren't good, will make it through Open at X-4 without much difficulty (I've coached a few teams through this).
I'm available on danielk at fliffr.com if you have any questions.
I run away screaming when I see this in somebody's profile.
This is what most closely resembles what I want! Of course, in 2017 it'd be for everyone.
We could even be like those strange upper class British clubs that don't allow people to talk to each other.
I feel its like Palm vs. iPhone. Sure Palm was earlier to market with a reasonable solution, but someone needed to nail it.
I was thinking recently that I'd like a liberated Android, found CopperheadOS, but I'm still not sure I'd like to use it on the desktop.
You know, you could also just make it illegal to "sell" votes in the way the United States currently allows? Most other Western/Democratic countries figured this out a long, long time ago.
There are a ton of online whiteboard apps, but it's hard to find a good one (know of any?).
Then there's the problem that drawing with a mouse is difficult. It's hard to quickly express ideas as boxes-and-lines without something like a drawing tablet. Wacom makes some low-end ones that are pretty affordable though (like this one[0] for ~$80). Maybe that'd be a good solution, though it does require some practice to get proficient.
Whiteboarding specifically - don't know of any good ones. It should ideally be a collaborative multi user real time web app (websockets?), support drawing on top of uploaded images, have very large canvases you can zoom/pan, and run together with hangouts/Skype or have VoIP built in. Want to collab on building one? :)
I've used many Wacom tablets - even the cheap ones are good and pretty intuitive - no real learning curve after setup.
And providing some equivalent to Cpanel for things like OS patches, domain management, SSL certificate management, automated backups, web analytics, file manager, etc. Cpanel's license costs are pretty high...they charge per customer / per month, and so it sets a minimum bar for what you can charge.
If you incorporated additional functionality, you could capture more of the market. What wix.com does, for example.
Every nuclear powered ship becomes a prime terrorist target, either to hijack it or destroy it in place and cause a radiological incident. So you also need constant armed security (also expensive).
A more practical way to have "nuclear powered" ships would be to use electric power from land based nuclear plants to manufacture synthetic hydrocarbon liquid fuels, then load that fuel on the ships. Nuclear plants on land are far more cost effective since they can be built much larger to achieve economies of scale on operations and security.
Seems like a natural fit. For almost everything in the military, IMO there should be some market in the private space that could use those skills.
Not only "instances," but that seems like a worthwhile business just by itself.
edit: Nope, they don't let you setup a proxy (for Node) and PHP on the same server :( it's one or the other
<giggles>
Only if you travel along established tourist routes. Go to a local marketplace or try to ask for directions in a smaller town and you will find it hard in many EU countries. Yes, in Northern countries even most elders speak English fluently, but in South I have had many situations where finding a single English speaking person was a challenge (notably in Greece and Italy).
You probably didn't struggle to find an English-speaking person. You struggled to find a person willing to speak English with you. That's a subtle, but important, difference.
Most of my neighbors pretend not to understand English around tourists because it saves them enormous hassle. At first, I was appalled when I realized this. Now, I confess to doing it myself. It gets exhausting answering the same questions from unresourceful tourists over and over again.
Locals don't want to be your tour guide. They just want to enjoy their coffee in peace.
And in addition to that, even though most young people can communicate well in English doesn't mean they want to shop in an English store. You need to have a very good proficiency (probably C2) to know the English words for all articles you have in your household.
But translating a website shouldn't be a big deal anyway.
Let me tell you an old story. I'm spanish. We had in the late 90's a mail list about the Delphi programming environment. Delphi was made by Borland, a private company that had translated the IDE to French and German.
At a certain moment there was a vocal group in the list that very insistently demanded that everybody made a petition to Borland to create a Spanish translation of the IDE (the manuals had already been translated). I didn't care, not only because I had already read every manual when Delphi was released, before they were translated, but also because I believed that any pro should know enough English to move around, instead of depending on the ones that had already done the job.
I tried to stay away from the discusion until a friend tried to force my hand very publicly with the argument that Spanish was no less important than English in culture or number of speakers or quality programmers... the political problem!
So I had to answer the obvious: English was not only important to communicate with English speakers. I can talk with people from Sweden, Russia, Poland, Greece... instead of learning a dozen languages. It's not a matter of what should be, it's a matter of what is!
And that was twenty years ago. Today my teen son has no problem chatting in Minecraft with people all around the world.
About shopping in an English store, they do. Google Translate works great if there's a problem. There is that musical instruments shop that everybody uses and another of bikes, both in Germany. People are used to the English words for that stuff anyway. The difficult thing, even in local shops is hearing many terms translated. What is a "flanger" called in Spanish? No idea. Or a "chorus", etc. We just used that as is. Household stuff are in local stores, no need to shop them online.
Anyway, if you look a little above, you'll see my comment that I think it would be a good idea to create a company that help other companies to operate in a multinational space. I was thinking more on taxes and regulations, but of course decent translations would be nice to have.
But the EU has their own version of the Commerce Clause, the Common Market.
On that last point, you can execute an effective denial of service attack on most GIS databases with a well-crafted set of polygons and polygon intersection queries. It doesn't even require malicious intent. (Yet another thing I learned the hard way.)
For example, the intersection of n polygons could have exponentially many segments. To prevent denial of service, accuracy has to be sacrificed, but "one part per trillion error" sounds hard.
As another example, representing the intersection between two line segments without error requires a data type that has three times as many bits as the x/y components of their endpoints, so rounding has to happen here, too.
The only solution I can come up with that would not have those problems would be to subdivide a plane into grid cells of size one trillionth of whichever unit, rasterize all polygons into it do the Boolean operations at pixel-level, but that would require huge amounts of memory and processing power. And additionally it would be vulnerable to a DOS attack where the attacker sends many very large overlapping rectangles.
Lastly, huge amounts of data would require many computers to be able to work on this problem in parallel, but if an attacker sends only overlapping polygons, parallelization would be very tricky if not impossible.
There's a long, long way to go before video conferencing feels more like an actual face-to-face conversation, and it hasn't really changed much in the past 10 years.
I mean, the main complaint against remote work seems to be that there's still no substitute for an actual face-to-face conversation. That IS a tech problem that CAN be solved with tech. The current tech is woefully inadequate.
You just have to draw a schema to understand.
3 to 5 meters is a good distance for a video conference.
A good example of an IoT data analytics problem is analyzing a petabyte of drone sensor data, which on a large drone amounts to a few flights worth. Typical raw sources tend to be some combination of hyper-spectral imaging/video and LIDAR. Or RF probability functions e.g. mobile. Or a combination of all of the above because you are fusing multiple sources to reduce the uncertainty for your analysis.
FWIW, the "tens of trillions" of IoT records I mentioned was a real-world example from one of the most famous financial companies. It was a spatial analytic on a polygon model, and a classic IoT data model. If KX solved that particular analysis problem, they would have used it.
There's been an explosion in raster data in just the last 5 years. Cheap satellites, cheap drones, and cheap platforms have really turned the firehose to "high". And the resolution on scientific data -- climate and weather model output, astronomy data, particle physics data, seismic data, etc. -- just keeps going up.
This is an area of massive growth for which no existing solution is quite adequate. If I had the time and/or the cash, I'd be diving in head-first.
His company provides sensor systems for civil engineering projects. A single large bridge can have sensor packs every 50m or so - per beam. The amount of sensor data coming in for a single municipality or region is already staggering. Vibration and stress analytics are required on a daily basis.
The final requirement, one which you didn't mention, is that this setup should be fairly low maintenance. If you need a team of rocket scientists to operate and just keep it from falling over, the cost structure will be unsustainable.
A service that provided all this in a platform with sane APIs and good BI integration should be making tons of money.
During development or if you want to store the raw data you can split the stream. eg: collect | tee >(store) >(anotherAnalyzer) | analyze | report
ain't that the truth
One of the points I've tried to make at various companies (we've worked at the same one before) is that streaming solutions and batch solutions need to be fused into a single execution engine.
A streaming system on its own (operating on temporal windows) is not nearly as useful as on that can be joined to a storage engine with data at rest. It also needs to be disk based, so windows can be large, which most people do not want to take on. It also needs to be extremely parallel, and efficient.
Thousands of requests a second per server is not even in the right ball-park (which is lots of current execution engines now). Operating at line rate is generally table stakes IMO. The operations on the stream should be parallelized automatically, up to petabytes a day of input. Humans don't have the necessary context to do the partitioning up front, especially with streams that change.
The issue is (and I've tried to come up with designs to address this, though not in practice), is that co-locating the data at rest, with data that is moving through the system is a tricky problem, especially with complicated joins.
They can be the same engine (and should), but traditional database engines tend to have a problem with streaming queries, since they are just repeatedly executing a query against every new record. They are expressible, just not efficient. There is room to innovate in this space, but most people building these engines either solve the parallelism problem naively, or not at all.
There's also the problem of driving this computation to the edge, which is also something I have a solution for in a way that no one is doing, but have not yet met a company willing to take this level of effort on.
All the points you make about the kernel are apt, as are the points about the distribution algorithms. Also, the protocols used aren't nash safe, so at scale most of these systems become an operational juggling act under pressure.
All streaming systems that I know of do not know enough about the underlying data to gracefully rebalance and co-locate, since they all tend to embody the map/reduce paradigm, which is oblivious to underlying data distribution, at least in current practice.
There is available computer science to solve all these issues, I think some of the spatial algorithms out there can also be applied to the streaming space, especially in join evaluation.
I'm just speculating, of course. I was sort of entertaining your idea and going back and forth between "a sounds-good fantasy" and "No, that would be awesome, why does this not exist?"
The data processing could become a commodity but the architecture won't be -- its highly tied to your specific industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising
Might have been nice if it happened all across Poland rather than just Warsaw.
This is actually a really good example for why we don't want to ban weapons: Genocides are often perpetrated by the country the victims actually belong to.
Examples: Germany under Nazism, former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, -I'm fairly sure the list goes on.
I feel totally safe and I'm actually happy knowing that many of my neighbors have weapons. Especially here in Norway were I know there are strict background checks on who gets permits.
(For Americans: What I would do is start cooperating with NRA like Nordic countries has traditionally done with their local equivalents. Work not to prohibit guns but to promote safe storage and safe practices.)
There is a very long list of countries that are doing better than fine and severely restricting gun ownership. Long before it becomes the case that you need guns to defend your space, you may want to take a long hard look at the politics of your community / country.
The times are right, because many people are researching guns now due to external factors. It's a growing market for such NGO as mine (even though i don't profit off it).
Plus, take into account that US has a very messed up situation with guns, laws and relations between groups of people. Nobody's trying to copy that over here, we have better role models.
> something I have a solution for in a way that no one is doing
Is the general direction for this something you can share? 30 years of database literature accumulated a lot of knowledge. It's be a bold claim to say there's something powerful yet non-obvious.
It's not necessarily new computer science, just a clever (if I can be so bold) way to tackle edge computing in the context of a streaming engine.
Not really:
* There is always someone with a bigger gun
* There is always someone who wants to steal your gun/ammo
* There is always a bigger gang that wants to steal your gun
If your solution is to join up with others to make your gang the biggest/best armed and enforcing a monopoly on the use of violence, congratulations, you've either reinvented Warlordism, or in the best case, reinvented the idea of a police force, depending on whether or not the head of the gang answers to a civil authority whose legitimacy comes from something other than "might makes right".
All that said, I don't mean that firearms aren't at all useful, just that they aren't more useful than other important tools. You for a group to be able to defend itself you will find that basics like picks, shovels, sledgehammers, crowbars, hammer and nails, axes and hatchets, saws, ladders, wheelbarrows etc. are all at least as useful as a firearm.
Generally speaking, making the other guy waste his ammo can be a winning strategy.
Clearly if you're planning to hold a big cache of firearms, then that becomes an incentive for other gangs to go after you, but most of the time, there are plenty of unarmed people out there which present an easier target.
The aim of firearm ownership at the time of civil unrest is to not be an easier target for bad elements. Somehow implying that by owning firearms you become a bigger target than an unarmed household is ridiculously dishonest statement.
Plus, note that we only make it easier to get a permit if you're a sane, law-abiding adult.
Also, I'd like to be (or feel like I am) much closer than 5 meters when talking with someone.
[1] http://tachilab.org/content/files/publication/tp/imai200604P...
No one really wants to build cargo ships right now, shipping companies are barely staying afloat right now because there is a glut of cargo capacity.
This technology would need to be cheap enough that it would make sense to retrofit a ship with it... which would probably not be the case for a very long time.
I do think it's a very thought provoking idea however.
It's a type of 'tragedy of commons' situation, where every shipping company is making the right decisions from their individual perspective, but collectively they're driving themselves into the ground.
For me this explains the rise of slow-steaming. It makes a lot of sense in this market because it lowers the cost of shipping a container (less fuel), while simultaneously reducing the market capacity (# of containers / year).
Finally, very few shipping companies make money on the major lines (e.g. China to Europe), because it's pure price competition. They're much more likely to make money in places where they have a 'monopoly' on something: e.g. being the only ship that leaves in the next 3 days, or being the only shipper going to a specific location. For example inter-Africa shipping falls in this category.
Further exacerbating the problem with the glut of cargo capacity.
"When the wind conditions are favourable, Norsepower Rotor Sails allow the main engines to be throttled back, saving fuel and reducing emissions while providing the power needed to maintain speed and voyage time. Rotor sails can be used with new vessels or they can be retrofitted to existing ships."
There have been cracks at putting "sails" of one form or another on ships but they've always been heavy, relatively ineffective and basically just not worth the hassle.
The speed of a ship is actually quite easy to work out. You find the time/value curve for the cargo and the cost/time for the ship and see where they cross - essentially. The long and short of it is that the lighter and more valuable your cargo is, the faster the ship goes. This is why container ships are much faster than oil tankers.
Drone ships won't be practical any time soon because of maintenance problems. Crews spend much of their time at sea performing preventative maintenance, painting, and fixing broken equipment. With a drone ship all of that work would have to be done at the pier which would be far more expensive than paying a crew.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/25/slow-shi...
However ironically though, these mega vessels are considered with quite a bit of disdain by many in the industry. This link can provide quite the rabbit hole of information. http://www.supplychain247.com/article/state_of_ocean_contain...
That's overstating my argument.
Let me boil it down further (at the risk of some nuance being lost): Firearms are useful, but not extremely useful.
1) Firearms are not a panacea, and there are plenty of other tools that are at least as important, and a few that are more important. Lack of clean water is a lot more likely to kill you than lack of a firearm.
2) Rather than focusing on personal defense where everyone needs one or more firearms, a better approach is community defense, which at the Dunbar Limit (~ a small village) scale requires at most 1/3 of the firearms, so the resources that the other 2/3 would represent can be spent on other things.
In other words, if you assign a probability of 1 against a Kristallnacht scenario, then nearly all your self-defense effort should be spent on your own security and nothing on community.
On the other hand, if you assign a probability of 1 against a Jericho style scenario where either foreign invaders or neighboring town or an illegitimate federal govt attacks your town then maybe 1/3rd-2/3rd split might work.
The idea is, firearms are possibly the most effective protective measure you can use in all situations, things like clean water preparation might not help you if you're worried about Kristallnacht.
[shrug]
Agree to agree to disagree on the remaining point?
P.S. I would recommend you use a generic term such as "false flag" in the future, rather than any specific historical event. There are those for whom those events have personal significance.
I want amazon.eu, where I can filter by products, that can actually be shipped to my EU country - one stop shopping. I would probably stop buying online from local shops in my country entirely.
100 hundred times this! I avoid using Amazon just for their shipping information stupidity - I have to use checkout to be able to see if selected item can be shipped to my country. I find it funny and bizarre that it's easier to order online from China (which is half the World away) than from neighboring countries that belong to the same free trade zone. Ebay has an "EU only" search option, but it's useless as Ebay itself has become smaller Aliexpress cousin with same items and higher prices.
The store segmentation is created by amazon themselves and doesn't really make sense.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/amazon-dublin-dat...
There are long lists of entities who safely ignore tail risk events - that's true almost by the definition of "tail risk".
That doesn't mean buying a cheap insurance policy against tail risk events is a bad idea.
in Europe, having guns widely dispersed throughout society would be considered about as expensive as it gets (and far more likely to kill the patient than offer a potential cure under very particular and exceptional conditions)
In Europe a number of countries has and has had guns widely dispersed throughout society since forever. A number of those countries are - and have used to be - very peaceful.
Source: Grew up in Europe. Could disassemble an assault rifle since I was a teenager (my father was assigned one as part of extended draft and kept that and a number of rounds at home. At some point he showed me since I was interested. He also used the opportunity to tell me how grateful I should be for peace and how he hoped he would never have to use it for real).
Also, there are many things significantly more dangerous than guns. Should we ban those things too? If not, why not?
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/are_gays_or_guns_mor...
>> In Europe a number of countries has and has had guns widely dispersed throughout society since forever.
> Gun ownership and gun deaths are minimal in Europe compared to the US.
I think you are moving the goal posts.
I assumed it was obvious I was referring to quantity of guns in a society rather how far apart these guns were actually placed.
I'm aware that Europeans have their own unique culture with their own unique unsupported assumptions and myths. That's not really a substitute for evidence.
Also, you dodged the question of whether we should ban other things that are vastly more dangerous than guns. Weird.
That is not good form.
We are trying to argue against you in good faith but I must admit I find it frustrating.
Edit:
FWIW, here is some more data: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm...
Well the numbers are overwhelmingly against you and a smart person would stop digging.
Your own figures show that the US is off the charts compared to EU on a) gun ownership b) gun deaths - it's a no brainer and therefore no useful debate on the merits/demerits. (I'm not going to get into US politics and it's really up to them if they want to have more deaths, but even they fall back on 2nd amendment and notions of tradition to try and justify gun ownership.)
> That is not good form.
Form fits the circumstances I'm afraid.