I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided:
"We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and reliably."
There's a blind spot in prose like this that gets repeated all over the place in our community: it emphasizes writing over reading. I think we have to start with reading. My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use, wanting to make a tweak. How can I orient myself and make a quick change in just one afternoon? This is hard today; it can take weeks or months to figure out the global organization of a codebase.
You can't "deliver software continuously and reliably" until you rethink its underpinnings. Before the delivery problem there's a literacy problem: we programmers prefer to write our own, or to wrap abstraction layers over the code of others, rather than first understanding what has come before.
More on my approach: http://akkartik.name/about
Reading is not the issue as well because most code is terrible and it doesn't matter how easy you make it to read the code I'm still going to waste my time reading it. So I'd say that the problem again lies elsewhere. Few people have the aesthetic sense to write elegant code. It doesn't matter how many tools and abstractions you throw at the problem there are still going to be people writing terrible code.
Writing and reading code or doing anything else with it is in many ways like art. It is also like science and craft and a bunch of other things that require creativity. Even with the accessibility of paints and all the accompanying technology we still don't have the likes of Michaelangelo and Picasso being any more prevalent than they were around the time those guys were alive. Literature is another good example. We teach everyone to read and write but it doesn't matter how much money or technology you throw at it (ebooks, libraries, etc.) we still don't have any more great writers than we did a century ago.
This is not a technology problem. It is a culture and human problem for which you are not likely to find a technical solution.
Most reasonably skilled programmers can read code. They choose not to. Cultural problem not technical one.
I've been in the industry a long time and the best codebases I've seen had a handful of things in common:
* They were written by highly competent programmers who all had an interest in doing a good job. * The code was neat, well-document, and sensibly structured based on agreed upon standards. * The programmers writing them weren't forced to inject changes faster than they could compensate for them.
That's it. Most of the disasters in industry are the result of extrinsic demands. People not caring or people. People documenting nothing. People under extreme deadline pressure hammering in something that then has massive, long-term design ripple effects on the rest of the codebase. Do this several dozen times and you're almost certain to produce a disaster and some point.
Therefore, most software problems have to do with people in over their heads or making changes haphazardly to meet deadlines. These cultural issues seem largely to stem from people thinking that writing software is a deterministic process - it isn't, and has more in common with chaotic systems than linear deterministic systems. Hell, I've written virtually the exact same piece of software twice at one company and each time produced both identical bugs and completely new bugs.
We would probably benefit more from understanding what software actually is and educating people about that than attempt to technologize away our problematic understanding of technology.</screed>
Elegant code does not necessarily mean readily understandable code (or "readable" code). For example, some Haskell programmers like writing extremely elegant code -- so elegant that you can base a whole new (elegant) branch of mathematics on it -- yet it is no more readable than, say, many early BASIC programs.
But why pick on Haskell? I've never seen Microsoft Word's code, but let's imagine it were the paragon of OOP design. Then, I'd like to add a feature similar to the spellchecker, that tests whether consecutive sentences rhyme. Now, I could probably find the spell-checking code rather easily, only to learn that it is attached to the main program via the most beautifully intricate plugin system -- with lifecycle management, runtime loading and unloading and whatnot -- that it takes me a few days only to learn that bit.
The point is that software is complicated, and very non-standardized. Code readability rests only in part on its structure, and a lot on how many "advanced" language features are used, the number of libraries used and their familiarity. You'll probably find "terrible" code that uses a couple of popular, mature libraries, that you're familiar with, much easier to understand than the most "elegant" polyglot codebase (written in both Python and Haskell, because, you know, the best tools were picked for each job) that makes use of 10 of the newest, shiniest libraries you've read a lot about on HN and always wanted to learn but never had the time to.
I want programming to be like reading, with most people able to skim most article-length pieces of prose -- even if it's poorly written -- and get a sense for its global organization. That doesn't require teaching everyone to write like Shakespeare.
This is what we're trying to address at Sourcegraph (https://sourcegraph.com/). 80% of programming is about reading and understanding code, not writing code.
Why don't existing tools focus more on helping people read and understand code--and, more broadly, collaborate on a development team? Things like:
* seeing everywhere a function or class is used, in context (like https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/joyent/node/.CommonJSPack... on the right side)
* seeing who at your company knows the most about an area of your codebase
* seeing the history of changes, in terms of functions/modules added, not just lines (like https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/fsouza/go-dockerclient/.c...)
* having a long-lived discussion about a module/class/function that doesn't vanish after a commit is merged or the file's lines shift around
So far, most of the innovation in programming tools has been in editors or frameworks, not in collaboration and search tools for programmers.
While there are great editors and frameworks, the lopsidedness is unfortunate because making it easier for programmers to learn and reuse existing code and techniques, and to collaborate on projects, can have a much bigger impact than those other kinds of tools. That's because, in my experience, the limiting factors on a solo developer's productivity are the editors and frameworks she uses, but the limiting factor on a development team's productivity is communication (misunderstanding how to use things, reinventing the wheel, creating conflicting systems, not syncing release timelines, etc.).
...but I can't give you money without Java/Scala support. Roadmap? Pleeeeease? =)
It lets you cross reference and document any language with gigabytes of code, e.g. Android platform code. Jelly bean ~9 gb of code.
Try it out: http://www.srcmap.org/s/sl.htm/p=android-4.2.2_r1
Sample Documents created from that app are here:
http://www.srcmap.org/p/1/4af293f91271/Android_Init_startup_...
http://www.srcmap.org/p/1/80c16319d25e/Docker.html
http://www.srcmap.org/p/6/4a88339ceef3/mtpd_source_code_stud...
http://www.srcmap.org/p/1/212c9a285186/Google_IO_2014____sch...
The ux is ok. A few gigabytes of code db running in a cheapest $5 instance of Digital Ocean.
The app is very simple ~8 mb of standalone binary, no external dependency do any other app/db.
Perhaps the biggest gain yet to be realized in the programming environment is the use of integrated database systems to keep track of the myriads of details that must be recalled accurately by the individual programmer and kept current in a group of collaborators on a single system.
Surely this work is worthwhile, and surely it will bear some fruit in both productivity and reliability. But by its very nature, the return from now on must be marginal.
Tools will not solve the essential difficulties of software engineering.
This tells me it's not that understanding how that code works is intellectually difficult; rather it's discovering how it works is time-consuming.
It would be amazing if you could "interact" with the code about its structure and intent the same way you might interact with its author.
"There are so many times where, if I could sit down with the original program author for 5 - 10 minutes, I could understand more from that interactive back-and-forth than several hours of reading code in solitude."
Peter Naur wrote a paper in 1985 where he conjectured that this seemed to be a universal law. No matter how much documentation authors provided, new programmers still needed to talk to them. http://alistair.cockburn.us/ASD+book+extract%3A+%22Naur,+Ehn...
So you could choose to hear what the author was saying right when he was working on a certain area of the code. (You'd normally turn it off, but if you're really stuck it might be a good last resort.)
FWIW I think you are exactly right, it made me sad that Google expected people to be 'useless' for anywhere from 6 to 9 months of their early employment as they tried to get their head around the code base and tools. Having the ability to eliminate that spin up time would probably triple their productivity numbers.
The biggest difficulty with current languages is their reliance on absolute determinacy. Programmers must express in exact form what computations ought be performs, and the languages possesses no intelligence in themselves. I think this needs to change. Inference should have applications outside type declaration, and the vast knowledge base that is the Internet should be taken into account.
At this point, there are two promising pursuits that I've seen. First is Wolfram Language, which you've all heard of. The other is Escher, which enables "programming in analogies". It's on early stages right now, but I'd encourage you to check it out at https://github.com/gocircuit/escher.
In the end, an analogy-based approach seems inevitable though, especially once natural language-based inexact. grow popular. Everyday speech is littered with ambiguities, and programming "languages" need to handle these. They can't throw compilation errors upon each inexact command.
The software fulfillment process has a lot of issues.
We are stuck in a local maxima and jumping the chasm to the next maxima with ideas like "what comes after programming languages" is really really hard.
Sadly, one of the biggest hurdles is self preservation because software developers don't want "software development accessible to the widest part of our society". I hate to say it, but there are Luddites among us.
So, I tend to agree that a startup is the wrong vehicle for this.
> I think we have to start with reading.
I agree with this point. People understand things differently. There should be multiple ways for people to read and understand software programs. Unfortunately, there is only one major way now and that is with source code.
I do think that tools like IFTTT are moving us towards more accessibility but it is a small step.
I like what you are working. Keep the conversation going.
It's a strange form of Luddism that seeks to limit opportunities to integrate the existing skills of the labor force into the structure of production. We don't have much in the way of unions or guilds, so perhaps the only effective way to restrict the labor supply is to keep the tools user-unfriendly.
But are you sure the RFS actually disagrees with you? What you're working on covers 2/3 of what the RFS deems worth focusing on. Collaboration and understanding.
†I think it's clear what comes after programming languages. A return to their roots. Programming a computer today is like moving by telling every single muscle what to do. To make writing code easier we want to be able to do more with less, to have the code figure out from context what the best thing to do is. We want more intelligence in our compilers. It is telling how powerful the notion of AI is when so many world changing ideas (functional programming, OOP, search, Databases [influence goes: prolog -> datalog -> SQL]) are compromises, failed attempt and detritus of AI projects.
So I'll stand by my statement that the RFS's phrasing is -- not wrong, but rather -- misguided as stated. Or maybe "misleading" would be better, but that carries connotations of malice.
1 http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nipype/ 2 http://nipy.org/nipype/0.4.1/_images/graphviz-01bb1b88b33f7c...
Software engineering won't exist as a profession until it really is turtles all the way down, and not a pig on a fish on a tiger etc.
Is this a reference to something, or should I point here if I want to reference this idea?
Both those things literally only came after reading so much code! No shortcuts from the Dev environment (idea, docs) aside from navigation and search!
from Bret Victor:
http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
and intentional programming from Charles Simonyi:
Once Apple and other companies showed what the world looks like when a phone is a giant touch screen + giant battery, phones with buttons become a niche, not the norm.
I don't know what the programming paradigm is that completely changes that, but I do know that I haven't seen it yet and everything we've done so far seems to completely miss the mark.
Someone is going to come along with some other radical assumption about what designing/implementing software really is about.
I know that it is not about static vs dynamic, functional vs. imperative, etc. like we've traditionally thought. Maybe it will be more like using Excel or Gmail. Maybe it will be more like flowcharts, or maybe just like sketching out a structure and the machine knows how to wire it together for you. Maybe humans won't be involved at all.
Speculation is endless, but nobody has had the iPhone unveil of new programming paradigms yet.
I'll suggest an alternative approach that might stimulate your neurons. Look back at the ways that your life is improved reading code today compared to twenty years ago. When I look back, the highlights for me are:
a) version control, and
b) automated tests
Forget all their benefits to the people writing code. For me, the guy with one afternoon to make a tweak to an alien codebase, it has been invaluable to have not just the current snapshot of a codebase but a story of its evolution so that I can see what the skeleton of the program used to look like in a simpler time, and gradually play enhancements forward atop it[1]. It has also been invaluable to be in situations where I can go, hmm why do I need _, why don't I just rewrite it as _, try it, and find a failing test with an enlightening name.
What's common to these two ideas is that they are additive. You don't have to give up programming languages. You just need new ways to share information between programmers besides just the code that runs "in production". My current favorite candidate for the next augmentation for codebases is logs. More info: http://akkartik.name/post/tracing-tests. If that whets your appetite feel free to get in touch. My email is in my profile.
[1] More details of how this helps: http://akkartik.name/post/wart-layers
I think "naked objects" or "apache isis" are the best examples we've got for that for now , but they are rooted in somewhat complex java code, instead of being rooted in an easy to use tool, such that lets the business analyst who had some course , sit with the client and fully define a running system , step by step. In some cases the auto-generated UI would be good as it is , and the system will be used as-is.
In other cases , we might need easy tools to customize the UI.
Would love to get in touch with you.
http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susa...
$264.39, for students that work part time jobs at $7.00 an hour (before taxes).
Not only students are angry about this. Professors are angry, and authors are angry too. Bitter fights between professors and publishers are common.
Everybody wants to see the big players in this industry fail. Please, someone, make it happen.
Cost of attendance at my state flagship is $24,000. Full time at minimum wage is $15,080. Any education worth that kind of money is hard enough that you physically can't work full time while doing it. Student labor is pretty miniscule as a source of funding.
In other words, $264.39 is not actually 37 hours at McDonalds. It's a rounding error on a parent's 6-figure contribution over 4 years. Or a rounding error in your monthly loan payment when you're making $50k instead of $8k. Or it's coming out of interest on the school's endowment if the school is good enough and your family poor enough. Or it's coming from whoever funds your scholarship if you are one of the handful of people smart enough to get a merit-based full ride. Etc.
(No, your experience of putting yourself through a state flagship in the 80s is not relevant. Minimum wage is roughly what it was; tuition is decidedly not.)
I believe the textbook publishing industry could adapt (or be disrupted) to be more cost-efficient, but you would first have to vastly reconfigure the higher education system such that it's reasonable for students to pay their own way. Then you'd actually have incentives to price things for students.
I don't really understand how they can afford tuition + room + board but need the $140 (less taxes) a week, but as it turns out this is very common.
It made a big impression on me when a student walked in to turn in his homework wearing a Chick-Fil-A cap. Asking around, I learned that this is typical at the university where I teach.
So, yes, here at least, $264.39 is 37 hours at McDonalds. Well.... taxes.... so make that more like 50.
You talk about full-time classes and a full-time job. Actually some of my classmates are raising children or that sort of thing as well. But beyond that, you're correct that it is hard to take a hard STEM major full-time and also work full-time. It would be almost impossible to maintain a 4.0 or 3.9 or whatnot. The solution is obvious, don't take a full course load - take three classes a semester, or perhaps two, or perhaps one. It takes longer, but what is the alternative for those who can't afford full-time study?
If some 18 year old can't really afford full-time study...then don't do full-time study. Why make your parents shell out thousands they can't afford, as well as burdening yourself with enormous loans, for something you may very well not complete in four years. Some kids graduate and are not working - a lot nowadays. On this public school commuter campus, the smarter half of the CS major seniors I know have never heard of software version control, have no idea what git, Perforce, cvs etc. is. Most of our professors are good too - most of them understand their topics, and some are even good at explaining it. A dedicated person can get a lot out of the education, and then perhaps go get a Masters at a more prestigious school afterward if they want.
If people can't afford fulltime, don't go fulltime. Maybe the government should help more, maybe not, but if someone can't pay fulltime they should go parttime.
The right place to target reform would be professors. They should take a stand to write and use only open textbooks that can be freely downloaded and distributed. This is already common at the research level, but it doesn't seem as common for intro textbooks.
Studies have shown that text is not the ideal format for novices to learn a subject for the first time.
I'm a co-founder at https://www.clutchprep.com and that's what we're tackling. Students go to 300+ student classrooms, don't learn much and then have to rely on a $250 textbook to teach themselves (doesn't work well for most). It's a broken system.
Edit: fixed the link
As a recent graduate I remember shelling out thousands of dollars during my undergrad years to pay for textbooks. It was always a crapshoot because you never knew if the professor would not use the textbook at all or would heavily rely on it and assign reading/problems from the book.
There are definitely ways around purchasing expensive textbooks, but most are illegal, and none are convenient or guaranteed.
Here's an open source Java book on Penflip: https://www.penflip.com/lynnlangit/tkp-lesson-plans
http://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php
Free online, <$10 in print. There is a high school level stats text book available as well. Its also not "crowd sourced", but the results seem solid.
Listen, Uber is an example: Not playing by the rules makes it easier to win and when you do a few will complain about your lack of ethics but only a tiny fraction will make that count against you.
JustFab? You may be upset about dark patterns but people love them. Apple, Google, et. al. intentionally breaking the law? No one cares, people still want to work for them. Intel's illegal anti-competition activities? Microsoft's? People still love them.
No one cares about the guy who worked his ass off so he could afford a book, if that work cut into the time needed to study, leaving him less educated. People celebrate the guy who, having pirated books, was able to concentrate on learning and has the free time to become better at many other things.
But please oh please disrupt textbooks for schools. Parents are forced to buy new books every year because of social pressure. After all, you wouldn't want your kid to be known in class as "the one with parents too poor to even buy a textbook" and bullied for it. Not that adults would care about someone having a copied book - but the kids do. Recognition and respect of their classmates is of paramount importance to every kid in the school; publishers know this and they can charge whatever they like, and parents have to pay.
The big problem I'm facing right now is how to subvert universities requiring super specific and customized versions of their textbooks. I think the solution is a crowdsourced list of textbook alternatives (ie: "your university says you need Biology Harvard Custom Edition, but that book is the same as Biology minus chapters 6 and 11. You can get the generic edition for $11").
That's really just a bandaid, though. A real solution would look something like https://www.boundless.com/ or Khan Academy.
Obviously the books changed slightly. But they kept change lists, so you always knew if you had the latest info or not. Sometimes, even the lecturers did this. E.g. "If you have ed4, it's on page 400-403, otherwise it's page 389-392 on the latest edition, etc".
Some useful discussion here, including indications that cheaper options exist: http://suburbdad.blogspot.ca/2014/08/oer-erps-and-idea.html
Maybe what's required is a company that a) publishes cheap (probably older) textbooks, and b) rouses student organizations to push for their adoption.
Part b) is by far the harder one, and probably doesn't have a technical solution. It's a marketing/consciousness-raising thing.
Really takes open access (which is great, but still expensive) to the next level. Very inexpensive publishing, and free preprints.
If anyone is interesting in this domain and would like to chat, please ping me. I'm in SF Bay Area, email is in my HN profile.
> Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable.
That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United States with its pro-profit healthcare system, and American doctors and healthcare corporations end up being fabulously more rich than in those countries. (And they still have private healthcare, like in Sweden, which competes with public healthcare organizations.) The other reason healthcare costs are getting higher is that people are getting older and thus more sick. That's a generational bump, there's very little we can do about that. Not that I'm opposing the types of ideas YC is after in this sector (preventative medicine and better sensing/monitoring), just that the premise is wrong that it's a technological problem.
> At some point, we are going to have problems with food and water availability.
That's because we dedicate most of our water and land resources to feeding cattle that we then eat. Innovations that will have the most impact in that sector will involve weaning people from animal products. Stuff like Beyond Eggs and lab-grown meat.
> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.
Sure, some super-low-cost index funds would help, but the main problem here is two-fold: 1) real incomes are stagnant, due to government policies favouring corporations and 2) government/pension funds are much better at providing good ROI on investment than individuals can. Once again policy change is much more likely to have a massive impact than trying to improve the individual worker's investment returns. Collect retirement contributions at the source, and have the best investors in the country manage them. Without taking a profit for themselves. It's done elsewhere.
#1 on that list is medical costs.
To quote the article: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html "A study done at Harvard University indicates that this is the biggest cause of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies. One of the interesting caveats of this study shows that 78% of filers had some form of health insurance, thus bucking the myth that medical bills affect only the uninsured. "
So yea, fixing healthcare will also fix a lot of America's debt problem. There are only a couple ways to do that - decrease the costs or have a single payor. We've tried the 'decrease costs' part with college funding. That didn't work, because any time we subsidize funding to colleges, they request more money. College debt is huge now. So going the medical route and just subsidizing a broken system isn't going to fix it. It will only make the problem worse. We need to have medicare for everyone, and it should start before birth. If someone wants a college education, allow them to get it, only paying to re-take classes. That would wipe out most people's debts.
So the big policy change the parent asks for has already happened, and the U.S. will gain universal insurance coverage over the next couple years.
If we want to see healthcare costs drop in cost beyond that policy change, it's almost certainly going to need to be driven by technology in some way.
Yeah, but people being is debt is great for the part of the financial services industry that they owe money to, often with ridiculous and crippling interest rates (compare to the interest rates these players get from the government when they borrow, which is essentially 0% -- which is nice, for them). This is especially true when it comes to student debt, which can't ever be discharged. And these companies have a ton of political power (money begets power begets money).
Which all is to say I agree with frandroid. The root problem here is our political system is almost completely broken due to lobbying and lack of meaningful campaign finance laws and the best way to actually fix some of the issues listed here is fixing those core government/policy problems, but those problems aren't technical in nature and won't be fixed with a Ruby on Rails app.
Software may be eating the world, but if your only options for government leadership are (to put it in South Park terms) a "turd" or a "douche", both of which are controlled by big money whose interests are at odds with the overall populace then there are a lot of core problems that there will never be a software fix for (short of the call for better AI going really well and having a benevolent SkyNet take over).
Countries with universal coverage through other-than-single-payer systems do this, too. (every OECD country other than Mexico and the US has universal coverage -- but not all of them through single-payer -- and every OECD country spends massively less per GDP, let alone per capita, on healthcare than the US does; to the extent that many of those that do have public single-payer universal systems pay less in GDP for that than the US does considering public costs in the US alone, without considering the slightly-higher private costs in the US.)
Page 6 of
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/F...
gives a very thorough overview.
1 - using buying leverage to negotiate prices, something republicans owned by the drug and device industry specifically banned (see eg [1])
2 - rationality about end of life care, which we spend a lot of money on -- 20%+ off the top of my head. As many doctors have shared, they often choose not to aggressively treat terminal illnesses and focus on quality of life. Unfortunately (remember Sarah Palin's death panels, and let's all thank John McCain for bringing that snowbilly grifter to the national stage), attempts to do things like pay doctors to sit down with patients and have end of life conversations, explaining what is happening have been successfully yet stupidly fought off. Whereas when doctors talk about how they die, they often chose to undergo very little treatment [2,3]
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being
performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of
technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The
patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and
assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a
cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would
not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow
physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if
you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical
personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to
perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo. [2]
my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most
physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good
night. [2]
Research shows that most Americans do not die well, which is to say they do
not die the way they say they want to — at home, surrounded by the people
who love them. According to data from Medicare, only a third of patients die
this way. More than 50 percent spend their final days in hospitals, often in
intensive care units, tethered to machines and feeding tubes, or in nursing
homes. [3]
More typical was an almost eighty-year-old woman at the end of her life,
with irreversible congestive heart failure, who was in the I.C.U. for the
second time in three weeks, drugged to oblivion and tubed in most natural
orifices and a few artificial ones. Or the seventy-year-old with a cancer
that had metastasized to her lungs and bone, and a fungal pneumonia that
arises only in the final phase of the illness. She had chosen to forgo
treatment, but her oncologist pushed her to change her mind, and she was put
on a ventilator and antibiotics. Another woman, in her eighties, with
end-stage respiratory and kidney failure, had been in the unit for two
weeks. Her husband had died after a long illness, with a feeding tube and a
tracheotomy, and she had mentioned that she didn’t want to die that way. But
her children couldn’t let her go, and asked to proceed with the placement of
various devices: a permanent tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and a dialysis
catheter. So now she just lay there tethered to her pumps, drifting in and
out of consciousness. [4]
[1] http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2012/sep/04/t...
[2] http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/how-doctors-die...
[4] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/02/letting-go-2
[5] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/02/letting-go-2
The problem is not that it's hard to find good ways to save and invest, although that is a true statement. The problem, at least for most people in the US, is that besides Social Security, "personal saving and investing" is currently the only available way to secure one's future/retirement. An additional, related problem is that the only personal saving and investing option available to most people is "buy one or more Financial Services products": Savings accounts, stocks, bonds, funds, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, even pensions which are long gone. They're pretty much all the same scam: Hand your own personal money to someone else, and in 50 years, it may end up bigger or smaller or the same, depending mostly on who you chose to give it to, and other factors totally outside of your control. If it ends up bigger, you chose wisely and/or got lucky, and deserve to retire comfortably. If it ends up a lot bigger, you chose brilliantly and/or got really lucky, and deserve to retire in luxury. If it ends up smaller, you chose stupidly and/or got unlucky and deserve to eat dog food when you're old.
Can we get away from "use your own personal money to buy a risky financial services product" being the sensible way to secure one's financial future? Now that would be a worthwhile problem to solve.
Not to mention the fact that "Saving and Investing" is only available to people who can actually afford to save and invest (which is yet another problem that desperately needs solving).
You claim it's all a scam but the market has been going up and up over the last 100 years. The scam lies with the advisors and products that charge high fees and are not transparent. Companies like Betterment and Wealthfront are changing the game buy making these fees transparent and putting you in a good diversified portfolio.
The second problem is that like you mentioned saving and investing is only available to people who can afford to save. This is the same thought that 85% of millennials who don't save feel but the reality is, you can. There is just no easy way to do it...yet
https://www.wellsfargo.com/press/2014/20140610_millennials http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/historical/djia1900.html
Look at Uber, Uber has an app, but the real issue in Uber is creating a marketplace, managing a brand, managing relationships with drivers, fighting the taxi companies, etc.
Innovations in how health care is organized and delivered are very possible.
As for food and water I'll say that the case for vegetarian and veganism is often overstated. Out here in upstate New York we have plenty of water and plenty of hillsides that are good for grazing and not for tilling. In other places the situation is different, but in some places animal agriculture is part of the solution and not the problem.
I think both the single payer and pension arguments miss the fact that the US is at a hub of a system. Inflated drug prices in the US finance drug development and cheaper drug prices in the ROW. Similarly, what a government run pension fund can attain in another country is unrelated to what one can attain in the US.
I agree with the part about stagnant real incomes, which meshes with the rising cost of health insurance, housing and college, but I don't think professional pension fund managers do that much better than individuals in the long term. They may avoid stupid mistakes like selling all of your shares in the winter of 2008-2009, but the real advantage pensions have is that they can borrow from peter to pay paul, at least in the short term.
The room in Canada was paid out of pocket (because I'm not a resident) and cost $600 for 1 x-ray a consultation with 2 doctors and a room for the night, and another $30 for the pain meds (morphine)
The 60 minute consultation I had in the US was $150 co pay, which if I had no insurance would have been $2000 Which got me an x-ray and 15 minutes with a doctor and another $10 for "prescription" acetaminophen. (aka overpriced over the counter Tylenol)
Doctors aren't the problem, it's the insurance companies. I don't see how it's a technology problem as much as a political will (and maybe stubbornness in believing America is always the best even when it's not). The best we can hope for is technology can help by gathering political will.
I'd love to be proved wrong.
Where I live there is an abundance of crystal clear drinking water being wasted by fracking to sell LNG at bargain basement prices.
As a farmer, I'm struggling to picture how we could change that land utilization in a significant way without technology to enable it. It's not quite as simple as consumer desires, although you are right that changing consumer habits changes the flow of money and where it is invested which would also spur on the necessary technology, presumably.
Yep. You're not going to fix a problem caused by privatization with more privatization.
Also, a lot of this prevention can be tied back to diets, not a lack of sensors.
That's the point though: the right insight might provide a technology solution to what everyone could only think of as a policy problem.
These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' the problem).
In addition, the people with the skills necessary to make progress are going to be advanced researchers with PhDs, who are good enough to remain in academia if they wish or who have already developed a proven-enough idea through their research career that they don't need Y-combinator-style money.
I am not trying to be a downer on the idea, contrarily I hope there can be success. Really I am fishing for anyone with a good perspective (or an answer) to these points.
This is just a huge lack of perspective by people who've only worked on commercial software. Real science is very hard, very expensive, and does not result in billion dollar IPO's within 3 years.
I'm hoping that once YC realizes that such projects will never succeed through a startup incubator, they will become politically active and spearhead the reversal of the current decay of government funded science. Only the government has the resources, time and foresight to fund 50 year research projects in the fields listed in the RFS. I hope this becomes clear in time.
EDIT - Here's a bit more of my thoughts on this issue from a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614344
This is a pure example of the AI Effect[1]. Academia has been extremely successful with AI Research, but you don't see it because as soon as something becomes successful, you disassociate it with AI.
I would say that academia have had tremendous success with AI research... but that's IF you accept that the goal doesn't have to be "a machine that thinks just like a human" and if you don't hold to an "all or nothing" outcome.
In terms of incremental improvements in techniques that make machines "smarter" and more capable of helping humans solve problems, there's absolutely been amazing progress. Look at Watson, for crying out loud.
So, if you accept that premise (that the goal is just "smarter" and not "thinks exactly like a human") I don't see any reason to think a startup can't make progress in this area. Will they invent the first full-fledged AGI? Maybe not, but I don't think that's the point.
In biotech anyway, cost of doing the work is falling rapidly. It's not software development costs yet but we're getting there. Also YC offers a lot outside the check (alumni network, demo day, great partners, visibility, etc).
PhDs are an untapped founder pool in general. There are tons of great PhDs minted every year where academia may not be the best way to accomplish their goals. They are used to living on low salaries and working on open-ended problems. Great founders.
We can't be too far from that. Even if that thing sold at $10k it would have buyers lined up.
Agreed about y-combinator not being the appropriate format for hard nuts to crack. Mobile stuff and low hanging fruit like disqus and dropbox? Sure. Breakthroughs that define how business and society works? That's probably going to come out of larger institutions that dont consist of 20 somethings living off ramen. This format can be seen as working with breakthroughs that are out there, but haven't been applied the right way or are under-monetized. TBL didn't need to invest TCP/IP, fiber networking, server kernels, etc. He just had to write HTTP.
"incentives" - because the founders can get rich if they succeed.
"implement" - because customers don't care about theoretical work, they care about solving the problem.
"simple solution" - because founders can't afford to design a complicated one.
"severe problem" - because the problem has to be bad enough for even a very simple solution to be worth paying for.
Now, to answer your question directly, why is there hope for startups even in highly technical fields where academia is slow and expensive? Because when people are laser-focused on solving specific problems like this, they occasionally make leaps of insight, either in terms of reframing problems to make them easier, applying newly available technology, or just thinking of a new idea on their own. Smart people can pick up skills surprisingly quickly when they're focused on solving problems.
Also, the incentives are strong enough that they can sometimes convince these skilled academics to quit/supplement their academic jobs with startup work.
It isn't inconceivable, then, that today there ought to be enough liquidity and appetite for riskier, much less leveraged, longer-term growth modalities, as in the past.
If you want to advance these fields throw money at universities, not startups.
I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child.
Are there YC founders in this phase of life that were able to make it work in YC? What did you do differently? Is YC interested in working with these kinds of founders? (it's certainly a different kind of "Diversity")
Realistically YC doesn't care what stage of life you're in, they just want you in Mountain View for 3 months so you can significantly improve the chances of your company growing large. It's difficult to make it work, but I promise for me it was totally worth it.
"This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old over the 32 year old."
"By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids"
I would be wary approaching an organization that has publicly expressed such age discrimination.
"By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids" is a statement of fact.
"This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old over the 32 year old." is a reasonable conclusion.
Calling this age discrimination is like saying all employers are evil because they discriminate based on having or not having skills required for a job.
Only you can answer whether you're willing to do what it takes to make a startup succeed. I personally do not believe it requires sacrificing things like family and personal health. I'm not going to lie, it's easier when you have less obligations in your life (like when you're young), but not impossible.
It's more a question of whether your life fits to everything that comes with being a startup founder, rather than YC itself.
It's tough. But not impossible. My solution was to cut everything else out. But, I love my family, my co-founder is awesome, and building my company is what I want to do. So, "everything else" should probably have been cut out anyway.
SimpleLegal YC S2013
Sorry, this is not the right problem in financial services. Companies like Vanguard are already doing a great job of this and the costs are extremely low. Its a commodity product with razor thin margins that actually serves the needs of its customers well. Maybe there's a marketing issue where they aren't educating enough people, but that's not a technology problem.
As an alternative: Lower the Costs to IPO, disrupt Investment Banks
Sarbanes-Oxley, minimal competition between investment banks, and heightened SEC scrutiny have made the fixed costs to an IPO astronomical. These days a company, for the most part, cannot IPO for less than a $1 billion raise. This means that the broad public, including those index funds YC loves, is prevented from enjoying any returns at all for younger, high-growth companies.
There is room for startups to disrupt part or all of the process. It would be capital intensive and hard as hell. But, you're not looking for easy right?
Can you explain what that means?
I'm kind of confused by what Sam is talking about in the RFS about enabling lower cost index fund investing. VFINX has a minimum initial investment of $3,000 and minimum additional investment of $100. At 17 bps that's literally $5/yr. on the Vanguard S&P 500 fund. You are basically talking about a nominal cost to service accounts (send statements, support, backoffice, etc). It would be interesting to think about how technology can lower these costs, but cost isn't preventing anyone from participating.
And there are plenty of very low cost index trackers.
For a VC to make this sort of request is troubling as it indicates that they have very little knowledge on how investing works.
Remember too that Google got burnt by trying to avoid the sales process entirely.
I'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one API for every enterprise SaaS:
Empire is an API for accessing enterprise SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Apps, etc. It provides a uniform, database-like interface to every service that it supports. Empire makes it easy to integrate data from multiple enterprise services into your own enterprise app.
You can click Login to create an account, and we'll send you an API key. Or you can just sign up for the mailing list.
Aggregator APIs tend to provide extremely reduced functionality compared to the source API, and the ease-of-use doesn't compensate for this. In most cases it just makes more sense for the developer to spend a day building a custom adaptor for the API.
That said I think the SQL front-end is an interesting twist. While developers find it easier to use the source API there are many people (i.e. business analysts, etc.) who can't program but can use SQL and that might be an interesting market to go after (and also a market more willing to pay).
[1][www.catalist.me] [2][sumedh at above]
Doesn't this already exist, in the form of the bicycle?
Bicycles are not an 80/20 solution, they're a 99% solution, with the appropriate kind of bicycle and accessories. You can haul all kinds of crap - construction equipment, children, appliances, etc. - with a bicycle.
There are many other kinds of bicycles that make them accessible to people with reduced mobility: tricycles, hand-cycles, electric assist. Further - active transportation also counts as exercise and physical therapy, even further reducing the number of people who end up with reduced mobility in the first place!
I don't really know what a startup could possibly do in this area that's not already being done by the dozens of active transportation advocacy organizations at every level of society.
The final product -- Segway -- didn't, though. I'm not sure anyone is willing to try again soon.
- bike/scooter/... share programs
- new designs for bikes to improve safety, could work with the existing market
- while you're at it, new additions to other forms of transportation etc. to improve safety too.. even if a lot of it is policy, but even things like self-driving cars fall into this category
- new designs for bikes to improve ease of use. I don't ride bikes because I have never found any seat and any amount of cushioning that isn't immediately painful, while bikes that accommodate that (like recumbent bikes) are typically not as portable
Some of this is outside the scope of YC or it's definitely something else like policy, but just a thought. I especially like the idea of improving rideshare programs, and that is very doable. I was going to try out SF's program but there's no bikes near me since the company behind the rideshare program went out of business. :(
I still am curious about this one. Is there any startup that has successfully done this in recent history?
Keep in mind, there is a big difference (IMO) between creating new jobs and shifting existing ones.
For example, all the rideshare companies are creating jobs, but if they're working longer and longer for less pay like the drivers are claiming, then I don't know if that's a good thing. Homejoy and Handybook etc. take a big cut from what I can tell, to the point that I'm considering just getting a cleaning company/individual directly instead of going through the convenient middleman. Alfred, the latest Disrupt winner, is just like huh? How is that supposed to pay more than minimum wage? Plus everyone loves the contracting workaround, which tends to benefit companies more than the contractor. Even the one company I can think of that doesn't seem to be too bad - Instacart - contracts as far as I can tell.
My side biz is owning a burger shop and I'm trying to pay more than minimum wage and giving out overtime to share what little wealth I have - and it makes me really happy when I see my employees happy and buying new iPhones and MacBook Airs. Would be nice if others followed suit. Not just a startup problem either... it's a potentially huge reason as to why Americans don't have disposable income any more. :/
Another case where jobs are being created is in the direct service marketplace with the shared economy (Uber/Airbnb/etc.) as well as the general assistance (TaskRabbit/VA positions/etc.).
With the rise of mobile, I think we'll see more situations where knowledge workers can provide quick and dirty value to lower tech industries in ways that are highly targeted and very efficient. Making money on the side should be higher value than answering surveys but easier and with less commitment that ramping up a full consulting business or getting a part-time job at a b&m store. /rant
It could also be written like this: the government is a very bad customer with very large software.
This includes decision makers who often play favorites and often have zero expertise or sound counsel to leverage in making key technology related decisions.
The healthcare exchange is not an exception to the rule. It is the status quo of most government technology related initiatives.
It seems like the question can be rephrased as, "At any point in history, have humans been able to advance technology in a substantial way simply because they wanted to, rather than by stumbling upon a way to do it?"
Most technology is incremental. Take flight, for example. The glider had already been around for a substantial amount of time before the Wright brothers solved the "control problem" and the engine problem. Those two problems were the only two left before powered flight was a reality, and the Wright brothers knew it.
For the singularity, on the other hand, there's no clear laundry list of problems to solve in order to achieve it. In fact, there's no clear way to even define AI, or at least define it in a way that can be meaningfully translated into current technology.
Maybe the advent of quantum computing will change this. I've suspected that AI is fundamentally impossible to implement on a Von Neumann architecture. But this is very easy to say from the point of view of a society which hasn't remotely discovered how to make AI work yet. It's similar in spirit to someone from the 1500s saying "I think electricity is fundamentally impossible to harness, because there's no proper medium to channel it" even though metal was quite widespread at the time. Humans just hadn't figured out how to fashion wires yet.
The only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know what we need to know in order to make the singularity a reality, let alone how long it will take.
To know how far the singularity is 'off' is by definition impossible, it means that you have knowledge of which linkages are required to get to the point that you won't be able to predict the ones after that.
After all when the singularity is here the world we will end up in will have no relationship to the one we are in today.
For the record, I think we will see a period of accelerated progress and then we will either fuck up or things will slow down again, I don't believe there will be a runaway event.
Isn't this like asking what comes after spoken language? Arguably the answer is nothing because language is what structured thought is.
maybe i will write a blog post about this.
Between the staid companies that have been providing tools for decades that can be better, the tools that don't really exist that need to - I think we're ready. Similarly, with the security world starting to consolidate (FireEye buying Mandiant, likely goings public of companies like Rapid7 and TripWire), I'd think it's an ample rate/return option.
> We can’t imagine life without the Internet. We need to be sure it keeps working–this includes everything from security to free and open communication to infrastructure.
Oh yes, yes, yes. Everyone is talking about the quantified self but human augmentation would be so much cooler. I don't care if a watch can tell me my heart rate at all times (I know when my body is tired, or out of breath, because I live in it!!!)
But there are so many senses that I would like to have; for example, be able to always know where the North is relative to me. A device that would let me feel the North would be so cool and useful (I wear a Tissot T-Touch for that reason, but it's a very poor solution to this problem).
I think I heard the Apple watch will be able to do this, in some cases; but it sounds like an afterthought. I would pay serious money for a wrist bracelet or some other wearable that would do only that, but do it well.
replace your eyes with cameras (20/20 vision, ability to see "invisible" frequencies, night vision, 360 degree vision). replace your ears with microphones (hear "invisible" frequencies). if we can do that, we can also directly input synthesized sources (think oculus rift without the headset. or your iPod without the headphones.)
granted, if we can do that we've built the matrix sans software and at that point all bets are off. not that I think it's a bad thing, a body is a pretty shitty vessel for a consciousness.
im not sure we will have such a reliable interface in my lifetime, but it's amazing to live in a time where it seems completely possible.
Watches and wearable things are just the tip there. The issues with implants is that they are 100% against the Hippocratic oath. No doctor would ever do one if you are healthy. Implants are a long way off, and wearable enhancers may ease the road to them, however a new ethical system for doctors, or an extension of doctors without such oaths, would be required. Think about it for more than 30 minutes, it gets heeby jeeby real quick.
Would be great to hear from the leader of the startup world. Even if only to bring attention to their cause
What would be some good startup ideas here?
My only idea is a company that manages National/Regional parks and has a monetary incentive like a)Being paid by people who visit their parks. b) Being paid as a service per square foot they manage. What other incentives can we create to make sure the companies are kept honest without involving too much government oversight?
This is a bad thing. Replacing opens standards with proprietary APIs locked behind access tokens hardly makes the internet more accessible.
Walled gardens are great for making money though…
Also it's a very difficult field of science. Now you need to be proficient in AI, machine learning, computational linguistics, linguistic corpora research, cognitive sciences, statistics, and sometimes physics if the text changes over time. Of course, you also need to be a good programmer. This combination of skills is very rare. Thus, very slow progress.
I suggest to start with well defined practical problems. For example, no one seems to do much with user generated reviews. There is some sentiment analysis but that is just a binary text categorization problem - not even close to general purpose AI.
It would be much more interesting to show a seller a time ordered stream of clustered reviews that depict only the most representative review for each cluster. This way a seller can see how his/her fixes/changes impact user reviews. Also it would be a great source for features and bug fixes requests. This is an ideal testing bed for clustering, novelty detection, categorization and mild inference. The inference is required because of sparseness of data.
This would create a good data set for a more general purpose AI. We would have reviews and text documenting changes and improvements of a new version of a product. Now the computer could start learning the dialog between users and product developers. Then, we are just one more step from statistical inference based question-answering system. Not a brute force system like "Watson" or a hand crafted rule base system like "Siri".
[EDIT:] I was thinking more about a decision support system that can recommend product changes. But in a way that maximizes customer satisfaction and minimizes the cost of implementation. The dialogue between past changes and customer reaction would give us the surface that needs to be optimized. This would generalize well to other domains where there is a text for request and a text for response - just to name one: clinical text in healthcare (position 5 in the RFS).
From what I understand from speaking with Selmer Bringsjord, Bloomberg has an outstanding internal QA system, so there is progress, the trouble is that it's all behind corporate firewalls.
There was a silly little online game that came out a few years ago called Akinator [1] that would "guess" a public personality and did so by "learning" based on user inputs - very naiive implementation of CTL but gets the gist of how you can implement a mock AI to get damn good results.
If you did a little delphi to stack the initial deck of results, say for a car buying QA recommendation service, I think you could have a pretty powerful tool that could be replicated across services.
The http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus, http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/, and https://developer.oculusvr.com/ are jam packed with excited hackers cranking out their projects and with the Oculus Connect conference coming up I'd love to see some of this talent pointed towards Y-Combinator
The Oculus acquisition by Facebook is possibly the worst thing that could have happened to VR. With the Rift, Oculus had the opportunity to chart a brand new low cost platform accessible to millions, and be the next IBM/Microsoft/Apple/etc of their day. They had everything going on for them: a founder who knows the field by heart, which allowed him to act the moment he saw the curves of "state of the art" and "realistic potential for a consumer product" intersect. A lucrative vertical (gaming) in which to get their v1 out. Industry titans believing in and joining the company.
I don't know about you, but this reminds me of things like the Macintosh: the potential for brand new applications (with VR, "computer assisted design" takes on a whole new meaning). The potential to reach brand new audiences, and to make existing audiences experience thing they could have never experienced on traditional 2D screens.
But they went the acquisition route. Now they're owned by Facebook, which means that everything they do has to go through all the motions that a large company has. They can't do anything really risky, they can't say "fuck you" to the status quo (because Facebook is the status quo). What are we going to see from Oculus? Locked-in app stores. Social networking bullcrap à la second life (pro tip: we've been trying to make "social VR" a thing since the very first days of the internet, and it's always failed. The Palace (1995), Second Life (2003), etc. Every 10 years, like clockwork, someone tries it again and miserably fails. It makes for great science fiction -presumably why people are so intent on trying to make them happen in the first place- but in reality, it just doesn't work out.
What will we see from Oculus? Most likely nothing ever really revolutionary. As far as gaming goes, we'll probably see half-assed VR from Microsoft and Sony.
But as far as truly disruptive uses of VR goes? Well, it certainly won't be Oculus. Maybe someone else will pick up the torch where Palmer Luckey dropped it, but it seems like the window of opportunity has closed.
There already several startups in the "personal saving" space largely based on index funds, though some of them have large minimums. Complex schemes may not be worth the effort for those with only a few bucks to spare:
https://www.futureadvisor.com/
It would be cool if Vanguard had an API so we could do the same thing open-source rather than incurring the extra management fees from these companies which are mostly based on Vanguard funds.
Then there's a whole broad class of lifestyle apps that could be written, like a saving social network where you are socially rewarded for not spending a lot, win status in a game, etc.. E.g. maybe an app where you make a bet with a friend, if you spend under $100 on food this week, they owe you $100, and vice-a-versa. That would keep you both watching your spending and actually having something to save.
A few of the accelerators I'd applied to in the past don't see the business opportunity present in developer tools (Who pays for those?) so it's a relief that YC recognizes the opportunity there.
This exists already, there are a ton of discount brokers with very competitive pricing.
http://na1.www.gartner.com/imagesrv/newsroom/images/hype-cyc...
1. It has often been commented that the next Google will come from the company who develops a palatable version "next generation TV". Hollywood 2.0 really covers only part of this.
2. A YC generator. YC emerged as an anomaly in the VC field and became widely successful. How can its success be replicated, both for US and in other countries. This was on a 2008 list that pg posted (http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html).
Isn't that already catered to by experiment.com, a YC company?
"An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful."
I think a POSTman style Zapier, love-child would go down very well. Also products like Mashery where you provide APIs as a service and charge.
Notably missing from the list...
- Anything related to travel.
- Anything related to storage
- Anything related to video (Maybe that's Hollywood 2.0?)
- is full 99% of so established players, with lots of money. To enter this marked requires either equally amount of money or something truly truly innovative...which brings to point 2:
- what is left to invent in this area to be so disruptive so that a start-up in this area makes sense? I'd love to be contradicted, but I think all important things in travel have been invented.
Ultimately I think something that provides a whole financial picture is what is needed (I think Learnvest is trying to do that). I picture something along the lines of a combination of Credit Karma, You Need a Budget, and Vanguard as being the way to go.
My email and twitter are in my profile if you would like to talk.
Probably the best investing advice for people is really straightforward; you need to start saving now in order to reap the benefits when you retire.
A set of simple questions, such as your age, whether or not you are contributing to a 401k, and your net worth would probably get you 90% of the way there; from that information alone, most investing advice would follow based of basic mortality statistics, historical stock market performance, and the average retirement age.
The hard part is to start putting money away; that is, to start saving a significant portion of your savings and investing them in the market.
One way to do that might be to make it a one-time decision. What if there was a site where in order to sign-up you were required to setup direct deposit to special investing account? The investing account would, in turn, take a percentage of your salary, and invest it in age-appropriate index funds. The remainder would be re-deposited into a person’s local checking account. That way, it would feel like you only had the net amount that ends up in your checking account, and the invested amount would be removed before you had a chance to contemplate spending it.
A setup like this is something that someone could easily do for themselves using a discount broker, but a site that would more or less make it a one-time decision could be really helpful, because it would remove much of anxiety and education that a person typically has to go through to get this right.
We need business models which support partially-open graphs, e.g. object IDs and some metadata are open, some metadata is closed via API. Open metadata can be cached offline and standardizes models within a vertical market, driving demand for paid metadata. API revenue grows as the open graph grows.
Semi-open knowledge graphs reduce the cost of adversarial algorithms. Better to have many competing skynets than one big skynet. The open part of the graph lowers the cost of consumption. Multiple, closed annotations on the graph compete to support AI use cases, and can optionally become open as value moves to higher-order representations.
Anything resembling OpenCog or Freebase isn't AI—it's just a database with clever retrieval through traversal hierarchies.
The world does need better ways to analyze data sets, but conflating information retrieval with self-directed AI is misapplying the term "intelligence."
Who will remember these companies in 10, 20, 50 years? Most likely no one.
Who will remember companies that solve problems related to healthcare, energy, food allocation? A lot more people.
There's much to like about this list. It's ambitious in a tangible and actionable way. YCombinator realizes that if we don't want there to be a second bubble burst in Silicon Valley, we need to reach escape velocity and leave the social networks and iPhone news apps behind. That's a solid trajectory for them to take.
Pharmaceuticals Government Human Augmentation VR and AR Programming Tools Hollywood 2.0 Diversity Developing Countries Enterprise Software Financial Services Telecommunication
I came to Demo Day in 2010 (as an investor) but left without investing in anything, because I was so demoralized by the way it seemed everyone was trying to start lame web sites doing relatively trivial things.
If Demo Day looked like the stuff on this list, I'd be banging down the door to get in again.
Generation - Solar & Wind
Transmission - Distributed Grid
Storage - Batteries
Consumption - Electric Vehicles
> We believe economics will dominate - new sources must be cheaper than old ones, without subsidies, and be able to scale to global demand.
The world uses a huge amount of energy and it is vital that any technology is 1.cost competitive and can 2.scale on a globally. These are no small feats, but like Airbnb the assets already exist, but our access to them does not. This is a distribution and financing problem, not a creating new technology problem.
Why does YC think that it will be different now?
my implementation: https://github.com/zack-bitcoin/Truthcoin-POW
Science/Drug development: truthcoin allows for a new method of funding public goods that is far more impact per dollar than taxes.
Government: http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html
One million jobs: Successful traders can do it as a job. Every job that involves nothing more than decisions making can be replaced by a trader. Doctors, Governors, CEOs, various boards and counsels, Congressmen, Supreme Court Judges, etc. are all in danger of being replaced by anonymous, potentially uneducated, traders.
Diversity/Developing Countries: It will give modern financial instruments to everyone with internet connection. Insurance to hedge everyone's risks.
Enterprise Software: prediction markets are very unconnected today. Each business has a separate in-house prediction market built. They have to be heavily regulated. Truthcoin makes prediction markets as available as google or facebook.
Financial Services: prediction markets are a financial service. They are illegal. Use of a blockchain circumvents the law against prediction markets.
Our favorite use case is a medical office that has made the jump to EMR. Much of their data is digitized but there is little benefit directly to them. However, once that digital data becomes a part of their workflow they actually see the benefit in it.
We are trying to think more generally about each of these problems and providing guidance to our individual customers specific to their vertical. Although it may seem we are still finding product-market fit, the small business market is always fragmented and diverse so this is just the reality of the situation.
I had my doubts about @sama but he is pretty much on the right track and and seems to be the right person for the job. They are fighting the typical SV stereotype about not funding big ideas. Go YC keep on disrupting!
I think that's called the bicycle.
(Of course there are plenty of barriers to people actually using the things, especially in the US, but those have little to do with the machine itself and everything to do with the social context in which it's used. If a startup can manage to solve those problems then more power to them. Start by talking to the Dutch perhaps.)
I have been working (and still am working) with incredibly expensive software from IBM. Now it's somewhat trivial what it does and I have open sourced it (http://www.use-the-tree.com). Feel free to contact me. My dream is to find a team, apply to YC and crush IBM (I am somewhat serious).
While a great list, the mistake is being made of assuming disruptive startups (through technology, business processes, or both) will solve problems in several of the sectors. Some being Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Transportation & Housing, Telecommunications, and--most of all--Government.
It's not because smart people haven't developed solutions to the problems they see in these sectors. It's that government--through policy and/or bureaucracy--often prevents those solutions from being implemented.
For example, I have family who are in the pharmaceutical industry. PhDs and all. The amount of money spent on the bureaucratic steps to obtain government approval (FDA and others) to bring a new drug to market is the vast majority of development costs.
I won't even go into my experiences working with various levels of government on technology projects. Suffice it to say, never again.
You want great, efficient solutions to hard problems? Get government out of the way. Government involvement hinders progress, and makes what progress there is extremely expensive.
Actors are now being hired based on the amount of followers they have on twitter. If you have a lot of worldwide followers you're guaranteed to be casted since that's where all the money is these days.
>Government
The problem with this is dealing with government technocrats who will never deploy your software as is and will demand all sorts of complexity, basically creating the same garbage they were using before. If you can somehow survive this insanity there are gigantic contracts up for bid, for example many post offices are using Microsoft Mobile devices and looking into some kind of wearable scanner that doesn't charge hefty MS licensing fees. Then there's the Integrated Case Management software contract for $182 million that still doesn't work http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/government+million+co...
That said, I had more success building what wasn't in the RFC (dev tools in 2011), than what was (journalism stuff in 2010).
Learn by making awesome things to solve problems, then attach rockets and see what happens. It's a good approach, that's more fun for all and more accessible to folks that don't learn from the book & lecture model well.
I really like the prototype, simulate, 3D print approach. Being able to take home a flying model at the end of a lesson is just awesome.
Full Disclosure: Chris, the lead on the project, has been one of my best friends for the last 25 years so I'm biased.
That's not because saving is complex or low-yielding, it is because middle class non-disposable expenditures have gone up. (see Elizabeth Warren)
Maybe somewhere in the direction Meteor and Light Table are heading?
If anyone else is interested in Hollywood 2.0, hit me up (check profile). Tinj is reimagining content ratings, reviews and recommendations.
I have a side project where I am aggregating celebrity generated content and one of the things that surprised me, though it really shouldn't have, is how bad the underlying content is. New tools aren't really going to help here beyond creating an incentive for celebs to create better content.
In practice, this probably means something like a "Semantic Marketplace + Contract and Reputation Management".
When are they going to explicitly ask for it? I don't know. Time will tell.
I mean, reading over these requests, my guess is that, while some of them, if successful, would help lead to a better life for nearly everyone and save the world, so far not many people would "want" the results in the sense needed by a startup.
Some of the requests are nearly hopeless: E.g., the US Federal Government via DoE, NSF, and NIH have been spending billions on research in energy and medicine for decades. The idea that a YC start up could do a lot better makes most long shots look like sure things.
Next, a lot of these requests ask for some darned challenging research projects, and just a research project is one of the worst insults passed out by the venture capital community. Instead, no matter what the Web sites of early stage venture firms suggest, such firms want to see traction, not research projects, not even projects to write software for research already successfully done, not even to go live with software already written from research projects already done.
Example? Okay, want a research project to solve a big problem? Okay, consider security and reliability of the complex systems of large server farms and networks. We'd like to do better, right? For this, the first step is essentially near real-time monitoring for ASAP detection. So, we want detectors.
First big problem is getting a good combination of rates of false alarms and missed detections; I'm correct here; think for a few minutes and otherwise trust me on this one. Or, we're trying for a good combination of false positives and false negatives. Or for a good combination of Type I and Type II error.
Right, you guessed it, oh how you guessed it: Such detection has just two ways to be wrong -- a false alarm where we say that the system is sick when it is healthy and a missed detection where we say that the system is healthy when it is sick. Inescapable. Have any doubts, then think for two minutes. With me again now?
Okay: So, right, such monitoring and detection is a case of ASAP, essentially real-time, statistical hypothesis testing. I know; I know; you don't want anything that is just statistical. Neither do I. Tough stuff. We're necessarily, inescapably stuck-o never the less. Or, want a detector with no false alarms? Got that one for you -- just turn off the detector. Want a detector with no missed detections? Got one of those, too -- just sound the alarm all the time. Yes, some detectors occasionally make correct detections and have essentially no false alarms, but such detectors will detect only problems of a very narrow kind and otherwise have a high rate of missed detections. Arguing is futile -- the hard stuff isn't here, and I'm correct here. We're talking research here, like YC now seems to want to see, and research can be tough stuff to swallow. Keep reading ....
Now, what the heck to do about this? Okay, we've got some good news that, right Andreessen Horowitz should understand quickly: We can get data on each of several variables, maybe dozens or hundreds, at data rates of a point each few seconds up to hundreds of points a second. At a big, complex system, we're talking big data. So, we want our statistical hypothesis test to be multi-dimensional. Sure, go to the library and find a lot of those, right? Wrong. You won't find much. Next, most of the material you see on statistical hypothesis tests wants the probability distribution of the data when the system is healthy. Tough since for these complex systems there's no theory that will give you means of finding such distributions (we're talking multi-dimensional), and, even with big data, anything like accurate estimates of multi-dimensional distributions is agony with the curse of dimensionality. So, now what? Okay, we want to be distribution-free, that is, have a statistical hypothesis test that makes no assumptions about the probability distribution.
So, how many multi-dimensional, distribution-free statistical hypothesis tests did you find in the library? Not a lot. Maybe the only ones you found were mine. Mine? Yup.
But, when the dust settles, we do get a (large class of) genuine statistical hypothesis tests that are both multi-dimensional and distribution-free. So, right, with meager/standard assumptions, as is standard we can calculate false alarm rate and set it in advance and get it exactly in practice. For detection rate, as is usually the case we don't have enough data to use the best possible Neyman-Pearson result, but there is good reason to regard the detection rate as relatively high.
So, any large server farm or network doing important work and interested in security and reliability, , that is, nearly all of them, will be interested, right? And any VC firm, too, right? Nope. Don't hold your breath waiting. I only wrote nearly every information technology venture firm in the country, indeed, some months before the bubble burst in 2000. Responses? Even during the days of big bottles of Wonder-Bubble, none or f'get about it.
Lesson: Research, even for a big problem at important enterprises, even done research, even with algorithms to make the computing fast, even with prototype software running, even with a research paper that passed high quality peer review, doesn't get venture funding. I learned that lesson. Here HN and YC can learn it now or learn it later. Now is easier.
great marketing, kudos.
