New Requests for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ <comment><USER3> > What comes after programming languages?

I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided:

 _" We're interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and 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](http://akkartik.name/about)

<comment><USER4> Yes times 1,000!

This is what we're trying to address at Sourcegraph ([https://sourcegraph.com/](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...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/joyent/node/.CommonJSPackage/node/.def/commonjs/lib/fs.js/-/readFile) 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...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/fsouza/go-dockerclient/.commits/bf1b46533545b707ef2df1e6fbad239a08b76df4))

* 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.).

<comment><USER5> FWIW, I think this is absolutely fucking genius and everyone should check it out...

...but I can't give you money without Java/Scala support. Roadmap? Pleeeeease? =)

<comment><USER6> Yes please! Also, I didn't see bitbucket support; hopefully you folks are working towards that?

<comment><USER4> Yes, we are working on better Bitbucket support (on par with our GitHub integration). You can follow or +1 the thread at [https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph.com/issues/213](https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph.com/issues/213) so you get updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would somebody please disrupt the textbook publishing industry?

[http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications- Susa...](http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susanna- Epp/dp/0495391328/)

$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.

<comment><USER8> The bigger question may be why do we even still have "textbooks," at least in their traditional form? Are textbooks the optimal way to learn given all the technology we have today? I'm sure there are quite a few start-ups working on this problem.

<comment><USER9> I'd have to say there is a good use case for textbooks in engineering. Go into any mechanical engineer or chemical engineers cubical and you will find that they all have many of their college textbooks. Textbook chapters are a way better organized than websites when you are looking up values in tables, applying them to equations, and adapting example problems.

<comment><USER10> That's not anything that couldn't be solved with a better designed informational website or app. Those textbooks persist only because someone's making a lot of money from making them required parts of a course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > We'd like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low- > cost index funds.

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?

<comment><USER12> IPOs are sales problems, which require high touch interaction and networking. They are also dangerous to get wrong which is why companies pay high fees to do them.

Remember too that Google got burnt by trying to avoid the sales process entirely.

<comment><USER13> No, think beyond how they are now. For a start it is a high risk event because it is a big event, mainly because of the sales, it could be sold gradually. Also more data would mean that valuation was easier.

<comment><USER14> Warren Buffett wrote a letter to potential sellers of business that he (meaning Berkshire Hathaway) was interested in buying. It should be easy to find as I think it is reprinted in one of Berkshire's annual reports.

The basic idea is this: it's easy to make mistakes in business. As a startup or business in general you made many mistakes over the years that you've had to learn from and bounce back from in order to build you business into the success it currently is. You've earned this competence through your mistakes, and these mistakes cost you at the time you made them. Most businesses only get sold once (acquisition or IPO), so you want to go to the people who know what they're doing when you go to sell your business. For all the shit investment bankers get, they are very good at their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I've always felt a strong attraction to YCombinator (especially the cameraderie that comes from being a part of it) and been very inspired to apply, I can't help but feel that I am in a phase of life that's simply not a good fit for YC, or at least the narrative that's pushed.

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")

<comment><USER16> One should consider statements Paul Graham has publicly made as to where he places his bets.

"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.

<comment><USER17> It's not "age discrimination" (in the negative-connotation sense), it's _sober rational thinking_.

 _" 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.

<comment><USER18> Even if we suppose it were "sober rational thinking" that doesn't mean it's also not a "negative-connotation". Fifty years ago a southern business would have been engaged in "sober rational thinking" to deny service to blacks or at worst to make sure they were "properly" segregated.

In more modern times a more apt comparison would be with respect to pregnant women. Suppose he'd written instead "This is one reason I'd take the childless, single 25 year old woman over the married 32 year old. By 33 she'll probably be pregnant or have a baby."

That's very clearly discrimination, and very clearly in the negative- connotation sense.

For similar reasons, PG's statements re: age are very clearly "negative- connotation" age discrimination. Moreover, there's nothing particularly "sober" or even "rational" about it, considering the heaps of evidence regarding age and people who are very successful in running businesses (hint: "young" isn't exactly a word that comes to mind).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's a fantastic list; I'd like to comment on how some of the problems are already solved (outside the U.S.) or not cast properly.

> 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.

<comment><USER20> Look at the top causes of bankruptcy...

#1 on that list is medical costs.

To quote the article: [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html](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.

<comment><USER21> "That would wipe out most people's debts."

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).

<comment><USER22> I came here to say exactly that. The new projects YC wants to see are great and are defiantly problems worthy of effort, but the more pressing problems seem structural at the moment.

I also agree with your final conclusion ("skynet") and think it is inevitable given time. Remove human corruptibility from governance. Efficiency... it is selected for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised no one has commented yet on the first couple of these - Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design.

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.

<comment><USER24> Exactly. It is quite optimistic and borderline naive to believe that YC can replicate the Manhattan project in every one of these fields with a few hundred grand and a few months in a dorm.

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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614344)

<comment><USER25> I agree, I think this list is just going to make folks add AI or science! to their startup idea in the hopes it has a better chance of getting in to an incubator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _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'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one API for every enterprise SaaS:

[http://empiredata.co](http://empiredata.co)

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.

<comment><USER27> SaaSaaS? ...which of course leads to the general form, S(aaS)^n.

<comment><USER26> Alternately, it's an API of APIs.

We're hoping that S(aaS)^n = SaaSaaS for n >= 2, and we can prove by induction that ours is the last enterprise API you need to learn ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> While interesting - the thing that surprised me the most was _not_ seeing "security" (take that for what you will) on the list. Given the year of disclosures, the heartbleed incident, and all other sorts of things - I feel like this field is ripe for a disruption.

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.

<comment><USER29> > Internet Infrastructure

> 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.

<comment><USER28> I see that as internet/communication specific. But with meshnets, darknets, increasingly privatized communication networks and the like, I see these as two separate callouts.

The YC one is 'internet specific' \- at least as I read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I liked this line: "the government is a very large customer with very bad software."

It could also be written like this: the government is a very bad customer with very large software.

<comment><USER31> Selling to governments is very difficult and time consuming. The company I work for has spent over a year now trying to get approved to sell our software to the NYC schools (not land a sale, just get approved to try to land sales), and it looks like we may have hit a dead end.

<comment><USER32> One of the previous places I did some freelance stuff for solved this by partnering with a vendor that was already on the approved list.

<comment><USER33> So there is an opportunity here for a company that does nothing by handle the ugly administrative stuff on the government end, presenting a cool hacker- friendly work environment on the other? And pocketing a hefty cut for the service, I presume. Sort of a general contractor with very different inside and outside cultures.

"Yes, we launched it and it works. We have a great technical staff, and we've won some very lucrative contracts. We called it EnterpriseAdaptor, thinking the geeks would go for that but everyone persists in calling it CondomCo."

<comment><USER32> Interesting thought. One of the challenges will be that they look at stuff like how much capital you have and how long you have been in business.

There are a number of companies that can help you (Lockheed Martin, CSC, and IBM being three) if you find yourself in a position where you have something you need to sell in to government and don't have the credentials to land the contract directly. They do essentially what you describe... take a cut off the top in exchange for doing some of the paper work and taking some of the liability if things go awry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> >Specifically, lightweight, short-distance personal transportation is something we're interested in.

Doesn't this already exist, in the form of the bicycle?

<comment><USER35> Yes, this one was licked in 1885. The problem is not something amenable to a startup company. It's a huge entrenched cultural preference for terribly inefficient vehicles and development patterns that go with them.

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.

<comment><USER36> How do you deal with weather? It's certainly a lot more comfortable to drive somewhere in pouring rain than it is to bike, even when well prepared. And that preparation takes time and effort. Not to mention trying to bike in winter.

I really really hate cars, but I can see why people prefer them.

<comment><USER37> In cities I can imagine an apparatus not unlike a retractable roof in function, spanning the gaps between buildings. It would capture rainfall and prevent flooding while keeping citygoers dry. The "rooves" themselves would channel water as would an aqueduct, possibly reorienting themselves to better handle local downpours. The underside would need to emit light, whether transmitted natural light or otherwise.

Such a system would bring ancillary benefits of improving travel safety in the city, and reducing the need for road maintenance and vermin control (esp. mosquitoes).

I imagine the biggest technical challenge to be durabiity: The need to be resilient against hail, high winds and flying debris. And should it fail at the worst time ... an awful thought! But levees are a similar technology in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am very happy to see this list.

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.

</comment><comment><USER39> Energy generation, transmission, storage and consumption technologies are the opportunity of our lifetime and it is great to see Energy as #1 on this list (though there might not be a correlation between rank and YC weighted importance).

Generation - Solar & Wind

Transmission - Distributed Grid

Storage - <USER2>

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.

</comment><comment><USER40> S.A. is talking about general-purpose AI (position 2 in the RFS). This means processing natural language. There is a lot of progress but it's just slow so it's almost invisible.

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).

<comment><USER41> I have stated this previously to the AGI community and think that the way to go is that QA recommendation engines will be the first killer app for AGI. Not recommendation like the ones you see now with the "others who bought...", but ones that look more like "concierge" QA services.

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.

[1][http://en.akinator.com/](http://en.akinator.com/)

<comment><USER42> For anyone else that wasn't sure, AGI means "artificial general intelligence".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I loved seeing VR on this list as an Oculus enthusiast.

The [http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus](http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus), [http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/](http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/), and [https://developer.oculusvr.com/](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

<comment><USER44> VR can be so much more than what Oculus and its associated acts are about. In fact, they cast a shadow over it that will probably be harmful to it in the long run.

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.

<comment><USER45> >As far as gaming goes, we'll probably see half-assed VR from Microsoft and Sony.

Look at all the amazing things the Kinect did. I played a few Kinect games. The effect is amazing. Imagine if Facebook bought it instead of MS. I don't see why MS or Sony would make things half-assed. If anything, VR gaming might be a natural monopoly from a commercial entity instead of some open standards things Oculus kinda-sorta is pushing.

Reminds me of how people are baffled that there's a near MS monopoly on the dekstop and why Linux can't break through. Natural monopoly here as well.

VR gaming might be a console-only affair with a small "pc master race" types telling us how much better their experience is. Meanwhile, Jane Console Gamer puts on her headset and enters the world of Minecraft or whatever is going to be the big time waster, with little fuss as it all because it "just works." Meanwhile Joe PCGamer is whining on forums why $video_game isn't working with his Oculus and he has no one to support him.

<comment><USER44> > Look at all the amazing things the Kinect did

Mmh, what amazing things did he do? Last time I checked, there is no killer app for the Kinect. Microsoft tried to force it on everyone by bundling it with the Xbox One (because no one wanted it otherwise), and now they're removing it because even when their console is bundled with it, no one does anything with it.

<comment><USER45> It certainly was explosive on the 360. As an Xbox One owner, there just aren't too many games that make use of it, compared to the dozens on titles on the 360. There's a dance game and a token fitness game and not much else. I think if the console launched with 5-10 good Kinect games, it would be a different story. It looks like MS was too afraid of being a second run console if they waited too long after the PS4's debut and launched with very few titles and very few good titles, let alone kinect titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > 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.

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.wealthfront.com/](https://www.wealthfront.com/)

[https://www.betterment.com/](https://www.betterment.com/)

[https://www.futureadvisor.com/](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.

<comment><USER47> I think you are kind of missing what the hard part is for many people, which is not choosing where to put the savings, it is choosing to save at all. Many live paycheck to paycheck, even go deep into debt on credit cards and payday loans. There's a whole broad class of apps like Mint, where it will show you all your costs and income and give you tips about how to reduce your spending, save more, refinance debt, etc..

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.

<comment><USER48> As nerfhammer mentions, for some reason YC focused on the "invest" side of "It's too hard to find good ways to save and invest" in their description. It would be good if they clarified that that's really what they intended.

I find this confusing as well because while simpler investment mechanisms would help some people who already have money to invest, for the majority of people getting this initial money is the problem.

It's improvements in personal finance tools and systems to help people make better decisions that let them save (and hence invest more) that could make the most difference for the most people. It doesn't necessarily have to be games or social networks though. Even just presenting the right information at the right time could work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > _HUMAN AUGMENTATION_

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.

<comment><USER50> [http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?cur...](http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?currentPage=all)

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.

<comment><USER49> Before implants one could build sense enhancers that are just worn, not "plugged in". Running shoes are "capability enhancers" that don't involve a doctor unless you're running professionally. Glasses usually involve a doctor but you can buy simple ones without seeing an ophthalmologist.

A simple device that would buzz on your skin isn't "medical".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Very cool to see this list expanded. My own personal interest lies in programmer tools and their inevitable evolution, so it's great to see them listed on there.

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.

<comment><USER52> It helps that many of the YC partners are developers themselves.

<comment><USER51> Absolutely. The final decision makers at other accelerators were often non- technical and (understandably) did not immediately see the value in developer tools.

Thankfully, companies like Jetbrains, Github and Light Table have made a lot of progress in demonstrating that a viable market exists here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >This seems to us like something software should help solve. We'd like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds (in a normal account or a retirement account), do some customization around individual stocks, and otherwise set it and forget it.

This exists already, there are a ton of discount brokers with very competitive pricing.

<comment><USER53> That whole paragraph was bizarre. Yeah, lots of people are doing things wrong, but there is a competitive industry of index funds and ETFs out there. I'm sure they could be squeezed a little bit more, but not much.

<comment><USER54> I think this and the grandparent miss the point. The paragraph starts "it's too hard". Too much choice, lack of metrics, lack of clear comparisons can make things as hard as no choices. The availability of discount brokers doesn't solve the problem, as evidenced by the number of people making mistakes.

"Most people either pick individual stocks and bonds and expose themselves to high volatility, or pay very high fees to mutual fund managers and lose to the index anyway. Most people are also non-experts when it comes to portfolio rebalancing and tax optimization."

Education, clear UI, consistent metrics and prioritisation are all potential issues. Do all these services exist outside of your country? What if I move countries? How do I explain it to my mother? What if I only have $1000 to invest?

<comment><USER53> _Too much choice_

So we are going to make another choice?

 _What if I only have $1000 to invest?_

Put it into your savings account because you need a rainy day fund.

When you have $3000 to invest, put it into Vanguard's S&P 500, and call it a day. You are already beating more than half the managed funds out there. You spend time with your kids.

This is slightly more complicated than _YO_ , but only slightly.

<comment><USER55> Not another choice, just a simpler way to choose funds, with recommendations, etc. Wealthfront and a few others have offerings that do a pretty decent job at this, but they don't cover 401k plans, and their fees are high for something that should be set and forget. Target date funds are actually pretty good at doing this, and some have relatively low fees.

A lot of the 401k providers just dump a list of 40 funds on your lap, and let you figure it out, but it's information overload.

I really want something that can help me decide what type of risk I can handle, and then properly choose funds / balance between all of my accounts. Financial advisors are able to do this, but software can do it better and cheaper.

Basically, I want something like Mint that connects to all of my investment accounts, and sends me an email once or twice a year with specific instructions for rebalancing.

<comment><USER56> I think the app I'm working on ([https://www.RetirementPlan.io](https://www.RetirementPlan.io)) is in the right ballpark for what you are asking for. Can you try it out and provide feedback? It's free while in beta.

It's missing the Mint-style auto-connect, but it largely does the rest of it (the actual hard math).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Awesome, ambitious and inspiring list of the challenges humans need to solve to move forward. One huge issue forgotten though: animals and wild life. They also inhibit our planet and part of our lives, but many quickly disappearing.

<comment><USER58> Well said, we share our planet. Poor animals and plants dont have their own voice, but certainly need more represntation in our daily thinking.

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?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Have any previous RFSes been filled? Have any been successful?

</comment><comment><USER59> > _We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million > jobs._

I still am curious about this one. Is there any startup that has successfully done this in recent history?

Keep in mind, there is a big difference (IMO) between creating new jobs and shifting existing ones.

<comment><USER60> I think it would have been a lot more interesting if they had requested startups that significantly reduced the average cost of living and/or moved us closer towards a world where not everyone has to have a job.

<comment><USER61> They did. Housing is the main component of cost of living in the developed world, but to a significant extent that's a problem of transportation, which was mentioned. In the US, housing, healthcare and college fees are the big three, and the latter two were explicitly mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > what comes after programming languages

Isn't this like asking what comes after spoken language? Arguably the answer is nothing because language is what structured thought is.

<comment><USER62> Not really. IMHO programming languages should become more and more expressive to the point of being as closed as possible to spoken language, in a distant future.

<comment><USER63> Spoken language makes no sense. Maybe you just mean expressive, but the last thing I want is a programming language anything like the spoken word, because at least English is a colossal mess of inconsistent jibberish.

I've always been interested if someone ever tried to make a sensible spoken word - use all the enunciable syllables of the human voice (go read wikipedia on all the sounds you can make that are defined by one of the 26 English letters) with combinatorial and sensible word structure and straightforward sentence structure.

And the, ironically, best way to define something like that would be like how you define a programming language.

<comment><USER17> > _because at least English is a colossal mess of inconsistent jibberish._

Yup. Every natural language is. The reason we can work that way is that conversation is a tight feedback loop and people look for voluntary and involuntary clues telling whether the others understood them properly, and keep correcting until the (perception of) understanding is reached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Huh? This looks like a laundry list of everything, not a specific request.

</comment><comment><USER65> A few more areas (lots of overlap):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies)

<comment><USER66> I'm also reminded of Gartner's Hype curve:

[http://na1.www.gartner.com/imagesrv/newsroom/images/hype- cyc...](http://na1.www.gartner.com/imagesrv/newsroom/images/hype-cycle-pr.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> >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.

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…

<comment><USER52> The alternative to known and published APIs is no API, not closed APIs. In general the API companies we do fund are of the open sort and they accomplish something useful in the real world, eg Lob, EasyPost, Hellosign.

<comment><USER67> There is no such thing as an open web API. They are all proprietary alternatives to open data formats or protocols. If those companies used open and standard data formats or protocols (I admit that in many cases this might mean proposing a new standard) there would be no need for a custom API at all. Standard data formats can still exist behind a paywall, so it's not an issue of free-as-in-beer. It's an issue of user lockin.

For a bunch of things it won't matter one way or the other because not many people will ever use it, and there isn't much likelihood of other organisations offering the same data anyway.

Take Google Reader API though, where we ended up with a bunch of clients that only targeted the proprietary Google Reader API. When Reader shut down clients had to be rewritten to work with the APIs of other RSS syncing services, services had to try and recreate the Reader API to ease migration and so on. All to arrive at a situation that isn't much better than before - a bunch of clients hard coded to specific services that will have to be altered if those services go away. If Reader had been based on an open protocol then switching would have been trivial for everybody - you just point your client at the address of your new rss syncing server.

I want a world where switching between providers and clients is trivial(ish), like email, rss or the web itself, not a world like Google Reader where we are all hard coded into proprietary APIs that are one cost-cutting meeting away from being closed, leaving everybody with a lot of work to do to migrate.

I'm sure there is less opportunity to make money that way - you can't lock people in as easily and so on. However it's not like most of the companies we are talking about here are ever going to be profitable. The game is about getting bought out. I'd rather we at least create something a bit more lasting while we play the buyout lottery.

<comment><USER68> If a data format is open, startups can still provide proprietary metadata & analytics, which could be distributed via API. The presence of open data would encourage startups to define a common, open API. The challenge is convincing startups that they should invest limited resources into building an ecosystem, instead of a walled garden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most "blue sky" innovations have come from the state sector (either universities, publicly funded research institutes or majority state-funded private companies). They are commercialized by private companies afterward.

Why does YC think that it will be different now?

</comment><comment><USER69> Two things I think are missing from the list:

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](http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html)).

<comment><USER70> You'd have to replicate Silicon Valley first.

<comment><USER71> Ok, put that on the list then

<comment><USER72> I think pg has written about this a couple times. Checking...

Yep. In order from oldest to most recent:

[http://paulgraham.com/maybe.html](http://paulgraham.com/maybe.html)

[http://paulgraham.com/revolution.html](http://paulgraham.com/revolution.html)

[http://paulgraham.com/hubs.html](http://paulgraham.com/hubs.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Truthcoin satisfies 8 of the 22 requests: [https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin](https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin)

my implementation: [https://github.com/zack-bitcoin/Truthcoin- POW](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](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.

</comment><comment><USER74> Regarding enterprise, our approach with Catalist is a combination of 1. (Making the Expensive Cheap) & 3\. (Digitizing Every Industry). We are providing companies with easy-to-use solutions based on the basic systems they understand. Half our companies come from competitor's tools while the other half are just getting started with a tech solution for their general workflow. Our hypothesis is that majority of workers wear multiple hats and spend more time figuring out what to do by assessing their responsibilities across multiple tools. We give these workers and their teams one place to address their system. This gives everyone on the team a clear idea of what actually needs to be done with full context.

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.

</comment><comment><USER75> These new RFS are awesome. I hope YC help accelerate a few startups that doing these type of RFS. It would be game changing. I can see allot more investor interest in YC if a non tradition YC backed company based on one of these RFC makes it big.

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!

</comment><comment><USER76> > Science seems broken. The current funding models are broken and favor > political skill over scientific genius.

Isn't that already catered to by experiment.com, a YC company?

<comment><USER77> They fund multiple companies in a vertical...

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> "lightweight, short-distance personal transportation is something we're interested in"

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.)

</comment><comment><USER79> ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE > Making The Expensive Cheap:

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](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).

</comment><comment><USER80> (US-based comment.)

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.

</comment><comment><USER81> \- INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE

"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?)

<comment><USER82> Let me reply regarding travel:

\- 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.

<comment><USER83> Let's see:

\- When should I buy a ticket, what is the punishment for not buying right now?

Kayak has a "when to buy" feature, but I can't think of anyone else. Microsoft Travel stopped doing it and even then there's was only for US.

\- How often is the flight I'm booking delayed? For how long? Airport or Airline fault?

Some Airlines show you the delay/arrival percentage but its not aggregated anywhere AFAICT. Also I believe airplanes have a lot of leeway before a flight is considered "delayed" Also people suggest never to land/fly out of O'Hare in Chicago if possible but is there evidence for this? Would someone outside the US who is not a frequent flyer even know about this?

\- How much space does this airline's seat provide?

I'm willing to spend a little more for more space on longer flights...

\- Does this plane have power outlets? And not the ones that EmPower plugs, those don't count. I'm looking at you United!

The problem is there's actually very little accurate information except the cost of the flight, and thats what most people choose to pick their flight. Sometimes even willing to take weird layovers/extra stops to do it. If it can be shown that your comfort and stress would be better cared for by purchasing a ticket that cost $50 by next Wednesday.... well no one has done that.

<comment><USER84> > \- How much space does this airline's seat provide?

> \- Does this plane have power outlets? And not the ones that EmPower plugs, > those don't count. I'm looking at you United!

Seatguru

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> >Hollywood 2.0

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...](http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/government+million+computer+system+just+work+with+video/9840193/story.html)

</comment><comment><USER86> Nice to see programming tools listed here. In 2011, investors couldn't've cared less. That description could almost have been written for CircleCI: "delivering software continuously" and "better software, faster".

That said, I had more success building what wasn't in the RFC (dev tools in 2011), than what was (journalism stuff in 2010).

</comment><comment><USER87> How far off is singularity? Seems like quite an interesting topic.

<comment><USER88> _How far off is singularity?_

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.

<comment><USER89> _In fact, there 's no clear way to even define AI,_

It's easy to define, but the term has been stolen by people wanting more media attention for less work.

AI is just "what we are" without all the squishy parts. AI ("hard" AI, AGI) is a fully thinking, doing, feeling software system implemented in non-biology.

 _I 've suspected that AI is fundamentally impossible to implement on a Von Neumann architecture._

Balderdash. We haven't discovered any computation problem that our universal computing architecture can't compute because... universal. It's not "universal \ things-that-can-generate-thoughts." Universal simulation machines can simulate things... universally. Now, we may not have the software architecture discovered yet, but it's certainly doable given our current hardware.

<comment><USER88> _We haven 't discovered any computation problem that our universal computing architecture can't compute because... universal. It's not "universal \ things- that-can-generate-thoughts." Universal simulation machines can simulate things... universally._

And yet, the Game of Life is completely deterministic and is the opposite of real life in pretty much every way, even with the new advances. Quantum may change this.

There are certainly problems which are tractable only on quantum computers. Shor's algorithm is of course the classic example. Saying that Von Neumann architecture is a universal problem solver is a rejection of the idea that quantum computing allows any new problems to be solved, but we have evidence that that's not the case.

<comment><USER89> _Game of Life is completely deterministic and is the opposite of real life in pretty much every way_

My computer also can compute 5 + 5 and that is the opposite of real life in pretty much every way too. Not every algorithm results in life [and it requires algorithm + data + continual input, which the GoL doesn't integrate].

 _is a rejection of the idea that quantum computing allows any new problems to be solved_

Because the idea quantum computing solves new problems has no basis in research or reality?

"Quantum" != magic

A tiny, currently impractical, factorization algorithm isn't a new problem current computers can't solve. They just take the long way 'round.

<comment><USER88> The fact that a previously-intractable problem can be solved in a tractable amount of time on a quantum computer is important. It doesn't mean the problem didn't exist before, but rather that the problem can now be solved.

For all we know, making an intractable problem tractable is the necessary step to make AI a reality. In fact, it's hard to argue that it isn't, so quantum computing becomes very interesting.

<comment><USER89> _For all we know, making an intractable problem tractable is the necessary step to make AI a reality._

But, we know that's not a necessary step. We have computer vision systems working essentially the same way our brains perceive images (and since the new systems are on computers, we can speed them up millions of times to recognize millions of images quickly instead of relying on our dumb 10Hz to 100Hz brain clock).

 _so quantum computing becomes very interesting._

But quantum computing doesn't magically reduce difficult things to non- difficult things: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=206](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=206)

Also, required reading on why no quantum juju is required: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/giqtm3.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/giqtm3.pdf)

<comment><USER88> I didn't say quantum computing magically reduced anything. You've set up a strawman and proceeded to beat it with a hammer. I said that quantum computers can solve previously-intractable problems.

We don't know what steps are necessary to reach AI, so we don't know what is or isn't a necessary step. Vision is a tiny part of cognition, as evidenced by the fact that there are fish which have no vision (or at least no human-like vision) since they live in absence of light. Yet they are alive: they reproduce, they seek food, they think, they do all of the things a living creature does, except see light.

<comment><USER90> You're confusing computing performance intractability with conceptual intractability. Shor doesn't do anything new for AI, it just speeds things up.

<comment><USER88> Never would I have guessed that saying "Quantum computing may open up new avenues of exploration" would be so controversial.

I said quantum computing makes previously-intractable problems tractable, and that it's therefore interesting for AI. I used Shor's algorithm as an example of a problem which could not be solved on a classical computer, but could be solved on a quantum computer, not as an example of a new AI problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> If anybody is working on the financial services one I would love to talk to you about it. My day job is in that industry and I think there is a ton of room for innovation. Sometimes it is hard to convince people in the industry of that as they retain the ideas they came up with. I recall hearing somebody say in a talk (or maybe on Twitter) recently that industry disruption happens from people outside of the industry rather than people inside the industry.

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.

<comment><USER92> Reading the new list of Y-Combinator "Requests for Startups", the Financial Services request really resonated with me.

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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> For Education, I really like this approach: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davinci- flight/davinci-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davinci- flight/davinci-flight-design-fly-and-3-d-print-your-own-p)

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.

</comment><comment><USER68> Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI?

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.

<comment><USER89> _Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI?_

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."

<comment><USER94> In practice, "AI" is used as an umbrella term that definitely includes that kind of stuff. I can't speak for YC, but IMO Semantic Web work should probably fall under the AI umbrella in this case.

(Edit: in the interest of full-disclosure, my startup is doing a lot of work with Semantic Web technologies, particularly in terms of applying them to Enterprise knowledge management)

<comment><USER89> I think there's two viewpoints. There's "outside in" when the media calls things like Siri "AI" then there's the scifi AI perspective where we want talking starships.

Siri++ doesn't get us closer to sarcastic GSVs. If saying a structured connected wisdom of the crowds folksonomy is actually AI helps people get funding/attention/growth, that's what people will do.

There's also "middle out," but that's a talk for another day.

<comment><USER94> FWIW, when you talk about the Semantic Web, that also entails reasoning and reasoners, and there's no requirement that those reasoners be simple deductive logic based reasoners. Work being done to make a more useful reasoner could certainly be "real" AI work. I'd also personally say that "knowledge representation" is part of AI, and KR problems are also being attacked by the SW community. Those, among other reasons, are why I say that one should classify SemWeb "stuff" as AI.

But you're right to say that there are different definitions, and it does depend on who you talk to. The media definitely take a more expansive view of AI than probably most of us, but what can ya do? _shrug_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Given sama's enthusiasm for SpaceX, including as a "great example" in his blog post on the original new RFS, it seems unambitious for the RFS to mention space only in the context of robots and science.

</comment><comment><USER12> > The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.

That's not because saving is complex or low-yielding, it is because middle class non-disposable expenditures have gone up. (see Elizabeth Warren)

</comment><comment><USER96> With less than a month left to the deadline, its really challenging to build a decent MVP with some traction in one of these fields. And I think that seem to be at least the minimum requirement to get into YC.

<comment><USER97> you certainly do NOT need an MVP to get into YC. lots of people get in with just a compelling idea.

maybe i will write a blog post about this.

<comment><USER98> You should. I was under the apparently mistaken impression that people who get into YC at least have a functioning demo, and generally have users already. So when my friend and I were applying, we limited ourselves to ideas for which we could create a semi-functional demo in the few weeks before the application deadline. We ended up getting rejected because of the idea that we chose, and rightly so, but I wonder what ideas we would have come up with if we had not felt so time constrained. (I am glad that we were rejected because I don't think that we were ready to start a company yet, but I am curious anyway.)

[Edited for clarity.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Was interested to see nothing mentioned about news & current events information startups. This seemed to be a re-occuring "problem worth solving" on YCombinator lists, and is notably absent.

<comment><USER44> Do you mean things like Flipboard, Circa, etc.? Not very surprising to see them absent on YC's list. Like the more recent waves of social networks, they don't offer much and just add to the noise.

Who will remember these companies in 10, 20, 50 years? Most likely no one.

Who will remember companies that solve problems related to healthcare, energy, food allocation? A lot more people.

There's much to like about this 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.

<comment><USER99> No, I didn't mean like Flipboard or Circa. I also wouldn't expect much support for these kinds of things.

I meant companies that are trying to change how news is consumed and produced, not those that prettify how it is presented for final consumption.

PG outlined the problem pretty clearly in 2008[0]. Perhaps you believe the news industry is healthy and functioning in delivering accurate current events to world citizens as it is. I do not believe that that is the case.

I was thinking of companies like Grasswire or non-profits like Ushahidi and Standby Task Force for this category. I'm sure there are others changing this space significantly.

[0]-[http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html](http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html) (item 3)

<comment><USER44> Cool, I wasn't sure what you were talking about so your examples help.

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

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

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

<comment><USER99> Appreciate your thought out reply.

>I do know that world citizens seem to be very happy living in a world of celebrity photos and memes and " listicles" these days.

Like they were happy using nokia 3600 phones before there were touch screens.

Listen, I'm not saying it's a guaranteed money maker or something; I'm saying it's a category of industry that could use improvement and attention from startups. It is poised for profound change.

>The only thing that has really changed news is that now everyone has a camera on their phone and can post footage of events on Twitter, Instagram, etc.

That's very true. I've found it quite interesting that ordinary citizens have been breaking stories before professional journalists could even make it to scene for a number of years now. Makes me think the industry could use a change.

I hope we could see more change than you predict, but wouldn't be surprised if you were right. I'll leave it at that.

EDIT: Cut an unfinished thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I think you really shortchanged the section on transportation by only focusing on personal transportation. The real opportunities are in commercial transportation and logistics. The US spends more on truck logistics every year than the market cap of the top 5 _global_ car manufacturers combined. And the trucking industry is only 50% of the total logistics contribution to US GDP. Even a mildly successful startup in a tiny niche of logistics could result in a wildly profitable company.

<comment><USER8> It seems like driverless trucks are likely to come to market as a precursor to mass consumer adoption. Trucking as we know it will be deeply changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Is it just me, or are these RFSes too vague to be inspiring or actionable. It looks like you perhaps had a good list of actual ideas, which you redacted to death ?

<comment><USER102> I think they're seeds for thought, nothing more.

<comment><USER101> Yes, it's just that we're used to more focused initiatives from YC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> It would be awesome if programming could actually be as easy as you imagine it to be in your head. Any non-tech person could _program_ in their head: When this happens, do that, except for when this happens. It's more of the hidden bugs and shit just not working for no reason that makes programming so difficult and frustrating, but if there was a way that things would "just work," that would be game changer.

<comment><USER104> I am not so optimistic:

[http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks- NoSilverBullet.pdf](http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Best RFS yet. Well done Y Combinator. I hope this orients more technical people toward problems that really matter.

</comment><comment><USER106> If anyone is interested in exploring ideas for SE Asia email me (in my profile). I'm based in Bangkok and have 15 years of experience living and doing business in this part of the world. I have a network and access to capital but would be interested in finding some fresh blood to help me execute.

</comment><comment><USER107> This a surprisingly promising list of ideas, especially for an incubator to suggest. Things like internet infrastructure, ideally, are in the non-profit sector. And though YC does fund non-profits, I can't imagine they'd be happy with a swarm of unprofitable applicants coming in next round.

</comment><comment><USER95> "What comes after programming languages?"

Maybe somewhere in the direction Meteor and Light Table are heading?

</comment><comment><USER108> I'm glad the disrupt Hollywood rfc is now Hollywood 2.0, before it seemed needlessly antagonistic.

If anyone else is interested in Hollywood 2.0, hit me up (check profile). Tinj is reimagining content ratings, reviews and recommendations.

</comment><comment><USER109> Great to see diversity on the list. I notice that gender isn't on the list of what you're looking for ("all ages, races, sexual orientations, and cultures"). Just an oversight or a conscious decision?

</comment><comment><USER110> Which ones are the new ones?

<comment><USER111> Many were slightly tweaked. But these are the new categories:

Pharmaceuticals Government Human Augmentation VR and AR Programming Tools Hollywood 2.0 Diversity Developing Countries Enterprise Software Financial Services Telecommunication

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> It's interesting to see the progression of YC's RFS over the years. The ideas behind the new RFS seem to driven by fundamental problems of society, not just market opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER113> This is a great list! Our startup, Glassbreakers, is focused on diversity and enterprise software to help women within organizations find mentors- applying for YC's winter batch!

</comment><comment><USER114> There used to be an advertising category in the previous version of this document. Wonder why it has been dropped. Did the field get too crowded? Are the existing solutions adequate?

</comment><comment><USER115> I was sure you will not cover human mind augmentation, which possibly is the easiest and more difficult to improve, but here it is, fairly vague described, but there.

</comment><comment><USER116> I have a governance/citizen participation startup that I will be applying with in 2020 according to my current progress speed.

</comment><comment><USER117> There is a minor typo in the "Government" section: s/INternet/Internet (or just "internet"...)

</comment><comment><USER118> "New Ways to Distract People From Building Startups to Disrupt Existing Our Startups/Investments"

</comment><comment><USER119> I'd like to see a diff between this and the previous RFS(s). How often has this list been revised, anyway?

<comment><USER111> Last time was July 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> I see what you did there: "We deserve a simpler, more elegant solution for a more civilized age"

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm really glad to see AR on the list, we are excited to be at the inflection point of that medium.

</comment><comment><USER32> > Celebrities now have direct relationships with their fans.

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.

</comment><comment><USER121> Well, I already applied, but I guess I can update my app. Human Augmentation ftw!

<comment><USER111> Yes, you can update your app all the way to the deadline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> Maybe something related to "Fixed the current problems?"

</comment><comment><USER123> What YC is really looking for is a better language or communication framework.

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.

</comment><comment><USER124> but no mention of photosharing? videosharing? the current YC batch had this smuggling startup, where is the black market stuff?

great marketing, kudos.

</comment><comment><USER125> We should be able to comment on start-up requests if we are involved in a start doing specifically what is mentioned in the request. This way we can help expand start-up awareness!

</comment><comment><USER126> Hmm... No photo sharing apps? SnapChat for X?

</comment><comment><USER127> What about the YC motto "Make something people want."?

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.

</comment><comment><USER128> bits v/s atoms anyone?

</comment><comment><USER129> Nothing about the Web 4.0 that's weird! [http://slideshare.net/Facehacks/web-40-is- coming](http://slideshare.net/Facehacks/web-40-is-coming)</comment>


Microsoft to Launch iPhone Rival on Verizon Early Next Year? - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2009/04/28/microsoft-to-launch-iphone-rival-on-verizon-early-next-year/

<comment><USER2> ZunePhone launch colours reportedly include powder blue, teal and tye dye!</comment>


Collocations in Wikipedia - terms occurring frequently together - <AUTHOR> http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/10/22/collocations_1/

<comment><AUTHOR> I love these posts by Matt - big data exploration and statistics for nothing more than the joy of it. Great stuff! In this one Matt explores terms that frequently occur together like "Darth Vader".</comment>