He was Julius Caesar's nephew and successor, who ultimately did all of the things that Caesar wanted to do but never had a chance to to see done (the month of August is even named after him). In the lines that Paul mentioned his legacy, I think he means that someone similar to Steve Jobs (his would-be successor in our pop culture) could continue a similar path as Jobs. It's now clear that being a visionary in that position is possible, and he showed us all what just one person can do there.
That may be it. However, it's not completely clear.
>Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users' minds that a single person could unroll the future for them.
We've got Banister, who lead, and Augustus who followed (I mean in succession - he was still a leader), and ... well, it's a little confused but I guess you're right.
Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen.
This has been my experience with Google search and Gmail (the Google products I use most). It's really frustrating that sometimes I'm handling them the way I'd handle a Samurai sword. That's not how it should be.
If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?"
This is critical. I have tried it the other way, and struggled for these very reasons.
I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.
As a programmer, I intuitively understand the value of building up from small pieces.
I think what Paul is saying in the first part I quoted is different though. He is saying don't even say you are going to build the "grand vision" because it sets unreasonable expectations and defocuses you from making incremental progress.
The second part I quoted is about avoiding top-down design / blueprints and you are right on the money there.
Unless you plan to discover new ideas by mistake, you absolutely need a vision, and then find the way to get there.
If you start from the bottom (bottom-up), you'll constantly compromise technically, as lots of things are not yet possible to do.
If you start from the top (top-down), you'll "know" that it's possible to accomplish, and you'll only have to find out how to do it.
You have far more chance to solve an enigma if you know there is an answer than if you don't. Visionary ideas make you believe the answer exists, which makes it much more easier to accomplish.
Clearly, you have to "know" that it's possible to accomplish and then find out how to do it. I don't think even PG was disagreeing with that.
When he says "don't have a blueprint", he is saying don't presuppose you know how to get from where you are to replacing Google as the de facto search tool. Instead, just make progress. It seems you agree with that.
Preventative Diagnostics as Paul describes in #7 will really be the future - it's barbaric that we can only make a diagnosis when the disease has already manifested (in most cases). There are a few players in this space (Scanadu comes to mind), but it's seems like nano biosensors and the like are still very new technologies. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I look at medical diagnostics as though I'm looking at my production servers (a poor analogy in many ways, but lets go with it)
Watching charts on a production server, you see patterns over time - e.g you can see a weekend, or holiday quite easily. Keeping an eye on these, you can see when things start hitting bottlenecks and you need to do something to improve the situation.
When I get my bloodwork checked, its once a year - can you imagine checking in on your production servers just once a year?
I live in the Seattle area - Vitamin D deficiency is a huge (but not well known) problem in this area. I would pay real money to see a chart of my Vitamin D levels on a daily basis (without needing to draw blood!). I can then adjust my supplement dosage as needed.
I have a food allergy that is slow to flare up and slower to go away again - being able to check various levels of things in my system to track against food intake will help me find out exactly what foods cause what issues. The US food industry would pay a fortune to have this ability not be available!
I'm not optimistic. I think pg's discussion of automatic diagnosis is a bit ill-informed.
For example, the recent trial that showed screening CT scans reduce mortality in lung cancer cost 250 million dollars to run. Even then, nobody is sure if it is even a cost effective measure.
It is difficult and costly to produce a screening test. It also takes many years to validate. Then there is the problem of what to do with the results - for example, if you are diagnosed with possible pancreatic cancer, the treatment is a massive operation to replumb your upper abdomen. 5% of people die because of the surgery alone, and the surgery costs a fortune.
Unfortunately a simple relationship like "find cancer early = good outcome" does not exist. There are incredibly high barriers for a startup developing diagnostic tests for screening. There is a good reason why the only people doing cancer screening studies are large government funded research consortia that can afford to wait 10 years or more to prove a result.
The example of Bill Clinton is misapplied - cardiovascular disease is really common, maybe 30% or more of people will get heart disease in western countries. We don't need to have a cool machine to screen for it, we need to risk stratify people with a few simple tests (ie ask them if they have a family history, check their cholesterol and blood pressure) and improve their risk factors (eat better, quite smoking, exercise, lower cholesterol etc). But then you are talking about modifying human behavior...
I live in Australia, and we are indoctrinated to check your skin for moles that maybe cancerous. There are claims that the high rate of early detection leads to higher survival rates[1].
My understanding is that early detection of bowel, breast and prostate cancer is relatively easy and produces good outcomes too.
There are radical ways to do early detection (sub dermal computers continually monitoring, etc etc) but there are ugly hacked solutions that just might work, too.
How much would it cost to build a toilet with a bowel cancer test kit built in?
Not sure what you are arguing here... if you are arguing that screening for cancer can be useful and saves lives, then I agree with you!
If you are arguing that a start up could have come up with a screening program for bowel cancer for example, then I don't agree with you for the stated reasons.
Breast cancer screening is not as useful as you would hope either. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2F14651858.CD001877.pub4)
2000 women need to be screened for 10 years to save 1 life, with 200 initial false positives requiring biopsy. Also, I see lots of people diagnosed with breast cancer despite having mammograms.
Radical ways to do early detection are fine, but you have to prove that it works and that requires a lot of people for a lot of years and a lot of money.
Building a toilet with a bowel cancer screening kit built in is a form of behavior modification to improve uptake, and that is a great area for start ups to get involved in. pg was talking about something different however.
See, I don't think he was. "Ongoing diagnosis* doesn't have to mean new tests if you can make the existing tests radically cheaper and easier. Given that existing behaviour is always hard to modify it would seem sensible to try and piggyback on existing behaviour.
Toilets with cancer sensors that would check for bowel cancer everytime you go would be as about as "ongoing" as diagnosis can get.
Maybe toothbrushes could be modified to check for viruses in saliva.
I'm sure there are other easy tests that could be done if you have blood. There are obvious ways that could be integrated into everyday life (for women, anyway).
I've read some studies that showed dogs could be trained to smell cancer. Maybe people would pay to have their clothes sniffed (!) when they have them sent to the laundry.
I've previously suggested (on HN) the idea of payment companies partnering with food outlets and exercise software vendors to log the calories you are buying. That's a good input into diagnosis software too...
I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas - look for low hanging fruit and you can do radically better than the status quo.
System on chip PCR machine? The lowest hanging fruit would be miniaturization and better engineering of existing diagnostic machines. At the moment the medical diagnostic market is filled with overly expensive devices that could be easily made cheaper and more efficient (somewhere with a favourable patent/legal regime so you don't get sued to oblivion).
For insurance companies early detection of chronic illness can lead to a longer lifespan when old, which costs them more. Better you die fast after a certain age?
The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask.
- No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues
- It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.
- Even when you can access journal articles, it's hard to know which ones to look in to answer your question. Sometimes it's hard to even know which field(s) your question falls under.
- Even if you vaguely know which field your question falls under, you don't necessarily know any of the vocabulary used by that field.
- No way to search by dependent and independent variables, confounding variables, etc.
- No way to sort articles by the quality of their methodology, the quality of the journal they were published in, the quality of the researchers, etc.
I know this isn't a product that more than 1% of the population would use, but if someone built it then maybe there are other things it could be used for.
I use it more as a way to shortcut sites. For example, if I want to Wikipedia "pi" instead of typing www.wikipedia.org, in the address bar, then typing in "pi" in the site's search bar, I enter it in Google and find the link. Firefox's awesome bar is gradually taking over as I can favorite things and "search" for them using that just by typing in a couple letters, but I still use Google for anything I haven't favorited.
I like Firefox's Keyword Search bookmarks. The Awesome Bar becomes a "web command line". Some example search bookmarks I've configured:
* "w pi" to search Wikipedia articles
* "d pi" to search Dictionary.com definitions
* "am pi" to search Amazon products
* "map pie" to search Google Maps locations
* "g pi" to search Google
I'm honestly surprised not every hacker does this. The vast majority of popular browsers supports keyword searching either out of the box or via a plugin.
I've been doing that for years on Opera. Just gotta right click a search bar, give it a few letters to ID it and off I go with 'w pi' to search wikipedia. I do not miss having to go through google first if I just use the search bar, or even going to wikipedia.org or wherever first.
You're talking about highly-focused, or micro, search. Yeah, Google doesn't seem to do that very well. They have a few segments, like book search and image search, but it's not specific enough.
One thing I search for sometimes are code examples in a particular language. Search for something in C on Google and you end up with lots of stuff for C++, C#, etc... Github, with its large repository of public code, lets you filter by programming language, and is much better than Google in these cases.
Bing copies Google. DuckDuckGo returns different things than Google, but otherwise is a copy. There's no micro search engine for specific topics and sub-topics, outside of site-specific search. Market opportunity...
We're trying to do something like this, i.e, let the user build more complex queries (than a free text search) for their specialization without having them write actual SQL ;) We've started off with Biotech - http://www.distilbio.com
> It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.
We obviously need something better than the status quo here, but the status quo isn't as bad as it seems if you know how it works.
Quick hints: email the article author. They'll probably more than happy to send you an article and a quick summary worded for a lay audience (not to mention talking your ear off about their more recent work...) They're not worried about you not paying the publishers, they want to spread their work around.
Another trick is knowing people in academia. Maybe you have a friend who's doing graduate work, or lecturing. You could ask your old lecturers if you went to university and if the paper you're after is in their field. There are also communities like /r/scholar on Reddit, though I imagine some people are against that sort of thing.
Actually the use case you described seems very ripe for disruption if you ask me. Because it's hacking your way to the solution, whereas we could need a better solution.
We're surely working all the time to make search "more sophisticated"; many special case queries are already smart (from "2+2" to geo, stocks etc., you don't need to go to special sites like calculator, maps and finance). And we surely have plans to go way beyond, but generally, this is Hard Stuff(TM). For things like journal articles, the information is often behind paywalls like ACM, and even when it's not, specialized engins like citeseer are hard to beat because the info has very special organization needs like collecting and measuring citations. On your most advanced requirements, I think only an Asimov's positronic robot would be that smart ;) unless there's a specific effort to curate this data... which requires tons of human labor, so ads served to the very small amount of people who needs this service will not make it viable. It's the same problem we have with patents (see http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/opinion-the-...).
No; these reasons show why the are is ripe for anyone to do it. The only fallacy in Paul Graham's comment (or in possible interpretations of it) is that Google has a weak spot there so it's an opportunity for somebody else to beat Google. Trust me, we have a ton of resources dedicated to improvements in search and we have lots of cool things coming down the pipe, although maybe not in the velocity that one could dream (e.g. something like intelligent research for scientific papers is firmly in the sci-fi realm today, at least for fully-automated computing).
BTW, Paul's article has a big #fail when he mentions code search as a possible idea; dude, we do have that and it's amazing (but unfortunately we recently shut it down; not sure if this will eventually resurface as part of some other product).
All that said, of course some company can always make an effort dedicated to a specialized niche that we are overlooking and beat Google Search in that niche; an excellent example of that is Wolfram Alpha. Still, not a big deal; to really "beat Google" you need a new general-purpose, full-Web search engine that beats Google's. Not impossible either, but the barrier to entry is simply colossal and it amazes me that people don't realize that and dream that it just takes some cool new idea or clever new algorithm to do that--we are not anymore in 1998, when Google, still working off a garage, started to beat the current top engines like Yahoo! and AltaVista.
> The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse,
Google, today, after all is a stock-holders company that is aimed to generate PROFITS, and maximize those. It should be kind of obvious that at some point they (as a company) will try to maximize cash coming in, and minimize going out (spent). Therefore, their product [search] is narrowed towards the ones who push the most obvious questions/search queries: what do they play in theatres, what car to buy, best lcd tv, pharmacy near me, etc. Thats probably 90% of search queries they getting. I say, as long as they work in this zone and make sure simple queries return the best results, they are winning - winning biggest chunk of market and smile on shareholders' faces.
> The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask.
This simply means that Google doesn't work very well for you, and I mean no offense, but what you are searching is a very, very small minority of search queries. Google still serves a crushing majority of people very well.
You are making the same mistake that Paul is making throughout his essay: he wants startups to build products for him and not for regular users. Seriously, email is actually a todo list? Come on, now.
Google holds the elite back, holds science back, holds are collective knowledge back. Even if it is a minority of queries, these queries are more important than your typical query.
This is something I've been thinking about seriously, building an "academic-level" search engine. I have the IR/NLP background. If anyone is interested discussing/collaborating, ping me!
> - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.
That's because of the business model around funded research. Academic research funding is driven by a limited number of funding agencies being bombarded by huge numbers of proposals. One of the key metrics they use is how many peer reviewed journals has the author been accepted by. Those journals make money by charging access fees and by being semi-trusted gate keepers. Journals WANT it to be hard to access them online since they view the Internet publishing paradigm as a threat.
People have been trying to disrupt that business model since the mid 90s.
There are very few successful futurists in the literal sense.
The long bets are not on the current startup ideas which will still mould the world 5 years from now. YC's view of investing in those with the wherewithal to effect change - not those who necessarily have the answers to hand - bleeds through the ambiguous edges of this essay.
pg's reticence to put his full belief behind a specific idea due to the evanescent nature of the current concept-du-jour is good guidance - tackle the extant problems and retain half an eye on the bigger picture.
The thing about replacing e-mail is that is isn't just a todo list, for many people it's just a receipt box - the thing I keep all my notifications that I bought stuff from amazon. For others, it's still the primary means of business communication.
My work e-mail is largely about communications, with a todo element to it and unfortunately some file storage too. My "home" e-mail is completely different. It's where I get my monthly statements for banks and investments and where my notifications go. When replacing e-mail you would need to service all these components of what e-mail is.
The thing that originally made e-mail so important was it's identity factor. That seems to have withered away as other services have replaced some components of what e-mail was for.
I would argue that e-mail needs to not be replaced, just reclaimed. My e-mail client (web or otherwise) should know that an e-mail in this case is actually just a twitter DM notification and be smart about how it presents that to me. It should know that something from Bank of America is probably something I want to keep, but something else from Bank of America is just marketing junk.
I haven't seen anything that is smart enough to do that on it's own. I don't want to have to deal with creating filters - it should just know. I would totally switch from gmail if this were out there.
There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable catalog of all my receipts.
I would sign up for this tomorrow if someone on here goes and builds it. :)
> I would sign up for this tomorrow if someone on here goes and builds it. :)
But would you pay for it? If so, there is a way to generate almost infinite revenue with this service, which is to charge a small fee for each receipt stored. Naturally, when receiptbox.com charges this fee, it issues a receipt, which it emails to you...
Give a third party my password so it can scan my email for financial data? No thanks.
I realise there are people who would love this convenience, and you'd make a killing on targeted ads, but this is a privacy nightmare. Good luck getting people to trust you. Furthermore, you really want the results of the filtering to be applied in the user's own mail client rather than having a separate UI..
Might be feasible as a client-side app. How about a Thunderbird/Outlook addon with a subscription service for known filters?
(What is the Google Chrome of desktop mail clients, anyway? Hardly any seem to use WebKit.)
there were sites like this , swipely and blippy.. both failed as I don't think people in general are ok with giving out their purchases information... I'm really against giving permission to anyone for my email.
A replacement for email should be a lot smarter and I think what pg hints at is pretty much the same as you're saying here, but broader.
If I receive an invitation to something, it should end up in my calendar and whatever gadget I have on me should notify me and ask me if i wanted to participate.
If i receive a receipt it should be stored and analysed. For example if the item had a 30 day guarantee it should ask me before that if I am satisfied with it.
If i receive a shipment notice it should automatically tell me on the day it arrives and alert me when I'm in proximity of the post office that I need to pick it up.
Actually I would want almost all of my emails to be read solely by a computer so that all of these emails I didn't even see. I don't need to see that I've bought something — I know that! I need to be told when its in my post box though, or if its a license key I need my computer to pop up a question if I should apply that license.
So a good startup idea here would be something that took your email, filtered it and just removed all of the receipts/etc messages from your view, while keeping it neatly organized somewhere else for the future.
That's exactly what I'm planning to build! I'm not sure if I should go hybrid or all-in.
By hybrid I mean that people could receive regular human-readable emails, but senders could include a small url or tag that links to the semantic information (it could be an event invitation, receipt, valid email confirmation, password changing, task proposal, marketing offer, flight information, etc.).
The "smart" email client could then automatically interpret semantic emails, and act accordingly. It would also hide those emails, and only show you the relevant notification.
In my experience, Sand Hill Road does not want "frighteningly ambitious" startup ideas if substantial capital expenditure is involved. (In fairness, they are willing to hear those pitches – I guess that's something.)
> Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel.
Pixar got funded only because Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) paid for it of pocket to the tune of $50 million total. It's Pixar that made him a billionaire (not Apple, as most people assume). How often does Steve Jobs invest in companies? Virtually never. But he knew (correctly) that Pixar was on to something.
I'm dealing with the Pixar bootstrap-problem at my own company, Fohr. Fohr is the live-action version of Pixar (photography, not animation, is what gets computerized), and requires $32 million in capital to do the process today on a feature film (well over half of that is for hardware - $2 million alone for electricity!).
Fohr is only constrained by capital – the R&D has already been done (it took nearly 13 years to develop the tech) – so you'd think Fohr would be ripe for funding. And you'd be dead wrong. There are no Steve Jobs left to pay for it.
The startup world today seems to only want tech innovation on the cheap, and that includes Paul Graham and all the rest.
So if I wanted to do PixActing like I wanted to breathe, my five year plan would be a) get VC funded for anything, b) achieve a modestly successful exit, and then c) recruit one similarly situated person and just shake the money tree. Without making disparaging comments about identifiable businesses, it is not a controversial observation that proven entrepreneurs with existing networks have vastly superior access to capital compared to first-time entrepreneurs with no network, independent of idea quality, target market, or execution ability.
$40 million is not a number that is unachievable in 2012. The password is just a bit different than for $200k, $700k, or $5 million.
1986-1995 is a bit closer, I think; from 1979-1986 they were in effect an R&D division of Lucasfilm, and it wasn't their job to even think about making films. They were supposed to develop new tech and do special-effects in films, which they did do for quite a few prominent films.
> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.
> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.
So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.
You're right that VCs tend to be leery of the most ambitious ideas. That's another of the obstacles in your way if you pick one. But you shouldn't let your ambitions be limited by what VCs will fund.
(In any case you can trick them by only telling them about the initial few steps.)
It's likely that even Steve Jobs would not have invested in Pixar if he knew how much it was going to cost to make it successful. He originally put up $10 million ($5 million for Lucas and $5 million to finance it). It became a money pit that either pride or faith compelled him to keep funding.
Looks pretty interesting but I find myself having to guess what you're doing. It's important to be concise and reference things people already know ("Pixar") when you want to convey information quickly, but it's unclear what the value of the technology is in the 2 paragraphs I could find written about it. Everyone knows "Pixar" by name but I'm struggling to understand what you're doing. Is it animation software that maps photographs to the virtual world and renders it "almost-real"?
Please see my reply to @ricardobeat in the parent post.
Part of the issue is that Fohr has two sources of funding. One source is for the technical side of the company, which I expected tech funding to pay for. The stuff on AngleList is basically only about that.
The other source is film funding for the first computer-photographed film, Carpathia. I have a completely different talk for that, which is more about how the tech is actually used to make a live-action film.
Point is, AngleList is only a small (but expensive) part of the story.
Sand Hill Road is just one source of money and money is the most fungible representation of wealth, so if they won't help you, go to somebody for whom 32 million is chump change or who are used to pay way more for a movie. Hollywood way be more receptive to your ideas (making a block buster isn't cheap and there is always a risk, so they should be used to taking them).
Filmmaking is a technical and artistic discipline, and only the films themselves are sold to a mass audience, so my pitch really only makes sense (and is tailored to) those in the industry.
Thanks for the link, that clears it up nicely. Maybe the video could explore the production workflow a bit more, it looked like a simple tech demo to me.
Not at all surprised that aapl has taken a dip in after hours trading. Wouldn't be surprised to see it fall monday either. The last time PG publicly endorsed amzn we saw it briefly spike before returning to ~183. Almost reminds me of what 50cent did with hnhi.
Not sure whether it's a clearly causal thing or that PG simply has his finger on the tip of investor consciousness.
If Microsoft : Google :: Google : Facebook, I'm not sure that the frightening startup idea here is to replace Google. Don't get me wrong, I've also started to see some cracks in the G edifice; and Facebook has definitely begun to set their agenda, but doesn't that mean search in general is already waning and that the next big thing will be whatever replaces Facebook?
Great essay though, lots to think about. I really like the anecdote about bolting an iMac to the wall as well. I still have a TV, but it's only purpose is to act as a large dumb monitor for my laptop, and I've been seeing a lot of this type of thing happening even among my non-hacker friends and family. I'd like to see an 'app-store' translation for drama as well, but it seems like tv / movies are not as amateur friendly to create as games. One person can develop a fun indie game, but it's nigh on impossible to create drama with a similarly small budget.
What aspiring drama writers / directors need are tools equivalent to game level editors to create their scenes without actors, cameras or studios. Packaged believable human CG characters may not be possible, but cartoon, animal, alien, etc. characters might be able to bridge the gap the way they do in video games and still tell a compelling story.
> What aspiring drama writers / directors need are tools equivalent to game level editors to create their scenes without actors, cameras or studios.
I'm not trying to be intentionally dense, but that's just literature.
If you get rid of things like actors or cameras, you're no longer operating within the medium of television/cinema. And that's not specifically bad, but that's not specifically good, either.
Even barring the inability to create life-like characters without serious investment, there are other problems, like animating them. But I'm reminded of the early days of the Ill Clan and machinima.
You would think a small team could have san animator to produce the needed animations, a few operators to control movement (and maybe voice), and a director. But I really haven't seen much movement in that direction since visual effects and YouTube became so accessible. But that's shop heavily comedy it's... Well, maybe not annoying, but unfortunate.
Anyway, my point was that I can still easily see a future where people download actors and write, choreograph, then compile, feature films in their bedrooms. And for a few programmers, I think it's a perfectly achievable goal.
I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it. More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation?
This is the crux of the problem with our current political system, I think. It's not campaign finance, it's not religion, it's not disagreements about economics, foreign policy, security vs liberty (a lovely false dichotomy) or what have you. It is simply the fact that lies win and truth loses. Or, if that statement is not necessarily true, it is true in the current practice.
So, if you buy my premise, how can technology help? Isn't it a problem of human nature? You can't force people to be honest. You also can't force people to learn how to recognize dishonesty in spheres where they have not much competence. You can't impose good sense or decency.
But human nature is varied, and so maybe the seeming ascendancy of its more unfortunate aspects is situational. Maybe by improving the context and presentation of information they can be mitigated. Maybe technology can be used to recognize and reward honesty and to point out and discourage dishonesty. It hurts to think about, doesn't it? It does for me, because it is so hard, and that's what I took from pg essay. Granted, I may not be talking about problems to solve which would make you the next Google.
As an aside, I think that the utility of greater transparency of public actions (governmental or corporate) is already well-understood by many and much work is already being done in this direction so I am leaving out. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for new solutions there, as well.
Interesting idea. I think the most intractable part is that many people believe what they want to believe. They gravitate to a world view for various reasons, backfit it to the data, rationalize the cherrypicking of supporting data and discarding of refuting data, integrate it into their id or ego, fight tooth and nail to protect it, and happily accept the political dis/misinformation you're referring to.
I'd imagine you'd have to identify why people do that, why others don't, and whether it's formalizeable and transferable. Pretty sure psychology has done some work in that area, but brain-fried atm and drawing a blank...
Yes, I agree. But these people do continue to be influenced by information in the public sphere, although they do tend to select sources that they agree with. They also were influenced when settling into their original positions.
I really don't think this general behavior will change, but it's not all or nothing, it's a matter of degress. I think everyone does this at least a little bit. Unfortunately, a lot of people do it a lot. If you can shave away at it a little bit at a time, it could have a large impact in the end.
Yup, psych has been looking at this intently for a while - I think cognitive has been doing work looking into this.
There was an article on this a while back on HN as well - why walmart knew someones daughter was pregnant before her dad did. (forbes, after taking it from wired iirc)
Its based on the fact that peoples habits (in regards to shopping) are ingrained, and that there are only a few times in life when those habits are open to change.
Thats when there is a major change in their life - like a new job, baby, marriage and so on.
Dan O Reily (from arming the Donkeys) also had an old pod cast on this.
This is the crux of the problem with our current political system, I think. It's not campaign finance, it's not religion, it's not disagreements about economics, foreign policy, security vs liberty (a lovely false dichotomy) or what have you. It is simply the fact that lies win and truth loses. Or, if that statement is not necessarily true, it is true in the current practice.
I think Eric Drexler had hopes like this for hypertext before the World Wide Web started to hit it big. However, "In every age, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same."
"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month."
Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ?
Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.
I think email needs to be changed from top to bottom, but offering speed alone would be a hard sell to launch with. You can get the Microsoft offering (Exchange Online or packaged with Office 365) starting at $5 a user. Microsoft can afford to spend money on it. I've used it and it is a lot faster than GMail (although it wasn't enough for me to switch).
One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right away. Kevin Rose talked about this a few years ago, and I've heard many high-profile investors complaining about this.
For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well.
Perhaps email is perceived as a problem just because it gets tons of "face time" with us every day. I'd leave it alone and focus on one of the countless unsolved problems in the world.
It is, but only in terms of what we think of email in today's usage. I think the next step will be where you can make the messages dynamic which would basically allow you to receive/deliver an interface to an app. Of course with all that power comes the issue of how to control it, but that would be an interesting problem to solve. Imagine instead of getting a notification email for an update on a Basecamp todo list, you would see the actual todo list and could manage right from your inbox.
The only reason you can't do that already is because email clients prohibit it for security reasons, and Hotmail is already experimenting with emails that allow that within a sandbox.
Emails can send HTML and JS, there's nothing innovative about it. You only need to convince developers to add JavaScript sandboxes to their email clients.
Would you pay for computer support, or extended warranties? I wouldn't, but millions of people do.
It really depends on the context. When thinking about something for the masses, you are one very particular data point. You want evidence that lots of people would pay for something.
If you are building something for people like you and:
- there are lots of people like you, and you can make it very cheap
or
- you ARE paying tons of money for it already, and it could be better and cheaper (e.g. travel)
Rich people have the same number of seconds per day as poor people, except each second is worth more. Right now everyone is driving a black Model-T; there isn't a premium edition of email available, though one is certainly desired (personal assistants and secretaries currently fill this gap).
If the cost of a premium email/task-list system is less than the dollars saved in time, and less than an assistant, people will buy it. Aim for the higher-end market, solve their problems first on their dollar, and later expand downward to everyone else.
there isn't a premium edition of email available, though one is certainly desired (personal assistants and secretaries currently fill this gap)
I think you misunderstand. The premium edition of email is much like the premium edition of anything else- it's the email you don't have to use, the plane you don't have to fly, the car you don't have to drive, the food you don't have to cook. So I don't know that personal assistants and secretaries are "filling a gap" in the stop-gap sense, but rather they are the solution.
If you want to capitalize on it, do like a chauffeur company would do, but with email.
Somehow people manage to pay Dropbox hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in spite of their stingy-ness. The email version of Dropbox would almost certainly be a bigger market.
"I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur.
Peter Drucker said: "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."
So an entrepreneur tackling this problem would already have at least one prospective customer, thus they'd immediately be in business. And who knows, maybe something "big" grows out of it (e.g. maybe you discover there's a big market for this in the enterprise space).
Most households have no problem paying $50/month for a service that their whole family uses frequently: cable TV. So here is my idea: make and sell this great email-like/todo-list/file-sharing/whatever service that an entire household can use, and charge $50/month.
That's only $10/month/user for a family of five. Come up with reasonable limits to ensure enough revenue (eg. max 10 users per plan).
I'm not sure you can compare cable to email. I may be in the minority here, but I agree that email is not really a pain point for me. I pay $50/month for cable because that represents a choice of having ready access to television or nothing.
The idea that households would pay $50/month for email is a bit of a stretch given that the alternative is free email that works pretty damn well.
I am talking about this service that pg thinks needs to replace email. I do agree with him that people currently use email in a way it was not intended to (todo list, sending files, etc), and that surely there must be a better way of doing these tasks, that would be worth $50/month, while getting rid of the limitations of email such as attachment size limits.
In fact I know I am right, because the reason we, in 2012, still have no easy way to share large files between friends and family members, is precisely because the storage and bandwidth costs are higher than the cost of email.
You honestly believe there are a lot of families that would pay you $50 a month for a service that enables them to easily create todo lists and share attachments? You're a pretty optimistic person.
How many services do you yourself pay for today on a monthly basis? I can count mine on one hand. To get $50 from me every month you better have a life-changing service.
Number of business email users? Tens of millions certainly.
"Would I pay for this?" is a great question for founders to ask, because it combines two of the most powerful techniques for generating startup ideas: solving problems you yourself have, and using payment as a test of how much people want something. One of my techniques for helping founders to come up with ideas is to ask them what they need so much that they'd pay for it.
One of the simple ideas we could do with email for power users is to show the sender a list of imap folders the receiver has created in his inbox and allow the sender(maybe an assistant) to target the emails in that folder thus turning it into a collaborative effort in organizing stuff
But there are decades of precedent against how much people will pay for email.
Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email?
Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees.
Thats the problem with enterprise scaling vs cloud/startup scaling. They are inverse;
The enterprise wants the cost per unit to go down when scaling. The startup/cloud wants the profitability to increase at the same rate when scaling.
We all want great services, but NOBODY wants to pay for it.
I myself seek to offload cost at every opportunity; work pays for machine, phone, travel, software etc...
Same model.
Yeah - I'll seek to solve problems I have, but not based on how much I would pay - but how much I would like to offload that cost.
(Clearly there is a lot of grey here, and there are areas where this doesn't make sense -- and others where it does -- and these are not mutually exclusive. (i.e. in areas where I am both building for the consumer and the provider (healthcare))
"Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email?
Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees."
Yes, I certainly do believe that any American corporation with 150K employees spends significantly more than $7.5mm/year on their messaging system.
These systems actually get _more_ expensive as they grow larger - Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Sarbanes Oxley, Customer Service, SLAs, Data Loss Protection, Intrusion Detection - All these email services that the small enterprise doesn't worry about (that much) - add up significantly in larger enterprises.
Lockheed is a horrible example too because they have extensive classified operations (their support costs for email within classified projects probably exceed 7.5mm alone), and because Lockheed IS&GS is a major contractor for outsourced IT services.
I think the Gartner figure was something on the order of $500-1000/yr per employee for messaging in large high tech businesses. A lot of that is IT staff, and all the other systems for security and compliance. Email is one of the big apps within enterprise.
The problem with emails is not the spam or the sorting, it's that they're not actionable. Tasks in a to-do list are almost directly actionable, and that's what most emails aim for.
Seeing as how you're on HN you may have heard of 37Signals, Fog Creek, and Atlassian. All sell products which are domain-specific improvements for email. They collectively have, conservatively, X00,000 paying users. These are small companies in this problem space - IBM has at least 48 options for I-can't-believe-it's-not-email at every price point between $200k and $200 million. Ditto Microsoft and a dozen other big software companies.
"The web" includes a bunch of stingy twenty something's on the consumer Internet, but it also includes the producer Internet, and the producer Internet is one giant system for turning piles of money into bigger piles of money. Something which makes that happen is cheap at any price.
Will it stop replacing my technical terms with non technical synonyms, and randomly leaving out my search terms? Cause whatever they've done to the UI, it pales is comparison to those two things.
maybe its because of my search history, but I find google gives the best technical results.. and actually its when I do a search for something that has non technical meaning the technical results come to the top.
"The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one."
The future is uncertain, because each person is a variable and chaos is inherent in nature. However, with the sun as my witness and the earth as my ally, there is nothing that will stop my effort to liberate all beings from suffering through my startup. It's all I got left in the world, there is nothing else that matters to me. I am 22 and there is no job I want in the world, so I will create one through my ideals of universal compassion and scientific method. I will post on HN soon, I hope people understand my vision of leading Homo sapiens to become Homo universalis, that may be the only way we can actually have a type 1 or 2 civilization.
I'm working on #2, but the solution I've found is not exactly what Paul suggests. I ran into a need while working on my latest startup.
I'm in bed with a large tech investor for my current company, and I'm working on this tech on the side. My term sheet is such that my company owns whatever I create right now, so I'm hoping said large investor isn't too annoyed with me allocating some time on the side; my plan is to ask forgiveness instead of permission.
Aiming to kick it out to the public in a month optimistically.
I have my own to add which I'll tackle if I ever get smart enough. Code is horrible right now. The problem is that code is written linearly, when in our minds it is a graph. It's usually a bad sign when our minds see things differently than our computers do. I think if we could properly abstract the concepts, and change both our linear list of functions and our unsorted list of files to a single graph structure, we could understand our software so much better. I guess I'm thinking of UML diagrams with code, but in a way that feels natural to code in the first place, even for a beginner, not as a commented afterthought.
I just read an article today or yesterday about the reason that VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l or whatever.
I think the reason that code is ASCII text is pretty much the same reason VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l. All they had was a terminal so it had to be ASCII.
If you think about it, all information is structured and multidimensional. But people can only make one sound at a time, so information must be serialized to be communicated.
There are some easy starting points for understanding why we should get away from pure ASCII source code. One of them is to try first coding a complex UI with pure text and then build the same UI using a graphical editor with widgets.
Another one is this: just answer this question -- why can't I represent division in my source code using a numerator over a divisor the way that we are taught to write mathematics? Should we continue to pretend that we are required to edit our code on terminals from 1979?
As you suggest, this is definately a legacy issue of being tied to the teat of a 1980's terminal. People still like to edit in simple editors.
I've viewed it as a Model-View-Controller problem, where everyone is attempting to merge the Model and View into one. Technically your editor should be worrying about the View. It can draw division however you configure it to. But when saving to a Model source file, that should be portable, without any (or very little) formatting embedded in it (e.g. MultiMarkdown).
You should be able to customize your editor, much like swapping out a CSS file on a website, and skin it to your desires.
We talked about exactly this at a Camp Smalltalk almost a decade ago. If it had flown, at least one computer language (Smalltalk) could've allowed each programmer to have their own customized code formatting (View) while the code was actually stored as the Abstract Syntax Tree nodes.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing! My workaround so far has been to use IDEs that have some project management features, and separate the code into separate files.
Nice! I've started using files to separate logic, I recently went from 3 tiered (GUI/code/libraries) to 4 tiered (GUI design/GUI action code/data structures and algorithms/libraries) and added folders for elements (like a custom made back arrow image) and IO samples to run my programs on. Making my software structured like this has helped, but it's far from where you can see even a simple algorithm in it's graphical form that I see in my mind, as that algorithm would all be in a single section of my structure. I'll have to look into the separate files idea, though perhaps I'll build my own custom code editor, I'm skilled in things like that, perhaps I could pull it off.
I saw a neat Kickstarter a while back that seems like it was trying to tackle redesigning email from the ground up. Looks like they hit their goal too!
Google tried this with Wave and they failed. I wish they had succeeded. I think they should have spun it was "Email 2.0" and made the transition easier.
I think we'll see it again, though not necessarily from Google. What failed about Wave was the way the project was organized and pitched to users, not the idea.
Personally, I don't see what Wave has to do with email, it's a completely new protocol that wasn't integrated with email in any way and that's why it failed. They should have done this from the start: http://code.google.com/p/wave-email/wiki/Outline
Google wave was also horribly complex. Email needs to be simplified, not just added to, which Google keeps doing with Circles and other stuff that they keep bolting on to Gmail. Reminds me of how MS used to do stuff.
I actually loved wave, I think they would of succeeded had it been tied in to your email account. I had to remind people to send me messages @wave.google.com or whatever it is. If all my gmail messages automatically went to wave and vice versa, I think it would of succeeded.
I think that the hard part of tackling these ambitious projects is (often) not the actual engineering but rather making the ideas popular and fighting against the status quo. Another hard part is how difficult is the transition from how we do things now to the new way.
So most of these things he mentions, people are working on them, or something similar, or even have functional software. That software just isn't popular. Not because it isn't useful, but because it didn't catch on.
And a lot of these ideas aren't really useful until they reach a critical mass of users, which makes it even harder.
The big ambitious thing I wanted to mention was DONA (data-oriented networking or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking). You might be able to combine that with some type of semantic knowledge storage and engineering along with a type of e-democracy. People have working examples of these things, its just hard for people to pick them up and start actually using them and then mention them to others for them to become trends.
Before (or instead of) human-controlled knowledge engineering we may see Google (http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change...) (or possibly some start up) come out with a Watsonish system that builds huge knowledge graphs by actually comprehending the semantics of web pages it spiders and then lets you query them more naturally. (Which I guess that type of system does exist, just didn't catch on, maybe because it wasn't quite up to human level comprehension or didn't become popular for whatever reason.)
The KDD cup had some entries in 2006 on this idea. I found one of the papers by accident yesterday. It looks quite interesting, might be worth checking out.
www.daimi.au.dk/~ifrim/publications/kdd2006.pdf
One of the benefits of something like Y Combinator is that if you have one of these ideas, and you can actually make it work, YC and its associated network of people can be massively helpful in spreading the word.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] thread>Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users' minds that a single person could unroll the future for them.
We've got Banister, who lead, and Augustus who followed (I mean in succession - he was still a leader), and ... well, it's a little confused but I guess you're right.
This has been my experience with Google search and Gmail (the Google products I use most). It's really frustrating that sometimes I'm handling them the way I'd handle a Samurai sword. That's not how it should be.
This is critical. I have tried it the other way, and struggled for these very reasons.
I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.
Eat small morsels, chew well!
It's also the Lisp philosophy of building up from small functional pieces, rather than starting with an overdesigned top-down blueprint.
I think what Paul is saying in the first part I quoted is different though. He is saying don't even say you are going to build the "grand vision" because it sets unreasonable expectations and defocuses you from making incremental progress.
The second part I quoted is about avoiding top-down design / blueprints and you are right on the money there.
Unless you plan to discover new ideas by mistake, you absolutely need a vision, and then find the way to get there.
If you start from the bottom (bottom-up), you'll constantly compromise technically, as lots of things are not yet possible to do.
If you start from the top (top-down), you'll "know" that it's possible to accomplish, and you'll only have to find out how to do it.
You have far more chance to solve an enigma if you know there is an answer than if you don't. Visionary ideas make you believe the answer exists, which makes it much more easier to accomplish.
Clearly, you have to "know" that it's possible to accomplish and then find out how to do it. I don't think even PG was disagreeing with that.
When he says "don't have a blueprint", he is saying don't presuppose you know how to get from where you are to replacing Google as the de facto search tool. Instead, just make progress. It seems you agree with that.
Watching charts on a production server, you see patterns over time - e.g you can see a weekend, or holiday quite easily. Keeping an eye on these, you can see when things start hitting bottlenecks and you need to do something to improve the situation.
When I get my bloodwork checked, its once a year - can you imagine checking in on your production servers just once a year?
I live in the Seattle area - Vitamin D deficiency is a huge (but not well known) problem in this area. I would pay real money to see a chart of my Vitamin D levels on a daily basis (without needing to draw blood!). I can then adjust my supplement dosage as needed.
I have a food allergy that is slow to flare up and slower to go away again - being able to check various levels of things in my system to track against food intake will help me find out exactly what foods cause what issues. The US food industry would pay a fortune to have this ability not be available!
For example, the recent trial that showed screening CT scans reduce mortality in lung cancer cost 250 million dollars to run. Even then, nobody is sure if it is even a cost effective measure.
It is difficult and costly to produce a screening test. It also takes many years to validate. Then there is the problem of what to do with the results - for example, if you are diagnosed with possible pancreatic cancer, the treatment is a massive operation to replumb your upper abdomen. 5% of people die because of the surgery alone, and the surgery costs a fortune.
Unfortunately a simple relationship like "find cancer early = good outcome" does not exist. There are incredibly high barriers for a startup developing diagnostic tests for screening. There is a good reason why the only people doing cancer screening studies are large government funded research consortia that can afford to wait 10 years or more to prove a result.
The example of Bill Clinton is misapplied - cardiovascular disease is really common, maybe 30% or more of people will get heart disease in western countries. We don't need to have a cool machine to screen for it, we need to risk stratify people with a few simple tests (ie ask them if they have a family history, check their cholesterol and blood pressure) and improve their risk factors (eat better, quite smoking, exercise, lower cholesterol etc). But then you are talking about modifying human behavior...
I live in Australia, and we are indoctrinated to check your skin for moles that maybe cancerous. There are claims that the high rate of early detection leads to higher survival rates[1].
My understanding is that early detection of bowel, breast and prostate cancer is relatively easy and produces good outcomes too.
There are radical ways to do early detection (sub dermal computers continually monitoring, etc etc) but there are ugly hacked solutions that just might work, too.
How much would it cost to build a toilet with a bowel cancer test kit built in?
[1] http://www.cancer.org.au/policy/positionstatements/sunsmart/...
If you are arguing that a start up could have come up with a screening program for bowel cancer for example, then I don't agree with you for the stated reasons.
Also: Prostate cancer screening is not recommended (http://www.cancer.org.au/File/PolicyPublications/Position_st...)
Breast cancer screening is not as useful as you would hope either. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2F14651858.CD001877.pub4) 2000 women need to be screened for 10 years to save 1 life, with 200 initial false positives requiring biopsy. Also, I see lots of people diagnosed with breast cancer despite having mammograms.
Radical ways to do early detection are fine, but you have to prove that it works and that requires a lot of people for a lot of years and a lot of money.
Building a toilet with a bowel cancer screening kit built in is a form of behavior modification to improve uptake, and that is a great area for start ups to get involved in. pg was talking about something different however.
See, I don't think he was. "Ongoing diagnosis* doesn't have to mean new tests if you can make the existing tests radically cheaper and easier. Given that existing behaviour is always hard to modify it would seem sensible to try and piggyback on existing behaviour.
Toilets with cancer sensors that would check for bowel cancer everytime you go would be as about as "ongoing" as diagnosis can get.
Maybe toothbrushes could be modified to check for viruses in saliva.
I'm sure there are other easy tests that could be done if you have blood. There are obvious ways that could be integrated into everyday life (for women, anyway).
I've read some studies that showed dogs could be trained to smell cancer. Maybe people would pay to have their clothes sniffed (!) when they have them sent to the laundry.
I've previously suggested (on HN) the idea of payment companies partnering with food outlets and exercise software vendors to log the calories you are buying. That's a good input into diagnosis software too...
I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas - look for low hanging fruit and you can do radically better than the status quo.
- No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues
- It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.
- Even when you can access journal articles, it's hard to know which ones to look in to answer your question. Sometimes it's hard to even know which field(s) your question falls under.
- Even if you vaguely know which field your question falls under, you don't necessarily know any of the vocabulary used by that field.
- No way to search by dependent and independent variables, confounding variables, etc.
- No way to sort articles by the quality of their methodology, the quality of the journal they were published in, the quality of the researchers, etc.
I know this isn't a product that more than 1% of the population would use, but if someone built it then maybe there are other things it could be used for.
* "w pi" to search Wikipedia articles * "d pi" to search Dictionary.com definitions * "am pi" to search Amazon products * "map pie" to search Google Maps locations * "g pi" to search Google
and many others. :)
One thing I search for sometimes are code examples in a particular language. Search for something in C on Google and you end up with lots of stuff for C++, C#, etc... Github, with its large repository of public code, lets you filter by programming language, and is much better than Google in these cases.
Bing copies Google. DuckDuckGo returns different things than Google, but otherwise is a copy. There's no micro search engine for specific topics and sub-topics, outside of site-specific search. Market opportunity...
Dialog have been doing this over the internet for a long time. It's generalised search of the web I feel that is too expensive to tackle as yet.
We obviously need something better than the status quo here, but the status quo isn't as bad as it seems if you know how it works.
Quick hints: email the article author. They'll probably more than happy to send you an article and a quick summary worded for a lay audience (not to mention talking your ear off about their more recent work...) They're not worried about you not paying the publishers, they want to spread their work around.
Another trick is knowing people in academia. Maybe you have a friend who's doing graduate work, or lecturing. You could ask your old lecturers if you went to university and if the paper you're after is in their field. There are also communities like /r/scholar on Reddit, though I imagine some people are against that sort of thing.
BTW, Paul's article has a big #fail when he mentions code search as a possible idea; dude, we do have that and it's amazing (but unfortunately we recently shut it down; not sure if this will eventually resurface as part of some other product).
All that said, of course some company can always make an effort dedicated to a specialized niche that we are overlooking and beat Google Search in that niche; an excellent example of that is Wolfram Alpha. Still, not a big deal; to really "beat Google" you need a new general-purpose, full-Web search engine that beats Google's. Not impossible either, but the barrier to entry is simply colossal and it amazes me that people don't realize that and dream that it just takes some cool new idea or clever new algorithm to do that--we are not anymore in 1998, when Google, still working off a garage, started to beat the current top engines like Yahoo! and AltaVista.
Google, today, after all is a stock-holders company that is aimed to generate PROFITS, and maximize those. It should be kind of obvious that at some point they (as a company) will try to maximize cash coming in, and minimize going out (spent). Therefore, their product [search] is narrowed towards the ones who push the most obvious questions/search queries: what do they play in theatres, what car to buy, best lcd tv, pharmacy near me, etc. Thats probably 90% of search queries they getting. I say, as long as they work in this zone and make sure simple queries return the best results, they are winning - winning biggest chunk of market and smile on shareholders' faces.
This simply means that Google doesn't work very well for you, and I mean no offense, but what you are searching is a very, very small minority of search queries. Google still serves a crushing majority of people very well.
You are making the same mistake that Paul is making throughout his essay: he wants startups to build products for him and not for regular users. Seriously, email is actually a todo list? Come on, now.
That's because of the business model around funded research. Academic research funding is driven by a limited number of funding agencies being bombarded by huge numbers of proposals. One of the key metrics they use is how many peer reviewed journals has the author been accepted by. Those journals make money by charging access fees and by being semi-trusted gate keepers. Journals WANT it to be hard to access them online since they view the Internet publishing paradigm as a threat.
People have been trying to disrupt that business model since the mid 90s.
The long bets are not on the current startup ideas which will still mould the world 5 years from now. YC's view of investing in those with the wherewithal to effect change - not those who necessarily have the answers to hand - bleeds through the ambiguous edges of this essay.
pg's reticence to put his full belief behind a specific idea due to the evanescent nature of the current concept-du-jour is good guidance - tackle the extant problems and retain half an eye on the bigger picture.
My work e-mail is largely about communications, with a todo element to it and unfortunately some file storage too. My "home" e-mail is completely different. It's where I get my monthly statements for banks and investments and where my notifications go. When replacing e-mail you would need to service all these components of what e-mail is.
The thing that originally made e-mail so important was it's identity factor. That seems to have withered away as other services have replaced some components of what e-mail was for.
I would argue that e-mail needs to not be replaced, just reclaimed. My e-mail client (web or otherwise) should know that an e-mail in this case is actually just a twitter DM notification and be smart about how it presents that to me. It should know that something from Bank of America is probably something I want to keep, but something else from Bank of America is just marketing junk.
I haven't seen anything that is smart enough to do that on it's own. I don't want to have to deal with creating filters - it should just know. I would totally switch from gmail if this were out there.
There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable catalog of all my receipts.
I would sign up for this tomorrow if someone on here goes and builds it. :)
But would you pay for it? If so, there is a way to generate almost infinite revenue with this service, which is to charge a small fee for each receipt stored. Naturally, when receiptbox.com charges this fee, it issues a receipt, which it emails to you...
Predict what I want to buy next and take a cut of the purchase.
I realise there are people who would love this convenience, and you'd make a killing on targeted ads, but this is a privacy nightmare. Good luck getting people to trust you. Furthermore, you really want the results of the filtering to be applied in the user's own mail client rather than having a separate UI..
Might be feasible as a client-side app. How about a Thunderbird/Outlook addon with a subscription service for known filters?
(What is the Google Chrome of desktop mail clients, anyway? Hardly any seem to use WebKit.)
If i receive a receipt it should be stored and analysed. For example if the item had a 30 day guarantee it should ask me before that if I am satisfied with it.
If i receive a shipment notice it should automatically tell me on the day it arrives and alert me when I'm in proximity of the post office that I need to pick it up.
Actually I would want almost all of my emails to be read solely by a computer so that all of these emails I didn't even see. I don't need to see that I've bought something — I know that! I need to be told when its in my post box though, or if its a license key I need my computer to pop up a question if I should apply that license.
So a good startup idea here would be something that took your email, filtered it and just removed all of the receipts/etc messages from your view, while keeping it neatly organized somewhere else for the future.
By hybrid I mean that people could receive regular human-readable emails, but senders could include a small url or tag that links to the semantic information (it could be an event invitation, receipt, valid email confirmation, password changing, task proposal, marketing offer, flight information, etc.).
The "smart" email client could then automatically interpret semantic emails, and act accordingly. It would also hide those emails, and only show you the relevant notification.
> Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel.
Pixar got funded only because Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) paid for it of pocket to the tune of $50 million total. It's Pixar that made him a billionaire (not Apple, as most people assume). How often does Steve Jobs invest in companies? Virtually never. But he knew (correctly) that Pixar was on to something.
I'm dealing with the Pixar bootstrap-problem at my own company, Fohr. Fohr is the live-action version of Pixar (photography, not animation, is what gets computerized), and requires $32 million in capital to do the process today on a feature film (well over half of that is for hardware - $2 million alone for electricity!).
Fohr is only constrained by capital – the R&D has already been done (it took nearly 13 years to develop the tech) – so you'd think Fohr would be ripe for funding. And you'd be dead wrong. There are no Steve Jobs left to pay for it.
The startup world today seems to only want tech innovation on the cheap, and that includes Paul Graham and all the rest.
$40 million is not a number that is unachievable in 2012. The password is just a bit different than for $200k, $700k, or $5 million.
I can do Fohr without the capital, it'll just takes me longer as hardware gets cheaper and my own net worth goes up.
18 month ago, it would have cost over $100 million to operate Fohr, so time is on my side.
> Pre-production continues on the first computer-photographed film, Carpathia, and production begins on June 1, 2012 in Los Angeles.
At the time, we were very close to going through with a deal. (Obviously, that fell through.)
http://engineering.stanford.edu/profile/alvy-ray-smith-ms-19...
> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.
> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.
So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.
(In any case you can trick them by only telling them about the initial few steps.)
Part of the issue is that Fohr has two sources of funding. One source is for the technical side of the company, which I expected tech funding to pay for. The stuff on AngleList is basically only about that.
The other source is film funding for the first computer-photographed film, Carpathia. I have a completely different talk for that, which is more about how the tech is actually used to make a live-action film.
Point is, AngleList is only a small (but expensive) part of the story.
The video on AngelList looks like just a rendering demo, and I can't find any other references.
Filmmaking is a technical and artistic discipline, and only the films themselves are sold to a mass audience, so my pitch really only makes sense (and is tailored to) those in the industry.
Not sure whether it's a clearly causal thing or that PG simply has his finger on the tip of investor consciousness.
Great essay though, lots to think about. I really like the anecdote about bolting an iMac to the wall as well. I still have a TV, but it's only purpose is to act as a large dumb monitor for my laptop, and I've been seeing a lot of this type of thing happening even among my non-hacker friends and family. I'd like to see an 'app-store' translation for drama as well, but it seems like tv / movies are not as amateur friendly to create as games. One person can develop a fun indie game, but it's nigh on impossible to create drama with a similarly small budget.
What aspiring drama writers / directors need are tools equivalent to game level editors to create their scenes without actors, cameras or studios. Packaged believable human CG characters may not be possible, but cartoon, animal, alien, etc. characters might be able to bridge the gap the way they do in video games and still tell a compelling story.
I'm not trying to be intentionally dense, but that's just literature.
If you get rid of things like actors or cameras, you're no longer operating within the medium of television/cinema. And that's not specifically bad, but that's not specifically good, either.
You would think a small team could have san animator to produce the needed animations, a few operators to control movement (and maybe voice), and a director. But I really haven't seen much movement in that direction since visual effects and YouTube became so accessible. But that's shop heavily comedy it's... Well, maybe not annoying, but unfortunate.
Anyway, my point was that I can still easily see a future where people download actors and write, choreograph, then compile, feature films in their bedrooms. And for a few programmers, I think it's a perfectly achievable goal.
I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it. More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation?
This is the crux of the problem with our current political system, I think. It's not campaign finance, it's not religion, it's not disagreements about economics, foreign policy, security vs liberty (a lovely false dichotomy) or what have you. It is simply the fact that lies win and truth loses. Or, if that statement is not necessarily true, it is true in the current practice.
So, if you buy my premise, how can technology help? Isn't it a problem of human nature? You can't force people to be honest. You also can't force people to learn how to recognize dishonesty in spheres where they have not much competence. You can't impose good sense or decency.
But human nature is varied, and so maybe the seeming ascendancy of its more unfortunate aspects is situational. Maybe by improving the context and presentation of information they can be mitigated. Maybe technology can be used to recognize and reward honesty and to point out and discourage dishonesty. It hurts to think about, doesn't it? It does for me, because it is so hard, and that's what I took from pg essay. Granted, I may not be talking about problems to solve which would make you the next Google.
As an aside, I think that the utility of greater transparency of public actions (governmental or corporate) is already well-understood by many and much work is already being done in this direction so I am leaving out. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for new solutions there, as well.
I'd imagine you'd have to identify why people do that, why others don't, and whether it's formalizeable and transferable. Pretty sure psychology has done some work in that area, but brain-fried atm and drawing a blank...
I really don't think this general behavior will change, but it's not all or nothing, it's a matter of degress. I think everyone does this at least a little bit. Unfortunately, a lot of people do it a lot. If you can shave away at it a little bit at a time, it could have a large impact in the end.
There was an article on this a while back on HN as well - why walmart knew someones daughter was pregnant before her dad did. (forbes, after taking it from wired iirc)
Its based on the fact that peoples habits (in regards to shopping) are ingrained, and that there are only a few times in life when those habits are open to change.
Thats when there is a major change in their life - like a new job, baby, marriage and so on.
Dan O Reily (from arming the Donkeys) also had an old pod cast on this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...
I think Eric Drexler had hopes like this for hypertext before the World Wide Web started to hit it big. However, "In every age, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same."
http://bit.ly/7gFYD
Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ?
Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.
For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well.
Perhaps email is perceived as a problem just because it gets tons of "face time" with us every day. I'd leave it alone and focus on one of the countless unsolved problems in the world.
It is, but only in terms of what we think of email in today's usage. I think the next step will be where you can make the messages dynamic which would basically allow you to receive/deliver an interface to an app. Of course with all that power comes the issue of how to control it, but that would be an interesting problem to solve. Imagine instead of getting a notification email for an update on a Basecamp todo list, you would see the actual todo list and could manage right from your inbox.
Emails can send HTML and JS, there's nothing innovative about it. You only need to convince developers to add JavaScript sandboxes to their email clients.
If you wouldn't pay for it, then why would you expect others to pay for it?
It really depends on the context. When thinking about something for the masses, you are one very particular data point. You want evidence that lots of people would pay for something.
If you are building something for people like you and:
- there are lots of people like you, and you can make it very cheap
or
- you ARE paying tons of money for it already, and it could be better and cheaper (e.g. travel)
then you may be on to something.
If the cost of a premium email/task-list system is less than the dollars saved in time, and less than an assistant, people will buy it. Aim for the higher-end market, solve their problems first on their dollar, and later expand downward to everyone else.
I think you misunderstand. The premium edition of email is much like the premium edition of anything else- it's the email you don't have to use, the plane you don't have to fly, the car you don't have to drive, the food you don't have to cook. So I don't know that personal assistants and secretaries are "filling a gap" in the stop-gap sense, but rather they are the solution.
If you want to capitalize on it, do like a chauffeur company would do, but with email.
Peter Drucker said: "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."
So an entrepreneur tackling this problem would already have at least one prospective customer, thus they'd immediately be in business. And who knows, maybe something "big" grows out of it (e.g. maybe you discover there's a big market for this in the enterprise space).
That's only $10/month/user for a family of five. Come up with reasonable limits to ensure enough revenue (eg. max 10 users per plan).
The idea that households would pay $50/month for email is a bit of a stretch given that the alternative is free email that works pretty damn well.
I am talking about this service that pg thinks needs to replace email. I do agree with him that people currently use email in a way it was not intended to (todo list, sending files, etc), and that surely there must be a better way of doing these tasks, that would be worth $50/month, while getting rid of the limitations of email such as attachment size limits.
In fact I know I am right, because the reason we, in 2012, still have no easy way to share large files between friends and family members, is precisely because the storage and bandwidth costs are higher than the cost of email.
How many services do you yourself pay for today on a monthly basis? I can count mine on one hand. To get $50 from me every month you better have a life-changing service.
"Would I pay for this?" is a great question for founders to ask, because it combines two of the most powerful techniques for generating startup ideas: solving problems you yourself have, and using payment as a test of how much people want something. One of my techniques for helping founders to come up with ideas is to ask them what they need so much that they'd pay for it.
Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email?
Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees.
Thats the problem with enterprise scaling vs cloud/startup scaling. They are inverse;
The enterprise wants the cost per unit to go down when scaling. The startup/cloud wants the profitability to increase at the same rate when scaling.
We all want great services, but NOBODY wants to pay for it.
I myself seek to offload cost at every opportunity; work pays for machine, phone, travel, software etc...
Same model.
Yeah - I'll seek to solve problems I have, but not based on how much I would pay - but how much I would like to offload that cost.
(Clearly there is a lot of grey here, and there are areas where this doesn't make sense -- and others where it does -- and these are not mutually exclusive. (i.e. in areas where I am both building for the consumer and the provider (healthcare))
Yes, I certainly do believe that any American corporation with 150K employees spends significantly more than $7.5mm/year on their messaging system.
These systems actually get _more_ expensive as they grow larger - Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Sarbanes Oxley, Customer Service, SLAs, Data Loss Protection, Intrusion Detection - All these email services that the small enterprise doesn't worry about (that much) - add up significantly in larger enterprises.
I think the Gartner figure was something on the order of $500-1000/yr per employee for messaging in large high tech businesses. A lot of that is IT staff, and all the other systems for security and compliance. Email is one of the big apps within enterprise.
Would your problems be solved by hiring a personal assistant (a real person)? Then the solution is AI and it's hard.
Or do you believe it's impossible for anyone but you to sort through your mail?
If that's the case, what we need is to make sorting email "fun" (more enjoyable than TV).
We may be looking for the Angry Birds of email.
"The web" includes a bunch of stingy twenty something's on the consumer Internet, but it also includes the producer Internet, and the producer Internet is one giant system for turning piles of money into bigger piles of money. Something which makes that happen is cheap at any price.
I wouldn't let that slide, because it triggers pattern matching not relevant to the subject at hand.
If you disable Javascript and cookies for *.google.(tld), you'll be greeted with Google circa a few years ago: http://imgur.com/LDBLk .
And people who don't know look for a new search engine rather than learning how do disable Javascript.
The future is uncertain, because each person is a variable and chaos is inherent in nature. However, with the sun as my witness and the earth as my ally, there is nothing that will stop my effort to liberate all beings from suffering through my startup. It's all I got left in the world, there is nothing else that matters to me. I am 22 and there is no job I want in the world, so I will create one through my ideals of universal compassion and scientific method. I will post on HN soon, I hope people understand my vision of leading Homo sapiens to become Homo universalis, that may be the only way we can actually have a type 1 or 2 civilization.
I'm in bed with a large tech investor for my current company, and I'm working on this tech on the side. My term sheet is such that my company owns whatever I create right now, so I'm hoping said large investor isn't too annoyed with me allocating some time on the side; my plan is to ask forgiveness instead of permission.
Aiming to kick it out to the public in a month optimistically.
I think the reason that code is ASCII text is pretty much the same reason VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l. All they had was a terminal so it had to be ASCII.
If you think about it, all information is structured and multidimensional. But people can only make one sound at a time, so information must be serialized to be communicated.
There are some easy starting points for understanding why we should get away from pure ASCII source code. One of them is to try first coding a complex UI with pure text and then build the same UI using a graphical editor with widgets.
Another one is this: just answer this question -- why can't I represent division in my source code using a numerator over a divisor the way that we are taught to write mathematics? Should we continue to pretend that we are required to edit our code on terminals from 1979?
I've viewed it as a Model-View-Controller problem, where everyone is attempting to merge the Model and View into one. Technically your editor should be worrying about the View. It can draw division however you configure it to. But when saving to a Model source file, that should be portable, without any (or very little) formatting embedded in it (e.g. MultiMarkdown).
You should be able to customize your editor, much like swapping out a CSS file on a website, and skin it to your desires.
For example, SAS Enterprise Guide lets you create a project flow like this: http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/uploads/egparallel4.png
Note some of the advantages: nice code structure, easy (minor) parallelization, easy code segmentation, ability to examine intermediate data, etc.
I haven't found anything nearly as useful for SQL or more general languages. I would love to see something similar in Clojure/Python.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1380180715/mail-pilot-em...
Google tried this with Wave and they failed. I wish they had succeeded. I think they should have spun it was "Email 2.0" and made the transition easier.
Google wave was also horribly complex. Email needs to be simplified, not just added to, which Google keeps doing with Circles and other stuff that they keep bolting on to Gmail. Reminds me of how MS used to do stuff.
So most of these things he mentions, people are working on them, or something similar, or even have functional software. That software just isn't popular. Not because it isn't useful, but because it didn't catch on.
And a lot of these ideas aren't really useful until they reach a critical mass of users, which makes it even harder.
The big ambitious thing I wanted to mention was DONA (data-oriented networking or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking). You might be able to combine that with some type of semantic knowledge storage and engineering along with a type of e-democracy. People have working examples of these things, its just hard for people to pick them up and start actually using them and then mention them to others for them to become trends.
Before (or instead of) human-controlled knowledge engineering we may see Google (http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change...) (or possibly some start up) come out with a Watsonish system that builds huge knowledge graphs by actually comprehending the semantics of web pages it spiders and then lets you query them more naturally. (Which I guess that type of system does exist, just didn't catch on, maybe because it wasn't quite up to human level comprehension or didn't become popular for whatever reason.)
In fact, that may be the major benefit of YC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions