
Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems? - mtae
In the article, &quot;Silicon Valley&#x27;s Youth Problem&quot; [1] the author mentions Meraki (now Cisco-Meraki) as an example of a startup working on advances in technology rather than the latest web app.<p>Do you know of other companies that fit the description?<p>Follow up: Are they (you?) hiring?<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;16&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;silicon-valleys-youth-problem.html
======
DennisP
There are several startups attempting practical nuclear fusion, including:

Helion - has investment from ycombinator, attempting D-D/D-He3 fusion, which
would produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation.

General Fusion - D-T fusion, but with a clever design that pretty much solves
material issues caused by hard neutron radiation. Fusion happens in a spinning
vat of molten lead, compressing plasmas with acoustic shock waves from steam-
driven pistons. Jeff Bezos is an investor.

Tri-Alpha - the biggest of the fusion startups, quite secretive, with about 30
Ph.Ds, 150 employees, and over $150 million invested. Investors include
Goldman Sachs and Paul Allen. Attempting boron fusion, which would produce
less than 1% of its energy as neutron radiation.

LPP - the smallest, only about $4 million invested, but might not need more to
complete its experiments. Also attempting boron fusion, from a reactor that
fits in a small room. About to start a new round of experiments using a
reactor core carved from solid tungsten, which they think will boost output
dramatically by removing plasma impurities.

Those are the ones that I know have funding. EMC2, the polywell company, is
looking for investors now that Navy funding has ended. Non-startups working on
alternative fusion include:

Lockheed - this has gotten a lot of press

Sandia - repurposing the Z-machine to attempt net-gain fusion, after
simulations showed they could hit breakeven with their existing machine, and
100x to 1000x gain with a 2-3x increase in input power. Very cheap since the
Z-machine already existed, and things were going well last I heard.

UW's dynomak project - the most conventional of all these, similar to tokamak
but does away with big external superconductors, which makes the reactor ten
times smaller and cheaper. Needs $10 million to test whether the idea will
scale.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Pardon, I think you meant to say:

[http://www.helionenergy.com/](http://www.helionenergy.com/)

[http://www.generalfusion.com/](http://www.generalfusion.com/)

[http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/](http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/)

[http://emc2fusion.org/](http://emc2fusion.org/)

[http://www.lockheed.com/](http://www.lockheed.com/)

[http://www.sandia.gov/](http://www.sandia.gov/)

[http://www.washington.edu/](http://www.washington.edu/)

I'll send you my bill in the mail.

~~~
DennisP
Thanks. Since you did all that work I'll upgrade your last three links to
point to information on the fusion projects:

[http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-
fusion.htm...](http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html)

[https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/mag_fu...](https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/mag_fusion/#.VQ4bQV02w_s)

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-
dynomak-a...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a-
fusion-technology-cheaper-than-coal)

------
zeit_geist
A super incomplete list:

Databases:

\- PipelineDB

\- Snowflake (Computing)

Internet of Things / Communications:

\- Helium

Robotics:

\- Pneubotics

\- Kuka, namely the research department

Autonomous Systems / "Self Driving Car" et al.:

\- Kiva

\- Anki

Computer-Vision / VR based:

\- Jaunt

\- Oculus VR (especially the 'research' department)

Agriculture:

\- Blueriver [http://www.bluerivert.com](http://www.bluerivert.com)

(there are many more super-interesting companies in this area!)

Computing:

\- Mill Computing; though quite dubious

\- D-Wave

and than there is Microsoft Research working on super interesting stuff in
programming languages, computer architecture (FPGAs).

Additionally, I believe really challenging problems will alwyas be coming from
creative people, companies in that area; such as Pixar, architecture, and
design (keywords, just to give a start: generative {design, art, ...}).

Hope this helps!

~~~
yen223
Is Kuka really a 'startup'? They are very well established among the
industrial robotics scene.

~~~
IgorPartola
What a name!..

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Yes, they're obviously not Scandinavian (where the name means male genitalia,
plural).

Funfact: in the northern parts of Norway, calling a policeman a "horses penis"
is not illegal, as that is a somewhat common thing to call another person.
Yes, this was tested in court in 2008.

~~~
yen223
I have a theory that if a word is less than 5 letters long, it probably means
male genitalia in a foreign language.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Interestingly enough, the number of <5 letter words in English is of the order
of 10-15 000 [1], while the number of languages is 7000. Since most languages
(I guess) have more than one word for male genitals, it is technically
possible for all English <5 letter words to mean precisely that.

[1] [http://norvig.com/mayzner.html](http://norvig.com/mayzner.html)

------
josh2600
Terminal.com is writing next generation virtualization. This includes live-
migration without hypervisors (already in production) and live-resizing (also
in production).

I think we'd like to think we're working on the ugly bits of infrastructure
people don't care about.

This includes a distributed file system optimized for speed and storing
machine state like Github, software defined networking for IP migration across
metal, and other abstractions for making devops easier.

We're looking for people who want to think about hard computer science
problems like managing stateful systems more intelligently (think auto-failure
detection and recovery and less I/O intensive WAN replication strategies).

~~~
fsniper
This is really interesting. I have never heard of Terminal.com before and I'm
now deeply interested. Do you hire remote or sponsor visa?

~~~
josh2600
Feel free to ping me on the email address in my profile. Be forewarned, we
have a pretty serious technical interview for all candidates. I would say it's
not easy to get a technical job at Terminal.

~~~
fsniper
Thank you. I pinged you ;)

------
damnusername
I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined:

"For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I
am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything
of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep
getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as
to call the whole thing deeply broken.

I am not going to name any specific startup, but I would like to ask the
readers of Slashdot a question.

I know this is not how the world works, but I am still curious to know what
kind of ideas would prosper if the primary aim of a startup was not to make as
much money as possible as quickly as possible. So, if your startup idea would
be judged by the amount of good it would to mankind, what would it be?"

~~~
hoodoof
Where has this concept of "world changing is important, and a business must be
of real value to mankind" come from in recent years? Who gives a shit how
incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a
business?

Since when did this become some sort of measure of the worth of a tech
company?

Sounds like misguided hippy shit to me.

Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't set out to change the world
and "do something incredibly important for mankind", despite what the message
might have become in later years. They all set out to do things they were
interested in, pursuing technology for its own sake, as most people were back
in the 1970's.

These days startups seem to need to feel that to justify their existence they
need to be "changing the world" or "doing something important for mankind" or
"giving back to the community". There's no need to justify the existence of a
business. Do it for the cash, do it for fun, do it to scratch your sense of
ambition, do it because you think it's a good idea, even if some pompous git
stands on a high horse and looks to the sky and proclaims "this business is
not changing mankind for the better, I am dismayed at the trivial nature of
this endeavour, I deem it of little value".

~~~
damnusername
Well, that's ok, we all see things differently. And I guess, I don't have a
problem with that. If that is what you want to do, go for it. But I would
rather not be called some pompous git, I really think that is as far from what
I am as possibly can be. Ok, I can be an asshole sometimes, but I try not to
be.

~~~
damnusername
Trying to find uses for the internet? Oh well. If you think it is pompous to
"judge the startups you see against some measure of "importance to mankind"" I
think there is a problem, and you are probably part of it. I don't want to
argue. Just go make lots of money and find some use for the internet and all
is well.

------
kentonv
Sandstorm.io ([https://sandstorm.io](https://sandstorm.io)) is working on
turning server infrastructure and security upside-down without the need to
rewrite applications. The goal is for distributed infrastructure and security
to be as easy as possible for end users to manage, and as hard as possible for
applications to screw up. The model we're building is capability-based;
previous capability-based research systems have usually required rewriting
apps to fit the model, but ours does not. This leads to a lot of interesting
computer science, systems engineering, security, and UX problems, both in
designing a new model that is practical and just-in-time reverse-engineering
of application intent in order to seamlessly fit it into the new model.

Possibly-interesting technical posts:

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-
docker...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-
apps.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-13-sandbox-
security.h...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-13-sandbox-
security.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-24-tinytinyrss-
plus-s...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-24-tinytinyrss-plus-
security-discussion.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-05-12-easy-
port.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-05-12-easy-port.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-
ap...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-
federated-hosting.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-
units.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html)

Sandstorm is not currently actively hiring. But it is an open source project
if you're interested in contributing. See:

[https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Get-
Involved](https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Get-Involved)

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Wondering why you're not actively hiring?

~~~
kentonv
We only just raised a seed round[0], which only gives us money to hire a
couple of people, and we already have more really awesome candidates than we
have budget to hire. So basically we're all set on hiring until Series A
(2016?). You can feel free to e-mail jobs@sandstorm.io if you think you're an
exceptional case, but _probably_ the answer will be: "Sorry, we don't have
budget or bandwidth to interview more people right now. :("

[0]
[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-15-sandstorm-1.3M-see...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-15-sandstorm-1.3M-seed-
round-pay-it-forward.html)

------
tmostak
MapD ([http://www.mapd.com](http://www.mapd.com)) is building a hyper-
interactive big data analytics and visualization platform running on multiple
GPUs/CPUs. We basically do every performance trick in the book (like compiling
our queries via LLVM and caching hot data on the GPU) to do this. The end
result is the ability to scan billions of rows of data in milliseconds at
rates greater than 2 terabytes/second per server when running on 8 Nvidia K80s
(although we also get great results on laptops and even ARM cores.) And not
only can you query the data with SQL but you can visualize it or feed it into
machine learning algorithms without copies because it is already distributed
across all available compute devices.

~~~
dsl
Where did your cofounder go? Why is half your company non-engineering (per
your team photos)?

Tech looks good, company looks shaky.

~~~
tmostak
Actually all of our team codes, we just wear other hats at times. Our Director
of Business Development has a PhD in GPU algorithm acceleration and I (the
ceo) coded the original version of MapD and still play full-time engineer as
much as possible. I can see why one might get the impression you got from the
website though - perhaps we should add a bit more background on ourselves.

------
lmeyerov
At Graphistry, we are powering nextgen visual analysis through real-time GPU
clusters that stream right into your browser. For example, we cracked a botnet
a couple days ago using it. Visually exploring millions of data points in
real-time is a hard problem for both infoviz design (hairballs!) and high
performance programming (1000 node GPU clusters), but unblocks some of the
biggest industries (finding criminals, avoiding economic meltdown, datacenter
rootcause analysis, ...).

And yes, we're looking for the right data viz folks to help us harness all
this performance and help data analysts make sense of it all.

~~~
huhtenberg
> we cracked a botnet a couple days ago using it

Do elaborate...

~~~
mkramlich
I love how due to the nature of the Internet that huhtenberg may be the owner
of that botnet. ;-)

(note: not saying he is, obviously. just making a point we should all be aware
or when communicating with strangers online.)

~~~
lmeyerov
If he takes it down without authorities forcing him to, great!

------
higherpurpose
Kryptnostic seems to be working on bringing usable fully homomorphic
encryption to market. If they actually have something real there, that could
be game-changing for cloud privacy:

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/kryptnostic/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/kryptnostic/)

It's a shame Google isn't focused more on this, too. They should be having a
Google X lab just for that, and invest at least as much as they currently
invest in quantum computing. They have a lot to gain from it. Infringing on
people's privacy is currently Google's biggest PR issue, and it's not going to
go away. It will only become a bigger issue in the future. Without this,
Google could perhaps return to being _almost_ as liked as it used to be
(there's still the issue of bullying others in the search engine, of course).

~~~
bostik
The first company that can crack the full operational cycle of homomorphic
crypto will get a license to print money. As long as they don't squander the
first-mover advantage, it will take quite a long time for the eventual second-
mover to take over.

It's not just doing the computations in an untrusted cloud environment,
although that's _a_ big promise. I would say that an even bigger part will be
the eventual ability to run computations on multi-party data sets. If you can
provide a provably secure zero-knowledge service that still manages to compute
results from multiple sources of opaque data, you will have every single
financial institution and insurance giant banging on your door.

------
chetanahuja
At Packetzoom we're building up a networking protocol specifically designed
for mobile networks. We've discarded the TCP/HTTP stack completely and started
from scratch. The idea was to go back to the drawing board (to the lowest
level possible) and ask this question:

 _How would network protocols on mobile work if they were being designed from
scratch today?_

And that's what we've done. Results so far are pretty amazing (yes, we're out
in production with private beta customers).

And oh... sorry but we're not hiring right now. We have a small, tight-knit
team and we plan to hire very slowly with only the exact right fit of people.

~~~
bostik
I have an honest question: what do you answer when the obvious comparison to
(and lack of industry adoption of) SCTP is put forward?

In-protocol multiplexing must be pretty high up the list of necessary
features, but how about transparent multi-network roaming? Not just over
mobile operator networks, I'm talking about hopping between different
transports.

~~~
chetanahuja
Let me answer your latter questions first:

 _In-protocol multiplexing must be pretty high up the list of necessary
features_

Yes :-)

 _but how about transparent multi-network roaming_

Yes :-)

 _I 'm talking about hopping between different transports._

Yes :-)

(I was thinking of writing a much more detailed answer to above, but it's so
detailed that it would be far better as a blog post... I'll post the link here
for a more inclusive discussion soon)

Now going back to your first question:

 _" what do you answer when the obvious comparison to (and lack of industry
adoption of) SCTP is put forward?"_

Oh... where to start.. OK. First off the comparison is not all that obvious.
SCTP was never built for the mobile use case (4 way handshake??). There are
some improvements over TCP (reliable, out-of-order message based delivery with
multihoming are all good things), but there's a fatal flaw that prevents any
serious use of this protocol. It's not TCP or UDP!! And there are umpteen
middle-boxes on the internet who won't let it through. That's all you need to
know to explain the lack of industry adoption of SCTP.

So we built our protocol on top of UDP (which we basically treat as a proxy
for raw IP). Luckily for the mobile users, UDP based custom protocols are now
well baked into various standard applications (DNS, VOIP etc.). A vast
majority of middleboxes support it and the trend is in the right direction --
every new middle box has to support UDP passthrough/NAT by default barring
exceptional circumstances.

Now, how do we expect our new protocol to get adoption. The answer is, we
don't. We're not just building a protocol. We're building a turnkey service
for mobile app developers. Our business case doesn't involve convincing anyone
of the technical superiority of the protocol. We simply sell a superior user
experience with minimal developer effort. And you'll learn as we get more open
in the coming few weeks (wink, wink), it's not at all a hard-sell :-)

Feel free to connect with me directly or just continue the discussion here if
you have more questions. I'm always happy to engage skeptical observers ;-)

~~~
bostik
Let's start with the encouragement: please, please put the technical details
into a blog post and publish it on HN. This is the kind of stuff I've
always[tm] been interested about.

> _umpteen middle-boxes on the internet who won 't let it through. That's all
> you need to know to explain the lack of industry adoption of SCTP._

Heh, I've dealt with IPSec. You don't have to convince me on the futility of
getting new protocols ("the magic number on IP header") approved for end to
end delivery. :) For better or worse, UDP encapsulation is the sensible thing.

I used SCTP as a fairly well known example of a protocol that has many of the
modern technical requirements built in. As far as protocol features go, it is
a pretty good yardstick.

Now, as for "turnkey service"... I would guess you're positing yourself as the
platform provider. You need to control the server endpoints to work with
multi-homing; you'll have to provide and maintain the mobile app libraries,
along with best practices documentation and aids for debugging; you _probably_
want to provide a patch for wireshark (dissector); and then there's the
security to think about. That's just off the top of my head.

I am genuinely interested how you have solved the problems and where you have
looked for inspiration. Because this is aimed at mobile developers, unreliable
latency will be a major factor. That's something you do not have control over
- maybe the protocol library can help a bit, and multi-homing already mandates
graceful handling of concurrent retransmits. But mobile networks are not just
unreliable, they are all too often outright crappy.

Can one ever work around that?

~~~
chetanahuja
_Now, as for "turnkey service"... I would guess you're positing yourself as
the platform provider. You need to control the server endpoints to work with
multi-homing; you'll have to provide and maintain the mobile app libraries,
along with best practices documentation and aids for debugging; you probably
want to provide a patch for wireshark (dissector); and then there's the
security to think about. That's just off the top of my head._

That's a good list of issues. And yes, we've thought about each of those
issues and have had enough success that a few pretty rigorous customers are
currently using us in live apps.

 _Because this is aimed at mobile developers, unreliable latency will be a
major factor. That 's something you do not have control over - maybe the
protocol library can help a bit, and multi-homing already mandates graceful
handling of concurrent retransmits. But mobile networks are not just
unreliable, they are all too often outright crappy._

Well the general issue of lossy connections, unpredictable latency and
outright disconnections and reconnections (often with a different IP address)
_is_ the main impetus behind designing a brand new protocol. TCP does a woeful
job here and any new approaches that limit themselves to just tweaking server
side TCP are DOA when it comes to solving those issues. We'll be going more
public with some of this info soon (in a couple of weeks).

Btw, checked out Cricket WC odds on Smarkets. I think you guys are spot-on on
the second Semi Finals ;-)

~~~
bostik
> _TCP does a woeful job_

Not just TCP. Network operators are guilty too. There are the network side
megalith buffers that are trying hard to "optimise" TCP transfers and just
murder latency. Then, precisely because TCP is a stateful protocol and clients
have the retransmission logic built in, the operators also have the option of
applying something like RED at the earliest sign of network congestion. False
positive or not.

(Note: I have a friend who works on the other side of the table and runs a
team of engineers responsible for installing new mobile network equipment in
the field. The use of mobile networks grows faster than the operators and
their contractors can add capacity. Which means the situation is unlikely to
improve soon.)

As you mentioned earlier, UDP at least has the distinction of being used in
real-time and streaming protocols => operators and network gear are more
reluctanct to mess with it. If you think you can get away with it, you could
also assign multiple ports to any single session and apply at-least-once logic
to the transmission - or to put it in layman's terms: blast and spam the
network, in order to get even a single datagram out without excess delay. Do
that often enough and you can expect the operators to crack down on it,
though...

As for work: thanks :-)

------
multiklout
Oscar Health in NYC is fixing the health insurance industry by building a tech
and data driven insurance company from the ground up. It's an extremely
complex, highly regulated industry that is in need of fixing. There are many
startups that try to address pieces of the broken health care system, but
Oscar is the only startup trying to solve it by doing it all. Engineering
talent from Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Spotify, Apple, and more.:
[https://www.hioscar.com](https://www.hioscar.com)

The USA shouldn't have such a terrible health care system. Let's fix it. They
are hiring all sorts of talent:
[https://www.hioscar.com/jobs](https://www.hioscar.com/jobs)

Fully cloud based, heavy aurora/mesos shop, kafka, hbase, redshift, mysql,
python, flask, and an abundance of data analytics.

~~~
kzhahou
No doubt health insurance is hard problem, but it's not _technically hard_. OP
asked for examples of company's pushing the limits of advanced technology, and
Oscar is not one.

~~~
multiklout
It's not? Why do you feel that way?

~~~
kzhahou
It's not solving difficult problems in algorithms, systems engineering,
hardware, ML, AI, etc.

Nothing wrong with that. But using today's technology in web and mobile to
build a highly-usable customer experience, is not what OP meant by hard
technical problems.

~~~
multiklout
I'd like to correct you on that, Oscar is not just a pretty design smacked on-
top of an insurance company. It's the entire insurance stack redesigned from
the ground up.

Algorithms and ML are all heavily used in analyzing member data to improve the
lives of people.

We're engineering systems that give us real-time feedback on the insurance
system as a whole, rather than the usual "30-60 days". Building a claims
system from scratch is not an easy feat.

If you'd like to learn more about what we're doing i'd be happy to demo it for
you.

Don't be fooled by our pretty and simplified website. It's all of the hard
engineering efforts that you don't see that make the simplified experience
possible. :)

~~~
kzhahou
Good luck! I hope you guys do well and deliver an awesome product :-)

------
philippnagel
According to basically every career page of every startup, every startup ;)

~~~
mtae
You're right, I should have been more specific in the title. Although I do
think the description gives a better idea of the kind of startup I was looking
for.

------
driverdan
I'll play devils advocate since no one else is. Why does the company's
product(s) have to be the advanced technology? The successful "latest web app"
startups have created tons of tech they build on top of. Scale leads to
technology.

------
apurvadave
I work in the data analytics space, so I'll focus there since many of the
other answers give a good, broad set of companies to consider.

* Trifacta ([http://www.trifacta.com/](http://www.trifacta.com/)) are dealing with the very grungy problem of data transformation. Their approach is heavily UX-centric, with built-in predictive capabilities that learn what you are doing as you try to transform disparate data sets to meet your needs.

* Segment ([http://www.segment.com](http://www.segment.com)) acts as a data router, allowing you to implement significantly less data plumbing in your application while allowing you to deliver your data to many different analytics tools.

* Jut ([http://www.jut.io](http://www.jut.io)) is a full-stack approach to building a hub for streaming data. They take any operations data (logs, metrics, alerts, events) as inputs, manage storage and analysis, and have creating a framework for streaming visualizations as well. Technologies include an in-browser, retargetable compiler, a streaming analytics layer, storage (elastic search and cassandra), A d3-based visualization framework designed for 3rd party add-ons, and a simpler way to manage large-scale data called hybrid SaaS. (disclosure: I work here.)

* Databricks ([http://www.databricks.com](http://www.databricks.com)) has implemented apache Spark as a service.

------
jbdowney
At Airware, we are doing hardware, embedded systems, flight controls, desktop
development, and web services. We deal with every type of data that could be
captured by a 5-50lb drone aircraft and processed or analyzed: images, video,
logs, streaming telemetry, etc. Problem spaces include autonomy, machine
vision, and distributed computing (both on the vehicle and in the cloud).

Yes, we are hiring:
[http://www.airware.com/careers](http://www.airware.com/careers)

~~~
neilparikh
Are you hiring interns (for the fall)?

------
vonnik
Skymind is building an open-source, distributed deep-learning framework for
Java and Scala.

[http://www.skymind.io/](http://www.skymind.io/)
[http://deeplearning4j.org/](http://deeplearning4j.org/)

~~~
blueyes
Plus their scientific computing library [http://nd4j.org](http://nd4j.org) and
machine-learning vectorization library Canova.

------
ephemeristicly
At Spire (spire.com) we are building small satellites to monitor the weather
and global trade. We're looking to improve the efficiency and safety of
shipping as well as help prevent illegal fishing. And we're hiring.

------
diafygi
[https://UtilityAPI.com/](https://UtilityAPI.com/) is making the Twilio for
energy.

Humans needs to switch 87% of our energy sources (~450 Quadrillion BTU/yr)
from fossil fuels to other source in our lifetimes[1]. That's an unbelievably
huge transition, and one of the current bottlenecks is energy data
communication. Solar and energy efficiency companies can't communicate
efficiently with utilities and vice versa because each utility has a unique,
antiquated, manual system for handling energy data. We are trying to fix that
by making a universal API that wraps utilities so energy innovation can happen
efficiently on both sides of the meter.

Yes, we are hiring:
[https://angel.co/utilityapi/jobs](https://angel.co/utilityapi/jobs)

[1]: [http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-
internet/](http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/)

------
pron
At Parallel Universe we are working on a full server-side stack (distributed
in-memory storage, through the database, and all the way to the communication
layer) that is mechanically-sympathetic with modern hardware architecture
(most current software architectures actually fight the hardware).

Most of our projects are free software, and yes, we are hiring.

------
pataphysician
Tachyus - Predictive analytics for the oil & gas industry. They offer
solutions for production optimization in cyclic steaming, steamflooding,
CO2-flooding, waterflooding, pump optimization, workover prioritization, and
shale fracking.

[http://www.tachyus.com](http://www.tachyus.com)

------
yzh
Three startups I want to promote:

1) Onu: A cloud computing framework based on GPUs. I have worked with both of
their co-founders and have really high hope for this company in the future of
cloud computing market. They are hiring top GPU programmers:
[http://anticipate.onu.io/](http://anticipate.onu.io/)

2)Tachyon Nexus: memory-centric distributed storage system. Just announced a
couple of days ago by my friend Haoyuan Li from Berkeley AMP lab.
[http://www.tachyonnexus.com/](http://www.tachyonnexus.com/)

3) Mental Canvas: A spin-off from Yale professor Julie Dorsey, they are
working on 3D reconstruction from 2D drawing. Very cool stuff and one of my
friend is the early employee there:
[http://www.mentalcanvas.com/](http://www.mentalcanvas.com/)

------
maaku
Blockstream is writing the code that will one day run not just the entire
financial system, but eventually all forms of digital property, contracts, and
services drives thereof. And we're hiring:

[http://www.blockstream.com/jobs](http://www.blockstream.com/jobs)

~~~
maaku
^services _derived_ thereof. Stupid phone auto-correct...

------
Osiris
I work at a network security startup [1], I can't say much until we come out
of stealth mode on Tuesday, except that it's a very challenging engineering
problem.

[1] [https://www.protectwise.com/](https://www.protectwise.com/)

------
spiritplumber
We were working on autonomous stuff, but had to move onto simpler things
because people weren't buying.

[http://robots-everywhere.com/portfolio/navcom_ai/](http://robots-
everywhere.com/portfolio/navcom_ai/) (2007)

~~~
cipher0
This reflects your current status I presume? [http://robots-
everywhere.com/re_site/](http://robots-everywhere.com/re_site/)

~~~
spiritplumber
Yeah. Was trying to not link that coz I don't want to spamvertise.

~~~
cipher0
I see. Nitpicks: \- The twitter icon on the top right points to @spiritplumber
which has the name of a "Linda Camezon", a standard issue avatar and only 1
tweet which doesn't signify anything. \- The text at the bottom of the website
(in green) is unreadable given the background. \- I couldn't find a careers
section or the location of the company. \- The videos are not professionally
produced which gives the feel of an amateur effort not an established company.

~~~
spiritplumber
Thanks!

------
hglaser
Periscope ([https://www.periscope.io/](https://www.periscope.io/)) is a data
visualization tool that automatically and transparently syncs customer data
into a huge multitenant data cache that runs queries ~ 150X faster than
customers' own databases.

In the long run, it is a data tool that will eliminate the need for data
warehouses.

It turns out the hard problem is not running the queries fast, but keeping the
cache accurate and up-to-date. Our cache coherence service is probably the
piece of code we're most proud of.

And, yes, we're hiring in SF. :) Reach out to me, harry@periscope.io

~~~
joelrunyon
For a second, I thought this was the streaming video platform that Twitter
just bought.

------
dgomez1092
I read this a few months ago. I agree with its interpretation over the current
state of the entrepreneur culture amongst the youger cohort of emerging
adults. I believe that I am working on a unique problem. One that involves
being able to create a behavioral profile on an individual based off what
their online behavior (i.e. their public timeline information) and connecting
it to how the tend to spend. (categories or unusual trends) Not currently
hiring, but open to talk to people interested in it.

------
clockwork_189
MetricWire ([https://metricwire.com/](https://metricwire.com/)).

We are building a platform that enhances the workflow of clinical trials thus
making it easier, faster and cheaper on drug companies and safer for the
participants involved. We help the researchers using the data collected from
the trial to adapt the future stages of the trial thus helping avoid serious
adverse effects or making them known to researchers in real time if they are
occurring at present.

~~~
politegoose
can you expand on the technical r&d involved? Sounds like a pretty normal user
interface & data sharing problem.

~~~
clockwork_189
In a way it is. So basically our platform allows users to create studies and
structure the entire workflow of a trial(in a lot of these they are multi-
staged so there are multiple steps that need to be designed). Now after this
done, they can follow this workflow on our platform when they are conducting
their trial in house. Now for parts where a doctor/researcher is not
present(like drug/medication/treatment application), we have a mobile and web
app that lets users answer questions/file serious adverse events if they face
any, etc.

Now here is the cool part, the above is just the surface. Our team is really
passionate about data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence
and its applications in real world. So we do something called adaptive
clinical trials where we run analytical models on the data that comes in and
can forecast when the trajectory of a trial needs to be altered. This means
you can catch any serious reactions to drugs, faster.

All in all, to answer the main question, our solution helps keep the costs of
clinical trials low and reduces error rate. Being able to run these trials
fast and keeping the costs low, allows not only for drugs to get out to the
market faster, but also helps reduce the costs of drugs(due to the reduction
of costs to process).

I also only explained the application of our tech in clinical trials, but our
software is so flexible that it can be applied to any industry such as
Consumer Insights, Depression analysis studies, etc.

Not sure if I adequately answered your question.

------
avital
At Meteor, we're building a complete open-source platform for easily building
best-of-class, fast, web and mobile apps. If you've never heard about Meteor,
check out the original screencast:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi0aJ9yr2o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi0aJ9yr2o)
(needless to say, lots have changed since then -- most notably a security
model :)

Meteor touches all parts of an application stack (client-side templating[1],
live database updates[2], a websocket-based sync protocol[3], an "all you
need" build tool[4] that can build mobile and web apps, an in-house
"transparent reactive programming" library[5], a cloud hosting environment[6]
built on Docker and Kubernetes, and the list goes on -- all with a very very
strong emphasis on great developer experience).

Learn more about Meteor's subprojects here:
[http://meteor.com/projects](http://meteor.com/projects). Most of these
projects are current edge new technology -- we develop new systems when the
existing open source ones aren't good enough (either because of how they're
implemented or because we can supply a better developer experience)

Moreover, almost all of our work is open source which means working here
builds your GitHub profile -- always a good thing. Remote is OK. Learn more at
[http://https://www.meteor.com/jobs/](http://https://www.meteor.com/jobs/), or
happy to answer questions at avital@meteor.com.

[1] [https://www.meteor.com/blaze](https://www.meteor.com/blaze)

[2] [https://www.meteor.com/livequery](https://www.meteor.com/livequery)

[3] [https://www.meteor.com/ddp](https://www.meteor.com/ddp)

[4] [https://www.meteor.com/isobuild](https://www.meteor.com/isobuild)

[5] [https://www.meteor.com/tracker](https://www.meteor.com/tracker)

[6] [https://trello.com/c/FMdB7GAu/78-galaxy-managed-
production-q...](https://trello.com/c/FMdB7GAu/78-galaxy-managed-production-
quality-meteor-deploy)

------
yazin
Have you seen Carbon3D? [http://carbon3d.com/](http://carbon3d.com/)

(I'm not affiliated with 'em, just think they're pretty rad)

------
sampl
At FarmLogs (YC W2012) we're using high-precision satellite, tractor, weather,
and nutrient data to generate predictions and recommendations for crop growth.

------
jmckib
Counsyl is doing great work in genetic testing.
[https://www.counsyl.com/careers/](https://www.counsyl.com/careers/)

------
SoftwarePatent
From the website for Vicarious

"our mission: build the next generation of A.I. algorithms"

[http://vicarious.com/](http://vicarious.com/)

------
frabrunelle
MaidSafe ([http://maidsafe.net](http://maidsafe.net)) recently raised over $8m
from one of the first ever cryptocurrency-based rounds of financing. As the
company approaches beta launch, they are looking for a front-end Qt Developer
to create applications to sit on top of the SAFE Network, a secure and fully
decentralized data management service made up by the individual users who
contribute storage, computing power and bandwidth to form a world-wide
autonomous system.

[http://maidsafe.net/careers](http://maidsafe.net/careers)

"Know any #QT (C++) developers who want to help change the world from our
Scottish HQ? Please ask them to get in touch: careers@maidsafe.net"

[https://twitter.com/maidsafe/status/578961937981161472](https://twitter.com/maidsafe/status/578961937981161472)

Features of the SAFE Network:

\- Self-authentication: users can create accounts and log in from any computer
without the need or knowledge of third parties
([http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/...](http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/self_authentication.html)).

\- Farming: this self-regulating network lets users offer spare drive space
and in return delivers anonymous, super-fast internet
([http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/...](http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/proof_of_resources.html)).

\- Examples of apps that can be used on the SAFE Network: cloud storage,
encrypted messaging, websites, VoIP, social networks and any existing service
that runs on the Internet
([http://maidsafe.net/applications](http://maidsafe.net/applications)).

\- Safecoin is the currency of the SAFE Network and a mechanism to incentivize
and reward farmers and app developers as well as provide access to network
services
([http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/how_it_works/safec...](http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/how_it_works/safecoin.html)).

If you have any questions about the SAFE Network, please ask them on
[https://forum.safenetwork.io](https://forum.safenetwork.io).

------
AndrewKemendo
Visidraft is working on making Augmented Reality actually deliver on the
promises of presence on mobile devices at the consumer level and give 6
degrees of freedom around virtual objects in the real world context.

We have to make Large scale Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM)
easily computable across existing mobile devices to bring consumers hyper-
precise (cm precision) geo-reference. This is actually super hard but also
pretty awesome.

Yes we are hiring. Specifically CV experts.

[1][http://www.visidraft.com](http://www.visidraft.com)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_m...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping)

[3][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom)

------
fh973
Quobyte. We're building a fault-tolerant scalable distributed storage system
for POSIX files, block and object storage. Lots of challenges around
distributed systems, architecture and concurrency.

Development is in Berlin, Germany, and we're hiring.

[http://www.quobyte.com](http://www.quobyte.com)

~~~
hoodoof
What's the revenue plan for a business like that?

~~~
fh973
Software licenses.

------
ratsimihah
Deepmind, working on general AI, and yes, they're hiring.

~~~
ScottBurson
No longer a startup -- they got bought by Google.

[http://deepmind.com/](http://deepmind.com/)

------
benburleson
Planet Labs [https://www.planet.com/](https://www.planet.com/)

~~~
autocorrector
seconded. geo-rectictification is insanely difficult and computationally
intensive

------
jacques_chester
I work for Pivotal, which is working on a bunch of problems. We're a startup
in that we were founded on investment capital (EMC and GE) and we're growing
very fast.

Probably the biggest effort we're making is on Cloud Foundry, an opensource
PaaS. Developing scalable production-grade systems for managing and running 12
factor apps is _hard_. Superficially it looks easy. Once you do anything at
scale, it stops being easy, which is where we come in.

We also have teams working on Hadoop, GemFire, antirez is on Redis and Disque,
the Spring team works for us and I've kinda lost track of the rest.

I work for Pivotal Labs, the agile development wing founded in 1989 from which
the whole company takes its name.

We're hiring across all divisions. Email me: jchester@pivotal.io.

------
noelh
At Second Spectrum we use spatial-temporal pattern recognition to tell stories
about sports. We have lots of interesting challenges in machine learning (how
to recognize patterns from moving dots), user interface/experience, (how to
intelligently display the mountain of information that we gather from a single
game or even play), and computer vision (how to augment video to display
semantic information from our pattern recognition layer).

And yes, we are hiring in LA, in those areas, as well as for full stack
developers. Feel free to reach out at noel@secondspectrum.com or
work@secondspectrum.com

------
ninetax
At The Climate Corporation we're making science based tools to push forward
precision agriculture.

I quite like it, there are lots of hard technical problems. I realised that
since I joined ~1 year ago, I haven't worked on any CRUD apps at all yet.

Here are some positions:
[http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=JobL...](http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=JobListing&j=ohHMXfwr&s=Hackernews_Satshabad_Khalsa)

Reach out if you have questions: skhalsa@climate.com

------
bobosha
At Netra ([http://www.netra.io](http://www.netra.io)) we are building true
visual search. Imagine being able to search video/images using other image(s)
or video clips. Yep we are doing that, and eventually Google scale.

We see immense benefits to humanity - from medicine, to environmental science,
crime prevention/monitoring....down to the trivial - search millions of your
photos for your pet dog, look for all photos where you & Aunt Millie were
together etc.

p.s : and yes we are hiring.

------
caseysoftware
At Clarify.io, we're making audio & video searchable. Unlike a general purpose
ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) engine, we perform a bunch of automated
analysis to tune the engine and optimize it for the particular language,
accent, and a variety of other things. We've found that our accuracy is much
higher than a general purpose one.

The founders went through Techstars London 2013 and moved to Austin right
after. We raised 1.4M last fall from a mix of angels and VCs.

------
gwulf
nvidia is doing amazing work, and many of their employees are in the bay area.
3072 cores for $999 - [http://www.geforce.com/.../geforce-
gtx.../specifications](http://www.geforce.com/.../geforce-
gtx.../specifications)

The number of companies using this device to solve real problems is growing.
Jeremy Howard just started an interesting one -
[http://www.enlitic.com](http://www.enlitic.com)

~~~
higherpurpose
Nvidia has done great work with CUDA, but I wonder if AMD/ARM's HSA will make
the work of the people using CUDA now much easier in the future - compute with
a high-level language that you already know. That's got to be some kind of
paradigm change there. I just hope they end up supporting Rust, too.

~~~
bjwbell
Compute on the GPU is unlikely to be unified in a meaningful way with the CPU
in the near future. The GPU is a massive SIMD machine in contrast to the CPU.

Even if you use the same language for both, the style of code & algorithms are
very different.

~~~
lmeyerov
Check out the AMD APU. We've had good experiences with recent Intel integrated
as well due to embedded RAM. You are right though in that we write our code
with data parallel and sometimes manycore SIMT in mind.

~~~
bjwbell
I worked on the Intel integrated embedded RAM a couple years ago (before
release)! It was tough getting the h/w bugs out. Are you using it in Windows
or Linux?

~~~
lmeyerov
Frustratingly, only when we do the client-only demos on our macbooks (iris).
Our 'real' version is AWS or dedicated nvidia boxes, where we don't get it.
OTOH, this sort of thing makes me excited that we can expect significant HW-
driven speedups for our approach for years to come.

------
ownedthx
At JamKazam, we are trying to enable real-time play of music over the
internet. While we can't magically make the internet better, we have spent a
ton of time getting latency as low as we can in Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and
on custom hardware (still under development).

Just a week ago we released our 'distributed metronome', which lets musicians
hear a synchronized metronome regardless of how much internet latency there
might be.

------
kevinmobrien
We're using a combined data pool from multiple companies (i.e., customers) to
predict security breaches before they occur, and provide a usable set of
notifications rather than the long list of "possible alerts" that so many
infosec apps drop on users' laps.

------
wriber
Wriber ([http://www.wriber.com/](http://www.wriber.com/)) is SaaS that
empowers enterprises to build marketing and communications content more
effectively using dynamically-generated artificially intelligent writing
prompts.

------
capkutay
WebAction is working on some complex problems from a data management aspect
(continuous queries on streaming, distributed in-memory data). From a front-
end dev aspect, we're working on efficient rendering, modular and re-usable UI
components and frameworks.

------
lingua_franca
Asteroid Mining:

[http://www.planetaryresources.com/](http://www.planetaryresources.com/)

Space Travel:

[http://www.blueorigin.com/](http://www.blueorigin.com/)

Robots:

[http://modbot.com/](http://modbot.com/)

------
GilSyswerda
Machine Insight. We have a powerful machine learning system based on genetic
algorithms.
([http://www.machineinsight.com/employment.html](http://www.machineinsight.com/employment.html))

------
automathematics
We're trying to develop a set of algorithms that can detect if two online
accounts are the same person as well as whether or not the person can be
trusted.

Not saving the world but its still a fun challenge!

------
miraj
maybe not a hard technical problem; but they're tackling (with science) a
gigantic challenge i.e. the global food industry and its discontents.

Hampton Creek [http://www.hamptoncreek.com/](http://www.hamptoncreek.com/)

This one also looks promising: Endless Mobile
[https://endlessm.com](https://endlessm.com)

and they're also hiring!
[https://endlessm.com/jobs/](https://endlessm.com/jobs/)

------
memossy
We (Ananas) are working on the challenge of using technology to eliminate
extremism amongst other things.

We will be hiring in a few months.

~~~
geoffbrown2014
What sort of extremism are you hoping to eliminate??

------
MKais
uBeam: Wireless electricity

------
vishalzone2002
Although I dont work there but I think theranos is one such company.

------
petercooper
Narrative Science

------
comrade1
I had a start up that was working on hard technically challenging problems.

We were a spin-off of the MIT mind machine project. We were working on
cognitive modeling with the long-term goal of modeling intention awareness,
which is modeling cognition (knowledge and emotions) with a time component.

We were working on knowledge graph theory, blending over time, based on all
written communication of an individual or population sub-group.

It proved to be too soon - probably about 10 years too early. We needed more
data from individuals - email wasn't enough. We probably needed daily
recording of all interactions to build a knowledge graph of an individual. But
even working with email data it was too much information - we could barely
process all of it especially when blending with a time vector.

Google glass was hopeful for acquiring enough interaction data for a person
and their daily lives, but it proved inadequate (no one used it). The closest
data set to what we needed was recordings of all interactions on the ISS.

This will be necessary to model a human personality AI at the beta level (copy
of an individual based on observations of that person).

We've since moved off on to other projects.

------
notastartup
Scrape.it works on building a web scraping tool that minimizes effort and time
invested to quickly extract data from websites. Web scraping is simple in
theory but building a tool that can work with a lot of different websites in
the wild is no easy task.

I am looking for a co-founder.

[https://scrape.it](https://scrape.it)

------
fivre
Yo.

~~~
mtae
Could you explain what advance in technology they're working on at Yo? (as
opposed to "advances" in social media)

~~~
georgespencer
Yo.

~~~
hoodoof
Yo.

------
inzim
Palantir and yes we are hiring.

~~~
adamnemecek
How do you justify to yourself working under a CEO who proposed making a smear
campaign against Julian Assange?

~~~
gojomo
A third party (HB Gary) — not Palantir and certainly not its CEO — suggested
the 'offensive' campaign against Wikileaks.

Palantir — and specifically its CEO — immediately disclaimed involvement or
interest in both that plan, or anything of its general type.

How do you justify to yourself slandering a company by claiming nearly the
exact opposite of what happened?

~~~
mtae
That is not true. Palantir along with HBGary and Berico Technologies authored
the report suggesting an 'offensive' campaign. [1]

They did apologize for this and as you say, disclaimed involvement or interest
in such a plan. [2]

[1]
[https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf](https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf)

[2]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palantir-
apologizes-for-wikileaks-attack-proposal-cuts-ties-with-hbgary/)

~~~
gojomo
The slide deck provides no support for ~adamnemecek's claim that the Palantir
CEO himself proposed the plan. And the CEO's unequivocal statements afterwards
suggest that if there wasn't a bright-line inside Palantir against offensive
operations before 2011, there has been since.

But also, the branding of the presentation does not reliably indicate the
origin of the specifically offensive bullet points (most notably the
"Potential Proactive Tactics" slide), nor whether the contents ever progressed
past trial-balloon status.

In particular, coverage by Greenwald [1] (working from more email thread
context for which I can't find a current online source) identifies HB Gary
principal Aaron Barr as the verbatim source of some of the most-aggressive
anti-Greenwald language.

So I can see that someone at Palantir was coordinating with the other entities
_and_ leading the document-prep. But they also cut-and-pasted material from
the potential contract partners, including vague proposals outside Palantir's
focus, that may never have been approved or presented.

I'd ascribe those bullets to Palantir itself if that deck was in fact ever
presented to a client. We don't know if that's the case. If instead that text
just bounced around as a discussion draft (including their more-aggro
partners), but went nowhere, and was eventually categorically disavowed...
then it's a stretch to say that the company or its leadership actually
advocated those steps.

[1]
[http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/](http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/)

~~~
mtae
Have you read the entire Salon article you linked to?

"So apparently, if Palantir’s new version is to be believed, a 26-year-old
engineer went off on his own and — without any supervision or direction —
participated in the development of odious smear campaigns intended for two of
the nation’s deepest-pocket organizations (Bank of America and the Chamber),
potential clients which the emails repeatedly emphasize would be very
lucrative. I’ll leave it to others to decide how credible that version is, but
I will note that several facts undermine it: ..."

"The leaders at the very top of Palantir were aware of the Team Themis work,
though the details of what was being proposed by Barr may well have escaped
their notice."

------
LeicaLatte
All of them

