
Ask HN: What 'hard tech' company are you founding or most interested in? - nick_araph
Where &#x27;hard tech&#x27; is defined as requiring lots of time, money (or both) and may or may not be possible with high technical risk.<p>I&#x27;m just really interested in people working on fixing hard problems and want to know what is out there.
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wbsun
Have you ever worked in a distributed system? If not, try one. If yes but you
don't feel it hard, try improving its
reliability/availability/scalability/performance/latency/debuggability/observability/consistency
one order of magnitude (e.g. one more 9 in addition to 5 9s) at a time with
one order of magnitude more distribution (e.g. spreading a global service to
10x more clusters/data centers).

~~~
kgraves
if you have the money that is.

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rladerman
Founding: Genteract ([https://www.genteract.com](https://www.genteract.com)).

Goal: Real personalized medicine, including predicting which patients will
respond to a drug, which won't respond well, and which will experience serious
side-effects, based on their genetics.

We actually have a working system that can do this today: it's a new genetic
analysis methodology that finds all the SNPs associated with a Gene-
Environment interaction (GxE) through analysis of clinical data, and generates
predictions for how other individuals will respond to the same environmental
stimulus (food, drug, behavior, etc).

There's a long timeline and potentially large expenses involved in getting the
right data to do drug predictions on (drug clinical trial data or EMR data),
performing prospective clinical trials with the generated predictions, and
finally getting FDA approval.

So we decided to start by analyzing existing NIH clinical study data (which we
have access to by permission of the NIH and the respective study managers),
focusing mainly on interactions between foods and nutrients (as Environment
variables) and health parameters like BMI, sleep quality, cognitive measures,
heart rate, etc. (as phenotype variables).

We're gearing up to launch a service that gives people access to these (and
future) discoveries through analysis of their genetic data (either 23andMe or
Ancestry genotype files, or whole genome sequencing that we'll offer).

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blaser-waffle
Everything related to drone racing. Applications could be widespread -- but
it's also just fun to watch/do.

Some research related to psilocybin, ibogaine, and MDMA happening, mostly in
Canada. Several of those firms have gotten lots of small (<8MM USD)
investments and look interesting. High risk, long-term plays.

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sdwedq
Drone racing sounds amazing especially if it is autonomous racing.

How does one get started in this? I saw this
[https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/events/ai-
innovati...](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/events/ai-innovation-
challenge.html) but still don't know how I can start at small scale as a
hobby.

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hsikka
Building learning systems that can operate on multiple modalities, and are
totally interpretable. I think of these requirements as the basis for the next
big jump in software usability, (I.e much better intelligent user interfaces)

AGI is not what I want to build, someone else can do that. For now I want to
increase the capacity for people to build neural networks that researchers
don’t dream of doing, as easy as stitching together web APIs. I internalize
this under the title “the Infrastructure of Intelligence”

Also, eventually I would like to work on a programming language for biology,
and contribute to building wetware computers.

Another thing that I think the first project would help is longitudinal health
tracking and quantifying human biology.

~~~
nick_araph
Any resources to share that can serve as an introduction to this
"Infrastructure of Intelligence" idea.

~~~
hsikka
That term is something I sort of came up with, but certainly there are some
cool papers.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10985](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10985) Is one,
talking about using ideas like neural architecture search to build better
learning systems. A lot of the references in it are golden.

I also wrote a set of notes formalizing what I see as the first step to
building this infrastructure of intelligence. There’s some great references in
there: [https://osf.io/bv4qp/](https://osf.io/bv4qp/)

I’d be happy to talk about this and get your thoughts, you can hit me up on my
email: harshsikka123 @ Gmail.com

I’m leading a research collaboration with some researchers in academia and
industry, working on this actively!

~~~
nick_araph
Thanks for the resources! I'll give them a deep dive over the next couple of
days

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thinkingkong
Groundstation network management for LEO satellite connections. Nobody,
including SpaceX has that figured out yet.

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WaitWaitWha
Oh? Interesting point. Although AWS applied for LEO licenses, and already has
ground station solution. You think they do not have this near- or solved?
[https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/](https://aws.amazon.com/ground-
station/)

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bsldld
Working on an idea to eliminate student debt/loans and increase teaching and
non-teaching staff income.

