
New Requests for Startups - comatose_kid
http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
======
akkartik
> What comes after programming languages?

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

 _" We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster.
This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the
next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software
continuously and reliably."_

There's a blind spot in prose like this that gets repeated all over the place
in our community: it emphasizes writing over reading. I think we have to start
with reading. My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of
programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use,
wanting to make a tweak. How can I orient myself and make a quick change in
just one afternoon? This is hard today; it can take weeks or months to figure
out the global organization of a codebase.

You can't "deliver software continuously and reliably" until you rethink its
underpinnings. Before the delivery problem there's a _literacy_ problem: we
programmers prefer to write our own, or to wrap abstraction layers over the
code of others, rather than first understanding what has come before.

More on my approach: [http://akkartik.name/about](http://akkartik.name/about)

~~~
sqs
Yes times 1,000!

This is what we're trying to address at Sourcegraph
([https://sourcegraph.com/](https://sourcegraph.com/)). 80% of programming is
about reading and understanding code, not writing code.

Why don't existing tools focus more on helping people read and understand code
--and, more broadly, collaborate on a development team? Things like:

* seeing everywhere a function or class is used, in context (like [https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/joyent/node/.CommonJSPack...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/joyent/node/.CommonJSPackage/node/.def/commonjs/lib/fs.js/-/readFile) on the right side)

* seeing who at your company knows the most about an area of your codebase

* seeing the history of changes, in terms of functions/modules added, not just lines (like [https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/fsouza/go-dockerclient/.c...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/fsouza/go-dockerclient/.commits/bf1b46533545b707ef2df1e6fbad239a08b76df4))

* having a long-lived discussion about a module/class/function that doesn't vanish after a commit is merged or the file's lines shift around

So far, most of the innovation in programming tools has been in editors or
frameworks, not in collaboration and search tools for programmers.

While there are great editors and frameworks, the lopsidedness is unfortunate
because making it easier for programmers to learn and reuse existing code and
techniques, and to collaborate on projects, can have a much bigger impact than
those other kinds of tools. That's because, in my experience, the limiting
factors on a solo developer's productivity are the editors and frameworks she
uses, but the limiting factor on a development _team 's_ productivity is
communication (misunderstanding how to use things, reinventing the wheel,
creating conflicting systems, not syncing release timelines, etc.).

~~~
eropple
FWIW, I think this is absolutely fucking genius and everyone should check it
out...

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

~~~
vishnugupta
Yes please! Also, I didn't see bitbucket support; hopefully you folks are
working towards that?

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

------
impendia
Would somebody please disrupt the textbook publishing industry?

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

$264.39, for students that work part time jobs at $7.00 an hour (before
taxes).

Not only students are angry about this. Professors are angry, and _authors_
are angry too. _Bitter_ fights between professors and publishers are common.

 _Everybody wants to see the big players in this industry fail_. Please,
someone, make it happen.

~~~
rcarrigan87
The bigger question may be why do we even still have "textbooks," at least in
their traditional form? Are textbooks the optimal way to learn given all the
technology we have today? I'm sure there are quite a few start-ups working on
this problem.

~~~
bcohen5055
I'd have to say there is a good use case for textbooks in engineering. Go into
any mechanical engineer or chemical engineers cubical and you will find that
they all have many of their college textbooks. Textbook chapters are a way
better organized than websites when you are looking up values in tables,
applying them to equations, and adapting example problems.

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

------
maxcan
> We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-
> cost index funds.

Sorry, this is not the right problem in financial services. Companies like
Vanguard are already doing a great job of this and the costs are extremely
low. Its a commodity product with razor thin margins that actually serves the
needs of its customers well. Maybe there's a marketing issue where they aren't
educating enough people, but that's not a technology problem.

As an alternative: __Lower the Costs to IPO, disrupt Investment Banks __

Sarbanes-Oxley, minimal competition between investment banks, and heightened
SEC scrutiny have made the fixed costs to an IPO astronomical. These days a
company, for the most part, cannot IPO for less than a $1 billion raise. This
means that the broad public, including those index funds YC loves, is
prevented from enjoying any returns at all for younger, high-growth companies.

There is room for startups to disrupt part or all of the process. It would be
capital intensive and hard as hell. But, you're not looking for easy right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm
married and have a young child.

Are there YC founders in this phase of life that were able to make it work in
YC? What did you do differently? Is YC interested in working with these kinds
of founders? (it's certainly a different kind of "Diversity")

~~~
sgustard
One should consider statements Paul Graham has publicly made as to where he
places his bets.

"This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old over the 32 year old."

"By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids"

I would be wary approaching an organization that has publicly expressed such
age discrimination.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's not "age discrimination" (in the negative-connotation sense), it's _sober
rational thinking_.

 _" By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids"_ is a
statement of fact.

 _" This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old over the 32 year old."_ is a
reasonable conclusion.

Calling this age discrimination is like saying all employers are evil because
they discriminate based on having or not having skills required for a job.

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

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

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

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

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

> Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to
> spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable.

That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with
single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the
United States with its pro-profit healthcare system, and American doctors and
healthcare corporations end up being fabulously more rich than in those
countries. (And they still have private healthcare, like in Sweden, which
competes with public healthcare organizations.) The other reason healthcare
costs are getting higher is that people are getting older and thus more sick.
That's a generational bump, there's very little we can do about that. Not that
I'm opposing the types of ideas YC is after in this sector (preventative
medicine and better sensing/monitoring), just that the premise is wrong that
it's a technological problem.

> At some point, we are going to have problems with food and water
> availability.

That's because we dedicate most of our water and land resources to feeding
cattle that we then eat. Innovations that will have the most impact in that
sector will involve weaning people from animal products. Stuff like Beyond
Eggs and lab-grown meat.

> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad
> at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the
> early 80s.

Sure, some super-low-cost index funds would help, but the main problem here is
two-fold: 1) real incomes are stagnant, due to government policies favouring
corporations and 2) government/pension funds are much better at providing good
ROI on investment than individuals can. Once again policy change is much more
likely to have a massive impact than trying to improve the individual worker's
investment returns. Collect retirement contributions at the source, and have
the best investors in the country manage them. Without taking a profit for
themselves. It's done elsewhere.

~~~
nobodysfool
Look at the top causes of bankruptcy...

#1 on that list is medical costs.

To quote the article:
[http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html)
"A study done at Harvard University indicates that this is the biggest cause
of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies. One of the
interesting caveats of this study shows that 78% of filers had some form of
health insurance, thus bucking the myth that medical bills affect only the
uninsured. "

So yea, fixing healthcare will also fix a lot of America's debt problem. There
are only a couple ways to do that - decrease the costs or have a single payor.
We've tried the 'decrease costs' part with college funding. That didn't work,
because any time we subsidize funding to colleges, they request more money.
College debt is huge now. So going the medical route and just subsidizing a
broken system isn't going to fix it. It will only make the problem worse. We
need to have medicare for everyone, and it should start before birth. If
someone wants a college education, allow them to get it, only paying to re-
take classes. That would wipe out most people's debts.

~~~
georgemcbay
"That would wipe out most people's debts."

Yeah, but people being is debt is great for the part of the financial services
industry that they owe money to, often with ridiculous and crippling interest
rates (compare to the interest rates these players get from the government
when they borrow, which is essentially 0% -- which is nice, for them). This is
especially true when it comes to student debt, which can't ever be discharged.
And these companies have a ton of political power (money begets power begets
money).

Which all is to say I agree with frandroid. The root problem here is our
political system is almost completely broken due to lobbying and lack of
meaningful campaign finance laws and the best way to actually fix some of the
issues listed here is fixing those core government/policy problems, but those
problems aren't technical in nature and won't be fixed with a Ruby on Rails
app.

Software may be eating the world, but if your only options for government
leadership are (to put it in South Park terms) a "turd" or a "douche", both of
which are controlled by big money whose interests are at odds with the overall
populace then there are a lot of core problems that there will never be a
software fix for (short of the call for better AI going really well and having
a benevolent SkyNet take over).

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

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

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

These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with
tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In
AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success
in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve'
the problem).

In addition, the people with the skills necessary to make progress are going
to be advanced researchers with PhDs, who are good enough to remain in
academia if they wish or who have already developed a proven-enough idea
through their research career that they don't need Y-combinator-style money.

I am not trying to be a downer on the idea, contrarily I hope there can be
success. Really I am fishing for anyone with a good perspective (or an answer)
to these points.

~~~
FD3SA
Exactly. It is quite optimistic and borderline naive to believe that YC can
replicate the Manhattan project in every one of these fields with a few
hundred grand and a few months in a dorm.

This is just a huge lack of perspective by people who've only worked on
commercial software. Real science is very hard, very expensive, and does not
result in billion dollar IPO's within 3 years.

I'm hoping that once YC realizes that such projects will never succeed through
a startup incubator, they will become politically active and spearhead the
reversal of the current decay of government funded science. Only the
government has the resources, time and foresight to fund 50 year research
projects in the fields listed in the RFS. I hope this becomes clear in time.

EDIT - Here's a bit more of my thoughts on this issue from a previous comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614344)

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

------
bravura
_An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more
businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more
powerful._

I'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one
API for every enterprise SaaS:

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

Empire is an API for accessing enterprise SaaS services such as Salesforce,
Zendesk, Google Apps, etc. It provides a uniform, database-like interface to
every service that it supports. Empire makes it easy to integrate data from
multiple enterprise services into your own enterprise app.

You can click Login to create an account, and we'll send you an API key. Or
you can just sign up for the mailing list.

~~~
zwegner
SaaSaaS? ...which of course leads to the general form, S(aaS)^n.

~~~
bravura
Alternately, it's an API of APIs.

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

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

Between the staid companies that have been providing tools for decades that
can be better, the tools that don't really exist that need to - I think we're
ready. Similarly, with the security world starting to consolidate (FireEye
buying Mandiant, likely goings public of companies like Rapid7 and TripWire),
I'd think it's an ample rate/return option.

~~~
cryptoz
> Internet Infrastructure

> We can’t imagine life without the Internet. We need to be sure it keeps
> working–this includes everything from security to free and open
> communication to infrastructure.

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

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

------
wmeredith
I liked this line: "the government is a very large customer with very bad
software."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
hazz
>Specifically, lightweight, short-distance personal transportation is
something we’re interested in.

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

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

Bicycles are not an 80/20 solution, they're a 99% solution, with the
appropriate kind of bicycle and accessories. You can haul all kinds of crap -
construction equipment, children, appliances, etc. - with a bicycle.

There are many other kinds of bicycles that make them accessible to people
with reduced mobility: tricycles, hand-cycles, electric assist. Further -
active transportation also counts as exercise and physical therapy, even
further reducing the number of people who end up with reduced mobility in the
first place!

I don't really know what a startup could possibly do in this area that's not
already being done by the dozens of active transportation advocacy
organizations at every level of society.

~~~
jkaunisv1
How do you deal with weather? It's certainly a lot more comfortable to drive
somewhere in pouring rain than it is to bike, even when well prepared. And
that preparation takes time and effort. Not to mention trying to bike in
winter.

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

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

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

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

------
jblow
I am very happy to see this list.

I came to Demo Day in 2010 (as an investor) but left without investing in
anything, because I was so demoralized by the way it seemed everyone was
trying to start lame web sites doing relatively trivial things.

If Demo Day looked like the stuff on this list, I'd be banging down the door
to get in again.

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

Generation - Solar & Wind

Transmission - Distributed Grid

Storage - Batteries

Consumption - Electric Vehicles

> We believe economics will dominate - new sources must be cheaper than old
> ones, without subsidies, and be able to scale to global demand.

The world uses a huge amount of energy and it is vital that any technology is
1.cost competitive and can 2.scale on a globally. These are no small feats,
but like Airbnb the assets already exist, but our access to them does not.
This is a distribution and financing problem, not a creating new technology
problem.

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

Also it's a very difficult field of science. Now you need to be proficient in
AI, machine learning, computational linguistics, linguistic corpora research,
cognitive sciences, statistics, and sometimes physics if the text changes over
time. Of course, you also need to be a good programmer. This combination of
skills is very rare. Thus, very slow progress.

I suggest to start with well defined practical problems. For example, no one
seems to do much with user generated reviews. There is some sentiment analysis
but that is just a binary text categorization problem - not even close to
general purpose AI.

It would be much more interesting to show a seller a time ordered stream of
clustered reviews that depict only the most representative review for each
cluster. This way a seller can see how his/her fixes/changes impact user
reviews. Also it would be a great source for features and bug fixes requests.
This is an ideal testing bed for clustering, novelty detection, categorization
and mild inference. The inference is required because of sparseness of data.

This would create a good data set for a more general purpose AI. We would have
reviews and text documenting changes and improvements of a new version of a
product. Now the computer could start learning the dialog between users and
product developers. Then, we are just one more step from statistical inference
based question-answering system. Not a brute force system like "Watson" or a
hand crafted rule base system like "Siri".

[EDIT:] I was thinking more about a decision support system that can recommend
product changes. But in a way that maximizes customer satisfaction and
minimizes the cost of implementation. The dialogue between past changes and
customer reaction would give us the surface that needs to be optimized. This
would generalize well to other domains where there is a text for request and a
text for response - just to name one: clinical text in healthcare (position 5
in the RFS).

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

From what I understand from speaking with Selmer Bringsjord, Bloomberg has an
outstanding internal QA system, so there is progress, the trouble is that it's
all behind corporate firewalls.

There was a silly little online game that came out a few years ago called
Akinator [1] that would "guess" a public personality and did so by "learning"
based on user inputs - very naiive implementation of CTL but gets the gist of
how you can implement a mock AI to get damn good results.

If you did a little delphi to stack the initial deck of results, say for a car
buying QA recommendation service, I think you could have a pretty powerful
tool that could be replicated across services.

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

~~~
ionforce
For anyone else that wasn't sure, AGI means "artificial general intelligence".

------
aresant
I loved seeing VR on this list as an Oculus enthusiast.

The [http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus](http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus),
[http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/](http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/), and
[https://developer.oculusvr.com/](https://developer.oculusvr.com/) are jam
packed with excited hackers cranking out their projects and with the Oculus
Connect conference coming up I'd love to see some of this talent pointed
towards Y-Combinator

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

The Oculus acquisition by Facebook is possibly the worst thing that could have
happened to VR. With the Rift, Oculus had the opportunity to chart a brand new
low cost platform accessible to millions, and be the next
IBM/Microsoft/Apple/etc of their day. They had everything going on for them: a
founder who knows the field by heart, which allowed him to act the moment he
saw the curves of "state of the art" and "realistic potential for a consumer
product" intersect. A lucrative vertical (gaming) in which to get their v1
out. Industry titans believing in and joining the company.

I don't know about you, but this reminds me of things like the Macintosh: the
potential for brand new applications (with VR, "computer assisted design"
takes on a whole new meaning). The potential to reach brand new audiences, and
to make existing audiences experience thing they could have never experienced
on traditional 2D screens.

But they went the acquisition route. Now they're owned by Facebook, which
means that everything they do has to go through all the motions that a large
company has. They can't do anything really risky, they can't say "fuck you" to
the status quo (because Facebook is the status quo). What are we going to see
from Oculus? Locked-in app stores. Social networking bullcrap à la second life
(pro tip: we've been trying to make "social VR" a thing since the very first
days of the internet, and it's always failed. The Palace (1995), Second Life
(2003), etc. Every 10 years, like clockwork, someone tries it again and
miserably fails. It makes for great science fiction -presumably why people are
so intent on trying to make them happen in the first place- but in reality, it
just doesn't work out.

What will we see from Oculus? Most likely nothing ever really revolutionary.
As far as gaming goes, we'll probably see half-assed VR from Microsoft and
Sony.

But as far as truly disruptive uses of VR goes? Well, it certainly won't be
Oculus. Maybe someone else will pick up the torch where Palmer Luckey dropped
it, but it seems like the window of opportunity has closed.

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

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

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

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

~~~
GuiA
> Look at all the amazing things the Kinect did

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

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

------
nerfhammer
> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad
> at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the
> early 80s.

There already several startups in the "personal saving" space largely based on
index funds, though some of them have large minimums. Complex schemes may not
be worth the effort for those with only a few bucks to spare:

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

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

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

It would be cool if Vanguard had an API so we could do the same thing open-
source rather than incurring the extra management fees from these companies
which are mostly based on Vanguard funds.

~~~
lnanek2
I think you are kind of missing what the hard part is for many people, which
is not choosing where to put the savings, it is choosing to save at all. Many
live paycheck to paycheck, even go deep into debt on credit cards and payday
loans. There's a whole broad class of apps like Mint, where it will show you
all your costs and income and give you tips about how to reduce your spending,
save more, refinance debt, etc..

Then there's a whole broad class of lifestyle apps that could be written, like
a saving social network where you are socially rewarded for not spending a
lot, win status in a game, etc.. E.g. maybe an app where you make a bet with a
friend, if you spend under $100 on food this week, they owe you $100, and
vice-a-versa. That would keep you both watching your spending and actually
having something to save.

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

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

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

------
bambax
> _HUMAN AUGMENTATION_

Oh yes, yes, yes. Everyone is talking about the quantified self but human
augmentation would be so much cooler. I don't care if a watch can tell me my
heart rate at all times (I know when my body is tired, or out of breath,
because _I live in it_!!!)

But there are so many senses that I would like to have; for example, be able
to always know where the North is relative to me. A device that would let me
_feel_ the North would be so cool and useful (I wear a Tissot T-Touch for that
reason, but it's a very poor solution to this problem).

I think I heard the Apple watch will be able to do this, in some cases; but it
sounds like an afterthought. I would pay serious money for a wrist bracelet or
some other wearable that would do only that, but do it well.

~~~
Balgair
[http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?cur...](http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?currentPage=all)

Watches and wearable things are just the tip there. The issues with implants
is that they are 100% against the Hippocratic oath. No doctor would ever do
one if you are healthy. Implants are a long way off, and wearable enhancers
may ease the road to them, however a new ethical system for doctors, or an
extension of doctors without such oaths, would be required. Think about it for
more than 30 minutes, it gets heeby jeeby real quick.

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

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

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

A few of the accelerators I'd applied to in the past don't see the business
opportunity present in developer tools (Who pays for those?) so it's a relief
that YC recognizes the opportunity there.

~~~
garry
It helps that many of the YC partners are developers themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
danielweber
_Too much choice_

So we are going to make another choice?

 _What if I only have $1000 to invest?_

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

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

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

~~~
xur17
Not another choice, just a simpler way to choose funds, with recommendations,
etc. Wealthfront and a few others have offerings that do a pretty decent job
at this, but they don't cover 401k plans, and their fees are high for
something that should be set and forget. Target date funds are actually pretty
good at doing this, and some have relatively low fees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would be great to hear from the leader of the startup world. Even if only to
bring attention to their cause

What would be some good startup ideas here?

My only idea is a company that manages National/Regional parks and has a
monetary incentive like a)Being paid by people who visit their parks. b) Being
paid as a service per square foot they manage. What other incentives can we
create to make sure the companies are kept honest without involving too much
government oversight?

------
foobarqux
Have any previous RFSes been filled? Have any been successful?

------
mbesto
> _We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million
> jobs._

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

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

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

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

------
foobarqux
> what comes after programming languages

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

~~~
S4M
Not really. IMHO programming languages should become more and more expressive
to the point of being as closed as possible to spoken language, in a distant
future.

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

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

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

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _because at least English is a colossal mess of inconsistent jibberish._

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

------
tsax
Huh? This looks like a laundry list of everything, not a specific request.

------
jolan
A few more areas (lots of overlap):

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

~~~
bduerst
I'm also reminded of Gartner's Hype curve:

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

------
anon1385
>An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more
businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more
powerful.

This is a bad thing. Replacing opens standards with proprietary APIs locked
behind access tokens hardly makes the internet more accessible.

Walled gardens are great for making money though…

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

~~~
anon1385
There is no such thing as an open web API. They are all proprietary
alternatives to open data formats or protocols. If those companies used open
and standard data formats or protocols (I admit that in many cases this might
mean proposing a new standard) there would be no need for a custom API at all.
Standard data formats can still exist behind a paywall, so it's not an issue
of free-as-in-beer. It's an issue of user lockin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does YC think that it will be different now?

------
Jun8
Two things I think are missing from the list:

1\. It has often been commented that the next Google will come from the
company who develops a palatable version "next generation TV". Hollywood 2.0
really covers only part of this.

2\. A YC generator. YC emerged as an anomaly in the VC field and became widely
successful. How can its success be replicated, both for US and in other
countries. This was on a 2008 list that pg posted
([http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html](http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html)).

~~~
jacquesm
You'd have to replicate Silicon Valley first.

~~~
acjohnson55
Ok, put that on the list then

~~~
saturdayplace
I think pg has written about this a couple times. Checking...

Yep. In order from oldest to most recent:

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

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

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

------
agorism
Truthcoin satisfies 8 of the 22 requests:
[https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin](https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin)

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

Science/Drug development: truthcoin allows for a new method of funding public
goods that is far more impact per dollar than taxes.

Government:
[http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html](http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html)

One million jobs: Successful traders can do it as a job. Every job that
involves nothing more than decisions making can be replaced by a trader.
Doctors, Governors, CEOs, various boards and counsels, Congressmen, Supreme
Court Judges, etc. are all in danger of being replaced by anonymous,
potentially uneducated, traders.

Diversity/Developing Countries: It will give modern financial instruments to
everyone with internet connection. Insurance to hedge everyone's risks.

Enterprise Software: prediction markets are very unconnected today. Each
business has a separate in-house prediction market built. They have to be
heavily regulated. Truthcoin makes prediction markets as available as google
or facebook.

Financial Services: prediction markets are a financial service. They are
illegal. Use of a blockchain circumvents the law against prediction markets.

------
orky56
Regarding enterprise, our approach with Catalist is a combination of 1.
(Making the Expensive Cheap) & 3\. (Digitizing Every Industry). We are
providing companies with easy-to-use solutions based on the basic systems they
understand. Half our companies come from competitor's tools while the other
half are just getting started with a tech solution for their general workflow.
Our hypothesis is that majority of workers wear multiple hats and spend more
time figuring out what to do by assessing their responsibilities across
multiple tools. We give these workers and their teams one place to address
their system. This gives everyone on the team a clear idea of what actually
needs to be done with full context.

Our favorite use case is a medical office that has made the jump to EMR. Much
of their data is digitized but there is little benefit directly to them.
However, once that digital data becomes a part of their workflow they actually
see the benefit in it.

We are trying to think more generally about each of these problems and
providing guidance to our individual customers specific to their vertical.
Although it may seem we are still finding product-market fit, the small
business market is always fragmented and diverse so this is just the reality
of the situation.

------
pptr1
These new RFS are awesome. I hope YC help accelerate a few startups that doing
these type of RFS. It would be game changing. I can see allot more investor
interest in YC if a non tradition YC backed company based on one of these RFC
makes it big.

I had my doubts about @sama but he is pretty much on the right track and and
seems to be the right person for the job. They are fighting the typical SV
stereotype about not funding big ideas. Go YC keep on disrupting!

------
colmvp
> Science seems broken. The current funding models are broken and favor
> political skill over scientific genius.

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

~~~
mhluongo
They fund multiple companies in a vertical...

------
pja
"lightweight, short-distance personal transportation is something we’re
interested in"

I think that's called the bicycle.

(Of course there are plenty of barriers to people actually using the things,
especially in the US, but those have little to do with the machine itself and
everything to do with the social context in which it's used. If a startup can
manage to solve _those_ problems then more power to them. Start by talking to
the Dutch perhaps.)

------
mqsiuser
ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE > Making The Expensive Cheap:

I have been working (and still am working) with incredibly expensive software
from IBM. Now it's somewhat trivial what it does and I have open sourced it
([http://www.use-the-tree.com](http://www.use-the-tree.com)). Feel free to
contact me. My dream is to find a team, apply to YC and crush IBM (I am
somewhat serious).

------
kfcm
(US-based comment.)

While a great list, the mistake is being made of assuming disruptive startups
(through technology, business processes, or both) will solve problems in
several of the sectors. Some being Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Energy,
Transportation & Housing, Telecommunications, and--most of all--Government.

It's not because smart people haven't developed solutions to the problems they
see in these sectors. It's that government--through policy and/or bureaucracy
--often prevents those solutions from being implemented.

For example, I have family who are in the pharmaceutical industry. PhDs and
all. The amount of money spent on the bureaucratic steps to obtain government
approval (FDA and others) to bring a new drug to market is the vast majority
of development costs.

I won't even go into my experiences working with various levels of government
on technology projects. Suffice it to say, never again.

You want great, efficient solutions to hard problems? Get government out of
the way. Government involvement hinders progress, and makes what progress
there is extremely expensive.

------
chrisacky
\- INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE

"An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more
businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more
powerful."

I think a POSTman style Zapier, love-child would go down very well. Also
products like Mashery where you provide APIs as a service and charge.

Notably missing from the list...

\- Anything related to travel.

\- Anything related to storage

\- Anything related to video (Maybe that's Hollywood 2.0?)

~~~
ccozan
Let me reply regarding travel:

\- is full 99% of so established players, with lots of money. To enter this
marked requires either equally amount of money or something truly truly
innovative...which brings to point 2:

\- what is left to invent in this area to be so disruptive so that a start-up
in this area makes sense? I'd love to be contradicted, but I think all
important things in travel have been invented.

~~~
swang
Let's see:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seatguru

------
dobbsbob
>Hollywood 2.0

Actors are now being hired based on the amount of followers they have on
twitter. If you have a lot of worldwide followers you're guaranteed to be
casted since that's where all the money is these days.

>Government

The problem with this is dealing with government technocrats who will never
deploy your software as is and will demand all sorts of complexity, basically
creating the same garbage they were using before. If you can somehow survive
this insanity there are gigantic contracts up for bid, for example many post
offices are using Microsoft Mobile devices and looking into some kind of
wearable scanner that doesn't charge hefty MS licensing fees. Then there's the
Integrated Case Management software contract for $182 million that still
doesn't work
[http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/government+million+co...](http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/government+million+computer+system+just+work+with+video/9840193/story.html)

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

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

------
taigeair
How far off is singularity? Seems like quite an interesting topic.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_How far off is singularity?_

It seems like the question can be rephrased as, "At any point in history, have
humans been able to advance technology in a substantial way simply because
they wanted to, rather than by stumbling upon a way to do it?"

Most technology is incremental. Take flight, for example. The glider had
already been around for a substantial amount of time before the Wright
brothers solved the "control problem" and the engine problem. Those two
problems were the only two left before powered flight was a reality, and the
Wright brothers knew it.

For the singularity, on the other hand, there's no clear laundry list of
problems to solve in order to achieve it. In fact, there's no clear way to
even define AI, or at least define it in a way that can be meaningfully
translated into current technology.

Maybe the advent of quantum computing will change this. I've suspected that AI
is fundamentally impossible to implement on a Von Neumann architecture. But
this is very easy to say from the point of view of a society which hasn't
remotely discovered how to make AI work yet. It's similar in spirit to someone
from the 1500s saying "I think electricity is fundamentally impossible to
harness, because there's no proper medium to channel it" even though metal was
quite widespread at the time. Humans just hadn't figured out how to fashion
wires yet.

The only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know what we need to
know in order to make the singularity a reality, let alone how long it will
take.

~~~
seiji
_In fact, there 's no clear way to even define AI,_

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

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

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

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

~~~
sillysaurus3
_We haven 't discovered any computation problem that our universal computing
architecture can't compute because... universal. It's not "universal \ things-
that-can-generate-thoughts." Universal simulation machines can simulate
things... universally._

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

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

~~~
seiji
_Game of Life is completely deterministic and is the opposite of real life in
pretty much every way_

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

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

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

"Quantum" != magic

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

~~~
sillysaurus3
The fact that a previously-intractable problem can be solved in a tractable
amount of time on a quantum computer is important. It doesn't mean the problem
didn't exist before, but rather that the problem can now be solved.

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

~~~
seiji
_For all we know, making an intractable problem tractable is the necessary
step to make AI a reality._

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

 _so quantum computing becomes very interesting._

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

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

~~~
sillysaurus3
I didn't say quantum computing magically reduced anything. You've set up a
strawman and proceeded to beat it with a hammer. I said that quantum computers
can solve previously-intractable problems.

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

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

~~~
sillysaurus3
Never would I have guessed that saying "Quantum computing may open up new
avenues of exploration" would be so controversial.

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

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

Ultimately I think something that provides a whole financial picture is what
is needed (I think Learnvest is trying to do that). I picture something along
the lines of a combination of Credit Karma, You Need a Budget, and Vanguard as
being the way to go.

My email and twitter are in my profile if you would like to talk.

~~~
johnobrien1010
Reading the new list of Y-Combinator “Requests for Startups”, the Financial
Services request really resonated with me.

Probably the best investing advice for people is really straightforward; you
need to start saving now in order to reap the benefits when you retire.

A set of simple questions, such as your age, whether or not you are
contributing to a 401k, and your net worth would probably get you 90% of the
way there; from that information alone, most investing advice would follow
based of basic mortality statistics, historical stock market performance, and
the average retirement age.

The hard part is to start putting money away; that is, to start saving a
significant portion of your savings and investing them in the market.

One way to do that might be to make it a one-time decision. What if there was
a site where in order to sign-up you were required to setup direct deposit to
special investing account? The investing account would, in turn, take a
percentage of your salary, and invest it in age-appropriate index funds. The
remainder would be re-deposited into a person’s local checking account. That
way, it would feel like you only had the net amount that ends up in your
checking account, and the invested amount would be removed before you had a
chance to contemplate spending it.

A setup like this is something that someone could easily do for themselves
using a discount broker, but a site that would more or less make it a one-time
decision could be really helpful, because it would remove much of anxiety and
education that a person typically has to go through to get this right.

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

Learn by making awesome things to solve problems, then attach rockets and see
what happens. It's a good approach, that's more fun for all and more
accessible to folks that don't learn from the book & lecture model well.

I really like the prototype, simulate, 3D print approach. Being able to take
home a flying model at the end of a lesson is just awesome.

Full Disclosure: Chris, the lead on the project, has been one of my best
friends for the last 25 years so I'm biased.

------
walterbell
Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI?

We need business models which support partially-open graphs, e.g. object IDs
and some metadata are open, some metadata is closed via API. Open metadata can
be cached offline and standardizes models within a vertical market, driving
demand for paid metadata. API revenue grows as the open graph grows.

Semi-open knowledge graphs reduce the cost of adversarial algorithms. Better
to have many competing skynets than one big skynet. The open part of the graph
lowers the cost of consumption. Multiple, closed annotations on the graph
compete to support AI use cases, and can optionally become open as value moves
to higher-order representations.

~~~
seiji
_Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI?_

Anything resembling OpenCog or Freebase isn't AI—it's just a database with
clever retrieval through traversal hierarchies.

The world does need better ways to analyze data sets, but conflating
information retrieval with self-directed AI is misapplying the term
"intelligence."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
foobarqux
> The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.

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

------
vishalzone2002
With less than a month left to the deadline, its really challenging to build a
decent MVP with some traction in one of these fields. And I think that seem to
be at least the minimum requirement to get into YC.

~~~
sama
you certainly do NOT need an MVP to get into YC. lots of people get in with
just a compelling idea.

maybe i will write a blog post about this.

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

[Edited for clarity.]

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

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

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

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

There's much to like about this list. It's ambitious in a tangible and
actionable way. YCombinator realizes that if we don't want there to be a
second bubble burst in Silicon Valley, we need to reach escape velocity and
leave the social networks and iPhone news apps behind. That's a solid
trajectory for them to take.

~~~
bradleysmith
No, I didn't mean like Flipboard or Circa. I also wouldn't expect much support
for these kinds of things.

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

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

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

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

~~~
GuiA
Cool, I wasn't sure what you were talking about so your examples help.

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

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

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

~~~
bradleysmith
Appreciate your thought out reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

EDIT: Cut an unfinished thought.

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

~~~
rcarrigan87
It seems like driverless trucks are likely to come to market as a precursor to
mass consumer adoption. Trucking as we know it will be deeply changed.

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

~~~
superzamp
I think they're seeds for thought, nothing more.

~~~
pyb
Yes, it's just that we're used to more focused initiatives from YC.

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

~~~
jacques_chester
I am not so optimistic:

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

------
npostolovski
Best RFS yet. Well done Y Combinator. I hope this orients more technical
people toward problems that really matter.

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

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

------
bfe
"What comes after programming languages?"

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

------
flipside
I'm glad the disrupt Hollywood rfc is now Hollywood 2.0, before it seemed
needlessly antagonistic.

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

------
jdp23
Great to see diversity on the list. I notice that gender isn't on the list of
what you're looking for ("all ages, races, sexual orientations, and
cultures"). Just an oversight or a conscious decision?

------
dharbin
Which ones are the new ones?

~~~
kevin
Many were slightly tweaked. But these are the new categories:

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

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

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

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

------
desireco42
I was sure you will not cover human mind augmentation, which possibly is the
easiest and more difficult to improve, but here it is, fairly vague described,
but there.

------
mladenkovacevic
I have a governance/citizen participation startup that I will be applying with
in 2020 according to my current progress speed.

------
napoleond
There is a minor typo in the "Government" section: s/INternet/Internet (or
just "internet"...)

------
chris123
"New Ways to Distract People From Building Startups to Disrupt Existing Our
Startups/Investments"

------
webmaven
I'd like to see a diff between this and the previous RFS(s). How often has
this list been revised, anyway?

~~~
kevin
Last time was July 2014.

------
calebm
I see what you did there: "We deserve a simpler, more elegant solution for a
more civilized age"

------
AndrewKemendo
I'm really glad to see AR on the list, we are excited to be at the inflection
point of that medium.

------
yaur
> Celebrities now have direct relationships with their fans.

I have a side project where I am aggregating celebrity generated content and
one of the things that surprised me, though it really shouldn't have, is how
bad the underlying content is. New tools aren't really going to help here
beyond creating an incentive for celebs to create better content.

------
lettergram
Well, I already applied, but I guess I can update my app. Human Augmentation
ftw!

~~~
kevin
Yes, you can update your app all the way to the deadline.

------
dhillonj
Maybe something related to "Fixed the current problems?"

------
miguelrochefort
What YC is really looking for is a better language or communication framework.

In practice, this probably means something like a "Semantic Marketplace +
Contract and Reputation Management".

When are they going to explicitly ask for it? I don't know. Time will tell.

------
pinaceae
but no mention of photosharing? videosharing? the current YC batch had this
smuggling startup, where is the black market stuff?

great marketing, kudos.

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

------
joeguilmette
Hmm... No photo sharing apps? SnapChat for X?

------
graycat
What about the YC motto "Make something people want."?

I mean, reading over these _requests,_ my guess is that, while some of them,
if successful, would help lead to a better life for nearly everyone and _save
the world,_ so far not many people would "want" the results in the sense
needed by a startup.

Some of the requests are nearly hopeless: E.g., the US Federal Government via
DoE, NSF, and NIH have been spending billions on research in energy and
medicine for decades. The idea that a YC start up could do a lot better makes
most long shots look like sure things.

Next, a lot of these _requests_ ask for some darned challenging research
projects, and _just a research project_ is one of the worst insults passed out
by the venture capital community. Instead, no matter what the Web sites of
early stage venture firms suggest, such firms want to see _traction,_ not
research projects, not even projects to write software for research already
successfully done, not even to go live with software already written from
research projects already done.

Example? Okay, want a research project to solve a big problem? Okay, consider
security and reliability of the complex systems of large server farms and
networks. We'd like to do better, right? For this, the first step is
essentially near real-time _monitoring_ for ASAP detection. So, we want
detectors.

First big problem is getting a good combination of rates of false alarms and
missed detections; I'm correct here; think for a few minutes and otherwise
trust me on this one. Or, we're trying for a good combination of false
positives and false negatives. Or for a good combination of Type I and Type II
error.

Right, you guessed it, oh how you guessed it: Such detection has just two ways
to be wrong -- a false alarm where we say that the system is sick when it is
healthy and a missed detection where we say that the system is healthy when it
is sick. Inescapable. Have any doubts, then think for two minutes. With me
again now?

Okay: So, right, such monitoring and detection is a case of ASAP, essentially
real-time, statistical hypothesis testing. I know; I know; you don't want
anything that is _just statistical_. Neither do I. Tough stuff. We're
necessarily, inescapably stuck-o never the less. Or, want a detector with no
false alarms? Got that one for you -- just turn off the detector. Want a
detector with no missed detections? Got one of those, too -- just sound the
alarm all the time. Yes, some detectors occasionally make correct detections
and have essentially no false alarms, but such detectors will detect only
problems of a very narrow kind and otherwise have a high rate of missed
detections. Arguing is futile -- the hard stuff isn't here, and I'm correct
here. We're talking research here, like YC now seems to want to see, and
research can be tough stuff to swallow. Keep reading ....

Now, what the heck to do about this? Okay, we've got some good news that,
right Andreessen Horowitz should understand quickly: We can get data on each
of several variables, maybe dozens or hundreds, at data rates of a point each
few seconds up to hundreds of points a second. At a big, complex system, we're
talking _big data_. So, we want our statistical hypothesis test to be multi-
dimensional. Sure, go to the library and find a lot of those, right? Wrong.
You won't find much. Next, most of the material you see on statistical
hypothesis tests wants the probability distribution of the data when the
system is healthy. Tough since for these complex systems there's no theory
that will give you means of finding such distributions (we're talking multi-
dimensional), and, even with _big data,_ anything like accurate estimates of
multi-dimensional distributions is agony with the _curse of dimensionality_.
So, now what? Okay, we want to be _distribution-free_ , that is, have a
statistical hypothesis test that makes no assumptions about the probability
distribution.

So, how many multi-dimensional, distribution-free statistical hypothesis tests
did you find in the library? Not a lot. Maybe the only ones you found were
mine. Mine? Yup.

But, when the dust settles, we do get a (large class of) genuine statistical
hypothesis tests that are both multi-dimensional and distribution-free. So,
right, with meager/standard assumptions, as is standard we can calculate false
alarm rate and set it in advance and get it exactly in practice. For detection
rate, as is usually the case we don't have enough data to use the best
possible Neyman-Pearson result, but there is good reason to regard the
detection rate as relatively high.

So, any large server farm or network doing important work and interested in
security and reliability, , that is, nearly all of them, will be interested,
right? And any VC firm, too, right? Nope. Don't hold your breath waiting. I
only wrote nearly every information technology venture firm in the country,
indeed, some months before the bubble burst in 2000. Responses? Even during
the days of big bottles of Wonder-Bubble, none or f'get about it.

Lesson: Research, even for a big problem at important enterprises, even done
research, even with algorithms to make the computing fast, even with prototype
software running, even with a research paper that passed high quality peer
review, doesn't get venture funding. I learned that lesson. Here HN and YC can
learn it now or learn it later. Now is easier.

------
ycskyspeak
bits v/s atoms anyone?

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

