
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas - anateus
http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
======
jballanc
Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of
this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to
successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough
powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines
you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine>

The Newcomen Engine has a fatal flaw: it cools the steam for the return
stroke, losing energy to the latent heat of evaporation each time. James Watt
discovers the latent heat of evaporation, and realizes that separating the
condenser from the piston would improve efficiency. So let's go build some
railroads, right? Not so fast. It would still be another 30 years (100 years
from the invention of the Newcomen Engine) before railroads and ferry boats
would be regularly powered by reciprocating steam engines.

What's the moral? For 100 years, vast leaps in technology came one after the
other. In the process, the Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered and
described. Many learned men stood around patting each other on the back at how
successful, how inventive they were...at digging a black rock called "coal"
from the ground.

But most people don't dig rock from the ground. Most people _do_ travel from
point A to point B on a fairly regular basis. The world changed when 100 years
of technology left the mine shaft and the factory, and got people where they
were going just a bit faster.

I'm convinced that computers are still at the Newcomen/Watt transition. We
have a ways to go before the world truly changes.

~~~
tomwalsham
This perspective is interesting when applied to communications.

Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax.
Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook
Messages. Video Chat.

It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of
some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day -
snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat, VOIP, Videochat - there are fundamental
reasons to stick with certain technologies (Fax, POTS, FB and Twitter
excepted). There is disruption to be had, but there is still massive value in
some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts.

The services need to adapt, and incumbents do restrict progress, but the
'email killer' notion is not well conceived. Most people don't use email as a
'todo' - that's an extension, not a replacement. This is why Rapportive has a
market, but is not _the_ market.

~~~
nostrademons
An idea I've been musing on: is there a fundamental set of problems of
humanity from which all economic activity is derived? For example:

"Shrink the world": couriers, seafarers, caravans, riders, roadbuilders,
railroads, telegraphs, automobiles, steamships, dockworkers, truck drivers,
aviation, telephones, email, social networking, videoconferencing.

"Organize labor": lords, finance, education, recruiting, HR, management,
information systems, law, accounting.

"Keep us safe": militia, pikemen, shamans, legions, samurai, knights,
musketeers, standing armies, chemists, doctors & nurses, the
military/industrial complex.

"Food and shelter": self-explanatory.

~~~
philwelch
"Find stuff to burn" is a pretty big chunk too.

~~~
zem
"Control more energy than your body can produce"

------
waterside81
These ideas, and the idea that they are frighteningly ambitious, clearly come
from the personal experience of living in northern California and dealing with
tech startups most of your time.

These are largely first world problems. Here are some ambitious ideas:

\- distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so
people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore.

\- synthetic food generation a la star trek

\- desalination that is cheap enough for a farmer in Mozambique to do himself

There are more, lots more. People outside the valley bubble have real
problems.

~~~
wmeredith
Solving first world problems gets you first world ROI. Y-Combinator is an
investment firm. I'm not judging, I don't have a dog in the fight. But I'm
pretty sure that's why you don't see stuff like stopping brown outs in rural
sub-Saharan Africa on this list. There's no first-world money in it.

~~~
sciolizer
It's a trade off. There's a lot more money in the first-world. But there's a
lot more users in the third-world. That's why the third-world is called the
majority-world.

------
Alex3917
The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've
also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much
any scientific question I would want to ask.

\- No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current
scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues

\- It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.

\- Even when you can access journal articles, it's hard to know which ones to
look in to answer your question. Sometimes it's hard to even know which
field(s) your question falls under.

\- Even if you vaguely know which field your question falls under, you don't
necessarily know any of the vocabulary used by that field.

\- No way to search by dependent and independent variables, confounding
variables, etc.

\- No way to sort articles by the quality of their methodology, the quality of
the journal they were published in, the quality of the researchers, etc.

I know this isn't a product that more than 1% of the population would use, but
if someone built it then maybe there are other things it could be used for.

~~~
tobiasSoftware
I use it more as a way to shortcut sites. For example, if I want to Wikipedia
"pi" instead of typing www.wikipedia.org, in the address bar, then typing in
"pi" in the site's search bar, I enter it in Google and find the link.
Firefox's awesome bar is gradually taking over as I can favorite things and
"search" for them using that just by typing in a couple letters, but I still
use Google for anything I haven't favorited.

~~~
cpeterso
I like Firefox's Keyword Search bookmarks. The Awesome Bar becomes a "web
command line". Some example search bookmarks I've configured:

* "w pi" to search Wikipedia articles * "d pi" to search Dictionary.com definitions * "am pi" to search Amazon products * "map pie" to search Google Maps locations * "g pi" to search Google

and many others. :)

~~~
dsrguru
I'm honestly surprised not every hacker does this. The vast majority of
popular browsers supports keyword searching either out of the box or via a
plugin.

------
run4yourlives
Does it bother anyone that "frightenly ambitious" begins with search and
email? Seriously? This is the pinnacle of our contribution to mankind -
building search engines and to-do lists?

Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh,
maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).

~~~
ahoyhere
What about this?

"In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day
from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF

That's 54 jumbo jets a day.

I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.

~~~
pg
That's an important problem. But my list was a list of startup ideas, not
important problems generally. I'm not certain the problem of water supplies is
best addressed by for profit companies (it might, but I'm not sure), so it
doesn't make a good example to put on a list of startup ideas.

~~~
david927
That's fair, but I think we, in this community, have a stigma that we work on
trivial and superficial problems. There are far too many cat photo sharing
sites like Color and not enough efforts like 1 Laptop Per Child. We have to be
diligent in clarifying that.

Our goal has to be to make the world a better place, not simply to make a few
of us more more money than we can spend.

------
erichocean
In my experience, Sand Hill Road does not want "frighteningly ambitious"
startup ideas if substantial capital expenditure is involved. (In fairness,
they are willing to hear those pitches – I guess that's something.)

 _> Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel._

Pixar got funded _only_ because Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) paid for it of pocket
to the tune of $50 million total. It's Pixar that made him a billionaire (not
Apple, as most people assume). How often does Steve Jobs invest in companies?
Virtually never. But he knew (correctly) that Pixar was on to something.

I'm dealing with the Pixar bootstrap-problem at my own company, Fohr. Fohr is
the live-action version of Pixar (photography, not animation, is what gets
computerized), and requires $32 million in capital to do the process today on
a feature film (well over half of that is for hardware - $2 million alone for
electricity!).

Fohr is _only_ constrained by capital – the R&D has already been done (it took
nearly 13 years to develop the tech) – so you'd think Fohr would be ripe for
funding. And you'd be dead wrong. There are no Steve Jobs left to pay for it.

The startup world today seems to only want tech innovation on the cheap, and
that includes Paul Graham and all the rest.

~~~
patio11
So if I wanted to do PixActing like I wanted to breathe, my five year plan
would be a) get VC funded for anything, b) achieve a modestly successful exit,
and then c) recruit one similarly situated person and just shake the money
tree. Without making disparaging comments about identifiable businesses, it is
not a controversial observation that proven entrepreneurs with existing
networks have vastly superior access to capital compared to first-time
entrepreneurs with no network, independent of idea quality, target market, or
execution ability.

$40 million is not a number that is unachievable in 2012. The password is just
a bit different than for $200k, $700k, or $5 million.

~~~
erichocean
I'm basically doing that, actually. Fohr has ridiculous technology, and I'm
parting it out (feels like chopping a car) as you describe.

I can do Fohr without the capital, it'll just takes me longer as hardware gets
cheaper and my own net worth goes up.

18 month ago, it would have cost over $100 million to operate Fohr, so time is
on my side.

~~~
tlb
Pixar did it for 16 years (1979-1995) before they released a movie.

~~~
_delirium
1986-1995 is a bit closer, I think; from 1979-1986 they were in effect an R&D
division of Lucasfilm, and it wasn't their job to even think about making
films. They were supposed to develop new tech and do special-effects in films,
which they did do for quite a few prominent films.

------
einhverfr
As an amateur historian, I found the Colombus bit a bit interesting, and
probably more on-point than Graham might have even known. Columbus, his
backers, and his detractors all accepted that the world was round. What they
disagreed about was how big it was, and how far it would be to Asia by sailing
West. Everybody, pretty much, by that point knew that the world was literally
round (and flat only in stories). This was especially true in monastic and
church circles which had known this for longer.

In other words they all agreed it was a great idea and an ambitious project
that might succeed. They disagreed about what it would take to get there, and
whether there might be obstacles in the way.

Seems like a very fitting metaphor for an ambitious startup.

Edit: For sources, you can start with "Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages:
The Physical World Before Columbus" by Rudolf Simek, which is a book uncommon
in its level of insight. His description of Marco Polo's purported encounter
with a unicorn had me laughing in both humor and amazement.

Simek's basic thesis was that Columbus's expedition was important historically
because it blew away an important piece of medieval ethnographic thought---
once it became clear that the areas he had reached were not India, but were
inhabited anyway, it doomed the Augustinian argument against the existence of
inhabited continents beyond Africa, Asia, and Europe. This then paved the way
for questioning the religious and classical basis for some aspects of the
physical world, and lead in many ways to the Renaissance (though I think the
failure of the Crusades and the translation of Arabic writings into Latin had
a strong hand there too). The importance of Columbus's voyage about changing
the way we think about our place on the world was still important. Another
good point about ambitious startups?

~~~
keithpeter
Thanks for the reference.

Of course, every sailor knew the Earth was round. Just take a morning off and
watch the boats going out of a fishing harbour should your location allow
this...

I found that pg quote useful as well, in a 'look for local advantage' way.
Plan the _next step_ based on how the weather and sea look _today_. Tomorrow
it might be different.

~~~
einhverfr
The Simek book is quite interesting. Of course it wasn't just the sailors. By
the 13th century, pretty much everyone knew the world was round as it was a
common description in popular literature. Their ideas of antipodes were rather
funny and something the church struggled against for some time until the
discovery of the New World but an end to the question.... And until Vasco de
Gama proved them wrong, they might not have believed you could sail across the
equator.... but they knew it was round.

But the Simek work is interesting beyond that. It's largely on the basis of
his work and the understanding that Europeans often knew more about Asia than
Europe that it's fairly clear what a unicorn was: it's what you get when you
describe an Asian rhino using a horse as a reference point. (Pliny's
description of a monoceros is also frighteningly like a rhino, although some
things are exaggerated.)

------
jonnathanson
In re #4, I'd suggest that your biggest hurdle isn't movie studios (as we
often like to suggest here). It's Comcast. It's Time Warner Cable. It's AT&T.
These companies exercise an oligopoly on most people's internet connectivity,
TV UI and UX, DVR experience, etc. They also set the terms, with the networks
and studios, for what you actually get to watch on demand. They pushed their
crappy DVR onto the masses, effectively killing off the far more innovative
and superior TiVo, because they offered their boxes at point-of-cable-hookup
to consumers. They control so many strategic channels in the TV business, on
both the B2B and B2C ends, that they're basically running the industry. (They
were also the prime movers in the PIPA/SOPA legislation, and they'll be back
with another attempt as surely as the sun rises in the East.)

Netflix, Apple, and Amazon look like compelling alternatives to the cable
oligopoly. Unfortunately, studios are deathly afraid of handing over
monopolistic control of their distribution to a single player like Netflix, so
they're fighting with Netflix and trying to push their own alternative onto
consumers (Ultraviolet). Meanwhile, they remain relatively oblivious to the
real snakes in the grass (Comcast, et al.) -- an obliviousness that's going to
get even worse, now that Comcast owns a major player in the production system.

To beat Hollywood isn't to beat the studios. To beat Hollywood is to beat
cable. This isn't a war over content; this is a war over distribution.
Technology vs. technology. Content producers will go wherever there's
distribution to be found, and money to be made.

~~~
majani
Here's another tip: I'm African, and I don't understand what you are talking
about here. Maybe the next entertainment innovation should force global
scale...

------
ericd
I think personal health monitoring is probably the most important thing on
that list. The thing that excited me the most when smartphones started
becoming popular was the prospect that they could coordinate data collection
from a number of sensors always collecting data - basic ones like Nike+, but
perhaps also sensors measuring sleep, taking periodic bloodwork, etc. At the
same time, perhaps you could automatically monitor personal behavior such as
foods eaten.

Personal diagnostics would be an important use of that, but I think more
importantly, with a very large public dataset of basic biometric data
correlated with behavior data and medical results across a significant portion
of the population, we could stop treating human health studies as bespoke one-
offs put on at great expense and start treating them as data mining problems.
You could begin to spot correlations between behaviors and results that are
unintuitive given conventional wisdom. I think that the resulting burst of
discoveries would be on par with any of history's great scientific
revolutions.

~~~
tomp
There is a fundamental difference between a scientific study and data-mining.

Science is based on probability theory. Until we discover the "grand theory of
everything", out other theories will be only approximate, and out experimental
results not 100% predictable. Therefore, scientists consider a prediction as
correct if the chance of predicting something at random is less than some
probability, usually 10%, 5% or 1%.

However, for this to work, each study must be based on new data. If you use
the same data to check e.g. 10 predictions, each of which has 10% chance of
happening even if incorrect, you will in average confirm 1 of your
predictions, even if all are incorrect!

~~~
lutorm
No, if 10 predictions each have a 10% chance of a false positive, you will
_always_ have on average 1 false positive. Whether you test them on the same
data or not doesn't matter (unless 10 predictions test the same thing, of
course.)

What you need is a control sample that you _know_ should be negative, so you
can actually measure the false positive rate. (But with a sufficiently large
base sample, you can look for correlations in small subsamples and use the
whole sample as a control.)

~~~
tomp
> No, if 10 predictions each have a 10% chance of a false positive, you will
> always have on average 1 false positive. Whether you test them on the same
> data or not doesn't matter

That's true.

I should have said it differently. In fact, I'm not even sure that my
understanding is correct.

The problem with not using new data to test each new prediction is, that if a
scientist wants to show A on data X, but data X doesn't confirm A, the
scientist modifies A slightly and now tests A' on X, which is again rejected,
and then modifies it again, testing A'' on X, and so on... until the data X
actually confirms hypothesis A'''''''!

That's the real problem - using data without a predefined plan for how you
will use this data. In the above example, the data that you collected affected
your decision-making process, so your results are not independent of the data
(and thus not replicable!).

~~~
lutorm
Yes, this is correct. It can still be useful to look for things that warrant
further study, but it won't be proof of something in and of itself.

------
hkarthik
There's a definite opportunity to build a competitor to Apple and reach the
hackers first: building a better PC for hackers to create new software built
on Open Source and Web technologies.

The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for
hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become
more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of
developing native apps also turns off a lot of the great OSS hackers.

If you could get an all star team together with someone like Rahul Sood to
design the hardware and someone like Miguel De Icaza to design the OS and
developer APIs, you'd be well on your way to tackling this problem and
building the next Apple. And this time, it could be a lot more open source
friendly.

~~~
tesseract
Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied
by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would
buy into this new system?

OK, so you really just want to target hackers first and then move into the
consumer space once you have some traction. But consumers are starting to move
away from laptops and toward things like smartphones and tablets. Apple is
moving in this direction and has a head start. If you start by making laptops,
Apple's head start is just going to grow.

Better to figure out what is going to come _after_ smartphones and tablets,
and get there before Apple does. I don't see any particular reason to retrace
Apple's steps and start by building a laptop.

Some companies I suspect might be following a long-term strategy similar to
this already:

* Google, with the rumored heads-up display project based on Android

* Jawbone

* Razer (in this case Apple is not the target)

~~~
hkarthik
> Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied
> by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who
> would buy into this new system?

I don't know if it's a large number yet, but it's growing and you can see the
cracks sprouting. Most of the hardware outside of Apple's really sucks, and
Apple's software ecosystem and the way they run things turns a lot of people
off. If there was something viable to switch to, I think it could get some
traction quickly,

> Better to figure out what is going to come after smartphones and tablets,
> and get there before Apple does. I don't see any particular reason to
> retrace Apple's steps and start by building a laptop.

This is intriguing. A Post PC device that hackers can use to create software.
Definitely something that hasn't been fully explored.

There are a few challenges, however. Hackers need significant hardware to get
anything done. Also, most of our tools that have stood the test of time
(Emacs, Vi, C, etc) require traditional keyboards as input.

~~~
bergie
Text input is the biggest problem of post-PC. While it may eventually get
solved, I'm exploring ways to make non-text-based programming productive:
<http://noflojs.org>

------
diego
"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people
will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month."

Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ?

Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a
terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think
represents the masses is a rookie mistake.

~~~
pg
Number of business email users? Tens of millions certainly.

"Would I pay for this?" is a _great_ question for founders to ask, because it
combines two of the most powerful techniques for generating startup ideas:
solving problems you yourself have, and using payment as a test of how much
people want something. One of my techniques for helping founders to come up
with ideas is to ask them what they need so much that they'd pay for it.

~~~
samstave
But there are decades of precedent against how much people will pay for email.

Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees
would spend $50/yr/user on email?

Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the
employees.

Thats the problem with enterprise scaling vs cloud/startup scaling. They are
inverse;

The enterprise wants the cost per unit to go down when scaling. The
startup/cloud wants the profitability to increase at the same rate when
scaling.

We all want great services, but NOBODY wants to pay for it.

I myself seek to offload cost at every opportunity; work pays for machine,
phone, travel, software etc...

Same model.

Yeah - I'll seek to solve problems I have, but not based on how much I __would
__pay - but how much I would like to offload that cost.

(Clearly there is a lot of grey here, and there are areas where this doesn't
make sense -- and others where it does -- and these are not mutually
exclusive. (i.e. in areas where I am both building for the consumer and the
provider (healthcare))

~~~
ghshephard
"Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees
would spend $50/yr/user on email? Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on
their email accounts for the employees."

Yes, I certainly do believe that any American corporation with 150K employees
spends significantly more than $7.5mm/year on their messaging system.

These systems actually get _more_ expensive as they grow larger - Disaster
Recovery, Business Continuity, Sarbanes Oxley, Customer Service, SLAs, Data
Loss Protection, Intrusion Detection - All these email services that the small
enterprise doesn't worry about (that much) - add up significantly in larger
enterprises.

~~~
rdl
Lockheed is a horrible example too because they have extensive classified
operations (their support costs for email within classified projects probably
exceed 7.5mm alone), and because Lockheed IS&GS is a major contractor for
outsourced IT services.

I think the Gartner figure was something on the order of $500-1000/yr per
employee for messaging in large high tech businesses. A lot of that is IT
staff, and all the other systems for security and compliance. Email is one of
the big apps within enterprise.

------
aptwebapps
The last graph of #6 is great.

I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy
and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it.
More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing
and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can
we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation?

This is the crux of the problem with our current political system, I think.
It's not campaign finance, it's not religion, it's not disagreements about
economics, foreign policy, security vs liberty (a lovely false dichotomy) or
what have you. It is simply the fact that lies win and truth loses. Or, if
that statement is not necessarily true, it is true in the current practice.

So, if you buy my premise, how can technology help? Isn't it a problem of
human nature? You can't force people to be honest. You also can't force people
to learn how to recognize dishonesty in spheres where they have not much
competence. You can't impose good sense or decency.

But human nature is varied, and so maybe the seeming ascendancy of its more
unfortunate aspects is situational. Maybe by improving the context and
presentation of information they can be mitigated. Maybe technology can be
used to recognize and reward honesty and to point out and discourage
dishonesty. It hurts to think about, doesn't it? It does for me, because it is
so hard, and that's what I took from pg essay. Granted, I may not be talking
about problems to solve which would make you the next Google.

As an aside, I think that the utility of greater transparency of public
actions (governmental or corporate) is already well-understood by many and
much work is already being done in this direction so I am leaving out. But
that doesn't mean there isn't room for new solutions there, as well.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Interesting idea. I think the most intractable part is that many people
believe what they want to believe. They gravitate to a world view for various
reasons, backfit it to the data, rationalize the cherrypicking of supporting
data and discarding of refuting data, integrate it into their id or ego, fight
tooth and nail to protect it, and happily accept the political
dis/misinformation you're referring to.

I'd imagine you'd have to identify why people do that, why others don't, and
whether it's formalizeable and transferable. Pretty sure psychology has done
some work in that area, but brain-fried atm and drawing a blank...

~~~
intended
Yup, psych has been looking at this intently for a while - I think cognitive
has been doing work looking into this.

There was an article on this a while back on HN as well - why walmart knew
someones daughter was pregnant before her dad did. (forbes, after taking it
from wired iirc)

Its based on the fact that peoples habits (in regards to shopping) are
ingrained, and that there are only a few times in life when those habits are
open to change.

Thats when there is a major change in their life - like a new job, baby,
marriage and so on.

Dan O Reily (from arming the Donkeys) also had an old pod cast on this.

~~~
Elepsis
It was Target and the New York Times Magazine, for what it's worth.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.html?_r=4&hp=&pagewanted=all)

~~~
intended
Thanks!

------
rmassie
The thing about replacing e-mail is that is isn't just a todo list, for many
people it's just a receipt box - the thing I keep all my notifications that I
bought stuff from amazon. For others, it's still the primary means of business
communication.

My work e-mail is largely about communications, with a todo element to it and
unfortunately some file storage too. My "home" e-mail is completely different.
It's where I get my monthly statements for banks and investments and where my
notifications go. When replacing e-mail you would need to service all these
components of what e-mail is.

The thing that originally made e-mail so important was it's identity factor.
That seems to have withered away as other services have replaced some
components of what e-mail was for.

I would argue that e-mail needs to not be replaced, just reclaimed. My e-mail
client (web or otherwise) should know that an e-mail in this case is actually
just a twitter DM notification and be smart about how it presents that to me.
It should know that something from Bank of America is probably something I
want to keep, but something else from Bank of America is just marketing junk.

I haven't seen anything that is smart enough to do that on it's own. I don't
want to have to deal with creating filters - it should just know. I would
totally switch from gmail if this were out there.

~~~
harryh
> for many people it's just a receipt box

There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it
my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It
periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known
e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details
(like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable
catalog of all my receipts.

I would sign up for this tomorrow if someone on here goes and builds it. :)

~~~
mappu
Give a third party my password so it can scan my email for financial data? No
thanks.

I realise there are people who would love this convenience, and you'd make a
killing on targeted ads, but this is a privacy nightmare. Good luck getting
people to trust you. Furthermore, you really want the results of the filtering
to be applied in the user's own mail client rather than having a separate UI..

Might be feasible as a client-side app. How about a Thunderbird/Outlook addon
with a subscription service for known filters?

(What is the Google Chrome of desktop mail clients, anyway? Hardly any seem to
use WebKit.)

~~~
jarek
Re: the first part, I'm reminded of this web application called Mint.com...

------
mmphosis
0\. free internet

    
    
       - as in beer and as in liberty
    

1\. a new search engine

    
    
       http://duckduckgo.com/
    

2\. replace email - with a todo list?

    
    
       - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk,

my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices
everywhere all being in sync

3\. replace universities

    
    
       - yup, and recreate the free university of olde
    

4\. internet drama

    
    
       - indie drama titles (movies/shows/etc) on netflix / apple
       - or just read the comments ;)
    

5\. the next steve jobs - but I am still impressed by the iPad3 rollout and
it's screen

    
    
       - raspberry pi
    

6\. bring back moore's law

    
    
       - easy parallelism in software
       - it's a compiler -- that's the hard part
       - a compiler on the web as a web "service"
       - an optimization marketplace: people in the machine doling out smart answers
    

7\. ongoing diagnosis

    
    
       - how about ongoing prevention? because cancer is a symptom too
       - why limit yourself to 1000 years of ?barbaric? western medicine?
       - why not look at all of humanity's history of medicine from all cultures?
    

8\. tactics

    
    
       - remember that columbus was a tyrant, and he didn't "discover" anything.
       - start small

yup, the best plan is not to have one, and never make one, when it's a fait
accompli then you announce the plan

~~~
patrickaljord
> \- why limit yourself to 1000 years of ?barbaric? western medicine? > \- why
> not look at all of humanity's history of medicine from all cultures?

Western medicine is nothing more than medicine being tested scientifically
before being accepted. If you know anything better than the scientific method
to test medicine than please do tell. How would you prove to people your
medicine work, because "it is so"? Nonsense. If by "medicine from all
cultures" you mean medicine who refuse to be tested scientifically, then
thanks but no thanks.

~~~
Jach
I don't really think this is the characterization of wester medicine. What
you're calling for, "Evidence-based medicine", or "Evidence-based practice",
is actually _new_. Bayesian probability theory is still nowhere near the
dominant method of measuring certainty in the field.

I hope mmphosis clarifies what he means by "western medicine", because I'm
confused by that term myself. It's not about the modern issue where the US FDA
mandates that "only a drug can cure, prevent, treat, or diagnose a disease"
(so if you try and sell oranges under the claim that they prevent scurvy you
can be thrown in jail), since he mentioned 1000 years. I don't think he meant
that western medicine has any less a desire than non-western medicine to "make
people better".

I hope he doesn't mean homeopathy since I hope we can all agree that's a silly
enterprise good only for making its proponents more money. But I suspect the
"western medicine" refers to alternative treatments that don't have to be
homeopathic. I think his overall meaning is that for current medical research,
the memory of the field only goes back 1000 years or so, which may or may not
be true. (I'd argue it's closer to 100 years.) It may be a call for more
testing of what old societies used to do for various things, such as the
Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese, and whether any valid
techniques are there that we should bring back. I seem to recall off-hand that
St. John's Wort historically has a use for depression, and in some study had
about the same effectiveness as some other depression drug (though neither
were much better than a placebo); if this is really the case then we need more
studies on St. John's Wort to confirm and in the US particularly we need some
new FDA rules and reduction of power (or just get rid of them). A similar
point is made when people say "stop destroying rainforests, there may be a
cure for cancer there!" There probably isn't, but it's not like we were
looking very hard anyway, and maybe we should.

------
sawyer
If Microsoft : Google :: Google : Facebook, I'm not sure that the frightening
startup idea here is to replace Google. Don't get me wrong, I've also started
to see some cracks in the G edifice; and Facebook has definitely begun to set
their agenda, but doesn't that mean search in general is already waning and
that the next big thing will be whatever replaces Facebook?

Great essay though, lots to think about. I really like the anecdote about
bolting an iMac to the wall as well. I still have a TV, but it's only purpose
is to act as a large dumb monitor for my laptop, and I've been seeing a lot of
this type of thing happening even among my non-hacker friends and family. I'd
like to see an 'app-store' translation for drama as well, but it seems like tv
/ movies are not as amateur friendly to create as games. One person can
develop a fun indie game, but it's nigh on impossible to create drama with a
similarly small budget.

What aspiring drama writers / directors need are tools equivalent to game
level editors to create their scenes without actors, cameras or studios.
Packaged believable human CG characters may not be possible, but cartoon,
animal, alien, etc. characters might be able to bridge the gap the way they do
in video games and still tell a compelling story.

~~~
jmduke
> What aspiring drama writers / directors need are tools equivalent to game
> level editors to create their scenes without actors, cameras or studios.

I'm not trying to be intentionally dense, but that's just literature.

If you get rid of things like actors or cameras, you're no longer operating
within the medium of television/cinema. And that's not specifically bad, but
that's not specifically good, either.

~~~
eurleif
So Pixar makes literature?

~~~
jmduke
Pixar has actors and studios.

------
akrymski
We're a YC company (www.post.fm) working on one of those ideas - email. We've
encountered lots of headwinds as PG mentions, and we've managed to stay strong
to our beliefs by keeping the team small and focused, and using our product
ourselves to constantly remind us that what we're working on is better than
Gmail.

It's not been easy admittedly, we didn't come up with some small idea that
could grow into an email replacement over time, or some add-on to gmail to
give us early traction, etc. We focused on replacing Gmail from day one. And
that's no small feat, cause who wants to use a minimum viable email service?

We also realize it's a huge bet, and we may be wrong. But at least we're
building something for ourselves, so we can't be too wrong, and that thought
keeps us going.

Can't say I agree with "Email was not designed to be used the way we use it
now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list."

Email was designed to be the electronic version of a letter - an async
messaging channel. Not some to-do list protocol. But with increased volumes
managing all that mail became difficult (I'm sure celebrities still struggle
to catch up with physical mail). That's the problem we want to solve, by
letting algorithms and better user interfaces help you manage your mail.

A to-do list is something different in my view, but naturally closely related
(and should be part of the same application). A piece of mail often prompts
you to create an associated to-do item, but today this functionality isn't
integrated so we rarely bother.

Sure IM, Twitter, and To-Do list apps chip away at some of email's use cases,
just like instagram is doing with facebook, but we're confident that email can
be just as good if done right.

Now I just have to finish it and avoid thinking about my idea for the google-
search-killer that would be oh-so-easy to try out ;)

~~~
revorad
Combining a better user interface with algorithms seems like the obvious angle
of attack. But I think there might be a better one.

Automate the whole thing. Get rid of the interface.

You know those virtual assistant services people use to manage their mundane
emails? Imagine if you automated all of that.

It sounds like a ridiculous idea. How can I allow a machine to reply for me?

But I would start with the simplest mundane use cases. If you can automate
complete handling of even a small percentage of a busy user's emails, they
will be delighted. On your end, you don't have to literally automate it on day
one. You can semi-automate it with some human help and over time use the data
to reduce the human input.

Over time as the user got more comfortable, they might not mind automating
more of their emails.

~~~
akrymski
We do in a way automate classification of mail in certain instances, which
allows the user to correct the system in case we get it wrong, but it's
important the the UI is intuitive and doesn't seem like a magical black-box
full of pretentious AI.

------
wolframarnold
This all assumes conditions as usual. Which I think is a painfully mistaken
notion. In an era of depleting fossil fuels, inferior ore quality of iron,
copper and all the rare earth metals required to make modern electronics,
water shortages and overpopulation, I doubt people will be worried about email
overload in even 20 years. What's missing from this list are the real big
issues of our time, such as quitting our reliance on fossil fuels, building a
sustainable economy for the planet's resources, and creating a currency not
solely based on debt expansion. In an economy with less energy surplus our
problems will be more primitive than worrying about heart disease or faster
computation or better search. Solving the shrinking energy surplus..., now
that would be a really scary big startup of planet-wide implication.

------
HSO
_"A New Search Engine"_ : You don't need to compete head-on with the biggie(s)
even if you want better search. You can vastly improve search by specializing,
i.e. getting data that the biggie(s) don't yet have. Find something that is
"universal" but where the necessary data is hard to obtain. Then innovate on
how to obtain that data, rather than focus on how to search or match etc. Find
a business model where you provide value for both those who generate/grant
access to the data as well as those who use/search it. When you have that
data, either build on it or sell it to one of the biggies.

 _"The Next Steve Jobs"_ : Watching the TED talk by Cynthia Breazeal
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAnHjuTQF3M&t=09m25s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAnHjuTQF3M&t=09m25s)),
it recently struck me that the next Apple will come from the robotics side.
The engagement level and seamlessness you can achieve with the physical medium
is on a completely different level from "devices". Even smartphones/apps
require (at best) minimal cognitive facilities for interaction. Being able to
I/O on a "reptilian brain" basis with body language, tone of voice, etc. could
literally "change everything" by weaving intelligence into even the dumbest
activity. People will not be able to do without such robots if they are well
done.

------
ajju
_If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't
make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going
to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your
employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?"_

This is critical. I have tried it the other way, and struggled for these very
reasons.

 _I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise
point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like
the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like
Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct
the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly
mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand
westward._

Eat small morsels, chew well!

~~~
miguelos
Let me disagree.

Unless you plan to discover new ideas by mistake, you absolutely need a
vision, and then find the way to get there.

If you start from the bottom (bottom-up), you'll constantly compromise
technically, as lots of things are not yet possible to do.

If you start from the top (top-down), you'll "know" that it's possible to
accomplish, and you'll only have to find out how to do it.

You have far more chance to solve an enigma if you know there is an answer
than if you don't. Visionary ideas make you believe the answer exists, which
makes it much more easier to accomplish.

~~~
ajju
Let us say your goal is building a search engine.

Clearly, you have to "know" that it's possible to accomplish and then find out
how to do it. I don't think even PG was disagreeing with that.

When he says "don't have a blueprint", he is saying don't presuppose you know
_how_ to get from where you are to replacing Google as the de facto search
tool. Instead, just make progress. It seems you agree with that.

------
underwater
_I've found myself nostalgic for the old days, when Google was true to its own
slightly aspy self._

Can we please stop using that word? It trivializes the disorder and encourages
the stereotype that engineers should be socially awkward.

------
asnyder
Intel has pretty good automatic parallelization
([https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=...](https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=intell+compiler+automatic+parallization&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest))
in their latest C++ compiler, but it's $1000+. I remember at a php conference
they simply compiled php with their compiler versus gcc, and everything ran
significantly faster in various benchmarks.

For a while I was working on automatic parallelization, and wrote plans, white
papers, etc. but at some point was introduced to the current methods of
automatic parallelization and saw that there are some pretty good solutions
out there right now such as Intel's C++ compiler.

Ideally, everything would be compiled with something along those lines at
which point the baseline for everything else would take advantage of multiple
cores, at least in the simple to advanced cases without additional direction
from the programmer.

After all, so long as you're not eval'ing you know the entire scope of the
program and you can link things up as parallel independent queues. It requires
more storage during compilation, and likely longer compilation times, but the
performance result can be dramatic.

It's disconcerting that something like Intel's apparently wonderful automatic
parallelization C++ compiler isn't more popular, even though it's demonstrably
better performance-wise than anything else I've seen.

------
rdl
There's a clear search engine improvement which I'd love, and my friends would
love, but I think it's not yet technically possible. (the tech to do it
exists, but it's a big engineering challenge to actually build it in an
economically viable way).

A way to search (public, private) documents without leaking ANY information
(beyond possibly "I did a search") to the operator. DDG's "trust us" security
policy doesn't really go far enough. A mix-net anonymizing your query is the
best option now, but it's insufficient. Just knowing someone in the world is
searching for a specific piece of information is itself highly actionable in
some contexts.

USG and other highly security conscious entities accomplish this by having the
full search corpus onsite and running the searches on their own hardware.
There's Google Enterprise (which was the most red-headed stepchild product
I've ever seen from Google) too, and there are commercial ways to buy the
crawl and run an engine on top of it, but this isn't really something even
Fortune 500 companies do.

Basically, either a permanent "personal google appliance", potentially hosted
in the cloud using some tricks, or a way to spontaneously instantiate a google
each time you want to do a search.

Probably the way to do this is to write some interesting sci fi novel
featuring the dangers of public search leaking, and also wait for some
interesting prosecutions which use search data as evidence.

You could actually still do advertising this way, too; just requires some
tricks.

~~~
edwardw
The tech exists, which is called fully homomorphic encryption scheme. But I
concur in what olalonde says, average people simply don't care that much about
privacy.

~~~
jscn
Hence why OP mentioned the need for a scifi novel and some court cases to
create a market. I'm not sure that would work, it doesn't seem to have done so
in other domains.

------
robot
_So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing
players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you
can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product
visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the
company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be
a startup.

I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as
big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as
Apple, and they did it._

I thought about this before, and I think building a hardware startup like
Apple, or a systems software company like Microsoft is an order of magnitude
harder than when they were founded. Let us take Apple. When Apple was founded,
there was an ocean of people that did not have a PC in their homes. Big,
uncharted market. When you hear Don Valentine (Apple's investor from Seqoia)
talk about it, you can see how they did not care about anything but the
market. Do we have that kind of market today? Maybe. At the moment everyone is
occupied with their ipads, phones, and PCs.

Technology. Today the hardware is so complex, that it can be only competed
with by largest companies in the world. It is not a coincidence that it is
only Samsung that can compete with Apple in mobile devices. Take a Texas
Instruments or Qualcomm chipset, you will face a complexity barrier at every
corner. We won't hear you saying things like, my co-founder designed a chip so
efficient, it will be a game changer. Anyone remember the JoJo Pad before the
ipad was released?

So what could be done? I think it comes down to playing on the above two
variables. For a new hardware/systems startup, it must target uncharted
territory, i.e. introduce (mobile) computers to an area of use where it has
never been tried before, and make sure everyone in the world needs it. (Like
that thermometer startup, except find a wider use case) Use existing cutting
edge technology, and build your new technology upon them (e.g. I would
probably start with a top notch chipset + android + add new, hard-to-replicate
technology.)

~~~
dwerew45234sdf
100% agree with you.

------
repos
Preventative Diagnostics as Paul describes in #7 will really be the future -
it's barbaric that we can only make a diagnosis when the disease has already
manifested (in most cases). There are a few players in this space (Scanadu
comes to mind), but it's seems like nano biosensors and the like are still
very new technologies. Correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
Gatsky
I'm not optimistic. I think pg's discussion of automatic diagnosis is a bit
ill-informed.

For example, the recent trial that showed screening CT scans reduce mortality
in lung cancer cost 250 million dollars to run. Even then, nobody is sure if
it is even a cost effective measure.

It is difficult and costly to produce a screening test. It also takes many
years to validate. Then there is the problem of what to do with the results -
for example, if you are diagnosed with possible pancreatic cancer, the
treatment is a massive operation to replumb your upper abdomen. 5% of people
die because of the surgery alone, and the surgery costs a fortune.

Unfortunately a simple relationship like "find cancer early = good outcome"
does not exist. There are incredibly high barriers for a startup developing
diagnostic tests for screening. There is a good reason why the only people
doing cancer screening studies are large government funded research consortia
that can afford to wait 10 years or more to prove a result.

The example of Bill Clinton is misapplied - cardiovascular disease is really
common, maybe 30% or more of people will get heart disease in western
countries. We don't need to have a cool machine to screen for it, we need to
risk stratify people with a few simple tests (ie ask them if they have a
family history, check their cholesterol and blood pressure) and improve their
risk factors (eat better, quite smoking, exercise, lower cholesterol etc). But
then you are talking about modifying human behavior...

~~~
nl
Is that the case for all cancers though?

I live in Australia, and we are indoctrinated to _check your skin for moles
that maybe cancerous_. There are claims that the high rate of early detection
leads to higher survival rates[1].

My understanding is that early detection of bowel, breast and prostate cancer
is relatively easy and produces good outcomes too.

There are radical ways to do early detection (sub dermal computers continually
monitoring, etc etc) but there are ugly hacked solutions that just might work,
too.

How much would it cost to build a toilet with a bowel cancer test kit built
in?

[1]
[http://www.cancer.org.au/policy/positionstatements/sunsmart/...](http://www.cancer.org.au/policy/positionstatements/sunsmart/screeningandearlydetectionofskincancer.htm)

~~~
Gatsky
Not sure what you are arguing here... if you are arguing that screening for
cancer can be useful and saves lives, then I agree with you!

If you are arguing that a start up could have come up with a screening program
for bowel cancer for example, then I don't agree with you for the stated
reasons.

Also: Prostate cancer screening is not recommended
([http://www.cancer.org.au/File/PolicyPublications/Position_st...](http://www.cancer.org.au/File/PolicyPublications/Position_statements/PS_prostate_cancer_screening_updated_June_2010.pdf))

Breast cancer screening is not as useful as you would hope either.
(<http://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2F14651858.CD001877.pub4>) 2000 women need to be
screened for 10 years to save 1 life, with 200 initial false positives
requiring biopsy. Also, I see lots of people diagnosed with breast cancer
despite having mammograms.

Radical ways to do early detection are fine, but you have to prove that it
works and that requires a lot of people for a lot of years and a lot of money.

Building a toilet with a bowel cancer screening kit built in is a form of
behavior modification to improve uptake, and that is a great area for start
ups to get involved in. pg was talking about something different however.

~~~
nl
_pg was talking about something different however_

See, I don't think he was. "Ongoing diagnosis* doesn't have to mean new tests
if you can make the existing tests radically cheaper and easier. Given that
existing behaviour is always hard to modify it would seem sensible to try and
piggyback on existing behaviour.

Toilets with cancer sensors that would check for bowel cancer everytime you go
would be as about as "ongoing" as diagnosis can get.

Maybe toothbrushes could be modified to check for viruses in saliva.

I'm sure there are other easy tests that could be done if you have blood.
There are obvious ways that could be integrated into everyday life (for women,
anyway).

I've read some studies that showed dogs could be trained to smell cancer.
Maybe people would pay to have their clothes sniffed (!) when they have them
sent to the laundry.

I've previously suggested (on HN) the idea of payment companies partnering
with food outlets and exercise software vendors to log the calories you are
buying. That's a good input into diagnosis software too...

I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas - look for low hanging fruit and you
can do radically better than the status quo.

~~~
Tsagadai
System on chip PCR machine? The lowest hanging fruit would be miniaturization
and better engineering of existing diagnostic machines. At the moment the
medical diagnostic market is filled with overly expensive devices that could
be easily made cheaper and more efficient (somewhere with a favourable
patent/legal regime so you don't get sued to oblivion).

------
ilaksh
I think that the hard part of tackling these ambitious projects is (often) not
the actual engineering but rather making the ideas popular and fighting
against the status quo. Another hard part is how difficult is the transition
from how we do things now to the new way.

So most of these things he mentions, people are working on them, or something
similar, or even have functional software. That software just isn't popular.
Not because it isn't useful, but because it didn't catch on.

And a lot of these ideas aren't really useful until they reach a critical mass
of users, which makes it even harder.

The big ambitious thing I wanted to mention was DONA (data-oriented networking
or <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking>). You might be
able to combine that with some type of semantic knowledge storage and
engineering along with a type of e-democracy. People have working examples of
these things, its just hard for people to pick them up and start actually
using them and then mention them to others for them to become trends.

Before (or instead of) human-controlled knowledge engineering we may see
Google ([http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-
change...](http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change-
search/)) (or possibly some start up) come out with a Watsonish system that
builds huge knowledge graphs by actually comprehending the semantics of web
pages it spiders and then lets you query them more naturally. (Which I guess
that type of system does exist, just didn't catch on, maybe because it wasn't
quite up to human level comprehension or didn't become popular for whatever
reason.)

~~~
waterlesscloud
One of the benefits of something like Y Combinator is that if you have one of
these ideas, and you can actually make it work, YC and its associated network
of people can be massively helpful in spreading the word.

In fact, that may be the major benefit of YC.

------
nikcub
Replace email and replace search are two signs that Google is failing at its
core strengths, and I agree with this. They have made many mistakes in the
past few years and there is a definite opportunity in taking them head on in
both of these markets.

with number 6, if you are going to break it up for cores you may as well break
it up for computers and put it on the network. Hence MapReduce, etc.

with #7, our bodies are very good at telling us when something is wrong with
warning signs. we can't afford health care as it is today, let alone with the
system being clogged up with healthy people paranoid about possibly being ill.

~~~
icebraining
_our bodies are very good at telling us when something is wrong with warning
signs_

No, not really. It does warn you, but in many cases way too late, and then you
lose the opportunity of fixing the problem with a fast, cheap and safe
procedure. If you want to save money, early diagnosing is key.

------
tobiasSoftware
I have my own to add which I'll tackle if I ever get smart enough. Code is
horrible right now. The problem is that code is written linearly, when in our
minds it is a graph. It's usually a bad sign when our minds see things
differently than our computers do. I think if we could properly abstract the
concepts, and change both our linear list of functions and our unsorted list
of files to a single graph structure, we could understand our software so much
better. I guess I'm thinking of UML diagrams with code, but in a way that
feels natural to code in the first place, even for a beginner, not as a
commented afterthought.

~~~
ilaksh
I just read an article today or yesterday about the reason that VIM's cursor
keys are h,j,k,l or whatever.

I think the reason that code is ASCII text is pretty much the same reason
VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l. All they had was a terminal so it _had_ to be
ASCII.

If you think about it, all information is structured and multidimensional. But
people can only make one sound at a time, so information must be serialized to
be communicated.

There are some easy starting points for understanding why we should get away
from pure ASCII source code. One of them is to try first coding a complex UI
with pure text and then build the same UI using a graphical editor with
widgets.

Another one is this: just answer this question -- why can't I represent
division in my source code using a numerator over a divisor the way that we
are taught to write mathematics? Should we continue to pretend that we are
required to edit our code on terminals from 1979?

~~~
dgallagher
As you suggest, this is definately a legacy issue of being tied to the teat of
a 1980's terminal. People still like to edit in simple editors.

I've viewed it as a Model-View-Controller problem, where everyone is
attempting to merge the Model and View into one. Technically your editor
should be worrying about the View. It can draw division however you configure
it to. But when saving to a Model source file, that should be portable,
without any (or very little) formatting embedded in it (e.g. MultiMarkdown).

You should be able to customize your editor, much like swapping out a CSS file
on a website, and skin it to your desires.

~~~
stcredzero
We talked about exactly this at a Camp Smalltalk almost a decade ago. If it
had flown, at least one computer language (Smalltalk) could've allowed each
programmer to have their own customized code formatting (View) while the code
was actually stored as the Abstract Syntax Tree nodes.

~~~
ilaksh
Have you seen the intentional domain workbench?

------
codex
It's not ideas which make billionaires, and it's not a lack of ambition which
keeps these ideas from being reality. It's that it takes killer execution with
a huge amount of luck. People think that they can predict the future, but they
can't. Capitalism triumphs because it lets a million monkeys do a million zany
things, and when a few become mega hits those particular monkeys are hailed as
visionaries.

------
yurylifshits
Let's add one more

    
    
        8. Replace prisons
    

Prisons do not make criminals back into normal people. Prisons are expensive.
Prisons are a big market. Prisons stay the same for the last few centuries.
What is a better way to punish and a better way to bring criminals back to
civil life?

~~~
olalonde
Don't all governments have a monopoly over their country's prisons?

~~~
kolinko
I think in U.S. prisons are private enterprises.

~~~
thejteam
This is highly dependent on the locale. Some places have outsourced prisons,
usually with poor results. Most have not.

------
rblion
"The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the
future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one."

The future is uncertain, because each person is a variable and chaos is
inherent in nature. However, with the sun as my witness and the earth as my
ally, there is nothing that will stop my effort to liberate all beings from
suffering through my startup. It's all I got left in the world, there is
nothing else that matters to me. I am 22 and there is no job I want in the
world, so I will create one through my ideals of universal compassion and
scientific method. I will post on HN soon, I hope people understand my vision
of leading Homo sapiens to become Homo universalis, that may be the only way
we can actually have a type 1 or 2 civilization.

------
chanux
_Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might
happen._

This has been my experience with Google search and Gmail (the Google products
I use most). It's really frustrating that sometimes I'm handling them the way
I'd handle a Samurai sword. That's not how it should be.

------
allenbrunson
Oh man! Replacing email is my personal Holy Grail. The ongoing escalation
between spammers and spam fighters is proof enough that it is a system that
has lived beyond its time.

I first became aware of PG when he was working on Bayesian spam-fighting
techniques, circa 2002. Email already seemed absurd to me. I was thinking of
writing my own email client, but I would have preferred to get on whatever
email-killing bandwagon there might be on the horizon, so I sent him an email
asking if he knew of such a successor. He wrote back and said no, he was not
aware of such a thing.

That we are still using SMTP in this day and age just boggles my mind.

------
Donald
"Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter.
... And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to."

If you disable Javascript and cookies for *.google.(tld), you'll be greeted
with Google circa a few years ago: <http://imgur.com/LDBLk> .

~~~
rquantz
Will it stop replacing my technical terms with non technical synonyms, and
randomly leaving out my search terms? Cause whatever they've done to the UI,
it pales is comparison to those two things.

~~~
bambax
Use "verbatim" under "Search tools".

~~~
rquantz
This is the most wonderful thing anyone has every told me.

------
tomwalsham
There are very few successful futurists in the literal sense.

The long bets are not on the current startup ideas which will still mould the
world 5 years from now. YC's view of investing in those with the wherewithal
to effect change - not those who necessarily have the answers to hand - bleeds
through the ambiguous edges of this essay.

pg's reticence to put his full belief behind a specific idea due to the
evanescent nature of the current concept-du-jour is good guidance - tackle the
extant problems and retain half an eye on the bigger picture.

------
lukev
The example of email as an "irresistible force vs an immovable object" really
resonates with me. There are _many_ things in that class:

\- The way we communicate (pg gave a good example of this one)

\- The way we write software (text files? really?)

\- The Operating Systems we use (All the major design decisions were made in
the 80's.)

\- Computer input systems (are keyboards really a global maxima for efficient
control?)

Eventually, these will definitely be replaced. Why not make "eventually" now?
We won't be running Windows or Linux in 2050. Why not be the person who
invents what we ARE using?

------
lunarscape
"2. Replace Email"

Google tried this with Wave and they failed. I wish they had succeeded. I
think they should have spun it was "Email 2.0" and made the transition easier.

~~~
pg
I think we'll see it again, though not necessarily from Google. What failed
about Wave was the way the project was organized and pitched to users, not the
idea.

~~~
akrymski
Personally, I don't see what Wave has to do with email, it's a completely new
protocol that wasn't integrated with email in any way and that's why it
failed. They should have done this from the start:
<http://code.google.com/p/wave-email/wiki/Outline>

Google wave was also horribly complex. Email needs to be simplified, not just
added to, which Google keeps doing with Circles and other stuff that they keep
bolting on to Gmail. Reminds me of how MS used to do stuff.

------
stcredzero
_The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve
Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung
and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable._

Some might say that Amazon is already doing better than Samsung, HP, and
Nokia.

------
js2
_[3] Roger Bannister is famous as the first person to run a mile in under 4
minutes. But his world record only lasted 46 days. Once he showed it could be
done, lots of others followed. Ten years later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a
high school junior._

One of the great stories of the last 100 years. There are many recountings of
it, but "The Perfect Mile" is as good as any. Supposedly it was claimed to be
impossible, and that any person to break the 4 minute mile would likely die
from the effort. Bannister also wrote his own book about it.

------
sayrer
I wonder if it bothered pg that two consecutive paragraphs in the Tactics
section started with "Empirically,".

I wouldn't let that slide, because it triggers pattern matching not relevant
to the subject at hand.

~~~
pg
That was intentional. That was anaphora.

------
elizabethiorns
I totally agree regarding the decline of universities. In particular I think
the research side will be the first to shift away from universities; at least
with education you are essentially paying for a brand name which has inherent
value. With research, the principle investigator writes the grant to pay their
own salary, the salaries of their graduate students and postdocs, and their
equipment. The university then takes almost all the scientists IP and charges
"indirect costs" equivalent to more than 50% of the grant to supply
"Facilities and Administration" - which is what exactly? Lights, building
space, and a whole lot of bureaucracy.

Already, some really innovative initiatives are getting around this problem.
The Pasadena Bioscience Collaborative offers lab space and equipment for
~$1,000 per month (no contract required!) and the EMBARK program administers
scientists grants and encourages them to outsource experiments to core
facility specialists (while providing access to a basic shared lab for those
experiments that can't be easily outsourced). Both initiatives offer ways for
scientists to avoid high indirect costs and burdensome admin - and importantly
the scientists retain 100% of their IP!

These initiatives are the way of the future - it's hard to see how big,
inefficient universities will be able to attract the top talent for much
longer.

------
dwerew45234sdf
I think Paul Graham and Ycombinator have done some great things for the world.
However I do disagree with some of the things that Paul Graham says, and this
article is one of points that I disagree with him on.

5\. The next Steve Jobs Why does PG seem to think that there has to be the
"next" Steve Jobs? Is there some sort of pattern to be recognized from the
Apple story, that a startup can emulate and be successful.

Wasn't Apple a large company already, even before Steve Jobs came back to it.
Though Apple at that time was in a dire conditions, it wasn't exactly a start
up. How come some hardware startup during the 90's, 00's, and this decade, do
what Apple has done.

I know people think Apple is constantly inventing something "new" and always
needs something "new" for it to survive, but I don't think that is the case. I
bet the iPhone wasn't really created in just 2 years, I am sure Apple had been
working on it for a long time. A feet that is much more difficult for a start
up, to do R&D for a long sustained period and pay the bills with some other
product. PG had the following quote.

PG: "well, and I asked him if the people now running the company would be able
to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs."

I think Steve Jobs had a particular vision for his products for a long long
time. He might have thought about functions of the current iPhone and iPad
during the Newton days. Steve might have had 3-4 products that he wanted to
create, and thats it. We don't have enough data to interpret, that Steve would
of kept pumping out "new" products if he was alive, like the iCar.

Allot of Apples success have been through luck and timing and making the right
gamble. Jobs couldn't have put Apple back, without the help of numerous
people, and the above mentioned.

I think if PG seriously wants to find the Apple formula in a start up; he may
as well start playing the lottery. Eventually with enough time he will find
one. But the odds don't look so good.

I am a fan of his writing, but I found this article to be disingenuous at
best. Allot the things we use today aren't just formed by start ups, they
formed by sole inventors, governments, large corporations, and random
hobbyist.

You can change the view of your world to include more items than startups.

------
dojomouse
Also frighteningly ambitious is the prospect of any meaningful startup driven
disruption in the energy industry. Which is a worry considering how
desperately disruption is needed.

~~~
johncarpinelli
Electric aviation and space launch. See our web-site,
<http://electrictakeoff.com>, for details. We are looking for collaborators,
co-founders, volunteers, etc.

I agree with PG that ambitious startups are better. However, I think engineers
should focus on sectors where the customers are dissatisfied. Aviation seems
like a good candidate. Most people dislike oil dependence also.

Tactically, we are aiming to fly advertising banners as a short-term path to
revenue. The next market would be air freight with prices lower than diesel
trucking. Passengers would come last after the technology is proven.

------
dgregd
Guys, please do something which will replace Word and Excel. These tools were
good in the '80 and '90.

One of the main reasons I do not like to work for corporations is Word doc
attachments hell.

~~~
jarek
On the other hand, I'm sure you'll _love_ the Word Replacement attachment
hell.

It's not the tools that need replacing here, it's the process.

------
brianmac
In regards to email, google wave took a stab at attempting to change the
dynamic of communications but that project has now been shelved.

The difficulty in a new "email" replacement is overcoming the hurdles of
engrained habits - see <http://zenhabits.net/> for more on that psychology or
even www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com (people see the inbox as a to do, that they
grind through in mechanical fashion).

Think to tackle the problem of email is to put a new UI layer that wraps
messaging into context while piggybacking off the traditional email protocol.
For example, with my own work email we tag are subjects with TASK, FYI,
MEETING, FOLLOWUP, FEEDBACK, etc. indicating what action we need done, helps
with searching and labels now in gmail, however take that "context" element
and combine with say www.trello.com UI concept of boards/cards in a visual
dashboard type of style would be stellar.

I just imagine something like this on an ipad i am just swipping/slidding
through my different buckets of communication (sort of like flipboard). KILL
THE INBOX :)

------
6ren

      6. Bring Back Moore's Law
    

hmmm, maybe _developer cycles are more valuable than machine cycles_ really is
getting out of sync with current conditions?

I didn't connect stalled clock-speeds to the web being slow til reading this.
One reason is that web-serving is usually embarrassingly parallel, as each
client is independent. Some other causes are increased client-side JS;
assembling many services (eg. amazon); increased usage with resources not
keeping pace. But pg's point is surely a factor too.

Bloated frameworks, and software with many layers (some quite unnecessary)
were facilitated by increasing clock-speeds - but at least it's possible to
get rid of them. Also, work has been done on JS JIT compilation. Server
languages are getting faster too.

This may seem like a tangent, but bear with me: Clayton Christensen (who
coined _disruption_ ) makes an interesting point about "integrated" (closely-
coupled, interdependent) vs. "modular" (clean interfaces enabling mix-and-
match) architecture.

The advantage of integration is you can make it perform _fast_ \- you can
optimize "performance" according to a variety of definitions (e.g. smaller,
lighter, more memory, less battery power etc). This wins when customers value
increased performance - Christensen describes this willing to pay more for
performance as it "not being good enough" because once it's good enough, they
won't pay for more of it.

The economic advantage of _modularity_ is you can develop _fast_ , you can
create and customize more quickly. Part of this is reusing components (e.g.
buy off-the-shelf or open source, or reuse internally) - this wins when
customers value that over performance. This usually doesn't happen until
performance is "good enough": if it's too slow to use, who cares how
configurable it is?

An example is iPhone/iPad (integrated) vs. Android (modular). The iPhone/iPad
is fast, light, slim, long battery-life, better resolution, smoother animation
etc. In contrast, there are many different Android devices, with different
prices, displays, shapes etc, and many have customized UIs.

Christensen's fascinating point is not that one approach is better than the
other, but that they change over time, cycling back and forth. It depends on
what the market wants at the moment: what will customers pay for more of?

Following the example, once smart-phones become "good enough" in performance,
customers will start to buy on other factors, such as price. This seems to be
starting to happen for smart-phones; but not yet for tablets.

In relation to pg's observation of server slowness, it seems that formerly,
performance was good enough, and so the developers that were most successful
favoured mix-and-match layers, because they were faster to develop and easier
to customize. But now, performance is a problem... which may mean that
developers who favour integration will be most successful. It's not black and
white, but an interesting perspective.

~~~
stcredzero
_Bloated frameworks, and software with many layers (some quite unnecessary)
were facilitated by increasing clock-speeds - but at least it's possible to
get rid of them. Also, work has been done on JS JIT compilation. Server
languages are getting faster too._

It's instructive to note how much more compact alternative operating systems
have been made compared to the mainstream ones. Full fledged BeOS systems used
to weigh in at just a couple of hundred megabytes, with feature sets
comparable to OS distributions taking several gigabytes. Also note that users
of Symbolics Lisp machines used to be under the impression that the company
had hundreds of programmers, and were amazed to learn that there were just 8.

A bit of bringing back Moore's Law could be done by getting rid of bloat.
Perhaps the advent of the Raspberry Pi will allow this to happen.

~~~
tomjen3
Today the OS has to support way, way more different hardware than BeOS and
Symbolics ever had to. BeOS made their own boxes right? Symbolics certainly
did and I doubt they had a TCP/IP stack build in....

~~~
jarek
Be did initially make BeBoxes, but BeOS later ran on off-the-shelf x86
hardware (provided it had drivers, of course, but basic graphics worked on
pretty much anything of the era). BeOS R5 at least also had a TCP/IP stack,
and while it wasn't highly regarded (Be was rewriting it when it went under)
it more or less worked.

By this argument, OS X should be a _lot_ lighter than Windows, which it isn't.

------
Stwerner
A recent blog post that didn't get enough love here:
([http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/03/08/halls-law-the-
nineteent...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/03/08/halls-law-the-nineteenth-
century-prequel-to-moores-law/)) seems to suggest that we are probably at a
point where the new "Moore's Law" (or new new Hall's Law) is soon to be
discovered.

------
cstefanovici
For big ideas that others clearly understand to be problems and of which
investors are afraid to get in on there always is... crowdfunding! I wrote
about the pros and cons of raising money through crowdfunding to pay for your
startup here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687835>

------
meta-coder
7\. Ongoing Diagnosis

I always thought of creating a wearable device that can report the body's
condition in real time. A device that can test the blood to find out amount of
haemoglobin, essential minerals, sugar, cholesterol, urea, water etc. The
device could be made safe enough to be inserted just below the skin, it could
be made to transmit the information via radio waves to a receiver outside the
body where you can read the information. We could write a program for the
receiver which will process all the information and compare it to healthy
values and based on it provide real time advice to the person. Eg. When you
are dehydrating the receiver will say "Hey dude, drink some water quickly, or
else you'll faint in 30 minutes!" "Hey dude, you should get some Vitamin
B/C/D/E/K." If the circulation of blood slows down it could say "Hey you've
not exercised in ages. It is time to exercise." It will redefine how we take
care of ourselves. Caring in real time!

------
un1xl0ser
E-mail isn't perfect, however as a transport system is is not meant to solve
the problem you described in "Replace e-mail".

If someone wants to have a meeting with me, they might send me an .ics
attachment[1] that will work with almost ANY software that I have my computer.
Since most meetings are in fact in-person and something that we have been
doing as a civilization for some time, the semantics are well defined and easy
to model.

A task list will always be harder to model, but not impossible and there is
certainly a lot of ideas on the topic. As long as it is an open standard this
sounds great, but I wouldn't like to see my tasks locked into either a
proprietary format or the cloud[2].

If you are going to replace something that is standards based, it should be
with a new standard of some sort. Not code, that's an implementation detail,
but standard.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar>

2\. I'm too old for this shit, and not everyone lives in the cloud.

------
EGreg
I started off reading this essay a bit carelessly -- it seemed that pg was
saying that these ideas are too nuts, and YCombinator would never back
something like that. I was about to write a post completely disagreeing.

Our company for example is building a new type of _social_ search engine, will
in many cases replace email for messaging, AND long term have a third party
platform that will enable websites to take advantage of our single sign-on and
be instantly social, while safeguarding privacy. We have a patent application
on this (yeah, I know...)

Is it too much to bite off? Maybe. But look at our usage already, after a
year. <http://qbix.com>

And lastly, I am very much hoping to build value, and not just sell quickly. I
haven't read Steve Jobs' biography yet, but I have heard he refers to such
ambitious people as "real entrepreneurs". I don't know... all I know is, I am
driven to accomplish this. And so far we've got some positive results.

------
aaronf
How do you "just say you're building todo-list software" and not get laughed
out of the room? Investors say the space is too crowded, and engineers joke
about it being one of their first classroom assignments. And even if you're
making traction on the vision to replace the inbox, Y-Combinator's partners
will turn you down.

~~~
jarek
Good reason not to depend on VC funding

~~~
aaronf
Actually, we bootstrapped for 2 years. We had launch coverage in lifehacker,
mashable, the atlantic and entrepreneur magazine. We had over 10,000 users the
first month. We got to the point where we needed some funding to go all-in,
but everyone we spoke to was really burned on the task management space. Based
on this experience, I'm really interested in how someone can take on the task
management space in a way that gets noticed.

------
OneBytePerGreen
Many startup ideas are about extracting a few more dollars from the end user -
what kind of annoyance can we solve today? - but I think it's important to
think beyond the scope of consumer products to get to the real game changers.

A lot of the value being created in the digital sphere right now revolves
around collecting information _about_ people and providing it to third
parties, who in turn use it to solve problems (and collect even more data). I
believe these services will change our lives the most.

For example, major innovations in the near future might revolve around
creating 100% safe neighborhoods through smart surveillance. People are
rapidly becoming accustomed to being tracked all the time, anyway.

Technological progress and major societal changes go hand-in-hand. I think
whoever can best envision what those changes will be - and how to profit from
them - will become the next Steve Jobs.

~~~
SMrF
"...creating 100% safe neighborhoods through smart surveillance. People are
rapidly becoming accustomed to being tracked all the time, anyway."

This comment shocks me. I'm not sure what to say. Are you being sarcastic?

An apt metaphor for people becoming accustomed to surveillance is slowly
boiling frogs to death. And what is your definition of safe? If it were up to
me, nobody could wear the color black at night -- too dangerous! Also,
drinking too much at the club is not acceptable in my society!

I'm being silly, but where do you draw the line? It's a slippery slope...

------
charlieok
“GMail has become painfully slow. [2]”

“[2] This sentence originally read "GMail is painfully slow." Thanks to Paul
Buchheit for the correction.”

heh :)

------
pbj
I saw a neat Kickstarter a while back that seems like it was trying to tackle
redesigning email from the ground up. Looks like they hit their goal too!

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1380180715/mail-pilot-
em...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1380180715/mail-pilot-email-
reimagined)

------
jacoblyles
It would be great to have a todo list with a similar interface to today's
email-integrated calendar apps. Someone could send me a todo item, and I could
accept or reject it. If I accept it, it gets synced across both of our todo
lists. That would be a huge step up over putting todo items in email.

~~~
akrymski
Task management apps like Asana probably let you do stuff like this. Email is
just for messaging. Nothing is stopping people attaching a to-do item as a
file that gets opened in some to-do app, just like attaching vcards or
calendar items.

Its just that very low percentage of emails actually map to some associated
to-do item. And in most cases you really just want to set up a reminder.

------
mahyarm
I think all of those things are being worked on right now. Khan Academy and co
on replacing universities. The whole 'quantified self' set of gadgets, like
the basis band, the zeo sleep tracker, the withing's scale, etc. DuckDuckGo
for a search engine startup, etc.

------
chmike
This is now my favorite essay of Paul Graham because it shares my thoughts.

The only thing I feel less comfortable with is that it emphasis financial
value over a useful contribution to mankind. In my view the later is more
relevant than a goal to become the richest person of the cemetery.

I guess this is a kind of perception distortion one gets when the main
variables considered on a day to day basis are ROI, wealth, influence power,
etc.

I'm aware that wealth provides a significant leverage to contribute to
mankind's good, but it is easy to forget about this relevant next step by
solely focusing on increasing one's wealth.

Open source is one example showing the difference and it also proves that we
don't need to be a billionaire to significantly contribute to mankind's good.

------
aptwebapps
I don't get the Augustus reference.

~~~
funthree
He was Julius Caesar's nephew and successor, who ultimately did all of the
things that Caesar wanted to do but never had a chance to to see done (the
month of August is even named after him). In the lines that Paul mentioned his
legacy, I think he means that someone similar to Steve Jobs (his would-be
successor in our pop culture) could continue a similar path as Jobs. It's now
clear that being a visionary in that position is possible, and he showed us
all what just one person can do there.

~~~
aptwebapps
That may be it. However, it's not completely clear.

>Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both
directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than
people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in
users' minds that a single person could unroll the future for them.

We've got Banister, who lead, and Augustus who followed (I mean in succession
- he was still a leader), and ... well, it's a little confused but I guess
you're right.

~~~
spnx
At the death of Julius, Rome being controlled by one man was unconscionable.
By the time Augustus died the opposite was true.

------
r7000
For a peak into a future with 'ongoing diagnosis' see the very cool Greg Egan
short story Yeyuka:

<http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/yeyuka.htm>

"So why did you go into medicine?"

"Family expectations. It was either that or the law. Medicine seemed less
arbitrary; nothing in the body can be overturned by an appeal to the High
Court. What about you?"

I said, "I wanted to be in on the revolution. The one that was going to banish
all disease."

"Ah, that one."

"I picked the wrong job, of course. I should have been a molecular biologist."

"Or a software engineer."

------
xavi
I enjoyed this essay very much, but I think that presenting Apple as a
hardware company ("the company that creates the next wave of hardware...", "If
a new company led boldly into the future of hardware...") won't help to find
the next Steve Jobs. Apple products success is based on the perfect
combination of well-designed hardware and software. I think the next Steve
Jobs will need the same holistic approach to product design.

------
mmaunder
The conclusion on Tactics and starting small and achievable is pure gold and
something I took a decade to learn. I'd simply emphasize that it's important
to fulfill a real need on a small scale. e.g. Harvard students really wanted
to stalk each other, a basic interpreter really was needed, Columbus sailed
west to find faster trade routes.

------
nazgulnarsil
why can't I configure a bayesian filter on my inbox to do more than just
filter crap I don't want? Can't I have another filter that builds a model of
the things I click on first given any set of new emails and generate a likely
list of things I will want to see first?

Is anyone doing this?

~~~
_frog
I'm not a Gmail user so I'm not sure how well it works, but I thought Gmail's
Priority Inbox was built to solve precisely this problem. How intelligent it
is at determining what gets the priority label I don't know but at least
someone's pursuing it.

~~~
olalonde
I can say the priority inbox works extremely well for me.

------
netcan
Maybe how frightening these ideas seem is a measure of your ambition. I have
no fear at all of these because they're all so much bigger than what I can
tackle that they become fun theoretical "how will the future be" ideas.

------
krosaen
I like this article, but am I the only one for whom gmail is still seemingly
as fast as ever? I don't doubt that it is painfully slow for PG, would be
interesting to see the distribution of performance and what impacts it.

------
mishkovski
"The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that
will parallelize our code for us."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions>

------
ra
I love this:

"There's a scene in Being John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a
very attractive, sophisticated woman. She says to him:

 _Here's the thing: If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do
with me._

That's what these ideas say to us..."

------
jseims
I'd add micropayments to this list. If someone built a system (and -- the hard
part -- it got widespread adoption) to charge a few cents with low friction,
it could disrupt advertising.

------
momoro
Re: "5. The Next Steve Jobs" / "None of the existing players. None of them are
run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by
hiring them."

Jack Dorsey.

~~~
simondlr
Agreed. When I was reading it, I was thinking of him as well. Square is a
shining example of simplistic design and value.

------
sidwyn
Is there a reason why Paul Graham's essay titles are images?

------
oob
Of the 7, only Replace Universities (already happening) and Ongoing Diagnosis
is frightening and ambitious, imo.

I would have included:

1\. Alternative Energy 2\. Fix the Government

------
opining
See also comments here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690106>

------
ubasu
Small nitpick: what does it mean to say "...search queries to be Turing
complete"? I didn't think that the SERP defined a set of rules. ;-)

~~~
philwelch
You type something in, you get something back. Why can't the search engine be
a REPL for some program environment, with the entire web as its data?

------
revorad
I wonder if PG would create more value by doing one of these ambitious
startups than he is by running Ycombinator.

~~~
jonnathanson
Probably not. Y Combinator is an entire startup ecosystem. It is a convening
source, and inspiring source, for a multitude of startups. Any single company
-- no matter how grand its ambition or its achievements -- offers less scale
and less total value than an entire ecosystem of potentially big companies.

------
RachelF
The medicine comments are spot-on, right now we only fix our bodies when we
feel pain, when it is often too late!

------
nchuhoai
Takeaway for me: Great ideas will change the world, but you never start with
them in the first place

~~~
gonein60
I always think back to Linus Torvalds's first email about starting linux.

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

------
zerostar07
We don't need to replace email. Just add an NLP engine and the ability for 3rd
party apps on it.

------
antidaily
I want a pause button. For my life.

------
Mjux
pg, reports like these [http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-
Use-2012/M...](http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-
Use-2012/Main-findings.aspx?view=all) gains the confidence over ambitious.

Relevance dictates the shift.

------
rainboiboi
Change all the "Replace" with "Displace" and you are on your way to IPO.

------
tcarnell
An obvious but scarey startup idea to me a a Skype competitor!

------
chj
is there anything like cloud funding? the most ambitious start up should kill
the jobs of VCs for good.

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vacri
the 'Automatic medical diagnosis' suffers from a common misconception - that
people want to 'go to the doctor'. It's pretty rare that people do, and in
most cases they avoid doing anything medical unless they absolutely have to.

How would you gather the information to make the 'ongoing diagnosis' if the
people aren't going to come to you to do it? And that's just getting the
symptoms - what do you do for tests for more info, which people like doing
even less?

I also think there are some seriously fundamental technical issues, but I'll
leave those off due to 'ambitious'.

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shingen
I'm working on #2, but the solution I've found is not exactly what Paul
suggests. I ran into a need while working on my latest startup.

I'm in bed with a large tech investor for my current company, and I'm working
on this tech on the side. My term sheet is such that my company owns whatever
I create right now, so I'm hoping said large investor isn't too annoyed with
me allocating some time on the side; my plan is to ask forgiveness instead of
permission.

Aiming to kick it out to the public in a month optimistically.

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ktizo
Is all about primary dependencies when it comes to large disruptions, so any
ideas that target the primary technologies, hierarchies or costs associated
with the agriculture, energy, manufacturing, telecoms, trading and transport
sectors.

And the really ambitious ideas are the ones that simultaneously target as many
of them as possible.

------
hastur
PG is back. :)

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zackattack
Not at all surprised that aapl has taken a dip in after hours trading.
Wouldn't be surprised to see it fall monday either. The last time PG publicly
endorsed amzn we saw it briefly spike before returning to ~183. Almost reminds
me of what 50cent did with hnhi.

Not sure whether it's a clearly causal thing or that PG simply has his finger
on the tip of investor consciousness.

------
jamesrcole
Great post, but minor quibble:

 _The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to
Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than
Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable._

That really should be:

 _The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to
Steve Jobs. But they wouldn't have to. They'd just have to do a better job
than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable._

~~~
gbog
Hell, thanks, you just pointed out that pg is not PC. Hope he will never start
writing in this silly new grammar.

~~~
hythloday
Whether you find "they" as a third person singular pronoun objectionable, it's
not "new"--it goes back to at least Shakespeare (through Austen).

~~~
gbog
I object to:

\- the idea that changing grammar is a way to fix moral problems.

\- any barrier, taboo, or artificial distance between what one think and what
one write.

~~~
jarek
I agree - we should get more people to _think_ in singular they, rather than
just write.

~~~
gbog
I don't like this kind of thinking police, sound too 1984ish to me.

~~~
jarek
Any time you advocate a position you are encouraging people to think in a
particular way. I don't think we're at risk of being thought police as long as
no one is forced to change what they think.

