Hacker News: yubrew

New comment by yubrew in "Why people believe weird things about money"

yubrew — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:34:16 +0000

Loss aversion is a large reason why many of my high school and college friends end up not doing start ups.

New comment by yubrew in "Ask YC: Any ideas about intelligent crawlers :)"

yubrew — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:00:21 +0000

dapper.net

New comment by yubrew in "On Comet, Paul Graham, and YC rejection"

yubrew — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:46:53 +0000

Yet another technology looking for a market application...

New comment by yubrew in "The Next Google Search Challenger: Blekko"

yubrew — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:33:11 +0000

Heh, looks like you responded while I was still editing my post.

New comment by yubrew in "The Next Google Search Challenger: Blekko"

yubrew — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:34:08 +0000

While search could be better, Google's results for text are good enough. How much better could text search get? Is it possible for someone to build a search experience so compelling that I would want to switch? And even if someone made a new, compelling search technology, could they get advertisers to switch over?

New comment by yubrew in "Ask YC: Coming up with a name"

yubrew — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:33:37 +0000

Adwords is good for testing out headlines and copy, but are you seeing much variation based solely on changing domain names?

New comment by yubrew in "No Deal: First experience from the investing side :("

yubrew — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 04:47:40 +0000

If you believe in it, can't you refer it to someone else that does not have the same deal-breaking constraints as you do?

Lightspeed Ventures Summer Grants Program

yubrew — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:25:29 +0000

Article URL: http://www.lightspeedvp.com/summergrants.aspx

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88639

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

With Google's My Location, Who Needs a GPS?

yubrew — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:17:02 +0000

Article URL: http://gigaom.com/2007/11/28/google-my-location/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84371

Points: 8

# Comments: 7

New comment by yubrew in "Would "liberal science" be a good major to create?"

yubrew — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:19:59 +0000

Or getting work experience outside of your area of academic study.

New comment by yubrew in "Ask YC: Where's the best place for online discussion?"

yubrew — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 05:35:52 +0000

signal to noise ratio seems extremely low.

New comment by yubrew in "Ask YC: Can lawyers and hackers be friends?"

yubrew — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:12:09 +0000

Learn some basic hacking in (insert functional language here). I'm not trying to start a programming language flame war.

The point of the statement is to do just enough so that you don't drive away potential technical cofounders. Basically make yourself more attractive as a cofounder by avoiding the traps that many other non-technical cofounders fall into.

New comment by yubrew in "Ask YC: Can lawyers and hackers be friends?"

yubrew — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:42:42 +0000

This question has been asked plenty of times before. Look up variations of "business/idea guy needs hacker." But you should at least hack a bit with Ruby on Rails so at the least you won't piss off your technical co-founder. If you have deep domain knowledge, significant contacts, and a problem that is worth solving, then getting a hacker co-founder should be pretty straight forward.

It is my personal belief that the team composition depends on the type of opportunity and where the core competitive advantage will come from. If you are a lawyer, and you want to make a paperless solution for legal firms, you better believe you'll need a technology wiz. However, if the technology component is honestly only a small part of the overall problem, then you can perhaps look to getting an employee or contract out the tech work.

New comment by yubrew in "Peter Norvig: Warning signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

yubrew — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:16:49 +0000

"Humans are very good at detecting patterns, but rather poor at detecting randomness." This is so true.

New comment by yubrew in "Ideas to monetize new artifical intelligence"

yubrew — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:01:27 +0000

I see. How about creating a public API (like someone else suggested) so we can see what it does, and then have a couple guys shop it around for you as you get validation studies going?

Then you give people enough to get enticed, but don't give everything away. You can then pursue multiple applications with a parallel effort.

New comment by yubrew in "Ideas to monetize new artifical intelligence"

yubrew — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:12:46 +0000

Subject matter expertise can be hired, as employees, or as advisors to your company. For this type of start up, you not only need a team to build out the product end users will ultimately use (an expensive endeavor in and of itself), but you also need to gain credibility from experts and get published before doctors will look at your stuff.

New comment by yubrew in "Ideas to monetize new artifical intelligence"

yubrew — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:31:47 +0000

I am a tech commercialization consultant for some of the crazy stuff that comes out of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Scientists and engineers make all this cool stuff, but they don't really know what to do with it, and how to package and sell it. That's where I come in.

E-mail me and maybe we can figure out what it would be good for. I'm thinking you should patent the technology, show proof of concept comparison tests, and shop application specific licenses around.

New comment by yubrew in "Report Gives Hope To Fla. Man's Cancer Killing Machine"

yubrew — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:03:45 +0000

This is really interesting stuff. But I wonder, how much did this guy do? The 'machine' they talk about emits radiofrequency waves of a certin wavelength and strength, something that can be bought from a catalogue. Did he make the nanoparticles? Probably not, you can buy these nanoparticles from stores found via a simple online search. Did he find the radio frequency himself, or did he look up other studies that have been doing this since 2002, and just copy their procedures? Maybe I'm wrong, but I do not see anything novel from this article.

There is a lot of promise from respected academic institutions for using gold nanorods and nanoparticles for cancer therapeutics. On the other hand, few treatments ever get through clinical trials and are approved for use in mass populations.

For those interested, other universities that have been doing similar things include UCSF, Georgia Tech, and Purdue University.

New comment by yubrew in "The future of programming languages in a massively concurrent world"

yubrew — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:39:45 +0000

Hi Hexayurt, we're looking at a couple different heathcare IT problems to solve, and creating expert systems for specific medical domains is one of the areas we are currently investigating.

Can I pick your brain a bit? Send me an e-mail, or let me know what your e-mail is.

New comment by yubrew in "Ask YC: Profit: $25/user. Customers: satisfied. Competitors: none. Target market: huge. But..."

yubrew — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:44:18 +0000

haha, iamelgringo, you beat me to bring up these comments. let me add on a bit to what you've already said.

hospitals are not just run as businesses, but they also need to serve the public. as such, you also have ethical and social concerns. there are a several substantial problems with your idea:

-promotes inequality of care based on money. this will likely turn out to be a huge legal issue.

-the decision of something being life threatening should not be determined by patients, but by health professionals.

-substantial change to hospital behavior. the act of creating and incorporating reservations to the ER system will likely be a shock that hospital administrators will not appreciate. (just look at how long it took for doctors to move from beepers to PDA's and cell phones, and also look at the adoption of electronic medical records which is still less than 18% of all doctors) making hospital staff jump through new hoops will increase the resistance of using your technology.

please do not take these comments the wrong way. your idea could work, if you tweaked the business model around hospital constraints, and nothing specific is popping up right now. perhaps other areas where waiting in line is a pain that people will pay for?