skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to discount the role of genetics, but how many parents ever prepare their children to learn Calculus at age 10 in the first place? If it were tried with all children and only a few succeeded, the genetic argument would be stronger; as it is, it is rarely tried but anecdotally it seems like when it IS tried, it is successful. This may have more to do with children's incredible mental elasticity than anything else.

And IMO calculus isn't really "hard"; e.g. the concept of infinity is no more difficult to teach a child than an adult. Actually I'd say it's a lot easier to learn it at 10 than at 18 anyway, just like a foreign language or musical instrument or computer programming.

The limiting factor with children in my experience is adults. Adults abrogate children's learning opportunities with regimented lessons that are merely someone's mistaken concept of what is "appropriate" for an "average" child of that "grade level", i.e. age.

"Readers"? Why not keep the shelf stocked with the best sci-fi, fantasy, and non-fiction and let them read what they want? Math in particular is going to undergo major changes because kids are going to grow up now with 3D worlds and coordinate systems that they play with. Kids are generally under-stimulated intellectually with what they're interested in, and over-worked on things they don't have interest in. Our potential is so much more than what we are permitted to grow into in these restrictive environments.
It is a unique story, try pitching it to the local news, worst they can do is say no.
I like it. Keep bootstrapping.

I wonder about scaling past that first hospital, though. Kind of a catch-22 situation -- the hospital has to be small enough to not care about having part of its records online yet large enough to support a growing business.
Good idea, I'll give that a whirl.

PG and others tend to talk a lot about how PR firms and offline marketing are irrelevant to online startups -- I think this may be one particular instance where that's not true. In a way, this is a very web1.0 idea, but hey, it's something people seem to want, so I'm running with it.

Thanks for the thoughts.
This is an absolutely brilliant idea, and I'd certainly use it if it were offered at a hospital near me and I needed it. (I hope I don't, for obvious reasons.)

I'd try two things to raise awareness. One is a local news story, as mentioned elsewhere on this thread. The other is to work with the emergency room staff at the offering hospital - I'd imagine they appreciate something like this too, since it means fewer frustrated patients when they finally do see them. Have flyers available for emergency room visitors - they'll be frustrated from the long wait time, which is the perfect time to offer them a solution. Put up posters around the waiting room. Try and get on the offering hospital's website.
What story could you possibly make this into except, "Rich fucks pay to get ahead of poor sick people in emergency rooms?"
Good point. We've had to do some interesting data gymnastics to satisfy the lawyers at our first hospital, and the bigger hospitals we've talked with seem even more concerned.

I think it needs to be a compelling service from a financial perspective in order to get the hospital's legal and financial departments to approve. If we were able to move 10-15 patients per day to a partner hospital, it could be adding $1 million/yr in profit to the hospital, easily. Hence the need for volume before we can partner with more hospitals.

Thanks for the comments.
Take-home message: "Amazon is so fast and cheap that I can run computations over 4TB data sets, notice that I screwed it all up, and run it again."
The fact that you have a hospital willing to do this is something huge. If you can make it work with them you could go to other hospitals to do the same.

It is a tough one to figure out though. I would think you would need to try to inform everyone in a 6 mile radius of this service. If it is densly populated you might try door hangers.
Users of this service aren't allowed to "get ahead of" anyone. This service only allows people to wait at home rather than waiting in the ER; the wait time is still the same, it's only a bit more comfortable.

Thanks for your input. ;-)
Why are they illegal? What should be illegal is noise pollution. (I guess it is...)
Yes that is the story. Everyone wants to be rich and the guy who gets into the emergency room first. Kind of like those people who go to the front of the line at Disneyland.
Stackless is an example of the communicating sequential process model, not concurrency. You avoid all the issues around locking etc because switching between processes (tasklets) is explicit - it's cooperative multitasking not preemptive. It's a very nice language but doesn't help at all with running on multiple cores. Once you start having multiple processes running simultaneously and shared mutable state you have to start worrying about things like locks. Erlang nicely sidesteps the problem by not having mutable variables.
You're right -- the ER staff love the service, because patients are in a noticably better mood when they haven't been cooling their heels in the waiting room for 3 hours.

The hospital's web site has a link to us on its front page, but this hospital hasn't invested much in developing their web presence. I'd like our next partner hospital to be one that has a stronger, more high-visibility web site.

If we could get on the first page of google for "<metro> hospitals" or "<metro> emergency room" that would be huge, I'd think. (But again, it's a local service, so getting link-fu is difficult right now)
2004 - when computers still had parallel ports.
Perhaps do a little thinking about who your customers are. Just guessing, but I would think they are people with a) not a immediately threatening problem, but one they want to see a doc about, b) have $25 or a credit card or something and are willing to use it to prevent waiting around, and c) are internet savvy.

So I'd go looking for a hospital that has a lot of these folks that use their ER and see if you can't set up a partnership based on the work you are currently doing with this hospital. Better yet, get a list of 50 such hospitals and work your way down :) With a high-enough density target market, you can move to things like radio, doorhangers, or newspaper ads. The interesting question is whether or not to use SEO, because of the geographical limitations.

Neat idea. I was just talking with a guy a couple of weeks ago about this exact thing, except for doctor's offices.
That part is basically true - to a VC, a person with "substantial industry experience" means an ex-founder or key employee that has already taken a company to tens of millions in revenue. That doesn't mean that only rich founders can start new successful companies (if it did, it'd disqualify Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, HP, etc). It means that you'll have a really difficult time getting VC funding if you don't have that track record, unless you demonstrate some other factor, like massive traffic or stellar recommendations from a founder who does meet those qualifications.
> How would you raise consumer awareness for a service like this?

I'm not sure that "diluting" your message in the press will be very efficient. I may be wrong but I guess people don't really care about emergencies unless they need it.

I would instead spend a day (or a few days) in the emergency waiting room (or ask a doctor there) to see if there are "typical" cases of non-life threatening emergencies. Then I would directly bring the information to those people (e.g. skaters).

edit: your domain name really sucks. There's no way someone will remember this or even type this with a broken hand.
Market the damn thing! Buy advertising! I'd definitely use this service, but there's no way I'd know to go looking for it.
"Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories."

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
There is not shortage of PHB at nytimes but there are enough folks that get it and if you know now to manage the situation good things can happen. Things have really been changing in the last year and there are many more really interesting things to come. This was just one fun example.
I agree. I found her article pretty spot on. Keep in mind that she starts the article by focusing on those whose financial plan is to get VC money from the get-go. I wrote about my own experience with VC's and I basically said the same. It is very difficult to get VC money unless you have a track record.

--Denny--

Denny K Miu

http://startupforless.com
StartupCampToronto 1 - Now taking submissions for companies to present
What a great idea.

The way I see it, there are a couple ways to work with it.

1) You've found a size hospital that it works well for and you get resistance when trying to go to bigger hospitals? The forget the large hospitals and find hospitals that match this one's profile around the country. Interesting niche.

2) Use the technology and apply it to any place that you have to wait in line (for a table at a restaurant, public golf courses, etc...)

What else am I missing?
i dont think marketing to end users is the way to go. like someone said, no one cares about an emergency until they are in one.

market to hospitals. get integrated into their website. when someone calls their ER, make sure the nurse tells them to register on the website.

i think going white label is your best bet.

but yea, this is probably the best "Ask YC about my idea" i've seen since i've joined. you're not selling ER software. you're selling software that helps people wait in line.

think of other markets that could use these tools, and then sell it to them as well.
Great idea. I've done some limited research, and it seems that this site would appeal very well to people who have some type of infection that has worsened over a period of days. I've spent some dollars on adwords for "fever" and related terms, but that hasn't been terribly effective so far.

Right now I'm working on a plan to market the service to schools, hotels, amusement parks, retirement centers, sporting arenas -- basically any place large numbers of people are gathered. It seems promising so far (fingers crossed, nose to the grindstone :P)

Thanks for the input.
Is this Trevor's sense of humor, or did he leave his computer unattended in YC's waiting room?
You are 100% correct, the domain name is horrid. ;-) It was chosen at the insistence of the hospital; eventually, we want to promote the service nationally at www.inquicker.com. Is that one any better? :p
I can't find anything about it online, but going from the word of my adviser while I was studying in China, there was a woman there who did something similar to this and is now very wealthy. IIRC, she paid people to wait around in lobbies and sell their spots when they got called, so people could bypass the rest of the line. What you are doing, I would say, is more ethical because instead of skipping the line a customer is just reserving a spot. I wish I could find some news article about this, but I have nothing. Either my adviser was lying to me or my web search skills are diminishing. Anyway, good luck, I think it's a good service.

Go after the big city hospitals where there tends to be a really long wait time, like Chicago, New York, and LA. Also, try to work in text message notifications for 15 minutes before the scheduled time.
Flyers & posters. Have the triage staff hand out a flyer along with the visit forms. It's the kind of thing that people will take note of and use later, and they may even tell their friends.
My wife once asked me how I could practice the same piano piece over and over and over, for hours, without being bored. It seemed to her that I was making a great effort. To me, every time I play, I discover something new, about music, about myself, about the instrument.... Even the least interesting basic exercise piece like Hanon (which roughly corresponds to the sit-up or squatting to build your body), if I concentrate on how every parts of my body works to interact with the piano, it's an unlimited source of discovery. I wish I'd known that when I was younger and taking lessons---I discover how to enjoy practicing long after I stop taking lessons.
White label would be much easier, but that's shifting all the marketing effort (and most of the reward) to the hospital, which I'm not ready to do. Building a new unified brand is difficult, but I think it will be best for the company (and best for the users) in the long run.

For me, the $25/user is the endgame, profit-wise; for the hospital, the $200-$1k marginal profit from a new insured ER patient that would have otherwise gone to another hospital is the endgame. Marketing to their current patients is good, but not fantastic; the real benefit is in bringing in new patients.

Thanks for the ideas.
So I was finally invited into Powerlabs and I had a look around. Actually I was mildly impressed. I have seen a lot of attempts at question answering and it seems like PowerSet is somewhat beyond state-of-the-art. The big questions I have are scalability and the expressiveness of their index beyond what they are currently showing. In particular I wonder about their ability to handle temporal relationships.

All in all I would say that there is value there. I just hope their money lasts so they can really deliver something big. Most of the companies that find success these days are so very unimpressive from a technology point of view. I think Powerset is different.

And don't get me started on what 'sells' in academia these days... Talk about going after low hanging fruit LOL. :-)

So three cheers for Powerset. Someone is finally going after something big!
This is a great service. I do not have much advices as I do not know about your industry but I can clearly see the value. Too bad I just moved from Smyrna ( I lived on Paces Ferry & Cumberland) or I would use it. Good luck, It's always nice to see startups from the ATL
If it's trivial to get there, then why wouldn't you be willing to go higher? Remember, you double your entire savings if you win. No matter how quickly your marginal utility curve flattens, it seems absurdly risk-averse to name any number lower than half of whatever you think you need in order to retire.
Whether it's true or not, this is going to get interesting very quickly.
Radiohead and bagels: Are humans ready for honesty-based systems?
I hope no one on reddit hears about it. Would be terribly confusing an overexciting for them.
I don't think erlang is that great for the scenarios that started this thread - it is designed for 1000's of processes, not dozens. And by all reports its straight line performance is much much much slower then anything else out there.

There is of course functional approaches like haskell (but it will take longer to be mainstream).
A retirement on half as much income as you'd like seems a lot better than a retirement on $5000...
Agreed. Lines are a waste if you look at them from an economics point of view - people willing to wait for something would almost always be willing to pay more to have it right away. but businesses are throwing that opportunity away because they don't have the technology to fix it or they don't see the problem. It is cool to see someone solve the problem with software.

I wish I owned a grocery store, because I think it would be a neat experiment to post a different markup rate for each cash register, and see what would happen. For example, one cash register charges the advertised price (+0%), another +5%, another +10% up to 40%. At certain times the +0% line would be the obvious choice, but what would happen in the rush hours?
Wow... a couple bad typos in that comment; I'm surprised I even got any upvotes. Some corrections:

s/working or someone else/working for someone else/;
s/like I was getting all I/like I wasn't getting all I/;

p.s. I don't typically use Perl, but it definitely has its uses, and quick and dirty text replacements are certainly one of them.
Is tonight's Boston YC News meeting still on?  Who's going?
They have that for housing in China too. Usually when a new building of condos is for sale, only the first 100 (or however many there are) customers can buy it, so a few days before they open the office, a lot of people would line up and sell their spots to real potential condo buyers.
You are wrong with statement: "people willing to wait for something would almost always be willing to pay more to have it right away".

It depends on the price of their time. If the price of their time is high, they would be willing to pay more. If the price of their time is zero, they will always stay in the line, because they have nothint better to do. Google for "opportunity cost" term.
I dunno... PG's articles don't make the top 10 on Reddit like they used to.
I have no data, but let me make some off-the-cuff predictions about your plan to create "premium" supermarket checkouts:

Customers who understand your novel scheme will tend to queue up in the line which has the lowest prices, because people do not consciously understand what their time is worth.

Then other customers will see the long line at the discount aisle and subconsciously decide to leave your store without buying, because the lines are too long.

Or perhaps, instead of abandoning their attempt to buy anything, frustrated customers will notice an apparently empty checkout line with a cashier standing there. They'll approach that line, and be told that that it's a "premium lane" which will cost them an extra 5%. Then they will become enraged. Nobody wants to pay extra for a service that they're accustomed to get for free. And when they're told that they can always stand in the long, less expensive line, they will continue to be enraged at the sight of one or more cashiers standing around idle in the premium lane, waiting for premium customers, when those lazy cashiers could be helping out in the discount aisles! What do we pay those bums minimum wage for, anyway?

Inevitably, unless you are on-site breathing down their necks, your cashiers will give in to popular pressure and go to work in the discount lanes. At which point the premium lanes will have no cashiers, and nobody will use them.

Of course, if grocery stores were more like emergency rooms -- scarce, high-margin businesses which routinely force you to wait two to eighteen hours for service -- things might be different.

For info on shopper behavior from a guy who actually does have data, I recommend Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping.

UPDATE: I have the answer! You could invent a scheme where customers who want to avoid waiting in line can trade their own labor for a shorter wait -- by scanning and bagging their own groceries at an automated kiosk. Suddenly, via a series of psychological tricks, your idea works well. I should patent this amazingly original variation of your idea. :)
Ron Paul's articles do.
Erlang is functional, but in any case, you're right about its performance - it's more or less that of a fast interpreted language, rather than a compiled language.
I think you might be a bit too ambitious.

1. Your target audience is difficult to reach (rich enough to pay $25, not rich enough to see a doctor, not willing to wait in line AND needing a visit to ER).

2. You're asking a lot from the hospitals (you collect patient data, you offer a no charge guarantee).

3. You're only getting $25 per successful transaction (needs to scale a lot).

On the other hand, you've already 'sold' your app as a white label. You have a reference and you can demonstrate that there's value for the hospitals.

Sell annual white-label licenses and you can built a very profitable company.
"Competitors: none" won't last.

This seems like a situation where raising tons of funding and scaling like hell is your best move. Settle questions of legality in different cities/states now, before you have competition.
So re-label it as a discount line. People who are willing to shop at odd hours or are willing to wait during peak times can save 5-10%. Meanwhile mark the rest of your stuff up 5-10%.

Not sure whether people pay enough attention to their grocery bills to tell a 5% increase, but I hear grocery store margins are terrible (like 2-3%) so maybe they would. It's tough to tell without some data.

Good idea though.
If reddit hears about this, it's over. Not really, but I'd rather HN itself not hit any social news site. We'll have to build a new community. In general, I think it's fair to say many of us jumped from /. to digg, to reddit, and then here. Of course, each community has it's own flavor - and not to be a pretentious jerk - but it's hard to beat the flavor during the outset.
CMU wins on points but they won't say what points.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/422997...
Well, there is actually a latency gain to be had from parallellizing indidvidual requests, rather than just running several requests in parallel.

Think about this example: You have 10 printers each capable of printing 10 pages per minute. Then 10 jobs are submitted each with 10 pages. If you run those jobs in parallel, all of them will finish after 60 seconds. If you parallelize each job and print page 1 on printer 1, page 2 on printer 2 etc., then the first job will finish in 6 seconds, the second in 12, and the last one in 60 seconds. The average latency is then (6 s + 12 s + ... + 60 s) / 10 = 33 s.

Your throughput will be the same, except for a bit of parallelization overhead.
I disagree. I initially wrote that sentence without the almost, because everyone must have a non-zero value of their time. However, I can't prove that statement, so I added almost in order to not get into a debate about a theoretical person who's time is worthless.

I am not saying that everyone is willing to pay 5-40% more to go in a slightly faster line, but I bet if you go anywhere that a line is formed there is some nonzero price which everyone in the line would be willing to pay to skip to the front.. Even if it is measured in cents.

Your right, it is about opportunity cost. And opportunity cost is rarely zero.
What Open Social Should Have Been
Who got in?
and how was it?
I agree that the initial response would be something like that, but it is the long-term behavior that I would be interested in.. Do people rationally value their time? Probably not. But I will bet you that some people would be willing to shop in the premium isles.

An automatic kiosk is a way to get around this, except you do extra work instead of paying more. But that misses the whole point of this - it isn't a solution to the lineup problem, it is a social experiment. You could potentially find out how much people value their time, in dollars and cents.

Thanks for the book recommendation.
Interesting comments!

I thought I'd post again, because I wasn't so clear the first time. Let's try again.

1) You DO have competition. Almost nobody has NO competition. Competition #1 would be "do nothing". There are other competitors.

2) This has probably been done before -- many times in many venues. You should find out where and why it did/didn't work out.

3) I hear you say you want to generalize to all kinds of things: doctors, grocery stores, banks, etc. Take a pill on some of that. If this has been tried before and failed, then you're going to need to grow organically inside one vertical -- then spin out. Waiting in line at an ER is just a different problem (both business and technical) than waiting in line at a car wash or something. Learn how to sell into one market well, first. Dreams are grandeur are probably a little premature. Mind your knitting.

Hope that helps some.
Not at all vain. Perhaps this is a more accurate refinement of what I enjoy about refactoring: progress. There really is an undeniability to constant and measured progress of programming as a whole. ie - Two minutes ago this wasn't possible, now it is. Constant gratification.