Are there any more startups with real technical challenges? | Hacker News Reader

Are there any more startups with real technical challenges?

5 pointsartifix8 comments

I'm a technologist with 25+ years of hands-on experience across all IT roles and hundreds of technologies. I've done it all: from startups to Fortune 500s, from desktop applications to global distributed systems to AI dark factory harnesses.

But I'm bored.

I want to work with a startup who's taking on real challenges, challenges that require the kind of engineering expertise that gave us the microprocessor revolution and the real birth of Silicon Valley.

Yes, everyone is talking about AI. Sure, in the right hands, with the right ring-fencing, AI is great, and there are plenty of great startup ideas around AI. At the same time, there is a lot of disinformation. The risk is that many of these startups will fail because they lack the serious engineering needed to use AI to its maximum potential.

But I'm looking for something else.

Do you have something that shifts the paradigm? Do you have a startup with a real challenge?

I'd like to hear from you.

I'd love to see what people are doing out there ... things that my AI agents haven't found yet.

There is a gargantuan technical challenge right in your face and few to none see it: all this confusion surrounding AI is an example of the tech industry completely fumbling and failing at the communications surrounding AI technology. What to know the biggest technical hole in all of human civilization? How to convey understanding in others, how to gain understanding from those too inarticulate to explain themselves, and the biggest baddie of them all: how to educate human society such that the discussion of disagreements and controversial issues does not trigger conflict and ultimately war.

This may all sound like 'wishy washy soft knowledge' but I don't think it is, that is a false distinction to claim that any problems that originate with communications are a "soft problem" and not worthy of technical or scientific analysis. I say such problems are technically too complex for our smartest. Such problems require huge amounts of empathy and life experience to even begin any level of forward progress capable analysis.

Start using LLMs to assist building hw projects. a couple ESP32's opened up a whole new world for me moving a lot of the brutal first steps forward quickly.

Ok yes, that's cool. Is that what you are doing? Do you have a startup?

yep, ioservices.io we are working on a bunch of projects.

Not public yet, but tiny ML system for ESP32 to track moving objects. networking multiple units together to communicate positionality of not only the unit, but the item that is being tracked. Big usage in certain fields.

Redwood Materials is doing some cool stuff with battery recycling.

Pentad.ai -- an operating system for agents... Very real tech challenges.

That's cool. Maybe not very cool, but cool. I like it. Is this you? The downside I think is that you'll freak out clients with autonomous agents that are working for vendors.

Let me put it to you this way: I don't trust vendors. I've worked with them on behalf of large clients. I know what they want. So how should I trust vendor agents?

Nonetheless I like the idea ...

Oxide, Cloudflare, Tailscale...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com