zeit_geist's comments

zeit_geist | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

In Berlin, there is the 'Social Impact Hub'

http://socialimpact.eu/

of which I am not affiliated with nor won't endorse here in any way. Sadly, in Germany at least, startups that aim for maximum positive impact and less so profit, are called 'social startups' which outside of Germany probably has a completely different connotation.

The news websites I usually frequent, are not very full of news; they are rather SV & VC company theory megaphones. Avoiding those websites sometimes leads one to people with a bit different entrepreneurial mindset.

This having said, would you work for such a company? And which compromises would you accept (on the ethics-, but also wage-scale)?

zeit_geist | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

A super incomplete list:

Databases:

- PipelineDB

- Snowflake (Computing)

Internet of Things / Communications:

- Helium

Robotics:

- Pneubotics

- Kuka, namely the research department

Autonomous Systems / "Self Driving Car" et al.:

- Kiva

- Anki

Computer-Vision / VR based:

- Jaunt

- Oculus VR (especially the 'research' department)

Agriculture:

- Blueriver http://www.bluerivert.com

(there are many more super-interesting companies in this area!)

Computing:

- Mill Computing; though quite dubious

- D-Wave

and than there is Microsoft Research working on super interesting stuff in programming languages, computer architecture (FPGAs).

Additionally, I believe really challenging problems will alwyas be coming from creative people, companies in that area; such as Pixar, architecture, and design (keywords, just to give a start: generative {design, art, ...}).

Hope this helps!

zeit_geist | 12 years ago | on: Why Berlin should not look up to the Valley

> Germany, despite being technologically strong, is not very inovative. At least not in the sense of new, scaling products.

That's the result of a tech-centric worldview (read startups, sw). Quite the opposite is true, for instance in the area of 'Green Tech'.

> While that indeed is one of the cornerstones of the german economy, these companies are most of the time too small for an interessting tech IPO.

I don't your argument here. You mean success == IPO here? There are plenty of highly profitable Mittelstand companies with a profit and revenue much higher than e.g. LinkedIn. What does that mean here, that LinkedIn is unsuccessful or that the other Mittelstand'ish company is? IPO is not a value of its own as some reports might indicate. Looking at Mittelstand, as the author wants us to, is about the values surrounding a company, for instance to re-invest money in a sustainable way, that it is not about growth for growth's sake (which seems to be an inevitable by-product of going public!) but making better products.

> Finally, what in my opinion makes it very unlikely that a company has a sucessfull tech IPO in germany anytime soon is people. There's education, focusing on producing people for the existing technologies and, even worse, companies.

For University-level education, this definitely and absolutely does not apply.

zeit_geist | 14 years ago | on: NoSQL – Back to the Future or Yet Another DB Feature?

The paper describes a system that is a library which adds distributed transactions to effectively every data store available (distributed and non-distributed). I see no reason why this technology should not be available really soon given the broad applicability.

zeit_geist | 14 years ago | on: MongoGate — or let's have a serious NoSQL discussion

I took "MongoGate" (sorry, I just fell in love with that term) as an example of what happens when overly positive expectations hit the hard ground. Removing the hype from NoSQL ("it's innovative", "it scales", "the cool guys use it", yada yada) is what I like to do.

I surely do not uncover any secret there. But I haven't stumbled upon a "what NoSQL lacks" blog post recently either. You can read my post in many ways, but the latter one is actually one possible way imho.

zeit_geist | 14 years ago | on: MongoGate — or let's have a serious NoSQL discussion

True. The author forgot to add "scalable" there -- but that is actually mean there.

I am studying Multi-Dimensional Indexing for more than 3y now and have implemented many of the state-of-the-art indexes. They are all not sufficient as especially MongoDB's implemention is insufficient in especially the scalability-domain.

zeit_geist | 14 years ago | on: MongoGate — or let's have a serious NoSQL discussion

I have taken a short look at your approach only. I still think KV-stores are Assembler-like constructs and as such I would apply my criticism to your approach equally -- please correct me if I (mis-)judge your project! But in general, I think your approach is a good one.

Regarding comments at my blog: I don't understand what you mean with "subscribing". According to the settings page, you do not have to register. You are free to comment there anonymously. That being said, your comment at HN is highly appreciated. Thank you for taking your time!

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