SwearySkyscraper: A startup that develops novel and personalized swear words to help people better cope with pain, and integrates these swear words into a liquid damping system to stabilize skyscrapers during earthquakes.
>SciDigest: An AI-powered platform that transforms complex scientific research into engaging, digestible content for the general public, making scientific knowledge accessible and actionable.
This would actually be great. So many researchers have a marketing problem with explaining and getting people excited for their work.
I'm a popular science writer with eight year's experience doing exactly this (SciShow, Crash Course, Veritasium and recent winner of the Wellcome Collection Non Fiction Awards) without AI. Done right, the right coverage of even a pre-print reached hundreds of thousands/millions of people. But I've experimented with every SOTA model since 2022 with the most detailed and specific prompting I can think of (including multiple examples of transcripts of work already in the public domain) to see if it can replicate good quality science communication.
The content is usually reasonably strong but the tone is always off and it never quite understands what it is a reader/viewer needs to really get to grips with the topic if they don't already have a prior foundational understanding (though I notice this about a lot of other media outlets with professional science communicators too). It also has poor editorial thinking around what bits are most likely to be interesting and cohesive when considered as part of the whole piece.
But I'm still reasonably convinced as AI improves it ought to be able to replace me with the right workflow/context/prompting. I think there will always be a demand for my (and many other writers') talents as they are so it doesn't really bother me, but it'd be great to extend the work to all the many scientific discoveries that don't get the same attention. If anyone is serious about developing something like this, I'd be interested in partnering with them as someone with domain expertise on science communication and familiar with prompt engineering (email in bio).
I think you're right about the editorial thinking + what do people find interesting parts. But that doesn't have to be solved by directly by AI, it's easy enough to sidestep the problem and provide a nice interface for the human-in-the-loop part. I'd imagine that would save you a ton of time by having a nice starting point depending on how much you have to rewrite for tone.
That's true, it could just turn the writer's role into more of an editorial role. The main time-saving I have so far is being able to upload papers and get it to fact check for me. The editorial guidelines at SciShow are stricter than any academic journal I've published in: any non-trivial statement has to be supported by a direct, findable quote in (most-of-the-time) peer-reviewed scientific literature. I once had to find a citation for the idea that heat + fuel + oxygen generates a fire! (for this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEcaE0e0CZg)
LLMs make that much easier. As I collect primary sources during my drafting/writing phrase, I can type up any non-trivial claims I'm making in my script in a separate document, share that with the LLM and say "Quoting directly from the set of attached PDFs, identifying which document, and on which page the quote comes from, find content which directly supports each of these assertions" and it generally goes a great job. At any rate, I have to check each of those quotes for accuracy but the help in _finding_ those quotes in order to pass a stringent fact checking procedure is a huge help if I didn't scribble down the supporting quotes during my research phase. This is also, by the way, stricter than the fact checking process for most non-fiction publishing.
Feels like there might be an accuracy issue as well. Although that might make it perfectly suited to replacing whoever writes university press releases...
Lets not waste your $0.0005 and share this pretty decent idea with everyone:
> Graphene Labs: A decentralized, open-source platform for creating and sharing interactive data visualizations and infrastructure diagrams that can be hosted locally and integrated with real-time data sources
Ha! Fun stuff. While some ideas are actually intriguing, many if its suggestions seem to be overly vague jumbles of common phrases and technology. "AI-powered databases to leverage personalized accessibility for team management..." Lol. Still fun though.
i was not expecting people to like the startup ideas so much, but it's a pleasant surprise!
i thought it'd be cool to let people vote on ideas that HN Slop came up with, so now you'll see an "i'd invest" button & that will let others vote on the idea on a leaderboard
hope y'all like it, keep sending the feedback, I'm listening!
Feature request: option to select a year so you can get retro startup ideas from e.g. web 2 or crypto-mania eras!
This should be connected to https://comsensei.com to get an available domain for each one of the ideas. It's all coming together :)
SwearySkyscraper: A startup that develops novel and personalized swear words to help people better cope with pain, and integrates these swear words into a liquid damping system to stabilize skyscrapers during earthquakes.
>SciDigest: An AI-powered platform that transforms complex scientific research into engaging, digestible content for the general public, making scientific knowledge accessible and actionable.
This would actually be great. So many researchers have a marketing problem with explaining and getting people excited for their work.
I'm a popular science writer with eight year's experience doing exactly this (SciShow, Crash Course, Veritasium and recent winner of the Wellcome Collection Non Fiction Awards) without AI. Done right, the right coverage of even a pre-print reached hundreds of thousands/millions of people. But I've experimented with every SOTA model since 2022 with the most detailed and specific prompting I can think of (including multiple examples of transcripts of work already in the public domain) to see if it can replicate good quality science communication.
The content is usually reasonably strong but the tone is always off and it never quite understands what it is a reader/viewer needs to really get to grips with the topic if they don't already have a prior foundational understanding (though I notice this about a lot of other media outlets with professional science communicators too). It also has poor editorial thinking around what bits are most likely to be interesting and cohesive when considered as part of the whole piece.
But I'm still reasonably convinced as AI improves it ought to be able to replace me with the right workflow/context/prompting. I think there will always be a demand for my (and many other writers') talents as they are so it doesn't really bother me, but it'd be great to extend the work to all the many scientific discoveries that don't get the same attention. If anyone is serious about developing something like this, I'd be interested in partnering with them as someone with domain expertise on science communication and familiar with prompt engineering (email in bio).
That's super cool, I love the SciShow videos.
I think you're right about the editorial thinking + what do people find interesting parts. But that doesn't have to be solved by directly by AI, it's easy enough to sidestep the problem and provide a nice interface for the human-in-the-loop part. I'd imagine that would save you a ton of time by having a nice starting point depending on how much you have to rewrite for tone.
That's true, it could just turn the writer's role into more of an editorial role. The main time-saving I have so far is being able to upload papers and get it to fact check for me. The editorial guidelines at SciShow are stricter than any academic journal I've published in: any non-trivial statement has to be supported by a direct, findable quote in (most-of-the-time) peer-reviewed scientific literature. I once had to find a citation for the idea that heat + fuel + oxygen generates a fire! (for this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEcaE0e0CZg)
LLMs make that much easier. As I collect primary sources during my drafting/writing phrase, I can type up any non-trivial claims I'm making in my script in a separate document, share that with the LLM and say "Quoting directly from the set of attached PDFs, identifying which document, and on which page the quote comes from, find content which directly supports each of these assertions" and it generally goes a great job. At any rate, I have to check each of those quotes for accuracy but the help in _finding_ those quotes in order to pass a stringent fact checking procedure is a huge help if I didn't scribble down the supporting quotes during my research phase. This is also, by the way, stricter than the fact checking process for most non-fiction publishing.
Feels like there might be an accuracy issue as well. Although that might make it perfectly suited to replacing whoever writes university press releases...
I am trying to do this, trying to generalize a workflow that at least has helped me grok a few papers.
Lets not waste your $0.0005 and share this pretty decent idea with everyone: > Graphene Labs: A decentralized, open-source platform for creating and sharing interactive data visualizations and infrastructure diagrams that can be hosted locally and integrated with real-time data sources
Ha! Fun stuff. While some ideas are actually intriguing, many if its suggestions seem to be overly vague jumbles of common phrases and technology. "AI-powered databases to leverage personalized accessibility for team management..." Lol. Still fun though.
No worse than a lot of actual companies. I would be totally unsurprised to see that description about a real startup.
Very fun and some of these ideas are.. actually not terrible.
Getting rate limit error - This request would exceed the rate limit for your organization
You should use something like openrouter or portkey or similar for managing fallbacks
wasn't expecting this to get so big so quick, fixing now
should be fixed, sorry about that! should alternate between a couple models now
thank kier for claude code
> openrouter
What pieces of openrouter are open source? I checked out their main github repo, and it hasn't had any contributions in months.
Every time I read OpenRouter I think FRR https://frrouting.org/
Wish they would have used a different name.
i was not expecting people to like the startup ideas so much, but it's a pleasant surprise!
i thought it'd be cool to let people vote on ideas that HN Slop came up with, so now you'll see an "i'd invest" button & that will let others vote on the idea on a leaderboard
hope y'all like it, keep sending the feedback, I'm listening!
LOL, the idea it just pitched me was inspired by the HN Slop submission itself!
I've been waiting for that to happen!!! Did you save the idea?
would be great if I could provide prompt/context, for example specifying domain and scope instead of getting random proposals.
when I make snarky comments about AI Startup Ideas from Hacker News, dang spanks me. guess i need to make a webapp to do it for me instead :)
[dead]
[flagged]
this can't be a real HN commenter...
I wasn't serious, I was just saying it was too nice of a comment lmao
Got flagged for being too complimentary. QED :)