
Ask HN: If you could build anything, what would you build? - traverseda
You&#x27;re already wealthy beyond compare. Profitability doesn&#x27;t concern you. All the standard startup stuff has fallen by the wayside.<p>What do you build? Do you hire a team, or are you building it to learn?
======
panorama
This doesn't answer the spirit of your question, but regardless of the
product/service, I would build a company with an emphasis on employee
happiness (which also doubles as a recruiting tool):

\- Full-remote

\- 4 days/week instead of 5

\- 2-3 months mandatory PTO

\- Bootstrapped

This isn't lofty or anything, it's really what I aspire to do some day soon.
To me there are few sane reasons to build a company predicated on the 40 hour
work week in an era where work is intellectual and not based on quantifiable
throughput (like working in an assembly line). Today, I would gladly take a
20% paycut to work 20% less per week (e.g. get Fridays off), and so I'd want
to build a company in the same way.

I personally think the world is already headed in this direction (with remote
work being the first big change).

~~~
explodingtardis
This is really interesting. I would love to hear more about how you would go
about doing this. Mind if I email you?

~~~
panorama
Sure, my email is in my profile.

I want to clarify that I don't think this will necessarily work for every
company, especially high-growth, high-competition companies like Uber.
Probably moreso for companies that acknowledge, due to market cap, that they
will never be a billion dollar unicorn.

------
angersock
Moon colony. Sex robots. Sex robot moon colony.

Open a chain of small 100-bed hospitals throughout the US, give them doctors
working normal hours and software to handle all the management stuff. Accept
cash and credit only--no medicare, no insurance, no bullshit. Just cheap
healthcare that people can rely on, payable on exit.

Start a scholarship for hackers at colleges--must have less than a 2.8 GPA to
apply, and must have cool hacks submitted every semester. Hacks that aren't
some stupid fucking sociomoboloco sharing economy coupon thing. Hacks that
have teeth.

Oh, and two gigantic hands, two thousand feet tall, flipping the bird to NY
and SV.

~~~
miguelrochefort
I like #2.

------
AnimalMuppet
Fixing drug resistant bacteria.

Here's the plan: You go into the doctor's office. You give a small blood
sample to a machine. It finds the bacteria in it, and DNA sequences them. It
then looks them up in a library of known antibiotics, and prescribes for you
an antibiotic that will kill exactly what you have.

If it can't find an antibiotic that will do the job, it sends the DNA sequence
to the US CDC. They hand it to a supercomputer, which solves the protein
folding problem, and therefore can determine what the surface of that bacteria
exposes. They then derive an antibiotic that will kill it, and add it to the
library in all the doctors' offices.

Taking the blood sample is a solved problem. Scanning the DNA is close. The
protein folding problem is harder, and deriving an antibiotic from the surface
geometry is really hard. So those are the problems that need solved to do
this.

I think it could be done in 30 years, but I can't guarantee it...

------
mindcrime
If I could work on _anything_? If I was already wealthy and really, really
didn't have to think about making money from it? Then I'd work on fusion
reactors. I'd have to hire a team, but I'd also want to dig in and learn as
much as I can myself.

------
ilaksh
Not sure I should really just give you all of my best ideas, but people will
probably ignore this anyway.

Distributed artificial general intelligence app, probably something like using
deep learning with a virtually embodied agent.

A digital circuit IP or maybe separate USB dongle that does path tracing in
hardware, maybe based on procedural generation from a built-in Forth.

Various business and government ideas built on Ethereum, promoted with the
intention of displacing existing more centralized institutions with
decentralized ones.

A backyard exchange website where people can rent out or share their backyards
for tiny house 'parking' and/or high-tech gardening like aeroponics or
aquaponics, or whatever they want besides being a big waste of space
collecting dog crap.

A deep underwater research living facility for testing closed eco-systems for
space/the moon/mars.

Mesh and optogenetic BCIs explicitly for human enhancement.

Robots based on mulitlayered-multibraided electroactive-polymer muscles with
anatomical mimicry.

A unification of computer science, programming, and math. Or, a metalanguage
and representation tying together classical programming and mathematical
notation with interactive and/or visual programming, with the common part
reused in all types of informations systems.

Simple, low-priced home aeroponics systems sold in grocery stores, with
plastic supports enabling sweet potatoes to grow.

A new operating system for virtual reality.

A small, lightweight hot-rod electric skid-steer with heads-up-display using
ultracapacitors and high friction to enable very high-speed cornering and
acceleration.

A house, fully paid for, for every person or family I could afford.

~~~
traverseda
>A new operating system for virtual reality.

Elaborate.

------
Someone1234
I'd want to start an infrastructure company, internet (fiber) and cellular.

But unlike traditional ones I'd build or buy the physical infrastructure and
then resell access to any party which wanted to buy it, from big to small. I'd
then use all of the profits to expand, then resell, repeat.

Essentially I'd want to become an "invisible" company that sits behind public
facing ones, and let's them take all the credit/blame, while I just continue
to expand and resell. Kind of like "Level 3 Communications" but in the "last
mile" segment (all the way to consumer's front doors/businesses).

Then if I grow big enough, I'd start buying up companies like AT&T, take their
infrastructure into my pool, and then resell the consumer/business arm off to
someone else (and have them rent back space on the network from us).

The eventual goal would be a complete monopoly over all US infrastructure
assets, but a completely fair one, big and small companies would pay the same
dollar price for raw access and could resell at profit margins they felt
suited their business model.

The hardest part aside from the billions of dollars it might cost, is setting
up a pricing scheme which is rational, but also encourages continued growth.
Most of the ways companies currently split up a fixed bandwidth network is
kind of clunky and doesn't scale very well.

------
hanniabu
I'd create a music generation software. You pick your base sounds and the mood
you want to create, and the software will take it from there. There's already
tons of research out there on what make a song happy, sad, etc. - all that
would essentially be needed are base sounds as a reference point and the
software would create various versions of an instrumental by cycling through
example or custom melody patterns whcih alter the pitch of those base sounds.
With all the info that's out there, I'm really surprised this hasn't been done
before. Would definitely need a team for this, but I'd love to get my hands
dirty in between managing.

------
T-A
Maybe non-rocket space technology [1]. Totally worth it even if all it does is
help Musk reminisce some more about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
rocket_spacelaunch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch) [2]
[http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-lecture-at-
the-...](http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-lecture-at-the-royal-
aeronautical-society-2012-11-16)

------
imakesnowflakes
If I had unlimited amount of money, I would buy all the advertisement channels
of the world and fill them with classical music. I would by all the billboards
spaces and burn them to ground or if that is not possible, I will paint them
sky blue with white fluffy clouds or camouflage them.

Just kidding (not really).

A bit more realistically, I would build an open source car company. I mean, a
car which is 100% documented and documentation publicly available. with all
the diagnostic tools and information how to use them available publicly.

------
codegeek
A free service where I can connect with doctors, medical professionals to talk
about health issues. Nothing formal but more casual information discussions.

~~~
infiniteseeker
Quora for doctors

~~~
Someone
figure1.com

------
J_Darnley
Since I am unskilled I wonder how I became so wealthy. Then I hire a team to
build the things I want.

The things I want to build: Firefox with the 3.6 or older interface and uses
libavcodec for video decoding; a clone of Windows Explorer for Linux; a
perfect clone of Winamp; media library software that links together all the
best features of existing programs.

ITT: things that will never happen.

~~~
traverseda
>ITT: things that will never happen.

That's the idea

------
petervandijck
A system that's as good (no, better!) at teaching as an individual teacher, at
worldwide scale. (Not sure if it's doable.)

------
traverseda
I think the GUI application paradigm completely broke the unix way. You used
to be able to pipe programs into eachother. This means that if you used
programs enough you'd eventually pick up programming skills.

I'd like to make modern GUI stuff work a bit more like that. I'm imagining a
state synchronized pseudo filesystem. Instead of storing files, it stores
hierarchical C data types. A folder, with an array of vertexes and faces,
inside another folder that contains textures and metadata. They're not
folders, just nodes, but hopefully you get the idea.

You can use your image editor to edit those textures, and the changes would
show up in real time in your 3D scene editor. Small applications that do one
thing well, because the "file types"(data structures) are standardized enough.

Programs subscribe to changes in a file, sometimes over a network, using a
state synchronization protocol. Think rethinkDB, but optimized for very fast
read/write, not querying data. If you wanted to query the data like that,
you'd have a daemon watch the folder, and index the data. The point is to
focus on speed above all else, so you can watch real movies or stream real
content in it, and then build your indexing a layer above that.

Of course there are a whole lot of problems with that approach, and it's well
beyond me. But I'd hire some C tutors, and the guys who make btrfs, and see
what could happen.

In my heart of hearts, I know this is probably just because I want to live in
a world with a real metaverse, and I think this will get us one step closer to
the kind of collaboration you'd need to get real work done in a virtual
environment. But I still think it's a pretty good approach.

I do find there's an advantage to hanging out and working with people in a
real space, and I'd like to break that down a bit more.

See:

#Problems in unix design, the art of unix programming, Eric S Raymond

[http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch20s03.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch20s03.html)

>#A Unix File Is Just a Big Bag of Bytes

>A Unix file is just a big bag of bytes, with no other attributes. In
particular, there is no capability to store information about the file type or
a pointer to an associated application program outside the file's actual data.

>#File Systems Might Be Considered Harmful

>Was having a file system at all the wrong thing? Since the late 1970s there
has been an intriguing history of research into persistent object stores and
operating systems that don't have a shared global file system at all, but
rather treat disk storage as a huge swap area and do everything through
virtualized object pointers.

#The Verse 2 Protocol

[http://verse.github.io/](http://verse.github.io/)

------
miguelrochefort
A better communication paradigm.

------
canterburry
Teleportation

~~~
jimsojim
I am curious how are you going to go about it?

~~~
canterburry
Ensure my financial stability and I'll work on an answer...works for you? :-)

