Ask HN: With 2 years and no obligations, what would you build? - Kevin_S
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skylark
If it didn't have to make any money and was guaranteed to have visitors, I'd
make Reddit with autogenerated subreddits.

At the start there's one community everyone is a part of. Every week, the
community is split into children based on voting patterns, grouping people who
are more similar. Communities can vote on a name, and anyone can see any node
in the tree.

There would have to be periodic resets, but I think it would be a fun social
experiment.

~~~
meric
Is it possible to parse Reddit and pick recent "important" nodes? A website to
comment on reddit threads, in the same way reddit is a website to comment on
website links... Except the submitted reddit threads are picked automatically
by your algorithm.

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no1youknowz
Tokbox, Vidyo, Frozen Mountain (liveswitch) all charge egregious amounts for
per user, per minute usage.

I'd take a project like Livepeer.org [0] and fork it, so to commercialize it
and integrate webrtc and then run an infrastructure so that anyone can do
Video Chat / Live broadcasts and on a monthly subscription basis. Much like
appear.in.

Of course, I'd do a pull request, as I'd want to give back to the community.

[0]: [https://medium.com/@petkanics/livepeer-
whitepaper-9e8b88418e...](https://medium.com/@petkanics/livepeer-
whitepaper-9e8b88418e30)

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perilunar
A flying car.

All the existing and planned designs I've seen are a bit lame — I've got some
much better ideas. Of course I have no aircraft or car design experience, so
I'm probably talking out of my arse, but anyone want to fund me?

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toomuchtodo
An automated manufacturing facility for homes. Raw inputs go in, affordable
housing comes out (powered by solar) that can be transported by roads. Would
pair this with partnering with companies that are fully supportive of remote
work, as well as coop land trusts, thereby bootstrapping affordable
communities with low costs of living, requiring a minimal work week to afford
to live there.

I'd basically be leveraging my "sabbatical" to increase the free time of
others at scale, which would hopefully spur higher quality of life and
possibly faster innovation.

Anyone know if that YC cities project is still a thing?

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HockeyPlayer
An app and supported web-service to report polluting vehicles. Camera access
to take a picture, then license plate recognition and automated reporting to
the correct government agency.

~~~
levimaes
I was actually driving down a boulevard in San Francisco, California (CA I-1;
19th Blvd), which has the expected frequent downhills and uphills, and I shit
you not a two trailer, solid iron, kind-of-construction-refuse-freighter
14-wheeler was braking at each of the stoplights by skidding--like 5 or 10
feet, on its rear wheels. The same kind of skidding that everyone who's ever
fish-tailed has come to revere. But at 25 tons. And 9 feet high. At 30 MPH,
and downhill, for like 2 miles.

Eventually he made it with me onto the I-280, but instead of reporting it, I
spent the entire time becoming intimately accustomed to the incapabilities of
my car's voice dialing system. I can't imagine something like that being
legal.

Oh, and if anyone reads this: Look up some videos of trucks and vans with
unsecured loads. Like landscaping trucks and vans, or trucks with Home
Depot/home-improvement loads. Their stuff falls off, so follow your reflexive
unease and repulsion and leave their lane and proximity.

~~~
japhyr
Yes, stay far behind the barely-braking heavy loads and get far in front of
the loose unsecured loads.

I was driving a highway in Colorado and I saw a flatbed with a bunch of large
haybales, cubes of about 6' each. The top one was unsecured, so I raced out in
front of that truck. A few minutes later I saw it fly off the top of the truck
behind me. The highway was eerily empty behind me for a while after that.
Scary stuff!

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zapperdapper
To be honest, probably nothing. I'd rather be diving.

But since you asked...

I'd always wanted to make a ROTT clone, as it is one of the only games I
actually completed (the others were the original Shadow Warrior, Blood, UT,
Q3A and Quake 2).

Many years ago when the original Wolf 3D source code was released I ported it
from nasty 286 code to DOS 32-bit - God that was hard. I got it into my head
that I would follow in Mark Dochtermann's footsteps and turn that Wolf
codebase into a ROTT like engine.

I believe the original ROTT has long since been open sourced, so, with two
years and no obligations I wouldn't mind having some fun getting that up and
running on Linux. Probably wouldn't take that anything like that long, leaving
plenty of time for diving too. :)

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drakonka
I would build my dream project, which I've been working on for years - a snail
simulation.

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twoquestions
I'd build a multiplayer economic management game akin to Capitalism II [0].
Economic concepts are dry and difficult to learn, and difficult to explain. If
I could build a good simulation of how an economy _really_ works, it might
lead to greater and easier understanding of how it works.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_II)

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JJarrard
For possible financial gain: Web applications. Lots of them, most will fail as
with mobile apps, but say I could do one every month or two, that's 12-24x the
amount of chance of success than building one substantial well thought
through, maybe unsellable thing.

None financial: I'd like to build robot or a virtual personal assistant (see
film 'Her')

~~~
riku_iki
I think success is more dependent on marketing/promotion effort, than number
of apps you would build.

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muzani
A story generator, based around tvtropes.

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peteevans
House below is a great idea! otherwise email replacement. Really it's 2017 and
we're still stuck in the dark ages, there has to be better way!

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SirLJ
Sand castles somewhere in the tropics, while sipping cold margaritas and
puffing fat cohibas...

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thesmileyone
A house.

100% srs.

Buy the land and build your own house. You will learn so much... and you will
make a load of money too!

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akulbe
Anything scrupulous that would give you recurring revenue.

The sky is the limit, with the exception that it shouldn't be illegal/immoral.

Of course, that's open to wide interpretation, but there are obvious things
you wouldn't want to do... if it was exploitative, for example.

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urahara
Some VR apps or robots.

