

Ask YC: Any suggestion/ideas for a college project - omfut

YC folks:
    I’m searching for a new project/idea for my friend, who needs to do a college project (3 months timeframe). Preferably web based, desktop client is also ok. 
 Appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance.
======
jacquesm
\- a custom search engine that will be what I would call the 'free
associative' little brother to what google does. It automatically finds all
synonyms to the words you have entered and their first level 'strong'
associations by counting digrams in the text body. It then _removes_ all the
results from the set that google or any other regular search engine would show
you.

\- 'deadmansknob', I've been playing around with this idea for a long time but
never got around to building it, a service which you need to check in to
periodically and when you don't one or more emails are sent out. 3 levels of
'periods', a day, a week, a month and trigger-able alarms for special cases
(such as holidays).

You'd use that to set up a series of emails containing messages to people that
you only want activated in case something happens to you. The various levels
are to make sure that really crucial information can be held back in case you
are in some kind of accident but still alive. Expand featureset at will :)

\- World Wide orphans: a place where you can dump your no longer wanted
domain. It would automatically spider the old site and then set up a web
server to handle the reguests. Strictly static. For people that run out of $
on their hosting that put lots of time and effort into sites that then
disappear from the net. This would hopefully kill a portion of the spammers
that buy expired domains. Simply assign the domain to WW orphans.

\- a good replacement to IUMA. Bandwidth costs have come down considerably and
I'm sure you could do it if you stayed away from fancy offices and executive
ferraris.

\- an interactive tour of the genome (ajax based)

\- a site where hackers can challenge each other with problems

\- ajax based corewars

\- a revival of webrings. I thought they were really neat, if done right I'm
fairly sure it would take off. Alternative link structures are very
interesting. A star based on that gorgeous treeview thingy I posted yesterday
would be nice too.

\- an interactive book written by the audience. I call this one for obvious
reasons the never ending story. At any point in the books you can branch the
story and continue it in a different way. Some clever ui to indicate the forks
where they exist, the default is the first thread that was written for a given
level in the tree

\- a site where you could registrate all your property until you flipped a
switch indicating it was stolen the site would be 'blank' for you. Serial
numbers, photographs and so on all could be uploaded to the site. Then when
your home has been burglarized or some other property was lost or stolen you
could make the pages active. Search engines would pick it up. If somebody
would then want to buy something on ebay or some other auction site or if they
found something they could use the site to find out about you by matching the
property and alert you.

need more ? This is just my list of stuff that I haven't gotten around to
(yet) that might be on the level of a college student (if he's good), all of
them could be done in 3 months with some dedication.

Let me know if you pick any of them and I'll send you my outline on what I
think it would take.

Same goes for anybody else reading this that thinks cool, I want to go do
that. I'd be just as happy seeing somebody else build this stuff than doing it
myself, there are only so many keystrokes in a lifetime (and I've already had
my fair share of them ;) )

My email address is in my profile in case you need it. Best of luck!

~~~
omfut
Excellent. Thanks a bunch! I love the "site where hackers can challenge each
other with problems"

------
magice
It highly depends on how much you are willing to do. I mean, the possibilities
are endless. Some come to my mind are:

* compiler/interpreter of some languages (for simplicity, usually Scheme or something easy) to Javascript, with good interface to Javascript code. Optimize the produced code. Bonus: full reflection (aka incremental compiling) support. Another bonus: mixed solution, with javascript for new users, and plug-in for accelerated speed.

* Telnet/SSH/VNC in Browser. I have seen some solutions, but all of them are primitive, especially with respect to the screen size

* Games, as always. Bonus: 3D.

* Geolocation-based stuffs. These are really hot these days, eh?

See, just one minute, and all kinds of thing flash through one's mind. Of
course, you have only 3 months, which makes any of these extremely
challenging.

