Ask HN: You have 1 year and enough money to live. What would you build? - ngalstyan4
======
m3nu
I asked myself that question last November. Big project was finished and
finances were good. I applied to YC Startup School to get into the "scene" and
they accepted everyone by accident that year.

I ended up doing a startup for backup hosting[1] and a new open source GUI[2]
to go with it. Not as grand as the ideas here, but I seems to solve a problem
for some people.

If I had to do it again, I would start with a niche problem I know well and
that other people are willing to pay for. Then learn new things on the way and
expand where it makes sense.

1: [https://www.borgbase.com/](https://www.borgbase.com/)

2: [https://github.com/borgbase/vorta](https://github.com/borgbase/vorta)

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N_trglctc_joe
Honestly? Nothing.

I think I would get more from investing in something boring-yet-reliable and
finding another job. Do you really think that an idea someone gave you on the
internet is likely to provide more happiness than having a cushion and
retiring earlier?

At the very least, you should hold off for a few years until you have an idea
and the technological/business skills/partners to implement it.

~~~
ngalstyan4
Given what I value now, having a cushion and retiring early would not provide
me much happiness so it is not hard for sth else to provide more happiness
than that.

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muzani
Random story/world/society generator, targeted at authors, game developers,
and DMs.

There's a lot of very inaccurate ones. There's a few very accurate ones, like
DF and Civ, but these require too much effort. I'd like to have something
where someone can just bash buttons for inspiration, mostly pulling content
off TV Tropes.

Some content might be crowdsourced, e.g. we could have a random clothing
generator, where all the clothing is custom written by humans. Or say, a
random village generator.

The crowdsourced and TV Tropes sourced content would be free.

Monetization might be subscribing to premium content. Content is written by
higher quality reviewers, and payment goes to them, either as a Spotify-like
"pool" or direct purchasing of bundles. So if you wanted a desert themed
world, you can buy a desert-themed bundle.

Another monetization route would be picking a target market and focusing on
tools for that market. Say, a DM-themed tool which generates dungeons or
pickpocketing results.

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riaandewit
Global logistics service, with side aim of distributing surplus food to areas
that need it.

Big data backed surgery scheduling for units with high contention, to minimize
patient loss.

~~~
dhruvkar
On surplus food distribution -- do efforts like this already exist?

I don't know anything about the area.

If not, it does seem like an area for impact using tech..

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mathnmusic
I would try to build a complete ontology of human skills that makes it easy to
learn anything efficiently. Started LearnAwesome towards this and contributors
have started showing up so hoping to make good progress even without taking an
year off: [https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-
awesome](https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome)

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rarrrrr
A multi-language, remote debugging/metrics-first/featherweight-processes JIT
platform like BEAM/HiPE targeting ia32/e, arm that can run as a process or an
unikernel... written in a compiled language (C subset, C++ subset, Haskell,
Rust, Crystal).

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quickthrower2
A Roomba that can do wet washing, spot stain removal and some basic
restoration stuff.

I also had an idea of an elbow greaser: a robotic arm that would keep applying
a cleaning product eg alcohol and rubbing until a stain is removed.

------
opendomain
A new internet - decentralized to prevent all the walled gardens

~~~
muzani
How does this work? All the walled gardens are voluntary.

------
codingslave
Machine learning model to generate readable web page spam that ruins and
inundates googles search engine.

~~~
is_true
A los of people beat you on that one

