6 ms·

Ask HN: With 2 years and no obligations, what would you build?

23 points by Kevin_S 9y ago

HockeyPlayer 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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!
- juliansamarjiev 9y ago
  Been waiting for this for ages!
akulbe 9y ago
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.
skylark 9y ago
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.
- mbrock 9y ago
  I had a similar idea: a forum with endlessly branching threads, where important nodes get highlighted as "subforums".
- meric 9y ago
  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.
no1youknowz 9y ago
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-9e8b88418e30 https://medium.com/@petkanics/livepeer-whitepaper-9e8b88418e...
SirLJ 9y ago
Sand castles somewhere in the tropics, while sipping cold margaritas and puffing fat cohibas...
perilunar 9y ago
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?
toomuchtodo 9y ago
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?
muzani 9y ago
A story generator, based around tvtropes.
JJarrard 9y ago
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 9y ago
  I think success is more dependent on marketing/promotion effort, than number of apps you would build.
drakonka 9y ago
I would build my dream project, which I've been working on for years - a snail simulation.
urahara 9y ago
Some VR apps or robots.
zapperdapper 9y ago
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. :)
twoquestions 9y ago
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
thesmileyone 9y ago
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!
peteevans 9y ago
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!

23 points by Kevin_S 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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!
juliansamarjiev 9y ago
Been waiting for this for ages!

akulbe 9y ago

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.

skylark 9y ago

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.

mbrock 9y ago
I had a similar idea: a forum with endlessly branching threads, where important nodes get highlighted as "subforums".
meric 9y ago
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.

no1youknowz 9y ago

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-9e8b88418e30 https://medium.com/@petkanics/livepeer-whitepaper-9e8b88418e...

SirLJ 9y ago

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

perilunar 9y ago

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?

toomuchtodo 9y ago

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?

muzani 9y ago

A story generator, based around tvtropes.

JJarrard 9y ago

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 9y ago
I think success is more dependent on marketing/promotion effort, than number of apps you would build.

drakonka 9y ago

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

urahara 9y ago

Some VR apps or robots.

zapperdapper 9y ago

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. :)

twoquestions 9y ago

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

thesmileyone 9y ago

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!

peteevans 9y ago

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!