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Startup Ideas
- strange_things 5y agothis blog summarises what's wrong with the world today
- dinedal 5y agohttps://www.gwern.net/Startup-ideas#pet-lemon-market https://www.gwern.net/Startup-ideas#pet-lemon-market what the actual fuck? seriously positing that a company sell purpose made pets with illnesses to extract money from people who love them? what kind of "value" did this add to the world? disgusting.
- sethammons 5y agoI advise not looking up Japan's live creature keychains where a little turtle is doomed to die in a pouch. "So cute!" or something. I find it horrible.
- SamBam 5y agoI've heard some talk about a CO2 Coin before (one where a coin is mined by carbon capture). I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons why it would not work, but it would be the only kind of crypto I'd ever be interested in owning.
- missedthecue 5y agoA centralized CO2 coin would work. Drop off your CO2 at our depot and we'll deposit coin in your account. Not sure how you'd decentralize a physical process though.
- prakhar897 5y agoIt's already decentralized. U can give each other the CO2 capsule as a form of currency.
- kimixa 5y agoI have no idea how to do this without opening yourself up to near-trivial cheating either, as the validation of work isn't intrinsically linked to the actual effort like current crypto coin systems rely on. And if there's a centralized arbiter validating people's capture results, then you've just invented a centralized currency? Why have crypto at all? It sounds like carbon credits (with all it's failings) with extra steps.
- rzzzt 5y agoAlso runs afoul of the cobra effect -- people can burn more stuff to produce CO2, then capture and deliver it to retrieve coin.
- meowkit 5y ago> I have no idea how to do this without opening yourself up to near-trivial cheating either, as the validation of work isn't intrinsically linked to the actual effort like current crypto coin systems rely on. This is known as the oracle problem and is actively being worked on.
- tsujp 5y agoThere was recently a launch on the Ethereum mainnet for a carbon credit DAO called Klima. Might be worth checking out, I’m reading up on it myself.
- count 5y agoThere’s a book with this at its core - Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoI’m reading it right now. A fascinating exploration of how humanity may be able to act in the face of climate change. It doesn’t try to sugar coat things and I appreciate that.
- karteum 5y agoConsidering the absolutely huge CO2/environmental impact of BTC and other proof-of-work cryptos, talking about a CO2-coin for the purpose of CO2 sequestration sounds like quite a joke to me...
- SamBam 5y agoBut the whole point is that it's not a proof-of-work crypto, or at least not a proof of useless mathematical number spinning. It's based entirely on carbon capture. There are non-proof-of-work cryptos already out there.
- Uberphallus 5y agoThe more bitcoins you mint, the more carbon you can capture! Perpetual money machine!
- jrockway 5y agoGwern is a treasure trove of good reading. I think my favorite idea is the Bonsai simulator. Low energy investment, but you end up with something neat over a long period of time. You friends would probably think it's neat when you post an update every year. And, you don't need any new technology, someone could just make this tonight.
- smodad 5y agoI feel like I always learn something new whenever I read Gwern's articles. I found this idea particularly hilarious for some reason: ceiling-mounted infrared beam emitters+guidance infrared camera, steered by segmenting CNN: it automatically detects & warms up the bare skin segments of female objects until thermal equilibrium of 37.5°C is reached, ensuring thermal comfort of women without requiring heavy clothing—thereby resolving the Great Office Thermostat Wars once and for all.
- cyberbanjo 5y agoKinda like the rejected pitch off Silicon Valley
- beefman 5y agoIndoor Tree-Climbing Gym[1] is like my Tree Cross[2] [1] https://www.gwern.net/Startup-ideas#indoor-tree-climbing-gym https://www.gwern.net/Startup-ideas#indoor-tree-climbing-gym [2] http://lumma.org/microwave/#2006.09.15 http://lumma.org/microwave/#2006.09.15
- Sniffnoy 5y agoThe closest thing to the "indoor tree-climbing gym" that I can think of might be the City Museum in St. Louis.
- lend000 5y agoI really like the idea of mouse longevity perpetual swaps. Wasn't too interested in any of the other ones.
- missedthecue 5y ago"non-medical hearing aids but for people with misophonia" Wow. That is brilliant. Plus, the startup could plausibly advertise to VCs how they use AI and machine learning to cancel out chewing sounds, and they'd have $30 million in funding by the end of the week.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoit is 15% of adults, but obviously it should be hearing aid as platform, with anti-misophonia as first killer app.
- robbedpeter 5y agoThere's a massive cartel of 5 shadowy, evil mega corporations to overcome in the hearing aid space with lobbying chops and deeply embedded legal fuckery on the level of big pharma. They use their position to exploit one of the most vulnerable populations on the planet, charging many thousands of usd for devices that cost $5 or less in mass production. They created a pseudomedicine called audiology and established regional and state level boards to maintain an iron grip on medical device classification, and have ignored decades of activism and campaigns to open the market despite massive bipartisan support and action all the way up to the presidential level. Innovations in the market are quietly litigated into oblivion, or purchased and incorporated into the existing framework of rent extraction from the elderly and disabled. Until we see punitive action taken to dismantle the groups behind price gouging and medical device restrictions, the market for hearing devices is off limits. There are a few exceptions, but the suppression of competition is brutal, ruthless to the extreme.
- mgkimsal 5y agoBose's "hearphones" seem to be trying to make inroads in to that space. What's your view on those?
- nonameiguess 5y agoThis is unfortunately quite true. My wife is hard of hearing. Thankfully, the devices are covered by insurance, but that is arguably part of the problem as it just subsidizes extortionary pricing. We're talking near ten grand for something that is technically impressive, but not any more than normal ANC headphones, and they haven't improved much while all other audio processing devices continue getting better. And insurance didn't cover it until a little over a decade ago, leaving her functionally deaf for most of her life when she didn't need to be. This kind of thing has a serious chilling effect on people, too. I can see it in the way I entered the software industry and decided to become an engineer after leaving the Army. I skyrocketed past her within a few years to the point I'm earning more than double what she does now and she's been doing it for 20 years. I puzzled for years over why she seems to so consistently get ignored and doesn't advocate for herself until I realized the obvious reason. She's been sitting in meetings and having face-to-faces with people for decades in which she couldn't hear what they were saying and she learned to just stay quiet and nod along, so no one has ever noticed her. It's a lifelong habit now leading to self-doubt, low self-esteem, peers thinking you're stuck up or unfriendly or even stupid. None of it had to be that way.
- EZ-Cheeze 5y ago#9981: Platform that enables a conversation to be had between entities made up of multiple people suggesting and voting for the most interesting, thought-provoking and engaging responses. The resulting conversations may be of a higher quality than ones between single individuals. #9986: Movie recommendation engine based on subtitle analysis. Comparing mean word and sentence length, words-per-hour mean, dialogue density variation over time, lexical complexity and vocabulary overlap will uncover similarities in the fabric of tone, pacing and subject matter. #9989: A website where people can define and popularize musical genres by listing a few exemplar songs, describing their perceived shared qualities and linking to samples. Seed songs can be similar in their entirety or just part of duration. Others can then suggest more that fit. #9990: A random restaurant, where a computer creates random bite-sized combinations from a big list of ingredients. Each time, this will result in a unique new interplay of flavor and texture. Personal scoring will uncover correlations of what goes together or performs comparably
- tjader 5y ago> #9981: Platform that enables a conversation to be had between entities made up of multiple people suggesting and voting for the most interesting, thought-provoking and engaging responses. The resulting conversations may be of a higher quality than ones between single individuals. Are you looking for something like https://www.kialo.com/ https://www.kialo.com/?
- asiachick 5y ago9989 will never work because people won't do it in good faith, they'll do it in whatever way they believe will make their music or their friend's music more popular. Go check out the mess that tags are on soundcloud.
- hoten 5y ago9990: In Google offices, you can find "Machine Learning optimized cookies". At least, you could pre-COVID, dunno now. There's even a published paper on it: https://research.google/pubs/pub46507/ https://research.google/pubs/pub46507/
- 5y ago
- jayd16 5y agoI like rock wall climbing but tree-climbing sounds dangerous. How could you fall safely without hitting branches on the way down?
- DocTomoe 5y agoHinges in branches automatically fold once a fall has been detected by video surveillance/weight&load sensors. Combine with foamy floor/ballpens.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoThat sounds like an overcomplicated maintenance nightmare with a too-high false positive and negative rate.
- revorad 5y agoIndoor tree-climbing gyms caught my eye. My first thought was "that's dumb, we already have natural trees outdoors. Why do we need to put them indoors?". Then I remembered we also have natural cliffs and indoor wall climbing is still huge. :-D OT: I love the design of this website! Some interesting details here - https://www.gwern.net/Design https://www.gwern.net/Design
- jerrre 5y agoRe indoor wallclimbing: I don't have any natural cliffs near me (I think the closest thing would be abandoned quarries at >2hrs driving) and I think that holds for many people.
- mynegation 5y ago> "that's dumb, we already have natural trees outdoors. Why do we need to put them indoors?" Do you live some place where it does not snow in winter?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoAt least at my climbing gym they change the routes frequently, providing a lot of variety and covering a wider spectrum of grading than any single location anywhere nearby can. Not to mention it never rains or snows in the gym, you don't have to haul equipment to the site, and it's slightly safer.
- carapace 5y agoI think recreating tall cliffs indoors is dumb. Why climb up high? Instead make a large cylinder that rotates slowly and mount it over a ball pit.
- mattowen_uk 5y agoBuried under miscellaneous: > NN GANs for photorealistic-but-legal child porn Hmmm.
- ptsneves 5y agoWhat would be the legality of this, given mere possession is illegal in many jurisdictions? The only way i see this positively, is as a kind of methadone for pedophiles, where they can wean their habits without further harming more children. Honestly i see this as a gateway drug for real harm, but for sure it is a damn controversial and thought provoking proposal.
- irthomasthomas 5y agoYes it's an obvious gateway to real harm as you said. Which is why, last I checked, it was outlawed in Britain. You aren't allowed to skirt the law by using artistic representations of criminal acts. Which led to the tragi-comic episode of a man being locked up for forwarding a porno featuring an actor in a Tony the Tiger costume.
- hahajk 5y agoHas it actually been demonstrated to be a gateway? It reminds me of the argument that playing GTA is a gateway to becoming an actual thug.
- irthomasthomas 5y agoYes. To demonstrate lets phrase the question thus: Does watching videos of people drinking cola, make people more likely to actually buy and drink more cola? For more details, I recommend reading material from the advertising industry, starting with Edward Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)
- yaveti 5y ago
- bayesian_horse 5y agoFirewood for rent
- oakfr 5y agoOng bak was the real movie reference to use for tree climbing.
- axegon_ 5y agoGwern Branwen possibly has one of the best blogs/personal sites on the internet period.
- baud147258 5y agoI like the idea of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games; I remember taking part in a forum CYOA (where the forum posters vote on which option will be chosen) where the writer used dungeon AI to write the text; once they arrived at an interesting cut off point, they just added the choices and posted on the forum
- cpfohl 5y agoI read the acronym wrong the first time through: cover your own a...dventure..
- GDC7 5y agoSay a startup actually goes and implements one of Gwern's ideas...they further become a great success and then a unicorn. Would Gwern point to his idea and try to take credit for the startup success or would he stick to SV mantra that ideas are cheap and low value?
- mushishi 5y agoDon't know, good question. But why should we care about credit? I know we do but should we? FWIW, I have lots of ideas on my Trello, it's not hard to come up ideas that have potential in my eyes, but the problem is to have energy or motivation to test-drive them and see if they could be sculpted into fruitful applications, not to mention profitability and marketing which I know nothing about.
- GDC7 5y ago> but the problem is to have energy or motivation to test-drive them Exactly, I feel Gwern is sidestepping this problem and could leverage the social hatred around the future founder of multibillion dollar company to claim that they are a fraud and he's the one who came up with the idea. kinda like the Winklevi with Zuck, but in the era of blogging, social media and metaverse
- gwern 5y agoPeople have already used my ideas, like https://www.lipreading.org/ https://www.lipreading.org/ or a bunch of things derived from my anime GAN work https://www.gwern.net/Faces https://www.gwern.net/Faces (Admittedly, no unicorns, but how many people can say that?) I've never asked a cent, because ideas are cheap, and timing/implementation everything: https://www.gwern.net/Timing https://www.gwern.net/Timing
- frobisher 5y agoReminds me of this video of Paul Graham, where he says that startup ideas like a beautiful woman to a nerd, "if you got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me"! [see 3:00 onwards ish in video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI
- CartyBoston 5y agoHah! All nerds are attracted to women. Hah! Nerds don't know how to have sex. God he is tone deaf.
- mapster 5y agoBring back the dumb terminal. Place mobile phone on a docking pad and see a standard PC OS on the screen - open apps, access files or use a browser. When done just grab the phone and go.
- amd64 5y agoHave you tried Samsung Dex?
- abbot2 5y agoThis already exists: https://ubuntu-touch.io/ https://ubuntu-touch.io/
- bingohbangoh 5y agoIt's mostly dead at this point. The list of devices includes phones as recent as the Oneplus One. [0] [0]: https://www.ubports.com/devices/promoted-devices https://www.ubports.com/devices/promoted-devices
- abbot2 5y agoTake the state of the project as a market fit test of the idea?
- westurner 5y agoIIUC, in 2021, you can dock a PineTab or a PinePhone with a USB-C PD hub that has HDMI, USB, and Ethernet and use any of a number of Linux Desktop operating systems on a larger screen with full size keyboard and mouse. The PineTab has a backlit keyboard and IIUC the PinePhone has a keyboard & aux battery case that doesn't yet also include the fingerprint sensor or wireless charging. https://www.pine64.org/blog/ https://www.pine64.org/blog/
- jsemrau 5y agoI had built a geo-spatial build-your-own adventure game. The problem is not in tech. The problem is that people want to be entertained WHERE they are bored not go somewhere to not be bored. The ask for adoption is too high. Unless of course you can collect rare Pokemon.
- zaybqp 5y agoWould someone please try all of these ideas one at a time and document all the experience for all of us? That should give us an equivalent of 10 seasons of Silicon Valley.
- headgasket 5y agoCarbon(Co2) credits to offset the cost/impact of your dog/pet, so you can have an eco responsable pet. Sell nft based tokens of these credits that can be pressed into a unique collar to show your mindfulness. Anybody ?
- gitgud 5y ago> "Pet Lemon Market - Monetizing pet ill health into revenue streams: exploit the temporal inconsistency of people in having high elasticity in pet purchase costs but extreme price insensitivity/ inelasticity in purchasing pet medical care by giving away sick pets (especially bulldogs), & getting vet kickbacks or direct profit-sharing." This is pretty horrifying, and doesn't even sound like a facetious idea...
- justusthane 5y agoThese are absolutely satirical. And good satire, at that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DeBraid 5y agoWhile morbid to some, pet crematoriums are potentially great business for 3 reasons: * service that humans require in perpetuity * luxury status good * no one wants to own/operate such a business (few competitors) https://twitter.com/brentbeshore/status/901908518675947520?lang=en https://twitter.com/brentbeshore/status/901908518675947520?l...
- PoignardAzur 5y agoThe conclusion is "[Fictional equivalent of Satan] would approve greatly", so I'd assume it's a joke. (Also, the scheme would be super impractical to monetize)
- danielkyne 5y agoThese are obviously (?) mostly facetious, but for people interested in actual startup ideas, worth thinking more about problems than just market opportunities: "The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself." — Paul Graham on 'How to Get Startup Ideas' - http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html Further reading; here's the initial problem and customer segment that 99 of the biggest companies in tech today started with originally: "99 Startup Problems" - https://www.opinionx.co/99-problems/ https://www.opinionx.co/99-problems/
- ricardobeat 5y agoI could barely keep reading after "Pet Lemon Market". The way it talks about disease and emotional bonds is cruel beyond measure. And then.. > CutFit: a cutting-edge new fitness fad, exploiting the fact that repairing biological tissue after injury is energetically & metabolically expensive, requiring ~20kj/g5. Enough tissue damage could represent a substantial caloric sink > GANs for photorealistic-but-legal child porn I don't know if this is supposed to be funny, but it's not
- runnerup 5y ago> GANs for photorealistic-but-legal child porn Not to mention that this still isn't legal, at least in the USA. That said, the top line above the table of contents does say that many of these are supposed to be satirical. > Startup Ideas: Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, *satirical* or serious. I suspect a lot of people may be getting caught up on items that are genuinely supposed to be satire. Whether its good satire or not, reasonable minds can disagree. But I find it unlikely that three you picked out weren't intended as satire. However, I'd also be surprised if a few unreasonable people didn't seriously consider building a business around these.
- duped 5y agoThere is a pretty famous SCOTUS case on this, Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition. Given the ruling I don't think it's illegal, although you'd definitely have legal challenges.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y agoAuthor claims, > satirical or serious. And seem to have put lot of effort in maintaining that ambiguity. Self plug: If you'd like to see less ambiguous site for startup ideas, I've been running a validation platform for over 2 years[1] where 'Problems' are the first class citizen, Startup ideas, MVPs which address that problem goes into comments. [1] https://needgap.com https://needgap.com
- finfinfin 5y ago
- _zfxr 5y agodynamic cat toys have been on my mind a lot lately.
- motohagiography 5y agoThe post is the fridge magnet poetry of startups, which at least provides a baseline or waypoint co-ordinate. They aren't startup ideas, it's a list of things nobody wants. Clever, but the general problem of ascertaining desires by speculating about them and then testing them is more interesting than just iterating ideas and seeing if any are funny or inspiring. I'd speculate the best startup ideas will come from more literary minds with insight into desire, and wonder if we can get better results by looking at how succesful startups in fact did not solve a problem at all, but instead understood a desire and implemented something to manage it. The difference is that desire is understood before it is problematized, where I think as technologists, we all have a tendency to filter experiences through the lens of problematizing, where we index on the things that seem solvable, and ignore the ones that are less concrete, but it's the incremental response to the more nebulous desires that ultimately scale into massive companies. Snapchat responded to young people's desire for porn. Facebook responded to the desire of harvard students to signal their status. Google originally responded to the FOSS community's desire for indexed technical documentation, and then to the desire to signal tech savvyness to align to power. Airbnb met a desire for authenticity (counter signalling status) in travel experiences. Some years ago I did an exercise about mapping startups and tech to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and what clicked is there wan't a tech problem I couldn't eventually find a solution to - I just couldn't think of other people I wanted to listen to and respond to their desires, which sounds awful, but I'd challenge anyone to answer the question of who they want to listen to and support. Chances are, you will have the same problem. Wishing some people were a different way doesn't count, and educating them about some truth you are in posession of ends as well as one might expect. Who do you want to listen to? Problems without people attached to them are boring and useless iterations on disconnected ideas. A version of the post of that listed groups of people Gwern would like to listen to and respond to their desires would be super interesting though.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago> Indoor Tree-Climbing Gym Congratulations, you just invented rope pyramids: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rope+pyramid&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rope+pyramid&t=ffab&ia=web