Before I die I want to...
beforeidieiwantto.org
beforeidieiwantto.org
"and all other goodness" is what this is. It is an art to exist as a whole and actually live. Hacker news is more than "vc drama," and "startups," it is about taking control of your universe because it is all you have and all you make it.
Take my advice when the inevitable awakening hits you and take longer breaks and look, really look. The world is way more fun than "feeling like you are wasting productive time."
What do you want to _____ before you die?
I am doing it.
People from the USA have much bigger aspirations such as to travel, run companies and dance on Broadway.
People from India want to go to school or own a shop / car.
Note: I know this is a generalisation but from a 5 minutes on each this is the general feel I get.
EDIT: Actually on further examination the wishes of the people from different regions in India vary massively.
What I found interesting was the level of how achievable most of the yearnings were.
People seem really scared to set goals for themselves they may not be able to achieve (to bad those are all the really valuable goals).
For those of us in the 3rd world (Uruguay in my case), it's not "really easy" - it represents possibly a year or several years worth of earnings, plus a lot of diplomatic hassles (haven't been able to visit the US yet because of visa requirements, for example), and the fear of being turned back at the border after all that.
For many people in my country, traveling (possibly on the wedding trip) is the high point in their lives.
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On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
For start-ups, it would be nice to be able to parse all of the things people want to do, and see if you could make that happen. If the site had enough answers (lets say if everyone on facebook did this, so say 400 million) and you could parse all the info to classify it into discrete groups, then maybe you'd find that 15 million people want to ride an elephant in the antarctic before they die. It could uncover some interesting business ideas.
And for the more technically inclined you could take the images and text as a training set for AI handwriting recognition, with the added help that each piece of handwriting starts with the same words. Or face-recog to match sex, race, age, then read the words and come up with some generalizations of who wants what.
All in all, I think there is plenty of material which can make this gratify your intellectual curiosity. Depends if you want to look for it, or want to be spoon fed it.
And deliver that line straight-faced, without errors, at conversational speed.