Ask HN: You have 1 year and enough money to live. What would you build?

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/

2: https://github.com/borgbase/vorta

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

A new internet - decentralized to prevent all the walled gardens

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