Ask HN: What kind of ideas are not VC-backable but should exist in the future?
I have been thinking about what the current VC fund structure limits the founder's imagination about the future for a long time.
Please share your wildest ideas.
Please share your wildest ideas.
Seriously, did you truly "need" everything you purchased new and could you have gotten it second hand or forgone?
I already hear grumbling from the crowd, "opportuniy cost", "time", "but shiny!", etc.
That is the trade off for not feeding a system energy that is demostrably destroying everything of true value on this planet.
It's worth it.
The waste feel needlessly big because you touch and see it. But on a real level, your and mine personal trash does not matter.
¹ Open to seeing real numbers if they exist!
It seems like one of those things that sounds like a big deal, like recycling, but when you look into it, it’s actually not cost effective to address it except a few special cases.
On the other hand, waste is a literal side-effect of all possible life, going all the way to level of entropy always increasing. All life processes produce waste, even digital life would produce waste heat and whatever electricity generating process it consumes from can’t be 100% efficient.
I view modern packaging as a really amazing invention. People can mail me a fragile piece of art from across the world and it can reach me quickly and safely. Factories can massively produce safely sealed food items that prevent literally tons of food waste through packaging, increasing nutrition availability, water availability and more.
Most modern packaging is virtually a miracle.
Where I agree with you about packaging waste though is when it is used for branding and designed around aesthetic form or market testing rather than utility. Disposability is not a harmful goal at all, but waste generated purely to support branding is hard to defend.
How do you ensure that they get properly sterilized/cleaned after every use?
How many years of life are you aiming at? What is your system for finding containers at the end of their life that may soon fail?
What weights are you aiming for. What strength are you aiming for. What about padding?
What price point are you aiming at for each container?
How easily removable is the ink? What happens if the ink gets removed in transit? Is the store allowed to re-ink that, or are they required to ship the package as damaged back to the manufacturer.
How do you ensure that the package has not been tampered with?
Given that this will result in extra bulk and weight compared to a custom designed package, (which we have now), how confident are you that this would end up being carbon neutral?
Ban plastic containers and you’re halfway there.
If companies were made responsible for their packaging, this kind of scheme could more easily become economical.
But even so, for many things, just reduced/alternative packaging would be a huge win.
An egregious example is shampoo. Especially the ones with pump-action dispensers (I won't even mention the glitter/plastic-microbeads that many shampoos contain). These containers use a good deal of plastic, and are surely bad for the environment. An alternative would be that you own a nice pump-action dispenser, and buy shampoo top-ups in plastic pouches - or even take your dispenser to the store where it's filled by tap. I believe I have seen something like the top-up pouches, it should be strongly encouraged, with packaging taxes of some kind.
for your products you can either arrange to take them back, or you pay a tax according to what would it cost to recycle.
for electronics for example that can't be fully recycled or put on a landfill or burned because of dangerous materials that tax should be accordingly higher.
The ultimate successful exit sees the entire sector of “tax service middleman” drying up once you have cut off the revenue of TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation lobby, so they can no longer keep lobbying the government to have this complicated process instead of just automatically doing your taxes and sending you a bill like every other civilized country. Your company vanishes along with the rest of this sector.
The analogy I used to use is a Robinhood for Taxes, but really now that Robinhood is increasingly seen as a manipulative tool, maybe I don't really want to associate with that brand anymore? (although I'm still a user though)
His last episode was all about why tax prep companies mislead customers and the Patriot Act team set up a site that points to free tax filing services. Characteristically, with a vulgar name: https://www.turbotaxsucksass.com/
Canada's been experimenting with this lately [1].
Frankly, as a rule of thumb, if something is potentially big and impactful, and isn't well suited to being funded by a VC, it should just be a government service.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/...
I’m also a turbo tax customer. :(
The UX simplicity and documentation is just amazing.
You may have a point on SEO. While SEO means nothing to me as a user, the fact that people think free apps don't exist certainly shows a marketing problem.
The growth imperative required by VC funding is directly or indirectly to blame for all the awful things about Dropbox mentioned in https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/. It's difficult to see how a product like Syncthing would be of interest to VCs.
Nobody who wants to deal with shell level management of a running program that also needs to communicate with other nodes is part of the target user market for Dropbox, totally different worlds, different feature sets, everything.
A lot of smaller markets exist. For example, I did a keto recipe app for Malay food. Malay food is different to the usual keto recipes; with rice based food, you can't simply replace everything with cauliflower. The market was about 200k people, too small for VCs but it was in high demand for the target market. People just kept asking to buy more. We only pulled out of the market because it was (literally) toxic and cultlike.
But similar problems exist. Primal diet for Japanese food maybe. Job boards for part timers and teenagers. A better language learning app, maybe for something very specific like Latin.
Take an existing market and hyperfocus it.
Banks actually called us up and asked us if we wanted to borrow money because we had steady revenue. Our delivery and food supply partners were actually interested in being early stage investors, so there's that route.
We started with about $2500, most of it going into salary. Suppliers were happy to send the stuff direct to customers when we started and let us pay them the money due once a month, at a smaller profit margin. As we started selling more, we'd keep a literal ton of stock on hand.
Local variation: "Never eat more than 25g carb"
"Drink lots of water. Eat a tablespoon of butter with every meal."
"Passing out is normal. Your body is detoxing itself."
"Soy sauce contains sugar. Substitute all your sugar with these substances."
"Yes, keto is expensive, but you can save costs by eating eggs and drinking lots of water. I eat 10 eggs a day and I'm just fine."
"If you want to further accelerate fat loss, here are some pills you can get. They're not approved by the health ministry, but the health ministry is bought out by Nestle and trying to get you to eat sugar and carbs."
Anyone who goes outside this norm gets bullied and banned from the community. It's really tempting to just blindly agree and let people kill themselves if your salary is coming from such a community.
There's a saying that users don't buy drills, they buy holes. The 'hole' here is that a keto dieter wants to lose 20kg in 2 weeks. Many are willing to die to achieve it; there's lots of stories of people who are crash dieting for a wedding or whose husbands have left them.
Keto diets are misleading too. A lot of the weight loss comes from water, not fat. The rapid fat loss gives the diet credibility, especially when someone has tried other things and only lost about 2kg with exercise and reduced calories. Once you've established that credibility, you can tell them anything. It's nice to have a business where people will blindly agree to buy whatever you sell them, but I don't want to deal with that kind of responsibility.
If you eat nothing but butter and eggs for a week straight you'll get drastic weight loss. It is common sense that cutting calories and exercise is effective. So if you do follow a a strict no carb diet, you'll be surprised at how much more effective it is, without going hungry. You get a lot of delicious things on the menu - meat, butter, eggs, oil, milk, cheese, meat, butter. And my role as a developer is to show how you can combine those things into something edible, like flaxseed pizza, konjac stew, and bringing sugar free sweeteners back into their life.
After a week on this diet, bread will suddenly seem like the best thing in the world, and you'll find yourself happy to throw money at the app that sells you flaxseed bread.
You'll never hit a unicorn valuation, but you could get a a point where you don't work too hard and live a comfortable life.
Can you provide some links to your app and press?
(UCSF has started waging a war against the HFCS lobby in the USA, which has used the same tactics as the sugar and cigarette lobbies.)
New law? Push the update.
Pull old law easy peasy. diff/grep on newer versions or the county's over.
Vote on what makes it to prod, sub-teams for smaller areas like parking tickets, etc.
Yeah, it's simple at the end, but digitizing it all, linking it to the underlying databases, root privileges, etc. would make it all run much smoother. Be nice to see people get involved more too.
Pretty sure it’s one of Audrey Tang’s projects [2]. She’s a member of the cabinet who is also an all-around hacker.
[1] https://congress.crowd.law/case-vtaiwan.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
People iterate knowledge together in a git-based knowledge base network.
Upload your own knowledge base, wiki to the network.
Push/pull -> new thoughts, breakthroughs...
Merge -> different knowledge branch
Then build a search engine on top of it.
"How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request Washington DC has made GitHub the authoritative digital source for DC laws."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/how-i-changed-th...
Design laptops and cellphones to last 50 or 100 years plus. Start designing for a long term and mature computer industry.
the main issue i run into with repairs tends to be mask roms / asics / gate arrays that are undocumented and long gone from the market. there are ways around that, but they require great effort. it's only in special niches like arcade machines or iconic 80s synths where people will go so far as to decap and image dies in order to get the needed information.
there is a particular value an object must have in order to tip the scales in favor of repair over replacement. it simply isn't practical to spend a major portion of a device's cost to repair it unless it is special in some way. i place value on repairing things and buying used but a lot of that is out of a personal feeling of pride in repairing and reusing. board level rework is a far cry from changing ones own oil.
on the topic of designing laptops and cell phones to last 50-100 years, you can absolutely make use of communications equipment from 1920-1970. radio teletypes didn't stop working, people still buy and sell them.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform https://librelounge.org/episodes/39-mnt-reform-with-lukas-ha...
It's important to understand that while tech-obsessed founders, like most of the people found in Hacker News, usually think of tech-startups and VC being almost synonymous with entrepreneurship, that's not at all true.
Lots of people all around the world consider themselves (and are!) entrepreneurs, without necessarily building innovative tech or seeking VC-like growth prospects.
E.g. the corner restaurant you ate at last week? Opened by an entrepreneur. That barbershop that cut your hair? Same. Even much bigger ideas fit in this category - the software that runs the local gym? Possibly a VC-backed startup, but also possibly just a relatively small company focused on a small market, not aiming for sky-high valuations but quietly churning out millions in income.
These kinds of businesses have existed for long before VCs, and it's entirely possible to get funding for them the "traditional" way, e.g. raising a friends-and-family round, getting money from a bank, self-financing, charging customers from day one, etc.
This will never be VC backable because the market is small and each local government has special needs and unique requirements. The cost per customer is high and there's a hard cap on the TAM.
I'm always curious how people discover these kinds of business ideas.
Sadly, the vendor provided scanned copies of JIRA user-stories as documentation of their app's API. Despite much struggling, the vendor wouldn't implement even the most basic auto-generated documentation for their API (Swagger). Bugs filed against their product regularly had a 3 month turn around time.
If there were an open source product in this space I could have forked it, made the changes I needed, submitted a pull request and then escalated it with management to get it mainlined by the vendor.
We were their only client for this product and they needed us to implement their system as an example of success so they could make further sales. But their secrecy made good-faith efforts at building integrations with their product extremely difficult. This might have been survivable if the vendor was good at communicating.
Alas this project just got delayed for another year after it was discovered by one of my old coworkers that the new system wasn't calculating property taxes correctly. If we had taken the vendor at their word this would have not been discovered and incorrect taxes may have gone out. Nobody loves taxes, but people rightfully hate it when their local government makes preventable mistakes.
Open source software in this space would reduce the rate of errors made in these scenarios and allow the public to verify the correctness of the system that taxes their property. As a bonus the cost of developing these systems could be spread across multiple local governments who each employ their own developers, rather than each group struggling through this process on their own once a decade.
(not only is that incompatible with VC funding, it's incompatible with capitalism & western style individualism, so arguably operating in such a fashion is unreachable from our current society, even if being able to operate in such a fashion would be superior from the perspective of the whole species)
Long term returns motivates you not to destroy the planet to achieve the goal.
Really Long term returns hinge on the fact that converting the asteroid belt O'Neill cylinders is the future of mankind and destroying the planet to get there is fine as long as you get enough people off this rock first.
https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/
Amsterdam's cityhall (NL) is piloting an implementation, so perhaps there is hope that it can go beyond a theoretical framework proposal.
We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally a 100x return for humanity.
The need is there. The scale is there. But it'll never get VC funding for obvious reasons.
This seems awfully high, what does it include?
For example, there's a charitable factory making soap in Scotland. They give us a few hundred thousand bars of soap every 6 months or so, and we ship em out to 15+ refugee camps in Greece to ensure the hygiene of 100,000 people are met.
Our 2019 budget was $10,000...
The advent of Bluetooth has made it normal to have things hanging out of your ears, but a lot of hearing-impaired people would feel less self-conscious if their hearing aids were invisible, yet still functional.
Pipe dream, I know... but one can dream.
See this photo: https://www.listenlively.com/_next/static/images/rechargeabl...
They claim to be "invisible", but what they really mean is that the tube from the aid to the ear is really thin and transparent, and the aid itself is skin-toned. But it's not invisible, anyone can see it, and it's still big! (though light-years smaller than they were in the 90s...)
First, a clarification. There are in-the-ear hearing aids and over-the-ear hearing aids. The difference is usually one of power. An in-the-ear hearing aid is usually for older people with minor hearing loss. Someone like me that is profoundly deaf or with a severe hearing loss needs more powerful amplification. More power == more energy, and more energy == bigger batteries. That means that we need an over-the-ear hearing aid, like the one in the image above.
The size factor for over-the-ear aids isn't due to design, but rather to the battery. The battery is the biggest part! They're this big: https://helpingmehear.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/hearing...
This means the aid cannot be ANY SMALLER than the battery.
If we could eliminate the battery entirely and rely on some other energy store, then the size of the aid could be slimmed down to almost flat.
The other problem with batteries is that batteries need to be changed when they die. My battery lasts somewhere between 7-9 days before it dies. If we were to use a smaller battery than the image above, it would die even more often. And trust me, it SUCKS to be mid-conversation when a battery dies... and it sucks even more if you didn't have any batteries with you and now you have to run to a local pharmacy to buy some, and you're trying to communicate with a cashier or whatever while completely deaf... Oof... But I digress... :)
Anyway! So the dream, as it were, is to create a battery-less aid that can run off body heat or something magical like that.
I haven't upgraded due to costs. Personally, I would like to see the manufacturing costs of better hearing aides come down. The last time I looked into it the costs was about $3500 per ear for modern in the ear hearing aides.
So this question might have some interesting answers if we take this knowledge into consideration as well, as some of the ideas here could potentially be funded by these VCs even if not by traditional ones.
We're fighting a huge war of misinformation and the current method of nice graphs and we'll constructed prose is failing[0].
So we need to use much of the same tactics used by misinformation groups to spread facts.
Plot twist: The underlying framework, database connection system, and model is sane - so that when you get to the point where the walled garden doesn't let you change what you want you can dive into the underlying system to do significant changes.
Actually, I wondered if someone would bring up Access. The problem with it is that it is trying to be a "real" database with an accessible interface. I feel it doesn't do either well. It can be very useful, but never simple and easy enough for the target users I'm thinking about.
The main block is funding. I could do it for life if it pay at least the bills, but how fund it?
Goal: Empowers humans to explore and iterate knowledge faster
Features:
- Upload your own knowledge base, wiki to join the network
- Search network-based knowledge
- 'Clone' a knowledge branch
- Edit on it then 'Push' it back to the network
- The branch owner / other users can choose to 'Pull' the update to their branch
- 'Merge' different knowledge branch
Steps:
1. Build a search engine for network-driven knowledge
2. The users iterate knowledge with other knowledge branch owners in the network
3. Build an efficient machine learning data pipeline on top of the structured knowledge input & output system
4. Use the unique data to train the customizable personal knowledge AI
Git, specifically, is bad as a backing store - as merge conflict resolution is not something you want end users to do - it's not friendly. p2p sync (OT/CRDT) is what I'm betting and building on.
If anyone is interested in this space, I'd like to discuss/geek-out on this with you. Please reach out.
Can you explain a bit more what the difference is?
For example, if you want to install/learn Haskell, Lisp...on your machine, you don't want to follow Wikipedia. Instead, you go community-generated docs or personal blogs for the updated docs.
Medical diagnosis is fundamentally an information problem, which should be both free and open source. But there may be little to no business model here.
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/
There are plenty of profitable businesses which do not fit this model and government is not equipped to invest in.
Incidentally, 19th-century America had a lot of faults and flaws (it was incredibly racist), but an absolutely unprecedented amount of scientific and industrial progress was made without much public spending at all.
for small groups nearly every dispute could pose existential risk, but for enormous groups very few disputes pose existential risk. then in the conflict side, enormous groups have MAD, where conflict itself carries existential risk. small groups of course can also be wiped out by conflict (even if they don't possess a bureaucratic mechanism to ensure that,) but the risk side of the calculation is heavier for them I think.
and enormous groups still engage in conflict with each other although it happens indirectly via proxy wars.
also paradoxically the larger the group becomes the more its interests, or "meta interests" (such as favoring stability and security), tend to align with its competitors but for small groups it's almost like every group for itself. but I believe that the calculation can tend towards cooperation being more beneficial the larger group gets. but I think this factor only applies when groups become very very large.
also there's some sort of entropy argument as in large groups cultivate more structure, organization and order and therefore it would take more energy to dismantle them so they're more stable. which not only makes them harder to dismantle but also gives them more to lose if they were to decide to tear everything down and build it up again.
that's how I think about it. what do you think?
If I put myself into that situation for a moment, as the leader of a small armed group, I can see two options at first. The first option is to go into hiding and potentially die of resource starvation if I am unable to cultivate the things needed to survive on my own (or be killed by outside attackers). The second is to grow bigger and bigger by forcibly and preemptively taking over the other small groups so I can secure my borders so to speak, but going on the offensive can also lead to premature death as well.
As a result I think some hybrid approach is needed, where one goes into hiding in a land so far away and inhospitable that nobody wants to attack, thus there's nobody to fight.
Can you explain why this is true? It's a very strong claim.
In an age of hoverboards and cheap electric scooters, something like this should be doable.
The site is made by volunteers, server costs are paid by donation, and there's full financial transparency. Legally the structure is comparable to Wikipedia/Wikimedia, and is a non-profit "association" in France.
Why volunteer? I build things because I want to. Sometimes they make it to Show HN. But nobody uses them. I lose motivation when there isn't a colleague asking me to fix things twice a day. Hospitality exchange has the network effect needed to bring in newcomers and get people involved.
My dream is that it could be much bigger. Passionate people could start other social networks within the same community: BeBook, BeChat, BeMail. I'd like to build BeTranslate, starting with Chinese/English. At first it would just be partnering with existing open-source projects (like all the CS meetups that are choosing to rename). But it would also be a commitment of these developers to never close their source, never charge fees, and always involve the community.
There's a nice paper you can read called "money is memory" which argues that keeping track of past transactions is actually a more effective way of allocating resources than using money/tokens. I've been figuring out how such a system would work in practice.
I believe that when we can more effectively and fairly manage reputation in the context of transactions (I'm not advocating some horrid "social credit" system that the Chinese government foisted on the country), then we won't need money anymore. That means no central banks as monopoly issuer of currency and I think the World will be a better place because of it.
It seems like this could also be within the scope of a single fund? The fund would own mineral rights, investors could buy in expecting those rights to appreciate in value over a very long term.
I suppose you’d want a few funds with different speculation strategies and then basically end up back at a market though.
Also I don’t see how anyone invests without the end goal _eventually_ being extraction.
Or a slightly more conversational article on his idea: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/every...
So if you are a startup wanting to build a long term business then the VC track probably isn't for you unless you are willing to either (a) get acquired or (b) IPO.
There really does need to be more revenue sharing VC options as this is the only way to support the type of long term, sustainable businesses we really need.
There are other types of investors that will happily take the 10-year old investment and ride with it for another number of years. Usually they do it by discounting the value, and thus making money that way. (not good for founders, employees, or early investors other than VCs with good clauses in their investment contracts).
Any great solution that can be successful under 100M/y probably wouldn't be of interest to VCs, so there's a lot of opportunity out there.
Many National Defense projects won't work for VC for a variety of reasons. Some can, but security clearance and regulations usually scare VCs away.
Many service based companies... not because they can't (strictly speaking) but VC has a system in place that doesn't gel well with service based approaches.
Anything that would take a long time to grow won't attract VC funds either.
A global power station that taps 'natural' electricity in the ionosphere. Unlimited free power, already in the form we need. No emissions, no need for mining or damming or drilling.
And the term 'aurora power' has a really nice ring to it.
In more detail: a few days ago on HN there was an article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362) about the risks of solar storms and EMPs on America's power infrastructure. Solar storms induce potentially huge electrical currents in the power grid. Rather than regarding it as a danger, why not find a way to harness it?
The Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American had a lovely article about electrostatic motors, powered by the Earth's electric field: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scien... (Search for the article title, there's a PDF available elsewhere on internet)
The SF writer Murray Leinster made extensive use of ionospheric electricity in many of his novellas...
This is a civilization-changer. Like I said, big.
Pick any large industry and look at the software used. It is probably not great (there is a difference between old software that works or works well enough and badly designed software that does not do its job well). Within that lies what is actually interesting, which is customer pain, and potential customers who will pay to have that solved.
https://escholarship.org/content/qt81h4g1f5/qt81h4g1f5.pdf
On a less quixotic note, electric buses, particularly dual-mode trolleybuses that never stop to refuel. They're slowly appearing but less exciting than electric cars apparently.
Cities are inefficient, expensive and unsustainable.
We could build cities in a better way. Ten times better. But why it’s not happening?
$COMPANY will allow millions of people to pool money, resources and great design to build better cities.
Our first milestone, or Tesla Roadster, will be to collect 100 million dollars in pre-orders for the first $COMPANY village.
Builders, home buyers, and a 10x great design, as if you were building a city on Mars. And maybe Elon Musk will like to help us too!
Eventually we will build entire cities from scratch, to make housing affordable and clean for everyone.
I tried to build something like this already once, and failed, but I really want to make this happen, and I want you to believe in me. So, let' talk!
[0]: https://youtu.be/GtMybYBGCwc
(please don't share this video elsewhere for now, if you can be so kind)
Edit: I will soon apply to Apollo [1] with this. Suggestions are welcome :)
Forgive a bit of optimism (and maybe arrogance): imagine AirBnB, making a cut on transactions between hosts and guests.
This specific company could make a cut acting like a marketplace between builders and homebuyers. Defensible? Not sure. Still many things to figure out.
So I'm paying taxes to the government, and then fees to some business, on top of fees for every service provided by the business?
We already tried company towns (look up Disney, among many other examples), and it's kind of fucked up. I don't think we need more of that.
Yeah, no thanks. Good luck with the idea
EDIT: btw, your site www.brunozzi.com is down. You might want to figure out CDNs before you try to disrupt cities
Social infrastructure is inordinately complex; I am not aware of a planned city that is pleasant to live in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_city
I've only been to Zamość out of these and it's grown out of the starting plan in last few centuries, but it was operating as designed for a while.
> Jan Zamoyski commissioned the Venetian (from Padua) architect Bernardo Morando to design the city, based upon the anthropomorphic concept. Its "head" was to be the Zamoyski Palace, "backbone" Grodzka Street, crossing the Great Market Square from east to west, in the direction of the palace, and with the "arms" embodied by 10 streets intersecting the main streets: Solna Street (north of the Great Market Square) and Bernardo Morando Street (south of the Great Market Square). In these streets, the other squares were placed: Salt Square (Rynek Solny) and Water Square (Rynek Wodny), functioning as the "internal organs" of the city whereas the bastions are the "hands and legs" for self-defence.[13]
And they are traditionally VC backed.
Doesn't mean they won't succeed - just that it's not the particular model I have in mind.
Without the convenience of an avi, it would just be Grizzly Adams cosplay in the woods.
Good luck on the project!
Incidentally, are you familiar with BauGruppen? It sounds in the vein of your interests.
In short, it's going to be about rethinking how we build and consider innovations in materials, in use of spaces, in reducing customization to improve efficiency. I am planning to write a long essay about it. But a lot of it is already in my head. Sorry I can't share anything more meaningful here at the moment.
BauGruppen: super interesting. Didn't know about them. Thanks a lot for sharing.
A set of patterns for creating vibrant living spaces.
According to whom?
Edit: Fixed link
VC funding means revenue optimization, which leads to either of the above 2 revenue models (or some variation thereof).
Charging your customers like how tarsnap charges its users means you won't ever make a lot of money, but it can be a sustainable business.
[edit: But these aren't sustainable businesses, necessarily, if that's what you're asking.]
It’s difficult to convince someone to fund something that can’t be sold. How do you profit by seeking fasting?
With all the push to remote work, it's not farfetched to do your daily Scrum on a Hawaii beach inside the Second Life VR.
Here's my idea:
P2P grid compute + storage that is actually cheap and can drive down the cost of computation significantly.
Can be achieved with unikernels, homomorphic encryption, ipfs. There's a lot of compute and storage available all over the world, idle, waiting to be used. A system like this can utilize it
If anyone has any insight on the technicanal foundational feasibility of this, please share :)
Let's face it. Church is boring. Most of that time on Sunday is consumed with the same old filler material. The choir sings. You stand up, you sit down, you stand up, you raise your hands, you sit down, you kneel, you stand up, you sit down. You sprinkle in hymns in between prayers. There's always The Lord's Prayer, which everyone recites by rote like zombies. The pastor/priest gets up and delivers a sermon/homily that may or may not be interesting. You stand up, sit down, a basket lands in front of you and you drop a few bucks into the donation basket, stand up again, sing another hymn, then sit down.
Finally, mercifully, it's time for communion. You wait until the row in front of you has gone, then you stand up and, like a parade of penguins, waddle down the pews until you get to the aisle where line up like lemmings and shuffle forward until you reach your destination. There's a little "this is the body of Christ, this is the blood of Christ", yadda yadda, then you sit down, stand up, sing a hymn, sit down, close your eyes for the final prayer, shake everyone's hands and leave.
For Catholics, at least, the important bit is communion, that little 5 minute sliver in the middle of an hour is the most important bit.
But hey, I mean, you're a busy person. You want to beat the crowd to the post-church Olive Garden all-you-can-eat buffet or you want to watch the football game that starts at 11:30am on the west coast, and all of that sitting and standing and murmuring along with prayers is cutting into your valuable time!
So,... drive-thru mass.
You pull up in line. There's a sign at the beginning that says, "Turn your radio to 1530 AM". You turn to the channel -- or maybe you download this week's podcast episode?! -- and it's the priest with today's sermon. He's talking about how the world is a scary place, and the only way to survive is through the grace of God. Yadda yadda. It's a 5-10 minute affair, but that's okay because you're in line for communion!
You pull up to the window, and a deacon leans out and says, "The body of Christ", then hands you a cracker. You eat it as you pull forward to the next window. The deacon leans out with a thimble-cup of wine (or grape juice, it's so small, who cares) and says, "The blood of Christ." You knock it back, do the sign of the cross at the Jesus-on-a-cross hanging just past the window, pull forward, drop a few bucks in the donation chute, and then head out on your merry way.
Time elapsed: 5-10 minutes.
You saved your knees and back, and you got the sermon, the body/bread, the blood/wine, and if you're really feeling it, you listen past the sermon and catch a hymn or two, and beat the crowd for those unlimited breadsticks.
Seems like a win/win to me.
One day on a whim I said to my family, why don't we "attend" last week's NBCC? So we did.
Apparently the Mandarin-speaking congregation (in my home church in Sydney) is getting a lot of attendees from Beijing.
When the restrictions were somewhat lifted (so that you could have more than immediate family in your house), we started a system where we rotate around to different people's houses in groups to join the videoconference.
There's no reason we couldn't have done these things before, but we just didn't do it until now.
I've often thought of churches as a poor man's country club more than as a house of God, and so yeah, I'm with you! I don't see why this can't just go remote like most everything else.
I do wonder how the long-term landscape will change due to COVID...
I say you go for it!
My inner Magician also notes that there are things that happen when you get a bunch of people in the same place focusing on the same stuff. It’s not in every church, some churches are pretty much designed to get in the way of these things. Mostly middle-class white ones, IMHO, they’re built to keep the commoners well away from any direct experience of the Divine. But it’s also not just in churches, talk to a serious raver for instance, come down to New Orleans and catch Rex with all your psychic feelers out, go to Burning Man, etc. Anywhere lots of people work themselves up into ecstatic states, there is the potential for magic. This stuff is not gonna happen with this five minute asynchronous ceremony.
I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for letting my inner Magician speak on this site full of “rational” money-seeking programmers. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised at how many people here are quietly mystical.
That said, you aren't wrong! But I think you underestimate how many people think communion is the most important part and don't actually participate in the community aspect of it!
Personally, I'm more in your camp, especially for Protestant churches. I've often referred to the local Methodist church that my friends go to as "the poor man's country club". Not disparaging them in any way, but for them it's more about the community than it is about God.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/10/drive-in-c...
Also, why bother go if you're just going to listen to Slayer... :)
Yes, 5-10 minutes is quicker, but it's not about spending _less_ time with God, that's not the point of mass.
the data can be used for anything from competition and pricing analysis, to dashboards, to creating automatic RSS feeds of anything.
it just seems that being able to unlock the late and value of all of the information the structured information on the web which is presented only in a semi-structured form but with the addition of human labor could be so it's machine usable could unlock so much value.
but I've been pitching VCS and y combinator on this idea for the last six or seven years and not so much as a peep of interest so it seems that this idea doesn't possess a way to create a lot of money but I do believe it's very valuable.