Startup Ideas
gwern.net
gwern.net
#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
That's what I am working on with finclout. Looking to expand the team.
Are you looking for something like https://www.kialo.com/?
I would be interested to hear what OP meant and how it would be different.
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
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.
> 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.
I should add that the reason the title text is currently overwrapping to ellipsis on phone screen instead of breaking words into new line is because the meta tags aren't relative to the title. HN seems to be using tables to avoid this issue, I might do the same or use flexbox instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is pretty horrifying, and doesn't even sound like a facetious idea...
* service that humans require in perpetuity
* luxury status good
* no one wants to own/operate such a business (few competitors)
(Also, the scheme would be super impractical to monetize)
The list of devices includes phones as recent as the Oneplus One. [0]
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/
Not sure how you'd decentralize a physical process though.
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.
And if it didn’t fall foul of that and if CO2 was over captured then most life on earth would die.
This is known as the oracle problem and is actively being worked on.
It doesn’t try to sugar coat things and I appreciate that.
There are non-proof-of-work cryptos already out there.
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.
> NN GANs for photorealistic-but-legal child porn
Hmmm.
Honestly i see this as a gateway drug for real harm, but for sure it is a damn controversial and thought provoking proposal.
For more details, I recommend reading material from the advertising industry, starting with Edward Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)
I'm sure there are places where porn has been illegal but later become legal, looking at how it changed the rape statistics might give some weak evidence (though correlation is not the same as causation of course).
Drinking coca cola isn't illegal or even looked down upon. Rape porn isn't advertisement for rape and is not meant to encourage people to rape. Coca cola advertisement/product placements is designed to make people buy it more.
The two cases are in my opinion very different.
Do you suggest rape porn or rape scenes in movies promote more rape in the real world? What about violence in video games? I don't claim to know the answer, but I've thought that was disproved (though I haven't really looked into it).
"Most significantly, they found that the number of reported cases of child sex abuse dropped markedly immediately after the ban on sexually explicit materials was lifted in 1989. In both Denmark and Japan, the situation is similar: Child sex abuse was much lower than it was when availability of child pornography was restricted."
(I must admit I haven't looked into it much however, you will have to decide for yourself how much you trust Diamond M et al).
However, anecdotally, after I masturbate to pornography my desire to engage in real-life sexual activity markedly goes down. That is the point of masturbating to pornography, isn't it?
Edit: also, the page has the following subtitle "Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious. ". I think it's clearly satirical.
There's no way I would have made it this far if I couldn't occasionally laugh in the face of the darkest parts of life. Jokes about a loved ones' recent suicide, my best friend's child sexual abuse, and my own struggles with depression, have all made me and the person I was talking to feel better.
It's hard to feel bad when you're laughing.
OT: I love the design of this website! Some interesting details here - https://www.gwern.net/Design
Do you live some place where it does not snow in winter?
[1] https://www.gwern.net/Startup-ideas#indoor-tree-climbing-gym
Combine with foamy floor/ballpens.
"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
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/
Congratulations, you just invented rope pyramids: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rope+pyramid&t=ffab&ia=web
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?
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.
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
I've never asked a cent, because ideas are cheap, and timing/implementation everything: https://www.gwern.net/Timing