Ask HN: What weird startup ideas do you have? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What weird startup ideas do you have?

2 pointstraverseda12 comments

I think everyone has an idea for a startup/foundation/invention that they know they're never going to actually work on. Because they don't have the skills, because although it would benefit humanity greatly there's not way to monetize it, because it's too risky, etc.

What's yours?

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Eventually we will have SOME people living on mars or the moon or wherever in space. Why waste fuel getting into orbit from these planets with low gravity?

A giant rail-gun-like rollercoaster that gently curves upwards. The combination of the right angle and the right velocity should be enough to fling you off the planet. I guess someone more mathematically inclined could do the actual math for me.

A bit less fancy than a railgun, but similar to what you were thinking: https://www.spinlaunch.com/

I'm aware, i had my bright idea years ago, around the time of this tweet:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1064741356080222209?t=It...

suspicious... quick question: is your first name Elon?

No hablo ingles

One of mine is a laundromat using great bit industrial laundry machines like you see in hospitals and prisons. Instead of keeping everyone's clothing separate everyone needs to put an RFID chip on each item of clothing. We use automation to sort clothing into multiple streams for different types of washing, and to put it all back together so the customer can pick it up. While robots have a hard time manipulating fabric they should have a much doing simple tasks like picking clothing items off of a conveyor belt, more complicated tasks like folding would be done by people.

RFIDs ensure that the clothing is washed perfectly every time and costs go down because we can use more industrial techniques. If you're interested in evil data-gathering you can get a bunch of metadata about people based on what they wear, how often they wear it, how often the keep old clothes, etc.

I send front and side-view photos of myself in my underwear and enter my height and weight on a site and some preferences like my favorite color. The site sends me clothes on a subscription basis that are guaranteed to fit and look good on me. This does not exist. Sites that are "exactly like that except for X" are not that.

At the risk of violating your diktat in your last sentence -- Would https://www.mtailor.com/ meet your expectation? They don't have subscription, I think. But they keep your measurements, so you can reorder from the app. I ordered a shirt a few years ago when I lived in the US, was happy with the fit and finish. I have moved out of the US and so haven't used them recently though.

I can't imagine there is no service that doesn't work how you describe it.

The flaw is how you described it. 'to fit and look good on me' is very subjective. Even 'to fit [...] me' is as subjective as it can get. You'd need Instagram/ Pinterest/ etc. data to determine what actually 'fits' you.

Landfill mining. Send droids into landfills to find stuff to resell. Easy side would be obvious items like coins, lost jewelry, etc. Intermediate would be collectibles. Moonshot would be difficult recyclables: lithium batteries, gold- or silver-bearing circuit boards, etc.

A similar idea I saw earlier was to collect and recycle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29760422

It would be great if someone could solve this problem and reduce the amount of microplastics in our oceans, food, and water.

an artisanal sourdough bakery except ordering supplies is entirely automated by software

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