For free subscriber's beat-down requests are published only with city, photo and reason. Paid subscribers get street address published with beat-down request.
or you could have beaters bid on the job...
this could be bigger than eBay!
On a related note, has anyone actually tried building a cypherpunk-style assassination market?
After that, I changed the way I thought.
Twitter just allows them to communicate publicly.
People use knife to cook food, but also use to same to commit murder.
It's really just about taking the time to better understand an idea, and trying hard not to dismiss it.
That should be on the HN faq regarding "Show HN" posts.
It never occured to me that celebrities would start using the platform. I still don't think that Twitter would be anywhere near where it is now if not for the endorsement by many celebrities.
(Explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_graph)
Imagine a platform where restaurants, bakeries, anyone with excess food that would otherwise go to waste, could get "points" for availing that excess inventory to those in need. It might be similar to the model used by Shelter Partnership (http://www.shelterpartnership.org/).
In a nutshell, they solicit donations from major manufacturers (think Johnson & Johnson, et. al.) for totally-usable products that can't be sold on store shelves for whatever reason - i.e. a typo on the packaging. They provide some receipt giving J&J the opportunity to seek some tax benefit for the donation at a discount of the retail-price, and needy people get the products for free.
I don't see a compelling reason why something like this couldn't work in major metro areas. Bakeries could get some off-set for donating bread; grocery stores could get some off-set for donating otherwise-spoiling fruits and veggies, etc.
There would be substantial value for this to exist in addition, or in cooperation, with food banks.
I could see this being a valuable tool for food banks to build relationships with willing-entities that otherwise wouldn't want to bother with setting up the relationship and keeping track of items donated.
If it were very simple:
- Bakery downloads App "Free Food"
- Plug in estimated donation
- Get matched with a willing food bank
- Pictures to confirm donation from both parties
- Some agreed-upon "value" (points) for said donation
- Food bank takes and re-distributes
Win-Win-Win
Bakery does good and maybe gets some benefit; Food bank gets more food (as long as the collection ROI makes sense); and hungry people eat food that would otherwise end up in the trash.
FYI, I wrote about this idea very briefly way back when: http://peterkimfrank.com/2013/01/21/doing-well-by-doing-good...
Ooops, forgot the topic -- that is indeed a truly idiotic idea.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Idea+dump+January+2011+edition
I should do another one of these, it's been way too long.
1) Train fish to swim towards some chemical/compound whatever you want to detect
2) Put valves at different places in the tank, where you can put in the diluted sample
3) Detect the "swarm opinion" via webcam and computer vision
I never found a good application for this...
Another one: Sponsor a homeless person. Crowd-sourcing getting someones life back on track. You get 100+ people to pitch in $5 a month to one person they "adopted". These 100 people have full transparency to how that person spends the money, can advise and help in other ways . If you see that they withdrew $50 in cash on a friday night, they have to show a receipt for a valid reason for doing so, or you can drop out as a sponsor.
Anyhow, it was a stupid idea because people are generally selfish, on both the giving and receiving end.
You would be able to snap a picture of your barista, put in where they work and rate them on things like: Skill Speed Attractiveness Friendliness
It all started to feel kind of creepy, because I knew the "attractiveness" would become the most important thing, then you'd have guys using it as an excuse to be creepy. Anyhow, there are barista competitions so it seemed like something worth measuring. Also, a lot of times the quality of the coffee in many places is on an even playing field and the person making it starts to become more important. Never went through with it though.
Say you want to gift someone but you don't know what they want / don't want to buy more stuff / etc. So you buy a card that has a message ("Happy Birthday!" or whatever) and a number of credits associated with it and you give it to someone. The person, then, can use the credits to give things to non-profits, like a shirt for the homeless, or some food for a orphanage.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm)
> The company's proposed advertising system, called Webwise, is a behavioral targeting service (similar to NebuAd) that uses deep packet inspection to examine traffic. Phorm says the data collected will be anonymous and will not be used to identify users, and that their service would even include protection against phishing (fraudulent collection of users' personal information). Nonetheless, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee and others have spoken out against Phorm for tracking users' browsing habits, and the ISP BT Group has been criticised for running secret trials of the service.
Edit: Maybe that came off as rude, but I really don't get the idea. You pay somebody for something you want to see done? What?
You basically can crowdfund your own X-Prizes.
A group of genetic engineers someplace in the world notice that me and my troop have collectively pledged, say $500k, and the genetic engineers actually spend some time and make such a flower. They send us a video, and we trust they've built it. We get flowers, and they get the money.
Am I right?
First place: Make the next World of Warcraft, with only 3 people and no money.
Second place: Make the next Unreal/Quake/Half-Life with 1 programmer, one artist and no money, for console, in 6 months. (yes, this idea is more common than you think).
Third place: Make iOS game and get rich quick, without no idea of how, and hating games in general actually.
Fourth place: Be the idea guy, and makes games only having the idea, and being so awesome with your ideas that programmers and artists will work to you for free and accept only 2% of equity in the end.
Fifth place: The same as above, but when said that he would be just a useless guy, he proposes to be the writer instead, the guy that make the rules (I still do not understood what being the writer has to do with game design... but it is fairly common! Even when the person want to make a soccer game, that has no writing).
Sixth place: the same as the two above, but knowing people won't work for free, want to sell his idea to Activision for 10 million USD, those are usually paranoid with NDAs too, and insist me to sign their NDAs before asking whatever questions they want to ask me.
I like this one. I've gotten that before. "Hey man, you write iPhone apps right? Let's make a game!" "Haha, alright, what kind of game do you want to make?" "I don't know, I don't play games on my android. What kinds of games are making a ton of money on iPhone right now?" "..."
2. Rubber trees. Sell them to commercial real estate developers/contractors. Cheaper than real trees, and less maintenance cost. Just pop them into the ground! We'd also sell accessories, like attachable bird nests or battery-powered hooting owls. Premium customers could buy four "styles" of the same tree, one for each season, and with a support contract we'd swap them out at appropriate times of year.
3. Renewable energy. What is the largest source of untapped energy in the universe? Little children! We'd sell shoes with an integrated battery that recharges as your kids play. The sole of the shoe contains a standard power outlet so you can plug in your TV and watch your shows after the kids are in bed.
They sounded stupid^W bound to fail at first, especially before seeing the implementation / impact:
Better search engine with no sponsored listings, seamless sync and backups, short status updates blasted to your followers, better social network, animated movies that target adults, online book store (without a book store experience), $4 lattes ...
Some ideas that sounded awesome and turned out to be awesome:
Open source and breakfast bars.
To be fair, many considered open source to be blindingly stupid -- "Anyone can edit the source? That would be madness! And why would anyone just contribute hours and hours of their time? Why do you think Microsoft pays their programmers so much."
But then, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -Carl Sagan"
Seamless Sync and Backups - This is an obviously useful concept, we just needed to wait for the technology to arrive.
Short Status Updates - Agreed.
Animated Movies that Target Adults - Animated movies originally targeted adults. Also, in Japan they have targeted adults for decades. The small group of anime fans in America gradually grew into a billion dollar empire. American companies waited for the business to be lucrative before they started making their own. How is that stupid?
Online Book Store - Might as well say the entire eCommerce industry is stupid. Selling stuff on-line is about as obvious and sensible as it gets.
In retrospect, yes, absolutely. But when you first hear it, having seen many other attempts, it seems bound to fail or at least don't seem like a billion dollar idea. Hence the "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
The idea of having all of your stuff get automatically backed up and synced with all of your devices seemed like a billion dollar idea the first time someone mentioned it. It just didn't seem feasible until recently. That's not the same as it being a stupid idea.
Seriously I'm probably the worst person to ask. Almost every startup idea sound ridiculous to me.
<existing social network> for <pet>
I was talking to a fairly smart VC recently and he made a good point -- while everyone likes to use "Facebook for Cats" as a joke about bad startup ideas, it's not actually a bad idea.
A lot of people REALLY like their pets. And they spend a lot of money on them. And they like to share pictures of them with their pet-owning friends (go see /r/aww if you don't believe me.)
It basically hasn't been done right (yet), but I wouldn't be surprised if something that looks like Facebook for Pets does actually become a thing at some point.
This website gives customizeable one page profiles for your pets. Seems pretty heavily used, I signed up one time and I get emails every couple of days because another user "loved" my pet.
and lot's of other ones.
An idea is always stupid. Few iteration later, it starts to be not that bad.
Also, services where you pay someone to digitize your mail. And Lockitron... I just... these seem like bad ideas waiting to happen.
But then I was sure Twitter was a terrible idea, and I loved the original format of formspring so what do I know?
Anyhow, the idea was that each bracelet would have an RFID card, and an RFID reader. When you shook hands with someone, it would read their ID #. So, you're not only physically meeting someone, but logging them as someone you met. When you got back to your hotel that night, you plug it into your computer and it pulls up everyone's bio (picture, name, company, email address, etc).
Either that one, or the guy selling fart scented candles on Shark Tank.
This was the stupidest! idea in the whole history of mankind.
I think everyone guessed who it is.
Humans don't need aliens or space creatures to get killed. they will kill themselves.
Long live war! Long live humans!