Ask HN: Idea Sunday

Yes and no, corporate politics is a minefield and often subtle.

Fair warning, I'm kind of a sarcastic person, and most of my ideas tend to reflect that...

If you actually want to work on one of these, go for it! Just please let me know as I'd like to hear about it (and if you'd like, maybe help out where I can). Contact details in my profile page.

My three latest ideas with variations:

#1: Kitty cooker social game (please don't actually build this): Basically Cow Clicker meets prisoner's dilemma. Everyone gets a cute little kitten. In order to earn in-game currency (find a synonym for "cat poop" for a currency name, please), you must cook your friends' kittens. Your friends cannot cook your kitten if you have cooked theirs first. If all of your friends decide to abstain from kitten cooking for the day - you either all get gold, or all of your kitties get cooked anyway. In game currency can be used to buy cat clothes, cooking paraphernalia, recipes, etc. Recipes are a tradable item, effect earnings, might cost resources to use, and have a "cool down" period. Variant: Puppy kicker.

#2: A toolbox of satirical marriage help apps. I really don't have a lot of tool candidates, but they're easy to think up. For instance, "argument score keeper."

#3: Rent-a-sheep (name taken, needs something else): Presale of wool from individual New Zealand sheep. I live in New Zealand. There are lots of sheep here. Imagine a site where the landing page is a paddock of little fluffy sheep trotting around (SouthPark style animation, maybe?). When you click on a sheep, up pops a bio showing a photo of an actual sheep, from an actual farm in New Zealand. For a fee, you can "rent" this sheep, thereby receiving its wool production from that year. In the mean time, you'll get little auto-generated notifications about your sheep, perhaps including photos. You should also be able to choose how the wool is processed. That is, scouring, dying, spinning. All to be done in small batches.

Much easier variant: Small-batch customized supply chain for New Zealand yarn sold to yarn stores in the USA (aka create your store's own brand of yarn). Interface looks a bit like a slot machine - choose type of wool, then choose scourer/washer, then choose either/both dying service and spinning service.

Both variants should be very "connection" focused. That is, if you're renting a sheep, the site should do everything in its power to make you feel a connection with that sheep. If you're a yarn store owner, you should know a bit about the people who are performing each of the services, and you should hopefully have a window into how they're processing your yarn.

hah. I am surprised you have not heard of any of these!!

http://www.quora.com/Food-Tech-Startups/What-companies-are-d...

The only part there that seems like it's actually hard (ooh er) is encoding information about the content of a given video or image file; I don't see any better way to do that than tagging by hand, which is going to take a while for a sizable archive.

Once that's done, it seems like keeping track of frequency and recency of access, plus user ratings which gradually go stale over time in order to model familiarity breeding disinterest, should suffice to give you the rest. In order to avoid the complexity of hooking into whatever image/video viewer you use, you could run your ratings collector as a background process which uses inotify or your local equivalent to keep track of accesses to the files under curation, and by some method decide when to request you input ratings. (I'm seeing a notification area icon with a bubble popup saying "Click here to rate the last 15 porn videos you watched." This thought amuses me, God knows why.)

Then it's just a matter of asking for more of what you've been watching lately, or stuff you haven't seen lately that matches some collection of tagged interests, or what-have-you. I don't know what you use as a UI for your porn collection, but a simple first approximation might be filling up a temp directory with symlinks to the content matching a given query, and then popping up a file browser on the directory -- in any modern OS, this should give you a pretty good overview, thumbnails and all.

Major legal problems with this, unfortunately (at least in the US). You pretty much HAVE to have a commercial kitchen in order to legally sell food in the United States, as well as be licensed by the state. It is cost prohibitive. Some states have what are called "cottage food laws" that enable individuals to sell food cooked in their home kitchens on a small scale, but there are many restrictions. (For example, in my state, you cannot own any pets, and the food can't be the sort that goes bad if you don't refrigerate it.)

Granted, what Airbnb does isn't altogether legal much of the time, but food safety is taken much more seriously than hotel taxes and zoning laws. If you did build a startup like this, the second it started to become popular, I expect that you would get shut down.