Ask HN: What project ideas have you had, think it would work, but will never do?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17800033

6 6 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Why do you think it would work?

Why don't you do it?

Something on the back of your car, that using a combination of your speed, the distance between you and the car behind you, an understanding of the weight of both cars (using a lookup on the Reg), and the stopping distance, taking into account weather.. is able to calculate the likelihood that the car will crash into you if you slammed on your breaks

And then display that figure in a big lcd panel in your back window.

Haven’t done it, because every time I remember it, I’m driving my car and forget by time I’m home.

xcubic• 8 years ago

Are you driving now? :D

creatornator• 8 years ago

A heads-up display to tell people in front or behind you on the road to turn off their brights. People either don't know or don't care that they are blinding others. I'm probably never going to do it because it would also attract negative attention.

marktangotango• 8 years ago

Database as a service; before you say RDS, cloud db is not what I mean, I mean postrest, an http/rest interface to a relational db, with jwt authentication etc. A backend for static html sites.

_raul• 8 years ago

I haven’t used it yet, but sounds a lot like Postgrest (you almost nailed the name ) http://postgrest.org

CM30• 8 years ago

Do they have to be potentially commercially viable projects, or merely interesting ones that'd work?

For me, I'd say:

1. Some sort of commission/freelancer marketplace for game development, since the biggest issue people have in this market is getting games finished without all the necessary skillsets and connections. Though I guess I may still create that one.

2. A HTML 5/JavaScript based arcade script. Always thought the future of those online game sites would be to move away from Flash and to open standards, and a good open source CMS for that would help too. But it's unlikely I'll do this, because... well I'd need to get a bunch of games to go with it.

3. Open source video hosting CMS. Not an original idea, but I do feel a WordPress/Magento/Mediawiki/whatever type 'standard' with decent community backing is needed here. But the sheer amount of technical work involved (so people's sites can basically replicate YouTube or Twitch with a simple install) makes this a project for another day.

4. I've also considered the idea of starting an event or convention for something too. Maybe web development related stuff, since (unfortunately) it seems the vast majority of them are in the US and I don't live there at the moment. Won't do this because well, I have no idea how to run an event and one look at the articles about it show you ideally need a decent team of volunteers, quite a bit of money and at least some experience in the field.

And that's about it at the moment. Any other ideas I have are ones I actually plan to put in practice at some point, likely on the project I'm working on right now.

Ask HN: What project ideas have you had, think it would work, but will never do?

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