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> 7384. Prepare customers' nails in soapy water, using swabs, files, and orange sticks.

Some are oddly specific

“Dump sugar dust from collectors into melting tanks and add water to reclaim sugar lost during processing.”
> 12399. Give enemas and perform catheterizations, ear flushes, intravenous feedings, or gavages.

Very specific, and somewhat disturbing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejmFSN2qBG0

How did you went so far while reading the list?
It's 1216 and 2399 actually.
I ctrl-f'd for something else and had to do a double take when I saw that. The worrying part is presumable someone actually does that job - which seems to only involve sticking tubes into people, never mind which hole.
Someone's gotta do the job.

I've thought that inserting IVs is something that nurses struggle with a lot and maybe could be automated. It would be an absolute nightmare to develop that robot though, as you'd have to go through all of the medical device certification on top of dealing with all of the edge cases of human anatomy.

Goes nicely with 18497 "Wash and reset wigs" provided that the wigs are made of ginger hair.

  2948. Deliver babies.
I raise you "2603. [...] deliver babies safely"
Sounds like something to worry about once we've achieved market domination.
holy shit, some of these are making me actually cry. this list is something else
> 4678. Develop transactional Web applications, using Web programming software and knowledge of programming languages, such as hypertext markup language (HTML) and extensible markup language (XML).

Where has this list been all my life? I could have been a zillionaire....

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>It maybe is even the listing of approximately all startup ideas.

I wasn't able to find cloudflare in there

2413. Google maps
Well, if you can out-Google Google Maps you'd definitely have a huge business.
I enjoy how some of them run together. 10933 and 10934 as an example:

Clean, shape, and polish fingernails and toenails, using files and nail polish.

Remove bones, and cut meat into standard cuts in preparation for marketing.

I am wondering if you have read all of the 20k rows in order to spot it
I'm confused about 10933. Isn't that just a regular nails salon?
Yes, but then you remove the bones from the freshly polished fingers and toes, and cut the meat into standard cuts in preparation for marketing.
Isnt wework just a regular real estate company
I've heard somewhere the way to find start up ideas is to take something like this list and add AI to it. How do you add AI to a nail salon start-up?

How about: build an augmented reality display for customers who are waiting to get their nails done. It's got a camera, and it will show users what their nails would look like with any of the styles offered by the salon applied.

Nails as a service - monthly fee, your nail technician comes to you once a week
Nails as a community, you get to live and work in a space exclusive to people with wonderful nails.
Isn't 737 just a fast food restaurant?
When I was a child, I really hated having to cut my nails. One of the reasons why I developed an interest in technology, is that I wanted to build a device that cod take care of this horrible job for me. Insert hands, and bam, nails trimmed to the ideal length.

To this day, I've neither seen nor built such a device. Devices to print patterns on your finger nails do exist, however.

> 10799. Align wheels.

Okay.

> 11031. Transport the deceased to the funeral home.

I think we've found another use for robots.

I’m pretty sure your mocking. But the funeral industry needs to be disrupted. Went through the process a couple weeks ago and it felt pretty scummy.
I don't really have a point here, but my wife and I recently looked at burial options and there's a beautiful cemetery near us but the only really affordable option is cremation and storage in a wall of tiny notches with little doors with an indoor/outdoor viewing area and garden for visitors.

I have started referring to it as, "Our Cubby" and my wife hates it.

Very good idea, as big plague is coming...
You do the align wheels thing and I'll get right on #660.

> Apply and release hand brakes.

>1556. Enter data into computers for use in analyses or reports

Literally scale.ai

I was thinking about Power BI.
"524. Solicit new business." how did i never think of this before...
done recursively, it is the koan for MLM.
Then when done:

7024. Collect payment upon job completion.

And:

> 1600. Collect payments from customers.

All of these are huge businesses. Debt collection. Factoring. Etc.
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A few of these are totally ripe for disruption!

>51. Conduct raids and order detention of witnesses and suspects for questioning.

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Definitely my favourite economic disruption!
Well, considering ideas are a dime a dozen this site is worth 20,000 / 12 * $0.1 = $167.

Maybe less actually :)

I'm sure there's a method we could use to find overlap and reduce the worth of items that overlap ...

"Maybe less" indeed ;-)

>20,000

there aren't even 20k ideas...

18514 so they are worth $154.28
Or ideas are worth nothing, it's execution that matters... so $0?
Oh no. There is a banner ad now at the top of the list.
uBlock Origin got my back. No ads to be seen.
REQUEST FOR IDEA:

i have a backend tech stack that i believe is scalable and efficient (REST or websockets). i'd like to prove this out with a demo or app. i can do a pure-js SPA frontend (eg fitno.us) but i'm terrible at UI so it's not gonna be pretty

is there a free service that i could provide that people would use at high scale ? there doesn't need to be a way to eventually monetize it

required: store data to database optional: rest calls to 3rd parties

anyone have an idea they're willing to share ?

My FBI guy: a moderated chat app.

Instead of just a 2-way chat program, there is a 3rd participant "the FBI guy" who also joins the chat. Every message sent must get approved by the FBI guy before it goes through to the recipient.

It should also be possible to send messages to the FBI guy directly. e.g. "Does she/he like me?"

How much do users pay for the privilege to use this app?
No idea, I'm a programmer not a businessman. I don't think OP actually minds about income: "there doesn't need to be a way to eventually monetize it"

I guess some money could be made by using the chat logs to train AI chat bots, and selling those bots. I have no idea how that would work in practice though.

+ the agent can retract words or make edits. retracts are visible, but edits are just counted.

this sounds fun :)

and chain the fbi-guys together into a game of telephone
i like the concept (and it's sort of the inversion of another chat app idea i've been tossing around along the lines of cyrano de bergerac) but i don't see what's going to drive adoption

what's the motivation for a user to use this app vs un-moderated chat ? is it driven by the moderator, eg a parent wanting to limit what their kids can say or see ? or is it one of the 2 chatting parties that prefers to have someone else sanitize content before they have to see it, eg to ensure that they don't get d*ck pics ?

in the latter case, what motivates the moderator to participate ?

I think it would have to grow (or die) virally. Like GMail in the early days, moderators would get accounts by being invited.

Although there probably is a way to pitch it as a parental control, I think other demographics could enjoy it too. As you say, the moderation basically ensures no creepers or d*ck picks. That will probably encourage more female users to trust the platform, which would certainly help to boost overall numbers.

It could be a means of chatting to strangers, where the moderator chooses 2 people to pair up. That could get interesting. The idea is still pretty half-baked, but I'd like to explore it more, and maybe use it as a testing ground for decentralised chat technology.

For people who are unsure about social norms of chatting to people, such as those with Aspergers, autism spectrum, or who are just plain shy, I think being a moderator would be a great way to learn how to have an ordinary conversation. I'd also want to make the website fully accessible, with text readers for the blind, and automatic language translation so that people can make friends in other countries.

The traditional answer for people wanting to get free load is to run an image-hosting service:

* Accept uploads.

* Push them to S3 / similar.

* Marvel as you have to filter out nasty images.

* Struggling under the load of hotlinked images.

* Start performing rewrites to serve ads.

* Add chat/comments to try to build a community.

* Get more and more slow and ad-heavy over time.

The process repeats every few years.

> 12064. Manage leasing of facility space.

Sounds profitable.

> Regular Brain - Lease an Office

> Nebula Brain - Virtual Offices like Regus Offices

> Galaxy Brain - Coworking spaces

> Exploding Galaxy Brain - WeWork

> Super Exploding Galaxy Brain - OurWork a per second billed coworking/living space

OurWork ?

More like Amazon Workplace Services, if Amazon does it.

WeLive.com is kinda getting there.
15728 would be an organised crime startup
Or the police becoming privatized?
Idea 20100, make a filtering and full text search service for all of these ideas for better reading experience.
The five shortest ones (11, 13, 13, 13 and 13 characters long):

> 874. Carve meat.

> 5221. Dig trenches.

> 8361. Graft plants.

> 10799. Align wheels.

> 16441. Shampoo hair.

And the five longest ones (291, 305, 308, 317 and 332 characters long):

> 6231. Keep abreast of government regulations and emerging Web technology to ensure regulatory compliance by reviewing current literature, talking with colleagues, participating in educational programs, attending meetings or workshops, or participating in professional organizations or conferences.

> 12863. Design, develop, select, test, implement, and evaluate new or modified informatics solutions, data structures, and decision-support mechanisms to support patients, health care professionals, and their information management and human-computer and human-technology interactions within health care contexts.

> 7530. Keep abreast of game design technology and techniques, industry trends, or audience interests, reactions, and needs by reviewing current literature, talking with colleagues, participating in educational programs, attending meetings or workshops, or participating in professional organizations or conferences.

> 4806. Direct environmental programs, such as air or water compliance, aboveground or underground storage tanks, spill prevention or control, hazardous waste or materials management, solid waste recycling, medical waste management, indoor air quality, integrated pest management, employee training, or disaster preparedness.

> 5895. Compute, retrace, or adjust existing surveys of features such as highway alignments, property boundaries, utilities, control and other surveys to match the ground elevation-dependent grids, geodetic grids, or property boundaries and to ensure accuracy and continuity of data used in engineering, surveying, or construction projects.

---

My method for determining these things (which may be of interest to some), using just my favourite text editor, rather than slurping it into a REPL for some programming language and manipulating it thus:

1. Copy the whole document to the clipboard;

2. Paste in Vim (and note at this point that lists lose their markers in favour of just a tab character, so the numbers disappear);

3. Manually remove everything that’s not the list;

4. Manually remove the tab at the start of each line with `:%s/^\t//` or block selection (this could also be done in the next step with slight modification, matching `^\t\(.\+)` and using `submatch(1)`);

5. Prefix each line with its length and the line number using `:%s/.\+/\=len(submatch(0)) . "\t" . line(".") . ". " . submatch(0)` (I actually used asterisk instead of \+, but HN formatting hates unmatched asterisks; see `:help sub-replace-\=`; another approach for the line number part alone would have been to block-insert `1.\t` on every line, then block-select all but the first, and use `g<CTRL-A>` to increment them, see `:help v_g_CTRL-A`);

6. Sort by line length with `:sort n` (since I had put it at the start of the line for convenience);

7. Optionally strip the character counts out again with `:%s/^\d\+\t//` or similar.

sub-replace-\= and v_g_CTRL-A are among my favourite not-so-well-known Vim features. They’re not useful very often, but when they are, they’re really great.

My first chance ever to be that guy!

My solution:

  curl "https://unawaz.github.io/stochastic-hill-climbing/tasks/" \
    | awk '{ print length, $0 }' \
    | sort -n -s \
    | sed 's/<li>//' \
    | (tail -n +11 | head; tail)
Updated to remove noise.
Congrats on being that guy!
The problem with such a pipeline is that it’s not interactive. Now if you had a REPL that would memoize the steps so that it only ever did one `curl` request, that’d be different and useful.
First,

  curl [address] > /tmp/foo
Then, build up the pipeline starting with:

  cat /tmp/foo |
(And I know this is probably "useless abuse of cat", but whatever.)
How long did this take you? I don't know vim wizardry and I was curious. Took me 4 mins to do the same thing in js console:

1. copy the text 2. split by \n 3. sort by length 4. you got sorted list

I know all of this off the top of my head, so less than a minute all up. Well, except the line(".") bit; that didn’t occur to me until I’d done it manually with the help of v_g_CTRL-A, and I had forgotten about the "." argument until I looked up its docs—haven’t used it in a while.
There are only 18514 ideas there
haha > 5131 Move and arrange furniture and turn mattresses
Is this what people mean when they say that start up ideas are worthless? Or is this a joke?
Looks a bit random.

If you give the start of this list to transformer

https://talktotransformer.com/

the generated ones look as good as those, example:

5.Evaluate a vehicle's operation and use of the system and record information on the system, such as the number of miles driven, total mileage, speed, and odometer reading. 6.Prepare and administer reports to provide data on vehicle performance, and to support vehicle performance maintenance and repair.

Maye someone should interface this to the patent applications system.

The idea is that if a bot can generate patent applications they aren't very novel.

From this we should backtrack and look at existing patents and throw a large percentage of them out : )

"Splice or solder cables together or to overhead transmission lines, customer service lines, or street light lines, using hand tools, epoxies, or specialized equipment."

No...no no don't do that you will stand a good chance of being electrocuted.

These are not startup ideas, but activities that people do. A startup-idea might be to find a way to make these activities easier.

To make this list more useful, there should be two additional datapoints: 1. How many people does the activity impact 2. How much does the activity impact each person. The product of these would be the total impact. Sorting by the amount of impact would give the most valuable areas for innovation, and there should already be a plenty of businesses focused on these activities.

What's missing is a resource that would let you understand each activity, it's tools, processes, problems, etc.
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Some (most?) ideas might be about how to make these activities disappear completely.