Ask YC: Any suggestion/ideas for a college project

- a custom search engine that will be what I would call the 'free associative' little brother to what google does. It automatically finds all synonyms to the words you have entered and their first level 'strong' associations by counting digrams in the text body. It then removes all the results from the set that google or any other regular search engine would show you.

- 'deadmansknob', I've been playing around with this idea for a long time but never got around to building it, a service which you need to check in to periodically and when you don't one or more emails are sent out. 3 levels of 'periods', a day, a week, a month and trigger-able alarms for special cases (such as holidays).

You'd use that to set up a series of emails containing messages to people that you only want activated in case something happens to you. The various levels are to make sure that really crucial information can be held back in case you are in some kind of accident but still alive. Expand featureset at will :)

- World Wide orphans: a place where you can dump your no longer wanted domain. It would automatically spider the old site and then set up a web server to handle the reguests. Strictly static. For people that run out of $ on their hosting that put lots of time and effort into sites that then disappear from the net. This would hopefully kill a portion of the spammers that buy expired domains. Simply assign the domain to WW orphans.

- a good replacement to IUMA. Bandwidth costs have come down considerably and I'm sure you could do it if you stayed away from fancy offices and executive ferraris.

- an interactive tour of the genome (ajax based)

- a site where hackers can challenge each other with problems

- ajax based corewars

- a revival of webrings. I thought they were really neat, if done right I'm fairly sure it would take off. Alternative link structures are very interesting. A star based on that gorgeous treeview thingy I posted yesterday would be nice too.

- an interactive book written by the audience. I call this one for obvious reasons the never ending story. At any point in the books you can branch the story and continue it in a different way. Some clever ui to indicate the forks where they exist, the default is the first thread that was written for a given level in the tree

- a site where you could registrate all your property until you flipped a switch indicating it was stolen the site would be 'blank' for you. Serial numbers, photographs and so on all could be uploaded to the site. Then when your home has been burglarized or some other property was lost or stolen you could make the pages active. Search engines would pick it up. If somebody would then want to buy something on ebay or some other auction site or if they found something they could use the site to find out about you by matching the property and alert you.

need more ? This is just my list of stuff that I haven't gotten around to (yet) that might be on the level of a college student (if he's good), all of them could be done in 3 months with some dedication.

Let me know if you pick any of them and I'll send you my outline on what I think it would take.

Same goes for anybody else reading this that thinks cool, I want to go do that. I'd be just as happy seeing somebody else build this stuff than doing it myself, there are only so many keystrokes in a lifetime (and I've already had my fair share of them ;) )

My email address is in my profile in case you need it. Best of luck!

It highly depends on how much you are willing to do. I mean, the possibilities are endless. Some come to my mind are:

* compiler/interpreter of some languages (for simplicity, usually Scheme or something easy) to Javascript, with good interface to Javascript code. Optimize the produced code. Bonus: full reflection (aka incremental compiling) support. Another bonus: mixed solution, with javascript for new users, and plug-in for accelerated speed.

* Telnet/SSH/VNC in Browser. I have seen some solutions, but all of them are primitive, especially with respect to the screen size

* Games, as always. Bonus: 3D.

* Geolocation-based stuffs. These are really hot these days, eh?

See, just one minute, and all kinds of thing flash through one's mind. Of course, you have only 3 months, which makes any of these extremely challenging.