activus

These would be great. One thing I had need for at a previous job was a combined search / compute engine.

We basically had a search cluster that would return ids that would get joined into the actual data in another system, then we'd do heavy post-processing and push it off to another system for slicing and dicing.

Not sure if it's any use to anyone else, but a system that allowed people to push search queries into a cluster, do some user defined post-processing and then have the engine pipe that to an endpoint would have been interesting for that use case.

I believe there's some Hadoop eco-system bits that do a bit of this now (Impala comes to mind).

One thing I always wanted to do, is mine all the data I could, and produce a corruption index for each politician, it would kind of be a Facebook for bills, Bills would be friends with lobbyists through politicians, and you could try and rank each bill by who bought it.

Great idea. I'd actually submit Rochester, NY as a candidate (I'm from there, but live in Seattle now). The property taxes are high, but the cost of living is very low, power is very cheap, land is cheap and there is RIT and University of Rochester right there pumping out fantastic engineers (an hour away is University of Buffalo, not quite as good, but has a few gems). I know a few people doing startups there (it's tough because of funding, but these guys self fund). It's also not too far from Boston / NYC if you needed to grab people from there.

It would be interesting to take this data and build an app around it for fantasy football. If you have all the tendencies, and how players like your player have played against certain teams, you could make better guesses on who to play.