(Also, in your life, do favors for Future You. Future You will be at a party someday and the cute one making small talk with you will say, 'hey, tell me about your HN username." You won't want to say "uh".)
If writers commonly misuse a term, it would flag the term, explain, and suggest alternatives. To the user it would function like Grammarly, but behind the scenes, it's a template: a (server-side?) file customizes it for detecting common writing mistakes that occur in the particular subject area. It would then be made available online for writers to use.The customization would be a file that...
Also: I would like to see a whole lot more thought going into how to do things in ways that don't unnecessarily get peoples' backs up.
Does this already exist?Its server-side? input would be a textfile or 2-col. spreadsheet, where [problematic phrase] is mapped to [better phrase]. Then the site users would submit a few paragraphs, and it would mark the changes it would recommend making.This must already exist...
If there is, it would encourage public institutions to put more of their content online.
This essay on his website was interesting - saying maybe you could do it, if you funded a critical mass of startups, "for the cost of a stadium". http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html
And I know he wrote later about being impressed by Detroit. (I thought there was a whole essay, but all I'm coming up with is this: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/595736193297457152 )