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Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?
64 points by 31reasons on Feb 26, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 91 comments
Everyone seems to be busy building MVPs in a weekend or in few months of time, and thats great as new technologies allow us to build much faster than even 10 years ago. But I want to know with that mentality and short time spans, what kind of stuff we avoid building simply because it would take years to make and has high opportunity costs for a single developer.

So as a hacker or an entrepreneur what product would you create if you have 5 years of time if you were sure you can not fail ? to put differently, What are the tough problems you think we need to solve but you simply don't have that much time or resources to do it? a new Mobile OS? file system? new language? what could it be?

EDIT: From the many comments, its interesting to note that some of the ideas are borderline science fiction! Amazing to know what a mere 5 year timescale allow human mind to think up.




Education. I feel teaching people reinforces learning.

Systems for targeting chronically disabled and introducing them to services they qualify for in the state. Introducing disabled to technology.

Background: My mother was born with cerebral palsy. Other than a $500/mo check, medicaid and $30 in foodstamps, she has not received any other services until 13Q1. I finally signed her up for meals on wheels and getting her cleaning services, etc, from the state. This was always available to her at no cost, but she had no clue.

My mother also has an IQ of 120 that is going to waste as she sits at home alone, many states away. Rather than going insane from loneliness, she could at least mechanical turk it up in her living room... beats talking to cats.


Check out the Virtual Ability group on Second Life. People there are really helpful both with helping you find aid, and learning technology. There's voice chat, if typing is difficult.

I actually want to help people with disabilities with daily things like cooking meals, helping to clean the house, grocery shopping, etc. I don't know how to start.


1 year to talk to people in real businesses that aren't in tech and study their problem in depth.

4 years to create what they need.

Too vague? I don't know enough about enough things outside of tech to really build something that would actually help the rest of the world. (The only thing I can think of is another Skype-like company akin to Twillio but for video communication with a phone. That probably would fail until costs come down.)


I really liked the idea that you added problem search as part of the product development. Many times investors want to invest in you if you already have the idea. It would be awesome to think some investment funds to just search for problems in specific domains!


thats a waterfall model, may be agile might be more useful :)


An interesting response, perhaps you're being downvoted for an English mistake?


More people should be doing this. You don't even have to move out of tech yourself, find a position in a company where tech is only ancillary, not the core focus. You'd be surprised just how many real problems are out there waiting to be solved.


You can do that, but it might not be fun. I spent 4 years in tech at A Big Financial Company and the one thing I learned was that I didn't want to work at a company where my work wasn't a core part of the business. I've heard that at Oracle they say (used to say?) that you build [stuff], you sell [stuff], or you are [stuff].


Won't disagree with you there! Though sometimes going outside your comfort zone can be a good thing.


A digestive system simulator. Input your biomarkers and some other statistics about yourself and your level of activity. Select a food and quantity. It will tell you how your body would process it. How much would turn to fat, how it will affect your blood sugar, and other consequences of eating it. It could possibly be paired with a blood sugar monitoring device that is always attached to your finger. You'll be able to do fun stuff, like find out how many Pop Tarts you need to eat to get diabetes, etc. We are getting sick eating modern food and most of us are oblivious to it. This will help open some eyes.


A more unified computing environment: I love the simplicity of spreadsheets, the plotting of Matlab, the interactivity of SLIME, the pragmatism of bash scripting, the breadth of knowledge of Wolfram Alpha (and Wikipedia), so on and so forth, but I hate having to choose one environment. Julia is the closest thing I've found to what I have in mind.

To put it another way, I want exactly one tool that's truly the best way to answer all these questions: What's 2^25? If I drive X miles a year and pay $Y for gas (+$Z for premium) in car A, how much will I spend per month? What's the largest prime below 9000? What does some list of numbers "look" like? Is there any trend between US Presidential elections and the following Super Bowl?


Try google.com


Computer vision, and augmented reality.

Real-time 3d reconstruction from simple video is currently possible with desktop computing power. I suspect that within 5 years it'll be possible with mobile computing power (note that the real dependency here is power efficiency). Obviously textured light techniques are even more powerful.

With projects like Glass and Myo, wearable computing is coming together.

We have the conceptual pieces we need to do useful augmented reality. Start by modelling lots of the world, both the geometry and also object categorization (the latter, admittedly, is still evolving fuzzily). Then build an app framework, for apps to help people execute tasks. One obvious example is step-by-step overlay instructions for doing repairs (changing your own car oil isn't that hard, right, but it's too intimidating for many people).

I think the short film Sight gets it mostly right, except I'm not talking about cybernetic augmentation, only wearable computing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFiE82Npbn4

There's lots of potential there.


This company is building AR Chip! http://gigaom.com/2013/02/22/metaios-augmented-reality-chip-...

AR is definitely going to explode in next 5 years. Incredible potential to make lives easier.


>> Real-time 3d reconstruction from simple video is currently possible with desktop computing power.

Can you point me to more on this? Stuff for reading? Toolkits? SDKs? etc.


The most-impressive research projects I'm aware of are from a few years ago.

Andrew Davison's group at Imperial College London has done lots of impressive things, but especially notice Richard Newcombe's DTAM.

http://www2.imperial.ac.uk/robotvision/website/php/pubs.php http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df9WhgibCQA

A precursor to this is the also-pretty-awesome PTAM (note the name resemblence), from Georg Klein at Oxford.

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/


Pretty awesome video!


http://www.metaio.com/products/sdk/

They have 3D tracking in the SDK so it must be doing 3D modeling based on realtime video stream.


I would build a web site for making policies.

https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/

A simple web site that is easy for the general public to use. A site that aims to connect the world, promote education, reduce corruption, and clarify the rationale behind political decisions. A site where people could express their satisfaction with political decisions. A place where people could hold rational debate backed by evidence.

Further, I envision an extension to the web site where budgets can balanced using crowd-sourced technology. Not where everyone can contribute, mind you, but perhaps for those who have backgrounds in finance and economy. Yet their work should be available to the public, along with why certain cuts were made.

As another extension, existing bills would be hyper-linked and have embedded content. Embedded content entails "single-source" definitions. For example, a bill that includes the text "age of majority", should have "age of majority" readily defined (from one source location).

A place where moderators are selected at random from the population, for random intervals of time, to prevent herd mentality.

Essentially, I would like to reshape the political landscape. Helpful pictures to get across the idea:

* https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Interests%...

* https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Policy%20P...

* https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Debate%20P...

* https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Supporting...


Had I the time, I would create a framework for building RPGs.

RPGs are hard because they require huge amounts of writing and art assets along with a farly complicated code base to allow for all the interactions.

I'd focus on creating a generic framework that would allow an author to write their game, define the rules in a simple DSL, choose from a set of standard art assets (or plug in their own).

The idea would be that no coding would be required, and weather you are creating a turn based game like fallout, or action game like Diablo it would all fit together.

So the author would provide their dialog, their quests, their item definitions and rules, and be able to generate a game playable on multiple platforms.


Pre-built algorithms for procedural content generation would be a must-have!


I would rewrite mediawiki from scratch... It's an important piece of software and it should be easier to use, manage, hack on and extend. I'm sort of working on that now, but slowly from the inside out with a bunch of other responsibilities. It would be fun to focus on just that part.


I would finally finish my goddamn compiler for my goddamn systems programming language.

I'm honestly considering just tearing out my type system and type-inference so I can implement something in there that has actually been verified as formally valid. Waiting months at a time just to get my stupid paper reviewed again is boring and useless.

If I had money, I would also hire some professional web designers to help me make my web-app for using Bayesian reasoning to replace tech recruiters. Launching the thing as a lifestyle business is really appealing, but I can't web-design for crap.


A programming language.

I may spend a lot of time in management-land, but I love coding, and still spend a lot of time in Ruby and CoffeeScript. In the past, I've coded in C, Perl, a smattering of Basic, and have a passing familiarity with Python, Scala, and Java.

Ruby is a nice place to be, mostly thanks to the community, but I get very frustrated with the Ruby core. There's a lot of bugs and inconsistencies in the standard library, and the VM should be a lot quicker. V8 is an existence proof that it's possible to build a fast dynamic language runtime.

Instead of a sane Net::HTTP, or some good GC instrumentation, or an actual grammar to try and do some static analysis, we get Refinements, which should never have made it into the core language.

I get a little jealous of the Python guys sometimes; not only for SciPy and NumPy, but for the fact that the Python core team does spend a lot of time fixing and improving the internals. They don't get it right all the time, but the level of engineering feels better somehow.

But I don't like the "one way to do it" attitude; one of the things I really like about Ruby is that the community feels more experimental, more tolerant of change, and less likely to criticize non-constructively.

Rather than just complaining about it, I'd like to try and scratch my own itch, and see if it's possible to build a language that can match V8 for speed, Ruby for creativity and expressiveness, and Javascript for portability.


A soup-to-nuts software development and production environment based on a predicate database supported by automated theorem proving with ranged domains capable of reasoning about optimization.

Why: streams of ASCII characters are no way to program yet every single piece of the software development puzzle requires them. They are the lowest common denominator. To be replaced, the replacement must replace everything.

That's what I'm working on. Get it done a lot faster if I could do it full time.


Ahh, others might be beating me to it, but would love to help bring low-cost computing tech to developing parts of the world. It's mind-boggling that there are $40-50 (in bulk/wholesale) Android tablets--not necessarily up to snuff with the spiffiest rich-world toys (or even the Kindle Fire), but actual computing devices nonetheless. It would would take time just to figure out what the key niches are where they could be useful (do folks need/want crop price data? weather info? news? wikipedia? Oscars coverage? something else?), what technical work has to be done to get there (connectivity, software, content, and maybe different kinds of devices, e.g., maybe the ideal device for some folks is e-ink-based and low-power like a Nook/Kindle), and all kinds of distribution/operations stuff.

And it could be a great business: being the first folks to get things right for this huge group of people is going to be a big deal as that chunk of the world moves up the development/economic ladder, one hopes.

I can't, personally, do very much of that in 5 years but had I capital and all-purpose moxie, there's the problem space I'd love to tackle.

I think there are big things to do in genomics, GWAS, medical data, etc. I don't really know what they are. I could go back to school for that; that might be the most interesting "hard tech" possibility.

No lust for this personally because it's too close to my real job, but I think too much of the effort around databases today is too focused on the lower layers of the stack--we have lots of scalable DB products but too little good software to stitch everything together (from a client-side cache to scale-out OLTP to memcache to data-warehouse-y stuff, ideally) and take the repetitive bits out of setting up a full stack and building a a minimal but modern UI.

We don't need 2013's BigTable, in other words, we need 2013's FileMaker. It's 2013, so it needs to be scalable and Web-based and not too drudgy either when you're either starting out or making a 'real,' heavily customized product. I'd want to offer code you can run on your boxen, not a service-only thing. If I had five years, even with help I could only probably attack a tiny slice; some kind of common API atop various datastores (client-side, memcache, Hadoopish, etc.), and some kind of Web form/page bindings that don't suck (allow modern UI patterns and are extensible) would be a couple interesting ones.


Re your tablet idea: I have thought it would be neat to give tablets to homeless Americans and give them a class on how to use it, not just technically but practically. Help them find and install apps. Give them free games. Outline things that can be done to improve their lives in the here and now, like freelance websites that can bring in a little extra money.


I would build a comprehensive framework for teaching Hanzi/Kanji to non-native learners of languages that use Chinese characters.

Anecdotally, I've seen what I assume is a disproportionate amount of passionate learners of languages that use Chinese characters give up their studies after a few years, and many of those I talked to cited difficulty in learning/using/recalling the meanings and readings of Hanzi/Kanji. There are many tools and strategies for learning Chinese characters already in existence (using SRS, mnemonics, calligraphy, etc.) but amongst students in an academic setting, their use seemed fairly minimal when I was a student (a couple of years ago).

If I had 5 years to build something, I would bring together a system using both new approaches enabled by uniting the various existant methodologies and tried-and-true methods that could take you from complete ignorance of Kanji/Hanzi to a degree of reading/writing fluency over a few years. I consider a push like this to be akin to the shift we are seeing in learning methodologies used to teach programming to newbies like Codecademy and TryRuby that rely on hands-on learning rather than lecture learning or trial-and-error learning.


Given that Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world (overall) and conversely English one of the easiest, to the point where it is far easier for a literate Chinese person to learn sufficient English to be useful than for an English speaker to learn Chinese, is there any reason why you would expect substantial value from this kind of project?

Recall its 5 years of your life that you would be dedicating...


Part of it is personal value. I spent years learning Japanese and frequently felt that, while there were many resources for learning kanji, there were few routes that one could take to mastery that were not mostly self-guided and didn't take years to accomplish.

The market for something like this would obviously be niche to those learning Chinese/Japanese characters, but I'd also argue that the absence of a comprehensive way to learn the characters has turned off many learners who were otherwise perfectly capable of learning those languages. Considering the growth of the Chinese economy and the enduring size of the Japanese economy (still one of the largest in the world even after years of recession), I'd bet that the pool of those learning Chinese or Japanese for business purposes will not be dwindling in the near future, even if Chinese and Japanese learners would have an easier time picking up English.

On the other side of things, Chinese and Japanese students also have their own issues learning their own characters. Many young Japanese struggle to master the kanji and it is not uncommon to meet university level students in Japan who would not be able to write a simple character like "turtle" without looking it up first. While I would no doubt love to change how the Japanese school system teaches kanji, that might be a little bit ambitious for only 5 years time, but tools to help students learn at the same pace as their peers could probably be extremely valuable (especially in a society that frequently expects students to go to after-school education to keep an edge on their competition for prestigious colleges).

Now a lot of this is making a lot of assumptions about my success in this endeavor, but hey, if I have 5 years, I would try to do the research and polish the experience to the point where it would be perfect. I do have to admit, 5 years is a long time for me at this point (only been developing for a little more than a year now) so I might be totally off on my estimates and whether this would be a good value for my time. But based on the prompt of this post and where I am at today, this is what I would work on if I had the freedom to focus on something of my own choosing.


I don't think people choose languages to learn based upon difficulty.

As a side note, Chinese (and English too) has been simplified over time, both in terms of sound and vocabulary, and writing. In the old days, not only did you have up to 9 tones and more consonants, you also had regional variations from village to village. You needed a tremendous understanding of the culture and history to comprehend it all, not to mention any special idioms related. For writing, a standardized system had to be implemented to deal with all the variations, which read like nothing you would speak.

Now today the standard Mandarin has much more simplified tones and vocabulary, and it's written in vernacular. And yet here we are...


As a linguist, I don't think it is fair to say English is one of the easiest languages to learn, and Chinese is one of the hardest.


I think I would devote those 5 years to writing a new browser. My goal would be to have a browser that is 100% standards compliant. My browser would run, and display web pages, equally on Windows XP+, OS X 10.5+, as well as all the major flavors of Linux.


100% standards compliant -- have you read specs and tried to implement them before? This is the kind of phrasing I tend to expect from people that are either selling things, or not really involved in implementation. Standards aren't actually programs, and there is generally some measure of ambiguity.

Then, real-world interop issues that cause things to be less than standard. Not to mention that it's unlikely if the browser was "100% standards compliant", it would probably be missing some functionality that would severely impact behaviour.

And I'm also curious as to what benefit you think there is to delivering a browser in 2018 that targets a 16-year-old, 32-bit OS?


The advantage to being 100% standards compliant would be that when you use a specific <insert technology here> feature, it would work as the <insert technology creator here> claims that it should.

As far as why benefit to creating a browser in 2018 that targets 16 year old OSs, because there is no guarantee that we will be in a 64-bit (or greater) exclusive world by then. Without knowing the future, my goal setting off would to remain as cross-system ready as possible, which of course includes some 32-bit OSs


That seems like it would be a waste of 5 years. In 5 years browsers will be even better than they are today.. and they are given away for free!


For money: a system that manages data for preparing 510(k) submissions to the FDA for new medical devices and automates the process as much as possible. From watching how much effort my multi $Bn employer goes through to do this, there must be many, many smaller companies that suffer orders of magnitude more than we do. And they'd pay a handsome amount for a tool.

-or-

I'd find out just what it is that so many people hate about their CAM software and fix it. Bonus points if I get to build hardware as well: iPhone interface to a Haas OfficeMill anyone?

For fun: a walking robot with high payload (> 1/2 ton) capacity.


I have a propensity to think overly-meta. I'd delve deep into connecting disparate parts of the internet, fusing services together into an experience which eliminated a lot of the "service here, service there" paradigm we currently observe. This is really an extension of what I'm already working on in the social+news realm @ Streamified.com, but ultimately would be much larger in scope, incorporating learning algorithms and neural networks to ultimately transform the internet into a sort of persistant secondary-hive-mind accessible from anywhere.


Communication, because we need to wake-up & evolve.

People have to communicate much more deeply and without telepathy we have to augment this using technology.

If not money, but efficiency was the currency, we would have to share technology, ideas and experience. We need a game-changer.

I can't stand the stupidity of the actions our society is taking or failing to take. There are already plenty solutions to all our problems, but nobody can successfully share their ideas. It's not done with just talking about a topic. This results in inferior technology and lifestyle.


I'd really invest and help Vijay Kumar's team that made Autonomous Quadcopters http://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_coo...

Given 5 years time and a few hundred million dollars, I would heavily support them. As a software developer I don't know much about robotics in general but I think a simple step on moving forward is if there was a way to create a friendly abstraction on top of the quadcopters.


AI. I would immerse myself in everything from neuroscience to machine learning to computation theory. Then try to build practical implementations.


This.


A fully integrated Electronic Medical Health Record (EMR/EHR) system and patient portal. Completely web-based application providing secure patient/doctor communication, scheduling, patient visit summary, health record summaries, etc.

Sell it to small/independent clinics. Then make tons of money by letting big pharma companies advertise their drugs to patients on the portal.


I have a similar goal, but would want to integrate CDSS into the fabric of the EMR.


Not incredibly ambitious, but would be cool:

Gmail like it used to be before the Google Plus redesign, with Boomerangforgmail and Idonethis built in


Iron Man Suit, (Complete), doubt it'd take me only 5 years though. I think it would be so amazing to fly, and have all the capabilities of that thing (not as excited about the weaponization, but all the other aspects)

Thinking machine, software that learns how I learn.


Thorium reactor + prior nuclear waste processing station

or

starting a company that google outsources fiber buildout work to.


Food (all aspects):

- use warehouses to build automated aquaponics food farms managed like servers (the info available on this stuff is not exactly scientific)

- fast food that is _real_ food (and potentially grown in an abandoned warehouse close-by).


SAAS applications to disrupt the enterprise software sphere.

Primarily a full featured generic workflow engine with a customizable frontend to boot! I think this application would be able to replace 60% of all corporate apps.


You should checkout http://www.kissflow.com This is what they are attempting to do, with a fair degree of success.


A fully fledged artificial artist.

Edit: (and why?) ...because nothing would interest me more.


A badass robot.


So you don't have an idea? Here is mine: what about spending 3 years tracking other startups' evolution, interviewing entrepreneurs, angels, VC's etc..., with all this information and contacts spend 3 months preparing a kickstarter campaign for a book about startups and entrepreneurship, 9 months to write your book, and with all this information/contacts and press you have collected 1 year building something thinking about what the would would need two year later.


I would make a modern and open standard to replace email, fully encrypted and that would handle both voice and text and besides have a user interface that suits for short as well as long messages in a convenient way. =)

And if I get some time over I'd start making a replacement for the HTML standard that is more suitable for todays web apps where the inherited semantics no longer means anything.


That is related to one of mine: an email/messaging client that doesn't suck. Or rather, multiple clients based on libraries for ‘mailboxes’ of various kinds (including those in which messages appear asynchronously, like mail and messaging servers, RSS, usenet, scrapable web forums, and so on). I don't know how continuous AV links would fit in this framework, though.

Another five-year software project I'd have fun with would be LLVM front ends for various historically interesting programming languages, and likewise code generators for dead or niche processors.

If I also had money for expertise and prototyping, I'd like to make a keyswitch that feels like an IBM Selectric (or at very least an IBM beam spring switch) but fits ISO's thickness requirement so that it's salable.


IMHO Having more time like 5 years doesn't mean anyone is going o build something more valuable; I even think by having a limited time to deliver something (e.g 6 months) you are going to deliver the most valuable thing and skip anything that is simply not needed for user. So I think you should stop thinking about the time limit as a constrain to deliver a GREAT idea.


It might be more valuable simply by virtue of not being a product of this mindset. Certainly nobody on HN is going to tackle a problem that might take five years to bring to market, even as we adore products that obviously took more than six months to produce (the iPhone, the Roadster, etc.)


I would in fact love to tackle such problems since I think the market for 5 - 10 year problems is much less efficient.


While I'm giving out free advice I have no intention of acting on, consider tackling a problem with a significant initial investment in personnel. Nobody on HN is interested in launching a startup with a bunch of employees. If you find a niche where you would need that you can expect not to have much competition from folks around here.


Don't forget Tesla, SpaceX that certainly took more than 6 months to even design it.


Certainly you have a point there :)


The problem is that you can spend years or decades working on something that the market deems irrelevant. Case in point: GNU Hurd.


The question I have presented here does not imply an old traditional development model where you keep working on something for years and then release it to the public. You can use agile or whatever model deem appropriate to you. The question is about What would you FOCUS on for 5 years even if you don't see a light of success and keep working on it.


Isn't the problem with Hurd the fact that they did spend years working on it, instead of just releasing something early and iterating?


Fix the culture of hn, which was an actual community when I joined.

Change the way CF is treated, though I probably need more like 15 years for that.

Put some supports and memes in place to improve education and parenting.

I feel like I am forgetting something. :-/ Probably just as well. Comments of this sort from me tend to get downvoted or attacked.

Edit: Oh, yeah, duh: Get the Solano rail plan changed.


I would build robots. Not with AI, but simple programmable robots with commodity hardware. If I can add them AI in that time span, well great... depending of the level of AI of course. Or an exoesqueleton, that would be cool too.


A game. Because I love games :)


A platform to combine the services that I (and everyone else) use: social networks, self-tracking tools into a simple, chronological interface. I've started at lifegrid.co but have not began integrating APIs from services.


Java IDE in browser. That's the only thing I need from ChromeOS.


I'd build a programming system ala Bret Victor's vision.


I will build the OS and compiler in Sanskrit language. Sanskrit language is not only grammatically rich, but is also best candidate for computers.


Great question. I'm already building my 5 year project. It's called Nuuton. Why? Because current search needs to improve.


A "cache"-centric, non-bloated CMS (in Go?).


The best webapp since Zombo com. Then I'd spend my days doing whatever I want for the next 5 years.


A programming language you could program in while walking around.


What would the OP build?


I would build a robotic maid.


Are you from Japan ? :)


I wished. :)


Monetary freedom.


artificial general intelligence


team!


best answer yet


With a few hundred million dollars and five years, I'd build a functional, scalable LFTR.


What is LFTR ?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor


The first Google result for that is "liquid fluoride thorium reactor".


a big ass awesome boat.


That's probably what I'd do too. Build a boat. Just been out on a mate's boat that took him seven years part time. I'd like to knock out something bigger, and aluminium rather than wood. 5 years full time would fly by, I'm sure...


a time machine


Weird question and the answer is, don't plan for the next five years, plan for the next week, develop an MVP and when it's deployed think about the next step.




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