
Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why? - 31reasons
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.<p>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?<p>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.
======
ambiate
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.

~~~
Bjuukia
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.

------
wheaties
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.)

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

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

------
shanev
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.

------
arh68
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?

~~~
jzhen
Try google.com

------
jholman
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.

~~~
alok-g
>> 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.

~~~
jholman
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/>

~~~
31reasons
Pretty awesome video!

------
thangalin
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/Interests%20Page)

* [https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Policy%20P...](https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Policy%20Page)

* [https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Debate%20P...](https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Debate%20Page)

* [https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Supporting...](https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Supporting%20Page)

------
rrreese
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.

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

------
owyn
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.

------
eli_gottlieb
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.

------
donw
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.

------
jamieb
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.

------
twotwotwo
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.

~~~
Mz
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.

------
zampano
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.

~~~
drucken
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...

~~~
zampano
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.

------
Jeremy1026
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.

~~~
MichaelGG
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?

~~~
Jeremy1026
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

------
HeyLaughingBoy
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.

------
ZaneClaes
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.

------
X4
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.

------
acesubido
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...](http://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_cooperate.html)

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.

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

~~~
tharshan09
This.

------
era86
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.

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

------
jrosenblatt
Not incredibly ambitious, but would be cool:

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

------
onaclov2000
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.

------
djloche
Thorium reactor + prior nuclear waste processing station

or

starting a company that google outsources fiber buildout work to.

------
franklovecchio
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).

------
slake
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.

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

------
binarymax
A fully fledged artificial artist.

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

------
togasystems
A badass robot.

------
miriadis
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.

------
_one
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.

~~~
kps
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.

------
arash_milani
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.

~~~
fusiongyro
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.)

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

~~~
fusiongyro
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.

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

~~~
31reasons
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.

------
Mz
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.

------
ubersoldat2k7
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.

------
yamalight
A game. Because I love games :)

------
ErikAugust
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
tunesmith
A programming language you could program in while walking around.

------
dman
What would the OP build?

------
orangethirty
I would build a robotic maid.

~~~
31reasons
Are you from Japan ? :)

~~~
orangethirty
I wished. :)

------
FellowTraveler
Monetary freedom.

------
segmondy
artificial general intelligence

------
dotborg
team!

~~~
headgsaket
best answer yet

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

~~~
31reasons
What is LFTR ?

~~~
denniskubes
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor>

------
elf25
a big ass awesome boat.

~~~
davewasthere
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...

------
hnwh
a time machine

------
tferris
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.

