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Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?

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Re: Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?

#61

Post by 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?

Re: Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?

#62

Post by arash_milani »

31reasons wrote: post #28
arash_milani wrote: post #10

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.

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

Certainly you have a point there :)

Re: Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?

#63

Post by 31reasons »

jholman wrote: post #59

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 con…

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.

Re: Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?

#64

Post by alok-g »

jholman wrote: post #59

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 con…

>> 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.

Re: Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?

#65

Post by paulsamways »

wheaties wrote: post #2

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 unt…

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.

Re: Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?

#67

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?

#69

Post by 31reasons »

alok-g wrote: post #64
jholman wrote: post #59

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 con…

>> 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.

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.

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