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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?

#91

Post by gpjt »

paulsamways wrote: post #65
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.

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].

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

#92

Post by 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.

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

#93

Post by 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.

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

#94

Post by paulsamways »

gpjt wrote: post #91
paulsamways wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#95

Post by zeckalpha »

drucken wrote: post #71
zampano wrote: post #51

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. Th…

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...

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.

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

#96

Post by jzhen »

arh68 wrote: post #61

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 wa…

Try google.com
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