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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.