I'm sure plenty of you work on projects with no motivation for financial returns, but suppose you could quit your job right now, and work on any project full time. What would it be? Why?
I'd go after fixing the software deployment and packaging issue. Actually getting software on systems is still a PITA.
There's a huge gap between dev and ops here - I'm thinking that building tools that allows a developer to make an ops ready deployable package as easy as pushing to source control would be the ideal. Then tools, that work against source control and can generate packages off any revision/flavor would be great for both continuous testing and eventual distribution.
We've been stuck in the "download the tarball and compile it" mindset for far too long.
>"Suppose you could quit your job right now, and work on any project full time."
Well, I just did the former though I can't really justify the latter. :) However, I mostly quit because my work was again taking over my personal life, so the intention now is the find something a bit more humdrum than yet another poorly managed startup so I have the energy at the end of the day to work on the side project.
Similar to Ivan, games. I want to make a Dwarf Fortress-like game for iPad, with a top-down 2.5D perspective, sprite graphics in a cel-shaded style, and culled down to the core elements I find to be most entertaining (with influences from other games I enjoy). It's a game I want to play, but I'm probably the only person on the planet willing to make it. However I'd also like to raise Dwarf Fortresses's visibility through my work, and get it some additional exposure to ensure DF development can continue. I've also a few concepts for iPhone games that scratch some other itches of mine, but the iPad game I at least have written a basic rendering and pathfinding engine already.
However I need to line up other work for the time being (should only take a few weeks). I'm a perfectionist that prefers the "when it's done" release cycle.
I'd like to create a sprite-based 2D rpg, also heavily influenced by Dwarf Fortress, where terrain, cities, forests, rivers, people, monsters, quests, dialogue, groups, and stories are all generated procedurally. Push a button and an interesting game comes out. That'd be cool.
"What would it be? "
- Open source Federated P2P socnet.
"Why?"
- Software can be as closed as it wants 'cause we can always drop it for another option anytime we want since the data is still under our control, but imprisoning our digital lives into these walled gardens put up by "for-profit, maximize-shareholder-value-at-all-costs, turn-user-into-product, shove-ads-into-the-user's-stream-and-if-possible-download-a-few-into-their-throats-as-well" companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, is a recipe for disaster as our data, our friends, our relationships, our entire digital lives, go out of our control in realtime. The situation is really, really bad and to make things worse, the people currently working on this problem are so geeky, so out of touch with the common man's mentality that their technically smart solutions will never ever go mainstream. I'm very passionate about improving the situation and I desire to make social, at minimum, a federated system like email so migration can get a little bit easier when better alternatives pop up down the line or if the user feels the service provider is starting to get a tad too "evil" for his taste.
I specifically see "games" a lot from developers and I always wonder if they have all 5 or 6 talents necessary to pull it off.
I think most developers are interested in the engine development (a known quantity) but when it comes to the art assets (3D models, animations, textures, level design) that seems like a giant unknown to me.
I would enjoy working on a rendering engine, but if I had to model characters and animate them, I think I'd release the game 6 weeks before my 97th birthday.
If you have talent in all the required spots to do this, I'd agree with the other poster... so 2 or 3 proof of concepts in the app store to hone your skills.
1. Game 1, simple terrain traversal game. Get used to open-world rendering.
2. Game 2, character-focused game with stats. Get used to modeling and animation.
3. <some more stuff>
4. Game 4, Skyrim for iOS
I’d hire a team of 8–10 sharp developers and write a better Photoshop. There’s quite a bit of low hanging fruit in terms of (a) improved image processing that can be done on modern computers that wasn’t possible when Photoshop’s core features were designed 20 years ago, and (b) much more sophisticated, flexible, and intuitive user interfaces. The needs of those photographers who deeply care about bending images to their will have been sadly neglected by the whole industry for 15 years, with most of the recent improvements (e.g. in Lightroom, Aperture) coming on the workflow side, for photographers who need to worry about organizing tens of thousands of photos rather than getting any particular one just right.
"There’s quite a bit of low hanging fruit in terms of (a) improved image processing that can be done on modern computers that wasn’t possible when Photoshop’s core features were designed 20 years ago,"
That's an interesting area of thought. What things today are the way they are, merely because things were the way they were when the canonical instance was produced?
At the risk of sounding cheesy, I would work on something that helps soothe or at least mitigate the destructive effects humanity has on the planet, ecosystems etc. This could be anything from renewable energy, self-sustaining houses, solar powered cars, arcologies, biodegradable or fully recyclable materials and so on. It's a far cry from the web stuff I am working on now. I would definitely need to acquire some new skills first (which would not be an issue if I don't need to worry about money).
Also, education. Things like Khan academy are amazing, but not yet accessible to everyone in the world. Thinking about that, working on internet access for all seems like a pretty noble cause too.
This idea is sort of wild, but auto-generated scripted media. Auto-machinima? I think in the perhaps distant future, even if your favorite tv show is no longer being produced, you will be able to input a script and some source material and have the result be a decently rendered creation that looks and feels like the TV show you're used to.
Imagine downloading a script with very detailed stage and setting direction. A piece of software would exist that would take as input the script and as much source material as you have (seasons of a tv show or a movie) and create the setting, model the characters, synthesize the voices and output the finished product.
I think a lot of the tech to get started with this exists in the fields of game development, video editing, machinima, voice synthesis, etc. If money were no issue, I would work on putting it together. It would probably just be a toy for years before it could generate something watchable, but would be lots of fun.
I kind of hate this type question. I feel like I have been working on my top priority "full time" (every minute of every day) for over a decade and cannot for the life of me figure out a) how to monetize it when money is a huge personal obstacle and b) how to effectively spread the word.
I and my oldest son have a dread disease and are basically well at this point when that is supposed to be impossible. Is the public curious? No. It is incredulous -- as in "you are a teller of tall tales".
Having said that, I did recently quit my job and moved a thousand miles to live on the beach and support myself doing freelance work. When the income is a little less dicey I may try to finally pursue my dream of creating a web comic or similar entertainment. That might actually pay. I very much need the money and I am extremely burned out on getting kicked in the teeth for trying to help people.
I'd learn AI, machine learning, natural language processing, compilers, interpreters, drawing, playing guitar/violin/piano, snowboarding, martial arts, socializing better and effortless, programming/natural languages and whatever else I can come up with.
I'd love to come up with answers to questions others have not yet answered and discover questions no-one else has discovered, yet.
I'd also like to travel the world and get to know as much people as possible.
However I fear that even with unlimited amounts of money the real problem I will face is time which is why I hate procrastinating and even more the fact that I can't seem to stop it.
Inexpensive robotic aerial platforms for film-making and the attendant software that controls the platform as well as the various aspects of post-production, such as match-moving, involving footage shot from same.
I'm currently leading a small project where something like that would be extremely handy.
Copenhagen Suborbitals (copenhagensuborbitals.com) is doing five testlaunches of rockets this summer from the baltic sea. My job is to get live video from the launch to the Internet. There are several interesting problems in this, one is getting good footage of the launch and preparations.
The rockets will launch from a specially built self propelled vessel that sails from Copenhagen to The launch site aacompanied by a navy vessel that will act as support and crew ship. On launch the navy vessel will be around one mile from the launch platform, so getting good footage of the launch and preparations will be difficult.
I've thought that aerial remote robotics with cameras would be a good way of getting some really great shots. It's not easy though; you're operating over water, with one mile to the support vessel, and you'll need to steer the remotes via the Internet since there won't be available space for an operator on the navy ship (there will be a reasonable good internet connection available from the support ship)so you need remotes that can be operated over the Internet and send footage back.
If this sounds interesting, or if you have any ideas let me know, either here or by email. My mail is in my profile.
This would take more money than just quit-my-job money, but it I had the money, I would ask around for suggestions (here on HN and in other places) on how to build a new crowdsourced general encyclopedia that would provide a competitive nudge to Wikipedia. (I'd probably try to hire away some of the existing Wikipedia team, depending on what kind of noncompete agreements they are subject to, and would look to bring in a new kind of staff for overall direction of the project.) I was an editor in a few earlier workplaces, so I'm interested in the challenge of how to manage a mostly-volunteer, world-facing general encyclopedia project. Wikipedia sets an amazingly high standard for a project that started out so haphazardly, but here on HN and elsewhere I've seen criticisms of Wikipedia that get me thinking about how to do a similar project better. Of course, different readers define "better" in different ways, and the first challenge would be figuring out what intentional differences from Wikipedia would help a competing project be successful over the long term. The reason I would do this is to enjoy the result of thousands of new, well written articles on a variety of subjects, a resource my children and grandchildren and people all over the world could use for decades to come. The reason I would ask other people for advice on the project is that it would be interesting to hear how to improve upon something that is already free.
Speaking as someone who worked for the Wikimedia Foundation: noncompete agreements? That just doesn't exist in our culture, as far as I know. But your idea seems to overestimate the staff's importance when it comes to writing the encyclopedia.
The community does all the content and most of the policy decisions, by themselves. The staff is there for things like ops, fundraising, legal, bugfixes, research, PR, and projects that require a longer-term vision.
Ian Baker aka Raindrift recently did a cool project to expose how things really work on Wikipedia. People usually underestimate the process.
There is a way to kill wikipedia and it is simple in essence, just build a beautiful encyclopedia by field. Start with a world atlas, with stunning images, then continue with animals, a book on birds, plants, books on flowers. Even greek mythology, history, religion, art.
Something to rival Facebook that puts more control into the hands of users. The "wordpress"/blogging phenomenon came shortly after low-cost hosting. Now VPSs are where web hosts were 10 years ago.
Seems like most people probably wouldn't need more than something like a TonidoPlug to serve content to people on their friend list and, complementing that, to pull content from their friends' TonidoPlugs to make a nice looking news feed. A dirt simple to use, one time $100 box that puts you on the new social network the users control would be nice.
Nice question, some answer are pretty sad though. Particularly the one of binarymax ("PhD in Computer Science"). Money shouldn't be an issue to learn.
If I have a lot of time (not only money). I would certainly work in Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Life. I believe this is where I would be the most efficient in discovering something useful for the rest of the Humanity.
Sadly, even with a PhD in Machine Learning, I lose most of time resolving trivial issues or making trivial softwares.
[+] [-] zdw|14 years ago|reply
There's a huge gap between dev and ops here - I'm thinking that building tools that allows a developer to make an ops ready deployable package as easy as pushing to source control would be the ideal. Then tools, that work against source control and can generate packages off any revision/flavor would be great for both continuous testing and eventual distribution.
We've been stuck in the "download the tarball and compile it" mindset for far too long.
[+] [-] wink|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atjoslin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrFoof|14 years ago|reply
Well, I just did the former though I can't really justify the latter. :) However, I mostly quit because my work was again taking over my personal life, so the intention now is the find something a bit more humdrum than yet another poorly managed startup so I have the energy at the end of the day to work on the side project.
Similar to Ivan, games. I want to make a Dwarf Fortress-like game for iPad, with a top-down 2.5D perspective, sprite graphics in a cel-shaded style, and culled down to the core elements I find to be most entertaining (with influences from other games I enjoy). It's a game I want to play, but I'm probably the only person on the planet willing to make it. However I'd also like to raise Dwarf Fortresses's visibility through my work, and get it some additional exposure to ensure DF development can continue. I've also a few concepts for iPhone games that scratch some other itches of mine, but the iPad game I at least have written a basic rendering and pathfinding engine already.
However I need to line up other work for the time being (should only take a few weeks). I'm a perfectionist that prefers the "when it's done" release cycle.
[+] [-] pradn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Morendil|14 years ago|reply
1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Why aren't you working on them?
(See http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)
[+] [-] bartonfink|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vjk2005|14 years ago|reply
"Why?" - Software can be as closed as it wants 'cause we can always drop it for another option anytime we want since the data is still under our control, but imprisoning our digital lives into these walled gardens put up by "for-profit, maximize-shareholder-value-at-all-costs, turn-user-into-product, shove-ads-into-the-user's-stream-and-if-possible-download-a-few-into-their-throats-as-well" companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, is a recipe for disaster as our data, our friends, our relationships, our entire digital lives, go out of our control in realtime. The situation is really, really bad and to make things worse, the people currently working on this problem are so geeky, so out of touch with the common man's mentality that their technically smart solutions will never ever go mainstream. I'm very passionate about improving the situation and I desire to make social, at minimum, a federated system like email so migration can get a little bit easier when better alternatives pop up down the line or if the user feels the service provider is starting to get a tad too "evil" for his taste.
[+] [-] ivanbernat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkalla|14 years ago|reply
I think most developers are interested in the engine development (a known quantity) but when it comes to the art assets (3D models, animations, textures, level design) that seems like a giant unknown to me.
I would enjoy working on a rendering engine, but if I had to model characters and animate them, I think I'd release the game 6 weeks before my 97th birthday.
If you have talent in all the required spots to do this, I'd agree with the other poster... so 2 or 3 proof of concepts in the app store to hone your skills.
Step #3 is critical; don't skip that :)[+] [-] lionhearted|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_a_r_o_n|14 years ago|reply
That's an interesting area of thought. What things today are the way they are, merely because things were the way they were when the canonical instance was produced?
[+] [-] mdolon|14 years ago|reply
- Kickstarter for scholarships
- A cheaper, more effective means of transportation for third world countries (essentially creating a better bicycle)
[+] [-] michael_fine|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sopooneo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micheljansen|14 years ago|reply
Also, education. Things like Khan academy are amazing, but not yet accessible to everyone in the world. Thinking about that, working on internet access for all seems like a pretty noble cause too.
[+] [-] a_a_r_o_n|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|14 years ago|reply
Being very political and very active, during my personal time, I'm working on tools that I need to be more effective.
Sunlight Foundation's stuff is a fair start. There are some other initiatives.
The day job is just for healthcare and rent. It's a huge distraction.
[+] [-] bullcity|14 years ago|reply
Imagine downloading a script with very detailed stage and setting direction. A piece of software would exist that would take as input the script and as much source material as you have (seasons of a tv show or a movie) and create the setting, model the characters, synthesize the voices and output the finished product.
I think a lot of the tech to get started with this exists in the fields of game development, video editing, machinima, voice synthesis, etc. If money were no issue, I would work on putting it together. It would probably just be a toy for years before it could generate something watchable, but would be lots of fun.
[+] [-] czcar|14 years ago|reply
I love electric cars and rocket ships. But my god there are some big ass problems I want to solve for my future children...
[+] [-] Mz|14 years ago|reply
I and my oldest son have a dread disease and are basically well at this point when that is supposed to be impossible. Is the public curious? No. It is incredulous -- as in "you are a teller of tall tales".
Having said that, I did recently quit my job and moved a thousand miles to live on the beach and support myself doing freelance work. When the income is a little less dicey I may try to finally pursue my dream of creating a web comic or similar entertainment. That might actually pay. I very much need the money and I am extremely burned out on getting kicked in the teeth for trying to help people.
[+] [-] pinaceae|14 years ago|reply
Writing soothes me.
[+] [-] DasIch|14 years ago|reply
I'd love to come up with answers to questions others have not yet answered and discover questions no-one else has discovered, yet.
I'd also like to travel the world and get to know as much people as possible.
However I fear that even with unlimited amounts of money the real problem I will face is time which is why I hate procrastinating and even more the fact that I can't seem to stop it.
[+] [-] bmh100|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wistar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmax|14 years ago|reply
Copenhagen Suborbitals (copenhagensuborbitals.com) is doing five testlaunches of rockets this summer from the baltic sea. My job is to get live video from the launch to the Internet. There are several interesting problems in this, one is getting good footage of the launch and preparations.
The rockets will launch from a specially built self propelled vessel that sails from Copenhagen to The launch site aacompanied by a navy vessel that will act as support and crew ship. On launch the navy vessel will be around one mile from the launch platform, so getting good footage of the launch and preparations will be difficult.
I've thought that aerial remote robotics with cameras would be a good way of getting some really great shots. It's not easy though; you're operating over water, with one mile to the support vessel, and you'll need to steer the remotes via the Internet since there won't be available space for an operator on the navy ship (there will be a reasonable good internet connection available from the support ship)so you need remotes that can be operated over the Internet and send footage back.
If this sounds interesting, or if you have any ideas let me know, either here or by email. My mail is in my profile.
[+] [-] lsiu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilk|14 years ago|reply
The community does all the content and most of the policy decisions, by themselves. The staff is there for things like ops, fundraising, legal, bugfixes, research, PR, and projects that require a longer-term vision.
Ian Baker aka Raindrift recently did a cool project to expose how things really work on Wikipedia. People usually underestimate the process.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Raindrift/Workflows
For example, here's the diagram for Articles:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Article_lifecycle.svg
[+] [-] Kilimanjaro|14 years ago|reply
Knowledge, beautifully presented.
And free.
[+] [-] adnam|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nooneelse|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] szcukg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yogsototh|14 years ago|reply
If I have a lot of time (not only money). I would certainly work in Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Life. I believe this is where I would be the most efficient in discovering something useful for the rest of the Humanity.
Sadly, even with a PhD in Machine Learning, I lose most of time resolving trivial issues or making trivial softwares.