Ask YC: what is your most important idea?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=259954

by andreyf • 18 years ago

13 32 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Two hundred years from now, what piece of work would you like to be remembered for most?

If you had one year to devote to working on one project, after which you could never code again, what would you make?

qhoxie2• 18 years ago

An open collaborative platform for education. Something along the lines of OpenCourseWare. I feel like that should be the future if it isn't already in sight. I'm of the school of thought that puts educating people as a top concern, and the more readily available and collaborative it is, the better it can be for everyone.

aditya• 18 years ago

Selling things to .edu institutions is a royal pain in the neck. Couldn't tell if this is non-profit pie-in-the-sky idea or for-profit venture, but if it is the latter, best of luck :)

qhoxie2• 18 years ago

Likely the former, heh.

trekker7• 18 years ago

maybe there are applications for enhanced training within companies, or even to sell on the cheap to college students themselves that want a better group-study environment for when they can't meet up. you don't have to sell bulk licenses.

andreyf2• 18 years ago

I'm of the school of thought that puts educating people as a top concern

I like to think that the reason our industry has taken off so well is because the things we work with are available to kids to play with.

I notice that a lot of the big brains in CompSci follow your mentality, also - Woz and Alan Kay come to mind.

dangoldin2• 18 years ago

Showing that P=NP.

kylec2• 18 years ago

Just show that N=1 or P=0. Problem solved. Next?

kylec2• 18 years ago

It was a joke. Apparently people here have no sense of humor.

vaksel2• 18 years ago

200 years from now noone will remember anything you'll ever accomplish. Look back to 1808, do you honestly remember any major inventions from back then?

I don't remember the exact quote, but it goes something along the lines of "If you want to be remembered 100 years from now, you need to kill a lot of people"

aasarava• 18 years ago

Really? I don't know about 1808 exactly, but history is full of accomplished individuals whose names we remember many years later. Galileo? Gutenberg? Edison? Ben Franklin? Marie Curie?

azharcs• 18 years ago

But Hitler, Genghis Khan are always more famous than Edison or Galileo. Just like how G.W.Bush or Dick Cheney will be more famous than Sir.Tim Berners Lee for the future generation.

ken• 18 years ago

You could write music. Beethoven completed both his Symphony Nr. 5 in c (Op. 67) and Symphony Nr. 6 in F (Op. 68) in 1808. A few people have heard of those.

unalone4• 18 years ago

The same idea I'm working on this year. Something that makes it easy to do a task that's simple offline, hard online. (I'd say more but I'm a paranoid youth.)

Really, anything that does the generic idea presented above. Whenever you present a simple method of doing something, the whole system tips.

mleonhard• 18 years ago

Making sending money as easy as sending email.

walesmd• 18 years ago

Paypal?

thebigshane• 18 years ago

Paypal is easy. But it is not as easy and ubiquitous as sending an email.

neilk• 18 years ago

Lao-Tzu would argue that being of lasting significance, is, well, insignificant:

   Of the best leaders
   When the task is accomplished
   The people will remark
   We have done it ourselves.

The people who made TCP/IP and HTTP are among the greatest benefactors to humankind in the past 20 years. Yet hardly anyone knows who they are, and I doubt they will make the history books. Because they were so successful, their achievement now seems like an impersonal product of the age. If only!

All the internet entrepreneurs, all the ones who became richer than Croesus - their achievement was to become gatekeepers for a zillionth of the wealth that the Internet and the Web have bestowed on the world. And then they became targets for other people, who had piled up maybe a zillionth and a half of that wealth, and people like Arrington can't shut up about them.

If you want to change the world, and the people know your name, you're doing it wrong.

VarunGupta• 18 years ago

I think, to be remembered for long time it's not about the field or occupation with which a personality is associated but it depends on the quantum of fundamental shift that he/she brings in the evolution of civilizations. eg: Newton and Einstein will be remembered for the centuries to come though other brilliant physicists will not. Humanity will respect Wright brothers for many ages to come, though the case may not be same for the person who invented jet engine.

May be their original work is not in much use these days but they opened a new domains for future generations to work on and that created the shift.

altay• 18 years ago

Or -- just playing devil's advocate here -- perhaps it's a matter of PR... e.g., Edison vs. Tesla.

tc7• 18 years ago

On significance, I'm not so interested in people remembering me in 200 years as being able to look back before I die and know that I did something really important. (What that important thing is, I don't know yet.)

Like neilk says, fame and impact in many cases don't correlate. And that's okay. The people that made TCP/IP are/were probably satisfied with what they'd accomplished, and beyond that, who cares.

andreyf2• 18 years ago

I should definitely have said "which of your work would you want to be used/remembered?", thanks for pointing it out.

jgrahamc• 18 years ago

I would take one year with my daughter and travel with her around the world.

LKM• 18 years ago

My email sig:

"If there's one thing I am truly proud of, it's that I've wasted all my talents, contributed nothing to the human race, and will not be remembered by generations yet to come."

If you're doing things because you want to be remembered for them, you're doing things for all the wrong reasons and will never be remembered for anything.

biohacker42• 18 years ago

Linear time protein folding.

Ask YC: what is your most important idea?

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