Ask HN: What would you work on, if you had enough free time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you work on, if you had enough free time?

59 pointsmanx94 comments

As phrased, this is a nebulous question.

If I had 'enough' free time, I'd find a way to make people pay the costs of their actions or choices, regardless of where they land in the social/economic hierarchy.

Too many people who do bad things get away with them, and too few who do good are rewarded.

This, kinda.

We're not born equal yet some great minds never reach their potential (I've been one of them for a good 3,5 decades). I'd love to have that problem solved, and I believe the information technology (computer, networking, etc) revolution can contribute to fix this inequality. What I'd like to do is use my 2 ct to contribute to fixing the problem. I don't believe I can fix it all by myself, but I'd love to contribute my little bit towards it.

What actions and what sort of payment?

Not the OP, but in my mind I want a system that rewards members who are improving the health(mental and physical) of the largest possible group of other humans. The anti axis of this would be producing pain in the smallest set of other humans possible.

The way to punish behaviors that are scoring worse on the above would be to reduce the total number of connections possible to other humans. You would need a recovery sensor to catch run away cascading punishments and isolate for rehab.

So you find someone who has healthy relationships and you empower them. You someone with unhealthy relationships and you isolate them and rehab.

Someone who can maintain large n umbers of healthy relationships is a leader.

This sounds dystopian at best.

I was thinking the exact same thing. The whole tone is incredibly Orwellian.

We already do a less granular version of that in the US (it was developed before the ubiquitous surveillance necessary to implement the fine-grained version)--our mechanism for punishment-by-constrained-relationship-options is prison.

Our system was developed with an eye towards penitence (this started with Eastern State penitentiary in Pennsylvania). Forced penitence is a flawed concept to begin with which renders our penal system almost ineffectual in its current state. The fact of the matter is that certain people are better off separated from society while other people could do with a brief respite coupled with some therapy.

This is most aparant in non-violent cases involving drugs. The war on drugs has ruined more lives than conceivable and this is while our government has realized the bad effects of prohibition for almost a century now (there is an entire constitutional amendment). The war on drugs has the effect of granting criminal organizations a monopoly over vices. While vices might not be attractive, they are necessary and granting the monopoly to violent organizations is at best gross negligence on our government's behalf.

So like the social media system china has?

This is a concerning comment. Are you thinking about doing anything which may cause harm to yourself or others?

Sorry if that sounds cliche or something but if you find yourself overly concerned with retribution then any action you take is likely to cause more harm to yourself and your loved ones than anyone from which you extract retribution.

Please feel free to discuss this with someone you trust or failing that I'm here.

After your update, this comment feels out-of-place, but (while I contemplated deleting it) I feel like I should leave it here...just in case.

Ok Dexter

If you see society's problems as caused by bad actors in an otherwise working system, I can see why you'd be so angry at individuals. I'm angry too but when I have a shelf full of bad eggs I don't whip the chickens, I call a fridge technician.

Learning as many languages to B2 level as possible and maintaining that level as needed. B2 is the level where you "can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party." [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

Yup, same here. Although this is definitely something you can do in your free time. I find too, that there is a cap to the number of hours or minutes you can spend working on a language per day. Kind of like working out a muscle. Of course, actually being in the country you will go past this limit out of necessity and still thrive.

I still want to do a story generator. Something that just creates a world, creates characters, creates stories between them. And from all this generates history.

Possibly with a little guidance and balancing from a human input. I'm thinking they would be useful as an assistant GM in tabletop games. Just randomly generate a character on the fly, based on existing information, but it won't be as visionary as a human would.

Sounds like you should try Dwarf Fortress!

Or Caves of Qud

That's what I immediately thought of as well.

Too complex. It builds worlds well but takes too long to build stories.

you might find this interesting?

http://www.storytron.com/

Life imitates art. http://roalddahl.wikia.com/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammati...

Write a native Slack client for OS X which has identical functionality to the official version but doesn't chew through CPU cycles like they're going out of fashion. I would call it "Slick".

Problem is Slack protocol. Shouldn't depend on such proprietary, centralised protocol in the first place.

You should start a Patreon/Kickstarter/whatever. I'd pay good money for that.

Please do this! I believe there are probably undocumented APIs though.

I’d start with studying more math. So many other interesting doors open up as a result of better math skills. Plus it’s just gratifying for its own sake; feels like getting a deeper glimpse into the structure of the universe....

Scientific publishing has a deep problem right now with papers being published with data, algorithms, and/or code being proprietary. In addition but not always related, there is the problem of reproducing results in papers. From bad data to crafting results to have p be under 5% causes headaches for scientists and in general creates an ecosystem of bad science.

If I had enough time, I'd like to do two things:

1) Create a third party rating system where we attempt to rate the quality of the paper based on openness, reproducibility, who funded the research, data quality, etc. The hope is that researchers will not look for papers in their favorite journals, but refine their search to only quality papers.

2) In a similar vain to the above, have a company that does nothing but tries to reproduce experiments in papers. I think this would be a ton of fun and provide great value to the world. Where funding would come from however is unknown...

Are you familiar with the Center for Open Science? http://cos.io

Nope, but now I'm interested. Thanks!

No problem.

I was a very early employee (first dev hire) and still keep up with a lot of the employees and alumni. Let me know if I can answer any questions :)

I’d love to work professionally doing music production, composition, and sound engineering, especially for films and video games. I also like doing music transcription and transposition because I have a decent ear and use it to learn a lot of the music that I play (ps I’m a classically trained pianist of over 20 years).

Personally, I’d like to be in better shape. I’m not in horrible shape but I definitely do not have the time currently to undertake any sort of consistent exercise routine.

you don’t have 40 minutes a day for 3 days out of the week? That’s all the exercise-time it takes to get in great “athletic” shape. With visible results in only a few months to half a year (you may or may not be where you want to be at that time, but you will see results and progress in the mirror)

the rest is nutrition.

I commute an hour both ways, work 9-10 hours, and have a young child who has sports on the weekends. I also have a spouse with whom I would like to spend time. I also need to eat and sleep.

So, no, currently I don’t have that time available.

your situation is not all that different from many others who are making it right now.

One hack that’s very popular is waking up, eating a quick high-energy snack such as a banana (would be enough energy to get through a 40 minute workout), and then taking a shower in the gym (and putting on your work clothes there) instead of at home. You can keep a locker to make it a very comfortable process.

There’s a few other adjustments that make a big difference if it’s something you want to accomplish, but I’d have to know more about you. But the main message is that it’s doable, your situation is really not as unique or limiting as you think it may be, and many others in your situation are doing it, without killing themselves in the process.

Systematize online business creation. For example, if you have an idea for a product, it helps you raise money, develop prototypes, find manufacturer, build ecommerce site, do fulfillment, and online marketing.

Similar for sass.

I would continue working on my pet project, http://walks.io

What city is this gor? London?

I've been trying to work on this for years but never had enough time and always lost steam. So here goes:

I want to build a markdown editor that's built for writer powerusers. My idea was that it'd function as a "writing IDE" with some of the following features:

1. storing metadata about a markdown file using the MOML[1] format

2. ability to quickly search through an entire project (a book, blog posts for a site, etc.)

3. plugin support (such as for spell-checking, grammar-checking)

4. auto-detecting character/scene/location names and linking them together (eg. if a character named "John" shows up, you can hover over them to see other places they're at)

5. robust project structure -- ability to separate story from research from character/location descriptions

6. export using pandoc into epub/mobi/html/whatever format

7. despite all the features -- it's all plain markdown so you can sync it via dropbox/drive/onedrive/git

8. ability to run specific commands on the text you're editing. Similar to how in VS Code you can run format or other commands on the current code file.

9. clean/empty interface

10. autosave to temp location in case of a crash

I've already started on this and have a functional version of it called OMEN[2] and have a simple design up on my blog [3].

And yeah...I wrote half a book on my OMEN prototype. I had to switch when I realized that I didn't have autosave...and didn't have the Ctrl+S shortcut implemented yet.

[1] https://github.com/AntJanus/MOML [2] https://github.com/AntJanus/omen [3] https://antjanus.com/blog/dev-updates/dev-update-1/

My other project would be a game I've been designing for a while. It's like Diablo I mixed with Stardew Valley. Eg. your objective is to crawl through a dungeon but it's not as serious/dark and has a crafting/home aspect to it. I've worked up a game design, character design, etc. just never had time to build it.

If I had enough time, I would start a software design company focusing primarily on disabilities. All the current accessibility features are afterthoughts.

My thoughts were similar, make tutorials/guides on how to make the web easy to use by those who have disabilities.

Honestly? Pretty much everything. And thus in effect I get nothing done in my current level of free time as I'm jumping back and forth between dozens of fun projects.

I'm aware this may not be a satisfying answer, but it's the truth, for better or for worse.

It's satisfying for me, it's an honest answer, and as good as any other.

With enough free time there wouldn't be much need for a direction. And after a while I would probably figure out something I liked doing more than other things.

Only issue is that in my eyes, enough is probably pretty close to immortality. Largely because I would like to understand the breathd of the human condition, and how language makes us think differently. That probably requires getting to native speaking ability in maybe 100’s of languages, and also the patience to wait for the likely needed cognitive augmentation to be able to do that.

I would also very much like to visit a few stars and nebulae, which could take a while.

If I only had a couple of decades or so, I might take a stab at building tools to make programming the job it should be, but isn't now.

Definitely this (AGPL): I heavily use a tool I've mentioned before, which I wrote (after trying org-mode, collapsible outlines in other tools, etc). It uses postgres, and I hope that "sharing" data exchange features are coming (though it already does export to org-mode-like text, and to html). Best code is that in github, though a downloadable .jar is available. Currently keyboard and desktop-only (text-oriented). The most efficient/effective thing I have found for notes/lists/details of all kinds, and should be easy to learn to use, as all the essentials are on the screen. There is a tutorial.

[updated, to add:] Part of the eventual purpose of the tool is to help individuals and mentors via maturity models that apply more generally to life before getting into any particular topic. That could easily be misunderstood, and there is more about that at the web site (below). Part of the idea is to help in the development/growth of self and others -- skills, knowledge, positive character traits, anything good -- in any area of life that one chooses, so we can have good goals instead of trying to make life seem fulfilling with empty searching for more pleasure/power/attention.

By marking things done or "archived", it also provides a journal feature or personal log, of entries created or archived in any date range (defaulting to "yesterday and so far, today", to help with daily standup reporting).

http://onemodel.org

Feedback welcome. Thanks.

I do a lot of music right now, because I feel like I have a whole separate emotional energy reserve for that.

If I had more free time though I’d like to think I would work more on the browser I’ve been writing along with other small side projects (d&d charecter sheet validator, open street map renderer etc.) and maybe try to teach myself more math.

I’d also spend more time at art museums and hanging out with my friends though which I’d argue is at least equally important but probably more important.

- A social news aggregator avoiding machine learning and democracy/main-stream. Like a better twitter, but focusing on links.

- finally learn data science (and more python along with it)

Oh man, so much. This side project that has been perpetually at the back of my mind [1], spend more time biking and kayaking w/ the kids, maybe take up FPV drone racing.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQw1TPPvVvMu3Lee...

Love this idea. I think the next level would be to pool together different people's uncommonly used items (e.g. camping tent) to let other people in their community "borrow" them.

What's stopping you from working on this, just out of interest?

Hey thanks! I like it too because it's something I would definitely use. In the little bit of market research I've done (basically just asking a few friends on Facebook) the response has been "it looks cool and I'm sure someone would use it but I wouldn't because (it's too expensive|I already have plenty of storage in my house|etc.)" Seems strange to me because I would totally use it if it existed. But between other projects and a regular job and the lackluster response I got from friends I haven't been able to justify spending time on it.

I don't know if this is even possible but before I dive into what I would like to explain why(Read next para if you want to read what):

A large number of engineers today at least in India are writing the same CRUD applications again and again. I can't believe we haven't reach a level of abstraction where people who needs these app are able to design themselves. This would save tonne of man hours. I have seen so many companies implementing the same employee management, payroll systems, sometimes their own internal social networks. Heck, some are implementing their own email clients because the companies who are selling email services charge a lot. If only we had open source alternatives to these system as that of the grade of Linux kernel, a large number of engineers can start working on more pressing issues.

So I would like to build open source alternative to the systems like employee management, payroll management, student management, hospital management, email services, hotel management,etc. Anyone who wants variations in their system can tweak it making small code changes. Ultimately hoping to reach a level of abstraction where we won't need engineers to code every small business case.

It is possible. It came under various avatars called FoxPro, Visual Basic etc, but did not survive post web / web 2.0 era.

I have a few AI/ML pet projects and games http://wordsmashing.com http://bigmultiplayerchess.com http://multiplicationmaster.com

I have one project predicting cryptocurrency prices which makes money https://bitbank.nz, the games have no ads/attempt to charge and are more a labour of love :D

given more time i would venture into higher end 3D games and AI's, i also like to make things educational so i would love to make something biologically accurate, there are so many complex systems in real world biology that would make great games e.g for example a game centred around the life of one of these animals: meercat, beaver, bug/spider, ants.... the list goes on :D

I would start a business focusing on one of the things I really care about; education for special needs children and bullying. I don't believe in the whole "reinvent everything" stuff that most tech founders proclaim, I would look into working together with people who already work on these issues and see if there's something I could do to innovate on 5% of the process to make it more efficient.

I had a very tough time as a kid because of mild autism, my baby sister has it even worse. I never got much of the help I needed as a child and felt very miserable. My hometown and my parents are much richer today and my sister has gotten a lot of help but I still feel there has to be something one can do to make this better. I was fortunate in discovering my love of math as an adult, and the perseverance to become an engineer, most people weren't as fortunate. I feel an obligation to help the children with special needs in schools today to make them feel safer, respected and empowered in a way childhood me never did.

I will plant trees every day and find ways to encourage every human to do so. Save the planet for the next generations

I'd love to contribute to some free software projects, but I'm not a coder, and doubt I could ever get my coding and debugging skills up to the necessary level, even with intensive study.

I do enjoy contributing to some of my favorite crowdsourcing efforts, though, so I'd spend a lot more time on all of them if I could:

-Contributing to OpenStreetMap (especially when I travel to less well-covered parts of the world)

-Distributed Proofreaders (proofreading scanned books for Project Gutenberg - https://www.pgdp.net/c/)

-Support the Debian project by finding some software to package and maintain- https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned.en.html

Code is far from the only way to contribute. Documentation (read good technical writing) is what is missing in most good, lesser known open source projects. Most projects I have seen are almost overly-welcoming of good contributions to their documentation.

Well, you can't make more time. You can only make time for what is important to you. I've done that (working full time, starting a business, girlfriend...). I'm trying to get into being a backend engineer for MMOs so I'm starting my own projects which I plan to also live off of while I search for a job that will help me change my career path (currently in enterprise Developmemt). Also, if I'm financially independent I have the luxury of working for fun.

You should ask yourself what your goals are and what you should STOP doing.

One thing I enjoyed doing was building/repairing my race cars but it just didn't align with my goals anymore - so I have someone do it (for now).

Where did you start for exploring being a backend engineer for MMOs?

I'm already a full stack guy and have led both FE and BE engineers. I had just never built stuff myself that scaled this way. I just picked a small project and will learn from that to build a bigger one and so on.

Really technically advanced open source projects at the intersection of Python, C, and operating systems. For example, today, I'd probably work on Apache Arrow or a C-optimized Parquet implementation for Python. I just love that kind of stuff.

- Watch all korean & Japanese drama & anime & US TV series that get 8/10 rating or higher (It would take 50 years if I spent two hours every day devoted for it)

- Read all the books I'm interested in (I get depressed thinking I won't ever have enough time to read them all, even if I stopped working for the rest of my life)

- Watch all the youtube channel I'm following

- Learn how to play the piano smoothly.

- Put everything I read and watched into application in my own life. What's the heck to keep theories in your head if you don't put them into practice ?

Find an alternative approach to selling software, the benefits of managed software that SaaS offers but with the ease of use of adding a library to your code. No syncing data back and forth in order to really get the benifit

This or possibly a projec that would attempt to find an common Set of AST definitions that could be serialised & deserialised into most of the common languages, then store source code in this definition rather than any one language, allowing the “same” program to be shown as C#, or java, or F# or python or javascript ... even maybe individual functions... the syntax essentially just becoming a display preference, but the tooling (source control & diffing & static analysis etc) would all work at the AST level

Not exactly what you’re suggesting, but look at LLVM IR.

I would work on making regular space travel a reality for everyone, anyone.

my relationships, my body, and a variety of hobby projects i’ve been meaning to take care of for years.

i need a vacation, i think.

I want to design a framework for building web apps which uses up, down, right, left, space (as yes) and esc (as no) as the primary input mechanisms. The way I envision it would look a lot like the UIs the you see in console game systems. If this was coupled with a USB gamepad with a slide-out keyboard it would be even better.

If this existed, the first thing I would create with it would be a data analysis product along the lines of splunk or elk.

I cannot quite put it into words but the picture that I have in my mind would help me so much day-to-day.

Advanced Physics Research. Or an OS for the 21st century which discards the warts accumulated by the mainstream ones over the decades — which they refuse to discard for backwards compatibility.

I enjoy combining piano and computer programming and have so many musical composition and animation ideas but they are all fragments of completion. For the past year I've been trying to finish some and put on youtube but would enjoy doing more. Then I might actually improve too!

By chance I just put one up this morning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXECreEgcmU

I would build a self-programming software to build software.

So if you had enough time, you would end the Anthropocene? That's intense. I hope you get the time though; it's about time we accept our future!

The theory of chemistry from the perspective of information theory. Since we can equate energy and information and since chemical reactions are largely governed by energy landscapes and (quantum) thermodynamics, we should be able to reformulate the energy theories into information theories. Sometimes a change of variables or parameters introduces a more convenient representation for discovering new phenomena.

Either a new OS for power users that "just works" or a replacement for the web (a ground-up rewrite of web servers, browsers and protocols).

I've organized a group of technologists who are interested in working in our local community to improve understanding of how technology is used or misused in the public sphere. It was my answer to all the times I had to ask "what can I do to help stop this problem/help this effort?"

But it's a side thing and it could be a lot more effective if I could spend more time on it.

I'd spend time learning AI/ML stuff.

I'd be working on much of the same VR/AR stuff that I'm currently working on, but I'd also be out giving talks and I wouldn't be wasting time on corporate compliance training modules.

More specifically, I'd like to build a VR development environment with built-in teleconferencing: a virtual office.

I took a sabbatical recently and explored a bunch of interesting areas of NLP, which culminated in https://www.alphanym.com/

If I had infinite free time, I'd just continue exploring the wonders of computational linguistics.

Some form of communal space, completely (or almost completely) free for people to stay for a while and work on whatever they want (software, books, videos etc). Food, stay, internet etc will be free, with the understanding that they give away their work for free.

I think I would just dig in deeper on my existing hobbies, nothing terribly revelatory.

IRC with federated login and support baked in for roaming with multi-device sync.

What do you think of Matrix?

I think it's over-engineered.

Finally get that private pilot license. Spend more time with my kids.

Education Technology.

The question above doesn't addresses when the problems are large enough that one person's free time alone can't solve.. But maybe effect to some small degree.

Retro graphics adventure

If I had enough time, I'd start a software design company with focus on disabled people. All the accessibility features today are afterthoughts.

One thing I'd work on is open-source tech that can help poor rural families & schools get access to distributed electricity, internet, etc.

NLP bots to influence political issues on the internet

Cryptocurrency projects.

A simple EDA program that doesn't suck (yes, geda, kicad and especially Eagle all suck in various ways).

A football analytics website that I have been slowly building for years and learning ML.

Database system (for fun)

Minikanren, ckanren studying, game development, my own ssh client, my own DHT implementation

All sorts of shit. There's so little time for anything anymore. I'm considering retiring a few years early to get some hacking done.

A distributed OS made for programmers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com