5 ms·
Ask YC: what is your most important idea?
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?
- qhoxie 18y agoAn 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 18y agoSelling 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 :)
- andreyf 18y agoI'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.
- dangoldin 18y agoShowing that P=NP.
- vaksel 18y ago200 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 18y agoReally? 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 18y agoBut 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.
- unalone 18y agoYeah, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will be more famous than Bush or Cheney.
- vaksel 18y agoHow many people remember Rockefeller and Carnegie off the top of their head? Actually bad example, it hasn't been 200 years since those guys. How about Vanderbilt and Astor? I doubt you'll find many people who know who they are. Wealth alone doesn't get you into history books, you may fund some expedition, but it'll be Louis & Clarke who'll get into the history books.
- unalone 18y agoNot wealth, but ideas. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are not just icons of wealth, but icons of revolution, in a way. I don't think Warren Buffet will be remembered, which I find sad. But I believe Jobs will live on as a sort of legend of his own.
- unalone 18y agoThe 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 18y agoMaking sending money as easy as sending email.
- walesmd 18y agoPaypal?
- thebigshane 18y agoPaypal is easy. But it is not as easy and ubiquitous as sending an email.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- neilk 18y agoLao-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 18y agoI 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 18y agoOr -- just playing devil's advocate here -- perhaps it's a matter of PR... e.g., Edison vs. Tesla.
- tc7 18y agoOn 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.
- jgrahamc 18y agoI would take one year with my daughter and travel with her around the world.
- LKM 18y agoMy 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 18y agoLinear time protein folding.