4 ms·

Ask HN: What's your innovative idea to change the world?

14 points by 123user 12y ago

Rhapso 12y ago
Domesticate Octopi
dibillilia 12y ago
Capable graphing calculators for less than 50 dollars.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Cheap Android phone with an app? People were talking in another thread about Android 2+ phones for something like $12 IIRC.
davyjones 12y ago
Augmented reality contact lenses.
- smt88 12y ago
  You mean Google Glass in contact lenses? It's going to happen. You can hold me to that. I'd bet it'll take less than a decade, too.
KittenLanguage 12y ago
I am building a new programming language that I have named Kitten, with a new paradigm I call modular. Modular programming will be as easy to learn as procedural and as powerful as object oriented. I also plan to make the language nearly as fast as C but with Python styled syntax and with a good set of libraries and data structures. My language will not use manual pointers (no memory leaks or access violations), but will also not have garbage collection or reference counting, I have an idea to make things simpler, though it may add a few restrictions to the language. It will also be easy to extend the language from C, so any C library will be able to be used if a small wrapper is built (though of course errors in that part of the code could introduce memory leaks and access violations could occur). I have many more ideas I am adding to the language, those are just a sample of what I have planned. I have most of the language's details written up in pseudocode, hope to have a working Hello World in a month, a working prototype to give to friends in half a year, and a working prototype to post on Hacker News in a year, and a full language within 2-3 years. My problem is I am doing this on my own (which I don't want to change at this point) while working a full time job. I have thought about doing a Kickstarter to raise funds (I would ask for at least $100,000) but know the legal side of things means it would be unwise to do that until I create a company, which then would cost about $400 a year. I also don't want any kind of deals involving giving away pieces of the company, or going into debt, so donations are probably the only way I'd go. Does anyone think the Kickstarter would be worth it?
- smt88 12y ago
  Advice: don't do Kickstarter. A successful campaign is a full-time job by itself, and you need to have a hell of a knack for marketing to pull one off. Plus, your target market is going to groan at the idea of yet another new language. To reach them, you're going to need something that's fully usable and has a concrete use-case. For example, a lot of people have been announcing feature-complete languages that transpile to JavaScript, so they're usable right now. Two questions: 1) How is "modular" programming not possible in other languages? In something like Scala, I'd always imagined any paradigm is possible. I'd be extremely interested in a short piece of example code. 2) Why a new language instead of contributing to, say, Go, Rust, Scala, or one of the other "new" languages? It generally takes 5+ years for a language to become mainstream (sometimes much longer), so if you're looking at a release date of 3 years from now, you're talking about nearly a decade.
  - KittenLanguage 12y ago
    Thanks for your advice! Modular programming is certainly possible in other languages, the same way object oriented programming is possible in procedural languages. I believe that starting from scratch will allow me to create a much easier to use language compared if other languages were given the capabilities I am adding. One example of this I have seen is a language called AutoIt, which is a very small language and I am amazed at how easy it is to program. One of my goals with Kitten is to make it capable as a teaching language, but also as a large project language, similar to Python. I simply love the unrestricted feel of every capability being useful. As a contrast, I spent a lot of time with C++ in the last year, and I am constantly amazed at how much more difficult programming in it is because of older concepts. In particular, strings have caused a lot of problems, due to the many many varieties of strings between C, C++, and Microsoft data types, as well as Ansi vs Unicode and const vs non-const. There's just so much more to learn, and a lot of it is older concepts that aren't very useful. Over the last year I have built a set of ideas that I have now gotten to play well together. These ideas include very specific syntax unlike any programming languages I have seen out there so far. I admit I have not tried many of the newer languages, but I hit a certain point where I didn't care what else was out there, I just had to build my ideas. Of course, if I do go into the Kickstarter route, I'd investigate those languages more first, right now I just decided to put something out there to see what people's first impressions were. Thanks for your input!
smt88 12y ago
My friend came up with this: open contests to solve humanity's biggest problems. Similar to SpaceX, but the results are copyleft/free/open-source, and they could be purely software-based. Examples would be cancer research[1], solar-powered vehicles, next-gen batteries, carbon capture... pretty much any technology that would drastically improve and prolong life on earth. 1. http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_research http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_rese...
- fractallyte 12y ago
  Open contests would be meaningless without vast financial backing to launch those world-changing projects. And the contributing party would want some kind of financial reward. Never going to happen, for a truly innovative idea, because the risks are too high. The world needs a benevolent Bell Labs type of institution, with commercial intelligence, that channels profits back into its growth (like Amazon). It should employ tens of thousands of scientists - engaged in 'blue sky' research - and aim to solve problems that are currently considered 'too big'. The usual stuff, like climate change, clean energy production, and political reform (backed by hard political science).
  - smt88 12y ago
    Think about NASA. They created dozens of technologies that were then released to the public and have become multi-billion dollar industries, and many of those were not expected to have commercial value. Of course, that's with a massive budget. Examples of smaller budgets Linux, the World Wide Web, and probably a thousand more obvious things that I'm not thinking of. It takes these things a long time to get off the ground, but there are tons of companies that are making money off of community projects.
    - fractallyte 12y ago
      The bureaucracy at NASA is stifling. Slicing up a relatively small budget (compared to spending on finance, defense, and everything other than science) means that the majority of dream research is simply not undertaken. If the barriers to funding were (sensibly) removed, academia, and institutions like NASA, would flourish - and we'd see huge leaps forward for humanity.
ac360 12y ago
I think it's time people have their own databases, instead of the apps they use. I made Servant to give people their own databases in the cloud: https://www.servant.co https://www.servant.co It hosts people-friendly data models I call the "JSON Archetypes": https://github.com/servant-app/json-archetypes https://github.com/servant-app/json-archetypes If this interests anyone, my contact info is all over the website. I'd love to hear from you. Austen

14 points by 123user 12y ago

Rhapso 12y ago

Domesticate Octopi

dibillilia 12y ago

Capable graphing calculators for less than 50 dollars.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Cheap Android phone with an app? People were talking in another thread about Android 2+ phones for something like $12 IIRC.

davyjones 12y ago

Augmented reality contact lenses.

smt88 12y ago
You mean Google Glass in contact lenses? It's going to happen. You can hold me to that. I'd bet it'll take less than a decade, too.

KittenLanguage 12y ago

I am building a new programming language that I have named Kitten, with a new paradigm I call modular. Modular programming will be as easy to learn as procedural and as powerful as object oriented. I also plan to make the language nearly as fast as C but with Python styled syntax and with a good set of libraries and data structures. My language will not use manual pointers (no memory leaks or access violations), but will also not have garbage collection or reference counting, I have an idea to make things simpler, though it may add a few restrictions to the language. It will also be easy to extend the language from C, so any C library will be able to be used if a small wrapper is built (though of course errors in that part of the code could introduce memory leaks and access violations could occur). I have many more ideas I am adding to the language, those are just a sample of what I have planned. I have most of the language's details written up in pseudocode, hope to have a working Hello World in a month, a working prototype to give to friends in half a year, and a working prototype to post on Hacker News in a year, and a full language within 2-3 years. My problem is I am doing this on my own (which I don't want to change at this point) while working a full time job. I have thought about doing a Kickstarter to raise funds (I would ask for at least $100,000) but know the legal side of things means it would be unwise to do that until I create a company, which then would cost about $400 a year. I also don't want any kind of deals involving giving away pieces of the company, or going into debt, so donations are probably the only way I'd go. Does anyone think the Kickstarter would be worth it?

smt88 12y ago
Advice: don't do Kickstarter. A successful campaign is a full-time job by itself, and you need to have a hell of a knack for marketing to pull one off. Plus, your target market is going to groan at the idea of yet another new language. To reach them, you're going to need something that's fully usable and has a concrete use-case. For example, a lot of people have been announcing feature-complete languages that transpile to JavaScript, so they're usable right now. Two questions: 1) How is "modular" programming not possible in other languages? In something like Scala, I'd always imagined any paradigm is possible. I'd be extremely interested in a short piece of example code. 2) Why a new language instead of contributing to, say, Go, Rust, Scala, or one of the other "new" languages? It generally takes 5+ years for a language to become mainstream (sometimes much longer), so if you're looking at a release date of 3 years from now, you're talking about nearly a decade.
- KittenLanguage 12y ago
  Thanks for your advice! Modular programming is certainly possible in other languages, the same way object oriented programming is possible in procedural languages. I believe that starting from scratch will allow me to create a much easier to use language compared if other languages were given the capabilities I am adding. One example of this I have seen is a language called AutoIt, which is a very small language and I am amazed at how easy it is to program. One of my goals with Kitten is to make it capable as a teaching language, but also as a large project language, similar to Python. I simply love the unrestricted feel of every capability being useful. As a contrast, I spent a lot of time with C++ in the last year, and I am constantly amazed at how much more difficult programming in it is because of older concepts. In particular, strings have caused a lot of problems, due to the many many varieties of strings between C, C++, and Microsoft data types, as well as Ansi vs Unicode and const vs non-const. There's just so much more to learn, and a lot of it is older concepts that aren't very useful. Over the last year I have built a set of ideas that I have now gotten to play well together. These ideas include very specific syntax unlike any programming languages I have seen out there so far. I admit I have not tried many of the newer languages, but I hit a certain point where I didn't care what else was out there, I just had to build my ideas. Of course, if I do go into the Kickstarter route, I'd investigate those languages more first, right now I just decided to put something out there to see what people's first impressions were. Thanks for your input!

smt88 12y ago

My friend came up with this: open contests to solve humanity's biggest problems. Similar to SpaceX, but the results are copyleft/free/open-source, and they could be purely software-based. Examples would be cancer research[1], solar-powered vehicles, next-gen batteries, carbon capture... pretty much any technology that would drastically improve and prolong life on earth. 1. http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_research http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_rese...

fractallyte 12y ago
Open contests would be meaningless without vast financial backing to launch those world-changing projects. And the contributing party would want some kind of financial reward. Never going to happen, for a truly innovative idea, because the risks are too high. The world needs a benevolent Bell Labs type of institution, with commercial intelligence, that channels profits back into its growth (like Amazon). It should employ tens of thousands of scientists - engaged in 'blue sky' research - and aim to solve problems that are currently considered 'too big'. The usual stuff, like climate change, clean energy production, and political reform (backed by hard political science).
- smt88 12y ago
  Think about NASA. They created dozens of technologies that were then released to the public and have become multi-billion dollar industries, and many of those were not expected to have commercial value. Of course, that's with a massive budget. Examples of smaller budgets Linux, the World Wide Web, and probably a thousand more obvious things that I'm not thinking of. It takes these things a long time to get off the ground, but there are tons of companies that are making money off of community projects.
  - fractallyte 12y ago
    The bureaucracy at NASA is stifling. Slicing up a relatively small budget (compared to spending on finance, defense, and everything other than science) means that the majority of dream research is simply not undertaken. If the barriers to funding were (sensibly) removed, academia, and institutions like NASA, would flourish - and we'd see huge leaps forward for humanity.

ac360 12y ago

I think it's time people have their own databases, instead of the apps they use. I made Servant to give people their own databases in the cloud: https://www.servant.co https://www.servant.co It hosts people-friendly data models I call the "JSON Archetypes": https://github.com/servant-app/json-archetypes https://github.com/servant-app/json-archetypes If this interests anyone, my contact info is all over the website. I'd love to hear from you. Austen