> compilers, language design, machine learning, databases with strong ACID guarantees, etc. Compiler design isn't that hard. A perfect optimizing compiler is

> compilers, language design, machine learning, databases with strong ACID guarantees, etc. Compiler design isn't that hard. A perfect optimizing compiler is damn nearly impossible, but good enough is easy. LLVM makes good enough compilers pretty easy, see the number of new languages that get posted to HN every month! Machine Learning is hard to do right for non-trivial cases, but the only risk is you waste your investor's money and your customer's time, you don't risk identity theft (unless you are using machine learning to write crypto code maybe? :) ) Databases, yeah, everyone screws those up. The real key is how many people are trying to break your system though. Crypto is exposed, your DB layer can have protections put on it to sanitize your data and rate limit how fast stuff comes in. You can clean up the data that goes into your machine learning algorithm (or use one that is resilient to x% of malicious data). None of those defenses depend upon defending attacks of context switch timing in the CPU leaking data from a CPU that was releases 2 years after your code shipped through QA! (and yes new CPU designs can cause problems in any code! But Intel and AMD work hard to avoid the major cases!)