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Ask YC: what is your most important idea?

13 points by andreyf ↗ HN
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?

34 comments

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qhoxie
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
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 :)
qhoxie
Likely the former, heh.
trekker7
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.
andreyf
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.

dangoldin
Showing that P=NP.
kylec
Just show that N=1 or P=0. Problem solved. Next?
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kylec
It was a joke. Apparently people here have no sense of humor.
dangoldin
I got the joke, not sure why you got voted down.

In any case, I've already gotten the trivial solutions =)

vaksel
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
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
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.
unalone
Yeah, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will be more famous than Bush or Cheney.
vaksel
How 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
Not 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.

brent
Weren't Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt "icons of revolution"? I mean, oil, steel, and shipping are more important than ipods, right?
unalone
Not to the masses they weren't. But let's see who remembers Henry Ford nowadays. He's the icon of that era.
aneesh
Forget 200, I don't think Cheney will be remembered even 50 years from now.

Quick: Who was Harry Truman's VP?

ken
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.
unalone
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
Making sending money as easy as sending email.
walesmd
Paypal?
thebigshane
Paypal is easy. But it is not as easy and ubiquitous as sending an email.
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neilk
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
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
Or -- just playing devil's advocate here -- perhaps it's a matter of PR... e.g., Edison vs. Tesla.
tc7
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.

andreyf
I should definitely have said "which of your work would you want to be used/remembered?", thanks for pointing it out.
jgrahamc
I would take one year with my daughter and travel with her around the world.
LKM
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.