Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
It's rarely me not being good enough that's the problem. If I had more time, that would allow me to write the programs I'd want to write.
Well I'd argue being better night make all the difference. If the set of possible programs includes ones extremely difficult to program, then are those programs possible to program given an ordinary developer and sufficient time? Definitely not imo. Some things only a genius programmer could do. That programmer could come along and invent a way to do ai using today's commodity hardware. Without that ingeniousness it's doubtful more time would do the same for ordinary developers. Do I believe I could do it given enough time? No. Could some genius somewhere today? Maybe.i wouldn't rule it out, in fact I'm fascinated by it.
I love this comment because this is how I always feel.
Programming just feels like a large game of managing expectations. It often feels like I never have time to do anything "right", so I have to make trade-offs before some impending deadline. This is a serious source of discomfort in this profession that never seems to want to go away.
As neilsimp1 mentioned, it's not about not being good enough, as that's fixable with sufficient time.
To answer your question, I'd write a fantasy economic sim game like a sequel to Patrician III or something, except with wizards and weird races and stuff. A big bit of the game would be negotiating with customers for custom goods and services.
Exactly how much money would it cost to for a casting of Bull's Strength before a mercenary engagement? What are the obligations a wizard has in the event their town gets attacked? When is the Teleport spell economically viable vs just taking a boat? How do you negotiate with beings very alien to you?
Classic pet project that I've wanted to do for years, just never had the time/concentration to do it.
I'd find which top python modules have not been ported to python 3 and port them to python 3, working in descending order of popularity. Anything to end version hell with python modules and their related installation, dependencies, documentation, examples, and tutorials.
Sure, it may be possible to get things working smoothly today, but that doesn't mean that all the areas I mentioned (documentation, etc.) have caught up. The primary reason they don't catch up is the straggler libraries keep many teams in a past era.
If I was really really good, I'd advance the state-of-the-art in neural network-based machine translation, recurrent neural network language models, neural Turing machines, etc.
Right now, the state-of-the-art is exciting but falls short in some world-changing areas like question-answering. As much as I want to, though, I have no idea how to push the field forward, however.
For the other things I want to do, I am probably sufficiently skilled to do, but I just need the time and motivation.
Intelligent answers are hard to come by, that's why I too would write a a program capable of Spock like question answering facility.
If I had an infinite amount of time, I would write a much higher level equivalent of LLVM. Specifically, I would spend time investigating ways to easily generate code generators from specifications. I'm also very interested to see how things like theorem provers can be used inside compilers.
If I could be bothered, I would write a really detailed political simulator a la Democracy but with much more detail and elections.
I doubt any engineer considers himself not good enough to write any app/program and is sitting without building it. I feel many people have the ability to dive and explore and build things once they get a problem to solve. many of us don't realize the problems itself because they are busy working on something else. Also, you only realize the problems when you are actively involved into it. As an example, I have no idea if there is big problem that could be solved in say Finance industry. Identifying problem is a big hurdle. Also, many engineers are sitting in echo chamber where they don't get to know about relevant problems which they can solve.
Some kind of procedurally generated fantasy world, designed around generating stories.
this sounds really cool. some of my favorite games are essentially sandboxes (mount & blade, pirates), and I like the idea of taking the sandbox and building in non-trivial, non-artificial non-deterministic stories.
Yeah there are a lot of sandboxes that generate gameplay, but few generate an actual plot. Rimworld seems to be the closest thing to that but I think they focus too much on trying to build drama.
When I see the same thing, I think a lot of better stories can emerge - a lifetime bond between comrades, a romance between a prisoner and the nurse who comes to heal him, rivalries between factions, a 500 year old cyborg who questions her humanity. So many stories can emerge.
A Bitcoin trading bot that makes me a tonne of money
I wrote one of these, and it was incredibly successful!
disregarding transaction fees of course, otherwise it was horrible :)
Might be ok on btc-e then using those trading tokens I'll maybe get.
This: https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis
But then I grew tired of waiting and just did it already :)
Could that be a plugin to Thunderbird?
Would you mind explaining more what that would buy us? Because I can't see it from here. Snackis uses email as a dumb transport; it doesn't even bother with headers that much since most content is encrypted; it's quite possible that other protocols will be added down the line.
The "hard" programs I've come up with over the years very rarely have anything to do with programming skill.
A content-first web browser (think Reader-Mode for every page), depends on: a) Learning the differences between the HTTP|HTML|CSS|JS specs, and what browsers actually implement, and b) heuristically lifting out the content.
b) is a programming problem, not easy to solve well, but there's been a lot of work in that area to lean on.
a) is a documentation/people problem. Not my area of expertise, but definitely the harder problem of the two.
It's not the type of programming I'd write, but what I'd write it in... I develop web apps.. which are mobile friendly, but I've yet to really have any desire to break into the iOS and Android app market.
Related, from 5 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/mump9/if_you_were_be...
I would create a DB engine that runs on FPGA, it will translate SQL store procedures to HDL and run the query on FPGA. It might be stupid, but I am not a better programmer to know!
A daemon app that saves my slack messages to gmail or even local text files, so I can find older messages. I know this is not difficult, but wish I had some bandwidth to work on this...
A fetchmail cronjob will probably get you pretty far. I use this to backup my mail.
I would write an app which offers the best places to visit in any city or town according to my preferences and likes&dislikes indicated.
The same, only i would have finished some of them.
Probably not write but if I have more knowledge on computer/programming I would want to understand source code of Linux/Rails.
If(I){ were better at programming I would write a program that would teach me how to program better }
Distributed blockchain democracy
Excellent, I'm right with you. But, ahhh, I'm afraid that's more of a software problem than just a program problem.
You mean lack of computer connectivity for every eligible citizen? or...?
Oh, that's certainly gunna be part of it. And overall too, the human interfacing part of the program's program. The new laws, if necessary. Support from lawyers and communities. Etc etc etc...
Personally I think a blockchain based voting system doesn't beat some easier analog systems. It's pretty, but impractical in the current system. I think...