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by skewart 3723 days ago
Most of the comments here are pretty discouraging, which is reasonable. It sounds like an insanely ambitious project for a single non-expert to take on. But I completely disagree.

You should go for it. Even if you never really get it to work you'll most likely learn a ton along the way. And if you even halfway pull it off it would make an epic "Show HN". Also, a lot of the required technologies are advancing at an incredible rate (both the state of the art and public accessibility). It may well be an order of magnitude easier now than it would have been a few years ago.

I don't have any specific advice other than the usual for any large project: start small and focused, then take it one step at a time. Oh, and read lots of academic research papers.

Good luck!
3 comments
rburhum 3723 days ago
I second this encouragement strongly. Some of my favorite open source projects started with people telling the author "don't be stupid, why would you try to build [x] when there is [y] and you definitely don't understand the challenges of this topic". Linux, Leaflet, the geojson spec and several other projects started exactly like this - somebody excited to learn/build something challenging.
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ChuckMcM 3723 days ago
Exactly this, it is a difficult problem but if the goal is learning then it is one which will give you a number of challenges that will teach you a lot.

Start with any part of the problem and break it up into its component challenges. Start knocking off things one by one. Also start reading all the current papers on topic (a membership in a university library will help with this).

Since we take high school students and turn them into engineers with 4 years of training, figure that two and a half to four years (depending on how much time you will spend on core skills like upgrading your maths understanding) of reading, implementing, and improving.

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nxzero 3723 days ago
>> "start small and focused"

I'd even go as far you say, use an existing platform like Amazon's Alexa with their hardware to start.

Reading a books like "Calm Technology" and books on lean startups would be good too.

Books: http://www.amazon.com/Calm-Technology-Principles-Patterns-No...

http://www.amazon.com/Running-Lean-Iterate-Works-OReilly/dp/...

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