Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think about WebAssembly?
The last time I looked at it, support for Lisp was questionable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269736 I need to check again.
Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
81–90 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#82I'd let them go. Keep the best 5. Or have a contest where you narrow the field down to 5. 100 people fresh for 100 days is a disaster. If you're lucky they'd all ignore one another, group into small teams, and find their own way to do cool stuff. 3-people teams can grow into 100-people teams that do some awesome things. 100-people teams dropped in from the sky are trouble. I've seen it done. It's rarely productive.
It's all a question of management. As someone said: build 20 teams of 5.
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#83A voting system based on blockchain. Each voter must first perform an IQ test and their holistic thinking ability is tested. Depending on the result, the vote of this person counts more or less. The program should be rolled out worldwide to replace all the monkeys (politicans).
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#84Ask all 100 of them the same question, but they get 4 people instead of 100, collect the top 20 best results, give those 20 folks leadership over a team of 4 people, making a total of 20 teams of 5. Statistically at least one or two of those teams is likely to come up with a highly profitable idea.
I see only one flaw. Who choses these top 20 results? Maybe he cannot imaging how something could be profitable. I'm kidding but it's an interesting thought. Thanks for that.
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#85Auction the team as a resource to the highest bidder. I'm not positioned to deploy this resource effectively, so I'm likely to benefit most by trading it to a buyer who can't convert money into talent fast enough. The team is much more valuable to someone who can afford to pay long-term salaries and needs this talent resource quickly on an up-front basis (Tesla, Uber, a startup trying to crush their competitor, etc.)
It seems selfish on the surface, but to me this is one of the best answers to the question.
Why waste valuable resources, when someone more capable could utilize them.
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#86Figure out what to do with people with IQ less than 90 that doesn’t involve turning them into landfill. Seriously. We have plenty of people who aren’t that academic and the world is increasingly leaving them behind. How do we usefully deploy them?
We turn them into artificial artificial intelligence.
Exactly.
There's an article on HN today describing some AI startups secretly using mechanical turk etc rather than actual AI.
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#87As a theoretical experiment it’s interesting. But it would never ever work. You’d literally spend a year or more trying to prepare for that 100 days and I’m still not convinced you’d get anything out of it. Now, if you were going to give me 6 people that would be a different story. With 6 people I have a number of startup ideas that I would love to work on and I think I could get a working mvp out of in 100 days. As…
Agreed. I have no idea how to manage 100 people, nor how to utilize 100 people in any effective way. I guess I would be hacking the challenge by holding some clumsy event on the first day or two where we sorted into 5 to 20 different teams, and then got to work on a lot of things in parallel. And then people could switch around between teams as interested or as they might use their skills.
Here's a book recommendation if you're not sure how to manage these 100 people. You don't have to. Just facilitate them to identify what to work on, then to go and work on it.
Open Space Technology, Harrison Owen
https://www.amazon.com/Open-Space-Technology-Users-Guide/dp/...
A quick but insightful read.
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#88I'd let them go. Keep the best 5. Or have a contest where you narrow the field down to 5. 100 people fresh for 100 days is a disaster. If you're lucky they'd all ignore one another, group into small teams, and find their own way to do cool stuff. 3-people teams can grow into 100-people teams that do some awesome things. 100-people teams dropped in from the sky are trouble. I've seen it done. It's rarely productive.
It's all a question of management. As someone said: build 20 teams of 5.
Yes, it might work great as 20 teams of 5. No, not probably the way most people would do it.
It's not a matter of management, it's a matter of self-organization. People are not fungible like money. They are also not robots. So you just can't "manage" them or slice them into various groups and expect it to work well. You also can't take one giant problem and create 20 teams and expect them all to decompose it and solve it optimally without a lot of guidance. The things that work are counter-intuitive and the things that seem like they should work actually create a lot of friction and waste.
Put differently, there are a ton of startups that never made the leap from a 5-person team to a 100-person small dev shop. There are really good reasons for that -- and those are people who have been working together for years.
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#89Build an app that would remind you about things to do when you are in the vicinity.
Rational: there are plenty of things in my live I should do that are not time based, but location based. Post a package to a friend: when close to a postoffice. Buy shaving foam, when close to a supermarket. Buy these earrings, when close to that jewelry shop where she pointed them out to you. Buy flowers, when close to a flower shop. See that exhibition, when walking by. Visit a friend, when close.
Include the option for businesses to send you sweet deals when close and you'd be making money to pay the salaries.
Re: Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?
#90The people, by themselves, wouldn't be enough. Let's assume we have the people AND the kind of resources 100 people working at Amazon would have. Then I would have them work on a multi-pronged project to get a higher percent of people in the US voting. One team would be campaigning in all states against laws that make it hard to vote. Another team would be finding the most cost-effective ways to register voters, educ…
Of course there are going to be folks who claim that it's too political. There is one party that seems to benefit from preventing voting participation and fairness...