Could you learn as much taking a free course online (MIT OpenCourseware or Stanford's free courses)? No grades, no need to hand in assignments, no mandatory exams.
I'm trying it as an experiment right now. Any bets on whether I finish the course and/or learn anything?
While people's portfolio's are hurting right now, for the most part you can make a positive real return on investing in dividend paying stocks or long-term bonds. The only catch is that the rate is really low, so you need to already be very wealthy to make it work.
China, Saudi Arabia, and Japan have political considerations, as well as financial, so they are more likely than an impartial investor to take unnecessary risk or allocate funds poorly.
A tip to anyone thinking of starting an MLM scheme: if you ARE thinking of building an MLM scheme around your product, you NEED an MLM-specialised lawyer to validate that your scheme is legal in each of the jurisdictions you plan to operate in (most likely, US and UK).
That's more like a jumbled dictatorship. A few people each have unlimited power.
I'd see an oligarchy as more of a site like Reddit or News.YC, but rather than every person having a vote, a set group of people are able to. Like if only the leaderboard could perform certain tasks.
The problem to circumvent then would be if the leaderboard became overtly political, but I think that a) that isn't going to happen on a site like this, and b) it should be easy to make the system balanced if we have Dictator Paul Graham around to make sure that the people in such a system don't turn into absolute jackasses.
That occurred on Digg for a while, where a group of 'power users' submitted basically all of the content, which turned into a self-reinforcing cycle.
The problem lies when normal people stop thinking that they can submit and get content to the top, the submissions tend to become rote, and you lose community interest.
(As an aside some of the power users on Digg started taking bribes and were banned en-masse IIRC, but I don't see that happening here.)
I agree: I don't think that the theoretical oligarchy should have complete control. But moderation control is different. We might get a more civilized community if the upvotes and downvotes were controlled somehow.
It won't happen, but I think it would be an interesting experiment.
I've had people tell me that setting up the SVN, moderating discussions in a mailing list, twittering project updates, and orchestrating the cultural/public facing side of the organization are the most productive early tasks.
My question is: will people start working on a project without even a line of code, or will there be paralysis until there is something to work off of?
Although it depends on individuals, I imagine most of the crowd here, myself included, doesn't have any hesitations about designing systems ground up from scratch. Some times you screw up and have to redesign later, but that's part of the process of learning.
That said, it would take exceptional circumstances for me to work on such a project. Programmer time has a high market value, and--personally--I'm still having a hard time not looking at your idea as asking programmers to work on your idea for free.
Project management that your discussing is a non-issue until the project grows considerably. I think for many programmers it would feel like you were just taking credit for their work, rather than providing a valued service. People become project leaders by contributing publicly recognized effort and talent to the project, and I just don't believe the efforts you are suggesting would be viewed as valuable.
That brings up another important question. How do you find the ideal person to take a leadership role for development? That is where the credit should go, but it's a tough spot to fill.
Another idea I have been thinking about is the necessity of having plans in place, from the beginning, for if, and when, the project begins to have commercial merit. If everyone knows that 90% of any ensuing corporation will go to the top 6 developers on the project, they are much more likely to commit valuable resources.
> If everyone knows that 90% of any ensuing corporation will go to the top 6 developers on the project, they are much more likely to commit valuable resources.
You're confusing "my plan will work if other people behave this way" with "other people will behave this way".
Moreover, it's an open source project, so you can't say anything about "any ensuing corporation". You can only make committments for corporations that you control; you can't stop other corporations from getting most of the benefits.
And, who's to say that 6 is the right number? What if a given project takes 10 people to do reasonably? Why will those last four people contribute?
Fair point. Let's assume that the only goal is to make the project go forward. All compensation and credit should be structured to further this goal.
I guess 100% is the best way to structure it. Possibly even with a disclaimer saying the founder would not create any company out of the source code - but could be hired by anyone who does. The founder's role would then, simply, be an evangelist for the project(s).
I think the last four people would participate in the hopes of entering the top six, but a more open plan would probably encourage more participation. I think the last four would participate with the goal of entering the top 6, just like the dozens of applicants for the winner-take-all Ansari X-Prize.
Maybe all that is needed is a non-binding proposal that the top 6 developers would, after the product reaches a particular milestone, band together and start a company, dividing shares however they choose.
I just think that having any plan for the future would make developers more likely to invest their scarce time.
> I've had people tell me that setting up the SVN, moderating discussions in a mailing list, twittering project updates, and orchestrating the cultural/public facing side of the organization are the most productive early tasks.
If there's no code, what "project updates" are you twittering?
Note that all of those things are fairly low cost, so doing them isn't much of a contribution. They may add more value than the same amount of time spent implementing, but there will be far more implementation time.
I think there is news to report every step of the way. It would start with what needs to be done, and why the project is valuable, then move on to what is being done and what milestones are being hit.
All of these are definitely low value activities; the goal would simply be to reduce administrative overhead (time, not money). That way, contributors would spend more time doing the high value work and less time on BS. The goal would also be to foster a sense of community and make it easier for new members to join and get caught up on the big-picture goals of the project.
If the government could bend the rules and allow them to renegotiate labour contracts and healthcare without declaring bankruptcy, that should be option #1.
If these companies are still straddled with the nightmare of these obligations, no amount of government money will save them in the long run.
Government run "innovation initiatives" are fraught with the same problems as a government owned company (moral hazard, non-market competitive landscape, distorted incentives) and should be considered equally inefficient. Nothing can match the innovation that could be achieved by allowing these companies to be broken apart (a process that began 30 years ago when Toyota started achieving success using standard, outsourced, intermediate goods). Breaking these companies up would create a competitive framework for smaller players to enter. Think about what could happen if you could start a car company without having to hire a single assembly-line worker? It would be like giving the car business a set of APIs.
I have a 10meg PDF resume (4 pages with lots of pictures, hyperlinks, and partial nudity). It has gotten positive responses about 60% of the time, but they are generally very positive. Having a resume that doesn't please everybody, and stands out from the pack, is valuable. Even the 40% who didn't like it will remember it.
