
Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on? - yaronhadad
Imagine Jeff Bezos offered you 100 of his top people (engineers, designers, product ...) for 100 days and told you that you could work on whatever you wanted. 
The only condition is that at the end of the 100 days you need to start paying salaries in order to retain these people.<p>What would you work on?
======
rustler
A portable personal Internet server that runs as a turnkey no-user-maintenance
image on AWS, Digital Ocean, and OpenStack. It hosts your email, federated
social networking and chat, file sharing and ad-blocking web proxy. The user
experience is pure Internet with no ads, surveillance or vendor lock-in, all
for $6/mo (hosting + DNS).

~~~
l0b0
This is an idea I've been toying with several times, but it never gets beyond
the thinking stage because of the obstacles interacting with the rest of the
world: getting at least two cloud provider accounts (one for regular
operations and one for secure off-site backups, ideally with a different
provider), estimating costs (because good luck actually calculating them),
buying a domain and transferring it to the cloud provider, the intricacies of
configuring email to not be black-holed immediately by other providers
(something I only know from rumours), and I'm sure a host of others. Even an
effort to make some of these things slightly easier would be most welcome, but
I don't think 10,000 work days is enough to get something like this to a
"turnkey" level. It would be absolutely the best to be proven wrong, though!

~~~
rustler
Maybe we could get it "mostly" turnkey just for email, and charge $10/mo to
fund 2-3 full-time devops to maintain and extend it.

------
anoncoward111
Instead of worrying about the practicality of this, I'll answer your question
directly.

I would aim to create as many blueprints as possible for tools that can help
more people live and work remotely and sustainably.

There is no greater threat to human health, human happiness, and human
productivity, than there is in meaningless desk work and commuting.

~~~
stevekemp
You think the ability to work remotely is a more significant health-benefit
than tackling water-shortages, obesity, drugs, and climate change?

It is OK to have a niche, and to use hyperbole, but when it comes to human
health and happiness I'm certain there are more significant issues which are
real, and growing, than where somebody works (if they can, must, or even do
have a job).

~~~
anoncoward111
The problems you have listed would immediately cease if US and Chinese
corporations had any ethics whatsoever.

Obesity is caused by stress eating, cheap junk food, marketing, and a
sedentary lifestyle due to a desk job. 2 billion people in
South/East/SouthEast Asia live long lives because they are outside the
influence of the Western diet.

When you say drugs, I dont know if you mean medicine or heroin. Most medicine
is cheap. Pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies hold a cartel over
its pricing. As for illegal drugs, decriminalize it like portugal and your
problems will cease.

Climate change should be obvious. If everyone stopped consuming the wasteful
products US corps market as disposable (gas, cars, meat, etc), we would cut
our greenhouse emissions overnight.

All of these problems would end if corporations were somehow forced to stop. I
doubt anyone will ever acquire the political momentum to do that.

------
songzme
I would have them train 2 people (each) in their field to be as good (if not
better) than they are. At the end of 100 days, I'll have 200 people trained by
Jeff Bezo's top people. These 200 people will be tasked with building a
learning system / school that teaches these skills to underprivileged
communities for free. Each school would be named after each of the original
100 top people.

I'll keep tabs on each of the 100 top people and ask them for donations every
year to keep their schools alive. If they don't (and we ran out of money),
we'll close down the schools.

------
warent
Ask 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.

~~~
pvinis
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.

------
westoncb
First off, I'm crossing my fingers it was actually a drunk Jeff Bezos who
posted this :D

I hit on a new general scheme for structuring programming tools and languages
that doesn't use parsing, and I'd love to try building a language and editor
on it. I've seen other people working on these syntax-free, no parsing
schemes, but I've yet to see one whose fundamental structure is simple enough
to be captured by a simple diagram, or just a few sentences; and that's what
I'm lookin' at here, which leaves me endlessly curious about the potential
significance of this thing (including the potential for its significance to be
nothing!)—but I haven't had a chance yet to give it a real test.

So if I had the resources I'd do a bunch of iterations on it—likely with ~10
teams working on parallel iterations if I had 100 people. Actually, I'd start
with just one team of 10 working on it, and if it continued looking promising
after the first iteration, and add more teams in proportion to the perceived
promise. Meanwhile, I've got plenty other (over)ambitious projects I'd like to
have help with :)

------
ericjang
Auction 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.)

~~~
gitgud
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.

~~~
ericjang
Let someone else waste the valuable resource :)

------
chipuni
The 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,
educate voters accurately about what each candidate represents and has done,
and get them to the polls.

~~~
r00fus
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...

------
raverbashing
I would have them prototype a new computer language + ide for it

This language would have usability in mind as well as throwing out established
assumptions. For example, that source code should be ascii text. Or that
anyone should decide between tabs/spaces.

~~~
adamnemecek
Not enough people. Languages are hard as well as bad for making money. 100
days is too few.

~~~
milkytron
There's the possibility that money isn't his top priority.

------
peterwwillis
Oh, that's easy.

Develop a non profit program to bring tech skills to disadvantaged communities
so they can get basic remote work jobs and put food on the table. Key word:
'bring'.

It wouldn't make any money at all, but it might change some lives.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'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.

~~~
singularity2001
It's all a question of management. As someone said: build 20 teams of 5.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

------
patrickmay
Create a full replacement for Javascript based on Scheme and integrate it into
Firefox.

~~~
TomMarius
What do you think about WebAssembly?

~~~
patrickmay
The last time I looked at it, support for Lisp was questionable:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269736)
I need to check again.

~~~
singularity2001
[https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-
langs#scheme](https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs#scheme)

------
trcollinson
As 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 of today it would be around health care billing for small to medium sized
US based medical practices encompassing ehr, billing, office management, and
cash flow management. Not exciting but it’s what I’d be doing.

~~~
posix_compliant
You could make 16 teams of 6 and give each one a different startup idea. You
could then create some metric for success and then choose to continue to work
on the one with the most success.

~~~
trcollinson
I could. I’ve run very large development groups. It takes a lot of time and
effort to get it right and with 16 groups of 6 it would be the same overhead,
if not more. It just wouldn’t be for me, that’s all. I think I’d be much more
successful with one strategic team of 6. If you can manage 16 teams working on
projects for 100 days, by all means go for it.

------
newman8r
I'd probably have them work on finding as many zero-day vulnerabilities as
possible - after the 100 days I'd probably keep the top 5-10 performers on
salary if I was able to make enough money from the research.

------
neals
I would take them away from what they have known and done for years and years.
I would finally take their skill and ambition seriously. They will work on a
goal that is beyond what they could even imagine when they learned and studied
and improved their knowledge while others partied and explored sex and drugs .

Bacause for me, they would be figuring out how to have more people click on my
ads.

~~~
zaphirplane
Subtleties are lost in the unwashed masses, too funny.

------
agravier
An Amazon competitor. Either in a few underserved niche markets, or in an area
where Amazon is not very present.

------
zaphirplane
Post the question on reddit and HN, wade thru 99% bad humor theads, and borrow
the best idea

------
PappaPatat
Build 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.

------
scotty79
I would make them read everything there is to know on superconductivity (esp.
high temperature superconductivity) and make them brainstorm ideas on how to
get us closer to room temperature superconductors.

------
itomato
100 people @ 100 days / 6 hours per day is 6,000 person-hours at best.

30% of that time or more would be spent on consensus building and chatter.

10% on LaCroix & Coffee runs.

5% on bio-breaks.

I'm left with about 60% of the original time, which I would have to spend on
the problem of preserving the original allocation.

Certainly some software product would be the result, negating all the
ritualized product management activities we hold dear.

It would require ego death for all involved, as well as the willingness to
cast aside "reason" for the sake of gain.

~~~
miguelrochefort
60,000 person-hours _

------
znpy
I'd probably work on a mobile phone, based on some sort of SBC like rPI Zero
or the Chip Computer.

But I'd work more on the hardware than on the software: I want a physical
keyboard like the one the Nokia N900 has and I want a physical kill-switch for
the GSM/UMTS/whatever radio.

As for OS an apps, i always thought that some GNU/Linux distro with some
small-device-optimized wm and good selinux per-app policies could work very
very well.

------
slimshady94
A decentralized ecosystem for government and finances. It would be a good fit
as the domain is B2B, working and partnering with governments and banking
institutions (with a focus towards developing/third-world countries to
jumpstart their standards of living). The ICO would ensure their salaries
later.

------
user7878
\- Schedule a Hackathone of a single person for First 2 days on 10 different
domains that not exists.

\- We will have 100 MVP / POC after that (10 per domain)

\- Create 2 teams in each domain to develop 2 product for each domain out of
all best thing from MVP

\- We will have 20 product in which 10 will surely market leader

------
pro_zac
I recently watched a video of Kevin Horton discussing creation of the Super
NT, SNES on an FPGA. He mentions doing the same for the N64 would be extremely
difficult. It's not gonna change the world, but it would be a fun challenge to
throw some resources at.

~~~
itomato
Youre entitled to your own wishes, but really? Out of anything at all, you'd
put 100 (talented) people to work for 100 days to implement an obsolete
console in FPGA?

Think big.

------
harlanji
Have them turn on my youtube engineering vlog and work on something
interesting. Self organize onto teams using a compatible approach. I’ve just a
few months of lectures recorded, but I’d have them give me enough money to
keep supplying them with vision.

------
adiusmus
Figure 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?

~~~
miguelrochefort
We turn them into artificial artificial intelligence.

~~~
jacknews
Exactly. There's an article on HN today describing some AI startups secretly
using mechanical turk etc rather than actual AI.

------
minikomi
Real life Battle Royale match broadcast on pay per view. Solves the salary
problem nicely.

------
oceanghost
Build educational tools. Bring the cost of learning as low as possible.

------
gorbachev
Figure out how to convince Jeff Bezos to use his money on endeavors that
improve the lives of people on this planet rather than billionaire vanity
projects like space rockets or newspapers.

------
potta_coffee
I'd split them into 20 five-person teams have them each come up with a
different prototype based on whatever best idea they can come up with as a
group.

------
xellisx
Probably something (or things) along the lines with helping out with the
issues that low income families face, and more specifically the children and
their education.

------
bsvalley
I'd tell these 100 Amazon employees to finally go on vacation... and for a 100
days :) Let's not burn these "resources" out.

------
analognoise
I'd fix kicad.

------
rartin
I would fix the sad state of non-profit/charity management; which is currently
inefficient and expensive.

------
worldsayshi
I'd have them try to build a tool that allows finding the consensus answer to
this question.

------
phendrenad2
I would split them into small teams and call it a consultancy.

------
crb002
Affordable fresh meal kits in urban food deserts that other retailers can
franchise from from Amazon/Wholefoods.

------
purplezooey
Gerrymandering

------
gameswithgo
tw2002 mmo

------
DrNuke
I would train them on liberal arts, philosophy & politics so that we have 100
techno-humanists able to connect more dots while thinking of the future of
mankind.

------
matte_black
Assuming everyone knows each other and is ready to work, I would introduce
myself and my idea: A dating social network that uses genetics data as one of
the criteria for matching people.

I will select the top managers in the group, assign each a responsibility, and
then have them go into the crowd and build out their team to help accomplish
that. I would have the best pitchmen go out and try to raise money from
investors.

Everyone goes to work while I sit back in my chair and tent my fingers.

~~~
newman8r
Are you actually working on that? Sounds cool.

~~~
calciphus
Sounds like eugenics

~~~
theeeerob
Setting aside the fact that more diverse genes generally result in healthier
offspring...

