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Ask HN: What would you do with an army of assistants?

6 points by Abelton ↗ HN
With Facebook taking a lot of heat regarding the negative effects of social media, it made me think of this thought experiment.

Mark Z. decides to prove the positive benefit of using his platform, so he invites 1000+ volunteers with varying skills, resources, locations, etc to swarm around ideas and get stuff done that is a combination of cool, fun, and interesting. It could be online, IRL, or a combination.

You get randomly selected to submit the first project idea to the group. What would you have them do?

5 comments

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mikewarot
I'd have all of them write a story about some problem they are interested in solving, the knowns and unknowns. For the first week or two, everyone would have to read a random subset of those papers, offering feedback for all, and help if they were interested.

Essentially I'd take the old 20% Friday idea from Google, and make it 100%, I'd take point on managing the herd of cats that results, until I found someone way better at it.

Personally, I'd try to run down every hint of over-unity in energy production I could find, like cold fusion, cavitation as an energy source, etc. I'd systematically make sure that none of them work within experimental bounds, and publish all the results.

giantg2
"Ask HN: What would you do with an army of assistants?"

I would go broke since I dont have money to pay them.

Beneficial software projects could be good. Stuff like making charity or government services more accessible. If you have that much money, then you probably have a platform and connections. Maybe try to clean up bad laws, policies, etc by taking requests for help from the people affected.

austincheney
I would sufficiently beta test my personal project and go to market.

My current personal project inverts the web, which in practical form is a challenging concept to communicate. The benefits of the idea are numerous and obvious but only in hindsight.

mhcolburn
"Obvious only in hindsight" ~= "Obvious only once known"

Neither of those things mean "obvious" (aka "self-evident") the way we usually mean it in colloquial English. Which is why your project requires some refinement in messaging.

I'm not arguing the benefit you claim isn't there, just that your statement about benefits being "numerous and obvious but only in hindsight" is not the selling point you think.

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