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Either you are trying to encourage people with the money tag, or you are not doing anything and it is hard to imagine for this amount of money to be enough to m
by jstummbillig 4y ago
Either you are trying to encourage people with the money tag, or you are not doing anything and it is hard to imagine for this amount of money to be enough to move the needle for the type of person you need to make any progress on these types of big problems.
Improving something that has been optimized for years is obviously not going to be easy (which it might still be, non-obviously, but that's very unlikely). Offering a very small amount of money evaluates the required work, and by doing so pretty poorly actually devalues it. That seems bad.
- wongarsu 4y agoI imagine the idea is "there are plenty of students with more time than money, who are held back from doing really interesting projects by comparatively small amounts of money". This program isn't interesting to a software engineer working in Silicon Valley, but I know some brilliant 16-24 year olds who have time on their hands but would have problems investing $200 into software tooling or a little hardware. Sure, those people won't build the next sentient robot, or the next gcc. But innovation often happens by exploring lots of ideas a little, to even figure out which ideas are worth exploring further. An army of hobby projects can be very effective at that.