unono

There's always something 'wrong' about tech people wanting to meet face to face. What is the point of the telecommunication tech YOU created? Did you not do a good job?

There's a better approach than what the blog outlines - imagine that you have infinite wealth and begin to build what you personally want.

In most cases you will not be able to create the whole thing, but you can tackle a piece of the problem.

Example - you want a flying car. Imagine that you have 1 trillion dollars at your disposal. What would you do? Hire engineers. How would you hire them? What software is required. Look around, if it does not exist already, that's your first product. If it the hiring problem is already adequately solved, look for the next thing. How do those engineers communicate? etc.

These series of questions will lead to finding niches of opportunity, and it is always a software problem (organizing workflows).

I said don't don't punish teachers, simply fire all of them. Let charter schools compete to lure students.

Personally, I'd want to see self-directed curriculums with a core of entrepreneurship and computing.

Teacher union doesn't want any kind of performance based system - they're the villain.

Even if there is variability of pay, at least society would be far richer, so being poor wouldn't suck so bad.

We wouldn't be punishing teachers, just get ridding of a system that doesn't work. Salman Khan has a proposed a better one where schools are essentially libraries/babysitters that any child can go in and learn a self-directed curriculum.

There is an 'unlimited demand' for programmers skills because of demand ran out, there would be no work left (we'd have a singularity/post scarcity) - programmers automate work.

The government spends about $10,000 per year per child on public education.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/21/155515613/how-much...

That's $120,000 over k-12 (not including pre-school). Is $120,000 and 12 years not enough to teach every kid entrepreneurship and coding?

As I wrote in another comment, the current education system is 19th century stuff and it's amazing a lot more people aren't astounded why it still exists.

This is good stuff. Even better would be small cameras that can be worn around the body so the incidents can be recorded.

Yelp has already demonstrated why crowdsourcing is so important. The public often rails against the government, but most of the bad stuff is done by everyday people and they need to be held accountable.

The root cause is that the teaching system doesn't turn all children into businessmen.

If everyone was a businessman, they'd be earning more than government set minimums.

What are the successes. Are they successful in taking children from the socioeconomic group and turning them into high earning 30 year old adults?

Teaching metrics should be about how successful people turn out as adults, not some test scores at year end.

Until the government education system can show it's success in that, I'd hold off funding them.

What has shown success are private schools http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230382220457746...

Child care workers who watch children when parents aren't present make $19,000, that's maybe more appropriate. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-w...

Where are the proper studies (with 1000s of participants) showing teachers can do a better job than babysitters who hand out an ipad with learning software to every student?

The teaching system is a 19th system. It's like if the tech industry continued on with using telegraphs and morse code for everything.

Boo-hoo, teachers, who cannot clearly demonstrate how they actually add economic value to anything, want to be paid even more than their current $52,000 median salary.

Meanwhile, fisherman, who hold the most dangerous job, have a median salary of $25,000.

Firefighters, whose job is to enter dangerous buildings, $45,000.

Fast food workers, $18,000.

The root cause of poverty is the incompetent government education system - The Teacher's Union. Most public school teachers I've come across have contempt for the businessmen (people who create the wealth) and for poor people (teachers tend to be limousine liberals).

The first country or state to disband the current teaching system and replace with a competitive system will skyrocket to success. This is a no-brainer, but it's so to difficult implement because there's so many of the 'government handout' teachers voting they swamp the rest of us.

Larry Page, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla should've been speaking there, get the YCers thinking big.

That doesn't sound so bad to me - sounds like capitalism - greed is good http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vscG3k91s58

The flip side is does he help you succeed? You just made a case for why you should be in his portfolio - he'll go to the lengths of shady stuff to help you out.

He openly admits he's tough, but that's out of wanting all of his investments to succeed.

Vinod Khosla is one of the few good guy VCs out there. He's invested in high tech foods, robots, energy, healthcare, farming. He runs a Google X type fund.

Crowdfunding will replace venture capital, and investing itself to a large extent. You don't need investment, you make the case to customers directly and they prepay you.

Khan got famous for explaining concepts really well. There were plenty of online stuff covering it already. He just did a superior product.

Same with the app. It needs to be excellent, something Steve Jobs would be proud of, and it will make dent in the universe.

This is big, heady, stuff, and we'll kill the ed business with it. I like nothing better than to see government jobs disappear.

I think we'll keep disagreeing about this.

I think your argument comes from the traditional 'liberal arts' education angle.

I'm coming more from vocational type place. More of a rentacoder/odesk done more comprehensively.

Anyway, adios

Gamers are better at (virtual) surgery than MDs

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2012-11/teenage-gamers...

No, this ain't non-profit, it's big profit stuff.

Khan academy is definitely not it. They teach traditional curriculum which is isn't useful to business.

The app is definitely isn't the easy part - it is basically the whole part. The current education system is a failure for 2 reasons

- unanalyzed teaching

- unmotivated students

Apps solve both problems, every user interaction recorded and analyzed, gamification.

You can turn it around even and starting hiring those students yourself and create your own megacorp with the best employees and make megabucks.

Writing a really good app that is both enjoyable for students and a rigorous test of ability that employers are looking for is not chump work.

If you can show employers that your app truly tests useful abilities they would be lining up. The current education system fails at producing workers with the right skills and employers are always complaining abou this.

No.

A free app.

The data points of the app users are sold to employers.

Perfect opportunity for hackers.

Employers pay big money to find employees. Students pay big money to get educated to get a job.

Hackers roll in with apps that allow students to do courses for free on the smartphone/tablet, sell the info of the students to employers, who then hire the students. Everyone wins. Hackers are proclaimed heros.

The guy in the article wasn't completely moneyless, he just came up against the recurring costs of taxes/rent which can trip up the unorganized.

Google car expense is overplayed. In mass production and with competition the cost would go way down.

Also, if the government makes the 'homeless' drive to specific places out in the desert or something, that's better than the current situation where you're exposed to other homeless and dangerous people.

I actually wouldn't mind going 'homeless' for a while to save money on rent, but currently it's really dangerous to do so. Moving to low rent places is also usually more 'dangerous', especially with children. With a driverless car you can just take your family out into the desert or forest and pretend you're camping.

The current system of full-time rv-ing is quite hard because of parking restrictions and because sending kids off too school and getting groceries from out of town is hard, and because the rv's are too small. With self-driving rv's you can have a few of them to space out in.

Very enjoyable article. I was just thinking that recently, mobile is just a nicer experience and it's because of these cards.

There was something about reading books and magazines before the web came, a gamified experience, because you could more visibly see your progress. On the web you might have read the equivalent of a 1000 page book but you never get the sense of that.

This is why we hackers should all be helping Google get their self-driving cars on the road. It could save so many lives if people could have the option of living in their car.

By that standard few startups are 'important'. Twitter (sms on web), Facebook (another myspace), Microsoft (another OS).

InstaToiletPaper is a pretty good startup if existed. When you run out of toilet paper you really want it quick. A drone could fly through a small window and it get it to you. You'd pay $10 for a single roll.

Spoonrocket is pretty unique. You'd have to go to the 3rd world like India to get similar levels of service.

Spoonrocket's cars have builtin heaters that keep food warm, only 2 menu items a day, and really quick delivery. If they actually expanded nationwide they'd kill burger/pizza joints, or at least force them to innovate.

Current thinking on this matter is to avoid the tired old web 2.0 hipster stuff. The current batch of YC is all about solving real problem for real people. Spoonrocket got the most applause ($6 meals delivered within 10 minutes).

OK. I try to see articles and find a positive spin where I can say "hackers could ...". To some people it would be obvious, but to young or non-tech people it might not be, so it could be helpful to them.

As other commenters have said, psychiatry/psychology is an ineffective field and also expensive.

The self-help industry is kind of related to psychology/psyciatry, is unregulated, and a $11 billion a year field.

I gave a mention of a documentary that came out recently about people building apps in this category of self help/health/life monitoring kind of stuff. Some terms to google to find out more are what I typed in the OC.