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Comment by dangoldin | Hacker News Reader

Damn. I can only imagine what a bunch of hackers could do with $1.5 trillion.

It's easy to run a small team of talented people, it's an entirely different ball game to run a company with 20,000 people

Same with systems. A small team of hackers can work wonders on certain problems with no methodology and some TDD, but imagine 1000 of those small teams, many of them now with below average programmers, all working toward a single vision, that now need to integrate their individual projects, some of which can only be tested once our twice ever due to cost.

I agree it's difficult to run a company with 20,000 people and that's my point. Break it up into many smaller companies with more accountability per company and you'd see a lot more progress. It's very difficult to align huge companies behind a goal and very few are able to do it - I believe Apple is one that does succeed.

$1.5T isn't a solution, it's the problem. Hackers succeed because they have scant resources, and defense contractors fail because they have nearly unlimited ones.

Huge budget => massive feature creep => massive manpower => huge overhead, extremely difficult communication/sync => failure to meet deadlines.

You're right. But spread that out across thousands of small teams and I'm sure the outcome would be greater than what we're seeing here. Having some competition among teams would also help - the big defense contractors aren't so much competing against each other as milking the government.

Well, according to wikipedia [1] we could have run over 8 Apollo programs for that cost.

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_cost

Imagine what Elon Musk could do with that kind of money.

Either terraforming mars or we might make it to Alpha Centauri by the next century.

You forgot about commercialization of fusion ;) and hyperloop... and in his case we would additionally have permanent space colony, on Moon, Mars, deep space and one to be created in Venus ;)

1970's dollars are not the same as todays. Further down on the Wikipedia page:

> In 2009, NASA held a symposium on project costs which presented an estimate of the Apollo program costs in 2005 dollars as roughly $170 billion.

as roughly $170 billion.

So multiply by nine then.

if we take a moment, and divide 1.5 trillion by 170 billion, we see that we could afford over 8 complete Apollo programs with 1.5 trillion dollars.

Thanks, I stand corrected.

Produce 1.5 million different Instagram clones?

You mean 1500 Instagram clones...

Price to imitate < price to build the first time << sale price

It's a joke see, I was just correcting the math.

Its enough to supply everyone in the world (all 7bn) with six Raspberry Pi computers (at US$35 a piece).

According to Information Is Beautiful (McCandless, 2009), $465B is enough to feed and educate every child in the developing world for five years.

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