[lelandbatey]

Making Bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions is a terrible example because you absolutely cannot just tackle that by yourself. Not because it's technically hard, but because it's actually a people problem in disguise!

If you just walk up to the mailing list with the complete designs, documents, experimental results, schematics, trade offs, feasibility studies, you know what you're going to get? People saying "whoa, hey, great work but let's talk about this. I see here you've made assumption X about implementation area Y and that actually conflicts with the direction that we had in mind for the upcoming release, so let's talk more. To start, we'd like to see if we can explore option Z, thoughts?"

That ain't fun. It's rewarding but it ain't fun. Not like sitting down and messing with Legos in your own house is fun, or building a silly factory in Factorio is fun.

[com2kid]

> Making Bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions is a terrible example because you absolutely cannot just tackle that by yourself. Not because it's technically hard, but because it's actually a people problem in disguise!

I know a person who 2x'ed BTLE transfer speeds by herself by coming up with a new protocol to talk to iPhones w/o the need for one of Apple's security chips.

Sufficient brainpower can do amazing things.

[MichaelZuo]

Well of course it would take a literal super genius to actually accomplish successfully this via individual submission.

Nobody is going to believe anyone short of that bar would have even fully understood the bluetooth specification. So even a regular genius, 99.9th percentile HN user, would have a starting credibility of roughly zero.

But there are likely infinitely many waiting for that 99.9999th percentile HN reader to come along.

[surajrmal]

No one is waiting for super geniuses. They are just trying to use groups of people to solve hard problems instead of relying on individuals. It's amazing what people can accomplish by working together.

[MichaelZuo]

This isn’t a feasible pathway outside of a lifetime commitment, because it takes several decades to build up enough credibility to reliably advance proposals in such committee work. (Or be very lucky )