Then start with Khan Academy to go beyond barely passing 12th grade. Then move to AP courses on edX and coursera. From there the field is open for you to explore high-end courses.
151 karma · joined January 8, 2020
If interested, then please ping me. My email is in my profile.
Congratulate him and make him a mentor :)
PS: Also, it is his "net worth". That term is very loaded. It means he is not actually big, but is being projected as big.
The project is at an ideation stage. Did some research on the topic to write down the details of the project idea. Also, I have been talking to people to get feedback; and also have investigated what tech stack to use for the project.
> Where do you need help and support?
I am a software engineer. So I will be able to handle the tech side. I am looking for someone who is able to handle the non-tech side of a non-profit.
This is going to be fun!
What happens if I am watching a video with my family using this URL. And someone across the world is also watching the same video with his/her family using the same technique. Now we have two families sharing the same video, isn't it?
Loan is a debt based funding, where as I am proposing equity based funding.
Would love to connect with other developers to work on this.
Looking for co-developers for the project. It will be non-profit and open source.
Sounds odd, but keeping this in mind makes "selling" easy. I learnt this accidently. I personally don't have any sales background. Few years ago I volunteered for one of my employer's internal volunteering project. The sales team of the company use to conduct every year a volunteering program one month before Christmas to boost company sales. They use to take non-sales people from the company and give them opportunity to sell directly to customers in brick-and-mortar stores. As I had no sales background, I decided to volunteer to understand what sales is really about. We were not given any training and asked to talk to the store manager(s) what they expect from the volunteer. Nothing special was expected. The only brief received was that sell computers and accessories. So I started on the shop floor trying to sell the goods. At the end of the volunteering period I received an award from my employer for selling most computers that year by a volunteer!
So how did I do it? Well, because I did not have sales background, I did the only thing I was good at: inform, educate, guide, redirect and if still interested sell(this was not required on my part because by this time the customer was already willing to pay)! I did not try to sell anything to anyone. I just honestly informed them about the products, educated them about various parts in the product, guided them to different product(s) or to help them with decision making by asking them questions about what they really wanted, even informing them if something was not suitable for them, and if there was no product I could offer, I would redirect them to other stores. This built the credibility and people use to directly walk to me bypassing the regular staff at the stores. I was able to "sell" without any "selling efforts". I just offered them "help" rather than a "product". I couldn't believe myself that I was able to sell 24 computers(few very expensive computers) in just 2 weekends at three different stores in the city!
It was a revelation to me!
Sorry, may be I am bad a explaining.
> Universities already have accounting software.
This is not an accounting software. Though others can build an accounting software on top of the proposed platform. But that is not my project's scope.
> Money comes in via grants and student payment (in whatever form that is) and pays staff salaries.
That money via "student payment" is what I am trying to change. Students are given loans to pay for education. This is a bad idea. Making students debtors even before they start generating income is wrong on so many fronts. I am trying to change education funding from debt-based to equity-based. Students should not be penalised for taking education. But I do think that everyone who has benefited from education should contribute back to whoever helped them in their education(this will also help better the education standards). The platform I am proposing will facilitate that. In the present system students pay first(using loans) and then hope of a better outcome to coverup the cost. This is reverse to how we pay for any other service/product! In real life we get the service/product and then we pay for it. Why do students have to first pay and then cross their fingers in the hope that they will be able to get the income to pay back the loans. Instead, if we treat funding in education as investment in a student, then the repayment should be treated as dividend and not loan. That way students will not suffer bankruptcy!
> Nothing about what you describe requires federation.
It requires federation because it is not controlled by any single entity, but it still has to have some oversight as the data on the platform is about students. It could have been permissionless/non-federated like bitcoin/ethereum blockchain. That is the ideal situation. But as the data held by the platform is sensitive, it has to be federated/permission-oriented.
> You just simply announce it.
It is not that simple. There are many stakeholders in this: the government, education institutions, students, businesses and policymakers. It is a multi-sided platform. It will make a subtle change to education funding, but will be a major disruption to the way education is funded sustainably. There will be some who will not like this change as it will disturb their profit-making carts!
> Even in your paragraph describing it you just fall back on the description of the "funding with future salary" approach.
Yes, that is the aim. But instead of private investors, it will be government(directly) and/or education institutions(backed by government) that will directly invest in the students. And this platform will be available for everyone to participate in. It is a non-profit, open source and blockchain-based for a reason. If I didn't want to change the status quo of education funding and wanted to make profit out of students then I would have just started a private, closed source, profit making platform based on traditional database as other are doing it.
I am just trying to make equity-based funding of education open, transparent, sustainable and universal without penalising students(and tax-payers) and at the same time increase income of education institutions and its staff. All the present solutions that are available do not provide that.
I am using blockchain just as a distributed, federated and tamperproof database. Nothing else.
You could ask "What if cryptocurrencies do not exists tomorrow?" That is a valid question. But that I don't think applies as easily to database technologies.
Because of the following reasons:
* it has to be distributed and federated
* no one entity should control the data
* it has to be tamper-proof
> You even mention in the writeup that this behavior exists in other countries already - which means it already can be achieved without this technology.
Yes, the system exists. But it does not have the attributes mentioned above because those systems are controlled by single entity.
> Heck, in the US there are already educational institutions that charge a portion of future salary rather than a tuition.
Yes, I know. But I am trying to make this universal, a platform for everyone to use. My vision is that government will start funding education using equity rather than debt. That will promote life-long learning and reskilling without putting students into debt. That is a win-win for everyone.
> You spend a huge amount of time describing the merits of this approach and (as far as I can tell) zero time describing what your software actually does, even when digging into the page that contains additional details.
At the core the platform acts as a ledger that maintains records of monetary and non-monetary transactions between various stakeholders in education. The stakeholders are government, education institutions, students, businesses and policymakers. The non-monetary transaction is education "service" provided by education institution to students. That record is maintained by the platform to connect students to each education institution and its staff. And the monetary transactions are funding and grants received by education institutions from government for providing education per student; this indirect government funding of student education acts as investment in that student which the student pays back as dividend rather than loan-repayments. That way the students are not in debt but are still obliged to payback via auto-deduction from their income. This whole system is automated and handled by the proposed platform. Think of this platform as a distributed ledger that maintains connections between various stakeholders in education, and what those connections are used for. And based on that information the students are funded for education. And when the students start generating income, then a small percentage of that income is autodeducted and distributed automatically to those involved in that students education.
The project is based on blockchain(though it is federated) technology. In fact multiple blockchain platforms are used to achieve the overall goal. Blockchain for identity, payments, distributed verifiable but ownerless database etc.
Looking for co-developers for the project. My email is in my HN profile.
[0] Details of what the project will look like is outlined here: https://loan-free-ed.neocities.org
Critic, feedback, improvements to the idea are most welcome.
Looking for co-developers to work on the project.
I used it to write this document with two diagrams: https://loan-free-ed.neocities.org
Other tool I like are PlanetUML[1], BoUML[2] and Modellio[3](it is very heavy though on system resources!)
[0] https://casual-effects.com/markdeep
[2] https://bouml.fr
An open source, decentralised and non-profit platform to facilitate loan-free education that will enable life-long learning, and also increase income of teaching and non-teaching staff of education institutions.
Looking for pirates/rebels to change the education sector for the better. Not an easy task, we may die trying :)
My email is in my profile.
:) You owe me a building, not just a keyboard!
Now, this type of realisation comes only after you have done enough programming in one of the programming paradigm(OO or FP), and have at least some understanding of the other.
If you are using Java for career progression, then stick with it. But if you want to be able to decide on whether OO or FP is useful for a project, then that comes from practice. So practice on paradigm and have some understanding of the other. That makes it easy for decision making.