191–200 of 302 posts
Seems to be implying that cheap capital is ending? Isn't the narrative everywhere right now that capital will remain cheap (almost) indefinitely and one of the reasons why many fear inflation and money is rushing to wallstreet and sv-casino (SPACs)?
> as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered. This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said: > Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple microfluidic tests could produce…
As I understand it, for many of the tests Theranos was aiming to do there's no real way to achieve it with the tiny volumes of blood they were trying to use: the concentrations of the substance they were testing for were so low the statistical variation of the amount in any given small volume of blood would invalidate the test, even if you could accurately count it.
The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O’Reilly piece, which taught me that the man’s got a bit of social consciousness in his critiques of SV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403 I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes…
“The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” I've been hearing the trinity of information technology, life sciences and materials science for over a quarter of a century again and again. Since the first time and ever since it reminds me of these tests where you are presented a list of wo…
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The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals,…
Cybercrime vs cybersecurity is an arms race, and arms race scenarios are not necessarily resolvable.
Usually they are resolved when one or more of the racers goes bankrupt. See the Soviet Union.
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... that's because it's not a career risk when you're a multi millionaire who will just be rehired by your friends if your venture fails.
Who are these multi millionaires? Clearly I know the wrong people in tech in the Bay Area.
That's without any kind of growth, investment, stock options growing in value, raises, etc.
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The investors care. Traditionally they wouldn't fund anyone who wasn't in easy reach. It's also easier to hire employees since they're all in SV.
I am curious. What else do investors "traditionally" care about? I am referring to aspects that aren't always explicit, like physical proximity. Do investors not also want (competent) exceptions that stand out?
For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers. The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable, except for the well compensated engineers.
Monoculturalism is a failure to diversify, and it stems from an inability to build an effective dense urban region. The bay area could have had human AND financial capital rivaling NYC, a megapolis perhaps in league with Tokyo, but this failed to materialize so instead the region will likely go the way of Detroit: rising and falling in step with the industry it's built around.
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The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals,…
> The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Let's drop "cyber" for a second. Suppose some (potentially, foreign state sponsored) actor starts to physically attack/kidnap company employees in company's home country that is starts to affect the bottom line. No one would…
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Yeah, 5G is a real thing. It’s really fast and awesome! It involves both improvements in hardware and software. Huawei are the leaders in it. (Devastating to the narrative that China just copies everyone)
Define awesome. How will it improve my life? Please don't mention high speed. Or if you do, mention applications where it makes difference.
Network slicing is not consumer facing, but is a big deal in business-to-business connectivity, likely enabling business models that just aren't possible today. It's a bit like renting virtual machines in the cloud, but instead you're renting connectivity, tailored to your SLA needs.
Higher bandwidth, lower latency and lower power consumption are not exciting in isolation, but improving all of them at the same time does bring notably better user experience (see the raving reviews of M1 Mac for the same phenomenon).
This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's expected to get much worse this year. https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime. References: Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu... Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimat…
Comparing these two numbers doesn't make sense, because: 1) Cybercrime activity has an immediate impact, whereas the impact of climate-changing activity will be felt for many years, and 2) The impact of climate-changing activity results in actual destruction of value, whereas cybercrime results in only the transfer of value (from the victims to the perpetrators). Of course, the threat of cybercrime results in other v…