211–220 of 258 posts
Real Engineering did a great video on this company and their approach, specifically: https://youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38
Also a rebuttal to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?
> Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real How do you know? Have you seen it? The website itself is very sketchy, full of unrealistic claims and very vague explanations, it reads like a fanfic. Of course do people not buy this, it just smells too hard of scam.
There is certainly nothing about what Helion is willing to say about the technology that inspires confidence, and many glaring problems with their approach.
A healthy dose of skepticism is absolutely warranted.
HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?
8 years ago, HN was a place full of optimism and excitement. I've noticed a marked increase in cynicism in this place. Like most of the world, it suffers from extreme tribalism and group think. I miss the former positive HN. And the positive world. sigh
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/healthy-surf/
Sounds like Altman used his personal relationship with Microsoft CEO to do this meaningless PR stunt, so he can more easily pursaude stupid money to actually invest in this.
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I suggest you do a deep dive into the physics behind their design. It's quite clever. They are able to evade some of the practical showstopping issues that face most other fusion approaches.
This announcement has nothing to do with physics. As stated, it's just an agreement for Microsoft to buy electricity, and not obviously an agreement to do so at any particular price. And why make this move now? Is Helion afraid that no one would buy their electricity? It's literally the most fungible commodity ever and we're heading into an era of unprecedented demand for charging EVs. Anyone offering reliable, envir…
Your complaining there just looks like frantic unhinged negativism.
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Credit given! This is not, what I was up to. I was more referring to the marketing stunts behind those startups. In case of Helion this looks definitely like a marketing gig because they don't nearly seem to be there in any way. That together with things like this weird "fusion success story" at NIF (not nearly there, even further away than pretty much all fusion research before it but a proof of concept for alternat…
Helion has built six reactors. Their sixth maintained a vacuum for 16 months while doing thousands of fusion shots, exceeding 100 million degrees. Now they're building their seventh reactor, which will attempt net electricity in 2024. NIF's results were a scientific milestone that people have been working towards for half a century. Regarding overall energy balance, NIF uses lasers from the 1990s that are less than 1…
How fast of a repetition frequency is achievable and how much power does it produce?
HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?
HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?
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You say that but biological medicine and Technology continues to improve. The trajectory is positive. Will every startup be successful? Of course not! But as a whole, technology continues to March forward and improve.
It doesn’t seem to be improving through Silicon Valley VC money though. Name one SV funded biotech startup. Ginkgo is cool though.
If you want to constrain your question to Silicon Valley specifically, which isnt the center of biotech VC, there are still lots to look at[1].
You can also just hook at the helthcare portfolios of the SV VCs themselves and find several sucessful exits.
Venrock [2], e.g Anacor, regenxbio
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/28/home-run-exits-happen-stea...
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To be fair to Uber and AirBnB, they did introduce some genuinely novel innovations. But the business model does heavily rely on the non-technological aspects for their competitive advantage.
Non-technological aspects is an interesting euphemism for breaking the law.