241–250 of 258 posts
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If they can't build a fusion system, aren't they sort of bust anyway?
Isn't their plan B being an economical way of generating helium-3? Their power generation plan sounds dubious but the helium-3 production might make some sense.
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You can be optimistic when you’re just making an app to rent your room out or to find a dog walker. You can hustle and sell useless SaaS services long enough to get acquired for no real reason except managerial power plays in large companies. In the world of software you can kinda make almost any idea work with sweat and political maneuvering. You can literally see that they’re trying to play the same games here. How…
That's almost exactly what they said to Elon Musk when he started SpaceX, and now they are on a streak of >100 successful missions in a row.
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This critique seems very reasonable and accessible. So I'm puzzled how the caliber of people like mentioned in the article, who are technologists and familiar with physics, can get on board with the kind of investments they are getting. What do they know that we don't? At least in the case of Theranos the investors were not technical.
The guy did a much longer Q&A livestream afterwards and he did slightly roll back his critique. He admitted there were some advantages of Helion's approach even if he still doesn't think it is overrall the best way forwards.
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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.
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?
What percentage of the negative comments come from chatbots that are part of foreign influence campaigns to spread negativity in this largely Western world (or even largely US) forum?
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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
Is that feeling of yours actually founded in reality? You can have a look! https://hackermoods.com/ (I only did a quick search)
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"Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World" is a book that makes an excellent attempt to answer this.
Hm. From the description I am not really convinced. It starts with people think "rich gets richer, poor gets poorer" ... and then states this is all wrong. Except, it is not, by all the data that I know. E.g. " https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/global-income-inequal... "
https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
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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
I genuinely think HN has been overrun by influence operations designed to make people resigned to the world being terrible. It sounds stupid and paranoid, but I can’t explain the patterns I observe any other way. I think the way HN is operated makes it impossible to avoid: no real authentication other than an email address. It is (or at least was) a juicy target due to the concentration of influential people in an in…
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Having watched a short documentary on ITER it seems like an incredible waste. A bunch of mismanagement and bureaucratic nonsense. As an American, it seemed like exactly what we would expect from a Euro-based project. By the time any actual work can be done at ITER, won't the technology have progressed beyond they design they are trying to test?
This is one of those all too common misunderstandings of how engineering works. There's some idea that once designs and theory are done, that engineering is some kind of straight forward act of stamp collecting and that the best thing is always to wait until the problems are worked out on paper before we start to build. But in fact the engineering itself is exploratory. And often times, to understand something, you j…