drewvolpe

4. Acceleron (muon catalyzed)

There's huge advantages to muon catalyzed if they can get it to work. Plants would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper to build.

[0] https://www.acceleron.energy/

It's an addiction and really hard to stop. Facebook spends billions designing it to be as addictive as possible.

In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.

When I was learning to code, programmers had to know about a lot of low level details like memory management, disk I/O, process scheduling, etc. Today, the average JavaScript programmer never thinks about these things.

I could imagine a world in the near future where most programmers don't think about databases.

People are irrationally concerned about low-probability but high severity risks, which is what nuclear is.

The chance of someone in the US dying from a terrorist attack is about 1 out of 3 million. It's a rounding error compared with heart disease (1:6), suicide (1:93), storms (1:35k) or even sunstroke (1:6k). Yet, the US spends $52B / year on the department of homeland security.

That's fascinating. How popular are seed boxes? And does the consumer get them from their internet provider directly?

It's owned by banks but run by government appointees. Most Americans who watch the news and follow finance understand it's a public-private hybrid structure. As Lyn notes, this isn't unusual. Many national banks are not owned by the government, including Swiss National Bank.

Smell is such an odd sense. For example, I found this part amazing:

> It is understood that certain chemicals block certain receptors, occupying their binding sites such that no other volatile molecules can reach them. These antagonists might have smells of their own—they activate other receptors—but, in principle, they will dampen or eliminate the smells that depend on the receptors they block. Such aromachemicals could be used not simply to cover up the stink of a latrine, but, in essence, to prevent it from being smelled at all.

We like hackers and free thinkers. Communities like these are hacking modern society. Even if they don't work or aren't appealing to me, they're all interesting experiments that can teach us something about societies, group dynamics, governments, property rights, etc.

Jack tweeted a link to the page where you can buy the NFT, so I think it's accurate to say he's selling it:

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1367990471759306752

"You're Apple's customer and Facebook's product" is often repeated but completely true in this case. It's all about incentives.

Apple makes money by selling more products which means they innovate by making Watches, Earpods, M1, etc. Facebook makes money by selling your attention and data, which meants they innovate by extracting data from every experience they can (Oculus, Whatsapp, ...), using more complex technologies (Facebook AI), and encouraging whatever behaviors create more ad spend (hint: outrage).

Add in the fact that Apple has made privacy a core part of their brand promise and it means that Apple has strong incentives to protect their customers in a way that most companies, especially Facebook, do not.

Why start with a clean slate and develop a new plane? If the F-16 is still working, why not start with its design and upgrade the avionics and software?

NASA just successfully sent a helicopter to Mars. We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months and had it through FDA trials in under a year. CAR T cell therapies (3 FDA approved and more coming) are changing how we treat cancer. There's amazing technology all around you.

Come work with us at Plex Research. A huge problem our founder ran into while doing drug discovery research was that there's tons of data in the world, but no one is using it because it's all in thousands of different places. As a programming, it was crazy to me that even the most advanced organizations in industry (Novartis, Sanofi) or academia (Harvard, Stanford, ...) are still keeping many important datasets in Excel.

We're pulling together all of the world's biomedical research data, structuring it as a graph, and allowing research access all of it as easily as Google does the web:

https://www.plexresearch.com/products.html

Does anyone know if each of these has a remote operator as, I believe, the ones in CA do?

It was created by Christian Perone, a researcher at Polytechnique Montreal. I don't think he's active on HN. I saw he released it and just started looking through it.

One of the changes was moving start times of high schoolers later, which often came at the expense of younger students who would've had to start earlier. In my neighborhood, having to put 5 year olds on the bus at 6am or earlier was a big cause for the uproar from parents.

Can you talk about how you made this tradeoff? There's research that suggests high schoolers do better with later start times. But is there any research that backs up doing it at the expense of younger students? ie, is it possible that all students benefit from a later start time?

What I find most interesting here is that for a relatively small amount of money (compared with their fund size), Social Capital is creating an amazing dataset about founders and startups. It will be really useful for them a few years from now to be able to go back and see what was most predictive of successful startups.

The code is available here:

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/

Key components:

## Zircon

Zircon is the operating system's foundation: it mediates hardware access, implements essential software abstractions over shared resources, and provides a platform for low-level software development.

For example, Zircon contains the kernel, device manager, most core and first-party device drivers, and low-level system libraries, such as libc and launchpad. Zircon also defines the Fuchsia IDL (FIDL), which is the protocol spoken between processes in the system, as well as backends for C and C++. The backends for other languages will be added by other layers.

## Garnet

Garnet provides device-level system services for software installation, administration, communication with remote systems, and product deployment.

For example, Garnet contains the network, media, and graphics services. Garnet also contains the package management and update system.

## Peridot

Peridot presents a cohesive, customizable, multi-device user experience assembled from modules, stories, agents, entities, and other components.

For example, Peridot contains the device, user, and story runners. Peridot also contains the ledger and resolver, as well as the context and suggestion engines.

## Topaz

Topaz augments system functionality by implementing interfaces defined by underlying layers. Topaz contains four major categories of software: modules, agents, shells, and runtimes.

For example, modules include the calendar, email, and terminal modules, shells include the base shell and the user shell, agents include the email and chat content providers, and runtimes include the Dart andFlutter runtimes.

Early bitcoiners met with a lot of people with the means to invest. Almost all of them passed. Committing to investing and sticking with it through the ups and downs takes good judgement, courage, and healthy dose of luck.

It's no different from startups. A lot of investors were pitched by AirBnB and almost all of them passed. Fred Wilson from USV even had PaulG badgering him with emails telling him to invest and he still passed.

Plex Research | Boston, MA | Onsite | Full-Time | Visa |

Plex Research is the Boston area startup working on technology to fundamentally change how new drugs are discovered. Our team has decades of experience in drug discovery, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and big data analytics. We're committed to finding better medicines faster.

We're looking for a talented, versatile engineer who's excited about the challenges of building large-scale data systems that provide answers across huge data sets in milliseconds. We value pragmatic, experienced engineers who are strong problem solvers, and can learn new technologies quickly.

More here: https://plexresearch.com/careers

Or ping me directly: drew@firststar.vc (I'm an investor / board member)

The original version of Android looked like and worked like a Blackberry: small screen with a physical keyboard and a D pad for navigation (no touch control).

When the iPhone was announced in 2007, they realized that on-screen keyboards and multi-touch control were the future, so they did a complete redesign, moving to an interface similar to the iPhone. Here's a quote from one of their engineers talking about the iPhone announcement:

“As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted [an iPhone] immediately. But as a Google engineer I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over’” Chris DeSalvo said. “What we had suddenly looked so… nineties. It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”

http://bgr.com/2013/12/19/original-iphone-android-story/

The sintering process is the hard part of printing metal and where a lot of Desktop Metal's core technology is. They basically use traditional heating combined with microwave heating controlled via infrared temperature sensors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pk7Mq7ESwI

Yes, exactly.

Plex Research | Boston, MA | Onsite | Full-Time | Visa | Salary USD 875-150k

Plex Research is the Boston area start-up that's transforming the humble search bar into a drug discovery powerhouse. Our team has decades of experience in drug discovery, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and big data analytics. We're committed to finding better medicines faster.

We're looking for a talented, versatile engineer who's excited about the challenges of building large-scale data systems that provide answers across huge data sets in milliseconds. We value pragmatic, experienced engineers who are strong problem solvers and can learn new technologies quickly.

More here: https://angel.co/plex-research/jobs/234943-software-develope...

Or ping me directly: drew@procyonventures.com (I'm an investor / board member)

In the US and Canada, 57m people play and spend an average of $556 per year, which makes it a ~$32B market. (Source: http://fsta.org/research/industry-demographics/) That's 10^2 more than I would've guessed.

In China, "Uber for trucking" services have off over the last year or two. The largest player, Huochebang, has registered more than 2 million drivers and is doing ~100,000 orders per day. They don't charge anything for using the platform and make money by selling other services to drivers.

Taking a quick read, I see all sorts of issues with this dataset. Jay Hoag was not founder/CEO of Netflix, he was a growth stage VC and these are likely not his personal shares but his firm's. Dick Costello wasn't a founder of Twitter. TripAdvisor was acquired by IAC in '04 and then spun out; Barry Diller wasn't a founder.

What's your dissertation on?

Yes. I'm a parter at Procyon Ventures, a seed stage fund based in Boston.

You need to provide enough information to convince the investor that it's worth her time to meet. There are startups that can do this in one sentence ("I sold my last startup $2b..."), but, for most, it's simply not possible.

The email should have a good subject and opening 1-2 sentences which piques her interest enough to keep reading. If you start by clearly and succinctly saying who you are, what you're doing (without any jargon or buzzwords), and why it's a fit for her firm, there's a good chance she'll continue reading a page long email.