Hacker News Reader

Comment by RobLach | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent work and Microsoft Research continues to leave a positive impression on me by reason of what they're focusing their energy on.

View on HN

Microsoft Research has a great stable of researchers -- could you imagine just casually having Leslie Lamport being an email away while working on some distributed systems problem/design? Or being able to pull on

This might be one of the only benefits to monopolistic presences -- the amount of great minds in the same place, set free to mingle and create can produce amazing results when a benevolent sponsor exists and it's tunnel-visioned on profit.

I'm quite cynical towards Microsoft but I am very grateful that they publish at least some of their papers/insights and their links (to existing papers) generally don't die.

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/

It seems rich monopolies are good at having great research labs. AT&T Bell Labs and Xerox PARC come to mind.

Kodak also had a great research lab: they invented digital photography

Over the long haul basic research makes a lot of money, as does having a large pile of very smart people you can point at hard problems

I was surprised when reading Keynes texts where he criticized capitalism, seeing him counting the concentration of capital as one of the pros of the system: it allows efforts that no one else could take on.

Indeed, and not only did they develop the Perceus technique for the Koka language, but the immediately practical mimalloc allocator came out of that work as well.

https://github.com/koka-lang/koka https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com