Hacker News Reader

Comment by jack_riminton | Hacker News Reader

Crazy how Disney's R&D looks almost indistinguishable from Darpa sometimes

I miss when companies invested in R&D. Just think if companies paid you 1-2 hours of your day to do either R&D or open source projects, how many advancements we could have. Theres all sorts of open source projects stalled because not enough time or money.

I imagine some might fix bugs management isnt prioritizing, or performance issues, and so on.

It does happen like that, lot's of departments within big companies have R&D focus with time dedicated to development/discovery. The problem is that the output is captured. If it doesn't end up in a product, the general public will never know

Unfortunately the tax treatment no longer incentivizes this. Accounting practices that in the past allowed for this activity to be booked as an asset are no longer in use. Lower corporate rates no longer necessitate liability offsets that in the past fueled r&d budgets. Instead we have stock buy backs! Yippee!

Apparently Disney is playing the long game.

It still happens, but it’s getting more challenging due to outsourcing of manufacturing.

tech companies still invest in R&D, but that's mostly adtech these days

that sounds really sad

agreed... we should rename it sadtech

Closest to R&D we're getting is hackathons and the like, and in practice it's trying out new technology that someone else developed; coming up and developing something new in IT is really difficult, and said development takes time for which you need buy-in first.

That said, I'm sure there's still dedicated R&D at companies like Google and the like. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Hopefully its not wasted on someone replacing Google Talk, Hangouts, Allo and whatever else is left.

While I agree with the sentiment in your first paragraph, I think the idea of the second sounds like either working sub-optimally (fixing bugs that don’t need fixing) or else too much management ineptitude to overcome by fixing critical bugs for a couple hours per day that management just wants to ignore.

Every bug needs fixing. Some are just more profitable to fix.

The number of dumb bugs that make your company look incompetent, but never get fixed because fixing non-critical bugs is always low priority, is insane.

Reminds me of the MKV-L ballistic missile interceptor tests: simple physics, with impressive engineering implementation [0].

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM (the rapid fire rockets are a little loud)

dude, that’s freaking nuts. It’s amazing and terrifying at the same time.

Note that in an actual intercept, this thing is in space and going like 10km/s. It's job is to slam directly into an incoming Ballistic Missile re-entry craft before it can deploy nukes and decoys.

The giant nozzle pointed downwards is simulating 0-gravity, and probably does not exist on live fired craft.

Those thrusters must be extremely precision controlled too. At that flight profile, having a nozzle open an extra millisecond means missing the intercept by hundreds of feet.

And a Nuke hitting DC

And it looks small, but it's 1.6 meters long (over 5 feet) and fully fueled would weigh ~200kg/~500 lbs!!!

Considering they did first small-room-sized wireless electricity distribution, I'm not sure they're that different from DARPA in terms of know-how and amount of secret sauce.

You can't convince me there isn't some kind of funnel from Disney Imagineering into the US military if this is the kind of tech they're working on. Most R&D doesn't happen in the public spotlight the way Boston Dynamics and Disney apparently do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com