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Thank you for the "non-VC backed" part. Good to remind people that innovation can thrive without VC worship.

Good article and topic.

What's missing though is so critical for our time: R&D.

Yes -- it's usually wise to act like investors don't exist. But are you going to look at the world and go "oh, what we REALLY need is another SaaS company!"

The most pressing problems today require hardware, software (incl. data science), and a research component.

How to fund it, if not with investors? (They don't fund R&D anyway.) Take a dual-use approach. Bootstrap with government R&D contracts -- and in parallel, commercialize it, so that you don't get stuck in gov too much of course. And/or license technology from federal labs or agencies. E.g. go to Lawrence Livermore National Lab, or Lawrence Berkeley, or Los Alamos, or the many agencies, NASA, NSF, DoE, DoD (which is colossal) and connect with tech transfer folks. They have advanced technology sitting on shelves, waiting for capable entrepreneurs to come and pick it up. Same for many academic institutions.

This is how we get true technology companies like Qualcomm, and many, many smaller but by no means less significant companies.

Make not just "what people want" but also what is technologically needed in this partly fallen world today.

Worth remembering this is HN, where all too often, people hide behind screens and make less-than-considered comments for points. This is just one of many echo chambers. Apple worship in particular is quite prevalent in this thread -- but in reality, way more people use Windows.

The folks who spearhead the real fight against climate change aren't likely to spend much time on threads like this. They're in meetings with supply chain and logistics folks trying to figure out how to hit an ambitious decarbonization quota.

My point: there is hope, and usually, it's not found online, but out in the real world.

Absolutely, sir. It's curious how strange the HN community sometimes becomes when we enter the world of actual business -- rather than VC-fuelled entrepreneurship, FAANG employment, or the like. Not everything is engineering or YC type entrepreneurship.

Podcasts are incredibly powerful, when done well. How else can you connect with:

1. Over time, all key industry players in your niche.

2. Their customers.

3. Potential large customers. (You're not pitching them; you're gaining insights for your audience, and giving them a platform. Potential work can come later if it makes sense for them.)

4. Academic thought leaders. (Tons of them. Many of them love the chance to finally talk about the niche.)

5. And yes, investors.

6. Potential high-value employees. You get to learn from them at the very least.

7. You name it.

Try doing this with cold reachouts or networking -- it's doable, but typically takes quite a bit more time, and potentially some assets. And podcasts build trust, and typically take the form of a real human conversation about a niche topic.

Relationships are the lifeblood of any business, and podcasts are a wonderful way to initiate and cultivate real human relationships. They can be a refreshing change from all this automation and technology.

Fascinating. Seems like more of a frontier than even the US, in some ways. And curious point about big government.

Thank you!

Interesting. So what are the disadvantages of living in Quebec? (Never been there.)

>I really don't get good vibes from this whole thing...

Trust your instincts here. This thing is hardly a democratic technology -- it seems like it's by the Silicon Valley Elite, of the Silicon Valley Elite, for the Silicon Valley Elite.

Thank you! Working on a concept for a big org on what may become a large ML-based system one day. I knew about this feedback loop issue, but was too dumb to actually remember and face this problem. :) It's all over today's rec engines -- and yet, just like the things we're not shown in these systems, the problem itself seems to become invisible. Because it requires new thinking.

Worth exploring.

Consider all these:

https://technology.nasa.gov/patents

And the NSF's equivalent, the many national labs, defense labs, and research-intensive universities (eg UC Irvine is keen to for entrepreneurs to pick up IP; as are lots of others). There's so much out there, and it's just waiting for entrepreneurs to commercialize it. Many things won't have direct commercial application, but much of it does. Typically the entity doing the licensing doesn't just give you the IP, but a full teaching program and network to help you get further.

I think we are definitely in a new era.

My view: entrepreneurs should take on a little more technology risk. Not just market risk. License IP from federal labs and government agencies -- there is SO much advanced tech sitting on shelves. Do government contracting to fund R&D.

Go beyond just software, especially the SaaS kind, because ultimately, software can only make so much difference in society. Investors don't like government and anything sciencey, especially when there's a hardware component, so I don't believe most hotshot founders will go for it. But hopefully enough will take on more technology risk.

The biggest problems out there right now require a mix of traditional software, ML, hardware and research. All put together in the right way.

I wonder if the story of Heracles is our origin for the ancient-club-warrior concept.

https://www.joshobrouwers.com/articles/club-heracles-recogni...

Though naturally, the ancients didn't see Heracles as some primitive brute.

Thank you. Don't see why your comment got downvoted. Holding the Clown Platform accountable is surely in the interest of hackers.

Crazy story. Thanks for sharing and yes, suffice to say, this informs our tech stack choices, hah.

What I find regrettable is how GCP's startup program seems to be entirely geared towards VC-fuelled startups for the higher tiers.

Compare with Microsoft for Startups, which isn't seen as hip and edgy but can get you like $5k+$25k in Azure credits (and some OpenAI credits) without having to go the VC route.

Seems more entrepreneurial to me. Venture-backed is just not the right path for everyone.

May I ask what necessitates this level of security? E.g. work, or personal preference in terms of security and privacy?

"The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours" by Gregory Nagy, Harvard prof on greeks.

Deepens your understanding of a different conception of a hero. According to Nagy, the heroes in Homeric poetry were not meant to be directly emulated like our modern Superman -- instead of a single character being the role model, you should take your inspiration from the whole story. All characters, all nuances, sequences of events, consequences and interactions.

Also gives you a much richer vocabulary for so many concepts still central to the human condition. English and other modern languages don't allow us to explore these in the same way.

In-depth, but provides a "civilizing experience" according to Nagy. And I suggest: don't read it as an engineer, so to speak. It's not code, or an academic paper. Read for inspiration and conceptual diversification. Broaden your toolbox for understanding the human condition.

Exactly. And there is so much nonlinearity left to discover even here on Earth, once we get through a number of R&D and commercialization hurdles. Such as for commercial-grade fusion power.

All that deuterium in the oceans represents extroardinarily transformative potential for society. And new pathways for technology. Once we learn how to unleash this energy, Malthusianism won't have the appeal it does today.

Can such detection be countered with the same technology? Eg an ML system that controls emission of noise, light (optical and otherwise), and wiggles a magnetic field about in just the right way to make it look like natural noise, to an adversary's state-of-the-art AI-based detection system.

Yes -- I hear encouraging things about ARIA. It hasn't been stood up yet, but Peter Highnam, former DARPA deputy director, was supposed to be the first ARIA director, if I recall correctly. I met Peter very briefly, years ago. Good guy.

Reminds me of how different DARPA was in the early years, compared to now.

If you're interested in how the modern Agency functions, I'd suggest reading The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies.

It describes some of the typical trends in our time: contracts too often go to entrenched players and primes, rather than startups as primes due to technical merit rather than past performance and relationships. DARPA personnel reaching out from anonymous mailboxes post-RFI submission, asking if your team has TS/Sci clearance. (No answer if it's not a complete 100% yes.) And landlordism: extracting value from an existing system rather than seeding many new technologies.

However, there is still nothing like DARPA, despite its many problems. DIU is more for near-term innovation, and had its budget cut 20% just now. AFRL, AFWERX, Army SBIR/STTR, and so on, are all critical but not built to prevent technological surprise. Thank your lucky stars we have DARPA still up and running after so many decades.

To the founders and contributors of Atom: thank you.

Your work made more impact than you can possibly know. Atom became my absolute #1 editor. For code, and notes of every possible kind. As an entrepreneur, it carried me through so many adventures. The death of a cofounder, great losses and victories, the madness of 2020, a close friend's betrayal, a subsequent rebirth of sorts, and on and on. And always, this trusty piece of software sat there. Ready whenever calamity struck.

Thank you, folks. You created a wondrous piece of art and greatly impacted this entrepreneur's way of thinking and organization. Many have gained as a result.

Will follow Zed closely!

Extreme scifi-level scenario: could the Russians commandeer the ISS and use it as an impactor weapon on US or Allied soil? My guess not; super hard to do, and impact doesn't release that much energy anyway. Any space expert opinion?

Agreed -- and I should point out I don't personally support this piracy idea at all. Just 1) entertaining, 2) intellectually interesting to see how old school, Blackbeard-style piracy with letters of marque is actually still a possibility.

Agreed -- some resistance, because military investment can easily break out of proportion. Right now though, I believe for the most part, European investment is not sufficient. Considering the NATO target for countries to spend 2% of GDP on defense.

"Can be a net positive, if we also start to really stand by our principles of democracy and equality. The EU and NATO have a less then stelar track record on those for quite a while."

Absolutely. Our values are the engine of this entire thing. I'd say thanks to our insanely wired world, with the daily metric ton of stories coming out of Ukraine, people are realizing how precious Western values are, what they actually mean, and how necessary it is to defend them. We haven't thought in these terms for quite a while, in the context of superpower aggression.

"And the European disdain for military and defense spending only started after the end of the cold war when huge standing armies weren't needed anymore."

Yep -- we all hoped and worked towards a more advanced world. We didn't quite get it. But with the Kremlin intentions and ruthlessness made clear, for all to see, we now can make a wiser attempt. The aggregate political will that existed in Europe just 1 week ago, will now take a very different shape. That's despite Brexit, the pandemic, and the memory of our many past misdeeds. Great to see Western unity. That's what's holding the world together right now.

One positive side effect: this result, in the context of an ongoing land war in Europe will finally help to rattle us Europeans out of our traditional resistance to defense and military investment. (I'm both British and German.)

Stronger Europe -> stronger NATO -> more options for the Alliance, and for the US to prevent conflict in and out of Europe, since Europeans will shoulder more of the local deterrence burden.

Consider also the R&D spinoffs which typically result from military investment. These are dark times -- but longer term, imagine how much civilian technological advancement we can get out of this. This in turn can relieve so many other social and political problems in the West.

Some quotations I took from Columbo, to try to gain some insight into his methods:

"I like to get that background information very precise if I can."

"You know what it's like; you get hold of half of something, and you can't get a hold of the other half."

"Tell me about these movie stars. What do they do? They drink a lot?" (great open-ended question)

"Do you think you could just talk about the suture, sort of describe it in so many words?"

"It's just one of those things that gets into my head and keeps rolling around in there like a marble."

"There is something else sir, but I don't know where all that leads to just yet...I'll just wander around sir. Thank you very much."

"When people do something for the first time, detectives always want to know why."

With PCI cards like from Id Quantique [1] which generates true random numbers using quantum optics, isn't true random number generation a solved problem?

Guessing the quantum mechanics predicts true random numbers, but the messiness of real-world implementation makes it likely to be not so "true" after all.

[1]: https://www.idquantique.com/random-number-generation/product...

Forget arithmetic; I remember conversations with exceptionally capable academic mathematicians who in many cases couldn't count without making mistakes. The likely reason: every number triggers a symphony of mathematical results and complicated ideas in their minds, from both memory of association as well as logic itself, and by necessity their minds also conjure up new concepts every now and then. All this added mathematical machinery interferes with the actual counting process at hand.

In an extremely interdependent field like mathematics, maybe the more you know, the harder simple operations become, because our short term memory inevitably gets occupied and interrupted with all the more complicated stuff.

So it's impossible to design such planetcracker weapons, even in principle? Since the possibility of such design is all I claim.

In the early nuclear age, DARPA had proposals for a 10,000 megaton thermonuclear weapon [1].

In principle, we can design weapons horrendous enough to crack this entire planet apart forever. Four billion years of life up in smoke (or out in debris, I should say).

The question of whether humans are the most intelligent life form on the planet is still under active consideration. :)

[1] The Pentagon's Brain by Annie Jacobsen