quarterwave

Years ago I was an engineering post-doc in the US, and happened to meet this science post-doc (you can guess at which institute) at an airport. I was amazed to learn this person was spending 2X my hours in the lab at 0.5X my salary.

Many moons ago I've been exactly where you describe, so listen to uncle.

You are already incubating a start-up - it's your child.

Your sole task is to keep the cash register chiming bimonthly. Focus on the job that pays you, if you have extra time then work harder for your current employer. Pile up some good karma.

Run those errands, be with your spouse, speak much less than spoken to, & forget your buddies.

Also be on excellent terms with your in-laws.

Say $2M in Valley is 10X of cost-to-company (CTC) per person. If CTC in India is say $30K then the India valuation with the same 10X should be at least $300K.

If the 10X somehow ends up at 3X, then at that point the expected payoff for a founder may be better as a technical lead or manager at the India development centre of one of the majors.

(Very different if one delivers value, of course - either for local/global market, or in terms of non-trivial technical expertise.)

So, the real value of the article may be in the statement about the $100K versus $2M per acqui-hire. It may belong to the category of wrong-method-but-right-answer, which our educational system programs us to avoid.

A significant element of scientific research is being the first to find something. It's the ego thing, all the way to standing up there in fancy dress some day to receive one's gong. Publishing is a time stamping service for the ego trip. Why rail against it?

So, it's not an investment bubble because the new start-up's don't burn as much cash as dotcoms did? Is that the conclusion? What about all the people holding value stock at P/E's of 50-100, and more?

What's really great about Helvetica is that it's idiot-proof on a wide variety of browsers, and given my limited web-design experience that puts Helvetica in the "Swiss" category of robust design.

I personally prefer a more evenly kerned quasi-typewriter font like Inconsolata, but it takes a lot of work to get it looking right on all browsers.

One problem where i believed the result only after writing up some Python code to simulate N trials is the Monty Hall problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

The article doesn't explicitly say whether it is bulk Gallium Arsenide, or a quantum-well structure based on a sandwich of Gallium Arsenide and its crystalline alloys. Bizarre excitonic behavior in a quantum-well doesn't surprise me much, however in bulk it would be a remarkable phenomenon.

Also, droplets in physics (whether in the water, or in the nucleus) exhibit 'surface tension' effects - basically energy dynamics between volume and surface area. If that was the case here it would make this phenomenon very interesting indeed.

Whatever you do, please don't design your own chip.

1. The section on matrices should start (not end) with the orthogonal length preserving co-ordinate transformation. It's the easiest geometry/trig connection, the elements can be worked out by hand, demonstrates unitary property, and makes a nice segue into inverse. 2. The section on linear system response could make a mention of Fourier series (even Fourier integral). 3. It's still a mystery to me why linear algebra is not taught using the Dirac notation.

I would humbly add Victor Weisskopf to the list, in particular his article "Of Atoms, Mountains, and Stars: A Study in Qualitative Physics."

Human muscle also stores energy in the form of glycogen, so it's got batteries included. The approx 25% energy efficiency of the human muscle is limited mostly by the 40% efficiency of burning glucose into ATP molecules. The article mentions 'relative inefficiency' of the new muscle - a quick search indicates it's around 1%. My respect for human muscles has increased!

Does 'do no evil' include canonical net-neutrality, or will it end up like Animal Farm: but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Consider John Wayne's advice in 'The Shootist': It's not always about being fast or accurate, it's about being willing.

Add another quote (from Feynman): you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Now no one can intimidate you.

The Universe is a simulation, so what programming language/galactic cloud does it run on? Haskell for typing and correctness, Erlang for 'just fail', Ruby for POLA (God's, that is)...

One does not simply walk into Mordor. As mentioned in the article, at the spec level it makes perfect sense. Examples include hot-swap processor and memory boards. But to actually go about designing large processor chips - that's not easy. It needs DNA, one simply can't put together such a team by ones and twos. Apple had to go buy PA Semi, a start-up that had serious expertise in chip design covering two processor families.

That apart, does anyone know how much capex and opex benefit a company like Google or Facebook will gain by designing their own chips, as opposed to using commodity silicon?

Hawala is closer to traditional banking than is made out to be. Despite the hash code entries there must be a form of eventual resettlement. There must also be a distributed enforcement apparatus that charges its own fees. Also, in many countries hawala operators are 'too big to fail', which is the ultimate proof that they are banks.

Any recommendations for resources to improve one's Javascript code running on the back-end, for example node.js/V8 or vert.x/JVM.

Specifically: (i) how to leverage Javascript to write better networking code (e,g; cluster, websockets, etc), and (ii) for number crunching on the server-side, should the relevant code be written from scratch in functional Javascript, or is it better to fork a process that runs (say) Julia code?