Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15724351

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15715141

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15693071

Points: 108

# Comments: 96

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15693053

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15671254

Points: 141

# Comments: 14

Imagine you were building the first fission bomb, but doing it the Calico way (which is the way most science is done these days). You'd say: we need enormous progress in a wide variety of very distinct fields: nuclear physics, isotope chemistry, metallurgy, high-speed photography...

So you'd ask PIs in all these fields to send you grant proposals related to the problem of building an atom bomb. They would take their existing grant proposal template, rewrite it to talk about atom bombs, and send it in. You would send them money. They would deliver progress reports.

What would happen? Probably, you'd build an atom bomb. The first test would be in 1986, after 45 years and 500 billion dollars. It would cause major damage to three creosote plants and severely startle a jackrabbit.

Next, imagine Calico's funders said: we will take this same amount of money, and pour it into a single problem -- rejuvenating a dog. Much like Manhattan's single product deliverable.

Moreover, we will not hire existing players to repaper their existing lines of research. We will hire the best new PhDs and tell them to do whatever want to do, so long as it represents one piece of a reasonable strategy for, or step toward, an realistic engineering procedure for rejuvenating dogs. (Or at least mice, if long-lived animals are too hard a first step.)

In this kind of organization -- ie, a hierarchical company-shaped structure with a company-shaped goal, delivering a product -- the standards of relevance and collaboration will be much, much higher. Los Alamos hired the best people in the world, but no one took their existing research and tried to shoehorn it into the Manhattan Project.

No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't. We actually put a lot of money into science and technology, and the personnel are just as talented as ever. Every PI is an Oppenheimer. But there is no General Groves.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15322934

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

It always bugs me when I hear someone who I know knows better use a line like: "Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC" -- as though this was a matter of dropping a postcard in the mail. I'm confident that these writers know better.

The real situation -- as you can see in any of the stories about Blue Bottle's non-IPO, Hedosophia, etc -- is that "just do it legally" is rapidly approaching the regulatory singularity of "just get the NRC to license your new nuclear reactor design." Even for multibillion-dollar companies, "just do it legally" is becoming prohibitively costly. Compare to the 1990s, when sub-100M IPOs were not that weird.

This has enabled VCs to earn enormous monopoly fees, originally as gatekeepers to the IPO process, now as gatekeepers to a gigantic secondary market in "unicorns." Lambos all around.

As in taxi medallions, this bottleneck creates immense profits. Naturally, the spectacle of Uber versus the taxi mafia, or ICOs versus the VC mafia, creates a lot of passions. Especially among those with axes to grind.

There is one big difference: Uber provides a consistently excellent transportation experience. Whereas most ICOs are straight-out terrible. Let's hope that the sheep get separated from the goats, as fast as possible.

[/end imprudently-frank throwaway]