I'd guess for purity reasons. Volcanic eruptions don't always come from the mantle - in fact think convection cells, the rising material actually comes from deep down
Max Levchin put his money into Slide, Elon Musk put it all into Tesla/SpaceX, and I could name a lot of other entrepreneurs who did similarly but you get my point.
Investing in your own project isn't "commonsense," it's just an individual's view on risk management
At Burning Man I met a couple of people who work on the Tor project.
They were brilliant. Honestly it's going to be hard for a govt agency to recruit people like this - people who are incredibly passionate about security and cryptography may tend to care about privacy issues as well, for which the government currently incurs a negative sentiment, and this is compounded by the fact that brilliant people these days tend to work on problems they are ideologically aligned with. This isn't the Manhattan Project era anymore...
But you just never know, people come from all sorts of political backgrounds.
re: Manhattan project, I think one difference is that in those days you couldn't use investigate it yourself, you needed the supply and equipment that only TBF government could provide.
Now, a €500 laptop (which people have for sending email) can provide most of what you need to be world class. If you have the brains, you don't need the government.
Honestly I'd say this depends on your goals - are you trying to learn? Or just make something (either answer is fine)? If the former, build. The latter, plug something in.
Yeah I was thinking about that too. Though if the limiting factor for switching speed is the impedance of the interconnects (I'm guessing it is), makes sense.
How come not many people are talking about this article in the context of entrepreneurship? Pretty astute advice for people doing startups.
"1) it fits the classic definition of a disruptive company and 2) is an innovative company playing in a large market with unsophisticated competitors."
Of course, everybody who does a startup has to go through the cloning phase. It's just part of learning how to build a business...
You cannot level such a stark criticism against a man who dared to be great - when you do so you embarrass only yourself.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Talk highly of him all you want, his rhetoric has hurt the US far more than it has helped. Between his voodoo economics and ignoring of the AIDs crisis, Iran Contra, the 'Moral Majority', I think you are embarrassing yourself here, not me. He is the epitome of style over substance.
You can say the same about just any other politician. They all made (and make) mistakes and stumble. The key is how history judges them. In the case of Reagan I think history is pretty clear about what he accomplished and what he didn't. Notice I said "I think" because that's just my opinion; everyone is entitled to one. Informed opinions are not embarrassing. Waving your arms and pushing your own absolutes on other people however can be quite so.
You're being silly now. I am not trolling - I stated my opinion. You said:
> Waving your arms and pushing your own absolutes on other people however can be quite so.
Which seemed to be directly in response to the OPs assertion:
> Ronald Reagan was a wise man and great president.
You can see how I would think you were referencing this in your comment as you specified that you were stating an opinion and the OP asserted this comment as fact, yet I stated:
> As far as I'm concerned he is an embarrassment
Which is obviously presented as opinion and not hard fact. I did however back up my opinion with points in a follow up comment.
edit: the downvotes don't make me any less correct in my response, if you disagree please explain.
The US didn't win the cold war, the USSR stopped playing due to an insolvency of mostly their own creation. And the same could happen to the US if it is not extremely careful over the next decade or so.
Much as I hate to stray this far from the topic at hand, AIDS turned out to be a much, much smaller deal than the alarmists of the 1980s would have had you believe. Not that it wasn't worth being concerned about, researching, and educating people about, but y'know what the death toll from AIDS is in the United States nowadays? Forty per million per year.
While that's still an order of magnitude above "lightning strike" it's below, say, Hepatitis C or many hundreds of other diseases that get less press.
Talk about hindsight fallacy. "Nowadays" is hardly the point; at the time, depending on what circles you moved in (or perhaps one should say, which classes of human beings you cared about), AIDS was devastating.
This is exactly why this political stuff needs to stay off HN. By your apparent definition no one could level start criticism against Hitler (hopefully that kills the thread).
RPX is defensive aggregation only - they don't go out and sue people.
There's also value add whenever you have centralized expertise: think PGExperts, Percona, and EnterpriseDB (mysql and postgres consultants) - if I'm running a company whose core business is not in the data, it's usually more economical to outsource that expertise than hire a 'superstar' DBA. Same with RPX: if your core business isn't IP law you might as well outsource that.
This is why consultancies of all shapes and types exist in the world, after all.
Companies spend millions just to defend a suit whether they win or lose - that's why they settle. The genius of RPX is that they basically identified that as an inefficiency aka market opportunity.
A lot of startups could learn from this model: taking an existing market and making it more efficient. That's usually a better bet than building an Instagram or Twitter analytics company - the big caveat of course is you actually have to have domain expertise in an industry to do this type of startup ;)
Paul, how does C fits into the picture? I don't see anything in the source for compiling native extensions, and the implementations src/recommendify.c calls look incomplete?
