graphene's comments

Therefore, even if the raw performance in terms of FLOPS sound similar, the two systems will have widely differing performance on real workloads.

Re: rigidity; I'm curious (apologies for not having read your papers) how you define "just enough" flexibility, and how your design tools take freely moving components into account. Would you agree with my intuitive feeling that there's a tradeoff between designability and functionality, and that your spiroligomer work sits between rationally designed protein structures (very hard problem) and Drexlerian molecular-scale gears and ratchets (similar, determinsitic design rules as in macroscopic systems)? Or, do you feel that anything protein "machines" can do, spiroligomer machines can do too?

I recently started a startup that has molecular nanotechnology as the end goal, and my thinking has been that the flexibility of proteins is an essential element in achieving the capability to design and manufacture with atomic precision, and that the concomitant complexity of the large numbers of degrees of freedom can be tamed with a data-driven approach leveraging machine learning algorithms. I'd love to hear if you have any thoughts on this, and how it relates to the spiroligomer approach.

If you read the Feynman speech that he references at the beginning, he actually mentions that as you scale machines down, things like mechanical rigidity will degrade and you will need to change your design rules accordingly. I always assumed that when you reach the molecular level, thermal motion and the constant bombardment by water molecules would mean that the only viable option is to use proteins, just like nature does, so it's very interesting to see that this guy is aiming to use more rigid structures at the molecular level. I guess this is a way to reduce the complexity (degrees of freedom) compared to designing protein tertiary structure. I wonder if this is too constraining though, he admits he has yet to figure out how to build mechanical machines using this approach, and intuitively I'd expect that to be very difficult with this degree of rigidity. You might need the additional flexibility of peptide chains to do many of the interesting things that are possible.

He does point out the advantage of durability, but this raises the obvious issue that one of the questioners alluded to, namely toxicity/pollution risk. I'd think degredation by biological or other means would be a feature, not a bug, since as he points out, even conventional plastics are a huge pollution problem.

Fascinating stuff nonetheless.

After three months, they invest £10000 (in exchange for 8% equity) in all teams that are settled on an idea and seem promising.

There are no fees of any kind.

(disclosure: I'm on the current cohort)

(disclaimer: also in the current cohort)

It won't be that simple, since even this (allowing customers to contribute power back to the grid at scale) requires expensive infrastructure upgrades.

Also, the main result of this work seems to be not energetic efficiency, but the production of flexible precursor chemicals.

On the wetware side, there is of course a similar incentive to keep the genetic sequences that result from your work private, in addition to perhaps ethical concerns regarding the dissemination of arbitrary DNA.

As a fellow software guy considering going into drug development research though, I do wonder: Given your mentioned open source credentials, it's probably plausible that you are at least sceptical about software patents? If so, what is your opinion on patents on drug molecules and DNA sequences? I'm struggling a bit with this since the only way to a big exit seems to involve protecting any findings as IP (because of the costs of the regulatory process), but I'm not sure I'd want my work to be patent-walled.

Do you know what you would do if you are one day faced with the choice of whether or not to patent one of your molecules or sequences, knowing that not doing so would have significant adverse financial effects on your company?

(This all may sound somewhat critical, but I'm really just curious. My email is in my profile if you prefer to respond privately.)

Shame, but understandable.

You can obviously screw up a great market -- and that has been done, and not infrequently -- but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.

And neither a stellar team nor a fantastic product will redeem a bad market.

Any pointers for reading material on this?

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: python, numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, pandas, flask, nginx, C, Fortran 90, MPI/OpenMP, haskell, pandoc, git

Resume: http://be.linkedin.com/pub/mark-szepieniec/89/7a6/53/ https://github.com/mszep http://mszep.com

Email: mszepien gmail

My name is Mark, I'm submitting my PhD in computational physics in a few weeks, and am looking to get into software engineering. With a background in electrical engineering, I'm especially interested in applying the tools of machine learning and data science to systems in the real world. I've really enjoyed completing Andrew Ng's online machine learning course and working on some side projects that touch on data science, and I can't wait to get started making a difference at your company!

I'm an EU citizen, and willing relocate elsewhere in Europe, or North America.

Note: Flask is basically just a combination of werkzeug and jinja for templating.

Still food for thought that YC would reject a founder so obviously good (although perhaps not obviously then) as DaniFong..

I wonder if getting rejected was one of the reasons for her to start working on something more "zero to one", and closer to her area of expertise?

I'd be super interested to know more about this, since LightSail seems like exactly the type of company (and founder) that YC says it wants to fund: Working in a RFS domain (energy), massive potential upside, and founder with considerable domain expertise.

His Startup School Europe talk was amazing, although to be fair it was more "why to start a startup" than how.

I believe nVidia has a similar effort going (can't remember the name), so it's still not a single agreed standard, but it's moving in that direction I feel.