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seanr88's comments

seanr88 | 2 years ago | on: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

there is more to the analogy too. Once you have convinced a large player that your offering is important and have raised money successfully, everything gets a lot easier. Have a big grant and work at a top University attracting more money is a hell of a lot easier. Get into YC, guess what raising your Series A just increased in probability by about 20X.

seanr88 | 2 years ago | on: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

but the people you have to convince are the people who are doling out tax payer money for research. By definition they don't know your fabulous discovery only you know that. So you need to convince someone else that the idea you have is worth investigating and they should give you money to do it. So the people who are best at convincing other people are the people who get the grants and who get to do the research.

Even once you have discovered something convincing other people that what you have discovered is worthwhile is not easy, as this article shows.

Being a good fundraiser is more important than technical skill in both research/academia and also in startups.

seanr88 | 2 years ago | on: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

Even the concept that the flow of traffic is more important than the pedestrian's flow is indicative of the change in attitude. Somehow the car has come to be most important while the pedestrian is a nuisance. Both own and pay for the road but the pedestrian is a second class citizen (obviously some people will moan on about road tax and fuel tax, but these taxes don't come close to paying for the road infrastructure, I doubt they would even pay the rent on the area dedicated to roads in one major city - say NYC).

seanr88 | 2 years ago | on: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

No other country has anything to teach the USA. The USA is unique and special for a large number of reasons and so foreign methods won't work here. If I recall they even drive on the other side of the road in the UK, that will never catch on here.

seanr88 | 2 years ago | on: Toyota Research claims breakthrough in teaching robots new behaviors

I would disagree. All of what we are seeing from this latest surge in AI is essentially jumped up predictive text. To get to C-3P0 there is a whole additional layer of Intelligence needed. C-3P0 can make plans and execute those plans. This latest wave cannot reason about the world, it does not know or understand the world it just assembles words (and here motions) in a way that we value. It is not planning anything.

seanr88 | 2 years ago | on: Intermediate sci knowledge associated with overconfidence and negative attitudes

I'd agree with this although I understand where the idea comes from. It is difficult for people to understand what is and is not a science and it is easy to think that computer science is not a science even when you study it.

The way we learn and study topics is divorced from the original method of discovering those topics. The way people learn Computer Science is generally by absorbing the information, not by doing the experiments. So it is difficult for people to understand that the way we have this knowledge is through hypothesis forming and experimentation i.e. Science.

seanr88 | 2 years ago | on: We built the fastest CI and it failed

I'm having a very similar issue getting https://brisktest.com/ out there. People complain about things like the speed of their build system, but convincing people that your CI system is faster just seems like an uphill battle. Maybe the era of launching new indie dev tools to developers is over and you just need a massive marketing budget to bombard devs with advertising and lots of sponsored content.
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