I know the founders of an AI chip company that taped out and got working chips on their first go. They got their chip done, it’s pretty solid. Chip has great perf and is super power efficient, a solid delivery. I knew they'd nail it and they did.

The SW story is a train wreck, though. The problem basically was that they couldn’t hire any good SW peo... See more

I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself.

Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.

If you don't be... See more

There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are.

As a founder of a ... See more

> The authors believe that the modified/strained structure of their material creates a large number of “quantum wells” between particular lead atoms and the adjacent oxygens of the phosphate groups bound to them, in effect making a two-dimensional “electron gas”. They propose that electron tunneling between these quantum wells, which are bet... See more

A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g. Anki, SuperMemo, or other flashcard-style systems), in my experience using them for several years for long-term memory: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to use this software to learn certain topics.

Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced rep... See more

From 2012, to 2016, to 2020, google bled an incredible amount of key talent

I think that was kinda known in the valley, but not sure any media really covered it

Honestly a lot of the blame goes to Larry Page for turning the company toward G+, pushing top people toward Gundotra, the product failing quite badly, and Larry stepping back as CEO

My view of... See more

At CodeSandbox we use Firecracker for hosting development environments, and I agree with the points. Though I don't think that means you should not use Firecracker for running long-lived workloads.

We reclaim memory with a memory balloon device, for the disk trimming we discard (& compress) the disk, and for i/o speed we use io_uring (which we o... See more

To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while makin... See more

The collapse of the GDR has many reasons, mostly it ran out of money during the 80s. There have been several reasons for running out of money, e.G. taking on massive credit in the 70s to produce more consumer goods and build flats (the reason Honecker was very popular after his coup against Ulbricht), which it had problems to pay back in the 80s. A... See more