You seem to be implying that breaking up the VC cartel in Silicon valley with money that was potentially stolen from russian peasants maybe OK. I understand that Ycombinator companies need their $150K, but this seems contrary to Valley values. Or maybe you meant something else?
I came to the US 20 years ago too and in my experience, the wait-times are nothing like what my employees from Indian and China face. I got a PhD in 6 years, then applied for a GC 2 years into my job and got my GC within 1 year. The total time was 9 years, which while long was nothing compared to the mess today. Fast forward to today. We have PhDs from Stanford and MIT whose application has been stuck since 2005, meaning even if you adjust for the 6+2 = 8 years to apply, the total time to GC will end up being more than 15-16 years at least.
I should point out that the system specifically disadvantages Indians and Chinese relative to say Mexicans, Canadians and everyone else. This coincides with an increasing level of opportunity in these countries relative to 1991 in India. To compare the two is making a fact-free argument, since even in a rational scenario, the relative attractiveness of the US has diminished over time.
I think asking that Vivek return to India is an unnecessary ad-hominem attack. There are many reasons that people choose to stay here including personal ones (wife, kids, etc. don't want to go back) not all of which are driven by relative opportunity.
As a lapsed superconductivity physicist, I hate to burst the bubble. In the community there has been a long-standing joke about USOs, Unidentified Superconducting Objects, and it is well known that just because you see "Signs of Superconductivity" does not prove that something is superconducting.
There are really three questions at hand: 1> Does the sample show the Meissner effect, 2> Does it show zero resistance, and 3> Is it stable under addition of impurities. It turns out that for most ceramic compounds, even if 1 is true, 2 and 3 are often not true. For example, the Cuprates (the first to cross the 77K mark) actually have a higher resistance close to the critical temperature than copper. Point 3 is especially damning as sensitivity to impurities also means you can't draw these things into wires (certainly not wires you can bend) as the very act of bending may introduce defects that change local concentration of ingredients and hurt the superconductivity.
So the burden of proof remains very high, and the small blurb is very underwhelming.
I agree and I remember the days of being a grad student and scouring the pages of High Tc Update looking for the next super-material. It seemed like every other quarter there was a hint of room T superconductivity and it was always dashed by the next quarter.
I have no idea why you are getting upvoted. You're not bursting any bubble, you're just parading your cynicism and knowledge of a specialized field before a technical audience. The post http://www.superconductors.org/276K.htm contains a whole bunch of data which may answer your 3 points. How about you go through it, or email the author who has "released [the details] into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research" and get back to us? You ask, "Does the sample show the Meissner effect" and I ask you does the information provided supply you with the answer? In which case you should write, "the published research information does not provide any information regarding the Meissner effect" because otherwise it sounds like you didn't even look closely at the article. And 10 out of 10 for not explaining what the Meissner effect is by the way. The top graph on the linked to page has a portion of the plotted function circled and labelled Meissner transition, is this what you mean? From Wiki P: "The Meissner effect is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state. Walther Meissner and Robert Ochsenfeld discovered the phenomenon in 1933 by measuring the magnetic field distribution outside superconducting tin and lead samples."
Is (Tl4Pb)Ba2MgCu8O13+ a ceramic compound? If not, why mention them? They are claiming superconductivity, so this implies zero resistance doesn't it? We can worry about impurities when we make enough of the stuff to extrude and bend it.
I for one am grateful he commented on this at all.
He has professional experience in this field, and his hunches are worth a thousand completely uninformed responses such as yours.
If you want him to dig through data, email the author, and look up stuff on Wikipedia for you, then how about you pay him before indignantly demanding that he do it?
After receiving backbiting chastisements from the popcorn gallery, I wouldn't be surprised if he refrained from commenting at all next time some similar announcement in his field of expertise came up.
That would be a pity, as his expertise, insight, and any time he cares to spend explaining his field to us are certainly valued.
You're not bursting any bubble, you're just parading your cynicism and knowledge of a specialized field before a technical audience.
In this case, I'd have to say that it's probably well deserved cynicism, though. An extremely effective first filter when any scientific or mathematical discovery is announced is to ask, "Does it look like science?", where "it" refers to whatever materials have been released.
In this case, the announcement does not look much like most science, and in fact the design reminds me more of all of those "Einstein was wrong, here's the real special theory of relativity!" sites than anything else.
This might not be a 100% correct filter, but I can't think of the last scientific breakthrough where the author didn't bother to at least set the paper in LaTeX and throw up a preprint somewhere. These days, even most incorrect proofs and discoveries look more like science than this does.
That said, as I know nothing about this field, I'd definitely be curious to hear what an expert had to say in about the specifics of these claims, as well as the other stuff at http://www.superconductors.org - it looks very crank-y to me, but then again I have known legit scientists that suck quite badly at web design, so who knows...
The Meisner transition is the transition to a state where the Meisner effect is observed.
The author also reports a "resistive transition", 1°C lower than the Meisner transition. He claims that this signs the superconductivity of the material and confirms the origin of the magnetic transition.
Hmmm, Reid Hoffman is a very interesting example. LinkedIn is technically not easy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Voldemort#SNA_LinkedIn), and he and it have been quite successful. (From my viewpoint it is by far the most useful social network.)
Skimming his resume and recommendations (on LinkedIn :-), it's clear he's very good with people and social stuff (surprise!) ... and I would suspect that transferred to dealing with the technical people who built LinkedIn. His history prior to it would have also given him a chance to learn about them, learn to respect them, etc.
Exactly, that's the point. You are extremely correct. Of course a non-technical founder can run a startup. However, there is this stigma that business guys have no place in a startup,and I wanted to show that depending on the type, of course they do.
Right. And allow the economy to go into a long-term depression with 25%+ unemployment. A government "for the people" does not have a choice in this matter. The real problem is that bankers/speculators have so much power on the outcome for people who are not at all related to the industry.
The point isn't whether or not the government should have intervened, the point is that because they did we can't blame Capitalism for the outcome of that specific action. A purely capitalist market would have let the financial crisis run is course, right or wrong. At least, that's how I see it.
strangely enough, that's not what happened when harding kept his hands off the market during the major crash of 1920-21.
and why did the bankers get so much power in the first place? there is a LONG history of government centralizing, cartelizing, supporting, and regulating the market's major financial players.
You write like you have a crystal ball and can see the future. There is no telling what "letting the banks fail" will do for the long term. However, we do know that increasing national debt to the degree that has been done is not good.
There is also no telling how bailing out failed businesses will help us in the long term either. Intuitively it seems worse to me. And unfair--what about all the other banks that didn't screw up by leveraging 35:1?
It seems to me that the core dilemma in the AI community has always been - is intelligence a "systems" problem or is it a "general" problem. It seems people first tried a series of general approaches and did not make much progress. Now that people are taking a series of bottom-up approaches in individual domains they are making a lot more progress. So maybe the AI winter is still on for the "general" approach but the thaw is well on its way for the "systems" approach.
VCs are clearly exaggerating their contribution but it is easy to forget that they are the only long-term investors in the current financial system. Who else will commit to eight years of involvement with an unknown entity? Do they need to restructure - yes, but their disappearance will not be good for startups.
Yes, but some previously lousily governed countries like China and India have become much better options than they were even ten years ago. The goal is not to have "some kinds of immigrants", it is to have the best.
Not to mention that many of the "best" immigrants (i.e. highly trained, highly educated) have come from first-world industrialized nations to begin with. Political instability and threat of mortal danger is not the only thing that compels people to move.
