Keynote: Paul Graham, YCombinator

I find these stories helpful on a lot of levels, and they provide great insight into problem solving, technology, and you end up learning a large amount about why things are the way they are when people recount how they got started. E.g Anthony Casalena is young by non-tech standards and I still find it totally foreign that when he started squarespace he bought 2 physical dedicated servers and hooked them up in New York at pier 1 hosting, he needed to own the physical boxes and have 2 for redundancy. I am not doing a startup but have found these talks particular insightful generally. I am looking for some more Inspirational ones if anyone knows any great founders or leaders with inspirational stories, or particularly good interviews. Here are some I have found particularly good: [0]Ashton Kutcher, Startup School ===================== I listed this first because it is most likely to get dismissed. Give it a chance. He starts off shaky and it is really a great Meta look at how people are out of their element, but really come back, win the crowd and provide insight when it is unexpected. [1]Kevin Rose, Foundation ================= He has done 43 interviews with very prominent tech leaders for his foundation series. Some of them are Elon Musk, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Ben Horowitz, etc. [2]Paul Graham, Pycon 08' ================== This is one of the most interesting things I have seen in a long time. He makes predictions, and talks about technology climate and infrastructure. To r

This seems to me a clarification of the strategy PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012 and an essay called "frighteningly ambitious startup ideas". It is a great way to think about and frame how to judge startup ideas. Mainly centering around high potential technology, overlooked ideas and opportunities that these startups can take advantage of. My question becomes, and it seems PGs, how can you do this without the value of hindsight. One one hand, you could sit and reason why startup x or your startup idea is the Microsoft in this scenario. But you can also easily delude yourself. Pebble, IMO, is shaping up alot like early Apple did. They are entering a competitive industry with a new product, facing a goliath and have a huge emphasis on their design & focus on developer. Which makes me believe history will repeat itself. That if we have the Apple for wearables, there should be, or soon, a Microsoft for wearables. Just a thought, would love any point for/against. For reference: [link] [this video]

PG talks about this idea of looking back at the present from the future in this video [1]. Applying this technique to the way power on the internet is distributed, it seems ridiculous to me that Governments have massive surveillance capabilities on its citizens, big corporations exploit customer data at the expense of customers, and that the internet is used as a tool to control political dissidents. So this is something that will eventually change for the better. As the OP points out, transparency and oversight are the short term solutions. If the present is any indication, implementing these effectively with cooperation from Governments and corporations around the world will likely remain a pipe dream. The OP also mentions reducing power differences as a long term solution. IMO, one of the best ways to do that would be to educate the masses about the mentioned problems and how it affects everyone involved. Once a sufficiently large population cares enough about the problems at hand, change should not be far away. [1] [this video]

I cool a wafer scale with a liquid that boils at 43 C and immersing the wafer in this liquid. The bubbles (cavitation) of the boiling liquid should not damage the surface layers of the wafer, of course. This boiling liquid is further cooled by water and a sonic heat pump moving the heat into a water tank where the stored heat is used for showers or cooking [1]. Given 45 trillion transistors (45x10e12) times 3 femtojoule (3x10e-15) to switch each transistor at 1 Ghz (10e9) you get 1.000.000 joules/sec = 1 megawatt. These are ball-park numbers, back of the envelope calculations. In reality I make full physics simulations and electrical SPICE simulations of the entire wafer on a supercomputer aka on the wafer scale integration FPGA prototypes and the wafer supercomputer itself. The EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software tools we write ourselves in Smalltalk and Ometa, and these also need our own supercomputer to run on. Of course the feedback loops are Bret Victor style visualizers [3][2]. Apple Silicon or this small company demonstrate that only with custom EDA tools can you design ultra-low power transistors to prevent our wafer to melt. The FPGA prototype is a few thousand Cyclone 10 or Polarfire FPGA's with a few terabytes/sec memory bandwidth or a cluster of Mac Studio Ultra's networked together in a Slim Fly network that can double as a neighbourhood solar smart grid [5]. You need a dinosaur egg to design a dinosaur, or is is it the other way around? [6] A TDP (Therma