3 ms·
Reminds me of an infamous VC story I heard years ago: A bunch of engineers tell him that feature X is impossible due to latency, and the latency is capped by th
by nikanj 7y ago
Reminds me of an infamous VC story I heard years ago: A bunch of engineers tell him that feature X is impossible due to latency, and the latency is capped by the speed of light.
He challenges the team by asking them to speculate about options, if they managed to "disrupt" the industry by breaking that speed barrier, and gets mighty upset by these closed-minded engineers who are unwilling to accept any possibility of a breakthrough
- yummypaint 7y agoThats when you say sure well start a basic research lab that will be $100 mil per year
- ahartmetz 7y agoIt could possibly be a valid question: Think about what it would do for the customer, then see if there are different solutions for some of these things. But I guess that was not how it went.
- FakeComments 7y agoI’m not convinced the speed of light is a barrier when you can build a non-Euclidean quantum computer. Maybe the VC had a point, and the engineers were overly confident in one perspective — one that had assumptions subtly different from reality.
- copperx 7y agoWell, MOSH breaks through the speed of light latency limitation of SSH by ... predicting the server's response. Although the laws of physics can't be broken, in certain scenarios we can simulate we have done just that. And often that's just what you need to get ahead of your competition.
- nikanj 7y agoYou sound just like a VC! "You're saying we can't do HFT between Tokyo and New York faster than the speed of light? Here's a completely unrelated product, that does something completely different, and the limit they're working with doesn't really apply to us. So it is possible! Maybe you should go to Burning Man, that would open your mind.."