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This article is quite fascinating. See some parallels to Elon Musk’s story. Intense curiosity of youth, building a business early, any business, and using tha

This article is quite fascinating. See some parallels to Elon Musk’s story. Intense curiosity of youth, building a business early, any business, and using that money to finance future businesses. Also, I see evidence in Edison of first principle thinking. Funny Edison’s rivals last name was Tesla ;-) Also amusing that he had a lab in Menlo Park, but the New Jersey one ;-) It became Bell Labs, which paved the way of research labs as an idea, leading to Xerox Parc, then the PC and Arpanet. Wow! Thought experiment, what would a modern, open source “cross-disciplinary invention factory” look like? Is this what GitHub is perhaps? I think so, after watching a recent GitHub Satellite talk that had some of the scientists who developed the first picture of a black hole present. They said their team was ~200 people, but the contributor count of all the open source project transitive dependencies they used was on the order of 20,000+ people[1]. How will that idea evolve and how can we all participate in that evolution? 1. https://youtu.be/E5GDI__r_Is https://youtu.be/E5GDI__r_Is

petra 7y ago
GitHub and open-source are Amazing, for sure. But if you're looking at something close to inventions(and not "just" useful product features) from open source, I would look for open-source projects that are publically funded , maybe with some criteria to filter important projects from the noise.
- davidjnelson 7y ago
  Interesting point, thank you. This is why I shared the video last night of how we are starting to open source research created by our tax dollars, but _not_ the software [1]. Do you have any ideas on what a modern “cross-disciplinary invention factory” would look like? 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21297448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21297448
  - petra 7y ago
    I agree, sharing code is better for the research community. But once you share everything, you sort-of lost your edge. And since we live in a very competitive society, that's a big problem. Not just for academia, btw. As for ideas: I think AI and code offer us new ways of capturing expertise(search engines already do so to some extent) - and that may mean everybody could build a cross-disciplinary team "on the cheap". But even with that, inventing important things still feels like it would require a lot of work and experimentation and tools - so it would be an expensive business.
    - davidjnelson 7y ago
      > I agree, sharing code is better for the research community. But once you share everything, you sort-of lost your edge. And since we live in a very competitive society, that's a big problem. Not just for academia, btw. Interesting. As a taxpayer, I’d like to see legislation passed to mandate open sourcing code I’ve paid for. I have compassion for researchers careers though, but am not well versed anywhere near enough in the machinations of that to suggest a solution. > But even with that, inventing important things still feels like it would require a lot of work and experimentation and tools - so it would be an expensive business. This feels a bit like capitalism as practiced today. Not judging it. Just curious if there are new approaches to be discovered and applied here.
- deleted 7y ago
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petra 7y ago

GitHub and open-source are Amazing, for sure. But if you're looking at something close to inventions(and not "just" useful product features) from open source, I would look for open-source projects that are publically funded , maybe with some criteria to filter important projects from the noise.

davidjnelson 7y ago
Interesting point, thank you. This is why I shared the video last night of how we are starting to open source research created by our tax dollars, but _not_ the software [1]. Do you have any ideas on what a modern “cross-disciplinary invention factory” would look like? 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21297448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21297448
- petra 7y ago
  I agree, sharing code is better for the research community. But once you share everything, you sort-of lost your edge. And since we live in a very competitive society, that's a big problem. Not just for academia, btw. As for ideas: I think AI and code offer us new ways of capturing expertise(search engines already do so to some extent) - and that may mean everybody could build a cross-disciplinary team "on the cheap". But even with that, inventing important things still feels like it would require a lot of work and experimentation and tools - so it would be an expensive business.
  - davidjnelson 7y ago
    > I agree, sharing code is better for the research community. But once you share everything, you sort-of lost your edge. And since we live in a very competitive society, that's a big problem. Not just for academia, btw. Interesting. As a taxpayer, I’d like to see legislation passed to mandate open sourcing code I’ve paid for. I have compassion for researchers careers though, but am not well versed anywhere near enough in the machinations of that to suggest a solution. > But even with that, inventing important things still feels like it would require a lot of work and experimentation and tools - so it would be an expensive business. This feels a bit like capitalism as practiced today. Not judging it. Just curious if there are new approaches to be discovered and applied here.
deleted 7y ago
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