Remix clone Hacker News

There is a place like that today. It is called "Nokia Bell Labs".

justin66 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This comment was illuminating. It would indeed have been more accurate to say "we could really use people like that today." Where they're located is a secondary concern.

▲

jll29 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a valid point.

Are there still regularly ground-breaking innovations (which ones e.g. in the last decade) coming out of the same lab today, whatever its owner or name?

▲

rollcat 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It's more difficult to innovate today on a similar scale, or with similar impact. It also seems that big budgets don't really help.

Graphene chips are an insanely exciting (hypothetical) technology. A friend of mine predicted in 2010 that these chips will dominate the market in 5 years' time. As of 2025 we can barely make the semiconductors.

Apple makes chips that have both excellent performance per watt, and overall great performance, but they make small generational jumps.

On the other hand, startups, or otherwise small-but-brilliant teams can still produce cool new stuff. The KDE team built KHTML, which was later forked into Webkit by three guys at Apple.

Paxos was founded on theoretical work of three guys.

Brin & Page made Google. In the era of big & expensive iron, the innovation was to use cheap, generic, but distributed compute power, and compensate for hardware failures in software. This resulted in cheaper, more reliable, and more performant solutions.

But yeah, most of the "moonshot factories" just failed to deliver anything interesting. Maybe you need constraints, market pressure?

	▲	dimator 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> But yeah, most of the "moonshot factories" just failed to deliver anything interesting. Maybe you need constraints, market pressure? It's funny you say that because to me it seems like bell labs was the exact opposite. Because of the antitrust ruling, there was a cap on profits, so many monies were instead funneled into green field R&D. The facility was run by people who knew how to manage a large group of capable people: put them in close proximity with other cross discipline stars, get out of their way, let their imaginations dictate the path.