HN user

gjmulhol

282 karma

NC State, Cambridge, Stanford grad. Materials Scientist, Computer Engineer. Founder, CEO of Citrine Informatics (citrine.io). There is nothing better in this world that working daily with smart, motivated, honest people, and I am lucky that I get to do that on a daily basis. @gregmulholland on Twitter.

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citrine.io 5y ago

Navigating Uncertainty and Parenting in 2020

gjmulhol
1pts0
pubs.rsc.org 7y ago

Can machine learning identify the next high-temperature superconductor?

gjmulhol
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www.theverge.com 10y ago

A huge team of Apple veterans is now making smart accessories for your car

gjmulhol
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medium.com 10y ago

Introducing Jelly, a New Search Engine

gjmulhol
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medium.com 10y ago

The Biggest Transformation of the Auto Industry – Mark Fields, CEO Ford

gjmulhol
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www.science20.com 10y ago

Discovery of Pi in Quantum Mechanics a 'Cunning Piece of Magic'

gjmulhol
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medium.com 10y ago

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan Demands Materials Innovation

gjmulhol
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www.gsb.stanford.edu 11y ago

Shaping Tomorrow's Breakthrough Materials

gjmulhol
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www.citrine.io 11y ago

Data Processing with Ruby, RabbitMQ, and Sneakers

gjmulhol
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www.citrine.io 11y ago

Getting started with the Jackson JSON processor

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research.google.com 11y ago

Google: Security questions aren't secure

gjmulhol
3pts2
www.citrine.io 11y ago

Machine Learning for the Materials Scientist, Part 1: Data

gjmulhol
5pts0
www.citrine.io 11y ago

Installing Custom Plugins in Elasticsearch

gjmulhol
4pts0
www.citrine.io 11y ago

Building a custom analyzer in Lucene for Elastisearch

gjmulhol
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medium.com 11y ago

What is going to happen in materials in 2015

gjmulhol
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www.mrs.org 11y ago

First Materials Science Hackathon Happening at Materials Research Society

gjmulhol
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medium.com 11y ago

The Hustle Quotient: At a Startup HQ IQ + EQ

gjmulhol
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medium.com 11y ago

My Dream Design Curriculum

gjmulhol
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techcrunch.com 12y ago

Homestar Runner is Back

gjmulhol
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k4connect.com 12y ago

Job: Full Stack Developers at Responsive Home Startup

gjmulhol
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www.kickstarter.com 12y ago

Duo Coffee Brewer: the best of both French press and pourover

gjmulhol
9pts0
www.microryza.com 12y ago

Evolution of Promiscuity in Angiosperms

gjmulhol
5pts3
gizmodo.com 12y ago

Apple's Sapphire/Glass Laminate Could Made an Unbreakable Phone

gjmulhol
1pts0
www.youtube.com 13y ago

Use Bitcoin

gjmulhol
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blogs.hbr.org 13y ago

Your Summer Intern Is Here. Now What?

gjmulhol
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espn.go.com 13y ago

Allegation Ends Coach's Career

gjmulhol
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blogs.hbr.org 13y ago

What Really Makes Tech Stars Shine

gjmulhol
3pts0
www.newrepublic.com 13y ago

"Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture": A Defense of the Humanities

gjmulhol
2pts0
techcrunch.com 13y ago

In Defense Of Prosperous Inequality

gjmulhol
6pts1
kottke.org 13y ago

Visualization: Miguel Cabrera's fantastic plate coverage

gjmulhol
3pts0

This is a good list with some good advice.

As a personal anecdote, I had a very well-known investor tell me that my business would never make more than $5m per year (not venture scale). And this was even knowing that my business is a pretty standard enterprise software business model. We are well past that at this point, so I am proud to have proved him wrong.

Proselint 6 years ago

This is cool in concept, but the live demo doesn't seem to be working. Or maybe I am using it wrong?

One of the big questions is whether we can extract these minerals from existing devices that are out of use/have been disposed of. Ideally, that means that we are designing new devices with disassembly in mind. Everyone from Apple to Huawei is talking about doing this, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Some of the comments are slightly inaccurate. We actually don't know where all the deposits are, and there was just a large discovery of rare earth elements off the coast of Japan. Much rare earth extraction has been happening in China because of relatively lax environmental standards that have reached back decades, so the US, Australia, and many other countries with deposits can't compete due to the costs of labor and complying with environmental standards and regulations. Mountain pass is one of a few deposits in the US, and happens to be one of the larger ones that is sitting idle. There are lots of mines globally and could be more, but economically they need to be attractive.

Copper is another interesting element. It is exceedingly hard to extract from existing devices because it is buried inside the chips, boards, etc. You can recover about 25% of the copper in a device, or about 3% of the total mineral content of a device when you extract copper. Widespread copper mining has destroyed parts of the Atacama desert in Chile and is a really nasty process.

Finally, work has been going on for a long time to replace rare earth elements or dramatically reduce how much is used. In some cases, you need small amounts because you need those f-orbital electrons but you can get away with using creative coatings instead of large volumes of materials. In other cases, you can replace them by multi-layering other materials to approximate their performance. There are huge opportunities here, but we are a couple decades away from seeing any real sea change in what our devices are made of.

Building physics and chemistry domain specific machine learning systems at Citrine Informatics. It's the best of both the physical science world and the data science world, has really hard problems, works with big companies and has big contracts, and is a team where more than half the people have technical graduate degrees.

This article is spot on. Using AI and ML in an enterprise setting is about changing behavior and helping people to understand why the AI/ML system is making the recommendations (or whatever the output is) that it is. I have seen this in dozens of companies now: even great AI requires cultural change to succeed. And good cultural change can make only mediocre AI models into game changers.

Focusing on quarterly goals or the like just glosses over this as an issue. It is important that men be willing to say "that isn't how we talk around here" or "man, that is a pretty crude thing to say to someone in a professional environment." If you have the power, comments like that should be met with "you're fired" because honestly, if someone in my workplace can't maintain some sense of decorum around women, how should I expect him (in this case, always a him) to behave around clients, investors, etc.

This is not something around which to dance lightly. It is far too common, and it only takes a few people willing to stand up and say that this isn't acceptable to break the norms of a bunch of guys just laughing along while a few say crude things.

Yes, this happens to everyone, but this happens to women much much more. Even well intentioned managers at good companies can find themselves victims to cognitive bias, unintentionally. This article raises specific things to watch out for.

Note: I am a male, a manager, and occasionally guilty of such things.

I agree -- there was also a very "product v. engineering" vibe to it also. Maybe my company is different from most they see, but we don't have product doing code reviews for developers. The place tension can arise seems to be more around the fact that product always wants to move faster and engineering expresses that they can't always do that. I don't think either side is right all the time, but the way the article starts with "Winning battle = product giving into engineering", "losing battle = product being pushed into a better decision by engineering" screams to me of a lack of understanding that in a good organization each party has the best possible information for making decisions that represent the interests of the company from different perspectives, and these meetings are to figure out how those interests align or conflict and sort them out.

[dead] 10 years ago

How do you know they have traction if they won't share numbers.

It is fine to not share everything. Numbers are scary and can be used out of context to make people very fearful. A 10% drop in revenue from month to month could look really scary but actually just be natural business variation. I would say you should trust the team, and that trust should lead to their sharing their vision and numbers to support that vision, but you should not have to have constant access to company financials necessarily.

I really like this idea. We groom our Kanban board, which creates a similar effect, but not so explicitly.

In your case or ours, one of the nice things about stepping back is reprioritization, which happens nicely in Scrum but not so much in Kanban. It is easy to define a path and never diverge only to wake up and realize you built an old vision.

I love this. We briefly flirted with scrum but now just have a much more Kanban-like system now, too. The only issue I foresee long term is that the sprint mentality of Scrum might recharge people and get them to, well, sprint, at product goals. Kanban, because it is never ending, might start to feel like a slog. There is never a way to have that feeling of "wow, we crushed it and cleared out our list. We are awesome." The list just extends forever. We have put measures in to help with this: primarily just having our engineers say at the beginning of the week what they hope/plan to get done this week (or two). Sometimes that is just noting subtasks in pursuit of a larger feature, but at least it borrows some of what is a very powerful part of Scrum: the social commitment that comes from standing up and saying "this is what I will finish this sprint."