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> 1)Germany is large too with different dialects.

The US is 27 times the size of Germany.

> Every country is an amalgam of cultures,

No European country is even remotely close to the US in terms of diversity. The US is a nation of immigrants. There is no American 'people' in the same way there is a German people. America is not a nation-state. Germany has many different areas with different dialects but these are indigenous to Germany.

> the point was that the US once produced these things (guitars, bicycles, etc) now we don't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bicycle_brands_and_manu...

Ctrl + f 'USA', many are defunct yes, but many are not. You are factually incorrect.

> They use different, more expensive grains (rye, whole wheat) and sourdoughs which do exist in the US but only in a few locations.

Not only do bakeries exist in the US that use locally grown whole wheat and rye, bakeries also have the option of importing these ingredients from areas that do have whole wheat and rye. Have you never had a New York sourdough bagel?

> Baklava is hard to find outside college towns and metro areas in the US, this makes it unique

Baklava is hardly unique to Iran unless you expressly call it 'Iranian baklava'. And if you do that, why not call American-made baklava, 'American baklava'?
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I think a good gateway into personal development is lifestyle design, and there are plenty of blogs in that genre.
What's wrong with cheap things? Is there really something so terribly wrong with the ability of everyone to acquire basic, somewhat decent functional furniture, clothing, entertainment electronics, household appliances, and automobiles cheaply? Would it be better if only more expensive, long-lasting, luxury goods that most people couldn't afford existed?

We've lived in that world before, it wasn't a better world for anyone. Since the same people who could have afforded expensive, high quality goods back then can today (a tiny subset of the population).

I may not like the style of most of the furniture at IKEA, but I am glad that it exists so that people of modest means can outfit their homes and spend the rest of their money on items that have a greater impact on their quality of life.

I would address the other points in the piece, but I thought this point was worth making on its own.
Thanks Chris!

Cheers,

Marcus
I've never received one of these calls, but someone should set up a VM and let them in. See what they do exactly, and then report it. If you could get enough info on them, am sure the central office could be taken down very quickly, and the owners arrested.

Just a thought anyway, exposing them is an excellent first step though, and am sure keeping them on the line is slowing them down a little.
I don't think this is unique to the US, and not unique to the last 10 years either.

Consider this: Of all the products made a 100 years ago, only 1% was made to last for a long time. Right now the other 99% is broken and thrown away and the 1% is still being used.

We only SEE old products which are well built. That doesn't mean all old products are that way.

There are still products being build which we can use for a long time, but they don't stand out and will only be noticed after a tens of years.
Is there a CoffeeScript debugger yet?
"you have a PM screaming at your engineers" - and there lies your problem.

I'm the sole engineer for a distinctly non-engineering company (we deliver food, and I'm the only person with any sort of engineering background).

However, we work in a very similar way to GitHub. We have a motivated team who love our product - and that rubs off on our working practices. No one is ever told they have to work late, or they have to hit a deadline, but things get done at an amazing pace. At some point soon I'll be working on an internal CRM system, but because I care about the company, and the impact it will have on everyone else's ability to do good things I'm excited about that.
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Catalan pirate here. EFF joined to the initiative today. We are going to publish it soon and all USA citizen will be redirected to EFF.
Yes. Don't get me wrong, I think there are big challenges ahead for humanity, and some of those can only be addressed with advanced engineering, which, in turn, needs programming.

But my paradox is: The biggest of dangers comes from people's use of technology as a means of control. A creeping surveillance state, soon to be autonomous killer drones, and that ugly old nuclear threat that keeps rearing its head. Due to fear of each other, the technological dream is turning into a nightmare.

And a the hardware and software used there is built by people like you and me. There's a societal problem to be solved first, or maybe it should solve itself, and only that will bring responsible and sustainable use of technology. Or we'll kill each other, in video-game style (yay for gamification).
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Article in a similar vein: http://nat.org/blog/2009/07/nerds-and-jocks/
> I see them faltering and operating a little blindly.

What are they doing "blindly"? Can you offer specfics?

> I want them to succeed - but it is plain foolish to say that getting a 1 - 10 physician private practice is the gateway to knocking on the door of a large hospital.

I don't think they ever wanted to knock on the door of a large hospital. Why do you insist that they must find a way to do this? More importantly, why so immediately? Of course they know they can't compete with Epic, Cerner, etc. So they're not even trying.

It's quite possible that enough small practices adopt a system for it to be hard for big hospitals NOT to notice. Then hospitals will be knocking on their door. Many many markets have been disrupted this way, where the big players don't take small ones seriously until it's too late.
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PIRATA.CAT lawyers (and other pirate parties legal teams) are working on this. This hasn't been done before.
This is a reminder that robotic exploration is much, much cheaper than sending humans. We should send robots (and Lego figures) into space.
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Well, it literally is like going off the edge of the world ;)

Besides, going across the earth is just like walking around the block, just with a bigger radius.
Yup, a pH sensor based off (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10972) is certainly on the cards.
I'm in a similar company at the moment - it's not quite GitHub, but the atmosphere of smart people working on things they love is there. Since I started they've also started adapting to the "Work when you want, where you want" approach as well ;)

When looking for work a big requirement was that I could work from home, and have Wednesdays off - filtering down the opportunities was just a case of mentioning that in the initial contact with a company I was interested in. No one you want to work for is going to be offended at you pointing out something that could be a problem early on in the process so long as you go about it politely.
EDIT: I think that my conclusion in this message is wrong.

----------------

[PDF / page 8] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

PES http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_of_European_Socialists and The Green Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Party voted for ACTA.

EPP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_People%27s_Party voted against ACTA.

... and people call the right wing "evil fascists who eat babies".
I think people want to believe that hand-made things are better (particularly when they are committed to hobbies to build things that have no market), but I rarely see an example of it.

Food, clothes and jewels are the first things that come to my mind.
Now closed... broken or really an experiment!?
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Some people do that http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/news/lego20110803.htm...
You're getting downvoted because your position is all over the map, and doesn't add to the discussion:

You start out claiming that developer salaries in SV are out of proportion because SV developers do not create enough value. You also state that if developers are paid too much then there won't be enough left over for other workers, non-technical and such. Of course, for that to be true we'd have to assume that hiring an engineer in Silicon Valley is a net loss or a wash at best, because otherwise hiring one actually means more resources for further hiring and salary increases.

Then, when confronted with the fact that they most certainly do create proportional value and at a rather healthy ratio no less, you instead make the claim that they are overpaid because cheaper work can be had elsewhere (in Bengaluru). You make the implicit assumption that, for a firm based in Silicon Valley, an engineer in Silicon Valley is equivalent to an engineer in Bengaluru, India (or anywhere), provided they are equally talented. Not many of your readers will grant you that point. At any rate you seem to claim the market should determine what the fair salary is, when the very issue at hand is collusion by several large employers in Silicon Valley to distort the job market there. Is there any force acting in the opposite direction that you think is raising salaries there? Did all the engineers there unionize when nobody was looking? Because otherwise developer salaries are determined by market forces. Everywhere. (Again, with the issue at hand being an exception, but an exception not in favor of your argument.)

Your principal beef seems to be that developers in India don't make enough money compared to their peers in the States and specifically in the Valley. You make the claim that rising salaries in Silicon Valley mean lower salaries and reduced job prospects in Bengaluru. You do not justify this claim nor do you give anyone any reason to give a shit in the first place. Let me make an equivalent claim: rising salaries in the Valley mean lower salaries for everyone everywhere else. See now why it's bullshit?
Speaking as I find, no hyperbole intended, I meet CS graduates who have no comprehension of a CLI or anything but the most incomplete notion of how memory or machine code works.

I knew maths (and even history and modern language) students at university who had a complete and full understanding of these things and were also handy with a soldering iron and who could build a functional "computer" in a workshop as part of their degree -- utilising transistor logic. This is something you no longer see at most institutions today. I am sure it must be getting taught somewhere but it seems incredibly rare.

By contrast, it was quite common when I was a student and was being done by people who weren't even doing CS as a subject.

CS students today seem to know nothing other than Java and the IDE du jour -- and from lots of different institutions not just one. The best programmers I've met don't even have a CS degree (or even a degree) or they specialised in something utterly non-technical. But having logical, problem solving minds, they turned out to be first class coders -- usually because they had do develop something specific to help them do a certain job and they found the concepts easy. This was true of me, too.
To imply that Bill Gates' goals were "simply making 'all the money'" is at best intentionally misleading. Microsoft's unofficial mission statement from 1977 was "a computer on every desk and in every home". They aimed ridiculously high, succeeded past anyone's expectations, and fundamentally changed the world all on their own.

To dismiss the tens of billions of dollars that he is ploughing into his foundation (and the tens of billions of dollars he convinced Warren Buffet to also donate) as just "play[ing] the nice guy and work[ing] on [his] place in history" is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

This is a foundation working hard on some of the most fundamental problems of humanity: crippling poverty and devastating diseases. Sure, this gets them a few headlines, but what do you expect when their budget is as much as the International Red Cross and Oxfam International combined?

Bill Gates: Changed the world once. Will probably do it again.

Steve Jobs: "This changes everything. Again."
We have contacted piratebay.com as well.

Yeah, good luck with that. https://thepiratebay.org/legal
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The rest of the quote is relevant too: "no demonstrated ability to rescue doomed businesses with (soon-to-be-)failed business models".

If you're referring to Macs, the Macintosh line is more like a luxury clothing brand than a horse-drawn buggy manufacturer. Macs sell because they're commodities that have been dressed up with a luxury veneer[1], like a boutique clothing brand or "luxury"-class car. The perceived (and monetary) value of "luxury" commodities comes from the cachet of owning it more than any increase in value from better quality. Sure, luxury goods do usually have better craftsmanship too, but the high profit margins of luxury brands is pretty good evidence that consumers are paying for more than just the increase in quality.

There isn't really any analogue to luxury commodities in the media distribution space. The closest I can think of is HBO, and that's a pretty good model of the future: it's a service you subscribe to if you want it, and it's delivered over a generic pipe. More pure HBO-like entities are the future, except without the artifacts of having to be shoehorned into a cable and satellite distribution system.

1. Some would argue that they're also better from a functional perspective too.
ricksta, I couldn't fit the definition of value into my post but I mention it in my previous post.

Mass production is something I didn't clearly define. You are right. The point I made was that increasing the "quality" in quality of life has meant a decrease in value to the consumer with increasing profits for the heads of companies who convince consumers they are saving money by buying poor-quality.

I answer this by my question "If you believe you have a high quality of life, how many things around you will be worth something in 30 years?" If nothing, it is an illusion.

I value quality, quality defined as something that will remain functional. If we no longer have to design for longevity and function engineering will wither, because consumers won't be willing to pay for the value engineers invest in making things beautiful (long-lasting).
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It seems to me that the hook.io project would make an ideal candidate for the software to connect these devices.

https://github.com/hookio/hook.io

hook.io is all about building the software for connecting devices together to do functionality like this. It would be amazing to see this coupled with actual custom hardware.
That's incredible.

Even though I don't like it a bit that they're yielding to censorship, they did the best thing you can do when forced to censor: stay transparent about it. Provide a public API.

Same with the subpoenas: They were forced to give away the user's information, couldn't help that, but they did notify those users, and publish the subpoena.

Despite claims, Twitter is certainly not evil and secretive here.
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Link in the article comments to http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/09/21/microsoft-dumps-p... is worth reading. Amazing that someone would have the balls to try this, but I suppose there are no penalties for what amounts to abuse of privileges. I know MS tightened up on some aspects of the partner scheme (presumably to stop everyone and his dog using it as a way to get free copies of Windows).

So, who owns Comantra? There needs to be an international register of people unfit to own companies, or whose companies one shouldn't do business with. In the UK, Companies House records the really bad guys who've managed to get struck off as directors, but this kind of scam needs to get you on a little list too.
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Thanks for that. They probably launched from an area where they were allowed to/usually did I guess.
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Sometimes when I'm tired of coding and thinking about the same problems for a while, I still catch myself in managing to focus on a game of Sudoku on the phone while having a break. Maybe I'm just using a different part of the brain to do this, so the other part used for programming really gets a break? Just like you can't manage to do any more squats when training, but still can do lots of bench presses?
“Do not pull all your eggs in one basket”

Problem is, most of us only have one egg.

Whether that one egg is backing your own startup, taking one job, freelancing for one big client. What else can we do?
No European country is even remotely close to the US in terms of diversity

England surpasses it.
Apple should stay out of education.

The last thing education needs is lock in (content and application walled gardens) and a high entry cost (expensive hardware requirements).

Education should be free and open.
I have several questions. I'm co-founding a global social network startup and our team is of 4 Computer Science senior year students studying and living in Turkey.

Do the startups located outside the US and has no chance to relocate for 8 months can be elected in YC? Is there a chance out there for us do you think?
Personnellement, rien que le fait d'être français me décourage totalement à lancer la moindre « startup ».

Big bisou ;-)
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A nice reminder that not every product can succeed (within a certain amount of time), and that infact most don't.

I do wonder what impact a better marketing strategy would have had - I'd have thought that taking advantage of the contacts from their previous success would have been the first thing to do.

They are definitely right about one thing though - general tips lines are swamped, it's now even more important that you network before you release. Unless, of course, you get a front-page spot on HN.
"The old days of having artisans build guitars for Fender or build bicycles for Schwinn was the old model; i.e. giving a niche market high quality products. These quality products have usually gained value (a Fender Stratocaster in 1964 sold for $289, today it sells for +$23000; a Schwinn Paramount in 1966 sold for $245, today sells for $2500). Inflation from 1963 to 2011 is about 600%. Money spent on products was money invested."

Having ridden Schwinn bikes as a kid, I must say they were a good example of mid-century American engineering. They were simple, strong, and hard to break. On the flat ground of northern Ohio, I didn't miss gears. But would you want to pedal a heavy, one-speed bike up the hills of Washington, San Francisco, or Seattle? And to the best of my knowledge, they were produced by men who would not have described themselves as artisans.

Consider an automotive equivalent, say a 1966 Ford Falcon. It got decent gas mileage for its day, and it was apt to last and last. It was handsome, and it had a distinctive look, something missing in lots of more recent cars. But who but a hobbyist would want to drive on now? In every way a 2012 car is better, whether made in Stuttgart or Detroit--the engines and transmissions are incomparably better. The safety systems are incomparably better.

That is also an odd notion of investment. Putting $200 into GE shares in 1966 is one thing--presumably the investment goes toward paying for new factories, new equipment, etc. to build products and make money. Putting the same money into a Schwinn bike invests in private transportation. That the bike gains in value results not from all the potential passenger miles one can rack up, but from the disappearance of all the thousands of identical bikes over the years.
This interview might be interesting to others interested in Bill's foundation work:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11456
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This is a cool project, and I'm supporting it...

...however, sigh this is exactly what you should _not_ be using kickstarter for.

Kickstarter is not a shop, and I hope that anyone who pledges towards them realizes that they are supporting the project _not buying something_, and those $$$ have absolutely 1) no guarantee on receiving any product or 2) no recourse if anything is defective / wrong / whatever on it.

Kickstarter shouldn't be allowing this sort of project.
Great, so now a cloud service will know when somebody is at my front door and all other sensors fire.

Privacy where are you...
I think you just may have a great possible opportunity staring you in the face. At the minimum, don't just wash it off.

> Have you heard of startups pivoting and making their internal side tools into their main business?

Even if it may not have happened before, it doesn't mean it can't happen. After all, there's a first time for everything. :)

All the best moving forward.
While I love what you guys are doing, it really troubles me to hear you say that so blatantly...
the web browser has now come full circle to being a very weird virtualized operating system, whose APIs rival Windows in size, idiosyncrasies and complexity

Er, I don't think so (on any of those three counts).
Shake that preconception!
I can say with confidence that in the Hursley UK site (where us tech types are) you'd struggle to even find someone in a suit.
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