baguasquirrel

I couldn't disagree more. I moved back to NYC because after six years in the Valley, I thought I needed some change. I have two major gripes with the Valley.

The first is that it is a bubble chamber. People there follow their passions. This is a good thing but I believe they are out of touch with the common folk.

The second is what I perceive to be a general, blatant disregard for non-engineering and non-data-driven approaches to startups. I remember when I was figuring out my own project, I had wanted to take a more design-oriented approach to it, and one well-meaning friend suggested I create a "contest" to attract designers (i.e. get them to do some work for free). At least he didn't flick off the idea of making design of central importance, on par with engineering. I mean, what gives, right? Designers are makers too.

Make no mistake, now that I'm here, I don't think it's going to be easy or pretty here. The blatant disregard goes the other way around here. I can't shake the feeling that tech is regarded as second best, that people are cynically passion-impaired, and that good engineering is simply not appreciated outside of a few top shops like Jane St. Most of the startup engineers I meet are strangely risk-averse and used to working for MBAs, practically to the point that they seem defensive when introduced to someone who isn't. Chances are, I will probably end up back in the Valley at some point.

But to think that the Valley is invincible is wrong. The success of Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy and FourSquare are ample cues to the weaknesses of the Valley. These are not edge cases. They are a pattern. And this is fine. I think the two can coexist and learn from each other. If anything, going between the two makes you realize how arrogant each of their cultures are about themselves.

Make NCAs illegal. Make it so your employer doesn't own what you do in your spare time. A truly nuclear option is to bar discrimination based on previous employment history.

One major peril for erstwhile startup founders is that if you fail while bootstrapping, it can be hard to get a job because people, for some stupid reason or another, consider you to be unemployed. That problem is a non-issue in the valley but I do wonder if it will have to be solved by brute force elsewhere.

I wonder how much of this is due to Facebook deciding that location check-ins aren't that big a deal. Most of my friends still don't "get" what is the big deal with this.

Well that's not much different from how we play right? Make the future happen, literally. But they ultimately have to face what we will face. The markets may not buy. All that real estate stock for example.

I don't think the military shot anyone. There is a paradox here and it's that the military response would put the republic in danger if it indeed turned violent. But the mere presence of the military put the riots down. As others have pointed out in this thread, the rioters are largely opportunists. They won't stand up to the army, but it is regrettable to society at large that the army had to be deployed to begin with.

I was pointing out why people think the way they do. No need to get condescending or shoot the messenger here. More than that, you are merely being pedantic.

It makes little difference that Hollywood made it when it was people who made a cult out of it.

Whatever dude. Just ask anyone who grew up in anything resembling a ghetto. There's lots of us who begin to think that shooting rioters on sight is not a bad idea. Where do you think Boondock Saints came from? Honestly, at some point, you just get sick of the shit and you want it to stop, and solutions like the military become appealing.

And therein lies the problem. We know it's inhumane. We know it degrades us further to succumb to that shoot-the-fuckers mentality. It is understood then, that for riots like this to happen at all, we've already lost. That there are scarcely any viable solutions merely brings to surface the existing societal decay.

The point then, is not that you are right and he is wrong or vice versa. The point is that ultimately, the military is brought in for riots of LA-scale intensity because the people want them to be brought in, because in a lose-lose situation, you'd prefer the choice that affords peace.

p.s. It is interesting then, that folks like Jefferson were against standing armies because they were only necessary for oppressing the populace.

p.p.s. Looks like people can't handle the notion that society can slide into nihilism. =P

What is the state of patent law, especially regarding software patents, across the world? If patents really are going to be a murder on innovation, then the least broken system should enjoy an advantage, no?

I can't shake the feeling that it's because they didn't want to play the bad guy. Sun was hemorrhaging money. Layoffs were going to have to happen.

Maybe it would've been nicer if we just said "deep shit" instead of "default." When you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you, but when you owe the bank a trillion dollars, you own the bank.

Greece knows that there are lots of important people who are overexposed. It knows that if it does the wrong thing, it could trigger a run on its creditors that is akin to what happened to Lehman. It doesn't want to be the bad guy necessarily, who does? But its finances are untenable.

"30 years, and accept a modest coupon of 4.5%", I rest my case. This is comical.

Even if it does get repaid over a longer period, this more or less means those bonds are shot as an investment. Moreover, this means that no one is going to lend the Greek gov't any more money. I didn't see any terms in the agreement where they said they'd be lending the Greeks more money. That means the government is going to stop working. Or Greece will exit the Eurozone. The Greek gov't could of course cut all the way back, but that means a depression, which also means the money won't be paid back.

It just means that instead of having the train quickly derail, they're going to stretch it out like it were a Hollywood movie. Seriously. No one believes that debt is going to be repaid. The politicos are just praying that the train doesn't hit the ground on their watch. If you read the text of this, it just "says" they're going to extend all the terms.

But we all know the truth. Shit is going to happen. If for no reason other than that the Greek government is going to stop working because it can't fund itself.

[Edit: What diff does it make if they're going to practically indefinitely extend the terms? And at those rates? That's like hoping that inflation will make the debt go away. Except Greece is in the Eurozone so that's not quite going to happen.]

Well it works, doesn't it?

Maybe it has something to do with the reporter being from NYC.

[full disclosure: I am from NYC]

If they want to help build one here in the U.S., it may help for the sake of rhetoric to make a scapegoat out of the one they have over there. It's just a PR sleight-of-hand.

The title is white-lie misleading. Cisco has been doing this sort of thing for China for as long as I can remember.

Actually, I was originally of the same opinion, but then I read some lecture slides from Simon PJ. He has suggested that laziness was perhaps not the best default. It is hard to reason about space leaks with laziness. Likewise for typeclasses being inferior to ML functors.

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/appsem-slides/peytonjones.pp...

I personally disagree. I'm pretty sure laziness has made it much easier for me to try out an idea. If it works, then I'll test that I didn't space leak. The notion of it almost makes me feel dirty. ;-) :-P

You know, this almost reminds me of the ML vs. Haskell debate. I remember fondly, hearing the 15-312 kids talk about how ML is right and everything else is wrong. The CMU PL dept was kind of adorable that way.

One of the classic examples is Haskell's typeclasses. Haskell's typeclasses are kinda kludgy because there's no way to provide more than one instance of a typeclass. ML's functors are way better.

But as it turns out, most of the time, we just need one instance. It's much simpler to invoke, and much easier to understand. If you need more than one instance, then use newtype.

In the end, we wouldn't be where we are in PL without the crazy folks at CMU and Bell labs. So I feel no small amount of sadness that ML didn't win. I concede the notion that ML may have made better design choices. But what matters more to me is that elements of FP get into the mainstream. Here, Haskell has done a better job of showing what is good with FP.

I've actually been trying to prove people like this guy wrong for years. My takeaway is that Haskell is not the problem. The real problem is that solving people's problems is hard. Designing and iterating on a product or service is hard. Finding and involving the ambitious folks with halfway well-baked ideas is hard.

Now I'm going to get a lot of flack here for saying this but I simply just don't feel that most of the stuff we make today is of particularly high craftsmanship. We need one of two things to happen.

The first is that the demand for thoroughly well-crafted software has to increase. But that much is out of our hands as it is conditional on the public at large. This will happen eventually. New tech starts life as a toy. At some point, people will want those toys to be reliable.

Going the other way, we could make it more rewarding for people to build scalable, maintainable systems in Haskell. But we are already well on the way to doing this. For example, Snap was much easier to use than Happstack (IMHO), and Happstack itself has already much improved over the years. The libraries for Couch and Mongo are as good as any other. Tools aside then, Haskell's main impediment is that can be a bit intimidating. But a friendly and openminded developer community can go a long way. We just have to keep this in mind, and keep fostering projects.

I'll tell you what doesn't work. Overbuilding the place. Staten Island is a tragic example of this. In Manhattan, it's like they're repaving the streets with park.

You need a certain amount of density. But the overriding purpose of the density is to be able to cram more stuff-you-want-to-do near your house.

Also, keep in mind that the "stuff" in stuff-you-want-to-do can be replaced with "people".

One word for you. Copenhagen.

until a scientist runs the experiment, it could be said that our wisdom is anecdotal. that having been said, I don't think you should wait for science if you know from experience what's right.

Some teams may be more experienced than others? I just noticed the strain relief on my latest-gen power adapter. I never noticed that before. It is so cool.

Existential types? The author alludes to this, and then proceeds in ignorance of what he'd just said for the rest of the post.

In Java, all you have for these is interfaces, so it's no wonder people think that types are problematic.

Types aren't the problem. Crappy types are the problem. Not making the types lightweight enough that people can dish them out at their pleasure, that's the problem. When the math don't work well enough, make better maths.

They are agreeing on a protocol, they aren't saying that they're going to share their mined and ranked data. No way in Hell is Google going to agree to that.

My bet is that Google is worried about its relevance in a world where an increasing amount of the data is not accessible to its crawlers. This is not just FB and Twitter, but Yelp and GroupOn traffic as well.

That's where Yahoo and MSFT come in. By agreeing to standardize search APIs, they can hope to net more of the developer mindshare. Now, instead of this just being "lets program for Twitter or FB's or Google", this becomes "lets program for one of the social networks, or for search". Google doesn't lose the monetarily valuable human-driven search results, and YHOO and MSFT get to take a risk that they will be able to monetize potentially valuable developer-driven search along with Google.

The thing that's funny about this is that no one seems to have figured out how to monetize APIs yet. If anyone is going to figure it out, it may well be Twitter because it is life or death for them. But Buzz goes to show how much Twitter envy there is going on at Google. They're concerned that if there is a way to monetize that traffic, then they will be shut out. Better to take a larger share of the pie with YHOO and MSFT than for traditionally-crawled to get shut out of the party.

They are scared of Facebook and Twitter.

It's horrifying because a young boy, with many years left in his life, in all likelihood gave one of his organs to someone who's probably got 10-15 years left tops.

That's funny... Americans don't have an economically rational aversion to becoming movie stars in much the same way.

There is truly and honestly a crab mentality going on, and it's because of guys like this. Personally, I'm getting tired of all this raging against the stereotype. What if some of us actually like math? What if some of us actually like coding all day? I often get the impression that past school, it is no longer acceptable to overachieve. Corporate America will do just fine.

Is the Tiger Mom thing a problem? Yes. But this is not the answer.

It's worth noting that Toyota has its plants primarily in the states that have scored the highest in this survey. San Antonio is one of their biggest plants, IIRC?

If you want to be in tech, OTOH, the two worst states are the only ones with VCs you actually hear about on HN.

It does make you think about American management culture.

[edit: I just noticed Illinois is third worst, hehhehheh. I wonder what DHH is thinking.]