awucs

I think you are correct to some degree. With the housing market being essentially an additional equity program I don't really see how anyone will be able to convince people to take a huge loss, or give up future gains, so there can be affordable housing.

I think most of these comments are missing the mark. There have always been cameras. As you say older people don't often care if they are naked. Younger people do because it isn't normal anymore. And that is because the influence of US media, and maybe especially social media, where you can't be naked. And if you are it is to sell something, or it is dirty. Freedom on the Internet is American freedom and that includes stolen celebrity pictures on the dark web (since apparently celebrities don't deserve actual privacy), but not showing your own nipple, even by mistake, on Instagram.

I don't think "2% or 3%" was very realistic, but you have to remember that when the iPhone first came out it wasn't very good. I didn't have 3G, GPS or App Store (nor a couple of other things). Apple was certainly ahead, but the market also wasn't ready nor big at that. When it actually matured there were a couple of solid offerings including from Microsoft, which among other things had arguably better design than Android. But at that point the market was moving on. The non-Apple market was no longer about selling the operating system or phones but apps, ads, components or accessories. If people want to go "Haha Microsoft" I guess that is fine, but they didn't lose to Apple.

I don't think that is ever a good idea. But Google does also have a reputation for getting things wrong. Plenty of their product never make it anywhere, because they don't have to. You have been able to get a cheap Windows laptop for probably almost ten years. Recently e.g. the Lenovo IdeaPad and before that there were netbooks. I think there could be merit to ChromeOS, but for now it seems like a placeholder so no one else can take that position in the market.

People often quote that, but I don't think he was necessarily wrong. What happened wasn't really so much between Apple and Microsoft, as Google giving away Android. That made all the other, arguably better, offerings redundant. Also letting Apple take a lot more market share because of quality and fragmentation issues. Almost no one makes any money from smart phones. Microsoft is probably fourth in terms of profit (from patents and such) behind Apple, Google and Samsung. Though Microsoft might have lost more in terms of influence and maneuvering.

Addition: Which part, if any, are the downvoters objecting to? From the people I have talked to in the industry that is exactly what happened and why a lot of companies got out of it.

I disagree. I think his way of having a debate is very dysfunctional. Many of his essays makes themselves hard to argue with rhetorically. He doesn't leave much room in the text itself nor in the medium for people to share their own opinion about it. And when people despite that still do write e.g. blog posts his response isn't to their argument, but that they have misunderstood what he meant. The way to make pedantry meaningless is to have a substantial debate. I also think there is as much presumption of malice on his part as anyone else. You can even find that in many of his essays where he talks about other people either being with or against him. I could find you some examples where I think he did an especially bad job, but what is the point? If you like his essays do that, but base that on substance and not some sort of universal truth on Hacker News.

I don't think is has that much to do with technology. Just that the people who got online in the 90s were likely more curious about new things and other people than the general population (while there were certainly exceptions). The opposite is probably true today, especially in things like tech or other general Internet things.

In general very few things are getting worse in society. What is happening is that things are getting more unequal. When you lack power any excess will be made to serve someone else. It isn't like driving an hour to a busy supermarket was the height of social interaction. And social interaction has always been about your status in society. In the end it is a choice of who is going to give up what.

I didn't listen to the whole thing nor do I care about any one individual thing, but they did talk about the co-founders as well from what I saw.

That said, other than that I disagree with you. If someone wants to have their opinions taken seriously they have take other people's opinions seriously as well and can't get angry as soon as people disagree.

Personally I think many of his essays aren't very good, but there just isn't any practical way to discuss them. And frankly I don't think people are really that interested in doing that either.

Presumably that isn't Separo's experience nor is it mine. There is more "unedited" material out there in live streams, podcasts, talks and hobby videos than ever. PG is one of the few people I remember having to turn off repeatedly despite wanting to listen to. Maybe it is individual in how you listen, but it is what it is.

It is really really hard to buy time and freedom after the fact. I have seen many people try and eventually they tend to end up getting a slightly more expensive house instead. It is just that once you are on some track it is really hard to change, because most of the time you are giving up substance for money and they are both compounding. Or to put in tech terms, if you aren't doing what you see yourself doing in the future you are always building up some sort of debt.

It is likely easiest to parse or even semi-manually reformat papers for a smaller screen.

If Hacker News wants to have any sort of intellectual discussions left it is going to have to discourage downvoting. I am not making myself hard to argue with here. It is perfectly fine to write a few lines if you disagree. In fact that is the whole point.

Say you make $150k. As far as I know that is around $100k after taxes i.e. $8350 a month. Say your rent is $4k and another ~$1k in miscellaneous expenses. That leaves you ~$3k in discretionary income and probably a bit less for saving if you want to have some "luxuries".

If you have been in the housing market for a long time or otherwise have a better situation your living expenses might be a lot lower. If you are paying $1.5k (upfront or de facto) in housing costs that might effectively double your savings i.e. what you get to actually control from your salary.

But it is sort of worse than that. Because every additional dollar you want to make gets taxed with your marginal tax rate. Meaning if you want to have the same savings as someone with lesser living costs you have to increase you salary quite a bit. In this case you have to go to somewhere close to $200k. Which is a pretty huge gap for something that doesn't have anything to do with your actual work performance.

Of course this can all get better or worse depending on circumstances. Still, it is a big deal.

Yes, I think a lot of thier curreny success comes from "exchange" with larger countries and a natural incentive to develop e.g. military technology. I guess it is similar to places like Taiwan.

If you removed all the US companies, restricted immigration and didn't allow people to go abroad to study it isn't clear how well they would do. From what I hear it is no dream to be young in Israel today. Also there seems to be a surprising amount of shady things coming out of Israel. Anything from spam and exploits to binary options and outright fraud. Which would suggest that people don't have better opportunities.

I don't think it has to do with demand as such. It is just hard to allocate resources with business class only flights. With a traditional layout you can oversell economy and upgrade or push people to the next flight. If you are running all your business class capacity on a few flights you can't do that. Nor can you have the same amount of routes. I guess you can say that is because of demand, but it is more because of the model. "Tourist business" doesn't really exist, unless maybe we count Norwegian.

That said, I would love to see an all business Airbus A321neoLR with Thompson Vantage Solo seats.

I don't like words like "entitled". But at least as an outsider the "compensation environment" in Silicon Valley doesn't seem ideal at all. Realistically pay isn't just about appreciation, but being driven up by things like living costs. Which means that your de facto compensation is largely determined by your position in the housing market. Which is post tax no less.

Usually one tends to put it the other way, that economy pays for the trip and business class delivers the profit. Which makes sense because that is how e.g. a low cost carrier operates. While business class only flights are almost non-existent even though that in theory would make more money.

It usually doubles per class from economy, premium economy, business to first class (for the cheapest tickets). But then of course there is more variance between airlines when it comes to business and first. A cheap first class intercontinental return ticket might be 2000€. More realistically you are looking at 3000€ to 4000€. If you have somewhere to go or a time to be there it can of course be a lot more.

I am not so sure. The problem is that you probably would have to rearrange the entire airline industry. You could for instance just run long haul flights from a few places per continent. Then you could engineer an airplane model to just go back and forth in comfort between two places in the middle of nowhere and optimize the hell out of everything. Today everything is so "unorganized" that airline can't even offer a good experience on the ground, which would be the far easiest innovation you could make.

I really don't think they do. Most, if not all, of these "the next Silicon Valley" is about self-promotion. More often than not there isn't any good way to get an apartment, visa or any sort of unique thing to suggest that it would be a good idea to actually go there. If anything they put up a lot of artificial barriers to pretend that there is something going on while in reality technology projects, startups and talent already have to and should compete in the market.

What people are lacking isn't some phony experts but time, space and motivation. Give people that in ample supply and the rest will sort itself out.

Vision means that you do things in a way that isn't the default. Because if you just do the default you end up like everywhere else (which of course can be a good thing in some cases). The problems in the Bay Area isn't unique by any means. But not dealing with them means that they more and more lose their competitive advantage. Overall they become more like somewhere like e.g. New York.

You can do that. But to a large extent you are giving things up for that money. Being close to your family, or cultivating friendships have value. So does many other things. I get why people do it, especially since alternatives hard to come by, but it is still a bit of a tragedy. Or at least not ideal.

I think a lot of people misjudge Silicon Valley. They aren't where they are because of vision. They are there because they managed to control much of technology. They aren't going to give away any opportunities regardless if it is housing or smart phones. They of course have to keep up appearances, some might even believe it, but the reality is that if housing became cheap people would lose hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. And if they let go of control of the technology market they would lose a lot of market share, if not their jobs.

I personally don't think there has ever been any real indication that the Bay Area would become utopian. It is just that there used to be a "flaw" (relative to US society) where technology was undervalued, so opportunities were cheap. That has now been corrected, so you are paying for those opportunities.

What people mean is usually not Silicon Valley, or the Bay Area, as a city but as a phenomenon. The technology industry is likely going to be there for a long time. There is just to much inertia, if not substance, for it to disappear overnight. But the "anomaly" of leaving so much value on the table that companies could quickly grow from nothing to world leading is likely gone. Today you are paying for every such opportunity.

For some reason people tend to think that this means that this will happen somewhere else. Like the opportunities somehow transfers somewhere else. That isn't really what happens. We might never have this sort of situation in our lifetimes, or it might show up somewhere outside of our reach. It is very likely that China has been outperforming the west in this regard over the last 10 years. They might continue to do that or not. It isn't really predictable as far as I know.

Addition: Why do people even visit a discussion forum if a simple opinion is going to offend them? The Internet is full of agreeable material you can read instead. And you can close those tabs without suppressing someone else's opinion. But I guess that is really the point of Hacker News these days.

A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back.

I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.

How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me.

It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE, Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company.

In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.

The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete with locals.

I know this is sort of the commonly held belief, but I disagree. The problem is that the things you mention are primarily things that makes Linux useful for people who are already using it. For everyone else they would just use Windows if that is what they need.

That said most businesses don't care about those things either. They will happily use some old version of Internet Explore (in some weird mode no less) and force as many as possible to use Office 365. On top of that a lot of companies have all sort of esoteric solutions for machines sharing, authentication and storage.

There have been plenty of efforts to "streamline" Linux for different platforms, with different applications and modern user interface. There just that most things, including the ecosystem, beyond that are lacking.