jmj4

Here's a link to the original HN discussion from September 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975

Rent seems to be at least 50% higher in SF though[1]. How is that?

[1] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

Fiat currency is valueless and can only be used because people trust the government issuing it. If Bitcoin can gain the trust of enough people, it can easily become more 'valuable' then many currencies in existence at the moment.

PG does seem to make this differentiation: http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be.

The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter.

Either way, I agree that this article probably shouldn't be on hn.

EDIT: It looks like this has been flagged and removed from the front page

I don't want to be too rude, but to quote the hn guidelines

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I'm not saying that this article belongs here, but hn is not just for discussing hacking and startups.

>Start by deciding what you want to do

I was recently pointed towards Principles[1] by Ray Dalio by someone here on HN, and I highly recommend it. He talks about getting what you want out of life, and how that starts by figuring out what you want. He then lays out a process to get you there. If you're thinking about your career path, give it a read. It's long, and somewhat tedious prose, but it provided me a lot of insight as I'm figuring out what I want to do post-graduation.

[1]http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

I keep my eye out for Vidyard video's around the web, but the lack of branding makes it hard to tell where it's from. But I guess that's the point.

Congratulations on the milestone.

I'm still in school; just finished 3A, so ive got a pretty fresh look at things. It seems to me Waterloo's stature is rising in The Valley, and they are offering more jobs. I had about 30-40% of my class go to Apple this semester, for example.

I'm just running off personal experience here (I've been through the Velocity Residence and Eng), but of the 10 smartest kids I know, all but one is in The Valley/Seattle. I think they plan to stay South after graduation.

Why do you think you can you get better talent? Less competition? People want to be closer to home? You can offer more in perks, salary, ect compared to local companies?

Ps. Sick boots in that lederhosen picture.

Being a Waterloo engineer, I agree with this wholeheartedly. Perhaps even more importantly, I'd say the top talent disproportionatly dreams of getting out of Waterloo. Most quality students want to get down to Cali.

I respect what Litt, Pebble, Bufferbox are trying to do, but I don't think young talent is the reason their doing it. I think that the cost of living, tax credits and familiarity are the reasons they're back in Waterloo.

All the power to me, but for me, California sunshine seems too good to pass up when there's three feet of snow on the ground in the middle of February.

Perfect for local business shops too. Think of a local flower shop, I bet birthday orders could be huge for that type of thing. It scales decently as well if the business adds itself.

I believe instagrams web app is designed this way. Meaning they don't really have a web app.

Musk is one of my hero's, but his first company was a web start up that help publisher's get news articles and other content online. He then built a money management system, which eventually became part of Paypal. These are hardly the world's important problems. But the exits from these wins allowed him to do what he is doing.

I think that's important to keep in mind if you want to belittle guys building Web 2.0 apps like Flipboard, reddit, ect.

Microsoft is eyeing consumers with this announcement, and once consumers switch, they will adapt to the new interface. Once consumers adapt to the new interface, the overhead that you are talking about decreases, and companies can roll out Windows 8 without totally killing productivity.

MS is betting the house on Windows 8, but they know there will be growing pains. This $40 upgrade strategy is one way to mitigate the risk of alienating corporations by driving adoption in the existing consumer market.

Re-reading this made me think about how honest the start-up communities "test's" are.

> America was not actually founded solely on "tired and poor masses yearning to breathe free", but on a huge takeover and displacement plan for the native Americans.

America wasn't founded in order to take anything from Natives; this was a very unfortunate side affect. Your right, slavery was a stain on America for nearly a century. And there was racial tension against Irish, Jews, Italians ect, just like it is for Muslims in some sectors of society right now.

But these people were still given an opportunity to flourish through their own doing, and many of them have. The Kennedy's are the most obvious example of an Irish American family doing supremely well despite lingering prejudice towards Irish immigrants. Obviously other examples exist.

The Muslim question you bring up at the end is different. The reason people are so scared is that Islamic Law contradicts the notion of freedom. We can and should allow freedom of religion, but not before we ensure that all people are free. And Islamic Law flies in the face of a lot that is presented in our Constitution.

Cal Newport of at Study Hacks [1] has been talking about this type of stuff for a while. He approaches what he might call "a philosophy of deeply thinking about hard problems" from an academic standpoint, but I think you can apply it generally. He's done some pretty good interviews/detailed posts on the topic.

I really think that pseudo-work is a killer. PG talks about this a bit here [2]. This type of constant context switching is dreadful for productivity, and also stresses you out. Saying that, some startups actually do require 100 hour weeks. Read Max Levchin's interview with Jessica Livingston [3]; he spent like 4 days getting the Paypal demo ready, and then fell asleep at the restaurant table after showing it to the VC's. But there are also times when you have explore; Max said he had this later when Elon Musk came in as CEO and was trying to change direction. Max had tons of free time, so he started playing around. This led to the discovery of the fraud detection system that probably saved the company.

So there's a time and a place for 100hr weeks, but you can lose sight of the big picture if your head's to the grindstone all the time.

[1]http://calnewport.com/blog/

[2]http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html

[3]http://www.foundersatwork.com/

Also from Waterloo, but I think you got this mixed up. There is an outflow of talent because there are only few exciting, innovative places to work in Waterloo. So sure, you can call it a shortage of jobs, but really the culprit is a lack of innovative/entrepreneurial/managerial expertise. Things are changing for the better, but slowly.

Also, it's goina be pretty hard to convince someone from Silicon Valley, NY (or even Redmond) to move to Southern Ontario, let alone Waterloo, unless your doing some really cool, or you can pay them a lot. Obviously people who go to school here are much more likely to stay, but even then, most of them would take a job in California if they had the chance.

You can seen Peter Thiel's homage to Atlas Shrugged with funding this thing, but I think logistically its a little bit too much. I'm firmly in the libertarian camp, but things in this country would have to be pretty bad to move full time to a place like this.

Another cool idea is the possibility of creating self governing city's, with minimal regulation, inside of existing countries. Ex-Stanford economist Paul Romer is proposing ideas along these lines. If you partner with a country (Honduras is considering this) who give you land to set up an independent city, you could have the type of self-governing, anti-tax/regulation environment that libertarians yearn for. I can't see the US ever agreeing to something like this, but some countries would.

>So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair trade means.

Does Fair Trade really benefit all of the producers in the third-world? What are the side effects of Fair Trade? I think you could postulate that it drives down conventional coffee farmer's profits, since non-fair trade coffee will try and compete on price.

Wouldn't this lead to lower wages and higher poverty for the majority of the farmers?

I have no data to back this up. Anyone know any facts about this and care to share?

I think a lot of people misunderstand what Groupon offers a business. Basically it's advertising, but in a way that makes it affordable for small businesses. The company offering their deal, is putting their name out there, and only has to pay for it when someone walks through the door an makes a purchase.

Tradition advertising means paying for your brand to be seen. Magazines, newspapers, ect can target markets, but not to a very large extent. Google, Facebook, ect can target their market better, and businesses only pay when someone clicks (ie shows a bit of interest in the company). This is why they are stealing traditional advertising revenue. Groupon took this one step further, and made it so that businesses only pay when a customer walks through the door. This opened up advertising to much smaller businesses, Mom and Pop shops, since there is no upfront cost.

You'd think that Groupon would be trying to target their deals better. Have a "select your interests" when you sign up. Yipit is doing this, and it's a pretty cool take on it. That type of service adds a lot more value then a generic daily deal.

I like this idea, but the price would have to be quite low for me to consider paying for it. It seems like you want people to pay to be apart of this. Not sure that's the way to build a strong, useful community.

I would think about starting with a free version, and if the community grows strong enough, people will be begging to get in. Charge them then if you want.

> The nearly $500 billion dollars projected to be spent on advertisements by the end of this year has nothing to do with it, nor did any other forms of manipulation.

Fundamentally, people will not purchase something unless they think (however fleetingly) that it will be of benefit to them. Your right; they might not know exactly what they are getting into. But companies can't lie about it. And in this day and age, the information is usually obtainable without too much work.

Empowering people to figure stuff out on their own is the best way to teach. My Dad handed me the reins to out a small stock account with my own, my siblings and some of his money when I was 11. Man, can that motivate you to learn. I'd read 20 investing books by the time I got into high school. And fundamentally the most important thing it taught me was how to think about money. And its was so effortless on his part.

On a similar note, Warren Buffet made around $50,000 by the time he graduated high school by owning several vending machines, among other things.

> 4) You're in your last or next-to-last year and you're fed up with the system, you want your freedom and you want it now.

Don't do it. Why? Because dropping out is easy, getting back in later is hard. Sure, the system sucks, but you are this close to bagging that piece of paper, you might as well go all the way.

I fundamentally disagree with you on this one. Getting that piece of paper give you a quick escape plan for when things get tough. Lets say you graduate, and start your startup. In the back of your mind you'll be saying "If this doesn't work out, I'll just go get a regular, decent paying job". And then things start to head south. You can't raise money, or you have no traction, ect. That decent paying job starts to look more and more attractive.

If you drop out, you're burning your bridges and forcing yourself to stay committed when shit hits the fan. Graduating leaves open an easy retreat strategy; it makes it much easier to quit.