thijsc

You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe.

There are also vast differences between states in the US. If we're comparing I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick places that are on the top end of the scale on both sides of the ocean.

But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.

I'm not claiming that the EU is equivalent to SV, or the wider US. There is certainly much to love about SV and we can and should do better in a number of areas in which SV is already doing very well.

I'm only correcting the unfounded assumption that some people in this thread expressed that there's somehow nothing going on in the EU. Or that it's a bad place for business, it's really not.

Hard to know where to start!

Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here.

This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58...

There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.

On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company.

I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.

Not a fan of GDPR either.

I'm really not sure the total tax load as an employee is much worse compared to California if you factor in state taxes and health care payments.

I totally agree with you that the EU's efforts to replicate a SV style startup ecosystem are misguided and ineffective.

The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.

Reporting back: Your comment is utter nonsense. There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well!

Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free.

Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over here.

Overall many countries in Europe are amazing places to start a business in.

Try https://github.com/algesten/ureq, it’s very nice and not async.

What really helps me is to compose a complete song first and worry about the sound later. Just use whatever patch kind of gets the job done at first. Once the full song structure is in place, including all melody and transitions start tweaking the actual sounds.

Did one session with an acting coach once which was very useful.

Most useful tip he gave me: in between sentences focus on breathing out, instead of breathing in. If you clear your lungs they will take care of filling up automatically.

The quote is specifically about a few areas like the red light district that see so many drunk and/or high tourists that the situation gets too unwieldy. Quite a specific situation that's not saying too much about the general crime level.

It's rich that a British paper publishes an alarming story on this since British tourists are a huge part of these crowds.

I own one and it is suitable for longer trips. Regularly drive for 90 minutes with it.

It’s only real downside is that luggage space is very limited.

This uses pattern matching, the compiler will verify that all options exists and that the coverage of the enum is complete.

Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P2vYIgPdKg for a very well executed attempt to have somebody admit to a murder they did not commit.

I know from experience that it is possible to build Rust binaries that work on very old Linux versions. You could for example supply them with a Docker image with a new build stack which can produce binaries they could copy to the old machines. The same is likely true for Go.

Well the premise is that you would trust the company you choose do business with for this service.

You could implement it as an API call. The site could fetch the current "sponsored by X" line and render it directly in the HTML it serves.

It's not that your sources are nonsense, you're just drawing an unfounded conclusion from them.

The Whatsapp patrol described in the article is completely different from the goon squad you're implying it is. It's mainly an early detection system, people would call the police as soon as they see something happening.

I've lived in the Netherlands my whole life. It is true that the solved crime rate is pretty low, but the rest of your comment is complete nonsense.

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Awesome, please open source this :-)

For us as a small team it's a very positive change. Our monthly bill just went from $100 to $25.

We encountered this issue because we use MongoDB as our primary database and there was no driver available. I wrote a really nice (if I say so myself) wrapper [1] around the C driver, which really wasn't that much work. I think in general anything you can think of can be used by integrating with a C library.

[1] https://github.com/thijsc/mongo-rust-driver

https://www.senz.com/en

I own a couple of them, they work amazingly well. You can even use them on a bike with heavy wind.

I like Steve Blank's definition: A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

See: http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...

We're really happy with MongoDB too. Can't wait to see how these improvements will work out for us.

Funny talk on this subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj4vXMRenFo

Alternative is to have a very clear agreement about billing on a time and materials basis.

haproxy probably qualifies too.

You can set config.force_ssl = true to easily enable secure session cookies and strict transport security amongst other things.

I'll be there!

Paymill kind of got the idea right, but the execution sucks. Stuff in the API has strange names and the docs and examples are often not completely correct.

One thing we've hit is that there's a requirement to specify the first amount you're going to charge (which you might not know at that point) when you get a customer's CC data, that can be a real pain.