jd

As a EU founder I think the article misses the two primary reasons Europe isn't doing well with startups.

1) Target market

USA: natural target market of 320 million people with a very high level of (disposable) income. Established businesses are happy to buy products from startups. There is a positive feedback loop where businesses try to grow fast and therefore want to outsource the stuff they're not good at so they can focus on their core skills. This means startups can pop up to take care of everything else (HR/Invoicing/Data crunching/etc-as-a-service).

EUROPE: you have to deal with dozens of languages and cultures. Although the and Germanic countries are OK with English-only products, the rest of Europe wants their products translated. Salaries are much lower here and businesses are much more conservative. Businesses that grow slowly have to care much more about operating expenses, which means they will try to do everything in-house to cut costs.

As a consequence we get the vast majority of our revenue from the US, even though people all across the world try our software.

2) Culture

A lot of people talk about starting a startup, but nobody seems to want it badly enough. Perhaps this is because there are so few success stories over here in the Netherlands. People tend to focus on the negative (what if you fail? what about work-life balance? what if you get sued?), but it's hard to say if that matters.

The US has only one Silicon Valley. There is nothing comparable on the east coast, even though the east and west coast have a lot in common. If we figure out why Silicon Valley works and other places fail to really take off we should be able to create startup hubs all across the world.

Quick correction: it's not true that rdiff-backup has to be installed on the remote server. Rdiff-backup works brilliantly with a dumb target for storage and that's how we use it in production.

Our servers periodically run rdiff-backup of all important data to a /backup partition on the same server. Then this /backup partition -- with the backup version history and metadata -- is rsynced to various dumb backup storage locations.

We've tried many backup solutions, and rdiff-backup is by far the fastest and most robust backup program we know.

Although I don't know the specifics for Braintree, it's not contradictory to accept VC money for bootstrapped companies. If a startup goes from 0 to 10M revenue without taking any outside investment then that puts them squarely in the bootstrapped camp. However, if they then realize they're in a winner-takes-all market and that they need a lot of money in order to scale up, then they can still accept VC money at that later stage.

With the exception of image gallery carousels for mobile devices. Those can work great.

Another reason why / short term & software / is the currently the sweet spot is because it allows for short feedback cycles. A startup is a company that searches for a viable business model -- a product-market fit. When you create web based applications you can gather data, A/B test and do a lot of stuff that allows you to make measurable progress in the right direction.

When working in hardware or when working on long term software projects like AI you're in a vacuum. And even smart people are not going to do very well if they can't see the consequences of the decisions they make.

So long term projects take more people, more resources, are typically much harder problems and on top of that you won't be able to collect data early on to adjust course if needed. So the risk-adjusted return on an ambitious long-term startup is going to be horrendous compared to the low-hanging fruit most web startups go for. So investors avoid the big and ambitious ideas, and I can't blame them.

This seems to be a regional issue that mostly affects the UK.

The most obvious reason is that pg writes an essay when he has an idea or an insight he wants to think and write about. New insights don't arrive on a fixed schedule.

If pg had been posting every month the HN thread would read: "Ask HN: is it just me or has the quality of Paul Graham's writing gone down?"

Good point about the link to Lotus Notes. However, infrastructure decisions are usually made for short term reasons, and that's often an OK trade-off.

Inky looks awesome, by the way.

Exactly. pg has also written about "using your email as a todo list" (in Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund) to partially address the problem of email being more than just a dumb box for all incoming information. Email as it exists today is very obviously broken, and very few players are in a position to change it. (Although there must be some startups with the frighteningly ambitious plan to replace email as we know it today.)

Of course it remains to be seen whether this is just a first move by Google towards a big goal or whether Google is just playing with new Gmail functionality to see what happens.

The teardown iFixit link, hidden in the last paragraph:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Ouya+Teardown/14224/1

Exactly. Or to put it in a different way, the total time you spend waiting for your car to recharge/refuel is way lower for an electric car. The electric car is optimized for the 99% case (where recharging at home is sufficient). A gasoline car is optimized for the 1% case where you take a road trip.

You get the exact same effect for people who claim they need a pickup truck instead of a small city car just so they can transport some furniture or motorcycles or a Christmas tree in the back.

Most importantly -- when researchers know their data and methodology will be out in the open they'll have a big incentive to make it look clean and presentable. They know they risk getting called out on excluding certain segments of the data set, so they'll have to at the very least add a small remark in the spreadsheet justifying their decision. It also makes it really easy for other researchers to pick other start and end years to test if the result only holds for the original data. Which again, encourages researchers to explain justify the input data they've chosen.

In addition, researchers are likely to discover mistakes while cleaning up the excel sheet, data sources and code before publishing it. Just like we find mistakes in our work while refactoring and cleaning up code before we push it to github.

So even when nobody ever looks at the data and code we can expect the quality of the research to improve significantly: just because the code is there to be looked at.

I think the case in favor of making data & code public for academic research is pretty overwhelming.

See also this (much better) interview with the same guy: http://bigthink.com/videos/gravity-doesnt-exist

The economic malaise in Spain is really unbelievable. Take a look at this chart:

http://bit.ly/YNOc4q

(Also view "Unemployment" instead of "Unemployment rate" on the left menu to see the bigger picture)

> It's always seemed crazy to me that just because electric cars are non-polluting, people forget that dangling on the other end of that charging cable is probably a coal-fired power station.

I don't think that's crazy at all. Think of it as "refactoring" the environmental burden. First you move the energy generation from individual cars to a central energy source. If the energy source (coal in this case) is terrible you won't immediately get a big benefit. However, you have separated the environmental impact of energy generation from combustion motors to a central power plant. So now when you build an infrastructure of clean sources of power: nuclear, geothermal, wind, solar all your cars get the benefit automatically. This is good design. Separation of concerns!

The fact that we're burning coal in this day and age is crazy, of course. Especially given that nuclear power plants are being shut down in favor of coal. Environmental policy isn't exactly rational, but highly politicized issues never are.

What Siracusa describes as Technological Conservatism is probably more of a status-quo preference. I think this is because there are two opposing forces are work.

1. Innovation is often little more than a sequence of small incremental improvements. Improvements that -- when viewed individually -- don't really seem to matter much but when they accumulate you get a completely superior product.

2. Keeping up to date on the newest developments can be a chore. Things change, but for no apparent reason. APIs get refactored and break. Your favorite buttons in your favorite OS get removed. What was idomatic code last year is considered crummy today. This can be frustrating, because you just want to get your work done and not worry about all this stuff on the margins. Every hour you spend reading release notes and upgrading to the newest version of jQuery, Node or Go is time that would otherwise go into your product. And yet, by standing still you go backwards.

So this is where the comparison to politics breaks down a bit. In the short term being "conservative" and just sticking to whatever tools you know is optimal. It will get your product out the door the quickest and it can still be high quality and mostly bug free. From a short term business perspective it's often the right choice. In the medium term you run into bugs of frameworks that have already been fixed 6 months ago and the quality of your code base is slowly going to degrade as hacks pile on top of one another. The more out of date your technology stack is the more you lose out on great libraries and best practices. So for t → ∞ sticking to whatever you know today is clearly a poor strategy.

See the first answer:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/83983/why-isnt-the-len-fu...

In my experience this isn't true at all, at least if you target startups and SMB. We have a task management product which is used by many lifehackers around Europe, and we get requests about iDeal or Giropay only occasionally. We also have an intranet/wiki product which is sold to businesses in the 5-200 people range and everybody pays with a Credit Card no problem (OK, a few prefer wire transfer).

If you have a B2C company where you want to charge €10 or so then alternative payment methods may become an issue. But if you sell SaaS subscriptions for €50 or €200 a month a Credit Card is still the way to go, even in Europe.

Additionally, if you're willing to go to the dark side...

If he's independently wealthy he probably has a lot more to lose than you do. You can use this as leverage. If you can get him in a position where he may lose a lot then you can probably get him to back off and drop the lawsuit.

So be willing and prepared to fight dirty (but still get a lawyer). He's bullying you, and against bullies it's often a good strategy to escalate beyond the comfort zone of the bully. He can afford to sue you because he doesn't feel vulnerable; losing the lawsuit isn't the end of the world to him. This is what you must change. Find a way towards mutually assured destruction.

If he's just a bully he's very likely to back off if you put up a fight.

I don't think you have to worry much about this being a public mark on your record. Bogus lawsuits happen all the time, and especially if the lawsuit is dismissed or if you win it nobody will care a few years from now. So I would focus instead on surviving this lawsuit while taking as little damage as possible. So lawyer up.

> "Even with optimistic assumptions, the International Energy Agency estimates that, by 2035, we will produce just 2.4 percent of our energy from wind and 0.8 percent from solar." Seriously, [citation needed].

Okay, so I actually looked it up, and your hunch is correct. According to the International Energy Agency's "World Energy Outlook 2012":

"A steady increase in hydropower and the rapid expansion of wind and solar power has cemented the position of renewables as an indispensable part of the global energy mix; by 2035, renewables account for almost one-third of total electricity output.", [1], page 6

Also, from their FAQ[2]:

> How much of the world's energy comes from renewable sources?

"In 2009, the world relied on renewable sources for around 13.1% of its primary energy supply, according to IEA statistics. Renewables accounted for 19.5% of global electricity generation and 3% of global energy consumption for road transport in the same year."

So it looks like the Slate article is grossly misleading.

[1] http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...

[2] http://www.iea.org/aboutus/faqs/renewableenergy/

Congrats Venky!

Mirror: http://78.47.91.45/201211_musk.mp4

It's actually really easy to take the JIT-compilation engine from LuaJit and use it for the compiler of your own programming language. The LuaJIT code is surprisingly modular, and you can pretty much take what you need.

For scanner/parser generation Lemon and Ragel are terrific. That takes care of building the AST for you. LuaJIT does the heavy lifting and takes care of the architecture specific edge cases. That just leaves the fun part in the middle where you decide on the semantics and syntax of your language.

In the video they show the mount resting on a leg and on a cushion. If that works as advertised that'd be a killer feature. iPad stands have to take into account that people don't typically use an iPad at a desk, so the typical rectangular stands won't do the trick. This looks very promising, and much more comfortable than the alternatives.