It honestly doesn’t really matter to the world if “Silicon Valley” moves to another or multiple other locations. What’s far more important is, “does the ever-accelerating dominance of a small number of companies show any signs of weakness?” and this article doesn’t seem to think so.
Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
101–110 of 302 posts
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please let's not go into the Musk Wars. They're all the same and always lame.
Hi! Maybe you'd like to address the blatant abuse of the flagging system on this website? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26402532
You'd need to come up with better examples than nationalistic flamewar comments like that one and its parent, both of which were correctly flagged by users. The only problem I see with flags in that hellish thread is that there weren't enough of them.
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Between that case and this one, it seems like it would be good to calibrate your sense of what we're trying for here.
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#103This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's expected to get much worse this year. https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime. References: Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu... Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimat…
The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals, it's a result of really really poor security practices, a solveable problem.
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#104I have been a long time fan of Tim O'Reilly for the past ~20 years or so. Recently I had the opportunity to interview him [0] for a podcast/videocast I run, in which we covered his friendship and work with Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, how the O'Reilly Media company came to be; but most importantly, Tim's "political" involvement in keeping the internet free and open.
In particular, I really like his way of looking at good startups and good companies: the ones that don't simply intercept or capture value, but that instead create it.
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, I see what you mean and realize that I didn't really read your comment beyond the trigger phrase at the beginning. Yes, generic top subthreads that don't really address the article, but rather get sucked straight into $predictable-thing-people-always-argue-about, are indeed one of the biggest problems on HN and I'm constantly trying to convince people not to go there. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&…
I understand, it’s incredibly dispiriting to see long written comments that grab a bunch of upvotes yet have absolutely nothing to do with the OP kill off all the interest in the actual article. Can they simply be flagged? Though admittedly this article would probably be easier to approach if it was broken up into four parts that could each be addressed in different threads.
You can flag them because generic tangents are against the site guidelines. It might help, but when they're at the top of a thread, the upvotes will most likely dominate the flags. That's why moderator intervention is needed.
Btw, a lot of the time these comments are perfectly fine as long as they're halfway down the page. Humans like to talk and we naturally talk about what we already know, and repeat things we've said or felt many times before—it's just the way we are. The problem comes more because people upvote the familiar (because hey! I feel that way too!), and then suddenly the more boring category (regurgitating the familiar) chokes out the more interesting one (new and unpredictable information). In most cases that wasn't the commenter's intention. The solution is for a countervailing mechanism, like downweights, to dampen the effect of this suboptimal one. Unfortunately that still requires moderator intervention, which is a bottleneck.
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#106There is no place like Silicon Valley where taking a career risk to quit a job and start a company is normalized, understood, and encouraged.
Yet with the high rents and the lack of universal healthcare it takes a crazy person to take such a risk. I personally will start my startup from abroad when the time is right.
Yes, it’s still risky. But at least you’re still understood because of the pervasive startup culture in SV. Everyone in SV can relate to startups. I think what’s tough outside of SV is that people don’t relate to startups. People might think you’re just weird.
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#107Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a re…
> That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed.
> Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.
Nothing lasts forever. Some time ago, Detroit would have been on your list, too:
"so tired of random writers trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. It's like saying Detroit is doomed. Detroit has the critical mass of talent and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world."
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#108This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's expected to get much worse this year. https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime. References: Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu... Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimat…
Climate should be considered worse, the 250B will go up. and the lost oppotunity cost isn't factored. Crime will always be with us. right now we are in the wild west stage of the internet (still) but give it 20-30 years and everything will be better. The crime will be more complex. But the climate will just keep getting worse.
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#109There is no place like Silicon Valley where taking a career risk to quit a job and start a company is normalized, understood, and encouraged.
... that's because it's not a career risk when you're a multi millionaire who will just be rehired by your friends if your venture fails.
Why doesn’t that happen elsewhere?
Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora
#110> The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence are still there
Is it? I think it's dying with the generation that believed in that culture. What are the collective intelligence projects created by young inventors?
Even this article is written by someone who is of an older generation