Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it was a three day period in the middle of the week.
Well that's plenty of time to make sweeping generalizations. Carry on.
Sweeping and evidently spot on as well. Carry on!
San Francisco Bubble
131–140 of 393 posts
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#132It's a gold rush. Nothing new. Fun to watch once you have the context to understand what is happening.
> It's a gold rush Which means it is best to sell the shovels so startup X can more easily/faster "disrupt the banana hammock ordering process"
Nobody's selling shovels. Everyone is selling month-to-month shovel subscriptions.
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea no kidding. "AppNexus helps brands connect with consumers, empowering agencies and advertisers with a uniquely powerful approach to programmatic online advertising." Thanks for working on Ad Tech, the very thing that powers this bubble by trading attention as a commodity. Other people work on silly startups, but this shit is akin to HFT.
Unless microtransactions for content take off, and they haven't, ad tech is necessary to incentivize content on the web. 90% of the websites you read could not exist without the ecosystem that appnexus is a big player in. Hacker News, being one big ad for ycombinator, doesn't need to bother. So he's doing a real thing that provides real value to the web. And it's actually a sustainable business, to boot. Lastly, ther…
See, whether a startup is silly or not is an opinion. I happen to have an opinion that adtech is evil. Whether it has a side benefit like allowing "content" to exist is tangential.
I usually keep that opinion to myself because it's not a popular one, but in this particular subthread we are not discussing the article, we are discussing the author who volunteered his "I am very hypocritical" comment.
Elsewhere in this comment thread I discuss the article.
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There are thousands of dumb startups" This is a feature not a bug. The whole VC model the Bay Area thrives on is based on the premise of hitting on only a small percentage of successful startups and you never know what's going to be a hit. Many successful startups have pivoted out of "stupid" ideas. I'm sure at one point "Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.
"Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea. I struggle with this all the time I try to put myself in the shoes of VCs hearing AirBNB, Uber, Twitter and other pitches. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give them money. (and then, I would post on HN saying "How I missed AirBNB. Including email threads with the founders and beating myself up). This is indeed the premise of VCs but even with that in mind,…
It's worth remembering that at the time it wasn't "blogging 140 characters at a time" it was "SMS blogging" which is a much easier idea to pitch in that the use case is more obvious (being on the go) and the character limit isn't arbitrary.
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#135> Everything is too expensive. I’m from New York... I take issue with this one. It's entirely possible to live frugally while living IN San Francisco. I moved here about 7 months ago and expected it to be incredibly expensive but it hasn't been the case (beyond rent). The author mentions $15 crappy local IPAs but I've actually never found a beer for this price. There is no shortage of $7 craft beers you can buy at a…
Compared to Portland, $7 a beer is actually pretty expensive. Not as crazy as the mythical $15, but for a local craft beer it should be more like $5-6. But that could all just be taxes. (and we do have $7-12 beers, they're just known to be extra fancy or aged)
I've heard that Portland COL prices are climbing sharply due to people moving in. Is that true?
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't even know that "banana hammocks" were a thing. Maybe whoever runs bananahammockworld.com reads HN.... http://www.bananahammockworld.com/banana-hammocks-for-men/
Should carry a NSFW warning. I had no idea what a banana hammock was, I thought it was an actual hammock.
I thought it was somehow tied into the hipster-foodie thing, like you'd get charged $15 for a 50 cent banana if it was delivered to you by some precariously employed scooter driver swaddled up like the baby Jesus.
Perhaps it's my unadventurous lifestyle, but I have never found myself in a situation where I so urgently needed a posing pouch that 'Uberising' the industry would have helped me out.
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#137I think the problem is that many of the business models of these startups is basically taking VC money and shuffling it around.
I've been to many startup competitions in the last couple of years and most of the winners have no business model.
For instance, last year, the winner was a startup that was "Twitter with 255 character limit". It think it was awarded $20,000
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#138Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture. The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myse…
Tangent but: I doubt the rate raise will stick. They'll probably have to cut it again. I see a "planet Japan" scenario in which global central banks are zero-bound for decades, if not "forever". Rapid growth is over. There are no more frontiers and birth rates are stabilizing. From an ecological point of view the stabilization of birth rates is good, but it basically breaks all the economic assumptions of the past 25…
> Tangent but: I doubt the rate raise will stick. They'll probably have to cut it again. I see a "planet Japan" scenario in which global central banks are zero-bound for decades, if not "forever". Rapid growth is over.
Agreed nominal interest rates will likely drop down again to zero to restimulate the economy, but I doubt that will stick for the next decade, as inflation should creep back in forcing the Fed's hand. However, if you believe that "real interest rates" (ie subtracting inflation) will be zero for a long time, I can concur -- currently they are negative.
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#139According to the about page, the author is an engineer at a startup and is on sabbatical. That feels weird given the criticisms leveled in the piece.
FWIW I live in New York and prefer it massively to SV, but I mean....
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#140Re: There cannot be these many quality engineers. I've seen grads come out of boot camps that are better programmers than people who have been programming for years. They might lack the knowledge, but they've got good sense and hustle, and at the end of the day, I'd take that over a stubborn engineer who looks like they're gonna age into a Dilbert comic.
I mean, if I am developing an app for millions of users - I would hope there is at least 1 engineer on the team that understands O(n) vs O(n^2).
If the app is for 10 users or for the other 75% of employees, may be less important...