> A village in china that paints portraits of pop culture icons as various dog breeds. Look, Obama as a GreyHound!
If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog
Retarded ideas make money too.
Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.
There is actually a town in china where the entire village makes their money painting caricatures of monkeys. Not saying it's a good career move, but at least that's the context for where the idea came from.
Interesting enough, the majority of the world's oil paintings come from this one tiny village with 5,000 painters who spend all day slavishly copying the same templates over and over:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen
You can find all their stuff on ebay and alibaba.
So I wouldn't call Xiamen itself a village, but you may be referring to a small village nearby.
Conversely, people who believe ideas are a dime a dozen tend to focus on shallow ideas. The lack of deep interaction with technology (and whatever a pivot is supposed to be) forces you into businesses with a more social rather than technical role: web design, blogging, social networks, etc. I don't see much of HN's advice working well for a company developing asynchronous CPU chipsets. In theory they should be the same; the advent of fabless semiconductor shops and hardware synthesis languages lets someone design chips in their garage in Iowa, but the depth of technical knowledge required makes it a much different game than starting up "a distributed Facebook" or "a Foursquare but for X."