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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Author of original post here ...

... this is a crazy trip for a comment to make! And I still think most people over-engineer and over-think their startup tech.

Customers don't care what you use, as long as it solves their problem. The rest just helps with recruiting I guess.

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I am amazed a rant can go English -> Mandarin -> English via half the world's tech forums, and still be recognised by its original author.

But what really blows my socks off is how a tech forum in Beijing follows rants from Slovenian blog to a Californian forum and back again. And it actually matters to the Chinese because they liked it as much as we did.

Welcome to the new global culture, sharing the same memepool.

This is scary, we are loosing diversity at an incredible rate.

Of all the conclusions to be drawn from this observation, I believe yours is the most pessimistic.

I'm much more excited by the fact that information was able to quickly traverse national and language barriers, making it's way all around the globe to catch up with where it began in such a short time. That's pretty amazing if you ask me!

Heh, not surprising that comment isn't popular among the group of people who are currently exporting their worldview.

Harder to see the harm in it when it's your culture that's becoming the monoculture. That's the "good one"!

I don't think that's entirely fair - we can safely assume the Chinese tech forum techsmth has a techie culture, because to the relevance of the rant.

That does not mean they do not have heavy influences from their own (and from a quick surf-by Japanese) culture - lots of threads on photos from the 70s and what was it like then.

They will export back. Just because all the money in Hollywood is forcing young pretty WASP vampires at us does not mean its the only way to express oneself

Yeah, it's not just a one way thing. "Western" culture and American in particular is mostly exporting at the moment. I just found it quite funny that a pro diversity comment was downvoted and so disagreed with (well, it was when I posted) here. The startup culture (that HN had a large part in defining) is extremely monolithic and really skewed to exporting ideas right now. Sure, it's happy to import arguments or small ideas from anywhere, but only if they don't disturb the core philosophy.

I feel a powerful need to poke at people, especially smart ones, when they seem to be knee jerk supporting the status quo. Just a good/bad habit of mine.

Some forms of diversity we want to lose - the current Syrian culture stands as a good example, China's own culture of terrible human rights abuses is another. On a more usual definition of culture diversity of attitude towards race or sexuality covers diverse opinions such as the KKK and that guy who protests at gay funerals.

Not all diversity is positive - and given that the norms on the forums this passed through are themselves widely different is a indication of how culture will disconnect slightly from geography.

A genepool is strong if it has variety and if it can spread the beneficial genes widely. This can be dichotomous, but trust me 4chan proves generating a wide variety of memes quickly is something we can do.

I don't think this implies we are losing diversity. Internet makes easy to connect with like minded people and share information. That sounds good. Like minded people around the globe becomes more alike? Maybe. But just in the field they share. And they started with similar interests anyway.

And the ability to spell as well.

Ironic since the original comment complaints about too much diversity. Just because a good rant is recognised across cultures does not imply a loss of diversity. Somethings are just common on this planet, like gravity.

It stands to reason, therefore, that humans do not want this diversity.

Because humans are rational actors with perfect foresight?

What on earth would make you think that this leap "stands to reason"?

To those who are confused due to the myriad of OPs here, Swizec is the author of the excellent blog post that is the beginning of this interesting global thread.

(I bet you over engineered your startup, posted on July 2012 at http://www.zemanta.com/blog/i-bet-you-over-engineered-your-s...)

If you haven't read it yet, highly recommended, much better than my rant.

Sometimes I love over engineering my projects. It helps me hone my skills and keep updated. But I limit my self to one side. E.g. Back end or front end.

In my case, it's back end. API and stuffs. I'm also trying to limit my self in using different kinds of language. My current Back end stuff today are Grails for web app, Scala for non web, Redis, memcached, MongoDB.

Don't ask me about front end. I'm not updated with it by choice.

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