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The great profit margins tend to be in branding though, not OEM work. This is a huge hurdle Taiwan's industries in general have to overcome (HTC and Foxconn are Taiwanese), and probably part of the reason Foxconn bought Sharp.

Cloudstitch | San Francisco | Full-time | REMOTE OK

Join a Y Combinator company (S15) building the future of web publishing stacks. Think GitHub Pages, but powered by MS Office & Google Docs. We handle all the hard engineering under the hood, and our users interact with their sites as if they were just spreadsheets and shared doc folders. We're already powering millions of pageviews for thousands of developers, and we have the whole web in our sights.

We're currently hiring strong full-stack (Node) and front-end developers. Great opportunity to have a large impact and generous equity.

https://www.cloudstitch.com/

Email ted@cloudstitch.com and/or visit https://www.cloudstitch.com/hiring

A lot of times, religious literature is about the ascetics, just like how TechCrunch tends to be about a very small portion of the tech community with rather extreme situations. TechCrunch isn't so much a charge to actually live the same life as, say, Jeff Bezos, but rather (if we typecast as a religious text) to extract and learn from it.

When my wife and I took a birth class in Boston, the ice breaker was to go around and say who you were and how much time you had off once the baby came (ostensibly so the instructor could tailor her advice).

After a long string of answers like "two weeks.. three weeks.. six weeks.. four weeks", the international parents in the group felt compelled to begin their introductions with an apology for numbers like six months, one year, two years...

I've never been able to understand how a parent could advocate against European-style healthcare goals (implementation details left as an exercise for technocrats).

You're making the assumption that quitting would burn the bridge but my guess is that might not be so. Bosses of course don't like when they lose an employee but it's also not the end of the world.

My best piece of advice is to decide what you want (not what you believe others want of you) and then explain you've made your decision to your advisor in a way that is final, but also authentic and showing compassion for your understanding of their situation.

> China's firewall is largely constructed to create technology transfer towards China.

That's been a huge effect of the GFW, but is there material indicating it was the original purpose? My understanding was that much of the explosion in Chinese censorship tech happened as a way to prevent social media from gaining control over the news cycle. (i.e., when a train wreck occurs, the Party prefers stick-to-the-facts news coverage over whose-to-blame social media mobs)

I only recall problems on 9 actually, but I wanted to be careful not to oversell after checking the compat matrix

There's a bit of hassle required to bind conditionals to object paths IIRC. Also CSS classes bound to variables don't work well if you're also using custom-style elements, which is virtually inevitable.

We use it pretty extensively at Cloudstitch and like it on the whole.

A few commenters mentioned poor browser support, but we haven't experienced any problems other than IE<=10.

In many ways Polymer is just a shim for the WebComponents spec with data binding added in, along with a standard library of web components. The resulting framework-style is basically plain-JS/HTML with a la carte use of Web Components where appropriate. Unlike [my perception of] React or Angular, you can use Polymer a bit without going all in. (Ironically the one thing you can't currently do is mix Polymer Elements from Source A with Polymer Elements from Source B at runtime if they have common, but separately hosted, dependencies).

WebComponents feel a bit like Java swing, in that making HelloWorld is high overhead, but once you've got a nice toolbox of components going, you can pull them out and use them flexibly. This is not unlike React components, except Polymer/WebComponents use an HTML-centric definition format while React uses a JS-centric definition format.

I was mugged by a gang in Rio and, for a little over a minute, had a knife shoved against the front of my neck and a gun into my back. For me the experience was so bizarrely, intensely focused. The world didn't exist outside gazing into the eyes of the guy holding the knife. We just kept repeating back and forth to each other "não problemas, não problemas" until they left.

I came away wondering if training would have allowed me to think _at all_. It sounds like such a low bar, but I seriously don't think a single thought went through my head the entire time. It was pure experience.

I asked this question of the Boston VC community as a soon-to-be father, and the resounding advice was: "wait until the baby is at least a few months old"

There are a lot of logical reasons for this that you already know, so I'll just vouch for the emotional one, which is a style of thinking that's going to become more prominent in you as soon as you hold your child. I'm really glad I waited. Unless fundraising now is life-or-death for your company, I think you'll both be really glad if you wait, too.

This gives Foxconn/Honhai a globally recognized brand to put on products, which is a big deal for the growth of Taiwan's economy.

Taiwan has gotten decades growth by manufacturing high-tech products for other countries (phones, lcds, etc). But Korea is now posing major competition, and China is investing heavily to catch up.

Strategically, there's still good runway to convert Taiwan's existing manufacturing prowess into a vertically-integrated set of brands that can reap nice retail margins (like Samsung has done).

I suspect this angle is a big part of this deal.

I think famous outspoken thinkers (Chomsky and Harris.. RMS comes to mind, Hitchens, Buckley, etc) can sometimes harbor off-putting personalities as a side effect of the situation they find themselves in: being a symbolic figurehead of a particular ideology. Or sometimes perhaps it's part of the reason they got to that place.

There is a certain level of social decorum most people keep that prevents no-holds-barred exploration of ideas. On the tails of the bell curve faith-based orthodoxy and intellectual orthodoxy.. rude but incredibly sharp instruments of exploring thought.

I'm not advocating for being an asshole... but rather for a select few we should try to see through the incivility to the ideas they're contributing.

We (Cloudstitch) would love to help you migrate your GSheet-driven pages onto our platform. We provide all the middleware tooling to run a GSheet-driven page or web app at production scale.

My first thought when reading the docs was: this is a game changer for the efficiency of applied ML (nlp, vision, speech) phd students. Coming from a school where there's a bit of a libertarian "write it all yourself, from scratch!" ethos, I always marveled at how much mileage other students got from research groups that built off a common codebase. Exciting to start to see glimmers of that possibility across the entire field.

To put this into the concrete terms of a story..

I used to be in the NLP group of a good school on the east coast. I was trying to reproduce an algorithm from a paper that won Best Paper from a good school on the west coast. A postdoc from that school said, "oh stay away from that algorithm. they basically cooked the results of that whole paper by cherry picking data. it doesn't really work at all".

At that point I dropped it and never thought about it again -- there is no career value for a phd student (the engine room of research) in "outing" bad research. I was just trying to get some baselines to compare my own work against. On the flip side, getting best paper award at a top conference is the kind of thing that sets you up for faculty interviews at you choice of university.

All that said, academia and the scientific process tend to work well, in aggregate and over time. I think a lot of times people with juicy or disgruntled stories speak more and get remembered more, and it casts academia in far more negative a light than reality. Most of the time, science works well.. just in a way that doesn't produce stories worth posting to boards like HN. So that's my counterbalance.

I agree there will probably be a performance lag for a while, but long-term I think the WC model wins out because it brings encapsulation and reuse into the formal suite of W3C specs.

That's not a big deal for any one web app, but a huge deal across web development in general.

I've been using Polymer for a few months now after following the WebComponent spec for quite a while, and I'm really liking what I'm seeing.

While it can admittedly lend itself to a very Java Swing-feeling development flow, that's a breath of fresh air compared to the traditional mess of web code I usually end up with.

WebComponents in general (and Polymer as a particular library on top of them) I feel are going to be a 10x force multiplier for web development.

I got to see Kerry present this work at UIST last year and it was very cool. The spreadsheet provides a great visual way to interact with both the API you're pulling data from and the web app you're ultimately providing it to. With a bit of hierarchical spreadsheet support (take a look at Eirik Bakke's work from CSAIL), this could easily replace all API documentation with examples you can play with instead of protocol descriptions.

Hi folks -- what a surprise to check HN and see my own article.

Here's a summary of the reports I've gotten since publishing it the other week:

1) It works. Most likely problem you'll have is installing the Python libraries I used.

2) Check the comments for a version someone posted that works on RasberryPI with no extra libraries.

3) I'd love to hear what you build. Coolest use case so far is a few folks using it as a remote light switch for connected light bulbs.

That's really cool, and perfect for people like me who do everything in email (as opposed to having offline reader apps)!

This is precisely what we do at Cloudstitch. If anyone is interested in this model please reach out!

Hi finnn -- we're on it!

Thanks andrenotgiant!

We're keeping a close eye on the SEO implications of this approach. Even with Google's snapshotting the page post-Javascript execution, I think there's still value in offering pre-rendering, e.g. to reduce latency.

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement, encoderer. All very helpful. We know there's a lot we can do to improve the landing page (well, every page).

Totally feel you re: billing. At a certain point, you just have to kick it out the door, and some things are bound to be stapled on afterward. :)

Absolutely -- there's a whole interesting world of inside-the-firewall applications of this. Enterprise-style programming certainly has an important role to play, but we're pretty bullish on the role that lighter-weight solutions can provide as a compliment.

Hi everyone, Ted from Cloudstitch here. Thanks for kicking the tires and giving feedback.

We're particularly interested in hearing what domains you might be interested in using this for. We're going to be building out as many reusable projects as we can in the coming months, and if there is strong interest for some over others, we'd love to hear it!

Thank you!

Hi skrowl --

We know and understand your hesitation. It's coming this week. We'll have a free tier that we're aiming to make pretty broad in capability.

This is something we've been hearing from a lot of folks -- spreadsheet-driven websites are actually a really popular practice that we think should get more love and attention. I'd love to help you package that site you made for cloning and reuse on Cloudstitch so others can use it, too.

- Ted from Cloudstitch [ted@cloudstitch.io]