gozo

Not so much technical skill, as being able to run one of these "mass" game studios says something about the availability and flexibility of the talent pool. They've been profitable since 2005 so they've been doing something right.

Point being, unless you want to call gamification design, their success was far more based on engineering and business. Like you said it wasn't an original idea, but they could relativly quickly produce a clone of something and monetize. I'm not claiming that this is a particularly great way of doing business, just that it's inaccurate to say that it was design.

Maybe it is, but on the other hand I've never heard anyone which couldn't easily get funding, i.e. the majority of people, not complain about it. I would even expect that the factors of ones specific situation quickly overtake the importance of the general funding situation anyway.

What I do know is that if you play your cards right you can make your own seed funding in a year, even if the housing market is making this slightly harder these days.

Except if you look at the successes they are as based on engineering and business talent as much as design. Spotify, p2p + licensing deals. Klarna, Erlang + credit checks. King, game development + gamification.

While I don't think Stockholm can "afford" the state of its housing market, renting a sublet is quite comparable to the rest of the world. It's just that people expect more, including myself.

For some reason the swedes think it's a good idea to have insanely long mortgage terms, if they don't just pay interest. Prices in Stockholm proper is around $950 per square feet, which I guess is comparable to SF [0].

[0] http://www.maklarstatistik.se/ [0] https://www.google.com.mt/search?q=86304+sek+per+square+mete... [0] http://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Avg-D...

Linking a 91 page presentation without specifying your point isn't very helpful.

As I said, you don't get funding for an idea anymore so being bootstrapped is becoming the norm. The presentation even says that "all in all, Q3 was a quarter for big, big deals. Less so for seed-stage and Angel financing, both of which were down for the fifth consecutive quarter on a global basis". Fundraising is never easy, but having more and more eyes on Stockholm helps.

I don't see how that, without any data, isn't just "the grass is greener". No one is surprised that Stockholm isn't London, that doesn't really speak to the different ecosystems nor that you can raise money across borders. There can be issues with "per capita" measurements, but that pretty hard to discuss when you didn't bother to include your reasoning.

Uhm, no [0]. It all depends where you work though. The web industry is more of a separate phenomenon than in the bay area.

[0] https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/346637405668925440 [0] https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=language%3AGo+loc... [0] http://www.meetup.com/sthlmrb/ [0] etc.

> little risk capital available at the bottom

Compared to where? The days where you get funding based on an idea is over. I don't think the funding situation is particularly bad "per capita" [0]. There are other problems with Stockholm of course, but that's another story.

[0] http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/11/11/how-entrepreneur...

Speaking of the EU, anyone knows what is going on with the credit card fee cap? It's supposedly in effect, but I haven't seen anything in practice.

While that's true many commodity components also currently doesn't live up to the real requirements of those environments. I have a number of friends who work with enterprise Linux deployments. They are all doing very well financially.

Not entirely sure why you're being downvoted. Sun terminals have had smartcard access for, what, 15 years? (Yes, for hospitals). It's a good idea. Some sort of complementary directional RFID might be even better.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R497CzmKyVQ&t=38s

Eh what? It's a reference. The year has no other meaning than to account for when the referenced work was published, which was in 2007.

Don't get me wrong that's all good and well, but it's still 15 year old technology being implemented and not a paradigm shift. Most of the time you're still going to be typing in your e-mail, postal address and credit card number when doing things online. It's not like you swipe your card once for logging in to you computer and then when buying some service online to verify the setting up a subscription payment and having all your data at the provider encrypted with your identity.

While "raw" progress is always fun, there's so much untapped potential in software that I'm not sure how much it matters. You stick one, two, three or a hundred ARM chips in a computer and, currently, it wouldn't really matter. The limits today are things like ecosystem, development process, robustness etc. at least for personal computer applications.

They've had this in Sweden for like 10 years. It's all pretty clunky, even though you can now use an app instead. You generally have to have your card, then some plug-in, then the host have to implement the whole thing. Usually signing things isn't the whole story either, so you still have to deal with e.g. payments.

The Estonian system is probably better, since it's newer, but the challenge isn't really in handing out cards. It's standardizing authentication on the Internet and connecting that to whatever else matters.

Because demand is much more elastic than building? Also they are building, it's not just going to help much. Because there is still money to be made in making inefficient households into efficient airbnb rentals and shared flats for young tech workers having to move to Seattle if they want kids. When the money stops flowing you'll see change like redevelopment.

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly. But Mobileye, probably the most prominent company in the field, does object recognition? And they design their own ASICs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKfwHsHUdVc

I don't know, it think the scenario in the article is pretty common where people offset the time the property is empty with a high price. Especially when there's things like seasonality. If an apartment becomes empty in the spring the owner might have it empty to the summer, rent it out at a higher price to tourist and then instead rent it out in long-term in the autumn when there is more demand.

I don't pretend to know everything about the housing market. Just that in a time where the Internet have created opportunities to more easily work on the things you think matter with like-minded people, the housing market is going the other way in terms of flexibility. Paradoxically time and space are more important than ever. Being able to do conferences and have people hang around afterwards, as a smaller company bring some in to consult in person, even just hanging out and exchanging ideas all takes time. It's all possible now, but not only is it not equally distributed, it's somewhat getting less so.

As someone who has lived a similar lifestyle for a while I have strong indications that Airbnb has made this much harder. People have become reluctant to rent out for one to three, or even six, months and prices have gone up significantly. Especially in international or dynamic cities, which are generally the ones you want to stay a bit longer in.

Not only do I not think that is true, I think there's real danger that people conclude that more risk is better. SV is in many ways risk averse. The days when any kid could get a million dollars are over. Almost every success story seems to happen on a background of brand name colleges, companies, incubators or investors. What I think people mean when they talk about risk is really "hype". People move to SV to work in the tech industry because that is THE place to be. You don't have that in London, Berlin or even New York. The pure momentum of the industry simply overshadows any health care, housing, dating problems in the bay area.

I feel like I'm being contrarian, but I don't see how your points aren't overshadowed by other factors.

1. Russia, China, India and other markets that to some extent have "their own Google" are completely horrible in terms of running companies. Much more so than Europe. The US is no dream in terms of e.g. declaring taxes either. I think this has more to do with attitude than anything else. US companies simply hire someone to do this.

2. That would explain why people doesn't start companies, if Europe didn't already have many successful technology companies. It offers little explanation why those companies doesn't go on to become "Googles".

3. I do somewhat agree with this one. Because while the technology industry do pay good salaries in Europe startups usually doesn't even though they are in high cost markets. I'm not sure this is actually that different from the US though. There are huge incentives for "the best" programmers to work at Apple/Google/Facebook where they have higher salary and relative job security, especially if the want to keep up with the housing market.

I would say that that almost they entire reason why Europe doesn't "have a Google" is because we are part of the US market. All our contenders in the early days used to be domestic. Once we realized that we had to be global US companies bought those that were successful. Skype, for example, could have become a Google if it had been forced to stand on it's own or been acquired by a local company like Ericsson. Rather it was built to be sold and was to Microsoft.

"How many people do you know in Europe that can do that?"

I did that, after only a couple of years in the tech industry. Most of my friends could do that. I wrote a tutorial of sorts how to do things like this in a comment on HN a while ago, but removed it because people seemed to get upset (I could summaries if someone is interested).

"the poor execution of a good idea (take the EU privacy directive that forces the opt-in for cookie tracking. This has in its execution by Google etc. generally become more of an annoyance than a privacy feature)"

That's because Google rather have these annoying notices than make it easy to disable tracking. The EU did the right thing in leaving it up to the industry how to solve these problems, it's just that the industry doesn't want to.

I'm guessing this is what you're looking for?

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROM...

Unfortunately this seem to have become par for the course on HN. Disagree, but don't say why so no one can counteract your arguments. Anyone who looks at self-driving cars from an engineering perspective know that there are still many challenges.

Congestion is more a factor of tolerance than technology. As demand and tolerance for long commutes go up we might actually see less efficiency. [0]

It's still hard to match the human mind, especially without significant overhead. [1]

Cars are a compromise and aren't as efficient as pods or as fast as trains. [2]

Current electric vehicle technology can only drive you for about an hour at relativly slow train speed, at which point you'll have to charge for about as long. [3]

etc.

The car really is the weakest link in the "self-driving car". Which isn't unexpected because it's engineered around the driver.

[0] http://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/transport...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3ik5f3-2c

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit)

[3] http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/203/modelsrange...

I would be interested in hearing why you think proprietarism is such a greater problem than, and just not a symptom of, the things I mentioned and how you would expect to fix that.

That's not the point, the point is that the effort required makes it harder to innovate and that not only does that limit competition but it also enable proprietarism.

In a perfect world you could just e-mail the data without any concerns of authenticity, privacy, robustness etc. But you can't, so you would have to bring in a huge firm that is going to spend a lot of money and effort getting everything right or at least certified. Of course with all that effort they now have a huge incentive to keep thing proprietary since they want to recuperate their cost and the large barrier to entry make it even more advantageous because there will be little competition.

Innovation often requires COTS components to be available at a sufficient standard. No one would doubt this when it comes to something like AWS or how Tesla could make such a high level car in a relatively short time. Of course if you question the state of software you get downvoted into oblivion without reason on HN.

And if it wasn't clear, these (proprietary) systems very much exists.

I think it's too easy to blame proprietarism as such. It's a lack of universal sophistication in computer technology that makes designing systems living up to real medical concerns great efforts. When the "manufacturing techniques" of computer software is modernized, and enables more widespread implementation of these types of systems, proprietary formats simple won't be able to compete.

There is little overlap between desktop and phone applications. Most phone applications are web applications in their non-phone form. Games being the exception. Microsoft needs to focus on the things they are good at and the competition isn't, productivity. Like Apple used to.

I would say that "fast following" is a necessity for the Chinese market. Just look at how poorly Europe is served by US startups and our cultures are quite similar. Many western service are "clones" of other western services anyways. I'm not entirely sure what the huge downside would be?