shas3

Rockets have been made in and around LA for ages. It is a defense industry hub, arguably the biggest outside DC area. Overview: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-socal-aerospace-201607...

Bizarre article full of unsubstantiated claims (e.g. Midwest cities generally “spending years in the doldrums” huh? Twin Cities, Chicago, Kansas City, Indianapolis, etc. have consistently been doing well) and sketchy assumptions (mid-tech blue collar?). This whole tendency to bunch all mid-west cities together is ignorant and condescending. Also, “decline of mid west cities” is mostly a story of cities not necessarily the entire region or even the cities’ suburbs (Detroit’s wealthy suburbs are as rich as ever). Generally muddled piece.

Funny, you say that.

Once upon a time, you could buy satellites, satellite dishes (DirecTV), IT services, and armaments from GM.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/30/business/with-hughes-sale-...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1997/01/17/r...

Wow exactly the situation in india! We’ve had 2FA, mobile alerts, etc. ever since the dawn of the Internet banking in late 90s. Wasn’t so in the US even as recently as 2010.

Just wannabe mega-Corp. Believe it or not, most mega-Corps are pretty ethical by Uber standards.

Yeah this is almost the same experience in India too. Specialists like orthopedics, ob-gyn, etc. are often walk-in or same day appointments, and finish everything for under $50-$100. The only drawback with the overall health system in India is that there is mind boggling inequality. Easy access to specialists is true in big cities in good neighborhoods, but hospitals and healthcare can truly be medieval in remote or poor villages.

They’re probably in the wrong company. Are you suggesting there are isn’t an explosion of jobs and applications requiring advance math and machine learning or statistical inference? If so you are off the mark.

The dissing of PhDs is unwarranted. Gross over-generalization. People being skeptical of ideas in a peer-review sort of way can be both good and bad. For example, the assumptions and claims of this article can do with a substantial amount of skepticism. Perhaps someone should express skepticism and view this article with the peer-review critical eye that he mentions.

I am reminded of climate-change skeptic articles that say “hey these scientists know nothing. See today it’s 10 below zero. Common sense! No global warming.”

The most famous case of foundations being sued for owning businesses is Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Hughes Aircraft, which was then the largest defense contractor in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Aircraft_Company

You’ll be downvoted for preaching frugality because many coastal-city HN software folk making six figure salaries are probably inimical to frugality: buying 3000 dollar bikes, luxury cars, eating at fancy restaurants, etc. in very anti-fragile way without saving with substantial cushion for rare adverse events.

The argument for diversity as a good investment:

1. With high-income whites some dumb blokes may sneak in due to privilege and winging it based on family connections, etc. This might be happening at the expense of spunky smart low income whites or blacks who worked harder and were smarter to overcome their disadvantage to get to a point where they’re in the pool of those being considered for admission into Stanford.

2. Diversity hires bring fresh perspectives and help break group-think. In my experience, all-white, all-Indian, all-Asian, etc. teams were always inferior in terms of the experience of working there to diverse teams.

Every paper that comes out of Apple gets disproportionate coverage! If nothing, their secrecy is helping in generating good publicity.

“Code-monkey Indians”

Huh? Casual racism.

This is like saying, "why are you learning to play the piano when you could get the same results from listening to the track on Spotify?"

Very similar to Heielmeier questions: http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Heilmeier_Questions....

Pretty universal set of things to check for in new ideas.

Theoretically, yes. Can you give a more concrete example? Many hard high dimensional and general topology problems can be visualized through their 2D special cases.

West Virginia is so beautiful, it is tragic that it’s ecompany is depressed. WVU owes a lot to the late Senator Robert Byrd.

True about Slumberland, Ashley, and other brick and mortar furniture stores too.

Ornithologists vs. aeronautical engineers... :)

You forget the (smaller, repeatedly broken up) American auto counterpart of Continental: Delphi. Google them and you'll find they're doing pretty well of late.

I think he clarifies this. Two things are germane:

1. Google is "more than just a company." It is more like an old style company-town by now.

2. They are the gatekeepers of all information ever. Perhaps we should hold them to different standards, especially when it comes to opinions and ideologies?

Worth noting: for better or for worse, companies are autocratic dictatorships or at best, oligarchies: opinions of employees do not matter much, unless such opinions somehow affect revenue.

Irony?

The evolution of boxing presents a template of how football will go. Boxing today is a rather fringe sport in school. Few parents put their kids in boxing enthusiastically. Similarly, boxing matches, although viewed by millions, are rather fringe in being grand and occasional pay-per-views. Football will go the same way, but perhaps much more slowly, given the cultural inertia. I firmly believe that these things evolve, rather than abruptly change. Whether it evolves into a safer form of the game or to become marginalized is hard to say. Already many parents are hesitant in putting their kids in football in school.

There's a very similarly sized city on the west coast with similar population, etc.: Portland. It is a good illustration of what can help or harm cities.

Portland lacks anchors like the one put down in Pittsburgh by robber barons. Later philanthropists like Vollum of Tektronix in Portland weren't nearly as effective as Carnegie. Silicon Forest turned out to be a bit of a volatile dud compared to Silicon Valley.

Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has great universities in CMU and U Pitt. Portland's equivalents PDX State, erstwhile Oregon Graduate Institute, and OHSU never reached the heights of CMU or UPitt as they lacked the deep and broad foundation of Pittsburgh's universities.

I like both cities, but just on the basis of Shadyside-Oakland-Lawrenceville-etc. and the intellectual atmosphere there, I love Pittsburgh much more.

Disappointingly, in Portland there's no intellectual atmosphere of any sort.

I grew up in India with an Indian language at home and school medium of instruction, English. I'm generally considered very good at written English (attested by great grades, scores, etc.) and good at articulation but average at getting spoken English correct. But I'm improving at spoken English as I live in the US. Dunno if your situation is similar.

Huh? Learning can be fun, last I heard. In any case, that's what I meant when I said 'feedback'. Further, there are some skills that are absolutely necessary to learn to function in society, basic math, basic language skills, etc. More important are skills like perseverance, managing one's own emotional well-being, self-control, delaying gratification, etc. It is one's responsibility to at least attempt to teach these to their children.

> Honestly, the whole "you need to get them when they are young" idea never convinced me very much. It's never too late to learn a thing and often you need a certain age to actually appreciate something. You don't have to be a childhood prodigy to be good at something.

While starting early is neither necessary nor sufficient for success, the question should be: do the benefits of starting early outweigh risks? Like the parent comment, I think they do, if done correctly and gently, but it should be decided case-by-case for each child. The only risk I can think of is: if you push too hard, it can have the opposite effect of making the child hate it. So, one has to do it with utmost sensitivity and by responding to cues and feedback from the pupil.

> When the iPhone first came out, the way you measured your heart rate was by putting your finger over the camera on the back of the phone.

Actually, no. Pulse-oximeters were always quite cheap. Also, Casio had heart rate (although not continuous) monitors on some of their watches for many years.

I think the problem with hardware startups is more subtle. Unless you open up a fundamentally new market segment or find a niche application, your product is asking to be commodified. Smartwatches and fitness trackers were too obvious a category and Samsung, Apple, etc. were sure to swoop in and win. There really is no distinguishing feature for Jawbone or Fitbit. Other hardware startups like Anki are doing stuff that's niche and novel in areas unlikely to be ever entered by Apple/Google/etc.

The technology component of Jawbone or Fitbit was, even in 2007, very very basic and hardly novel. There is literally nothing in Jawbone or Fitbit that is super novel: their sensors aren't ground breaking, their algorithms are (presumably) meh, etc.

VC's hope that these companies will mature to become superstars and achieve the level of tech quality of Qualcomm, FB, GE, Intel, Google, etc. in their respective markets. This didn't happen with Jawbone or Fitbit.