Nested iframes on that last one. Do you remember sites that would popup hundreds of popups - not virus/porn sites, but design sites that would orchestrate a variety of images in the popups? I recall iframes that would bring up more iframes as well. I wonder where we'd be if we'd followed these routes instead.
Where are you seeing that there were more denials than submitted?
On the first table, it shows the total submitted is 398,718. The number approved is 345,262, which leaves at most 53,456 denied (398,718 - 345,262 = 53,456).
What do you do for fulfillment? I'm 25 too and the only fulfillment I experience is from thinking about/eating good food which is just sad. I've forced myself into reading a lot of books and doing a lot of hobby programming but it feels empty.
Personally, my children provide more fulfillment for me than anything else ever has. It's mind boggling how the tiniest gesture from one of my kids can send me over the moon.
I relate to your comment; I've read a lot of books, put thousands of hours into hacking on side projects, played an obscene amount of video games. But nothing, nothing, has come close to filling my heart as much as spending time with my children. As far as I'm concerned, my career is a means to an end. The goal is to achieve financial security so that I can spend as much time as possible with my kids.
I'm not saying to go have kids willy-nilly, but this is my perspective.
This read to me as if you were putting my thoughts and life into text.
I am currently 24 and an exchange student in München, Germany. I will soon leave Bavaria and return to Sweden in order to finish up my masters. Been working on the side in a field I am interested in but I feel like I am so incompetent that I can hardly contribute anything useful. It is demoralizing.
books and typing never did fulfill me in that way, making programs and books were among the endless things that rived me, it was going out there, running, hiking, learning things that i thought i never would learn about, talking with people, living, making memories, staying outside beyond the screen to let the sunset walk into your eyes, to stay outside of the house, to scream, to love, to forget, to live.
(Not OP, but I'm currently founding a startup in the Bay Area.)
I don't have the perception that the Bay Area startup scene is dying, but it's perhaps true that the Bay Area startup scene is dying. Basically, you can't raise a $3M seed round on "I went to (Stanford|Ivy League|other top college) and have an idea for a mobile app" anymore, nor can you raise follow-on rounds off anything but revenue growth. That means that the days where a couple 20-somethings could found a company, hire 10 people, and code by day while partying late into the night are gone.
Good riddance, IMHO.
The startup scene is still healthy, but is very different demographically. Some observations:
Average founders skew older - it's more 30- and 40-somethings that worked for a big tech company and cashed out a million or so in stock options, or had a previous startup exit. (The exception is crypto, which is largely financed through ICO now.)
B2B is ascendant over B2C, and many startups are financing the company with pre-sales from paying customers.
Team sizes are smaller, and many companies are using outsourced labor where they either open an office abroad for engineering, or they use Upwork etc. to find contractors.
Startups in general have gotten cheaper and leaner and are more focused on doing the work rather than living the dream.
That's quite a positive take. When I see "lean" startups offshoring/using Upwork to build their offerings, I think the magic has left the bay and that people are trying to squeeze water from rocks. Partying all night might make investors and parents of 2.5 children wince, but that was part of what made unexpected, innovative software possible. It's ominous that startups are forced to outsource because cost of living has priced them out of local talent.
When I look at the bay now, I see a bunch of FANG drones measuring their RSU dicks. People caring more about buying a home and whining about NIMBYs than making cool shit with cool tech. Of course most startups are stodgy B2B and not moon shot B2C, you can't build B2C when your experience is so separate from a normal person's. But another JIRA/GitHub/Slack integration? Ooh, that's the good stuff we can relate to.
Maybe the bay got old, but I don't believe that when I see fresh grads falling over themselves to work at a FANG. Whatever happened, there's not much serendipity left. There will be a tipping point where enough cool stuff is coming out of Detroit/Atlanta/wherever that an investor would be a fool to fixate on the bay.
Typically the founders are building the core competencies of their businesses themselves and using Upwork to outsource programming tasks that have been commoditized, like mobile/web development or filling in the gaps once the product architecture has been built. The current funding & salary environment is not kind to non-technical founders, because the technical end of a new product now costs more than you can get in funding without a product, and because the type of ideas you can easily communicate to an outsourced dev team are the ones that have been well-commoditized over the last 8 years. (I still see a number of non-technical founders trying, but they've been struggling hard.)
I do think new startups face significant headwinds now, but they're not the ones you mention. I'm not worried about FANG drones, for example - the majority of people in Silicon Valley have always been employees of big companies, and often quite self-satisfied ones (do you remember how arrogant Netscape, Sun, and Cisco were when Google was still in the garage?).
Also, significant B2C startups usually come out of nowhere, from small teams that were toiling away in obscurity for years beforehand. Do you remember 2007-2010? I was part of the Web 2.0 boomlet, folded up my startup in '08, and proceeded to watch most of my peer companies die over the next 2 years. But while we were all folding up our social networks, AirBnB (founded '06, household name '11), DropBox ('07, '10), Uber ('08, '10), Instagram ('08, '12), WhatsApp ('07, '11), and Thumbtack ('07, '13) were continuing to work on their startups, many of them breaking a lot of common wisdom about what made for a successful startup. When the time was right these services exploded, but we had to go through a huge startup drought from 08-10 in the process.
The factors I'm more worried about are: 1) The average American consumer not having money, which makes B2C business models other than [advertisement, pyramid scheme, extortion, selling personal data] impractical 2) Attention being so focused on politics and tribalism that consumers are too fearful to try anything new and 3) Moore's Law disappearing. I'm not terribly worried about this last one because we can still get another factor of 10-100X out of better programming languages, OSes, and frameworks, and GPUs/TPUs continue to increase in power.
not the op- but I think what he's implying is that all the good engineers are in golden handcuffs with the FANG or unicorn startups making $300k. In the old days you could match the base salary and say my stock is better. Today its harder when MSFT is 3x or Netflix has 5x in the last few years. Your startup stock of 100K with 10% probability of becoming worth 10x in a few years just doesn't sound attractive enough to a good engineer. If all the good engineers are taken, it sucks the life out of other startups.
It’s not that all the good engineers are taken. It’s that the good engineers are doing mindless ad blasting to make a bigger buck.
There’s an opportunity cost of inventing things that actually make people’s lives considerably better.
The valley was the place where this would happen, now that culture and spirit is slowly dying.
Mostly because you can’t take those kinds of risks. Just the living expensive would kill you. VC money needs a quick buck so that kills those ideas in their infancy too.
Hit the nail on the head right here. You just can’t take the risks anymore. Everything is too expensive and it isn’t worth it anymore when Facebook dangles such a fat pay check in front of you. Entrepreneurship and free thinking has turned into copycat, quick bucks how to make quick money and complete group think. This is especially true in the sf start up scene
It is true, I live in one of those cities (Omaha) at a tech startup, it's been tiring these last 4 years sitting next to people who openly talk and try to 'educate' peers about how immigrants kill people, vaccines cause cancer, and climate change is made up from dodgy scientist readings.
As Misao Okawa who reached age 117 said, eating delicious things is the key to longevity
- though western "delicious things" are way different to Japanese "delicious things", I still like to lie to myself and proceed to order the bread pudding.
I'm curious as to how it displays the images without first downloading the full size first (and thus not saving bandwidth), is anyone able to explain this?
There's no magic, Browsh is just designed to be run on a remote server where internet is fast and cheap and then accessed over SSH or the browser client from a local network that is likely slow and/or expensive.
It runs a ‘real’ browser on the server and renders pages there.
The use case here is one where one has slow access to a machine with fast internet access, or where the local machine doesn’t have enough resources (e.g. screen resolution, battery live) to render web pages.
While I think Browsh is very interesting, you can immediately see a couple issues with this. When I tried it last week, it worked pretty well for a bit, and then I got an error that all the servers were busy.
That sounds like you were trying the SSH demo. I've currently got that limited to 20 instances. Each one has 2Gb of RAM and a CPU, so it's not cheap. And I'm currently funding it off a modicum of donations.
Yeah, I was using the web demo, and it was fine, but more limited, so I tried the ssh version to check YouTube (my coworker said that was working) and got the error.
Obviously, I don't expect a free service like this to let me stream unlimited video. At first glance, I saw the demo server as the actual service, rather than seeing this as a tool to set up on your vpn. That eliminates the scaling issue and the privacy issues.
It's a free demo with unlimited access to the web. I'm just covering my back for any possible misuse. If there's demand you can pay to turn off logging.
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