Waymo: Partnering with Valley Metro to explore public transportation solutions - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/waymo/partnering-with-valley-metro-to-explore-public-transportation-solutions-ff01ae36484d <comment><USER2> In my mind, there are a few potential outcomes from this kind of a partnership

1\. Waymo and other self driving cars become a bridge for transit, linking riders to major transit hubs and helping transit agencies become more efficient with traditionally expensive services like dial-a-ride and paratransit.

2\. Waymo uses these kinds of partnerships to pull transit riders into their self driving cars and show them how great the experience is, then drops prices over time to divert riders from transit. This could kill traditional fixed route bus systems.

3\. Another outcome could be a combo of the two as many large infastructure projects like subways and light rails will always be more efficient than transit. Bus systems could die and rail systems will thrive.

We shall see I suppose.

<comment><USER3> There are already rideshare-public authority partnerships for transit, in part to address the fact that fixed route bus systems aren't great in suburban areas.

It makes sense for SDCs for much the same reasonds. And the focus on first and last-mile makes it more complementary to existing transit than some partnerships.</comment></comment>


Socially Aware Cloud Storage - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/CloudStorage.html

<comment><USER2> Title should note that this is from 2009 (w/ Nov 2010 update):

>Date: 2009-08-17, last change: $Date: 2010/11/21 10:05:14

However, thanks for posting, as I had missed it.</comment>


Are You in a Bubble? - <AUTHOR> http://diegobasch.com/are-you-in-a-bubble

<comment><USER2> Why think about it when <http://TechBubbleForEveryoneOrJustMe.com/> has you covered? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a lot of smoke being blown into this "bubble".

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I4VKj4d0WI>

Personally, I can't wait for the pendulum to swing. People seem to have forgotten that it's far easier to launch a company when everyone else is panicking and running for safety. You're competing with fewer players, it's easier to find talent and there's more of a focus on starting actual businesses that generate sustained, predictable revenue.

Sounds great to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am not in bubble. I AM bubble. 16 yrs in IT add pounds.

On the other hand: I don't think Facebook "bubbles" will impact IT in a big way. Theoretically, if FB drops dead tomorrow - tech won't suffer that much. It will hurt companies that do business with FB, some marketing people like BuddyMedia etc. But there will be something else to do. And tech market is not based on FB, FB is a niche.

</comment><comment><USER5> _On the other hand, the Facebook bubble could pop any day. Most of the world would barely notice, and LinkedIn would still get business from other growing industries. Disclosure: I own LNKD shares._

Of course he's a believer in LinkedIn and owns shares. His company was acquired by them. I'd like to know if he actually purchased more shares than what he was given with the acquisition.

<comment><USER6> If he can sell the shares, it makes no difference. They are public and liquid, good as cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The price of the biggest new tech company of all, Facebook, has done nothing but go down since its IPO.

The public has said it's overvalued at $100 billion.

That indicates to me that we're not in a bubble.

<comment><USER8> What I do not understand, is why Facebook is called a "technology company". It's no more of a technology company than News Corp or any other media company. The technology there is rather simple, compared to biotech or SpaceX. I would classify it as media/entertainment (which harkens back to Zukerberg Productions) as it used to say at the bottom of FB a few years ago.

<comment><USER9> I take it you're a web developer of some sort, so web technology seems trivial. But building, evolving and operating a site like Facebook is an incredible technical challenge. Sure it's not biotech or space tech which require hard science, and sure the penalties for failure are not as high, but the infrastructure they're building is world class tech. Running a newspaper site at the same scale would be orders of magnitude easier because it's much more trivially cacheable, and I say "would be" because there is no newspaper site that operates at that scale.

Also, speaking of News Corp, let me point out that a big part of how Facebook killed MySpace was MySpace was not able to come anywhere near the performance, or pace of evolution of Facebook. It's also worth noting that the previous market leader, Friendster, failed because they couldn't fix their performance problems when they were a tiny fraction of the size Facebook is now.

There's no need to mince words: Facebook is slinging serious scalability sauce that could only be developed by a leading technology company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reading the title, can't help reacalling Remember Me from TNG, where Beverly Crusher gets entrapped in a warp bubble. Oh, those were the days... watching TNG on nights before almost every exams.

</comment><comment><USER11> FB is worth approximately the same as Kraft foods (70 vs 68 BN). Take away FB for 3 days and you get people bitching on twitter and some lost business for their advertisers. Take away junk food for 3 days and you get riots. Here is what wolfram-alpha thinks FB is going to do: <http://imgur.com/2c5me>

Which company will be here in 20 years...

</comment><comment><USER6> It's not just tech bloggers, here's an article by the Washington Post about Facebook and traders betting against it:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/could-facebook- fall-a...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/could-facebook-fall-all-the- way-to-22/2012/05/24/gJQADFuenU_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> It does in some ways remind me of the first bubble and I'd like to think that we're all a lot smarter now. I don't really see a massive crash happening like before. But anytime there are huge businesses which are not actually making the revenue to merit their stock valuation - there is potential of trouble.

</comment><comment><USER13> My issue with this bubble is that there's no underlying. Instead of green technology, we see Zynga employing people who work full-time trying to exploit the same class of people that were targeted by the dreaded telemarketers of 10 years ago.

The late-90s bubble was frothier, with all the talk of a recession-proof "New Economy" (oddly, most people now long for the Old one) and the massively overvalued technology stocks. Even still, there was a real underlying. The Internet really was changing the way people do business in a rather permanent way. The reason for the bubble was that people overestimated how soon certain changes would arrive.

This bubble doesn't have much of an underlying. I'd even argue that there isn't one. Facebook is a decent product and has provided a lot of value to its users, but it's not as earth-shaking as the Internet, and these "Facebook's tapeworm" startups like Zynga are insults to the millions of people trying to build things that are real. Also, the current climate of extreme social openness (where people want to broadcast their careers and locations without thought to whether they really want people to have access to that data in 5 years) is going to end, and the "cool" social startups will either be dead, or successful and "uncool", within a few years.

</comment><comment><USER14> I bet a lot of VC and angel investors right now are looking at those FB quotes and starting to get a knot in their stomach. The jig is up, the Social Network Bubble that VC's have been hyping and pumping non-stop for the past couple years is over. I bet we'll see a return to interest in companies that have actual revenue, actual customers, and actual businesses.

<comment><USER15> I don't think it'll be over until Twitter IPOs and fails to pop like FB.

I think we need at least these two major brands going thru the same fate for the social networking bubble to be affected.</comment></comment>


Apple spends more than $30M on AWS every month - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/apple-spends-more-than-30-million-on-amazon-web-services-a-month.html <comment><USER2> Why is it news every time that a company spends a lot of money on AWS? Infrastructure costs money. This isn't news.</comment>


Southwest Airlines pilot holds plane for murder victim's family - <AUTHOR> http://www.consumertraveler.com/today/southwest-airlines-pilot-holds-plane-for-murder-victim%E2%80%99s-family/ <comment><USER2> Although I commend Southwest and everyone involved, I'm more bothered by why he couldn't have been afforded even basic additional attention to get him on the flight on time without having to delay take-off. I'm not saying they did the wrong thing, but once you delay a previously on-time flight, you start affecting other people on that flight who might have tight connections.

The fact that they couldn't get him pushed through in the two hours he was there before the flight is the problem. The pilot just fixed the problem that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place. The entire support/service system let this guy down until the very last possible moment.

<comment><USER3> Do not complain about a two-hour security line for a domestic flight. Do you want the terrorists to win? I will wait 15 hours and submit to a TSA full body cavity search if it makes the flight safer.

<comment><USER4> Some may argue that waiting 15 hours and being submitted to a cavity search means the terrorists have already won.

<comment><USER5> It's hard to know these days, especially online, but my sarcasm detector went off for the grandparent post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google cache link: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http://www.consumertraveler.com/today/southwest- airlines-pilot-holds-plane-for-murder-victim%25E2%2580%2599s-family/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a great example of what happens when you give your employees the freedom and authority to do what they think is right, instead of enforcing a blanket set of rules. People are naturally compassionate and willing to do extraordinary things. It often is mostly a matter of getting out of their way to let them do what comes naturally, and rewarding them when they do something amazing.

Imagine what his experience would have been like had the other people he'd encountered had felt similarly empowered.

</comment><comment><USER8> Chicken: Does great customer service make a company great or does a great company insist on great customer service?

Egg: Who cares?

I aspire to build a company with raving fans like Southwest's.

Nice story. Thank you, OP.

<comment><USER9> Well put.

And all great companies have great people, which is yet another chicken/egg question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Incredible story. So happy this pilot got the proper recognition and appreciate he deserved, instead of scolding him for making the plane late. Southwest really is just far and away the best run airline of its class. They don't treat the people who fly on the airline like crap, and they are rewarded for it.

</comment><comment><USER11> This kind of story does a lot to assuage the sort of misanthropic "it's-end- of-the-world-and-people-don't-care-about-each-other" feeling I normally get when often dealing with big corporations. It's awesome to know that people still do the right thing to help other people even when those helpful things might inconvenience their business. It's just heartwarming.

Also, it makes good business sense. Especially for Southwest to say they're "proud" of the pilot for doing it. They ought to be proud. It shows they actually care, and that's what builds long term relationships with customers.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like it's already loading slow.

Alternate source: [http://www.elliott.org/blog/southwest-airlines-pilot- holds-p...](http://www.elliott.org/blog/southwest-airlines-pilot-holds-plane- for-murder-victims-family/)

</comment><comment><USER13> So I think the bigger story here is not that the pilot held the flight (really, it's not all that exceptional for a pilot to hold a flight for a late arriving passenger), but that Southwest is sophisticated enough to relay "hey, this dude's grandson was just murdered" to the pilots and flight crew.

It's also worth stating that even though other pilots on other airlines _would_ have done the same thing, good for that particular pilot for doing it on that particular day.

</comment><comment><USER14> If only every employee was so empowered to provide such a high level of customer service.

</comment><comment><USER15> I fly Southwest almost exclusively because their policies make me feel like a human - particularly their no-change-fee / full-credit policy. Don't charge me $100 for changing an entry in your database!

<comment><USER16> > Don't charge me $100 for changing an entry in your database!

Maybe they use Oracle. :-P

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is not hacker news.

<comment><USER18> Short version: Given the fact that it's sitting on top of the front page with 87 points, the community seems to disagree.

Long version: I don't specifically come to HN to read about why Google stopped doing something with H-2xx in Chrome. I don't specifically come to HN to read about Clojure 1.2. I don't specifically come to HN to read about a fantastic human interest story based on excellent customer service and human decency. What I do come to HN for is the over all quality of the content whether it's technical in nature or not.

It is an extremely narrow view to hope that articles submitted to HN are only technical or related to whatever narrow "belongs on HN" viewpoint you hold. I enjoy reading about Clojure but I also enjoy reading about a tiny little thing going right for humanity because one person (and by extension a huge company) did what was right and I think the community at large does as well.

<comment><USER19> >Given the fact that it's sitting on top of the front page with 87 points, the community seems to disagree

Since we can't downmod, it just means 87 people in the community were really moved and upvoted.

I don't think HN should be strictly tech either (though I do absolutely think "how I built/sold X" is much better than "here's my opinion on Y"), but I don't see how this story is HN material.

<comment><USER18> >Since we can't downmod, it just means 87 people in the community were really moved and upvoted.

Sure but certainly that's one of the risks you accept as a community member here.

The guidelines here say "Anything that would gratify one's intellectual curiosity". Maybe it's a stretch but I have intellectual curiosity about how businesses treat their customers. Seeing a large, successful corporation like Southwest treat a customer with dignity and humanity satisfies my curiosity in the same way. Granted, this is a very specific case but I think the concept is generalized to the bigger picture. It just happens to be wrapped up in a reasonably heartwarming anecdote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What a coincidence that Nancy was the step-mother of the ticketing agent!

<comment> brown9-2 The storytelling isn't very clear, but I think the author meant she is the step-mother of the mother/daughter that lost the 3-year old son.</comment></comment>


The World Expected a Chinese Tech Takeover. Alibaba Can't Even Conquer Vietnam - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-chinas-tech-giants-success-stops-at-the-border-11568043193?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> They played in a rigged market their entire life. Of course, when they have to play in fairgrounds it going hard for them to compete. They aren't good at investing in innovation because they haven't had to be.</comment>


Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different - <AUTHOR> http://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different <comment><USER2> I think it is also hard to be aware that you are in a trend when you are living it. Many of the things that pass as "clean design" at the moment are just a trend, and I promise you that they will look dated soon. This always happens. It happened with 80s hair, with 90s androgyny and it will happen again big text, extreme minimalist, big poetic photo backgrounds and so on.

<comment><USER3> I agree with this, but I guess many Asian websites do feel like they're stuck in a 1998 trend. Actually this also seems to apply to music too... when I hear my Taiwanese friends' music, it seems like it still hasn't escaped boy-band era (1998?).

<comment><USER4> Like "the West" had escaped anything… Justin Bieber? JLS? Even goddamn Take That are still outselling everyone else except _newer_ manufactured pop acts.

People in glass houses should not throw stones.

<comment><USER3> Haha sorry my bad, that is definitely true, but I meant the sound of that era, not boy-bands in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of these points is way off the mark. I'll add my own two cents.

 _Language Barrier - The web and most of the programming languages which drive it were designed by English speakers or western corporations and hence the majority of documentation and educational resources are also in English. Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted._

1\. Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English. They might not be able to carry fluent geopolitical conversations, but they do tend to have enough chops to read API docs and skim code. Most of the Japanese professionals I've met, in any trade, are _ultra professional_ , and will do whatever it takes to stay on top of their craft, including learning English if needed.

2\. It's easy to forget that some of these programming languages, notably Ruby, are actually from Japan. As recently as a few years ago, some of my favorite resources for Ruby were in Japanese, out in front of English.

3\. Go to a Japanese bookstore and check out the section for programmers. More recent web languages/tech, like node.js, are not well represented. But then look to the next shelf and you'll see something like Unity stacked to the ceiling. It could be that Japanese coders would rather work on different kinds of projects, spend their time learning new tech in those domains instead of the web, and only see the web as a means to an end. I wouldn't consider this a "language barrier", but rather a difference in priorities.

<comment><USER6> > _Many of the Japanese coders I 've met have put in the effort to learn > English._

I put a longer response addressing this point in a different thread, but you're interacting with the cohort that has _already chosen to be a computer programmer_. It's a biased sample group. I would expect people with no interest in learning English would be disinclined to even enter programming.

(This is still tertiary to actual cultural preferences in web design, mind you.)

<comment><USER5> Negative. One of the best Japanese coders I know runs his own property management business, and learned coding (and English) so he can stay on top of the various stuff he's created in support of his operations.

<comment><USER7> That's one arbitrary example. It's meaningless if he represents 1 out of a 10000 sample size.

<comment><USER5> It's anecdotal, but dispels the idea that my "sample group" was limited to career programmers, which was the point in the parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are good points made here. I suspect there's also a bit of herding going on.

In Germany, for example, it's pretty easy to find major websites which are fixed-width, left aligned and looking dated. There's no real geographic or historical reason for how it is, other than the fact that their neighbours have a similar style.

In a similar vein, many startups have similar designs. Even on the Internet, where you can connect with anyone in the world, there's a lot of tending towards those who are closest to you.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I suspect this is the major factor. Or maybe I'm just bitter after going to blender.org this morning and finding that they have ditched their orange- on-black color scheme for the "white minimalist + photo" style that's all the rage these days. Bleh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not just Japan or asian websites. The further away you get from the silicon valley bubble, the more sites look like they are from the late 90's. It's not really even location specific, more how tuned in developers are to the bay area style. You can look at local news papers in the US for example, or even government sites. I think part of the reason is that there's a lot of design talent in the bay area, and the further removed one is from being involved, the less people care about things like flat design and having lots of space and less content, etc.

<comment><USER11> That's a good thing. I am sick of lots of space and less content - I I go to websites to read things, not just look at them. A lot of minimalist websites are pretty in the abstract but unfriendly towards potential customers by withholding information or making users jump through hoops to get to it.

<comment><USER12> Yeah a lot of websites make you scroll too much. So sick of scrolling like 3 pages to see one sentence slide in from the left in 48 point text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A few more points:

\- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable space, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's.

\- I can well imagine that, in the minds of the staid gerontocrats who maintain an iron grip on Japanese corporate life, a website is merely a modern version of those "me! me! me!" brochures that get shoved in my mailbox every day. So it's natural that they would expect it to look like one.

\- Japanese culture is not nearly as minimalist as its made out to be in the West. Minimalism has its place, of course, but in commercial spaces its all about competing for attention, to the point of sensory overload.

<comment><USER14> \- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable spaaaaaace, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's.

I second this theory. A similar version of this happened in China too. A few years back, when Baidu was still copying Google's minimal design pixel by pixel, they suddenly discovered that it was losing traffic to a random site with only one static html page setup: hao123, which also fit into the 'cluttered, link-rich' interface category. Baidu ended up acquiring hao123, spending close to a million dollars on a few lines of html. Note that Chinese language bears quite some similarities to Japanese, they are both character based and typically a hassle to type in large chunks.

</comment></comment><comment> DanI-S > "Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980′s > vision of the future"

I'm British, living in the US, and I've always felt this way about America. I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain.

Not sure what to make of it, but it's interesting!

<comment><USER15> If you average all of those feelings out, then does it mean that we really _are_ living in a 1980's version of the future?

<comment><USER16> Only tangentially related if that, but I re-read Neuromancer recently and realized with some sadness that its very evocative opening line [1] will quite quickly cease to have meaning for generations who grew up without analog TVs. We tend to think of literature as timeless, but there's a very real, if small, slice of it washed out by the tide of shifting metaphors.

[1] "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"

<comment><USER17> I've heard it observed before that current generations will assume this meant that the sky was blue, or perhaps black, that being what many televisions display when 'tuned' to an inactive input.

Before i got to your comment, reading the grandparent about this being a 1980s future immediately put me in mind of something else William Gibson said in ~1993:

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"

<comment><USER16> I like to think they'd envision a big blue box stretched across the sky, with the words "This channel only available to premium subscribers." If nothing else, it'd capture the cyberpunk aesthetic nicely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good morning from Tokyo! Sites like Rakuten have more to do with in-house politics than Japanese design trends or a love for information density. [http://bm.straightline.jp](http://bm.straightline.jp) is a better guage of where he Japanese web _design_ trends are headed. As you can see, there's a lot of echoes of flash heavy sites and flat one page designs, but little which represents the special kind of chaos large bottom up created sites like Yahoo or Rakuten. They're more akin to the million dollar website than anything else.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for that insightful perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a breakdown somewhere of two distinct groups of human activities:

Design where correctness is defined as optimizing some metric goal, like designing an electronic circuit for maximum performance at a fixed price, or the strongest bridge pylon for a fixed cost or perhaps for a fixed concrete volume.

vs

Design where correctness is defined as a large group of people trying to imitate each other at an optimum distance as close as possible without introducing legal difficulties with accusations of direct copying and not failing at user interaction much worse than anyone else.

Web design and most software UI is obviously almost entirely in the latter category.

A huge source of disaster and trouble is people using language and attitudes from one category in the other category.

I'm not sure what to google / wikipedia for... this must be well trodden ground after a couple millenia of ladies high fashion clothing design, for example.

</comment><comment><USER20> The anecdotal cultural 'explanations' here are a little ridiculous without some real data to reference.

> Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become > comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / > space

not true - article with references: [http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster- chine...](http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chinese-or- english/)

> Japanese doesn't have italics or capital letters which limits the > opportunities for adding visual punch that you get with latin alphabets

Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text.

> Language Barrier... Although much gets translated this still causes a delay > in new technologies and trends being adopted

Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight

> Risk Avoidance

This might help explain why Japanese websites look similar to each other, but not why they look different from 'Western' websites. You could make a similar claim about big sites like Microsoft and Yahoo that have copied the look an feel of Google, or the mass of slightly-modified Bootstrap-based 'Western' sites. Risk avoidance/copying is universal - it does not explain the difference between Japanese and non-Japanese websites.

> Consumer Behaviour - People require a high degree of assurance, by means of > lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a > purchasing decision

Evidence, or is this just a personal observation?

> Advertising – Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese > companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push > their message across as loudly as possible

Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, _everyone_ demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing? It's not culturally unique.

> Urban Landscape

This has some research to back it up - Nisbett, Masuda, Shah, others

Other claims also read as casual inductive observations that don't hold up to much scrutiny. There probably are very interesting reasons why web design appears to be so culturally influenced, but this article doesn't really elucidate much.

/end rant

<comment><USER6> While I agree with the vast majority of your criticisms, I wouldn't be surprised if you're underestimating the language barrier issue.

> _Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the > world? Why would web development /design be different than almost every > other technical industry?_

Many programming languages are based on English and the Latin script. Programming, and more specifically web programming, requires a level of fluency with English and its alphabet that I would expect significantly decreases the available talent pool in non-Anglo countries, especially countries with different writing systems[1].

No other technologies lean so heavily a specific language. Math and science are universal and independent of any language. Computer science is universal. Computer programming is not.

[1]Comparing a country like Vietnam (that uses a Latin script) to another equivalent Asian country might be interesting.

<comment><USER21> Apart from having Latin-like script I don't think there is much similarity between English and Vietnamese.

Either way, isn't Japan also famous for its engineering prowess? I doubt that country with such high engineering competency will lack talent for web development simply because of the language barrier (if there is actually the lack of talent at all). I'm not saying language barrier doesn't exist but if language barrier didn't prevent them from having companies like Konami, Square Enix, Namco, Bandai, Nintendo or Sony then why would it prevents them to have more web developers?

Ruby was created by a Japanese for that matter.

<comment><USER22> Unsurprisingly, the companies you listed churn out some pretty terrible code. Square Enix for example has pretty big problems with ffxiv because hacking and botting is so easy. Maintenance windows have gotten longer and are occurring more often in an effort to patch vulnerabilities. Just last week players who were in a specific city accessing their retainers (personal bankers) had their money flushed from their characters by hackers who compromised the trade cluster and transfered it to their bots by listing bogus trash items for millions of gold.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but it's not like companies in western world don't make similar mistake. WoW/DB3 have plenty of exploits too. Bad code are produced by everyone regardless the cultural or native language background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ok, there's some truth to this article, I'm not going to say the author is all wrong, but look at Amazon.com's home page and imagine you couldn't read English.

[http://cl.ly/image/2i0r0G091U0P](http://cl.ly/image/2i0r0G091U0P)

It would look _really_ jumbled, incoherent, and poorly architected. Given that you _can_ speak English, it's relatively easy to digest the nav, suggested books, ads, etc.

My guess is that there are cultural expectations driving their design choices (particularly in color scheme). But the biggest difference is probably the fact that their type appears impossibly complicated. Nothing more.

<comment><USER24> Not a good example. Amazon.com is famously a jumbled mess.

<comment><USER25> It's an excellent example; it's directly comparable with the Japanese sites which are also big legacy companies with a lot of content competing for attention. It's not as if Amazon is an outlier in design terms amongst major Western ecommerce or portal sites. _Most_ Yahoo regional sites look a bit like the Japanese one, although some got round to updating the logo quicker. The US top sites list boasts portals that are even more text-heavy ike Reddit (and of course the infamous Craigslist) or noisy like the Huffington Post

Japanese startups, on the other hand, appear to enjoy their SV-style big stock photos, large bold text and colourful calls to action: [http://thebridge.jp/en/2013/06/top-50-japanese- startups](http://thebridge.jp/en/2013/06/top-50-japanese-startups)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I guess the cultural aspect is a big reason here. Everyone who has ever watched japanese television or has seen the nightlife of major japanese cities will be overwhelmed by the amound of screaming, blinking lights and information, it's quite different from the western point of view.. :)

<comment><USER27> Interestingly the information rate of spoken Japanese is comparatively low.

[http://ohll.ish- lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...](http://ohll.ish- lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf)

<comment><USER28> That is interesting. Though I don't have supporting evidence I find that the exformation rate of Japanese language amongst native speakers is relatively high. This view is widely held by Japanese people themselves. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishin- denshin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishin-denshin)

<comment><USER27> I'm familiar with the concept as it's one of the things that makes me feel even more comfortable with the language– for certain things at least. That being said, there is also a form of comedy based on the vagueness and misinterpretation of speech. I'm at a loss for what it's called– a quick check brought me to manzai[0] but it's not what I'm thinking of. I'll have to keep searching.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzai)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Semi-related story. I was doing a fan site for Final Fantasy XIV (mmo from Square Enix). It's interesting to see how things have to behave differently when a tech company has to deal with Japanese and English.

For tweets from their marketing department, they would write a tweet in Japanese first which would fit into a single tweet, but would spill over between 3 tweets when translated to English.

Within the FFXIV game, they had a chat box (like chat in many MMOs). The input field for typing in text only allowed 80 or so characters. This was fine for Japanese, but for English it was extremely limited. They fixed it soon after release, but it was something the dev team didn't realize as they were all Japanese.

<comment><USER30> There was a blog post from James Fallows last year[1] which contained a English translation of a single Chinese tweet. 140 Chinese characters transformed into 115 English words with 676 characters.

[1][http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/chi...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/china- soft-power-watch-the-yang-rui-foreign-bitch-factor/257403/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the first picture I saw border navigation panels and a main center content area. Why is that "too many columns"? 1998 was a good year, web pages contained more information, not just text boxes super sized freakishly, low content, just large massive items on screens which have shrunk vertically the past several years which is far more of a conundrum to me. Making use of columns seems to make more sense now than it did in 1998. If anything, the Japanese are ahead of the curve. If screen sizes start growing vertically again then I could see your point.

</comment><comment><USER32> The Japonic devotion to craftmanship does not typically extend into the virtual world. The culture certainly places an emphasis on physical goods.

I disagree in general with his statement, but Nobel Prize winner in physics Hideki Yukawa said that "The Japanese mentality is, in most cases, unfit for abstract thinking, and takes interest merely in tangible things".

<comment><USER33> He also said that at least 46 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I feel like the author wrote this article with a bias that Western websites are better and more aesthetically pleasing because it's simpler. But those are all subjective matters and Asian users probably prefer what they have. I come from a Korean background and I visit many different Korean and American websites daily, including the ones mentioned in the article. While some of the reasons given may seem plausible, non of them were actually convincing. There isn't really a solid reason why Asian websites look like that. That's just how it was and users are familiar with it. Some people like Hacker News because it's simple, while some people don't like it because it's too simple. There's no better or worse, it's just a preference.

Also, those patterns are not unique to Asian websites. If you go to cnn.com or msn.com, they're not that different either.

<comment><USER28> The bias you speak about is evident in the article's title. "Why Japanese Web Design Is So ... Different". The baseline is by implication English design, since the article was written in English. Probably also some subset of English sites that the author feels is representative, and expects his/her readers to resonate with. This is fine, but the problem is that this bias is not made explicit. It feels a little like asking "why are all these foreigners speaking funny languages?"

Since Japanese sites apparently look like they have not evolved since they were last like English sites around 1998, the better question might have been what factors have been driving evolution of English sites which did not affect Japanese? You may add other languages, but I'll just stick with Japanese since it is referenced by the OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm surprised this article got so many upvotes. It's a lot of anecdotal evidence, and even the anecdotes and websites they pointed out don't support the point that much.

[http://yahoo.com](http://yahoo.com) and [http://yahoo.co.jp](http://yahoo.co.jp) both have similar, tight aesthetic with a lot going on.

[http://youtube.com](http://youtube.com) (view in incognito if you are signed into an account [http://nicovideo.jp](http://nicovideo.jp) are very similarly information-dense. I'd say Youtube's layout is even more jumbled with all the different column widths as you go down the page.

[http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/](http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/) and [http://newyorktimes.com](http://newyorktimes.com) are both very information- dense, with a lot of text on the page.

And these are the cherry-picked examples that _this very article_ chose.

Here are some other sites that are among the most popular in Japan:

\- [http://naver.jp](http://naver.jp) \- Clean, Google-like simplicity

\- [http://www.ameba.jp/](http://www.ameba.jp/) \- Very common splash page style front page, and inside is a very busy social-network-like page, but not really that much different from Facebook, except the ads are a bit more tastefully done.

\- [http://www.nifty.com/](http://www.nifty.com/) \- Yahoo-like portal

Do these sites really look that different to you? If your answer is yes, I'm going to guess that you probably don't read Japanese, and that it being an unfamiliar jumble of characters is what makes it look weird/different/intimidating. Look past that, though, and you'll see that the similar sites ended up at a similar conclusion, even if aren't mirror images.

<comment><USER13> Re: Yahoo!, I guess you must be in the A group and I must be in the B group, because on my browser they look very different.

About a year ago, yahoo.com and yahoo.co.jp looked rather different. Yahoo! Japan's portal was astonishingly cluttered. Then it seems that Yahoo! HQ cracked the whip and ordered everyone to get in line, so the Japanese site became more like the US one. Still pretty messy, but nowhere near the sensory overload levels it reached before.

Now, it looks like Yahoo! have cleaned up their site more, and turned it more into more of a "What's hot!" portal. But, on my browser, Yahoo! Japan hasn't changed yet.

Of course, the article is cherry-picking a bit, but I don't think it's being unfair. Popular Japanese sites, including big e-shops, are garish and cluttered to a degree that would be unacceptable in the West.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Even though there may be a cultural difference, it's not enough. Look at Modern Japanese architecture. There are tons of different styles. Some clean and minimal, others maximal and extremely busy.

Japan is a very pluralistic country and there are going to be all kinds of different styles and personalities there in any field you choose.

My feeling is that big companies take a long time to change design. In the US, sites like the new york times, Dell, yahoo, Ebay, Techcrunch, zappos all had, at one point recently, really old-looking or just plain bad websites.

Even amazon is busted. Try searching for something and navigating to the 10th page of your search results. amazon is a wasteland in terms of usability and design.

</comment><comment><USER37> There's actually some truth to this that is missing in the article. I had lived in China for awhile and it was so incredibly difficult to navigate Chinese websites. I'm using China as an example because the web designs are similar.

There was some study done awhile ago within China that I can't find the link to that compared the designs of a complicated site like sina.com.cn with text and images all over the place and compared it with a much simpler design that practiced white space and minimalism. It showed that the Chinese actually preferred complicated designs over simple designs. Having lived in China, this makes sense to me because of the culture. Simplicity and white space is not very well practiced. The "East Meets West" graphic by Yang Liu is probably a good example of some of the cultural differences.

<comment><USER38> Would you mind linking to that graphic?

<comment><USER39> [http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=yang+liu+east+meets+west](http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=yang+liu+east+meets+west)

<comment><USER38> Hey thanks for the link, and for not being a passive-aggressive prick.

<comment><USER39> Maybe I was a little rude (not quite as rude as calling someone a "passive- aggressive prick," mind you), but this behavior is annoying. I thought it was one of the "rules of the internet" or something that you make the bare minimum of effort to find something yourself before you bother people about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Different" is a very diplomatic way of saying it. Probably better to just call it what it is: wrong. The link seems to be dead so I haven't even read the article but I do have some personal experience in the matter.

While there are a bunch of reasons for why it is the way it is, I think a big part of it is the goddamned Keitai. For a lot of Japanese, the only way they ever accessed the web was via their mobile phone. Until smartphones, this meant a very very dumbed down experience. Sadly, even now that smartphones are prevalent, there's still an attitude of "Let's wait and see if this smartphone fad keeps up for a while..."

</comment><comment><USER41> Most of this simply has to do with lack of disruption. Almost all sites tend to add clutter over time because new things need to be added and some stakeholders don't want old things removed. Sometimes the only way to get clean new design is to start over. My guess is that competition has been less fierce and/or has been won (rigged?) by incumbents more often than it has been in the US, leading to slower iteration and acceptance of less-than-ideal design by consumers.

Enterprise versus consumer apps is the same story - lack of disruption and consumer choice leads to decisions that make sense only to the middlemen.

</comment><comment><USER42> I see it like this:

I regularly used a fax machine at my job in Japan, and personal computers were not prevalent in my workplace. Businesses are very conservative and don't want to stand out.

In Japan, print is still the dominant way of spreading information. I always figured that the best designers ended up as print designers—and my web developer friends used Dreamweaver.

Not only that, CSS is very inconsistent with its english: "visibility: visible" OK! so then the opposite is "visibility: invisible" right? No. It's hidden.

</comment><comment><USER43> Try searching .io domains regionally. You'll find Japan has modern designs out there.

[https://www.google.com/search?as_q=&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as...](https://www.google.com/search?as_q=&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=lang_ja&cr=countryJP&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=.io&as_occt=any&safe=images&tbs=&as_filetype=&as_rights=)

</comment><comment><USER44> So I don't know what to make of [http://apple.com/jp](http://apple.com/jp)

Is it just cultural ignorance on Apple's behalf or do Japanese people secretly appreciate this design style (given the popularity of Apple products in Japan)?

<comment><USER45> I don't think there's much of a correlation between the rise in popularity of Apple products in Japan and Apple's Japanese website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> To disagree with one of the smaller points in the article: Uniqlo's website is not a great counterpoint to the trend of bad/outdated web design. I like their clothing, but their website (although modern looking) is one of the worst user experiences out there.

Search is an afterthought, and if you want to get to something at the bottom of a category page, have fun wading through several dynamic sub-category load times.

</comment><comment><USER47> To my knowledge, there isn't just a mobile _legacy_ \- the majority of Japanese still use a phone as their primary internet access device.

</comment><comment><USER48> One of my guess is that "applization"(I mean a web service becomes more and more like an app) has its role to play in current simple/clean/flat web design trend. A more app-like web service is more likely to require the app visual design. So this could be an interesting perspective to examine the development status of web design in different parts of the world.

</comment><comment><USER49> 404 - HN Effect :(

"Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_jk/1.2.25 mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.5.2 PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.27 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 Server at randomwire.com Port 80"

If this is your server, you shouldn't be giving so much information away. Make would-be attackers work a be at enumerating you.

<comment> T-Winsnes [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://randomwire.com/why- japanese-web-design-is-so-different)

Google captured the page before it went down :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Japanese web design tends to be broadly reflective of Japanese product packaging: cram as much textual info as will fit into limited space.

They have a U.S.-sized population and nearly U.S.-sized industrial base running inside a California-sized archipelago. They've gotten good at making the most of space.

</comment><comment><USER51> From that one screen shot he provides it looks like the reason the Japanese do it differently is because they don't assume their visitors are driven off by masses of text. I wish more websites I use were stuffed full of information (or what I assume is information) like that.

</comment><comment><USER52> Bakemonogatari, watch an episode of that and you'll see how creative Japanese text and design can be. Unfortunately the websites don't follow that trend, and anime is certainly a creative outlet with significant freedoms. Would be nice to see a renaissance over there.

</comment><comment><USER53> I find it interesting that a site that is posting about cultural trends is itself following one of the current western web site trends:narrow central column of text with tons and tons of empty white space on either side...

</comment><comment><USER54> Well, their adult content is also pretty different. Think about it.

</comment><comment><USER55> Interesting article. I really like Microsoft's metro design language but i often wonder how well it works out for asian languages.

</comment><comment><USER56> I would just like to say that Xelom & j03w make the best argumets in this entire thread...

</comment><comment><USER57> Wow. So ethnocentrism. Much condescent.

<comment><USER58> I agree with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> _> Windows XP & IE 6 – although the number of people using ancient Microsoft software is rapidly decreasing there are still a fair number of people using these dinosaurs, especially in corporate environments. Enough said._

Wow, this is like saying their clothes look different from ours because their sowing machines are too old. Their hair styles are different because their scissors have longer blades, their food is different because they use chopsticks - ETC.

Their web design is different because they are different culturally. Their tastes and preferences are stylistically different. just because their gardens are liked in the west, does not mean we like all of their stylistic preferences. This blog post is completely wrong IMO. "Enough said".</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone started a non tech related business before? - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone here started businesses that are not in the tech field, for example coffee shops, food franchises, worktop manufacture etc? What were the outcomes... <comment><USER2> This dude seems cool <http://doejo.com/>. I saw his design work and was impressed. He has an address listed on this website and I looked it up and it turns out to be this coffee shop near me. I chalked it up that he must work out of that coffee shop a lot.

A few months later, I just realized the guy OWNS that coffee shop :) And another one too in chicago. He also owns a vintage clothing store across the street from me, and sounds like he's building bar.

Looks like he's constantly still designing web applications and manages to run all these other non techy successful projects (his 2 coffee houses are pretty busy and get very positive reviews).

<comment><USER3> Yeah - I'm friends with Phil. He owns <http://nobletreecoffee.com> and <http://www.dollopcoffee.com>. Sometimes I wonder if he ever sleeps. He is trying to also open up a bar. He is also constantly photo blogging <http://philcoextra.com> and just launched www.texthog.com

<comment><USER4> I see he had a nice write-up here:

[http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi- bin/article.pl?article_id...](http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi- bin/article.pl?article_id=27423&seenIt=1)

It's a couple of years old but describes his strategy, which seems to be: get a loan to buy a business, add value, sell and move on to gradually bigger loans and businesses.

Nice execution!

P.S.: I don't know why somebody voted down your comment because to me this adds helpful information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm part of a company that my brother started. We oversee the production of fair trade products in Zambia and sell them (mostly) in the US. Right now we have an organic beeswax lip balm, and also soap. Other products are in the works as well.

<http://zambeezi.com/> <http://zambiansoap.com/>

We're doing pretty well, have a couple employees that we pay — one hourly and one on salary/commission. We aren't yet making enough that the owners are getting paid, but that may soon change.

I am also writing two web apps that we use for managing customers, ordering, invoicing, etc... I'm planning on releasing them as SaaS for other small businesses, but have not yet done that.

</comment><comment><USER6> I started a cafe while I was in college, which is still in operation today (4 years later). I no longer own or manage the business, but it's exciting to grab a brew there when I visit my old campus.

Looking back, that cafe gave me a huge insight into leading a creative team-- we had 7 very active employees-- and taught me to to appreciate the less glamorous side of starting a business-- like staying late to clean up or restocking the shelves.

<comment><USER7> How did you finance the café initially, as a college student?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I started an Oil and Natural Gas E&P (exploration and production) company when I was 25.

And no, I didn't have an "in" to the hydrocarbons business (a lot of people ask). My background is Stanford CS.

<comment><USER9> Much success yet? This sounds like a very exciting business to be in.

<comment><USER8> Ask me in 20 years.

<comment><USER9> I don't get it? You haven't yet struck riches or you are operating covertly and don't want Chevron to drink your milkshake?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a farm with my grandmother. We grow blueberries and figs. It's very interesting to make decisions that take years to see how they pan out.

</comment><comment><USER11> It wasn't exactly a business, but a couple of friends and I used to buy suburban railway tickets from the automatic vending machine. The machine required a smartcard whose minimum denomination was 10x the maximum ticket price, so people would rather wait in long ques to get the ticket from the clerk rather than use the ATVM. We bought some cards and people were happy to buy tickets through us for a small surcharge. We also made money on recharge options for the smart card. There were others who did the same thing and this is where I got my first taste at stealing customers.

As for the outcome, we got bored after we had saved enough for a PS3 ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> While in college I started and still run a summer storage company for college students. The problems associated with it were primarily customer service and logistic based for dealing with people stuff. I can't imagine it was much different from generally having to do customer service for a tech company, just different fields.

<comment><USER13> That sounds like an excellent idea. How is it working out?

<comment><USER12> It's very seasonal.

There is a lot of money it, considering that parents usually just pay for it, but me and my cofounder decided are taking a humane approach to it and trying to not rip off students.

A bunch of the big companies charge upwards of 50 dollars for a box that is about 2x1x1.5 feet. I realize business is business and that people are willing to pay that much, but it's nice being able to half those people's prices and still make a good profit.

We're looking to expand and maybe go head on with a bunch of the companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> comic book studio in middle school. i had a high school friend who was an amazing penciler/inker, so we teamed up and pretty much blew our friends away. we stopped after he went to college in oregon and i repressed my creativity to make room for practical stuff like AP classes, standardized exams, etc. i always look back on those times fondly and hope to revisit it someday.

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried to start this: <http://www.HapTap.com> in college an emoticon keyboard. What do you guys think?

</comment><comment><USER15> I am part of a company that manufactures canoes for competitive racing. It's been two years and we are doing well enough to live off the business. The most positive aspect is that we have 7 months of backorders. Our biggest problem is trying to expand without funding or loans. Another major hurdle is increasing production without a loss in quality.

<comment><USER16> Are they composite? Do you have only one plug/mold thats causing the bottleneck?

<comment><USER15> yes. Two molds in production. A third entering soon and we are making more molds. So it's part of the bottleneck, but skilled labor and shop space is also a challenge.

<comment><USER16> Most of the composite shops I know are somewhat to very slow right now. Maybe you could farm it out to someone in your area. Where are you located?

<comment><USER15> We are in Hawai'i and I only know of one other real composite shop here. If we were in California or someplace else I could see that being a great option.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, you are quite a ways away. Maybe you already do, but using prepreg can make the process a lot faster, much easier layup, and better final quality - but I doubt there is an autoclave that size on the island.

You could easily make an unpressurized one though, I made an autoclave for a 15"x8" solar car body I designed in college out of plywood, insulation, and a heater/thermostat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A local courier company in Bucharest. Mainly fast deliveries on scooters. After about one year it paid its bills, but I didn't get along with my partner and got out. Since then he turned it into a sub-contractor for a larger courier company, and swapped the scooters for vans - more profit, but a whole lot more risk.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've started 2 business. The first was renting inflatables for kid's birthday parties. It was a small, part-time business that I started to get experience marketing, dealing with customers, etc. It was fun and quite a work-out (they weigh from 300 to 500 lbs). I sold to a competitor when I moved and essentially broke even. My wife tells me every few weeks we should have kept one (we have lots of kids in our extended family and usually rent one for birthday parties).

My wife and I bought a business that does ultrasounds of expectant mothers (she's an ultrasound tech). It will be 2 years in Jan. Business is still growing, though not as fast as I had hoped. My wife mainly runs it and has learned quite a bit about business. Not yet profitable, but we're hopeful, we're working on getting a lower-cost lease and more clients each week.

</comment><comment><USER19> I started a company looking to do some small scale manufacturing. In a non-web space, it really depends on IP, either currently had or to be developed. Also, any product that is larger than a hand-held widget is going to cost into the hundred thousands to produce (molds, jigs, etc.). There is no open-source manufacturing.

Anything like coffee shops or restaurants are going to take all of your time and be difficult to scale. Only if you reach a level where you can franchise can you get to sustainable growth. Otherwise, it is how much time can you spend on growing it. Anyone who would be capable of taking over some of your responsibilities is likely to go and start their own restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER20> A friend of mine from high school (we're both at different colleges now) and I have put on a few local theater plays. If you keep your costs low enough and can find actors for free, you can make some decent money (couple grand).

<comment><USER21> I don't know what to think of this. Sure you are working to get this working and you deserve to be paid for it... but so does the actors. In my opinion, you were making money on the back of other people's dream.

<comment><USER22> Well, the actors _were_ getting paid, just not in money. The actors obviously decided it was worth the experience and publicity to invest their time.

That's why the acting trade is so hard to get in to. There are thousands of people willing to supply their skills for free. The supply vastly outweighs the demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I haven't _started_ a non-tech related business, but my parents started their own consulting company, which you can read more about through our blog: <http://blog.seliger.com> . The outcome was good, since we've been in business for 16 years.

What in particular do you want to know, aside from the outcome?

</comment><comment><USER16> Put my design engineering company on part time 6 months ago to start a new company selling a new type of eco-friendly lawn seed.

<http://www.earthturfco.com>

Stays green and low growing without fertilizer or chemicals.

Built and sold coat racks when I was a kid.

</comment><comment><USER24> I do freelance tutoring on the side. Eventually, I'll put up a website and write some materials for sale.

</comment><comment><USER25> i've been toying around with the same idea for a while, but the things i've thought about seem to be capital and time intensive. i recently read an article that compares opening your own restaurant to throwing your money away. i guess it depends on location and product/service.

<comment><USER26> I know the guy who started Ike's Place in San Francisco. He went from being homeless at some point in his life to the number one SF restaurant on yelp.com. I think the reason why he is so successful now is because he has some big failures under his belt. He has a tech degree but was always interested in starting non-tech businesses.

<comment><USER27> That's quite interesting. I live a block away from Ike's Place and have seen several businesses come and go in that space. I figured the location was just not good enough to support enough traffic for a business. Then one day this little sandwich shop opens up. I write it off as something that won't last based on what I've seen happen to other shops in that space. We'll I'm glad nobody was taking bets that day. Oh, it's lunchtime, I think I'll treat myself to a sandwich.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A friend and I are starting a retail sales consulting company. We're planning on developing training tools for managers to use with their sales staff. It's in its infancy still (started the 1st of the month), so no results yet.

</comment><comment><USER28> I own several well known franchised fast food restaurants for 25 years.

<comment><USER29> Do you have anything written up about being a franchise owner? I've heard of a couple people doing quite well, but I'm not sure what kind of effort goes into it.

<comment><USER28> I forgot the OP asked about the outcome.

I started with this franchisor when they were virtually unheard of, and now I'm sure all of you have eaten in one. For me, it's been highly successful and I earn a substantial income from it. However, the first few years were very difficult because it wasn't what I was used to. It's a totally different environment from professional engineering including the people. Dealing with them is quite different.

Running a restaurant means it's always on your mind. Things are always going wrong, mostly from people quitting, so it requires a lot of hours. It's also very hard on other family members, or perhaps due to other family members, that might want to put their two cents into how you should be running things. (Mostly wives.)

Almost everyone I know has provided themselves some income to a good salary but there were a few who went bankrupt. Now that's a few out of a hundred in my region.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon proves that REST doesn't matter for Cloud APIs - <AUTHOR> http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/1700 <comment><USER3> Capability trumps everything else.

If AWS sucked, or was merely a typical collection of services, then details about its API design might matter. Of course, AWS isn't typical – it's exceptional. Thus, its API could require the use of carrier pigeons and people would still be lining up to use it.

That said, nicer APIs are nicer. As someone that has programmed directly to EC2's APIs, I _so_ wished they were less crufty. I now use jclouds (via pallet), so I thankfully don't have to think about such things anymore.

</comment><comment><USER4> I find that RESTfulness improves the quality of design by forcing a little consideration on how to represent resources and actions on resources. The alternative is often littering the API with actions anytime a new one is needed - once that first version is out in the wild, it becomes a lot harder to take the time to consider the design choices. REST gives you a conceptual framework in which to implement new functionality.

In addition, all the consumers get the benefit of a common specification - <USER2> you tell me your service is RESTful, I can probably start making requests without even knowing much more than a starting URI, because I know how GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE will behave; I know what the error/success codes are going to look like; I can guess that Content-Type is going to drive the input and Accept will drive the output.

Sure, the consumer is probably going to leap through whatever hoops I put out there if they want my data, but RESTfulness is a courtesy, extending a hand and saying I'm not going to make extra work for you.

In the case of the OP, I'd say "Amazon proves that people who want to use a well-designed and beneficial service will work with whatever they're given".

</comment><comment><USER5> Amazon's API format is irrelevant because their service is so popular. Once the API is stable and client libraries are available for common languages most developers will be unaware of the actual mechanics.

If you're launching a startup then you don't want to give your early adopters an excuse to not work with your API. If you're developing an API for internal use then you won't be using an off the shelf client library in any case.

Furthermore, a clean API is a sign to other developers that you know what you are doing. If you are targetting an industry where coders get a say on whether or not they will choose your service then you'd better put your best foot forward. I've seen far too many APIs that show a company has no clue on the technical side, which causes me to cast doubt on other parts of their service.

</comment><comment><USER6> S3 is a superb example of a REST API, and is a key example in the RESTful Web Services book.

<comment><USER7> EC2's API is awful, inconsistent, and the subject of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The OP is completely correct. I designed a bunch of the Windows Azure APIs - we spent a lot of time making sure they were RESTful. Looking back now, I think it was a big waste of time. Almost everyone uses the API through some custom library and I doubt it would have mattered if we hadn't taken the trouble.

I'm involved in some API design again and I sent out a mail saying that any discussions involving whether option A or option B is the more 'rest-ful' thing to do will get smacked down :)

<comment><USER9> Hey Sriram - When are we getting coffee? I'll code against Amazon's gnarly API because I _have_ to, not because I want to. Flickr's another great example of this. I mean, seriously, look at some of the calls, here: <http://www.flickr.com/services/api/>

I think it's way more logical to POST a photo_id to <http://flickr.com/galleries/123456/photos> than to POST to [http://www.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.galleries...](http://www.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.galleries.addPhoto&api_key=123456&gallery_id=123456&photo_id=98765) (note: HN is truncating the displayed link.)

Then again, I don't think I'm in the target demographic for Azure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From personal experience where I work (mobile apps company) I can say that a RESTful API is a good choice usually in terms of familiarity and reuse of code. We usually work with RESTful APIs, so when a new one comes, we already have our internal libraries to handle it, speeding up development.

But we work with other kinds of APIs as well, when a client asks. Apart having to do more work since we don't have code to reuse for that, we have no other problems.

If it works well, it does not matter if it's RESTful or not. But as for everything, if you are familiar with something, you are usually faster and more accurate.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you ignore the APIs, AWS still has a substantial number of merits which make it a formidable player. It is a huge leap to say that because the market has smiled on AWS, we all love everything about it and wouldn't prefer more of it be REST-ful.

<comment><USER12> Exactly, if there was a similarly priced alternative to AWS that has a fully RESTful API I'd choose the one with the RESTful API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's not really a very consistent AWS API. Some services are very restful, others are not.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Every time a new Cloud API is announced, its "RESTfulness" is heralded as if it was a MUST HAVE feature. And yet, the most successful of all Cloud APIs, the AWS API set, is not RESTful."

I think whether you have REST or REST-like (i.e. RPC over HTTP) doesn't matter so much, as long as it's not SOAP.

That's what people are lauding.

<comment><USER13> EC2 uses SOAP, no one cares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the headline a deliberate echo of Dick Cheney's famous observation that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter"? Or a rhetorical malapropism?

</comment><comment><USER16> Are there more reasons than just "it's simpler" and "Amazon did well without it"?

</comment><comment><USER17> The RESTfulness of an API is of very low concern on how I choose a service to use and the quality of the service is paramount.

If the API lets me get things done and/or provides an abstraction library in my language of choice so I never have to see it, I really couldn't care less how it is written.

Does REST make more semantic sense? Of course, but if your app has no features or consistently loses my data, I couldn't give a shit.

</comment><comment><USER18> Could maybe someone give a concise definition of what makes an API RESTful and explain why the AWS Query API is not RESTful and how a RESTful API would be better?

<comment><USER19> Take a look at Wikipedia's description, for example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer#RESTful_web_services)

Applying this to one of Vambenepe's examples of an AWS method--

"AWS mostly uses RPC over HTTP. You send HTTP GET requests, with instructions like ?Action=CreateKeyPair added in the URL..."

you can see that it's not RESTful. A RESTful version of this method would have something like "KeyPairs" in the URL path rather than in the query string, and it would use POST rather than GET to signify a create operation.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the pointer. I read the Wikipedia page, but I found the explanation of the general concept too abstract. The definition of a RESTful web service further down the page is much clearer.

However, does it really make any practical difference whether the API makes full use of all the HTTP methods (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE)? Sure, it may be a bit of an abuse of the protocol to encode everything as a GET, but since you usually don't want any caching when using such an API, does it really matter?

<comment><USER20> I'm designing a RESTful api at the moment and using get, post, put, and delete to represent select, insert, update, and delete gives users a clear pattern when new features are added. Right now say there are just photos in my app. Post json or XML to /photos to create a new one, put to /photos/123/ to update. Now I announce that I'm adding videos. The pattern is exactly the same, the URL is just / videos. But I suppose you're right, I could achieve the same effect with ?object=video&action=createNew, but why make users learn a new vocabulary?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lots of things succeed despite being inelegant, but that does not mean it's not important to be elegant.

Amazon can afford to have an inelegant API as they're already dominant (and when they launched, they didn't have many competitors).

If someone launching an Amazon EC2 competitor today strapped together a pig- ugly set of RPCs over HTTP, I doubt it would encourage its use.

Elegant APIs are a sign that you respect developers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Aside from the blatant strawmanning of the article, consider a rephrasing:

"Every time a new API is announced, its 'nice-to-work-with-ness' is heralded as if it was a MUST HAVE feature. And yet..."

People work with what they have available to them. If another service came into existence that was in all respects the same as EC2, but had a nice, RESTful API, it would have an advantage.

Barring that, people use EC2.</comment>


Fleep - <AUTHOR> https://fleep.io/ <comment><USER2> Yet again. [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

Also, does it annoy anyone else when they don't even put a small amount of text telling what a program/service does on the front page?

I don't want to watch some video where people fawn over their great new service. I just want to quickly read what it does and move on (or sign up or download, whichever is appropriate).

<comment><USER3> What do you mean? Isn't it clear?

> Your files and messages. Always in sync. On all devices. Team communication > is now a simple, common-sense thing. Make it yours.

<comment><USER4> Apple, Google, and Microsoft all promise this, as do a ton of smaller companies. So no, this buzzphrase doesn't differentiate fleep much at all.

Apologies if I missed some subtle sarcasm. :)

That said, their homepage seems passable to me. Maybe they added some content in the past few hours?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it was sarcasm. I like the look of the page, I guess the pictures communicate what it is enough to explore it further, but the message I pasted is really horrible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this solving some problem that Hipchat, Campfire, Slack, Kandan, Unison, etc. don't already solve?

<comment><USER6> The problem with all of those services is a lack of a strong desktop client that isn't just their web app inside a browser container.

<comment><USER7> The problem with all of these things, in my opinion, is that they aren't IRC. Real time chat has been a solved problem since May of 1993.

<comment><USER8> IRC does not solve half of the problems all of these products do. Persistence, for starters.

<comment><USER7> What kind of persistence are you talking about? I use ZNC, which means I'm always logged in (and set /away when I'm not actually there), and I get logs saved to disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't see a point of trying it out unless there's a pricing model described - and I can't find any on their site.

<comment><USER10> It's free while in beta: [https://fleep.io/faq](https://fleep.io/faq)

<comment><USER11> You use it when it's in beta, get the team used to it, build workflow around it... _then_ find out how much it costs?

No thanks.

<comment><USER12> Definitely a turn off with anything that has a steep learning curve or high switching costs. I.e. pretty much everything in productivity and communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm having a hard time with the juxtaposition of upvotes to negative comment ratio. I was in the latter camp, ready to write a mini rant on "WTF another chat app?".

I found it more interesting that people are expressing interest in this; demonstrating a complete polar opposite of the comments. Is this a situation of people upvoting because they abhor the idea?

<comment><USER14> I upvoted because I like seeing new projects/apps on hackernews and this one appears as though they did put a good amount of time into building the site. Sure it's been done before but most things worth doing have been. Although I can't think of many problems that hipchat or flowdock do not solve.

I'm curious to hear what others think is still an open web app market? Or what category of products can still be improved upon?

<comment><USER13> If you want to truly add value, find large businesses to help. They're riddled with old software and inefficient processes. It's highly feasible to write custom software applications that can save larger corporations millions of dollars with a minimal amount of development time. The hardest part is:

        1) Getting them to recognize this.
        2) Coaxing out the pain points.
        3) Bypassing their bureaucracy (chain of command).

<comment><USER15> Large business also means supporting old stuff. You can stop dreaming of HTML5 and start coding stuff working in IE7. Also, weirdo DMZ, weirdo User Right, weirdo proxy settings, ...

It is complicated, you have little clients that each represent a significant fraction of your revenue. They will pay well but drain your development team in pointless, unportable, customisations.

Large businesses is not a sexy world and companies catering their need are similarly not sexy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Little bit offtopic: recently every startup website I've seen here looks almost exactly the same, especially those with .io domain. Is there some kind of a template or technology that is being used to fastly develop those or is this just a trend?If it is could someone link to some resources about how to create those? Thanks.

<comment><USER17> I'd also ask about those videos—they tend to be quite neat. I wonder which studios do that (are there many?) and for how much approximately.

<comment><USER18> +1, does anyone know what software is primarily used to produce this kind of videos?

<comment><USER17> I asked a friend, he says they can be using Adobe After Effects (his preference) or Final Cut Pro. I was surprised, but apparently these tools are fit to do this kind of animation.

The narrative can be a more difficult part, unless the video involves much custom graphics (this one appears to do a decent job reusing a few primitives). By narrative I mean not just the voice, which I was told is often done by outsourcing to studios out there, but the script in general.

Just my 2 cents, maybe someone can give more info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems like a potentially useful app but I don't see how I get started using it. I don't want to start inviting everyone I know. I still need Skype, Basecamp and email running while I work as well. I still need whatsapp, viber, Facebook & Google hangouts on my phone + sms and regular calling on my phone. Everyone seems to have a different way of contacting me.

If this could be an sms or email client or if it could pull in 2-3 of those services I might start using it. Seems nicer than most of them.

For now I'm just hoping I don't have 2-3 people that want to fleep me instead of Skype. I have enough places I can accidentally overlook a bit of text from someone I know.

</comment><comment><USER20> ...i don't want another chat solution at this point. it doesn't matter what you offer me or do different.

</comment><comment><USER21> I like how Flowdock does this. Using threads (or flows) within the same chatroom have really helped our organisation communicate better.

Our development team moved from Campfire to Hipchat, and then from Hipchat to Flowdock, afterwards we created rooms for the other departments as an expirement, and we couldn't be happier.

No more URGENT emails, or direct interruptions, its all there in the chat.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can I host it?

<comment><USER23> This!

There are so many of these things but "Can I host it?" Is the one thing that I don't know of a solution that allows it. Seems like we need an open source one.

<comment><USER24> I just posted a similar comment above. It seems like the time is right for an open source advanced chat server. Maybe there already is one, I just don't know of it yet.

<comment><USER25> I've never used it but it looks like it might be what you are looking for: [https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan](https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan)

<comment><USER22> Very cool, I'm looking into this. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We've been using Slack at work and we haven't turned back.

<comment><USER27> We just started using Slack a couple of weeks ago. Pretty good so far

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> ...or you could just use IRC

</comment><comment><USER29> my co-worker and i use kato.im for this kind of thing. fleep looks nice, but it doesn't highlight source code, which is kind of a deal breaker for us.

<comment><USER26> We've been using Slack, you should check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Feels like Google Wave.

</comment><comment><USER31> What about Flowdock?

</comment><comment><USER32> Lot of time wasted reinventing the wheel.

</comment><comment><USER33> another one?

</comment><comment><USER34> How does this compete with ___poot_ __and __ _fweeep_ __?

(sorry)</comment>


The Oldest Living Civilization (1944) - <AUTHOR> https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/gi-roundtable-series/pamphlets/em-42-our-chinese-ally-(1944)/the-oldest-living-civilization <comment><USER3> Does it make sense to talk about the Chinese civilization like a single continuous civilization? That's a bit like saying Italy's civilization dates from the first Etruscan settlements or that French civilization is as old as the megaliths in Brittany.

I am a bit suspicious of these claims as they are central to Chinese nationalism. In order to hold them you have to disregard the several periods where the country was split in several parts and have to integrate somehow the mongol conquest.

To the best of my knowledge, the best claimants to the longest enduring and continuously existing organizations are the Holy See and when it comes to governing bodies, Iceland's Althing (founded in 930)

<comment><USER4> Continuous civilization only means the defining characteristics of civilization remain unbroken through regime change.

Only China and India have had continuous civilization from the ancient to the present. That remains true even though the Yuan dynasty were foreign invaders.

Contrast that to the Saxon invasion of Britain or the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs or the gothic conquest of Italy.

<comment><USER5> Oh, come on... maybe get some interest in history and dig through at least some of the things that you are touching.

Paper is written in 1944. None of that was true for that time and does not apply to modern days at all. It seems to be influenced by pre-war mystical New Ageish movements in Europe, that claimed many things... like, that Europeans came from Tibet...

I'm really confused about definitions here. What we define as Western, Chinese, Indian civilization and what we define as civilization at all.

You can like it or hate it, but modern Chinese nowadays belong to Western civilization - they use Western inventions(and they still steal them - <USER2> offense, but I think, it is a right thing to do for them to get into better economical position and you should do the same) - phones, computers, mechanisms, medicine, sanitation, building, use western clothing and even Mao spread western ideas... At this point Chinese civilization as such certainly does not exist and it is a myth. Same applies to others.

Let's clarify some things about Western civilization: Western civilization does not apply exclusively to Western Europe. Roman Empire, that was melting pot of nations and cultures was spread in northern Africa and for most of what is considered world of Islam. Not bothering with colonies, core lands of ancient Greeks were in what is now called west of modern Turkey. Most of the world still does not know about great Chinese works, but they too don't predate works of ancient Greeks(as they were written more recently). There certainly existed even more ancient literature works in ancient China, but so did in civilization, what we consider western.

What you are talking about continuity of Chinese applies the same to Europeans as well, as they stem from steppe people, that were initially located in Eastern Europe and they even more efficiently than Chinese replaced local population. Heck, those steppe people even invaded civilization of Indus valley, eventually destroying it and replacing male population for most of northern India. Talk about continuity of ancient India - did you meant Tamil people or Harappans? Because if Harappans(Indus valley civilization) is considered Indian, then Tamil ancestors are thought to come from somewhere west of India and are not really native to India... unlike Veddas in Sri Lanka or Sentinelese of Andaman islands.

Now some nitpicks: Goths did not left any traces of Gothic civilization in Italy - besides, how do you even dear to consider Goths not belonging to Roman Empire, as they were employed by Romans! As far as I know, Goths did not invade only Italy, but also invaded Spain and settled in most fertile part of Roman Empire - Africa, so they walked over whole Roman Empire. There was no specific civilization of Britain during Saxon invasions. What did they even replace? And how do you differ them from Normans, Angles or even earlier Viking invasions? For all I know - all of them might belong to the same culture. Because of Spanish conquest, Americas are now considered part of Western civilization. Aztecs came from deserts of modern USA and were rulers over natives, so what's your point? And even then Aztecs were not unique civilization, but only part of civilization region of what we call Mesoamerica. Isn't is a hypocrisy to consider multiple states of China, that fought among themselves as continuous civilization(even today there are 2 Chinese states)... while looking on different European countries, who share the same civilization not consider them as continuous...

<comment><USER4> Here is the Wikipedia definition

> A civilization or civilisation (see English spelling differences) is any > complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification > imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication (for example, > writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the > natural environment.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization)

In my college ancient history class I learned civilization was any group comprising the following:

* Fixed and defined geographical boundaries

* A systematically developed art/culture

* A government, even something as primitive as despotism

* A developed institution of one or more religions and/or science

<comment><USER5> I can read wiki, but the source of 1944 article is hardly wiki material, as there is no mention of similar ideas about ancient China. If you scroll that wiki link you posted, then you can find this link with dates for civilizations: [http://www.ancienthistorylists.com/ancient- civilizations/10-...](http://www.ancienthistorylists.com/ancient- civilizations/10-oldest-ancient-civilizations-ever-existed/)

What's the use of learned knowledge, if it can't be used for practical purposes? Your definition of civilization is enough to ponder what makes civilization now:

one internet for communication, K-POP, impossibility to do isolated science, global corporations with factories in China, that will suffer shortages because of Coronavirus, that can be spread by connecting airlines. Suddenly Chinese eating habits is concern for the rest of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was taught as a child in Australia that the Indigenous Australians were the world's oldest living/surviving civilization.

<comment><USER7> They are probably excluded for not having any sort of symbolic communication system (writing, hieroglyphics, knot patterns, stuff like that).

<comment><USER8> Or cities, monumental architecture, or unified government. The term "civilization" in this context is an academic category for historical societies, and its absence does not imply the pejorative "uncivilized."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-app Related to this, reading some Chinese science-fiction (mainly Ken Liu's translations of full books and collections of short stories) has made me realize the gap in knowledge I have with regards to Chinese history. In some of the time travel-related stories some dynasties and other historical events are mentioned as easily as we do our Roman or Greek histories for example, which of course makes sense.

Does anyone have any recommendations on books covering the major Chinese historical eras? This article and the diagram in it are a great start that I would love to dig deeper into.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Until the Japanese invasion her conquerors have been barbarians who looked > up to the higher civilization of China and eagerly adopted it.

I always thought this is uniquely Chinese thing, but recently learnt that Athens had a similar history. Many of Athens architectures are actually built by its conquerors who admired its culture.

<comment><USER10> The echoes of Roman (and Greek) admiration are still visible in Europe, and even throughout the Americas:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_architecture)

Another example - the common language of ancient Rome, Latin, is still the official spoken language of the Catholic Church. Until the 1960s, priestly instruction and most Catholic masses were conducted in Latin:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_u...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_use)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Even a poor Chinese with no education is likely to have the instincts and > bearing of an educated man. He sets great store by such things as personal > dignity, self-respect, and respect for others.

I get the impression that Taiwanese and Hong Kong people might not agree with this point to describe the mainlanders.

<comment><USER12> The article was written before communism. I've heard from different accounts that communism has had a deleterious effect on people's manner. I don't know if this is true or not, but it's a reasonable explanation.

<comment><USER13> > communism has had a deleterious effect on people's manner.

Thats an understatement. Look at the history with the Great Leap Forward and how it changed chinese culture forever.

<comment><USER14> Yes - "bourgeois" manners were rejected as affectation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ravish-tech That's based on what we found of once humans started writing. Civilisation have been going on long before that. Many cultures like Hindus preferred oral methods to written books so no single person/object has the power. Having said that. China did give the world lot of things and I respect them food it.

</comment><comment><USER10> To what extent did the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and destruction of the "Four Olds" (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) damage this extensive cultural and historical tradition? Was the damage mostly material e.g. temples razed and books burnt, or did China's early Communist period have significant cultural/behavioral impacts as well?

I've heard some commentators say that Taiwan preserves much of this "lost" Chinese culture and history, but outside of temples and dragon dancing, I don't really know what this means. Could anyone shine a light?

<comment><USER15> > damage this extensive cultural and historical tradition

Damaging tradition is one of the traditions. Think of the first emperor literally damaged the culture of the six kingdoms to unite China in 213 B.C.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars)

<comment><USER10> I certainly remember Emperor Qin Shi Huang from his appearance in both "The Three-Body Problem" and the somewhat lesser-known "Day of the Dragon King," an entry in Magic Tree House children's fantasy series :)

Ironically given the book-burning context, our youthful protagonists in the latter are equipped with magic library cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how connected our deep desire for culture (community) is connected to having far right/left views.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Until the Opium War of 1840–42 the European merchants and voyagers who reached the distant land of China had looked upon the Chinese with a good deal of awe as a people of superior culture."

Bullshit and Chinese Propaganda with their "5000 years old culture".

5000 years ago we are talking about bones inscribed with precursors of the Chinese writing system. Not bad, but compare this to the Pyramids at the same time?

Around the year 0 the Chinese culture was en par with the level of western culture and technology - speak Rome.

Only during the middle ages the west fell so far beyond and Chinese had indeed a superior level of technology, knowledge and administration. Things reversed again with the industrial revolution and the center of industrial GDP moved to the west again. Now since China and the rest of Asia has also industrialized and due to far more people in Asia, the center of world GDP has shifted back to the East.

If you can really talk about a "continuous civilization" for 5000, 3500 or even 2000 years is doubtful.

The experience from businessman with Chinese: 30 years ago they had an inferior complex because they were technological too far behind and a feeling of cultural superiority. Now the have the feeling of technological superiority combined with cultural superiority.

Chinese culture has a lot of strengths. But it also comes with a lot of weaknesses. I am skeptical about the "Chinese Century"

<comment><USER18>
      > Around the year 0 the Chinese culture was en par with the level of western
      > culture and technology - speak Rome.
      >
      > Only during the middle ages the west fell so far beyond and Chinese had indeed
      > a superior level of technology, knowledge and administration. Things reversed
      > again with the industrial revolution and the center of industrial GDP moved to
      > the west again.

I think you've got shifting definitions of the West.

The Roman Empire was on par with China, but the Roman Empire was centred around the Near East – Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, etc.

Western European parts of the Empire were very under-developed, and only really served as a buffer for Rome. (Consider how quickly the Roman Empire gave up the West after moving its capital to the East.)

In the Middle Ages the West was behind, but it was in ancient times too, so no difference. And the Near East was still on par – no difference again.

It's only really modern times that have been difference, with the West exploding out of nowhere. But that is probably just a blip, and in the grand scheme we will probably end up with China and the Near East rising again.

<comment><USER19> That's not the impression I get from [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/byzantine- philosophy/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/byzantine-philosophy/)

Quote:

 _There was never in Byzantium anything resembling the autonomous universities of the Latin West. Higher education was designed to train officials of the state and church, not masters of the arts and sciences._

 _edit:_ I guess that's a reference to later developments, though...

<comment><USER20> I can only really comment on UK institutions.

The article is talking about between 730 and 1453. Oxf*rd wasn't teaching until 1096, so I think it's fair to say England was behind for at least 300 years. It wouldn't be until the renaissance (after 1450) that you started seeing a break from scholastic teaching and academics like Bacon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reading about the GDP of India and China, both two were the richest countries in the world before Mughal and British invasions. There was a reason they called India the jewel in the crown, it was the biggest transfer of wealth from the east to the west

<comment><USER22> As awful as the theft of wealth was, the bigger crime was the prevention of industrialization. India was directly stopped by britain from industrializing because britain didn't want a competitor and rather wanted to use india for resources to power its industrialization. China directly somewhat, but mostly indirectly was prevented from industrialization by western powers ( and eventually japan ) who destabilized china and seized its major ports, industries, resources, etc.

If india and china were able to free itself and industrialize when japan did, india and china would easily have the two largest economies in the world today. It's disheartening thinking about all the wealth, knowledge, goods, discoveries etc the world missed out because of shortsighted greed and brutality.

<comment><USER21> India before industralisation, did not need industralisation. It was rich because it had the oil of the time, which was cotton, spices, fertile land. The industry was removed and moved to Britain. Britain needed the industry as it was a relatively poor country, India did not.

<comment><USER23> I think you are conflating industry and markets. Britain already had the industries when it started colonizing India.

What it needed were the markets to sell the factory produce. That is what they traded in return for the spices and raw materials.

Hence it destroyed the competing industries in it's colonies like India - which was a huge market.

<comment><USER21> It had industries, but India did not need these industries. This was not trade, this was loot. Read up on the East India Company. It did not destroy competing industries, they shut down Muslin cloth production in Bengal lol.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>