The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/Innovation-and-the-face-of-capitalism-4342160.php <comment><USER2> "That's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer."

Reasonable and astute point.

"An Economist article this year exploring the state of innovation noted that centuries of scientific progress means it takes ever longer for people to reach to the frontier of any field, much less push past it. It also stressed that much of the technological low-hanging fruit is long gone."

Also true, and oft-overlooked.

"Thiel is at least putting his money where his mouth is at Founders Fund, his venture capital firm making investments into robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology (alongside a lineup of dot-coms)."

Ironically, AI was jump-started by DOD dollars,[1] and biotechnology by NIH dollars. Robotics had substantial manufacturing implications and got money from that area, but has also benefited heavily from defense money (think UAV's, etc).

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#DARPA.27s_funding_cut...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#DARPA.27s_funding_cuts_of_the_early_.2770s)

<comment><USER3> The article makes that exact point:

> Only governments had the long view and available cash to fund things like > supercolliders, deep space programs and - oh yeah - the development of the > Internet.

<comment><USER4> Thats not true. There was no long view government plan to create what we now call the Internet.

<comment><USER2> The whole point of blue-sky R&D funding is that you can't plan exactly what you're going to get out of it. Today DARPA is a bit more focused on practical application than it used to be, but it's ethos is still: "let's throw $10-30 million at a bunch of smart people and see what happens." The "plan" is to fund fundamental R&D and hope something really useful comes out of it. In that sense, the development of the internet was a fulfillment of that plan.

<comment><USER5> DARPA is amazing, at least for their history and what has come from them.

Dies any other country have a DARPA equivalent? Or, more specifically, did any other country have a DARPA equivalent 40+ years ago?

<comment><USER2> DARPA is a very interesting agency. It's got a $3.2 billion budget, but less than 250 employees and more than half are technical people. They're structured to maximize the amount of money that goes to the actual engineering teams and minimize internal inertia. The program managers get $20 million or so to throw around each year, and have tremendous authority over their projects and not a lot of oversight. They're on the younger side for people with that kind of budget authority and usually have PhD's themselves. They're limited to 4-5 year stints, so it's not a position that attracts people looking to make a career in bureaucracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These articles are easy to write (and upvote) but such conclusions are pretty meaningless till you have a definition of what counts as innovation. That's a very interesting question, and yet just about everyone who talks about this topic ducks it and goes instead for the easy score.

Maybe we can do better here on HN. What's the right way to measure innovation? E.g. surely the 5 year old's definition (big shiny things that fly through the air are innovative, and invisible software isn't) is mistaken. But what would a good measure be?

<comment><USER7> The appeal of these articles is that they speak our unspoken thoughts. When someone tells you about the snapchat/instagram clone they are building at a startup event, you are socially obligated to smile and say something nice about it. But on the inside you wonder at an economic system that puts people through two decades of training so that they can apply their talents to such activities. Meanwhile, companies doing big things find it tough to hire as they are competing with seed funding for your own cat pictures startup.

When I moved out to Silicon Valley it was right before the Groupon IPO and hundreds of man-years were being spent on Groupon clones. Of course nobody remembers them now.

<comment><USER6> _The appeal of these articles is that they speak our unspoken thoughts._

That is exactly the problem. Nothing is less the product of systematic analysis than what you call an "unspoken thought." "Speak our unspoken thoughts" is a nicer way of saying "appeal to our unexamined prejudices."

<comment><USER8> They may be prejudices, but I don't think that they're unexamined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you want to make a difference, quit trying to cash out as a 25 year old millionaire.

Get a PhD and do research. That's the real risk in life, that you might work your ass off for little pay, spend 30 years chasing a dream, and fail in the end.

But the people who succeed change the world.

Interestingly, most Nobel Prize winners donate a large percentage of their prize money to charity or research. They weren't interested in early retirement in the first place.

<comment><USER10> Really? I think you shouldn't come up in here telling people that cashing out at 25 doesn't make a 'real' difference. There are people who prefer life experience, over work and research experience.

There are people who rather invest in other people taking that risk, than taking the risk themselves. Everybody's different.

The millionaires are the ones paying for your research work. So when someone like you spends 30 years chasing their dreams after acquiring a PhD and fail-- they have more-or-less acquired a different way of thinking about things. Right? They gain a different self, a different sense of awareness. They gain a specialization of some niche topic. I get it. Researchers change the world theoretically.

The thing is doing research and influencing others to think differently is the same thing as influencing people with products or services. They all have the same goal, to change the way people think about a topic or way of doing things. It isn't tied down to one route.

Because interestingly, MOST millionaire's become philanthropists. And they are not interested in retiring either.

And like how the top comment said, it's not one big disruption that changes things, it's the succession of little bits of implementations or modrnizations of products, services, and ideals. All in harmony. One branch isn't worth worshiping more than the other branch.

I know you were targeting the people who retire and enjoy life, without investing or donating back but there's a world out there to see and not everybody gets bored with it at the same rate as you do.

Edit: Some people like to manage and become overseers, they get the thrill of life from that, you can't tell them they're doing it wrong, that they should quit and enjoy life. That will bring anarchy and chaos. The same thing with a whole bunch of people sitting in a laboratory. I remember reading a book that went over this topic, about people being programmed to work in the laboratory. There were different levels, and Level B's worked in the lab. The book isn't coming back to me..It was where one level were giving audios while they sleep to acknowledge their inferiority. What a book, if I find out what it was I have to re-read it.

<comment><USER11> I think you're talking about Brave New World by Huxley?

<comment><USER10> Yes, that book! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Time to drop the pretense"

But if you drop the pretense, how will you continue to convince everyone that SV is the center of the tech universe and that everything worthwhile that happens must originate or migrate to those few square miles on the planet?

</comment><comment><USER13> Evgeny Morozov wrote a must-read book review that deals with this bloviating mentality: <http://bookforum.com/inprint/019_05/10825>.

Can't wait to read his upcoming book on the subject.

<comment><USER14> Thanks.

I like his analysis, but particularly liked this interesting bit:

'Consider a 2011 survey by a British insurance company in which 11 percent of respondents claimed to have seen an incident but chose not to report it, worried that higher crime statistics for their neighborhood would significantly reduce the value of their properties. In this case, the quality of future data is intricately dependent on how much of the current data is disclosed; unconditional "openness" is the wrong move here—precisely because of feedback loops.'

<comment><USER13> This is basically David Simon's journalism in a nutshell as formulated by Campbell:

        The more any quantitative social indicator is use for
        social decision-making, the more subject it will be to
        corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to
        distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended
        to monitor.

Michelle Rhee's tenure is a cautionary tale that people insist to not learn anything from.

Gotta juke them stats.

<comment><USER14> Yes, only here the "corruption pressure" is applied by the "free market", not by a bureaucracy. This vital detail pulls the rug from under those who claim that less government would decrease these distortions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Clayton Christensen was profiled in Wired recently and came to a similar conclusion:

"We've encouraged managers to measure profitability based on a return on net assets, or return on capital employed. That encourages companies to liberate their capital, so they invest in efficiency innovations, which means they can make more money with fewer resources. But what the economy ultimately needs are empowering innovations—like the Model T, the transistor radio. Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently the world is awash in capital but the innovations we need to advance aren't there."

[http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/mf-clayton- christensen...](http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/mf-clayton-christensen- wants-to-transform-capitalism/all/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Author could have mentioned that Tesla and SpaceX received sizable government funding.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is a clear hostility toward digital products. If a physical product that shows up a screen in the air (holoscreen) to Skype another person, all people would suddenly scream: OH, that's innovation. Yet Skyping through an LCD screen gives the same result.

If BMW or Tesla design a futuristic looking key for a car, we call that innovation and cool. But a nice designed interface, is just another interface.

If some scientists burn a whole lot of money* to analyze DNA data, we call that innovation and science. However, when app ABC tries to connect people and do some social work, we call that another social app and a Facebook clone.

Please stop the hostility. Creating a new API library or writing code that does something new is indeed "Innovation". It's certainly not getting to the moon, but it's still a very little bit of innovation.

The new Internet enabled me, from a small third-world country to create a sizable income (at least comparing to my country per capita), learn a "LOT" and build a viable business.

Internet put aside, I have no chance of making even $1000/year in my country. That, and the fact that I started from exactly nothing (family computer) is for me this decade "miracle". The innovation in payments, digital products, advertising... have improved access to wealth and mobility.

I guess, the problem of the majority of people is access to wealth. There is too much wealth around (look at the majority of jobs, they are about moving wealth and not creating it e.g. doctors, lawyers, gov., traders, brokers, middle men...).

Access to wealth will improve the life of the average person more than accessing the moon. The Internet offers an unmatched opportunity to access wealth.

Please innovate in HTML, JavaScript and Servers.

* _I'm not nitpicking on data scientists or any body, just to give an example._

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are considering a new startup idea and you think "that sounds easy, I can build it in a month", then you are most likely entering a crowded market where your startup will not add much marginal value to the world. This is most consumer startups.

If instead, your idea makes you say "That sounds hard. I'm going to have to overcome technical challenges/ accumulate domain expertise/ leap regulatory hurdles" then you are most likely breaking new ground, adding significant value to society, and creating something hard to copy.

As much as I am happy for the success of the snapchats of the world (and the army of snapchat clones), I don't think the world would miss them very much if they were gone.

</comment><comment><USER18> Edit: Seriously, I really want to know what people think about the question at the end. I worked with someone who works at cd2, and on a selfish note I'm just curious.

I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love _nothing_ more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products. This seems to require two things: a) public investment in vague-but-cool-sounding-what-if projects, and b) easy ways to translate them into usable products.

For (a), someone should be funding things that might be valuable "platforms" for society: the human genome project, ARPANet, basic mathematics research (Fourier analysis, instrumental in many, many commercial products, was one such basic mathematical result for a long time). The value of these platforms may take a long time to pan out (if ever), so it makes sense to fund them as a society. Perhaps government per se isn't required - it could be done by some collection of nonprofits - but the funding won't come from many private firms. Further, if we _want_ these platforms to be of use to many companies, perhaps they shouldn't come from private firms.

I think about it like I think about LAPACK. LAPACK is used by almost every scientific computing library for matrix multiplication. Now if Intel and AMD want to come along and make proprietary versions of it (e.g. Intel's Math Kernel Library), or if Matlab or Mathematica want to wrap them into an easy- to-use product, or someone needs it for a robot controller for a factory, that's awesome! The point is that there is some value in public research the market can draw on to make nice things (the ROI on LAPACK must be HUGE for whatever nominal cost + non-nominal man-hours it takes).

(b) is difficult, but there have been some efforts. One such is INVO[0], an effort at Northwestern that helps researchers develop their ideas without losing too much control in the process. They just founded cd2[1], the center for device development, that helps clinicians and engineers navigate the bureaucratic and regulatory hoops, and ultimately pitch. The key is that like YC, they have a strong network of people who understand this process, who to talk to, what you're really signing when you sign a piece of paper, etc. They pay you (for a year!) to work on your project.

My question (updated for clarity): What do potential founders of not-widget- startups want to be able to pursue the kind of innovation mentioned in the article? In particular, what would help translate academic proof-of-concept ideas into viable, fundable, products?

It would seem that asking VC's to fund cooler projects at the expense of profits is not the right way to go. Maybe a better strategy is to ease the link between cutting-edge research and consumer-facing products. What would help with that?

[0](<http://invo.northwestern.edu/about>) [1](<http://cd2.northwestern.edu/>)

<comment><USER19> One issue I have not been able to resolve in thinking about the idea of society-funded research has to do with what I'll refer to as "bad" global actors.

It is no secret that China shines for its lack of respect for intellectual property. The same is true for their willingness to steal just about anything from anyone and make it their own.

If we, as an open society, fund programs costing billions of dollars we would, in no uncertain terms, be "giving it away" to the Chinese and other bad world players.

It's the concept of unfairness when on person in a team does absolutely nothing yet benefits greatly from the work of the rest of the team members.

I know I am over-generalizing. Yet, I have to tell you, as an American citizen I despise the idea of investing my tax dollars in something and have it simply given away to other societies who have done nothing to contribute to the cause.

Would I like to invest tax dollars to find the cure for cancer and make it globally available? Absolutely.

Would I like to see the labs and companies we built as part of that process decimated and driven out of business because the Chinese take the work product we funded and drive costs so far down that our companies crumble under the pressure of our pricing models? Nope. Not interested.

Yes, society as a whole would benefit from cheap mass manufacturing of such a drug. And, while that happens, our industry will continue to be shredded by bad players such as China.

I don't have all the answers. I certainly don't know what the solution to this one might be.

<comment><USER20> Your comment and the dilemma you present are very interesting.

I think part of the problem is that we have reduced everything to a matter of economics and profit. It has become the measure of value for everything, so much so that intelligent, compassionate people can discuss the value of human life in terms of dollars and jobs.

So, I think the problem you suggest is the product of a false choice.

That is, IMO if we had a cure for cancer, it is not that we should find it unfair that the "wrong" people might profit. It is that we should expect that no one would profit. Some things should be done for the good of all humanity. Why need there be financial incentive in ending suffering? And, why should there be financial reward in doing so?

This is the core problem of a capitalism run amok. Governments the world over should be engaged in benevolent research as an expression of the will of the people they represent, and for the betterment of same. It is, in my view, a grievous mistake that we must always seek a way to commercialize our activity in order to justify it.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't have a _major_ issue with a company profitting from the cure for cancer. On the other hand, I hate to seethe senior management of said company reaping handsome profits while people without the means to pay for it die without it. And I have _major_ issue with sick people's inability to pay when the initial research was either done by or funded by taxpayer dollars. And then apply that same principle to all the middlemen who handle the drug and add little to no value to it, but still profit handsomely. . .but that's for another thread.

<comment><USER20> I think it's a slippery slope though: exactly who should profit and how much profit is too much? Posing those kinds of questions raises the ire of the "free market/profit motive cures everything" crowd that drives our current brand of capitalism.

Once we give something over to the machine, we introduce the very problem. IMO, we need to completely rethink what should be left to the markets vs. what we produce as a society for the good of humanity.

<comment><USER19> That's a tough one because it is beyond clear that --and I am going to use that word-- innovation does not originate in government, master plans or even companies with huge funding.

Make a list of all the major products in the last fifty years, the companies they came from and how they got started to prove the point.

I can't think of a single major scientific discovery in any scientific field over the last, say, 500 years, that was originated or planned by any government or government agency in any country or culture.

Typical examples given are such things as power plants, roads, bridges, water and sewage distribution systems and such large infrastructure projects. These, I argue, have only been created at such scales mostly out of two positions: war-time strategic needs (autobahn and US highway system) and the "natural" evolution of human settlements (as they got larger the infrastructure was a must). In other words, I have never seen any proof that any government engaged in some kind of a long-range master plan to build and deploy infrastructure in support of specific future goals.

Well, except for China.

<comment><USER22> The Internet was 100% government _funded_ at it's start. Private companies where involved in it's creation but only as what amounted to paid contractors. And yes they had a clear goal of increasing infrastructure to aid collaboration. Or if you really hate the idea that any private funding was involved at any point, just look at GPS.

More to the point, the vast majority of recent particle Physic's, Astronomy, and basic Medical findings where government funded.

PS: There are literally thousands of counter examples but I think I destroyed your point as it stands.

<comment><USER19> You are choosing to assign the entire value of the internet to government. This is folklore that is nothing less than nonsensical. If your goal is to "destroy" my argument you have to do far better than that.

The ARPANET was going to go absolutely nowhere without private enterprise rescuing it from obscurity and launching it into every-day life like a rocket.

Government did not PLAN the internet as we know it today. They didn't even have a clue.

Back before the internet got launched to the masses the masses were using services such as Compuserve, AOL and a number of others. The "internet" was going to evolve out of one of these efforts one way or another. It just so happened that industry found something that could be leveraged to make this happen and they did. In fact, I believe Compuserve was one of the first to offer it to it's millions (yes, millions) of customers.

It's almost like the idea of giving some guy credit for the invention of the wheel. What, nobody else was going to invent the wheel if he did not? Nonsense.

For every government project that resulted in a successful transfer to private industry there's probably ten or more that are still sucking money out of all of us and are useless.

Government-funded initiatives are very important, but, please, don't give them god-like attributes as if claiming that without government programs humankind would still be rubbing two sticks together to make fire.

<comment><USER22> Both IP and TCP where invented by the us government. Just fucking looking at the protocalls makes it clear they where designed for a large global network. I could continue but you sir are an idiot, who seems incapable of accepting when there ideas are clearly wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> David Wheeler has an interesting list of what he considers to be important software innovations. [1] Most of the innovations listed occurred in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

An interesting quote from an article[2] about an interview with Linus Torvalds in LWN.net:

"A member of the audience asked Linus to describe his single most memorable moment from the last 20 years. Linus responded that he didn't really have one; the kernel is the result of lots of small ideas contributed by lots of people over a long time. There has been no big "ah ha!" moment. He went on to describe a pet peeve of his with regard to the technology industry: there is a great deal of talk about "innovation" and "vision." People want to hear about the one big idea that changes the world, but that's not how the world works. It's not about visionary ideas; it's about lots of good ideas which do not seem world-changing at the time, but which turn out to be great after lots of sweat and work have been applied."

[1] <http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html>

[2] <https://lwn.net/Articles/445687/>

<comment><USER24> Along those lines, the BBC documentary "The Story of Science" shows over its episodes that this is true. It's really a fantastically intellectual series and well worth acquiring and watching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "But these aren't free market aberrations brought on by regulations. They're the invisible hand of capitalism itself: reaching out for quick gains while avoiding as much downside risk as possible."

Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis.

Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives _efficiencies_ in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point.

So you have this huge bunch of people over many decades making things just a little better than before. Another person comes along and, now that many different pieces are much more efficient than before, connects them in new and innovative ways.

You don't have a Wright Brothers without machine tools, bicycle parts, and so on -- each of which was a tiny bit better than the thing before it. You don't have a Facebook without an internet, cheap bandwidth, and ubiquitous computing. Facebook wasn't "looking for quick gains while avoiding as much downside..", it was a more efficient way to keep up to date on important social information.

Yeah, every now and then somebody does this _one_ thing that we all think of as grand. But nine times out of ten? It's only possible because the rest of the world of mankind has evolved. This is why we see so many people discover the same thing at the same time. They're not necessarily copying, it's just that we're ready for that discovery to take place.

This is also what is wrong with VCs (and some government organizations) trying to select what sorts of technologies need more attention: it doesn't work. It's backwards. Sure, you can have a _goal_ that you then reward enough that somebody will reach it. But you can't decide on a solution and then keep dumping money on your solution until it works. "Winning WWII" was a goal the allies had that they were prepared to spend billions on. Because of 1) their resource pool in both money and talent, 2) the desire to have a goal reached instead of a technology deployed, it worked. If they had decided to "build a ray gun" no matter how much money they dropped, it would never be enough.

I'm not crazy about the day-to-day work of innovation, the guys making the better widgets, the folks making gears turn with less friction, the folks making farts come out of your iPhone. These aren't very sexy and nobody likes writing news pieces about them. But taken altogether, it's a million of these things that lead to the next cognitive jump in mankind.

If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions _without constraint to how they are accpomplished_. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car.

If you keep thinking of the problem backwards, in terms of capitalism vs. research, not only will you not be able to solve it, you'll actively and continually destroy resources that could be used in solving it.

<comment><USER26> _"Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis. Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point."_

Did you read anything else before you went into Political Strike Mode, or did you just skim it? From the previous section:

 _"most of Silicon Valley doesn't concern itself with aiming 'almost ridiculously high.' It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year....that's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer."_

The commentator has no problem with efficiency gains or capitalism. He's just saying that it's hypocritical to spend your life developing sheep-throwing software, while also complaining about how nobody aims for the stars anymore.

 _"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished."_

Right, like what the NIH and NSF do? Handing out money for research with no immediate commercial intent? Last I checked, that money (along with military spending) built the Valley. Government spending led to innovation.

You're looking for a political fight where none exists. Other than mentioning that Thiel tends to place the blame on the government (which he does), most of the essay is about the need for funding long-term research, not politics.

<comment><USER27> _Other than mentioning that Thiel tends to place the blame on the government (which he does),_

Not for the lack of innovation. In fact, he specifically decries the lack of innovation _by the government_ as well as the private sector. Thiel seems to blame it on a cultural shift - he believes the US has moved from an optimistic-deterministic viewpoint to an optimistic-stochastic viewpoint.

Go read his stanford lectures to see this expressed fairly well.

<comment><USER28> _Thiel [...] believes the US has moved from an optimistic-deterministic viewpoint to an optimistic-stochastic viewpoint._

The optimistic-deterministic viewpoint is the opposite of the "lean startup" movement and the MVP approach, which is an almost completely pure expression of the optimistic-stochastic viewpoint, i.e.:

        We're *optimistic* that innovation is possible,
        but we also believe we can't know in advance, so
        we'll use (controlled) chance to find out what
        works (A/B testing, random trials, etc.).

IMO, the culture shift to an optimistic-stochastic viewpoint is also why people hate Apple -- not because Apple is unsuccessful, but precisely because Apple _is_ successful – wildly successful – _but_ Apple is using the wrong paradigm to achieve that success. In Thiel's terminology, Apple works from an optimistic-deterministic viewpoint, and to the culture today, that's just _wrong_ somehow. Hence, the hate.

If you think about it, "minimum viable product" is practically the anti-thesis of innovation: let's create the least innovative thing we possibly can in the hopes that it _might_ , someday, be successful after a lot of A/B testing to hack the buying and growth process and find a niche market. MVP is not about shooting for the stars, but it _is_ about microscopic, incremental, improvement -- and a dramatic reduction in risk. That's the optimistic- stochastic viewpoint in action.

<comment><USER26> The problem with "deterministic optimism" (other than the obvious silliness of attributing one mindset to the _entire US_ ), is that it doesn't change the nature of reality. You can invest more in certain areas and yield a return on that investment, but you can't reliably call your shots. Life doesn't work that way.

Nearly all of the fruits of government research have been as a result of "stochastic" investment (i.e. nearly everything done by the NIH and NSF and DARPA), or second-order effects from "deterministic" investment (e.g. the space program and velcro, or radar and military spending). Other than wars and (maybe, debatably) the space program, we have a pretty spotty record of saying _"we're going to do $X amazing technological feat in $Y years"_ , and then making that happen.

Where we _have_ successfully called our shots (and I'm thinking mainly of the space program here), it's only happened after decades of stochastic progress got us to the point where a politician could reasonably say _"let's go to the moon"_ without sounding like a lunatic, and have some realistic hope that it would happen during a four-year term. Politics, as a societal force, is not particularly forward-thinking.

If you're looking for something governmental to blame for lack of innovation, you don't need to assign the entire political system a mindset, or compose elaborate pseudo-philosophical lectures: you need only look at the number of science PhDs who can't work in their fields, or the declining number of smart kids who go into research. When you gut government (and industrial) research, you don't get any returns.

<comment><USER29> Where is the research? I want to work in it, but every company in this 'hot' industry is too enamored with cranking out disposable apps.

<comment><USER26> That's my point: there isn't much going on.

You can try academia, but things are pretty bleak right now. There's so much competition chasing so little money that it's hard to see a path to a career for all but the luckiest few PhD graduates. And forget it if you don't have a PhD from a top school.

People put so much mental energy into pondering the lack of innovation, but we've been systematically under-funding science for more than a decade. There's not much of a puzzle here.

<comment><USER27> _There's so much competition chasing so little money that it's hard to see a path to a career for all but the luckiest few PhD graduates. And forget it if you don't have a PhD from a top school._

The problem here is that academic research (at least in math+physics, what I'm familiar with) doesn't have a place for second best. Most academic research produced by people below the top tier is worthless and will never amount to anything.

It's a very different situation from technology, where yet another CRUD app can actually bring huge value to the business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the critique would be more pointed if he could highlight a backlog of great ideas that Silicon Valley refused to fund. The money is available if you have a big idea. There is plenty going on in Silicon Valley outside photo sharing from biotech to microfinance to clean energy.

<comment><USER31> Well, you could start (for example) with these lists of unsolved problems in physics[1] and math[2]. I'm sure similar lists exist for every science.

Of course, private industry is interested in funding research in to next to none of them (at least not nearly to the extent that it is in problems that have immediate profitable applications).

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_mathemati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_mathematics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> For what it's worth, in my experience the people talking about big innovation, actually _ARE_ extremely supportive of genuine, plausible efforts at producing planetary scale improvements. In our case, we're trying to solve the economical energy storage problem (lightsail.com)

These folks put their money where their mouth is, and helped out greatly when we needed advice or funding or connections.

Particular people who helped us out and are known to publicly call for and support big innovation include:

Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Bruce Gibney, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Vassar, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Matthew Nordan, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates

\---

By contrast, most of the other VC firms, and all of the banks, were much less receptive and we did not get anywhere with them.

So I think people are at _least_ trying to act consistent with their philosophy. Generally, these folks will try to support great groups doing potentially great things, if there is good chemistry. They can't do it all, of course. There are not that many of them. But they try!

I think more of the blame should be on entrepreneurs and scientists who can and want to work in these areas but choose not to, and instead go into the hot software field of choice, or worse, undifferentiated finance. They should be encouraged to make some attempt at making the difference in the world that they want to see. It is not someone else's duty.

If you can do something important, and you have the resources to make a good attempt, you should try, because you may be in a very unique position to do so, and it's incredibly thin on the ground in many important areas.

There are incredibly few companies genuinely trying to make energy storage economical. There's only one, that I can tell, that's trying to make reusable orbit class rockets. There are very few trying to redefine personal computing. There are very few going after cures for cancer, broadly. There are very few effectively trying to make solar economical. There are very few well managed plug-in auto companies. There are very few trying to provide clean, low cost, distributed water. The list goes on.

People working on these major problems keep bumping into each other socially. It does not take long. The population of such entrepreneurs and innovators feels like that of a small high school. This scares me, because there are many, many problems to solve, and many reasons not inherent to the problem or solution that any one company or effort could fail.

There should be more efforts, more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more competitors. That would make me much happier, and feel much safer. At the moment, it feels like if the wrong few people are depressed, sick, or distracted, major world problems are just not getting solved, and the world is set back by as many days.

\---

I would welcome any hard _data_ to the contrary.

<comment><USER33> Ok, so here's a fun question: where do I find a list of the Big Problems? Because when I look at the world, it seems to me as if most of the really Big Problems are not technological but social. In the end, the conversion to solar energy won't be a single man's heroic effort, it'll be the combined efforts of an entire society that finally decided to go solar.

On the other hand, technological approaches to social problems seem like an excellent idea to me.

<comment><USER34> Really? What do you wish you could do that you can't? Let's make a list of things:

* I wish my body didn't start to break down as I get older.

* Related to that there are a whole host of diseases and disorders that I'll probably get one of and die from one day.

* I wish I didn't have to spend so much money on energy (not just directly on my monthly bill, but as part of the cost of almost everything I buy).

* I wish my internet connection was 100x faster.

* I wish I could travel to California from NY without having it sit on a cramped airplane for 5-6 hours.

* I wish I had a thinking interface to computers instead of having to take my damn phone out of my pocket and peck at it to get it to work.

* I wish my memory could be augmented in some way. I'm forgetting things all the time and that's really annoying.

* I wish that learning new stuff wasn't so hard. Can someone build on of those machines they have in the matrix so I can just download up some knowledge. I want to know Kung Fu!

* I worry about global warming. If everyone was as rich as Americans and lived like we do it seems like we'd have some pretty big problems. Can we do something about that?

* I hate that when I order something from Amazon I have to wait so long for it to show up. Why can't a machine in my apartment just zap it into being instantly? They've got that in Star Trek and it looks pretty awesome.

* Speaking of Star Trek, I'm bored of living on Earth. I want to go to the moon, or mars, or another solar system! How could we possibly do that?

OK. That's just five minutes of random thinking. I'm sure that I (or you!) could come up with many many other Big Problems.

<comment><USER33> _What do you wish you could do that you can't?_

Ah, there's the thing. I've spent too long learning how to deal with Real Life.

Actually, looking at it, many of these _are_ social problems, as I had hypothesized.

* Technical problem

* Technical

* Partially technical, partially an issue of almost deliberately building energy-intensive civilizations.

* High-megabits and gigabit connections are on their way, but come with the social problems of installing new infrastructure.

* Bullet trains, supersonic flight, and that sort of thing, but again, infrastructure and societal preferences.

* On its way right now.

* Memrise

* In the research stages right now.

* Again: social problems of Americans deliberately building energy-inefficient civilization (like suburbs, for example).

* Ok, there's an interesting notion: can we make shipping and delivery better between vastly far nodes of a graph rather than using the center/periphery model currently employed by the shipping industry? The whole reason for center/periphery is that the fixed costs of each shipping vehicle are significant, making it far cheaper to distribute them through centralized shipping and mass distribution to the periphery areas. I've heard someone wants to revive the notion of "shipping tubes" through the ground, which would function a lot like packet-switched containerized shipping, but that's another infrastructure issue and may not be the optimal solution.

* Social problems of building a carbon-nanotube-based space elevator, torus-shaped rotating space colonies, and generation ships. Well, that or teleportation, but the latter is far less likely.

<comment><USER35> All of the things you call "social problems" can be solved by disruptive technologies.

What if robots could install the fiber automatically instead of with construction crews and do it via overhead instead of underground cables? Social problem gone.

What if they could build the entire bullet train track cross country (Almost all of that multibillion dollar California train is labor)? Social problem gone.

Or how about ultra low cost solar, geothermal, and wind power, again with robots to set them up? You think the oil/coal lobby can politically compete against all of the industries they fuel? Social problem gone.

How about cheaper automated air transport that's not developed by Boeing or Airbus (monstrosities who, in my opinion, only innovate because at those scales its impossible not to)? Social problem solved.

Only on space travel can I agree with you, and just barely. Have a search through Google Scholar some time. Search for gas core (late 60's, early 70's), pulse (70s and 80s), dusty plasma (90s), and gasdynamic (00s) nuclear rockets. The technology is there, we just have to work out the details. However, the social problem we're trying to get over is the lack of FUNDING for radical (read: risky) R&D pathways.

It's of course much more complicated than that but and the end of the day the beauty of technology is that a new invention can cut through all the crap we humans have put up and it can change everyone's life for the better. (look at the internet: even with so many governments censoring it and controlling it we nevertheless are more connected than we have ever been and there is so little anyone can do to stop it)

<comment><USER33> The social problem wasn't labor at all. Workers are easy to hire if you've got the money and can make money back off the result. Hell, the economy needs more and better-paying jobs anyway, right?

The social problem is that putting in infrastructure requires making deals with property-owners and municipalities. I'm getting this from people who've worked for ISPs and other such enterprises: the biggest problem with new infrastructure businesses is getting cities and towns to agree to let you construct overhead poles (which "ruin the view") or tear up the ground under their streets (which closes whole blocks of road for a while).

In many cases, the money can be made back, the labor is workable, the invention is workable, but the right-of-way on private and public property is uneconomical to obtain.

<comment><USER35> I wasn't aware that was a big problem in infrastructure. Thank you for the info.

Perhaps a drop in the other costs could help cover the cost of acquiring land rights and permits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Lets make it illegal to start a photo/location/$%^ sharing startup. That will clear the space upto 80%. I am just kidding, please don't down vote me if you are running such startup.

<comment><USER37> Anyone building those companies - as of about 6 month ago - are going to be in trouble anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder > than discovering and mass producing antibiotics

Incidentally, if you'd like to actually turn terabytes of genomic data into actionable medical information, Counsyl is hiring software developers <https://jobs.counsyl.com>

</comment><comment><USER39> To boost innovation US needs to abolish software patents and significantly rework the whole sick patent system.

</comment><comment><USER40> Just like Levchin, we can find this article inspiring, but neither has hard numbers to back up their claim. Sure, we see a trend that there are a lot of innovations in the ways we communicate, share, and connect, but does that necessarily mean we're lacking "deep" technological innovation?

Personally I think web & mobile startups are getting easier to create so more people are becoming entrepreneurs to take advantage of that; the pie is getting bigger. I believe there are still plenty of "deep" tech innovators out there along with investors who believe in them.

Perhaps these "deep" tech innovators don't get much media coverage because they don't need it, therefore we don't usually hear about them.

</comment><comment><USER41> I agree with the article.True innovation is hard to find.Look at the startups promoted by incubators.Most of them are some sort of apps.We definitely need pure innovation, something so different, that will change all our lives.

And you can see here the difference between an idea-man and an innovator.Because in my opinion an idea-man can have good ideas and make some money out of them but an innovator will have brilliant ideas, passion to build something extraordinary, smart, without money being the first priority.His goal is to change the world.Now that is someone I would like to work with, not the typical I-have-an-idea-you-build-it-and-I-will-come-later-to-see-whatsup.

</comment><comment><USER42> This whole discussion boils down to whether the 'big' ideas can be considered to come from software or not. If they only come from hardware, e.g. infrastructure/energy/poverty-changing, then sure they take longer to create, and have higher risk. But we are making progress on them.

On the software side there _is_ of course big innovation, admittedly hard to quantify. The internet has changed the human experience in more profound ways than many physical innovations ever did.

</comment><comment><USER43> This article stirs the pot but is flawed.

Low hanging fruit gone?

Proof?

And how is that relevant?

If you want to innovate, do it. Figure it out. Stop blaming investors or the government. Blame yourself and fix yourself so you are doing the kind of innovation you want to, even it is part-time, initially.

Go be a professor at Caltech, MIT, Stanford or Berkeley and work on the hardest problems in science and technology and innovate.

Go work for Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.

Innovate yourself.

Stop trying to "kill it" as you Lean-Startup your way to a billion dollar company.

And stop whining. :)

</comment><comment><USER44> Maybe the problem is that innovation and invention are mixed up all the time. The CD was a great invention while Apple is an innovative company.

I'm not sure this is correct but I think that innovations remove risks while inventions are always risky or don't bother to think about risks.

Edit: to make myself more clear: I think that innovations are about renewal and inventions are about new. Some examples (in my eyes): Apple is innovative, IBM is inventive.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think another relatively recent development - last 20 years or so - hindering innovation is the proliferation of "Wall street analysts" and their quarterly projections which focus comapnies on the very short-term. . .at least publicly-traded companies. They can do well, but if they don't do _as_ well as "the analysts" projected then they are deemed failures who must do some soul-searching, cost-cutting, etc.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to also check out the cover story from Technology Review a few months back: "Why we can't solve big problems." [http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why- we-...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-cant- solve-big-problems/)

It touches on issues with the VC investment model but brings in a lot more as well.

</comment><comment><USER46> Whenever fundamental innovation is successful and a huge platform is created, it is followed by the creation of companies that exploit that platform.

That may take away from more fundamental innovation in the short term but creates more resources to pursue them in the long term. Its nothing to be concerned about.

</comment><comment><USER47> Completely agree with this. Very very rarely any real innovation happens. Most of the time financial success is viewed as innovation. It may innovation in terms of business. But hard to say they are innovation on a scale that is more universal.

</comment><comment><USER48> I very similar view on advertising was expressed by David Copeland not to long ago. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832538>

</comment><comment><USER49> Can people stop taking one data point and using that to extrapolate to a large group? This is pretty bad journalism. Sure, OK story telling but it's not exactly the truth.

</comment><comment><USER50> Silicon Valley has shifted from hardware to software, this is the real story. New hardware matches our understanding of innovation significantly more than software.

</comment><comment><USER51> The article points to some problems, and there are some. But the article also has some problems.

Here is an easier explanation:

First, the entrepreneurs are not bringing the venture partners enough projects with good, powerful, valuable innovation.

Second, the venture partners do not want to evaluate innovation and, instead, want to evaluate 'traction'. They want to see traction significant and growing rapidly. This concentration on traction may come mostly from demands of the limited partners. A failing of the article is that it didn't explain the crucial role of traction.

Third, as in the article, there are some cliches about 'innovation': It's very expensive in time and money, very risky, done for its own sake just for the fun of seeing amazing things, is from dedication to change the world and not for ROI, is impossible to evaluate, is largely separated from business and reality, etc. To save space here, I omit 1-1 pairings of each of these cliches with parts of the article. Exercise: Do the pairings. Hint: They all exist.

So, it is easy for the venture partners to be afraid of innovation, to fear that it is an interest and direction in conflict with ROI and not an advantage. With this fear, traction and innovation are worth at most just the traction alone and otherwise maybe significantly less.

Fourth, information technology (IT) entrepreneurship, from both sides of the table, has a problem with 'patterns': There aren't useful ones easy to see just from the past 40 years. Why? The examples of big successes are, say, Square, PInterest, InstaGram, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, HotMail, Cisco, Oracle, Seagate, HP, Dell, ..., Microsoft, Intel. So, get such a big win maybe less than once a year; in 10 years get only a few big wins; then in the next 10 years technology has changed so much that the empirical patterns from the past 10 years don't work very well.

Fifth, the cliches in the article about technology are too pessimistic. E.g., if innovation in technology is so risky and unpredictable, then how come it has done so much in the last 40 years? I mean, we're talking a 3.0 GHz 8 core processor for less than $200, main memory for $10/GB, a 3 TB hard disk for $135, 1 GbE on each motherboard, 100 GbE on one wavelength on a fiber with dozens of wavelengths, etc. No, there are some reliable 'patterns' as illustrated by the technology advances.

The pattern? Pick a pair of a problem and a solution. The problem should be such that a good or much better solution will get eager users/customers (want no doubts about 'product/market fit'). For the crucial solution, innovate, e.g., do some research in applied mathematics, applied science, or engineering. How to do such research? There is education for that, long heavily funded mostly for US national security. The education is available at the top two dozen or so US research universities and is called a Ph.D.

For more on this 'pattern', look at the progress in IT of the last 40 years, say, from when Intel got going, along with what the US DoD has done starting early in WWII to the present.

Risky? Not really: Mostly can eliminate nearly all the risk with just good technical work just on paper. And before that paper is written, one of the lessons usually learned in a good Ph.D. program is how to pick a suitable problem where 'suitable' means can get results that are "new, correct, and significant" with the meager time and other resources available to a Ph.D. student. For the needed innovation just want "new, correct, significant, powerful, and valuable" for the needed solution within the time and money available.

Expensive? Not always. DoD and NASA projects tend to be expensive due to some heavy hardware, but not all innovation is expensive. E.g., RSA.

But generally the crucial work should be done and on paper in good form before allocating a lot of resources.

The solution? IT entrepreneurs need to do better innovation with nearly all the risk removed by work just on paper (or in PDF). The venture partners, if they want to invest, need to be willing to evaluate work on paper and invest at that 'stage'.

But there is now a threat to the venture partners: Now the computing is so cheap that by the time a project has the traction that venture partners want to see, there is a good chance that the project is already nicely profitable.

E.g., suppose an entrepreneur does some innovation to get a powerful, valuable solution to a big problem and brings up a Web site to deliver the solution on the Internet.

Then look at the Meeker data at KPCB and average her CPM figures for mobile and desktop and get $2.125. Assume the Web site gets users enough to send 2 Web pages a second with 4 ads per page. Then in one month the revenue would be

2.125 * 4 * 2 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 44,064

dollars. If each Web page sends for 400,000 bits, the upload bandwidth needed is commonly available in US living rooms from a cable TV company.

It is likely that a computer with less than $2000 in parts is sufficient as a server. And can consider using cloud servers.

So, we're looking at a project with a $2000 chunk of hardware, an Internet connection, with phone and TV, for less than $200 a month, one or a few founders, and $44,064 a month in revenue.

Now why should such a project, sending 2 Web pages a second and getting $44,064 a month in revenue. call a venture partner or return a venture partner's call?

Yes, this scenario has not yet resulted in a lot of big wins, but the threat to venture capital and the opportunity to entrepreneurs is just sitting there.

Likely one good example is the romantic matchmaking Web site in Canada, Plenty of Fish, long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just from Google, and $10 million a year in revenue.

An established pattern? No. Obvious? Yes.

Note that I am saying that the opportunity is to (1) get a Ph.D. in applied math, applied physical science, or engineering from a good research university, (2) pick a pair of an important problem and a good or much better solution where the solution can be generated from software running on servers and delivered to users/customers over the Internet, (3) for the solution do some innovation, that is, some research in applied math, applied physical science, or engineering, (4) write the software, plug together the server(5), bring up the Web site, go live, get publicity, users/customers, ads, revenue, and earnings, and grow.

For the venture partners, they can (1) stay with their current ROI, significantly less good than an index fund, (2) look for more mobile, social, local, sharing apps for teenage girls to gossip and look for boyfriends, or (3) get serious about innovation and encouraging and evaluating it and then funding its exploitation. No, venture partners should not invest in research, but they likely will need to get quite serious once the research is solid on paper and, in particular, drop their scorn, contempt, ridicule, and phobia about research.

Funding based just on paper? That's how nearly all large engineering projects, DoD projects, etc. get done. Net, for what is crucial about innovation, paper is fine.

</comment><comment><USER52> Silicon Valley used to be a place with cheap land where people went because the cost of living was low, and they could tinker with cool ideas whereas, in the expensive East Coast cities, they'd have to work themselves to death just to tread water. California was this place where you could come and do cool stuff and build on land the East Coast elite didn't want.

It's no longer cheap to live there. Tinkering with new ideas on some modest amount of savings and "odd jobs" or consulting is no longer possible. Expensive real estate leads to calcification and risk-aversion and cultural death. It's _why_ urban ecosystems (including VC-istan, which is not a city _per se_ ) turn into hellholes shortly after their peak of greatness.

Enter VC, which connects people with the resources (funding) to try out their ideas and, better yet, _enough_ resources that they have a "rocket fuel" advantage over any competitors. Over time, the VCs and "tech press" became king-makers. Then, the well-connected became a new, informal, executive suite who care more about protecting each other than genuine competition.

Hence, VC-istan. It's the first postmodern corporation, cleverly designed to look like a free market. Reputable investors are the executive suite. People with the authority to write welfare-checks-I-mean-acqhires at big companies are The Compensation Board because they decide on bonuses. "Tech press" are another part of the HR department that writes performance reviews. So-called startup "CEOs" are semi-independent PMs. Software engineers are peons who work long hours because they haven't figured out yet that they work at a big company and _aren't_ actually going to getting investor contact and made founders in 7.35 months-- that was a degenerate empty promise.

VC-istan has clever marketing. It doesn't _look_ like a stodgy corporate behemoth, but it is. That is why it has ceased to innovate.

<comment><USER53> This rings true and people always seem to forget that it's much easier to innovate when the cost of living is lower.

I'm currently living in Auckland, New Zealand, which by NZ (and world standards I think, though can't cite anything off hand) is quite expensive, but myself and my girlfriend have been contemplating moving to Sydney, Australia, a city which is one of most expensive in the world but where we would both be paid more. The cost of living there makes it a complete non- starter if you're not just wanting to work full time - and then trying to eek out a pleasurable life at the weekends.

I currently contract 3 days a week to support myself while working on my startup and trying to fit in some time for music as well in the other 4 days (and try to get relaxation each week too). The money I make wouldn't last very long in Sydney or any world city for that matter, I guess that's where the VC is supposed to kick in, but if it doesn't then you're in trouble.

If it's one thing I've worked out recently, full time, 40 hour week style employment is the enemy of me being able to pursue any sort of interesting side project, I'm sure it's similar for others. It's a realisation that, now I've had it, I can't imagine ever working under those conditions on anything but my own projects. High costs of living such as those in SF and Sydney (and even Auckland) can necessitate such income just to live with a modicum of dignity however, and then trap you with dining out at weekends and such, resulting in not actually achieving any progress on the projects that matter most to you. Worst of all this is the debilitating feeling that socialising and being a functional human being is preventing you from achieving your goal.

<comment><USER52> _This rings true and people always seem to forget that it's much easier to innovate when the cost of living is lower._

The problem, or the balance that must be struck, is that it's hard to innovate without being surrounded by other innovative people. You need a city with a critical mass of innovative, talented people _and_ a low cost-of-living. California in the 1970s had that. I don't know what the 2013 analogue is, or if it's even in the US. The Midwest would qualify, but it's hard to raise any kind of money (VC, bank loans) out there.

When real estate is expensive, money dominates peoples' lives-- even seemingly wealthy people who still don't make enough to raise a family. When it's cheap, people focus on other things and money is just one thing in it.

I'm ideologically against expensive real estate. I think that the government should buy, build and own about 60% of housing and set the prevailing rent per square foot. Rich people will still have the ability to buy property and to rent or own nicer private housing, but the basic prevailing rate will be set. This actually doesn't bring along the negatives of price ceilings (shortage) because the government can also build more housing and transportation infrastructure to increase available supply. I think we should hold the government responsible for that. No one should have to pay more than 1/4 of post-tax income to live within 20 minutes of work.

The reason New York is expensive is that people like me-- ambitious, hard- working, extremely capable-- are able to find jobs here. People like me make the fucking city great. For each person like me, there are 9999 who want to be around (or employ, or exploit) people like me and they drive up the fucking rent. Instead of benefitting from our contribution, however, we get charged for it when we pay these enormous housing costs. We should be rioting in the fucking streets over this.

<comment><USER54> Expensive real estate is a deliberate policy of the government. Local government zoning laws keep the supply tight. And low interest rates and easy credit enable people to take out huge loans to bid up the prices of real estate.

To get cheap housing, the government would just need to repeal zoning laws and limit all the size of all home mortgages from any government subsidized institution (FDIC insured banks, etc.) to a maximum of 3X median income with a 25% down payment. That would get housing prices down very fast.

The government keeps housing expensive, because older home owners are one of the most powerful voting blocks. Your average 60 year old homeowner is much more likely to vote than your 25 year old apartment dweller. Furthermore, the homeowner is going to be irate and vote against any politician who enacts policies that make their home price go down, while the 25 year old is not really paying attention.

You're committing the "deus ex machina" fallacy where by you seem to assume that the government has the incentives and institutional ability to effectively manage public housing and keep the cost of housing down. The actual experienced history of government housing in the U.S. has been positively atrocious. And in terms of cost, government housing generally costs about twice as much to build as the equivalent private sector housing.

The really hard problems are: how do you wrest political power away from middle-aged home owners? How in general do you make government work for the general interest as a whole rather than work for powerful factional interests (such as homeowners, construction unions, etc.)

<comment><USER55> Let's not use FDIC as a crowbar to micromanage consumer banking, please. There are so many better dials for the government to turn than resorting to that.

<comment><USER54> "Let [us] not use FDIC as a crowbar"

Who's "us"? I don't work for or have any power over the government or FDIC.

<comment><USER55> You're not a citizen?

<comment><USER54> I am a U.S. citizen. But that does not mean I use the words "us" or "we" when discussing the actions of a government bureaucracy. I'm sure I have a few shares of Microsoft in some mutual fund, but that does not mean I use the word "we" when discussing the actions of Microsoft.

<comment><USER55> Instead of parsing my imprecise usage of the word "let's", can you address my actual point?

<comment><USER54> I find that most people who use the word "we" or "us" when talking about government actions are not being imprecise. Rather they have internalized the civics class myth that ordinary citizens have a large amount of agency over government. I like to poke at this delusion when I can.

I'm not exactly sure why you think the FDIC should not micromanage the mortgage market. My guess is because the FDIC is government bureaucracy, and our government is so dysfunctional these days, that you think any attempt to manage mortgage markets would just make things more screwed up. And you are probably correct. Although I would say the cat's a little out of the bag with regards to preventing government bureaucracies from messing around with mortgage markets.... But my main point was not to make an "ought" argument, but to demonstrate to michaelchurch that if he wanted a particular "ought" outcome (lower housing prices) there are easier ways than to have the government buy 60% of all real estate. If you have even easier ways, that require even less government micromanagement, I'd be intrigued to hear them.

In any scenario in which Michael or I actually have enough power to direct the FDIC or government to carry out our madcap plans, the political situation would be so different that many current arguments against FDIC intervention would be obsolete. There might be new arguments against FDIC intervention, that would depend on the specifics of the changed political situation.

<comment><USER55> When I say "let's not do X", I don't mean it literally, it's just a way of saying "X is a bad idea". Let's just set aside that entire digression.

> I'm not exactly sure why you think the FDIC should not micromanage the > mortgage market. My guess is because the FDIC is government bureaucracy, and > our government is so dysfunctional these days, that you think any attempt to > manage mortgage markets would just make things more screwed up. And you are > probably correct.

Two points:

1\. If you want to regulate the mortgage market, that's one way to go. But that should be a totally separate concern from FDIC and should be implemented in a separate way. Removing depositors' insurance because their bank didn't follow mortgaging regulations is a very poor way to regulate the banking industry.

2\. The federal government subsidizes mortgages in many ways. Instead of legally regulating mortgages it might be sufficient for the government to just stop doing this. For instance, there are tax incentives for having a mortgage. The government also intervenes directly in the mortgage industry in the form of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. When I said "there are so many better dials for the government[1] to turn than resorting to that", those are some of the things I was talking about.

[1] Note my use of the third person--are you happy with that or did "let's" derail you from reading the second sentence of my comment?

<comment><USER54> I agree that if you were trying to lower housing prices you would start by eliminating all the subsidies.

There is some chance that eliminating all subsidies would not meet whatever price goal is desired. Housing near employment is going to inevitably be scarce in some cities, and people will inevitably get in bidding wars. If people can take out the maximum mortgage that a high-earning, two income family can afford, then everyone will need two-high earning incomes to keep up (see the book _The Two Income Trap_ ).

 _If you want to regulate the mortgage market, that's one way to go. But that should be a totally separate concern from FDIC and should be implemented in a separate way. Removing depositors' insurance because their bank didn't follow mortgaging regulations is a very poor way to regulate the banking industry._

I think it is most reasonable to have the insurance company be the regulator. This is common in almost all other industries. If you are a landlord, the apartment insurance company will tell you to not allow smoking in the apartment or else it will not insure you or will jack up your rates. If I was czar, I would consolidate the bank regulating functionality which is now spread across a half dozen agencies all into the FDIC. If a bank refused to abide by FDIC regulations it would either face higher premiums or be expelled. If a bank was expelled, all customers would have an opportunity to transfer their deposits to another bank. The executives of the FDIC would be given a comp-plan designed to make them balance the need for expanding credit and the need for overall stability. For instance they could be comped based on overall premiums, but with clawbacks of the last decade of bonuses if the FDIC faces systemic failure and needs a bailout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Another thing: as companies get larger they will try to squeeze competitors, fire employees and do everything possible to increase their margins.

Legal, but they shouldn't brag about it.

Edited to add: Apple, Microsoft and Google alone have close to $250 Billion in the bank, $250,000,000,000 and what we hear each quarter about them? Increased margins, more and more ads, increased prices on software, anti-competitive behavior, essentially cheating on taxes, firing 20% of employees (Motorola) and holding cash overseas not to bring it to US due to taxes. It never ends, they have to be ready for the next quarter

<comment><USER57> I keep hearing about self-driving cars...

<comment><USER56> Oh, you must've heard about BMW, Audi and other car manufacturers that can't match Google's PR machine [http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/making-self- driving-cars-ev...](http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/making-self-driving-cars- everyday-reality-article-1.1251048)

<comment><USER57> I've heard about them, too, but when I find the relevance of your point, I'll drop you a line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "Silicon Valley loves to talk big about innovation; it's just not as good at following through."

BS. Computing, Networking, Biotech, Internet, and more. Silicon Valley has delivered, and there is more to come.

Not every new investment is going to change the world. But collectively, the track record is very strong.

<comment><USER59> do you really believe those things were created in or by silicon valley?

Even beyond their public pasts, their early private champions like Bell Labs, BBN and IBM weren't from california nor private equity backed.

<comment><USER2> Well Xerox PARC was in Palo Alto, though Xerox itself is based on Rochester, NY. And Xerox was of course not a VC-backed company. Intel, however, was founded in Santa Clara and was VC-backed. Though your point is well-taken. I think big corporate R&D labs are responsible for far more of the innovation we see in the internet sector than VC-backed Silicon Valley companies.

If we're talking about narratives, indeed, the narrative that seems more prevalent is actually a big company that has a cash cow (e.g. Xerox with copiers, AT&T with the telephone network) having money to throw around at R&D activity.

<comment><USER60> IBM Watson is IMO a huge embarrassment for SV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> "The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation"

Wrong title. It's "I, James Temple, have a different political philosophy than these guys".</comment>


Twenty-one cities in India will run out of groundwater by 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/indias-water-crisis-bengaluru-delhi-chennai-hyderabad-among-21-cities-to-run-out-of-groundwater-by-2020-4590221.html <comment><USER3> More context on this: [https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/1144483586042548225](https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/1144483586042548225)

<comment><USER4> why do people tweet like this? It is impossible to follow. Like.. just write an article or a blog post instead. :/

<comment><USER5> Because people don't click on links on twitter as often as they bother to read a tweet thread.

But also, I actually like this form of communication. By the nature of the medium (one thought per tweet), you are forced to discard all superfluous details. Instead each tweet/thought must be a strong point. This is compared to a blog, where the only thing holding you back from adding fluff is your own intellectual discipline.

Can you explain why you find this impossible/discipline to follow?

<comment><USER4> Well, not all discourse needs to happen on twitter.

Sure, it is nice when there is something you can actually convey in just a few sentences but I have a hard time reading this.

It is hard to follow because my reading gets interrupted, and I need to focus on where I am instead of what information I am receiving. I donno. I just think it's hard and it's very annoying so I'm rather inclined to stop reading because honestly I don't care enough to make the hassle worth it.

<comment><USER5> A tweet thread is also often meant to be chewed upon. Because minimal details are provided with the expectation that the reader will be able to fill in some of the obvious blanks with a little thought. So I usually read these threads a tweet at a time, wondering on the implications of each statement (a lot of times I can't think of any).

But whatever works for you.

<comment><USER4> I rarely read tweet threads, mainly because I am rarely on twitter but also because there is often little reason to. Most of the threads is simply just angry people who disagree or people that agree and want to spread the word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always thought watersheds were a great way of defining state-level regions. They're more stable than boundaries set by rivers, and are more natural than arbitrary lines of latitude/longitude. In the (near) future, there's going to be a lot of hand wringing over who has what rights to which water. The only way to completely solve it is to have one region be in control of the entire course of the water's flow.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/19/m...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/19/map- the-united-states-of-watersheds/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0f5a35bcd78c)

Granted, redrawing the map based on watershed doesn't solve India's problem. But, it sounds like that in the future their drinking water is going to come from careful management of groundwater, which will require a lot of state level agreements. Right now, I'm not optimistic those agreements will happen smoothly.

<comment><USER7> Watersheds may be a little too large to work well as administrative regions.

<comment><USER8> or go all in, and establish a world government. I think a single governing body is the only true way forward for humanity, if humanity is to move beyond earth and be a space faring civilization.

<comment><USER9> Talking of space faring .. according to [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Space_Research_Organi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Space_Research_Organisation), the Indian Space Research Organisation budget of 11,538.26 crore (US$1.7 billion)(2019–20 est.) would buy a lot of water infrastructure, but that's obviously not as exciting as going to Space..

<comment><USER10> All the infrastructure you can built won't solve the fundamental problem: humans are taking water out of the ground faster than it can be replenished, and there are more of them taking more and more water each year. Eventually the train will plow through the buffers...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There have been a flurry of alarmists posts like these but somehow I cant wrap my head around how will we run out of water. I stay in Bangalore and some people do have the problem of water - but for the most part it doesnt seem to be an issue of 'lack' of water perse but mostly distribution issues.

Bangalore has been having intermittent rains throughout the summers and even though few people use them now, but if situation gets dire almost everyone should be able to setup a rain water harvesting system and get by.

India is also installing solar at a rapid pace and the cost of electricity is going down. The next level solution could be just to use sea water that India is surrounded by, and use some of that solar power to filter this water.

Somehow I dont get all this alarmist news. Maybe im missing something.

<comment><USER12> Let me give the PoV from Hyderabad. Hyderabad gets water from mainly 3 sources;

1\. Musi river water/Manjeera 2\. the Large lakes like Hussain/Osmania Sagar etc. 3\. ground water/borewells

My apartment society in Gachibowli area, just ran of water for a few days back in June. The borewell just couldnt get the water. There is no lake around us.

Getting the river water connection would be around Rs.15_00_0000. To add to the issues, the gov is not giving out new river water connections without a longdrawn process and the river water itself is too low to sustain all the existing connection.

Right now several apartment societies with 3000+ apartments in them are coming up in my immediate neighbourhood. So next year, we can expect the borewell water to be over way before june (early may?). We will certainly don't have river water connection by then. So, we will be dependent on water takers for a few months. this year the tankers are charging 8k (from 2k last year) for each refill. next year, the price would be over 20k for each refill.

Rain water harvesting doesnt works greatly in areas like ours which only get a few months of rain. Where will you keep the harvested water for the next 8-9 months? How do you maintain the quality of this stagnant water? So, most likely people would end up using it and the hope would be that an equivalent amount of ground water will be spared. It really doesnt works out in practice. People don't ration the water usage and will not until it gets dire. Also rain harvesting infra will take years to set up. Desalinating water is not much help as transporting the water is a logistical issue. So yes, while there are possible solutions, they will take a lot of political will to execute and will certainly take more than a few years to bear fruit. The situation, till then will be bad.

The water in all lakes is incredibly low. The lakes are also extremely dirty ([http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2018/oct/07...](http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2018/oct/07/pollution- level-high-in-hussain-sagar-tspcb-1882240.html)) The water is already contaminated by industrial waste.

2020 is going to be bad for us in Hyderabad. Not Chennai level bad. but we will get there in the next few years. And what i do know of Bangalore form my other friends who live there, its pretty bad there already. A lot of large societies are dependent on tanker waters despite Bangalore having much more rainfall than Hyderabad.

All in all, I think this level of alarm is not just necessary, it should have come a decade ago, when it would have been easier to circumvent. Hyderabad's population will cross 12MM by 2030. Now, whatever approach we end up taking, its gonna be costly, hard to execute and will take a lot of time. And will probably will not be enough.

EDIT: I am wildly off on the Hyderabad population growth. The existing census data is from 2011. Apparently we crossed 12MM in 2019. [https://indiapopulation2019.com/population-of- hyderabad-2019...](https://indiapopulation2019.com/population-of- hyderabad-2019.html) If correct, this is over the population of major mega cities like NY, LA etc.

<comment><USER13> > Right now several apartment societies with 3000+ apartments in them are > coming up in my immediate neighbourhood. So next year, we can expect the > borewell water to be over way before june (early may?).

Do you mean that a permit had been given to developement project without providing adequate water supply first? And it will depend on borewells?

> Rain water harvesting doesnt works greatly in areas like ours which only get > a few months of rain. Where will you keep the harvested water for the next > 8-9 months?

Some desert cities in Palestine had a rain once in a three years. Still tanks provided adequate amounts of water.

Seems like India ain't lacking in water resources but in governance.

<comment><USER12> Governance and public apathy are always a big issue in India. And with the sheer speed of growth, it would be a struggle for even a gov with the political will to make meaningful changes.

Regarding you question on giving permits without providing adequate water supply, that's how it is in Indian metropolitans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Same issue in Pakistan, it's a very watery place in comparison to say, Europe or Southern USA, but you have hard time finding a place with reliable tap water:

1\. Water theft from utilities

2\. Gigantic and wasteful usage of water in agriculture

3\. Leaky pipes and contamination from sewage

4\. Utilities are just starting to recover from decades of extreme mismanagement

5\. Tanker mafia of course doing its worst to keep all of above going

</comment><comment><USER15> Want to make a difference on climate change as a technologist?

Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive):

\- [https://climateaction.tech/](https://climateaction.tech/)

\- [https://techimpactmakers.com/](https://techimpactmakers.com/)

\- [https://www.tmrow.com/](https://www.tmrow.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the govt must stop factories, soda factories, mineral water companies taking ground water ASAP.

<comment><USER17> How many litres of water does it take to make a litre of mineral water?

How does that compare with a kg of lettuce, or tomatoes, or beef?

Bottled water has its problems, water use isnt really one of them.

<comment><USER18> > How many litres of water does it take to make a litre of mineral water?

Interesting question, I found this article[1] which says:

\- for North American companies, it takes 1.39 liters to make one liter of water

\- That's less than the global averages of a liter of soda, which requires 2.02 liters of water

\- A liter of beer, meanwhile, needs 4 liters of water, wine demands 4.74 liters. Hard alcohol, it turns out, is the greediest, guzzling 34.55 liters of water for every liter

[1] [https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/28/241419373/ho...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/28/241419373/how- much-water-actually-goes-into-making-a-bottle-of-water)

<comment><USER17> I don't think that includes the plastic bottle.

[https://naturalsociety.com/study-analyzes-wastefulness- bottl...](https://naturalsociety.com/study-analyzes-wastefulness-bottled- water/)

Veg still tends to be worse though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> India does not have a water issue, they have a population issue, but it's really hard to mange the population, so natural resources are being consumed beyond sustainability.

This problem is not confined to India, it's a problem with humanity. Nature is working on a correction.

<comment><USER20> I beg to differ, India's population density is comparable to many Western European countries. They a problem of population distribution. Like many developing nations, populations cluster in large cities leading to pressures on resources.

<comment><USER7> > India's population density is comparable to many Western European countries.

I went down worldpopulationreview.com's list; I'll post my list annotated with country size as a reply to this comment.

Findings:

India, the country, is #28. It has essentially equal population density to the Netherlands (#29, in Europe!), while being a modest 87 times larger. Belgium (#33) has only slightly less density, and India is merely 102 times bigger.

The next European country down is England at #50. It's much closer to the size of India -- 8% as large -- and has two-thirds the density.

Pakistan is #55; it's about four times the size of England with comparable density.

#59 is Germany; it's less than half the size of Pakistan with comparable density. Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, who you might have thought would have super-high density, are equal to Germany. (Monaco and Vatican City really do have super-high density.)

The only other country-sized European countries in the top 70 are Switzerland and Italy, #68 and #69. They have half the density of India. Italy is a tenth of India's size. Switzerland is slightly larger than the Netherlands.

Bangladesh, by the way, is #12, with more than double the density of India (in about 1/20 of the space).

So I can't agree that India's population density is comparable to "many Western European countries". It's comparable to a couple of diminutive European countries. Equal density over 100 times the area is not what you would expect; it's something very unusual about India.

In fact, we can just compare the regions directly. Europe has 743 million people in 10 million square kilometers of land for an average density of 74.3 people per square km. India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) has 1740 million people in 4 million square km, for an average density of over 400 people per square km (roughly equal to the density of India the country, which makes sense), about 6 times the figure for Europe.

<comment><USER7> Areas are taken from Wikipedia, with water area removed where Wikipedia lists water area. This list is the full top 30 "countries" plus whoever I thought was of interest down to #70. Many areas are rounded.

         1. Macau               30 square km
         2. Monaco               2.2
         3. Singapore          720
         4. Hong Kong        1,070
         5. Gibraltar            6.7
         6. Bahrain            778
         7. Vatican City         0.44
         8. Maldives           298
         9. Malta              316
        10. Sint Maarten        37
        11. Bermuda             39
        12. Bangladesh     138,000
        13. Palestine        5,800
        14. Saint-Martin        53
        15. Mayotte            374
        16. Barbados           439
        17. Lebanon         10,300
        18. Taiwan          36,000
        19. Mauritius        2,000
        20. Aruba              179
        21. San Marino          61
        22. South Korea    100,000
        23. Nauru               21
        24. Saint Barthelemy    25
        25. Rwanda          25,000
        26. Comoros          1,659
        27. Tuvalu              26
        28. India        2,970,000
        29. Netherlands     34,000
        30. Israel          21,000
        33. Belgium         29,000
        37. Japan          365,000
        47. Vietnam        310,000
        50. United Kingdom 239,000
        55. Pakistan       860,000
        59. Germany        357,000
        68. Switzerland     40,000
        69. Italy          294,000

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When you cover large swarth of land with concert the rain water goes on the roof and on the road goes to gutter and makes it way to sevege. In absence, of this it is drawn underground and refills underground water.

When people were building these concert jungles, they didn't keep in mind where the water comes from and how exactly it's refilled and what we can do to replenish the capacity lost due to our development projects.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is there a way to limit the size of these big cities?

What if they start requiring a domestic visa process to let in the people from other states?

Everyone wants a life of high standards of living which cities provide along with employment.

If we do not limit the number of people who can get in, it will naturally result in whole population of India moving into these cities.

This will result in people making wherever they live better instead of just moving to a better city.

<comment><USER22> The way it's generally balanced out is exploding property prices and an unlivable mess of traffic and perhaps pollution.

However, people are willing to endure a lot if living standards are generally low.

<comment><USER21> Mumbai has high real estate price like but it doesn't stop people below the poverty line from coming to Mumbai and living in slums.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They've already run out in some, and truck in water. Those with money are able to pay for fresh water.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've see a number of documentaries about indians that have used permaculture to turn desert into food producing forests. maybe they need to apply their knowledge in cities?

</comment><comment><USER25> SA is closer getting more than 35% of drinking water via desalinating sea water

</comment><comment><USER26> how much is Coca-Cola[1][2] to blame for this. Afaik it has been the center of criticism in India for over a decade now:

 _Coca-Cola operates 58 water-intensive bottling plants in India. In the southern Indian village of Plachimada in Kerala state, for example, persistent droughts have dried up groundwater and local wells, forcing many residents to rely on water supplies trucked in daily by the government._

[1] [https://www.thoughtco.com/coca-cola-groundwater-depletion- in...](https://www.thoughtco.com/coca-cola-groundwater-depletion-in- india-1204204)

[2] [https://waronwant.org/media/coca-cola-drinking-world- dry](https://waronwant.org/media/coca-cola-drinking-world-dry)

<comment><USER27> I'll assume that every ounce of bottled water or soft drink replaces water that people would have drank anyway, and possibly with more efficiency - <USER2> larger percentage of the (expensive) bottled water gets used on the unalienable human need to drink than if the same water was piped to houses and used for both drinking and washing.

The plants may be blamed for _transferring_ water scarcity from places where the drinks are bought and drunk to the places where the bottling plants are operated, but not for _creating_ water scarcity.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to accept online payment from Egypt? - <AUTHOR>

I have a small online business.  Most customers are in North America and pay using PayPal.  I have an inquiry from someone in Egypt, where they use Moneybookers and PayPal is not available.
What is the best way for a Canada/US web company to accept online payment from Egypt?
Moneybookers doesn't seem to support withdrawals to Canada/US bank account.  PayPal doesn't seem to support customers in Egypt.
I am confident there are lots of Ycombinators who have already figured out the best way to serve customers in countries like Egypt.
Any advice or pointers would be very much appreciated.
David Jones email@example.com http://pairwiseaffinity.com <comment><AUTHOR> I received email from someone at MoneyBookers. Apparently they _can_ do a Bank Transfer to a US or Canadian bank for a flat fee of 1.80 Euro (about $2.40).

Just in case anyone else wants to accept online payments from locations where PayPal is not available.

\-- dxjones</comment>


Can Heroku (YC W08) Become the Official Cloud of Facebook Apps? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/can-heroku-become-the-official-cloud-of-facebook-apps/

<comment><USER2> Today I heard of <http://phpfog.com/> which might be good for Facebook apps too.

I think the headline is a bit linkbaitish, especially because the bundle is so specific. It's not just Heroku+Facebook. If you take away RPM and use something else, the bundle is no longer cheaper. So it's for people who want Heroku+Facebook+RPM.

</comment><comment><USER3> A bit out of subject but... the design of the overall Heroku website is just fantastic. For every new sections added, I'm always amazed by how the page looks great.

<comment><USER4> It is a great design except when you try and enter your credit card late at night and have to think about your expiration date because it's on your card as 03/13 and they make you translate it to March 2013 instead of just putting the numbers in front of the month drop down.

Then you have to make sure the CC number is entered with or without the dashes - I don't remember which. Then after you mess up the CC format they reset the expiration date back to the defaults and you don't notice and then have to start all over again for a third time. Great design - except for the part where you try and pay them.

I emailed them about it but I guess they have better things to do or don't want to offend their designers sensibility.

<comment><USER5> good idea. we've created a ticket for this request.

<comment><USER4> Future me from 2013 thanks you...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what the split between apps using the free instance and the rest of their products is? Are 90K of the apps just free accounts? I bet 5K are just people who went through RailsTutorial.org...

Still though - Heroku has a great service, and deserve their props.

<comment><USER7> I imagine the breakdown is pretty heavily weighted toward free accounts. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if 90% or so are free - I know I have a few projects on there that are mostly idle deployments of weekend tinkering. Personally, I haven't made anything yet that is "big" enough (ie generating enough traffic/data) to warrant me taking the leap to a paid account.

That being said, their infrastructure is such that I imagine free accounts only hurt them from a business perspective if they're consuming a lot of resources (bandwidth, processor time). And even then, if that is the case the user has probably already upgraded to a paid account. The overhead for idle projects is low, as apps are spun up on demand and killed for inactivity.

As you said, it's a hell of a service.

      heroku create myawesomeapp
      git push heroku master

Doesn't get much easier than that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well I like Heroku a lot but I think non Ruby Facebook apps are allowed as well. Aren't they?

<comment><USER2> Certainly. Facebook uses PHP, so it would be odd for them to support only Ruby.</comment></comment>