thijsc (u/thijsc) - Readit News

thijsc commented on Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/N1H1L

joelbluminator · 5 years ago

You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe. But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.

thijsc · 5 years ago

> You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe.

There are also vast differences between states in the US. If we're comparing I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick places that are on the top end of the scale on both sides of the ocean.

> But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.

I'm not claiming that the EU is equivalent to SV, or the wider US. There is certainly much to love about SV and we can and should do better in a number of areas in which SV is already doing very well.

I'm only correcting the unfounded assumption that some people in this thread expressed that there's somehow nothing going on in the EU. Or that it's a bad place for business, it's really not.

thijsc commented on Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/N1H1L

SOMA_BOFH · 5 years ago

>There is a thriving tech scene in Europe

please explain

thijsc · 5 years ago

Hard to know where to start!

Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here.

This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58...

There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.

On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company.

I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.

thijsc commented on Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/N1H1L

emptysongglass · 5 years ago

Work for a tech company in Europe. GDPR compliance is costing us massive manpower hours and money spent on compliance consultants. Most of my salary gets obliterated before it reaches me and I make significantly less than tech workers in the US.

There's a lot to like about the security but I'm starting to wonder if I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.

thijsc · 5 years ago

Not a fan of GDPR either.

I'm really not sure the total tax load as an employee is much worse compared to California if you factor in state taxes and health care payments.

thijsc commented on Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/N1H1L

reader_mode · 5 years ago

> There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well!

Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of the money and the rest was just EU grants to stimulate entrepreneurship. Do I need to say that their portfolio looks like a garbage bin of knockoff attempts and small businesses masquerading as startups.

thijsc · 5 years ago

I totally agree with you that the EU's efforts to replicate a SV style startup ecosystem are misguided and ineffective.

The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.

thijsc commented on Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/N1H1L

238475235243 · 5 years ago

I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once).

Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or whatever where opening for business more than one day a week is seen as aggressive. (again, I exaggerate slightly).

If anyone disagrees with this article who's in the US, I dare you to go and try and start something in the EU and report back. Not the UK, the EU.

Glory to the US, and the ability to move States with little friction. Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice (I'm looking at you, Belgium). Glory to sales tax below 20%. Glory to the country I chose as home, which so many natives seem to be delusional about how terrible it is.

One day I hope the EU lives up to the dream of being a genuine federation of EU states, with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US), defends its borders instead of giving up on them, allows free and fair competition and puts its citizens above the bizarre EU commission and its bonkers methods and plans.

thijsc · 5 years ago

Reporting back: Your comment is utter nonsense. There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well!

Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free.

Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over here.

Overall many countries in Europe are amazing places to start a business in.

thijsc commented on Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work theta.eu.org/2021/03/08/a... · Posted by u/tazjin

ntr-- · 5 years ago

I don't know how anybody can say this with a straight face.

Even in a systems context I think it's pretty reasonable to want to either perform or receive a HTTP request, as soon as you do that in Rust you are funneled into Hyper or something built on top of it (like reqwest) and instantly are dependent on tokio/mio.

The very first example in the reqwest readme^1 has tokio attributes, async functions AND trait objects. It's impossible that a beginner attempting to use the language to do anything related to networking won't be guided into the async nightmare before they have even come to grips with the borrow checker.

1. https://crates.io/crates/reqwest

thijsc · 5 years ago

Try https://github.com/algesten/ureq, it’s very nice and not async.

thijsc commented on Home Studio Setup Costs Compared – 1980s And Now pro-tools-expert.com/prod... · Posted by u/brudgers

endymi0n · 6 years ago

The oddest thing about this Cambrian explosion of possibility at dirt cheap prices is what it did to my creativity: It actually hurt it.

I started just a tad later and fully digital than the gear in this article, so the floppy discs I got Scream Tracker on with its included samples plus whatever I could rip from a few .MODs I could get my hands on had to do. There were four tracks. There were a hundred samples, half of which was obscure crap (and even those found their use).

Building with it and making them sound awesome, plus discovering the amazing tricks the OGs of tracker & demo culture did with their editors (sliding and bending notes! dead stops in the middle of the sample!) was endless fun.

Nowadays, I get Native Instruments Ultimate — and despite sounding orders of magnitude better, all I do is toying around. I always have the nagging feeling there's gotta be one sound or effect in that endless library that's still better than the one I'm using right now.

thijsc · 6 years ago

What really helps me is to compose a complete song first and worry about the sound later. Just use whatever patch kind of gets the job done at first. Once the full song structure is in place, including all melody and transitions start tweaking the actual sounds.

thijsc commented on Breathing and Exercise: Strength Training for Your Diaphragm (2018) pennmedicine.org/updates/... · Posted by u/robg

WalterBright · 6 years ago

I went looking for a voice coach. All I could find were singing coaches and autistic speech therapy ones. Nobody who could coach me at giving presentations. How did you find yours?

thijsc · 6 years ago

Did one session with an acting coach once which was very useful.

Most useful tip he gave me: in between sentences focus on breathing out, instead of breathing in. If you clear your lungs they will take care of filling up automatically.

thijsc commented on A Dutch first: Ingenious BMW theft attempt mrooding.me/a-dutch-first... · Posted by u/rapnie

21 · 8 years ago

Don't you read the news? There have recently been articles in the international press that Amsterdam is a jungle right now:

> Official ombudsman, Arre Zuurmond told Dutch paper Trouw that "the city centre becomes an urban jungle at night". He added: "Criminal money flourishes, there is no authority and the police can no longer handle the situation."

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/amsterdam-tourists-...

thijsc · 8 years ago

The quote is specifically about a few areas like the red light district that see so many drunk and/or high tourists that the situation gets too unwieldy. Quite a specific situation that's not saying too much about the general crime level.

It's rich that a British paper publishes an alarming story on this since British tourists are a huge part of these crowds.

thijsc commented on GM is launching a $5K tiny electric car in China made for city commuters dailymail.co.uk/sciencete... · Posted by u/prostoalex

swsieber · 8 years ago

To paint with broad strokes:

I'd blame the demand on Europe's higher population density and better public transit - there's not nearly as much "need" (demand?) for vehicles that can make long, sustained trips.

thijsc · 8 years ago

I own one and it is suitable for longer trips. Regularly drive for 90 minutes with it.

It’s only real downside is that luggage space is very limited.