Significant cultural difference makes for really interesting design differences in apps and websites! Americans (maybe Westerners more broadly) tend to prefer simple designs with plenty of white space, where Chinese users find a simple design to be annoying and difficult to use. They want the content all in one place - whitespace is wasted space.
I've read once that this might have something to do with slow internet in China, which leads to users wanting to reach content in as few clicks/page loads as possible, but I'm not sure how accurate that is.
The idea of factions in Microsoft fighting for control is interesting to me from a historical perspective - do you have any books or sources I can read to get the full story?
Most people only use 4-6 apps a day, or less. Users are spending more and more time in fewer apps. I reckon a good bit of that is the friction of installing new apps.
"Massive" JS frameworks aren't the issue, not by themselves. AngularJS, for instance, is only 39.5kb. Bloat sneaks into web applications in other ways, but merely bringing in a framework isn't enough to add a noticeable load on a web page.
I hold the door open for everybody, and I've never been accused of sexism. I usually just get smiles from everyone. If a woman were to call me a sexist for holding the door open for her, I'd shrug it off. I'm not so fragile that I avoid speaking to anyone of the opposite gender just because I'm too thin-skinned to deal with the hypothetical situation where someone, somewhere, might think me a sexist.
Part of professional life is understanding how to communicate with others and how to know before you say something how it will be taken. Some people aren't good at this, and those people should work on it until they get better at it. I wouldn't blame anyone who makes an honest effort. But many more people in my experience simply aren't interested in learning how to communicate with people that are different from them. In these cases, this mentality of blaming "PC culture" is just allowing people to remain lazy and ignorant.
I see variations on this phrase all over the place, and I don't understand it. It really isn't that hard to avoid saying offensive and distasteful things to women (or anyone else, actually). It's almost always obvious that some statements are pretty offensive or at the very least make people uncomfortable, and it only takes the smallest modicum of common sense and tact to avoid saying those things. "You're too hot to be an engineer" is an awkward thing to say to a woman in an elevator, and if you're a woman in tech, you're bombarded with those statements weekly. It's not about being brittle. It's about letting people know when what they're saying is garbage. If anything, the men complaining about how they don't like having to think before speaking are brittle.
Speaking as a man that manages to "navigate the PC minefield" every day, it really isn't difficult. I promise.
95% of YC-backed startups fail. A few go on to have decent success, and maybe 2 or 3 YC ventures actually went on to billion-dollar valuations (Dropbox and Airbnb). And that's considered a really good success rate.
Since we're talking here about what you call 'unicorns' (I hate that word), then we're talking about the odds of building a billion-dollar company. YC is made up of hundreds of incredibly talented entrepreneurs, and even then, it's pretty evident that building a billion dollar company is as much about luck and circumstance as it is about talent and determination.
EDIT: Correction - I was very wrong about YC stats, as it turns out [1]. My mistake. I stand by the original point, though. 8 billion-dollar companies out of ~940 YC companies demonstrate clearly that building a billion dollar company isn't easy, and takes a whole lot of luck.
> And let's not get into the whole privacy thing. A 1 TB drive is, what, fifty bucks today -- and people would rather store their files in a datacenter across the ocean?
Yep. Fact is, HNers are much more concerned with privacy than your average consumer is. Most people care much more about convenience than privacy. I don't really know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it's a truth.