I've been thinking about the same subject the last few months, and I think Andrew's spot on about the problem, but less so about the solution.
I live in SV, but I visit fly-over country every couple of months. When I'm in non-costal parts of the US, I spend a lot of time researching what other people are doing with their computers.
It's been enlightening: Most people use XP or Vista. Apple is for rich people or designers. Facebook is the hot new hotness. No one has heard of twitter except if they watch CNN. Smart phones are for the rich or business types (they use blackberries). Everyone loves their iPods. No one gets twitter. Even among non-SV geeks, using Python or Ruby is pretty rare, and no one has heard of EC2, although they vaguely know about "cloud computing" and virtualization.
The problem that Andrew brings up is very real, but there's an easy solution to the problem: get out of town and visit family for a while.
It's a double edged sword. Easy access to lots of people also means lots of people competing for the same resources. So if you are not 100% on the ball and moving that ball as fast as you can chances are somebody else will run with it.
In more relaxed atmospheres you might have a chance to make it on a slower pace but it will never be the hit that it could be without the power of the bay area behind it.
It's like going to hollywood if you're a pretty girl and you think the camera loves you. There are lots of pretty girls in hollywood and they all compete for that same attention. Don't be surprised if you end up waiting tables for the people that did make it - and you didn't.
To be a big fish in a small pond has its advantages, you have fairly little competition and you are almost guaranteed some exposure. But the chances of hitting out of the park are diminished by a similar factor.
The US presidential election was won with influence and money. Would Obama have won as an independent candidate? In that sense, the election was indeed gamed. Andrew too, is trying to use his influence (his 4630 Twitter followers) to win votes on HN. Because other stories on HN don't have the weight of massive Twitter broadcasts behind them, I view Andrew's actions as gaming the system.
It only takes one or two votes to get a new story on the front page. Past that, of course, it quickly disappears if it doesn't receive more votes - as it should.
Not arguing for or against anything, I just think that "4630 Twitter followers" and "massive Twitter broadcasts" is completely overstating the issue. You only need a couple of friends who also read HN.
It will be interesting to see how much a story's position depends on these kind of "advertising" tactics. The explicit "asking for upvotes" tactic feels a bit sleazy to me.
I think your susceptibility to the industry echo chamber has more to do with your personality and where you come from than where you are. There are lots of people outside of SV who don't want to work on anything that isn't related to the iPhone or Twitter. And there are lots of people in SV working on unsexy but massively profitable things like Facebook apps (which were sexy two years ago, before they started making big bucks) or whatever else.
Perhaps it goes without saying that living the bubble lifestyle entails focusing on the short term at the expense of the long term. As Andrew says:
As an entrepreneur, I can’t help but look at the short-term choices that get made in an environment like this without some degree of disappointment. There are many brilliant people who could be trying to make the world for the better and really create long-term value, but instead they are engaged in...
I share Andrew's disappointment, but from the rest of his post, it seems we probably disagree on the cause(s). Part of my explanation is in the post I linked to above.
"they are engaged in a zero-sum game to extract as much value as possible from the world"
I don't think this describes what a Silicon Valley startups are doing at all-- specifically, it's not a zero-sum game. Lots of startups are creating new markets that didn't exist before them.
You're taking that quote out of context. Andrew was referring to a subset of startups, including the "gold-rush" and copycat companies he discussed in the previous paragraph.
I live in SV, but I visit fly-over country every couple of months. When I'm in non-costal parts of the US, I spend a lot of time researching what other people are doing with their computers.
It's been enlightening: Most people use XP or Vista. Apple is for rich people or designers. Facebook is the hot new hotness. No one has heard of twitter except if they watch CNN. Smart phones are for the rich or business types (they use blackberries). Everyone loves their iPods. No one gets twitter. Even among non-SV geeks, using Python or Ruby is pretty rare, and no one has heard of EC2, although they vaguely know about "cloud computing" and virtualization.
The problem that Andrew brings up is very real, but there's an easy solution to the problem: get out of town and visit family for a while.