Everyone's heart rate is different and I don't think with any certainty you can expect to predict what someone's HR is in any particular situation. Personally my absolute max HR I've seen in my whole life is 166 yet I regularly cycle with guys in their 50s that can reach 180-190. The only way to find your max HR is by measuring it.

I kind of want to agree with most of the points but I think there also has to be a level of realism as to what kind of business Scotland can accommodate. For example, it's very unlikely that companies on the scale of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc, could ever grow to their current levels within Scotland. I think this for a few reasons.

The first is that the VC funding is just not at the same levels as in the US. Secondly, the talent pool is way to small. As much as we like to think the presence of 4 universities in Glasgow alone must mean we are overflowing with people this just isn't the case, you are lucky if you have 40 final year students in a CS course, and maybe around 15% of them are actually "excellent", and the numbers have been decreasing over the years. I have at least 4 friends that were looking to recruit in the last month or so and each one has been despondent about the quality of the candidates. Then finally you are going to be in a dog fight with the large financial institutions that dominate the hiring of new grads. Graduates here are still relatively conservative in what kind of job they want.

However, where I do think we can excel is in creating tech startups that don't focus so much on the consumer side of things. There are plenty of hard problems out there that don't necessarily need 300 million active users to make some money.

Regarding the scaling issue, location is irrelevant nowadays. Anyone can create a massively scalable system using a laptop and an internet connection thanks to services like AWS.

I'm sure if a startup looked as if it was becoming a global hist then it would relocate to the U.S. if it wasn't bought by an existing company there first.

To my eye anyway it always looks like Google got the developers to do the design as well (even though that's probably not the case), whereas Apples' designs have a little bit more of an "artistic" feel to them

Does anyone think the debate as to what platform a developer should be targeting (assuming they are trying to earn a living from it) is important?

The reason I ask is I'm currently developing an Android app (as I have an Android phone and no mac) but I keep wondering if it's worth getting hold of a mac and iPhone sooner rather than later.

I don't think it matters where you start as long as you think through design and architecture to be as cross platform as possible. You have got to start somewhere.

iOS is stupidly better for monetization, and the demand for Objective-C developers is still very high.

Android users simply don't buy as many apps, and the pretty steep upper limit on app sizes mean several apps you can easily do on iOS are considerably harder on android. We've yet to see a project yet where android outsells iOS. (This very likely has to do with the wonky payment system for Android which started with very few nations and still isn't anywhere near Apple's numbers of participating nations. For Most non-US specific apps, they sell about 50% abroad 50% domestic, so that's a HUGE deal.)

The tools have a laughable difference in quality (XCode/InterfaceBuilder used to be a little sketchy for apps, is now pretty good, but eclipse is still eclipse, and graphical layout and editing is still very out there for android, but is the norm for iOS).

(I used to be an embedded Linux dev, I really wish android was doing considerably better).

That $1289 you'd spend buying a late generation iPod Touch and a white macbook is very worth it (or a mac mini even).

The thing that struck me about some of the recommended reading on the list was that I suspect some of the books in the highly voted answers are probably not recommended texts on a good CS course (as is the author of the posts wish). I mean it's been a while since I took an undergraduate course but there were very few books recommended that looked at the more practical side of computer programming - apart from maybe in the first year of your course, and I'm assuming the author was looking for more in depth reading. Senior years on many CS courses tend to focus on theory behind topics which is something that I think is probably a lot harder to get motivated to read than say Code Complete. I mean you really have to want/need to learn Edmonds' graph matching algorithm as things like that are not comfortable reading. It's the reason why I think doing a CS course has some benefits as it's not often you are forced to approach the subject in that manner. That said, the accepted answer has probably provided a decent list of books with a more academic slant.

I think this is a good idea not only for those seeking to move to the Valley but also those just there for a visit. I was there for a week before and after Startup School this year and I would have loved to have had a definitive hackers reference for the area. It might also be worth asking pg is you can use some of the content from his "Where to see in Silicon Valley" essay.

I have seen the question on hacker news now and again and it was kind of hard to understand what the allure of the valley was until I visited for a week at Startup School. It was fascinating to view and compare it to my own experiences. I have thought many times that you can change things and break the mould but when you see the tidal wave of constant and relentless, for the want of a better word, progress it makes you see how difficult and how many factors are involved in creating another Silicon Valley.

I'm sure many people do benefit from taking notes but I'm convinced that pg most likely wasn't dismissing note taking in general. I think he was more likely to be meaning you don't need to write down every word he says, akin to almost transcribing the talk - well this was my take on it anyway. Basically he was implying that the substance of the talk will appear in a later essay, which it did. To me, with this point in particular, the author of the article appears to be trying to find something (anything?) to take issue with, which in my opinion makes me value his other points a little less favourably.

This all seems to me that you were trying to hire a machine. They will work on weekends and evenings without too much complaint, but form my experience as an employee, there are very few humans willing to work those kinds of hours and be happy about it. On an odd occasion when needs must, yes, but every day and every week will always lead to the inevitable. For most people (and maybe even more so in the UK), working at a startup is just another job, maybe not to you, but to them it will be. I also found as a PhD student those who worked longer hours never finished any quicker than those who enjoyed their time a little more - this is only my personal experience though. Maybe one of your biggest mistakes was not understanding people as well as you think you do - I dunno.