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This community is exactly the type of testosterone-driven money-obsessed community that would create a Goldman Sachs Commodity Index that will cause starvation,

This community is exactly the type of testosterone-driven money-obsessed community that would create a Goldman Sachs Commodity Index that will cause starvation, and then absolve themselves of responsibility due to some free market arms-length ideology. It's not a coincidence that you're disturbed by the comments. Wall Street entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are fundamentally very similar in mindset and outlook. Entrepreneurs are trained to have a laser focus on their own issues and to look at everything in terms of dollar value. Recently, it is becoming more clear to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that short-term windfalls are preferable, so they try to pump up the speculative value of their companies and dump them before anything bad happens. Pumping and dumping your own Silicon Valley start up is surely one of the easiest ways to get very rich right now.

edu 15y ago
The not-so-small difference is that tech-entrepreneurs (in SV or anywhere else) are creating real value and "WS entrepreneurs" (which I guess you mean brokers and similar) are just betting and not creating real value.
- forensic 15y ago
  I said they were similar in "mindset and outlook". Would Silicon Valley hesitate to cause humanitarian crises in the name of profit? What if those crises were very only indirectly linked to their behaviour? What if Silicon Valley discovered today that they were putting millions of low-skill Americans irreparably out of work. Would this motivate them to modify their libertarian ideology, or lobby for free educations for the poor?
sammathews 15y ago
I could not disagree with you more. SV Entrepreneur types, as a generalisation, are more like the farmers in this article selling there wares than the WS Bankers. Sure people are money obsessed but they do it either by being profitable or by selling equity in value creating businesses. I think the Google slogan of "Don't be evil" is the best summation of the average tech entrepreneur these days, generally because they are smart respectable human beings. They are looking to solve a problem that exists, for people willing to pay. Of course there are always bad apples. There is nothing broken about demand and supply, only the steps in between are broken, which the financial institution's such as Goldman saps on.
- forensic 15y ago
  I think "Don't be evil" is a slogan of tech employees, not tech entrepreneurs. I single out Hacker News as being psychologically different from normal software engineers. The focus on Hacker News is money, and many people here see profit as inherently virtuous. Social darwinism, eugenics, authoritarianism, and other extreme right political views are overrepresented on Hacker News, and given surprising amounts of leeway considering the swiftness with which other views are scrubbed away here.
- westicle 15y ago
  Something which has always disturbed me about the community is the macabre fascination with funding and exits. Obviously these are healthy steps in the progression of some businesses, but at times it seems HN focuses on them to the exclusion of whether a startup actually contributes something worthwhile. It is probably arguable that those things represent a reasonable proxy for the value created (or expected to be created) by the business. Then again, there are plenty of funded (and acquired) business models which are based on cynical exploitation of the less-educated for the benefit of the business owner, at a net cost to society as a whole. If an SV entrepreneur-type is more focused on getting funded or making an exit than creating net value to society, I think it is fair to draw ethical comparisons with the WS banker-type.
  - ramchip 15y ago
    I'm not sure I can agree. Sometimes there is an emphasis on acquisition, but companies that sound overvalued or negative to society tend to be disliked on HN as well. Groupon, for instance, gets flak in about every thread that mentions it.
- MrMan 15y ago
  Middle-men are often seen as ethically compromised in any supply-and-demand scenario. this is not new. The whole GS franchise is built on their role as a go-between. Need hyphens? You might not understand the hyphen farmer's strange accent, but the merchant has been dealing with him for a long time.

edu 15y ago

The not-so-small difference is that tech-entrepreneurs (in SV or anywhere else) are creating real value and "WS entrepreneurs" (which I guess you mean brokers and similar) are just betting and not creating real value.

forensic 15y ago
I said they were similar in "mindset and outlook". Would Silicon Valley hesitate to cause humanitarian crises in the name of profit? What if those crises were very only indirectly linked to their behaviour? What if Silicon Valley discovered today that they were putting millions of low-skill Americans irreparably out of work. Would this motivate them to modify their libertarian ideology, or lobby for free educations for the poor?

sammathews 15y ago

I could not disagree with you more. SV Entrepreneur types, as a generalisation, are more like the farmers in this article selling there wares than the WS Bankers. Sure people are money obsessed but they do it either by being profitable or by selling equity in value creating businesses. I think the Google slogan of "Don't be evil" is the best summation of the average tech entrepreneur these days, generally because they are smart respectable human beings. They are looking to solve a problem that exists, for people willing to pay. Of course there are always bad apples. There is nothing broken about demand and supply, only the steps in between are broken, which the financial institution's such as Goldman saps on.

forensic 15y ago
I think "Don't be evil" is a slogan of tech employees, not tech entrepreneurs. I single out Hacker News as being psychologically different from normal software engineers. The focus on Hacker News is money, and many people here see profit as inherently virtuous. Social darwinism, eugenics, authoritarianism, and other extreme right political views are overrepresented on Hacker News, and given surprising amounts of leeway considering the swiftness with which other views are scrubbed away here.
westicle 15y ago
Something which has always disturbed me about the community is the macabre fascination with funding and exits. Obviously these are healthy steps in the progression of some businesses, but at times it seems HN focuses on them to the exclusion of whether a startup actually contributes something worthwhile. It is probably arguable that those things represent a reasonable proxy for the value created (or expected to be created) by the business. Then again, there are plenty of funded (and acquired) business models which are based on cynical exploitation of the less-educated for the benefit of the business owner, at a net cost to society as a whole. If an SV entrepreneur-type is more focused on getting funded or making an exit than creating net value to society, I think it is fair to draw ethical comparisons with the WS banker-type.
- ramchip 15y ago
  I'm not sure I can agree. Sometimes there is an emphasis on acquisition, but companies that sound overvalued or negative to society tend to be disliked on HN as well. Groupon, for instance, gets flak in about every thread that mentions it.
MrMan 15y ago
Middle-men are often seen as ethically compromised in any supply-and-demand scenario. this is not new. The whole GS franchise is built on their role as a go-between. Need hyphens? You might not understand the hyphen farmer's strange accent, but the merchant has been dealing with him for a long time.