12 ms·

Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

109 points by jweir 2y ago

jweir 2y ago
This story was on the front page of Hacker News – but then disappeared. Did the original poster delete it or something else happen?
- jweir 2y ago
  Ah - all is clear ``` [flagged] [dead] Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac (gizmodo.com) ```
- adrianmonk 2y ago
  It's at the #10 position on my front page right now.
- dang 2y ago
  Looks like a moderator downweighted it, probably because it's a sensational-indignant article, which is not what HN is supposed to be for. Angry articles about how awful rich people or celebrities are a sure hit with upvoters, but their appeal does not come from intellectual curiosity, which is the organizing principle of this site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So it's standard moderation practice to downweight them here; otherwise the front page would consist of little else. We make exceptions if an article has significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) that can provide a basis for an intellectually curious conversation, but it doesn't look like that's the case here. Edit: it's also the case that users heavily flagged it, which has a similar effect. I'm not sure whether the moderation chicken or the user eggs were first in the downranking of this piece, but it doesn't matter much in the sense that both are the system functioning as usual.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    > their appeal does not come from intellectual curiosity Unless you're interested in human behavior and see finance as part of a natural process. From a biology perspective there's an obvious line of thinking around resource sequestration you can't really discuss in public, so I'm always interested in seeing the shape its eventual expression takes. The articles are also rage bait and I agree with the moderation fwiw. We aren't really here to square this particular circle.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
labrador 2y ago
My issue with American programmers and technologists who get rich is that it goes to their head and suddenly they think they're an intellectual on a wide range of subjects. It happened to me but I grew out of it when I got old. Marc Andreeson is no different. Have you ever really listened to Peter Theil in an interview? He's all over the map, saying things that sound profound but when you think about it actually make no sense at all. He's great at some things, but he's not great at everything. Same with Andreeson. At least he's not as bad as Musk in this regard.
- syndicatedjelly 2y ago
  Is this true of experts in other fields? Why are programmers prone to this behavior?
  - bmitc 2y ago
    Physicists and engineers are a lot like this too. I think software people have more of a chance getting rich very easily based upon some dumb idea that just happens to make them rich when the company sells.
    - labrador 2y ago
      Yes, when home copmputers hit in the 80's and the internet hit in the 90's, if you were a half-way decent programmer the odds were pretty good that you'd make a lot of money. Physicists and non-microchip engineers didn't strike it rich like that
  - jampekka 2y ago
    https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
    - labrador 2y ago
      The wise man is one who knows what he does not know - Lao Tsu In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few - Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance - Confucius The more I know, the more I understand one thing: that I know nothing - Osho Nobody knows anything - William Goldman, Hollywood producer
downrightmike 2y ago
"While Andreessen may be all over the place ideologically, when you burrow down to his core beliefs they seem pretty simple. He’s a big fan of power. That is power for certain people—i.e., people like him. Rich people, in other words." Tax these fuckers so they shut up
- emestifs 2y ago
  > Tax these Good luck. And I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, just that it won't be easy. Look at what happened in Canada when they increased capital tax rate few weeks ago. It was a ton of articles and opinion pieces about how it will destroy the economy and innovation. You try taxing more in US and it will likely be an even harder push back given the larger ultra-high net worth population.
  - bmitc 2y ago
    What's interesting is that taxing the super wealthy would actually increase the health of the economy. They are leaches on the economy, hoarding up more and more money, land, assets, etc. just to make more money. Decreasing wealth inequality will help the economy. And I think there's also a point of culture. I think the startup culture and Silicon Valley culture is damaging the American economy, hyper focusing on short term results. What startup has been actually influential in recent times, in terms of a benefit to society? There's very few, and there's plenty of examples of these startups harming things. Lastly, these billionaires are actually a security threat. They start to become so powerful, with so much money and power concentrated, that they can literally affect laws, policies, wars, and even elections. Trump won because of Robert Mercer, yet another libertarian extremist billionaire.
    - jahewson 2y ago
      Would it help the economy though? It helps to think of our current super-rich as an outcome of the asset bubble that currently exists in our economy, due to the fed’s post-2008 money printing; because it’s stock that accounts for most of their net worth. So what happens if we tax away the majority of that wealth? It’s a huge amount - enough to have a marked effect on the economic system. Well, we get a lot more money spread around the system, but we didn’t get any more products, services, or value being created. What do we get? Inflation. We have the same amount of everything - it just costs more. So the super rich end up being a place to park inflated dollars to keep them out of the real economy. They’re actually a useful deflationary mechanism. I’d prefer if we would get out of this asset bubble and return to a “normal” economy but this is the situation we are in.
daft_pink 2y ago
You either die a hero or live to become a villain.
- napworth 2y ago
  Perhaps he could have always been a, how you say, asshole?
AbrahamParangi 2y ago
What is the news value of this?
roschdal 2y ago
Yes.
cjensen 2y ago
Sometimes a person is in the right place at the right time and has an opportunity to become rich. It's important to resist the human urge to account success as a product of one's own intelligence.
- giantrobot 2y ago
  I've yet to see any SV billionaires admit any of their success involves luck. They seem incapable of recognizing that being in the right time and place is a huge component of any sort of success. Their egos are so wrapped up in their fortunes that their success must be their omniscience and not the fact they won the tech stock lottery.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - m3m3tic 2y ago
    There's luck involved, but if you listen or read some of Marc Andreesen's ideas there's no doubt he's highly intelligent and thoughtful. Ben Horowitz even said he was the smartest person he'd ever met in his book. While he was obviously working on the right thing at the right time, his fortune is not what I would consider blind luck.
    - xref 2y ago
      Ben Horowitz co-founded Andreesen Horowitz so you know, take whatever he says about his partner with a grain of salt
  - wdr1 2y ago
    > I've yet to see any SV billionaires admit any of their success involves luck. Are you even trying, or just being glib for karma? "You have to get lucky in today’s society in order for that to happen" -- Mark Zuckerberg https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/billionaire-mark-zuckerberg-success-like-mine-only-happens-with-luck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/billionaire-mark-zuckerberg-... "... it's both massively luck and massively hard work. Sometimes it's more luck than hard work, and sometimes it's more hard work than luck. But every success requires both." -- Reid Hoffman https://www.businessinsider.in/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman-says-success-is-both-luck-and-hard-work/articleshow/61746394.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman... "I'm a lucky guy. I mean, I certainly had a lot of near misses, but I was very lucky in terms of actually achieving success." -- Elon Musk, CNBC, May 2017
spamizbad 2y ago
In my view, Andreessen has always been more on the "hawkish" side - going back to 2016. He supported Clinton over Trump when it looked like Trump was going to be more Dove-ish on US foreign policy (ultimately he wasn't, but that was the general view during that era). Just speaking as an American, my biggest fear with SV getting involved in the defense sector is that founders and VCs tend to be very opinionated about how their products actually get used, and I'd be worried they rug-pull key defense technologies away from the US military should be applied in a manner contrary to their interests. Maybe those interests align with mine, maybe they don't, but I can hold my electeds accountable: I can't do that with Andreessen or his "Gundo Bros"
fwlr 2y ago
Quotes like “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep [rural Americans] docile” are really bad… so it’s quite the achievement for the words outside the quotes to be even worse. Every other sentence by the author feels like it’s practically bursting at the seams with spite, barely containing the writer’s apoplectic rage. A very off-putting read.
- dewey 2y ago
  If I could choose between what’s more off putting: the authors way of writing or the subject he’s writing about, I think it’s an easy choice for me.
- talldayo 2y ago
  It's like you can peer into Marc's thought-bubbles where he's imagining himself in the black turtleneck on-stage.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  It's Gawker media, what do you expect? OxyContin ref was obviously a joke.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
22yards 2y ago
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-time-to-build-andreesen-is-a-nimby https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-... Here is another example of this behaviour - its fine as long as it does not affect me.
lr4444lr 2y ago
I got the sense from reading the “Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto” that it was deliberately crafted to troll.
wellbehaved 2y ago
Blatant substance-free hit piece.
erbdex 2y ago
While I am all for social justice.. i don't think a Marc or a Zucker or Jobs should be turned into villains. A corner of my mind forgives them because of how "the system" rewards specialization and how little of the outside world they see. Keeping away from these personality caricatures, here is why i think this topic and these conversation are important, yet difficult to have in constructive ways: 1. It builds over our preexisting imaginations of how the world is, what runs it fundamentally, who governs it today and how these frameworks are changing. 2. People are fundamentally biased weather we are heading towards prosperity or slowdown. 3. We can't help adding our ideas of how the world should be - what systems should come etc. 4. Timeline of events - a truth 10 years down the road is practically a lie today. 5. Contradictory movements - as rural real estate crashes, urban might spike up and we can mostly only hold head or tail of the elephant. 6. To make the discussion simpler, one could use simpler analogies but the risk again is that complex systems don't follow simple linear paths. 7. These are conversations about the problems of the goats and not understood so easily by lions given little incentive to understand pastureland. Yet they do eventually affect them. There are fundamentals to growth of every system and what weakens them will eventually simplify the system. I am not as much interested in being "right" because that is a very naive way of looking at this. I am more interested in highlighting these trends because i fear we often build downstream of international trends (hyped areas vs fundamental changes that go unnotiticed). Safer proven strategies do reduce risk but they also take away the upside of rewards. There is no replacement for ahead of the curve courage and societies, markets, time - all punish as well as reward forward thinking. I see great opportunities when systems undergo large changes. As global energy economics, labour availability, localisation trends undergo fast changes, we have a real chance of riding these waves vs doing service delivery for NY and Valley. Cloud seeding was innovative till Dubai flooded. The world markets will quickly shift the narrative hanging us dry if we are not intellectually prepared for different possibilities. As short term trends, i am noticing that there is a huge collapse in the middle of the economic pyramid. Without fundamental innovations in how we recalibrate our systems, only rich dog shampoo products would work and a lot of us and our people will be out of jobs and economy.Perhaps this isn't as applicable to the audience of this group as the members are incredibly well connected and can float away to greener smaller pastures but i also see counter trends to the "infinite growth for everyone, eventually" narrative. There are only so many rich dogs to shampoo and this is to address the "rest of us" part of the problem. It is already clear in product circles that we aren't building for our people and i feel that we can. No answers here, to be honest. But an urge to highlight that these shifts are both opportunities and challenges and some of the hardest problems in the world. Having spent a few years in rural areas working on climate, i confess i have tilted my brains a little. :) I have come to love the tech community, in large parts because of the sensitivity, nuance and accomodation tech bros also have here on HN. Honestly i've tried many times to judge the tech world but i also see enough balancing acts going on here at HN. Many of us may fall, but I see great kindness and hope in Technologists to be able to inch the world towards great positivity. Few others have that agency in this tilted world, so it is also that.
_jl2g 2y ago
A gizmodo commenter made a good suggestion: replace "maniac" with "psychopath." I endorse this because mania is a medically recognized condition that can be managed successfully with treatment. Do we have evidence that MA is bipolar or otherwise verifiably maniacal? Or is he just another unscrupulous capitalist? I think it's the latter. MA: If you're reading this, just know that whatever trendy "ism" is making its rounds at the yacht club will not justify the awful, inhumane business decision you are about to make.
yashg 2y ago
>>It's never been clearer that the VC founder's whole outlook on life revolves around how great it is to be rich and how shameful it is to be anything else. Quite a few "successful" founders who invariably also turn angels/VCs seem to share this idea. If you aren't hustling and getting rich then that's a life wasted.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  Sounds better than putting your money into yachts and jets?
neilv 2y ago
This is always personally kind of curious to me, because, at the same time Andreessen was the young "hayseed with the know-how" (as I think JWZ once called him) working on NCSA Mosaic and then mcom/Netscape... I was also a (slightly younger) Internet-savvy Unix workstations programmer, working in a science park out in Oregon farm country. My own awareness and leanings were more towards traditional Internet altruistic/egalitarian, with a healthy skepticism of government and business in practice, and keeping an eye out against exploiters. (Separately, a more libertarian school of thought was also represented among the early Internet-savvy, but I had less exposure to that.) Sometimes I wonder what would've happened to the modern Web and tech industry, if certain formative figures in dotcoms had been of the more traditional altruistic/egalitarian Internet kind. But maybe they wouldn't have been able to get that influence, given their mindset and motivations. Maybe big money would've bought and colluded their way to shaping the Internet how they wanted, in any case. Certainly, a bit into dotcoms, the Google founders sounded to me like "one of us". But I think I was also quick to assume they were, when they did some smart things, and said some things ("don't be evil") that I expected from one of us.
neilv 2y ago
Seems buried on HN. It was at least rank 10 with some comments, but then I couldn't find the post in the first 20 pages of HN (up to rank 600). Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac (gizmodo.com) 80 points by jweir 1 hour ago | unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite | 41 comments
- yodon 2y ago
  Marc is likely a controversial character, which leads to people disagreeing about comments. Lots of conflicting up votes and down votes is a signal HN uses to detect disagreement. The HN algorithm is designed to promote good discussions, explicitly at the expense of discussions where people interact poorly with each other, even if those other conversations are important. Lots of disagreement is a common precursor to bad behavior, and the algorithm automatically pushes those posts down in the ranking. Not a conspiracy. An algorithm that intentionally and successfully encourages well behaved commenters here, at the expense of some important topics algorithmically being pushed down.
  - joadha 2y ago
    What are some other examples of topics that, well gorsh-darn, the algorithm just had to push 'em down so we can all get along? HN is an echo chamber.
    - neilv 2y ago
      The broad topic of this post might be especially relevant to HN: are we in danger of manipulating society through arrogance, elitism, greed, skewed perspective, bullying, collusion, influence-peddling, throwing around money/power, etc., and how would we know when we are.
cbHXBY1D 2y ago
I only realized how far down the rabbit hole Marc was when he was one of the first interviewees for a guy who came out of the neo-Nazi Salo forum, which means he was almost certainly reading Salo forum. Discussed at the time here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27343914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27343914

109 points by jweir 2y ago

This story was on the front page of Hacker News – but then disappeared. Did the original poster delete it or something else happen?

jweir 2y ago
Ah - all is clear ``` [flagged] [dead] Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac (gizmodo.com) ```
adrianmonk 2y ago
It's at the #10 position on my front page right now.
dang 2y ago
Looks like a moderator downweighted it, probably because it's a sensational-indignant article, which is not what HN is supposed to be for. Angry articles about how awful rich people or celebrities are a sure hit with upvoters, but their appeal does not come from intellectual curiosity, which is the organizing principle of this site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So it's standard moderation practice to downweight them here; otherwise the front page would consist of little else. We make exceptions if an article has significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) that can provide a basis for an intellectually curious conversation, but it doesn't look like that's the case here. Edit: it's also the case that users heavily flagged it, which has a similar effect. I'm not sure whether the moderation chicken or the user eggs were first in the downranking of this piece, but it doesn't matter much in the sense that both are the system functioning as usual.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  > their appeal does not come from intellectual curiosity Unless you're interested in human behavior and see finance as part of a natural process. From a biology perspective there's an obvious line of thinking around resource sequestration you can't really discuss in public, so I'm always interested in seeing the shape its eventual expression takes. The articles are also rage bait and I agree with the moderation fwiw. We aren't really here to square this particular circle.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

labrador 2y ago

My issue with American programmers and technologists who get rich is that it goes to their head and suddenly they think they're an intellectual on a wide range of subjects. It happened to me but I grew out of it when I got old. Marc Andreeson is no different. Have you ever really listened to Peter Theil in an interview? He's all over the map, saying things that sound profound but when you think about it actually make no sense at all. He's great at some things, but he's not great at everything. Same with Andreeson. At least he's not as bad as Musk in this regard.

syndicatedjelly 2y ago
Is this true of experts in other fields? Why are programmers prone to this behavior?
- bmitc 2y ago
  Physicists and engineers are a lot like this too. I think software people have more of a chance getting rich very easily based upon some dumb idea that just happens to make them rich when the company sells.
  - labrador 2y ago
    Yes, when home copmputers hit in the 80's and the internet hit in the 90's, if you were a half-way decent programmer the odds were pretty good that you'd make a lot of money. Physicists and non-microchip engineers didn't strike it rich like that
- jampekka 2y ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
  - labrador 2y ago
    The wise man is one who knows what he does not know - Lao Tsu In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few - Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance - Confucius The more I know, the more I understand one thing: that I know nothing - Osho Nobody knows anything - William Goldman, Hollywood producer

downrightmike 2y ago

"While Andreessen may be all over the place ideologically, when you burrow down to his core beliefs they seem pretty simple. He’s a big fan of power. That is power for certain people—i.e., people like him. Rich people, in other words." Tax these fuckers so they shut up

emestifs 2y ago
> Tax these Good luck. And I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, just that it won't be easy. Look at what happened in Canada when they increased capital tax rate few weeks ago. It was a ton of articles and opinion pieces about how it will destroy the economy and innovation. You try taxing more in US and it will likely be an even harder push back given the larger ultra-high net worth population.
- bmitc 2y ago
  What's interesting is that taxing the super wealthy would actually increase the health of the economy. They are leaches on the economy, hoarding up more and more money, land, assets, etc. just to make more money. Decreasing wealth inequality will help the economy. And I think there's also a point of culture. I think the startup culture and Silicon Valley culture is damaging the American economy, hyper focusing on short term results. What startup has been actually influential in recent times, in terms of a benefit to society? There's very few, and there's plenty of examples of these startups harming things. Lastly, these billionaires are actually a security threat. They start to become so powerful, with so much money and power concentrated, that they can literally affect laws, policies, wars, and even elections. Trump won because of Robert Mercer, yet another libertarian extremist billionaire.
  - jahewson 2y ago
    Would it help the economy though? It helps to think of our current super-rich as an outcome of the asset bubble that currently exists in our economy, due to the fed’s post-2008 money printing; because it’s stock that accounts for most of their net worth. So what happens if we tax away the majority of that wealth? It’s a huge amount - enough to have a marked effect on the economic system. Well, we get a lot more money spread around the system, but we didn’t get any more products, services, or value being created. What do we get? Inflation. We have the same amount of everything - it just costs more. So the super rich end up being a place to park inflated dollars to keep them out of the real economy. They’re actually a useful deflationary mechanism. I’d prefer if we would get out of this asset bubble and return to a “normal” economy but this is the situation we are in.

daft_pink 2y ago

You either die a hero or live to become a villain.

napworth 2y ago
Perhaps he could have always been a, how you say, asshole?

AbrahamParangi 2y ago

What is the news value of this?

roschdal 2y ago

Yes.

cjensen 2y ago

Sometimes a person is in the right place at the right time and has an opportunity to become rich. It's important to resist the human urge to account success as a product of one's own intelligence.

giantrobot 2y ago
I've yet to see any SV billionaires admit any of their success involves luck. They seem incapable of recognizing that being in the right time and place is a huge component of any sort of success. Their egos are so wrapped up in their fortunes that their success must be their omniscience and not the fact they won the tech stock lottery.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- m3m3tic 2y ago
  There's luck involved, but if you listen or read some of Marc Andreesen's ideas there's no doubt he's highly intelligent and thoughtful. Ben Horowitz even said he was the smartest person he'd ever met in his book. While he was obviously working on the right thing at the right time, his fortune is not what I would consider blind luck.
  - xref 2y ago
    Ben Horowitz co-founded Andreesen Horowitz so you know, take whatever he says about his partner with a grain of salt
- wdr1 2y ago
  > I've yet to see any SV billionaires admit any of their success involves luck. Are you even trying, or just being glib for karma? "You have to get lucky in today’s society in order for that to happen" -- Mark Zuckerberg https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/billionaire-mark-zuckerberg-success-like-mine-only-happens-with-luck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/billionaire-mark-zuckerberg-... "... it's both massively luck and massively hard work. Sometimes it's more luck than hard work, and sometimes it's more hard work than luck. But every success requires both." -- Reid Hoffman https://www.businessinsider.in/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman-says-success-is-both-luck-and-hard-work/articleshow/61746394.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman... "I'm a lucky guy. I mean, I certainly had a lot of near misses, but I was very lucky in terms of actually achieving success." -- Elon Musk, CNBC, May 2017

spamizbad 2y ago

In my view, Andreessen has always been more on the "hawkish" side - going back to 2016. He supported Clinton over Trump when it looked like Trump was going to be more Dove-ish on US foreign policy (ultimately he wasn't, but that was the general view during that era). Just speaking as an American, my biggest fear with SV getting involved in the defense sector is that founders and VCs tend to be very opinionated about how their products actually get used, and I'd be worried they rug-pull key defense technologies away from the US military should be applied in a manner contrary to their interests. Maybe those interests align with mine, maybe they don't, but I can hold my electeds accountable: I can't do that with Andreessen or his "Gundo Bros"

fwlr 2y ago

Quotes like “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep [rural Americans] docile” are really bad… so it’s quite the achievement for the words outside the quotes to be even worse. Every other sentence by the author feels like it’s practically bursting at the seams with spite, barely containing the writer’s apoplectic rage. A very off-putting read.

dewey 2y ago
If I could choose between what’s more off putting: the authors way of writing or the subject he’s writing about, I think it’s an easy choice for me.
talldayo 2y ago
It's like you can peer into Marc's thought-bubbles where he's imagining himself in the black turtleneck on-stage.
dzhiurgis 2y ago
It's Gawker media, what do you expect? OxyContin ref was obviously a joke.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

22yards 2y ago

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-time-to-build-andreesen-is-a-nimby https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-... Here is another example of this behaviour - its fine as long as it does not affect me.

lr4444lr 2y ago

I got the sense from reading the “Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto” that it was deliberately crafted to troll.

wellbehaved 2y ago

Blatant substance-free hit piece.

erbdex 2y ago

While I am all for social justice.. i don't think a Marc or a Zucker or Jobs should be turned into villains. A corner of my mind forgives them because of how "the system" rewards specialization and how little of the outside world they see. Keeping away from these personality caricatures, here is why i think this topic and these conversation are important, yet difficult to have in constructive ways: 1. It builds over our preexisting imaginations of how the world is, what runs it fundamentally, who governs it today and how these frameworks are changing. 2. People are fundamentally biased weather we are heading towards prosperity or slowdown. 3. We can't help adding our ideas of how the world should be - what systems should come etc. 4. Timeline of events - a truth 10 years down the road is practically a lie today. 5. Contradictory movements - as rural real estate crashes, urban might spike up and we can mostly only hold head or tail of the elephant. 6. To make the discussion simpler, one could use simpler analogies but the risk again is that complex systems don't follow simple linear paths. 7. These are conversations about the problems of the goats and not understood so easily by lions given little incentive to understand pastureland. Yet they do eventually affect them. There are fundamentals to growth of every system and what weakens them will eventually simplify the system. I am not as much interested in being "right" because that is a very naive way of looking at this. I am more interested in highlighting these trends because i fear we often build downstream of international trends (hyped areas vs fundamental changes that go unnotiticed). Safer proven strategies do reduce risk but they also take away the upside of rewards. There is no replacement for ahead of the curve courage and societies, markets, time - all punish as well as reward forward thinking. I see great opportunities when systems undergo large changes. As global energy economics, labour availability, localisation trends undergo fast changes, we have a real chance of riding these waves vs doing service delivery for NY and Valley. Cloud seeding was innovative till Dubai flooded. The world markets will quickly shift the narrative hanging us dry if we are not intellectually prepared for different possibilities. As short term trends, i am noticing that there is a huge collapse in the middle of the economic pyramid. Without fundamental innovations in how we recalibrate our systems, only rich dog shampoo products would work and a lot of us and our people will be out of jobs and economy.Perhaps this isn't as applicable to the audience of this group as the members are incredibly well connected and can float away to greener smaller pastures but i also see counter trends to the "infinite growth for everyone, eventually" narrative. There are only so many rich dogs to shampoo and this is to address the "rest of us" part of the problem. It is already clear in product circles that we aren't building for our people and i feel that we can. No answers here, to be honest. But an urge to highlight that these shifts are both opportunities and challenges and some of the hardest problems in the world. Having spent a few years in rural areas working on climate, i confess i have tilted my brains a little. :) I have come to love the tech community, in large parts because of the sensitivity, nuance and accomodation tech bros also have here on HN. Honestly i've tried many times to judge the tech world but i also see enough balancing acts going on here at HN. Many of us may fall, but I see great kindness and hope in Technologists to be able to inch the world towards great positivity. Few others have that agency in this tilted world, so it is also that.

_jl2g 2y ago

A gizmodo commenter made a good suggestion: replace "maniac" with "psychopath." I endorse this because mania is a medically recognized condition that can be managed successfully with treatment. Do we have evidence that MA is bipolar or otherwise verifiably maniacal? Or is he just another unscrupulous capitalist? I think it's the latter. MA: If you're reading this, just know that whatever trendy "ism" is making its rounds at the yacht club will not justify the awful, inhumane business decision you are about to make.

yashg 2y ago

>>It's never been clearer that the VC founder's whole outlook on life revolves around how great it is to be rich and how shameful it is to be anything else. Quite a few "successful" founders who invariably also turn angels/VCs seem to share this idea. If you aren't hustling and getting rich then that's a life wasted.

dzhiurgis 2y ago
Sounds better than putting your money into yachts and jets?

neilv 2y ago

This is always personally kind of curious to me, because, at the same time Andreessen was the young "hayseed with the know-how" (as I think JWZ once called him) working on NCSA Mosaic and then mcom/Netscape... I was also a (slightly younger) Internet-savvy Unix workstations programmer, working in a science park out in Oregon farm country. My own awareness and leanings were more towards traditional Internet altruistic/egalitarian, with a healthy skepticism of government and business in practice, and keeping an eye out against exploiters. (Separately, a more libertarian school of thought was also represented among the early Internet-savvy, but I had less exposure to that.) Sometimes I wonder what would've happened to the modern Web and tech industry, if certain formative figures in dotcoms had been of the more traditional altruistic/egalitarian Internet kind. But maybe they wouldn't have been able to get that influence, given their mindset and motivations. Maybe big money would've bought and colluded their way to shaping the Internet how they wanted, in any case. Certainly, a bit into dotcoms, the Google founders sounded to me like "one of us". But I think I was also quick to assume they were, when they did some smart things, and said some things ("don't be evil") that I expected from one of us.

neilv 2y ago

yodon 2y ago
Marc is likely a controversial character, which leads to people disagreeing about comments. Lots of conflicting up votes and down votes is a signal HN uses to detect disagreement. The HN algorithm is designed to promote good discussions, explicitly at the expense of discussions where people interact poorly with each other, even if those other conversations are important. Lots of disagreement is a common precursor to bad behavior, and the algorithm automatically pushes those posts down in the ranking. Not a conspiracy. An algorithm that intentionally and successfully encourages well behaved commenters here, at the expense of some important topics algorithmically being pushed down.
- joadha 2y ago
  What are some other examples of topics that, well gorsh-darn, the algorithm just had to push 'em down so we can all get along? HN is an echo chamber.
  - neilv 2y ago
    The broad topic of this post might be especially relevant to HN: are we in danger of manipulating society through arrogance, elitism, greed, skewed perspective, bullying, collusion, influence-peddling, throwing around money/power, etc., and how would we know when we are.

cbHXBY1D 2y ago

I only realized how far down the rabbit hole Marc was when he was one of the first interviewees for a guy who came out of the neo-Nazi Salo forum, which means he was almost certainly reading Salo forum. Discussed at the time here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27343914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27343914