Limit yourself to interpreting what has actually been said and discussion will probably go better. Q Where does the money come from if there's no profit? A Th

Limit yourself to interpreting what has actually been said and discussion will probably go better. Q Where does the money come from if there's no profit? A There would be profit, but they spent it investing in their business. Answering the implicit question "how can you spend profit investing to make it so there is no profit?" Which is the obvious follow up. That's it. I did follow it up with "what would you do given this choice in your own business?", "should this choice be possible?", and "how would you change things if you don't think so?" Because once you've understood what is going on these are the next obvious discussion points that come up. I expressed no opinion on any of them. What I have done is been really, really clear about what is actually going on in the face of some pretty poor responses for the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen this before even though it's a very common situation. What I avoided was a credentials size war and still haven't stated any, letting the argument run on merit. Maybe caring at all about it has been a waste of time. But yeah, that's another way of saying do we just give up on HN as being a community decayed too far to still be interesting and useful - especially to the startup-curious. I kinda hope not but YMMV and I could well be prone to wishful thinking.