Meta: Hmmm. Wonder how this discussion will go? HN readers skew young, so a fair guess would be that HN mostly has the politics of the young demographic. I kno

Meta: Hmmm. Wonder how this discussion will go? HN readers skew young, so a fair guess would be that HN mostly has the politics of the young demographic. I know a lot of the SV-types are of the same U.S. political party. Whether or not that skews their decision-making is beyond me. Since funding in general is just herd activity, I'd bet it did. Having said that, I've always heard that there was a strong strain of libertarianism in the hacker community. The Thiel fellowship comes to mind. As a libertarian myself, I'm too close to the subject to judge. I suspect, however, there are a lot of Ayn Rand fans who are either out in the open or too clever to make their opinions known. Just a guess, though. (And I count those guys as separate from just the libertarian folks) As for myself, out of the statist/capitalist debate, I like both sharing and trading, and I don't see why we can't have both. I think the sharing folks tend to be mushy-headed at times, and I think the trading folks tend to be hard-asses. In my mind, most of the huge improvements in our species, including language, society, government, and the rest, are based on freely trading things. Having said that, most of the things I hold dear -- family, friends, goodwill, living a decent life -- are based on sharing. I don't see a conflict here. Many do. [insert long discussion about how MSM and the net makes money by splitting us up into little groups and having us fight each other]