
Lived Fast, Died Young, Left a Tired Corpse - mattyb
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/lived-fast-died-young-left-a-tired-corpse.html
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thwarted
_That was over ten years ago. For context, Mark Zuckerberg was all of sixteen
when the original web bubble popped._

 _Yes, you will have incredibly lucrative job offers in this bubble. That's
the easy part. As Startup.com and Code Rush illustrate, the hard part is
figuring out why you are working all those long hours._

If this is supposed to some kind of _reminder_ as to what _we're_ doing with
our lives, it's not going to work to stop a bubble. Those who will work those
long hours this time aren't old enough to have lived through it the first
time. The people who were the foot soldiers of the bubble ten years ago are
not the ones who are going to be the foot soldiers in the next bubble: I
seriously doubt anyone who worked the long hours ten years ago is going to
consciously make a choice to do so again. It's not just that our collective
memory is short, it's that there are so many new, young, impressionable, minds
with no memory to influence their decisions.

~~~
TomOfTTB
This is just how I read it and I might be reading a lot of my own experience
into things but I was a very young foot soldier the last time (still in my
teens) and I think there's an important point here. The thing about the last
bubble is most of the foot soldiers that I knew weren't working to cash out.
They were working to change the world.

Don't get me wrong. Money was a nice consolation prize but still.

The problem today is most of the people I meet in startups seem to have the
same goals. For all the talk I can't recall meeting a founder who openly
admitted to building a company just to flip it. Yet they're repeating the
mistakes of the late 90s because our industry has very little institutional
memory

(perhaps all that looking forward makes us forget to look back)

I think his point here is that those of us who were there need to remember
what happened and make a point of imparting those lessons to those who weren't
there. Because they were too young to really see what was going on.

------
gamble
Perhaps I'm being cynical, but I suspect that part of the reason Facebook's
recent investors have accepted such a ridiculous valuation is that they expect
the everday ubiquity of Facebook to drive a flood of dumb money into Facebook
after the inevitable IPO.

~~~
eftpotrm
_Someone_ is definitely taking that attitude. I bet on Goldman Sachs when this
came up a while ago, describing their actions as 'Pump and Dump', but there's
no reason their customers couldn't be doing the same. The problem is that
we've then very clearly got the first two layers of a bubble pyramid, and the
roadmap for the next crash becoming all the more clear.

Honestly, some days I do wonder if we wouldn't be better off as a society
radically restricting the operation of the various investment markets. The
current system seems almost designed to create financial instability through
irrational exuberance, deliberate bubble creation and wild crashes while they
work out how to build the next house of cards...

~~~
benohear
No shit. My take on boom and bust is:

\- Boom is the process by which the money of the middle classes is transferred
to the top few %

\- Bust is when they announce that the transfer is complete

~~~
johngalt
So don't participate in the financial markets. At the moment there is a lot of
money chasing very few good bets. Figure out a way to be a good bet, and rake
it in.

~~~
benohear
Isn't there a direct contradiction between not participating and "finding a
good bet and raking it in"?

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure "not participating" works anymore. The last bust was
not paid for by people gullible enough to buy into it, but by government debt.
In the long run that means it will be paid for at least in part by inflation
(which again hits people with savings).

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michael_dorfman
Like a lot of Coding Horror articles, there's less here than meets the eye.
Unless I am missing some subtle subtext, the content is basically "Netscape
did some cool things, back in the day", to which those of us over a certain
age can only reply "No duh."

A deeper analysis of the Netscape case would be a fascinating read. This,
however, isn't it.

~~~
ojbyrne
I think the snippet about "Code Rush" being available online was useful, and
perhaps there's a deeper analysis of Netscape available there.

------
narrator
This onion article is now more relevant than ever:

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation-
dem...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation-demands-new-
bubble-to-inve,2486/)

------
cloudwalking
It seems to me there is a fundamental difference between today's market and
the dotcom bubble. Right now, sites with ridiculous valuations actually
provide a great deal of value. Facebook has >500,000,000 people using it and
makes a great deal of money. Groupon also makes a great deal of money. Google
too.

Sure, it seems like we might be in a bubble, but at the same time things seem
different.

~~~
kenjackson
But you have to remember that out of that bubble came a lot of companies that
also provided value. Google came out of it (Google was from the last era, not
this one). Akamai came out of it. VMWare came out of it.

The more things seem different, the more they're the same.

The big diff between now and then was that the first era was all about IPOs.
Now its all about acquisition. I personally think the acquisition route is
more ethical, since presumably the companies buying understand that your
company may never be worth $X on its own, but strategically may be valuable.
Whereas the IPO route seem like more of a Ponzi scheme.

~~~
richcollins
The same people that buy IPO stock own stock in the companies that make bad
acquisitions.

------
Luyt
What are they eating unhealthy in that movie! Boxes full of sugary donuts,
cream cakes, piles of empty Coke bottles. I hope that nowadays they serve
better food at those kind of companies.

~~~
lukifer
I can't help but wonder if there was a method to their madness. The brain
requires vast amounts of caloric energy to do anything interesting, and maybe
all that corn syrup went to good use: solving problems and writing code.

Anecdotally, one of the best programmers I've ever met was bean-pole skinny
and fueled himself with a big glass of OJ in the morning, cheeseburgers and
fries at every lunch, and eating candy all day while writing code. (Of course,
he also got lots of physical exercise).

Just a thought.

~~~
merijnv
Fructose is actually poison (not in the sense of "you die now", but in the
long term alcohol sense) with almost no energy benefit. The high fructose corn
syrup and sucrose (50% fructose, 50% glucose) used in most candy are
remarkably inefficient sources of energy. The fructose provides practically
zero and although the glucose in sucrose is good, there are better sources for
it.

For source, watch "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>) and/or look up the research it
references.

~~~
maxawaytoolong
What Lustig doesn't mention is that sugar is what your brain runs on. Eating
too much sugar is not good for actual marathons but it works great for coding
marathons.

~~~
merijnv
Do you have a source for this? As far as I am aware your brain mostly burns
glucose like the rest of your body. Admittedly glucose is also a sugar, but in
the context of this talk sugar refers to sucrose (i.e. the white stuff you put
in tea) which is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. Which would imply that sugar is
still inefficient "brain fuel" compared to other carbohydrates like pure
glucose. If you have any sources/references showing me wrong about the brain
metabolizing fructose I'd be very interested and grateful if you could point
me to it.

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stretchwithme
With all of the printing of money going on and no other sound investments
around to absorb it, its no wonder another bubble is developing. You literally
cannot even safely buy municipal bonds these days. So anything that has been
growing will get bubbled. Until, of course, it cannot be bubbled no more and
an extreme lack of people willing to overpay arrives.

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ecounysis
Are tech bubbles all that bad? They are periods of economic optimism where
money flows into tech companies furthering R&D and technological growth in a
society. In the long run this is a _very_ good thing. Where would we be now if
it weren't for the last bubble, or the one before that?

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jtchang
The tick lines on the graph shown are drawn in an exponentially decreasing
fashion. Makes it look like we are moving really close to pre-1999 days when
in fact we have a bit more room to "bubble".

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jsmcgd
Personally I look forward to the day when there is a bubble because then and
only then will the bubble speculation stop, if only for a brief while.

~~~
there
but what about the dreaded double-dip bubble?!

~~~
ahi
you mean the dubble bubble.

------
motters
I'm not seeing any signs of bubblenomics going on around here. Where's the
beef?

~~~
kprobst
Perhaps we're jaded with visions of the previous one, with its excesses and
unrelenting and misplaced hubris. Maybe the next one will be muted, but it
doesn't mean it can't or won't happen.

On the other hand not all bubbles are bad.

~~~
hugh3
Y'know, I think the "bubble" is primarily in the price of one asset, which
isn't even publicly traded: Facebook shares. And I could be wrong about that
one too if they ever develop a better revenue model.

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chopsueyar
e-Dreams?

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bigwally
Amazing how we go from; Stock market bubble to Netscape to Facebook to Stock
market bubble.

Jeff Atwood should write for CNN or USA today.

~~~
w1ntermute
Well, Coding Horror's the CNN/USA Today of blogs (and TechCrunch is the
National Enquirer).

~~~
chrisaycock
And Valleywag is the US Weekly.

