This is one of pg's theses about startups -- one that he bet heavily on when he became an investor. And the first essay that had a significant audience.
I'm surprised that conventional wisdom has flipped at HN. Is C++ now considered just as good a language for web startups as Python or Ruby? Really?
This feels quite eerie. I've felt the "decline of HN" posts were a bit overblown but this really shows, at a minimum, how the community has little to do with its origins any more.
I don't think you can attribute it to a "decline in HN", I think it's better attributed to the rise of a whole stack of languages, frameworks and software heavily optimized for web development, and the decline in hosting costs for any platform.
Today you can spin up an EC2 box for pennies an hour, even with Windows, and push a new build live or publish a new site just minutes later - very different to 16 years ago.
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
I'm surprised that conventional wisdom has flipped at HN. Is C++ now considered just as good a language for web startups as Python or Ruby? Really?
This feels quite eerie. I've felt the "decline of HN" posts were a bit overblown but this really shows, at a minimum, how the community has little to do with its origins any more.