There’s not a drop of irony here. It’s just mindboggling that HN prop these charlatans up like gods. You’re not temporarily embarrassed millionaires - you’re just embarrassing.
The thing about Marc Andreessen is that of all VC-types of people he seemed like one with a modicum of tech legitimacy, given his history/role in the development of the web.
I was at UIUC shortly after he graduated and the general impression was that he basically just stole Mosaic from the University to create Netscape. Not sure that bestows him with any tech legitimacy. He's certainly a good businessman.
he could have been actively involved in creating Mosaic as a university project, and still be accused of leaving the university and stealing the software to create a new commercial product.
Well, Page/Brin's BackRub was basically a science citation index, yet here we're. Add FB into that collection too. Ideas are nothing (we all have a lot of them), execution is everything.
What if that legitimacy is merely a story crafted by his press department? It so obviously will help interacting with his target audience: devs who take pride in technical skills and knowledge.
Why do you give people who can easily afford to have a team craft an image the benefit of believing it? I categorically don't. Not because I am of bad faith, no, precisely because I trust people to do what's in their interest: make sure your fund gets to talking with your audience.
Is it so hard to believe that people with “technical skills and knowledge” can be hypocrites?
The fact is, pmarca’s engineering chops are not a conspiracy invented by non engineers. He did in fact create a brilliant piece of software (Mosaic and, at some greater distance, Netscape), and the technical elites of Silicon Valley saw this and are responsible for much of his wealth and influence.
But the mundane truth is that engineering chops do not automatically translate into virtue, tact, political acumen, investment prowess, or any number of other skills or positive attributes. It is understandable that engineers want to believe they are on a higher plane of human existence but the evidence is inconclusive.
No publicist tricked us into thinking Andreessen was a brilliant programmer, we tricked ourselves into thinking brilliant programmers are necessarily superhuman.
>It’s just mindboggling that HN prop these charlatans up like gods
Link to some examples? My impression is that many HN users are associated with the startup community, and therefore like what Andreessen or PG is doing, but I don't think they prop them up "like gods" or even demigods for that matter. You can like what someone is doing in one area (ie. startups/VC), without thinking they're gods or blindly believing whatever they say.
The power of marketing works best when least expected, and for some reason this data-driven fact-based engineering bunch is either just not (surprisingly!) not cognisant of the mechanics of investors using their brains and are gullible, star struck, almost willfully ignorant (seeing the lengths the innocence of the wealthy is sometimes defended). Or people are cognisant, and then must be participating in the charade, on the basis of greed; not biting the hand that feeds you is good exercise for pitching.
What other mechanisms could be at play for this worship?
Anyway thanks for your concise comment; it could not be more on point!
I frankly don’t want housing the kinds of people who can’t afford houses anywhere near me. I don’t say this publicly, but the council candidate who “protects home values” has my vote.
I agree housing affordability is an important problem. I am not willing to have so much as ruffians in the nearby grocery store to fix it though.
Just to give you another perspective, it seems like they're not building low-income housing, they're just building denser housing than is normal for the area ("multifamily overlay zones").
As someone who lives in the Bay Area, guessing that if they went ahead and these were actually built, the housing/rental prices of these units would still be ultra high. Yeah, housing is so bad here, they'd probably just to attract young tech workers or people with at least decent jobs.
I am sure we are relative ruffians to wealthy people. Simply could be the difference between executives and entrepreneurs to whiny employee types like myself.
As a parent I also prioritize cleanliness and low crime over pretty much anything else. The difference between Marc and I is that I don't pretend to not be a NIMBY. If this causes me to be labeled online as a sad frightened person, so be it.
Can understand this, as I own a home in the East Bay, but I fight the urge to be a NIMBY, because I've come to realize, it's not good for the area in the long run.
One of the main causes of our homeless problem is our high-housing cost. At least from what I've read, the Bay Area has such a high-level of homelessness because people who normally can afford apartments can't and are forced on to the streets. We have some of the highest housing costs in the world, and if prices keep going up, homelessness and crime will get worse and worse. We need to bring prices down (or at least keep them from going up like crazy as they have been) so that we can support a range of workers, from cooks and teachers to well-educated techies and business people.
It came as a surprise to me too when I first heard about it, but it kind of makes sense. There are a lot of people living at lower incomes (not necessarily poor, just low), and in the Bay Area, their biggest expense is rent. All it takes is for them to lose their job or incur a big medical expense and they can't afford their apartment. So a lot of people who would normally live in cheaper apartments are eventually forced on to the street.
Yeah, i'm not opposed to high rent costs, but San Francisco is in the top two in the world in cost for renting apartments. This is just insane and it seems better for the city in the long run if this could be brought down.
Are a disproportionate number of those people suffering from addiction and or mental health issues? Yes. But make no mistake, the gap between people apartment shopping and people living on the street is frighteningly small in a housing market as expensive as SF.
>Then who will do the lawn care, cook, and serve? Will they have to commute hours everyday to make coffee and clean floors?
Sure, why not? They can then charge a fortune for these services because of the commute time.
And for restaurants and the like, they can simply charge extremely high prices to eat there, to pay for workers needing to commute so far. And if the wealthy people refuse to pay for that, the restaurants can just go out of business, and the wealthy people can just cook their own food at home.
I don't really see the problem here, except that this wouldn't result in a healthy community, but it seems these wealthy assholes don't actually want healthy communities. So maybe the healthy communities should be elsewhere, and the wealthy NIMBYs can just live in their own enclave and cook their own food and clean their own floors.
I concur. I'd much rather deal with rich people problems (overzealous HOAs, ostentatious sports cars, being judged when I don't have an immaculate lawn) than the ones you describe. Online discourse is heavily biased against openly saying these things, but as we can see, apparently people quietly believe it nonetheless.
They were talking about allowing the construction of ADU's to accommodate "low income" people per the RHNA - Low Income in San Mateo county is a 2-person household making $117k/year or a family of 4 earning $146k/year. I don't think you need to worry about pee on the sidewalks and "smoking".
There are regular employed people who are poor, prople who only male $100k per year and they don’t fit into your neighboorhood? Why not move out if you don’t like that part of the city evolve? Cities change over time, just accept that.
Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve been a part of companies where CEOs used this guy’s anecdotal bullshit to push/justify their own agendas. Some even met him and boasted about it like it’s a badge of honor.
This is why I don’t get the recent pg hate that’s been happening on HN. He’s always done this, but now people are saying he’s out of touch because he’s rich/white/old. Majority of things he’s blogged are no-nonsense observations.
I think one has to take his writing of late with a pinch of salt because he writes things that only a rich, white and old guy could write. But the earlier stuff is still great. Hackers & Painters is still a wonderful book.
> Russia has now become a fascist state, bent on neo-colonial conquest of everything post-Soviet and post-Russian Empire. Russian population, in substantial numbers, supports this fascism and this neo-colonialism.
I thought 1) Most Russians were against the war (“special operation”), and 2) that Russia is losing this war badly and with the new rocket equipment supplied to Ukraine that they’ll be pushed back, etc.
While sociological data in a dictatorship is to be taken with a grain of salt, the data shows that most Russians support the "special military operation": https://www.levada.ru/en/ Worse, there are a lot of people on Russian social media that are aware of war-crimes and support them, I hope their numbers are small, but unfortunately rulers known for cruelty like Ivan the Terrible, Peter I or Stalin are quite revered, and Putin has drawn parallels between himself and them (most recently Peter the First).
Russia lost the war in the sense that the original intent was to occupy all or most of the country. But Ukraine still has lost 20% of the area and much of the population is under occupation, refugees or mobilized. This is far from victory for Ukraine and the country needs to be helped to win. Ukrainian victory is in everyone's interest because otherwise wars of conquest will become the norm again.
Most ethnic Russians in Ukraine support the action too. The crisis in the Donbas has really soured them.
The inevitable outcome is that like with Crimea, Russia will successfully annex the parts of Ukraine that are overwhelmingly populated by Russians who prefer Russian rule.
Please don’t mistake a prediction for an endorsement.
> Most ethnic Russians
> in Ukraine support
> the action too
I think the cause and effect are reversed here: people choose the identity to reflect their political views. So, those who still choose the Russian identity often do so because they support Russia; but it's not a static group, their numbers are dwindling.
I believe that a lot of people who used to consider themselves Russians have now embraced Ukrainian identity to distance themselves from Russia.
The 'ethnic Russians' and 'ethnic Ukrainians' in Ukraine has much more to do with self-identification than with anything else.
(I have an example of my grandfather. Having born near Khabarovsk, he moved to Lviv when he was twenty-some.
He considered himself ethnic Ukrainian, while all his family that stayed in Russia consider themselves ethnic Russians.
They have the same family history: some of their grandparents emigrated from Ukraine, so it wasn't a made-up identity. But it was a choice: my grandpa, living in Ukraine, considered himself ethnic Ukrainian, and his sister in Kamchatka considers herself ethnic Russian.)
'Ethnic Russians' and 'ethnic Ukrainians' are not some stable groups where members of one cannot become members of another. Basically any Ukrainian can claim to be ethnic Russian, and almost any Russian from Ukraine (except perhaps late immigrants — but even those can usually find some Ukrainian roots) can claim to be ethnic Ukrainian.
> The inevitable outcome is that
> like with Crimea, Russia will
> successfully annex the parts
> of Ukraine that are
> overwhelmingly populated
> by Russians who prefer
> Russian rule.
I don't think such parts exist. After 2014, Ukrainians have had a good chance to see what happens in places conquered by Russia, so Russia is fooling no one: no one would look at Donetsk and say 'nice, I want my city to be like this!'.
> 'Ethnic Russians' and 'ethnic Ukrainians' are not some stable groups where members of one cannot become members of another. Basically any Ukrainian can claim to be ethnic Russian, and almost any Russian from Ukraine (except perhaps late immigrants — but even those can usually find some Ukrainian roots) can claim to be ethnic Ukrainian.
That may or may not be true, but having spoken with some that's not what they think. It's definitely not cut and dried. Even so, if you imagine a rainbow you could think of yellow as being west Slavic Ukrainian and green as east Slavic Russian. Then sure, you have a fair amount of yellow-green in the spectrum, but that doesn't mean yellow and green don't both exist as meaningful categories.
I do agree thought that many, even perhaps most, Slavic people in the region can trace themselves back to Rurik's days and thus have some tie to the various successor states.
> They have the same family history: some of their grandparents emigrated from Ukraine, so it wasn't a made-up identity. But it was a choice: my grandpa, living in Ukraine, considered himself ethnic Ukrainian, and his sister in Kamchatka considers herself ethnic Russian.)
How much of this was due to the founding of Ukraine and the somewhat artificial creation of a new Ukrainian nationality to supersede Ruthenian and whatever else people who lived there called themselves before? I honestly have no idea on this, but from a distance it looks like the standard consequences of a great power coming in and drawing borders without much regard for the ethnic groups living there.
I have a Polish buddy whose uncle lives in western Ukraine. The uncle considers himself Ukrainian, but his Polish family all consider him Polish. The Ukrainian he speaks even sounds to them like Polish with funny grammar.
It's nice and all to say people choose their identity, but one observable fact about ethnic conflicts is that your self-identity matters considerably less than how others identify you. Look at the powerful west Slav bias in Poland's refugee acceptance for example.
> I don't think such parts exist. After 2014, Ukrainians have had a good chance to see what happens in places conquered by Russia, so Russia is fooling no one: no one would look at Donetsk and say 'nice, I want my city to be like this!'.
One nice thing about this conversation is we're both making verifiable predictions. So let's see how it shakes out.
Comments like these should result in at the very least a suspension, if not an outright ban. You’re calling for someone’s death quite liberally. Take a break from HN for your own sake.
That's dang's decision, and he is welcome to act accordingly. Until then I will speak from the heart; I honestly believe that women, LGBTQ people, non-white people, non-Christians, and neurodiverse people should arm themselves, learn tactics, and be prepared to enforce their human rights with violence -- since the law will not uphold them on their behalf.
Sigh, why does HN keep picking these editorialized articles up? I honestly expect the community to flag this as clickbait.
We have new evidence that invalidates our previous hypotheses, so we adjust course and keep going. “We all” didn’t believe a “myth about depression.” We believed that scientific findings combined with some relevant studies, experiments and feedback loops would yield a step in the right direction. We accept that the scientific method isn’t infallible.
I don’t understand what people are after. The further along we get in our exploration the more hypotheses we’ll invalidate. Which is to be expected. I would rather be outraged at ignorance than outraged at new knowledge that contradicts the old.
Correct. We do not all share this planet. You’re lucky the plutocrats haven’t put you against the wall and shot you but they simply don’t think you’re worth the effort to dispose of. The moment that effort is decreased enough such that your presence and being is more burden than worthwhile, you will be put out of your misery.
If you truly believe that you should have a right, you’ll have to fight for it. Posting on HN calling for a ban isn’t going to cut it. You’ll have to put an end to it and enforce it. Just like they do when they want something.
> So what's going on here? Magic? Graham Hancock thinks a lost civilization of advanced humans visited the peoples of different continents and shared techniques like agriculture with them. Now, I like science fiction, but I think there's a better and simpler explanation for the agricultural multiple as well as all the other examples of simultaneous invention that have puzzled scholars over the decades.
Not to detract from the rest of the article but this is probably the least derisive, fair summary of GH’s work I have come across anywhere close to on a “mainstream” tech news site. Hell must be freezing over if people aren’t calling him a charlatan without actually bothering to read his work and listen to him, first hand, articulate his rationale.
