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Interview with Paul Graham

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Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#141

Post by klanderson »

dang wrote: post #65
yodsanklai wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he has become too much of a cult figure I didn't know who PG was until recently. I knew he was well respected on HN but I've never found that much value in his blog posts either. Maybe people like his writings in the light of his achievements, rather than for their intrinsic values.

His essays were what attracted people to YC (and HN) in the first place.

This is true, I bought the "Hackers and Painters" book before discovering HN. Pretty inspiring at the time.

This sort of interesting writing seems to have stopped in general. Spolsky and Yegge are other positive examples from that era, which of course is just 10 years ago.

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#142

Post by ywei3410 »

gonehome wrote: post #35
marcinzm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is disincentivizing the accumulation of massive wealth in a small subset of the population bad for society? What is the advantage to society of an individual accumulating tens of billions of dollars worth of wealth?

It's dis-incentivizing wealth creation in general and taking ownership away from people that build companies. There's a compelling argument that growth (that accounts for human rights and protecting the environment) is the best way to help the most people the fastest: https://press.stripe.com/#stubborn-attachments . Policy that dis-incentivizes wealth creation creates perverse incentives that limit growth. We're bett…

> Wealth creation isn't zero-sum, just because someone builds a business and creates wealth doesn't mean they're taking it from others.

It absolutely is zero sum - but not from the point of money, but from the point of view of another finite resource; human labour and talent.

The fact that someone has more wealth than someone else means that the market will value their time/spend more than someone who is poor.

Think about it this way, if you see money as a way for society to allocate resources - is the fact that you own more wealth than someone else mean that you can should be able to direct more of where the resource spend of human labour is?

How many talented engineers work at Rolls Royce to create £250,000 cars which would be better put to use elsewhere? How many software engineers work at startups funded as a moonshot for the wealth of the founders work on CRUD apps where they could be working on something like scientific or educational tech? How much chemical engineering talent do we sink into cosmetics?

Your cited examples prove the point above - the only reason why those examples exist is at the whim of those who have wealth. What about less savoury examples of the use of wealth such as Academi or Palantir?

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#143

Post by barry-cotter »

ouroboros1 wrote: post #93
hkai wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I didn't know whether I'll be born in the bottom 1% or top 1%, I'd still choose a society that incentivizes wealth creation. Poor people in those societies are the richest poor people in the world. They have more prospects, they have more rights and they have more access to the benefits of civilization like education or electricity than the societies that promote the idea of taking away someone's property and make…

Wealth taxes are common in Europe. But not in Africa.

There are only four countries with wealth taxes. That is not “common in a Europe”.

> Net wealth taxes are far less widespread than they used to be in the OECD but there has recently been a renewed interest in wealth taxation. While 12 countries had net wealth taxes in 1990, there were only four OECD countries that still levied recurrent taxes on individuals’ net wealth in 2017. Decisions to repeal net wealth taxes have often been justified by efficiency and administrative concerns and by the observation that net wealth taxes have frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals. The revenues collected from net wealth taxes have also, with a few exceptions, been very low.

http://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/role-and-design-of-net-we...

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#144

Post by benjohnson1707 »

eloff wrote: post #3
dvt wrote: post #2

As a huge fan of pg (since my early 20s), it feels bad (but also good) to see him so disconnected these days. Most of his Tweets read like the musings of "some rich dude" in an ivory tower (which is quite literally where he lives), whereas back in the day YC and pg's essays were very much "where the rubber meets the road" -- apologies for being a bit metaphorical. Anyway, I think he's enjoying his well-earned money,…

Because his deep knowledge about startups, from the perspective of running them, picking them, advising them, and investing in them somehow no longer applies? This is not the kind of knowledge that expires, like the JavaScript framework de jour. Perhaps he likes to talk and think about other things these days, but I'm sure he's still an expert in that area. Certainly he knows more about startups than just about any H…

Surely his 'expertise' expires over time.

Before YC, there was no real playbook about how to start a startup. Now there is one (startup school). That's one reason why sama switched gears towards openAI. Starting up is now kind of a solved problem, conceptually

But on top of that playbook, there is tons of advice available from countless people in any kind of niche imaginable, state of the art, updated almost every week. SaaS, e-commerce, platforms, engineering, marketing, you name it.

But this very differentiated professionalism was a direct result of the success of YC, among a bunch of other players. Starting up in your early 20s in your doorm was a niche itself before YC, now it's very much mainstream (thanks as well to cloud and mobile).

PG never was a 'startup expert' it seems to me. He always has been and still is a hacker that enjoys building things that are interesting. It just so happened that between 1995-ish and 2015-ish that very niche-y hobby turned out to be extremely valuable for (more or less accidentally) building the foundation of one of the most lucrative global commercial and societal transformations in history.

The period between 2000 and 2010 laid the foundation. But not because it was intended, but because in hindsight, the right people with the right mindset turned out to build the right tool set that paved the way.

And once this way was paved, the 'army' marched in with trillions of dollars and a global flocking of talent and ambition.

Job done, it seems.

That's why he lives in England now, writes, codes and checks out interesting stuff built at Demo Day. Like it has always been, but in a completely different world, in which building tech became the most valuable thing.

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#145

Post by mattmanser »

felipemnoa wrote: post #79
mattmanser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy ways to stop that, start with a huge tax on your wealth when you renounce citizenship. They built the wealth on the back of their nation, on the back of the infrastructure, education, laws and blood of their ancestors, no good reason they should keep it when they choose to leave. It's the fundamental basis behind tax. 95% tax on any wealth over, say, $500k on renouncing citizenship, total forfeit if found to be…

>>Easy ways to stop that, make it illegal to take your wealth when you renounce citizenship. If you have to come up with ways to stop people from fleeing your country instead of too many people wanting to enter your country then you probably have a problem. And no, I don't think it is as easy as you say. Simple sounding solutions like this can have huge disastrous consequences.

The two aren't mututally exclusive.

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#146

Post by mattmanser »

hkai wrote: post #86
mattmanser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy ways to stop that, start with a huge tax on your wealth when you renounce citizenship. They built the wealth on the back of their nation, on the back of the infrastructure, education, laws and blood of their ancestors, no good reason they should keep it when they choose to leave. It's the fundamental basis behind tax. 95% tax on any wealth over, say, $500k on renouncing citizenship, total forfeit if found to be…

See, I always thought that socialism degenerates into tyranny. My socialist country didn't even allow people to travel - to prevent capital flight and brain drain - and now you are proposing to basically close borders to some people until you buy your own freedom. That's scary as hell and a return back to 1920s.

Ha, shows what you know about capitalism.

America is one of the only countries to tax their citizens income abroad.

This would affect 0.001% of people who had managed to capture a huge amount of wealth and were attempting to avoid taxes.

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#147

Post by [deleted] »

marcinzm wrote: post #100
felipemnoa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Billionaires often make compelling arguments for why they should get to keep their money Well, it is their money.

Money is a societal construct and as such it belongs to exactly the person society says it belongs to. That may not be the billionaire depending on the society.

[deleted]

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#148

Post by felipemnoa »

marcinzm wrote: post #100
felipemnoa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Billionaires often make compelling arguments for why they should get to keep their money Well, it is their money.

Money is a societal construct and as such it belongs to exactly the person society says it belongs to. That may not be the billionaire depending on the society.

Everything in society is a social construct, implicit or explicit. Right now the social construct that we have is that you get to keep the money you worked for after paying some taxes.

I do wonder if you could make something like the wealth tax work in the United States.

I'm willing to be educated.

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#149

Post by ghgdynb1 »

dvt wrote: post #2

As a huge fan of pg (since my early 20s), it feels bad (but also good) to see him so disconnected these days. Most of his Tweets read like the musings of "some rich dude" in an ivory tower (which is quite literally where he lives), whereas back in the day YC and pg's essays were very much "where the rubber meets the road" -- apologies for being a bit metaphorical. Anyway, I think he's enjoying his well-earned money,…

What do you mean he quite “literally” lives in an ivory tower?

Re: Interview with Paul Graham

#150

Post by brian_foxx »

dang wrote: post #126
brian_foxx wrote: post #96

I never got the after popularity that this guy enjoyed after his major accomplishments. Look, Marrying your intern is one thing, but some of his more recent views are reflective of senility as one of my friends put it.

We moderate HN less when YC is the topic, but that's such a lie that moderating less still means banning the account.

Lol and u call urself a freedom of speech platform. U r preposterous.
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