Billionaires Build • Hacker News Board

Re: Billionaires Build

#331

Post by dang » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

pgayed wrote: post #297

dang wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but can you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a differen…

Implement the email spam solution that never was: set a nontrivial fee to create a (posting) account on hn. 10 bucks oughtta do the trick.

It's important to HN that anyone be able to participate. We pay a heavy price for that in spammers and trolls, but the benefit still exceeds the cost.

Re: Billionaires Build

#332

Post by dang » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

throwaway09223 wrote: post #296

dang wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but can you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a differen…

Yes, sorry. I started browsing HN on a new device a few weeks ago and I made a new account because I didn't have access to my other system at the time.

Appreciated!

Re: Billionaires Build

#333

Post by dang » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #299

dang wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg hasn't changed a bit, as far as I can tell. Surrounding conditions (e.g. the political and media climate) have changed a lot, plus there are the expectations people have from anyone they perceive as rich and famous. He ignores that kind of expectation, which pisses a lot of people off—but this is nothing new. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233038

Not changing when your environment changes is how everyone who is out of touch ends up well, out of touch. If Genghis Khan was still around roaming the steppes pillaging I'd hardly excuse it with "he's independently minded and ignores people's expectations, it just pisses a lot of people off" This is btw another theme of the later batch of his pieces, implying what he's saying is valuable because he's such a maverick…

Ok, but if you want to counterfactualize pg that way, then we get no YC, no Arc, and no HN—which saws off the limb we're all sitting on.

Re: Billionaires Build

#334

Post by bmm6o » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

ghufran_syed wrote: post #106

season2episode3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe Uber et al outspending their opponents on political advertising by hundreds of millions of dollars had something to do with it? Not to mention constant advertising for free in their apps. They had the “no on prop 22” people hopelessly outgunned. Even the idea that Uber drivers themselves wanted to keep their contractor status is questionable given that they collected those statistics via polls in the driver…

Your assumption seems to be that the side that spends more money wins - the prop 16 vote, with the YES side spending 20 million and the NO side spending just 1.5 million would seem to refute that idea. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr... Is it possible that maybe the voters actually have their own opinions regarding these ballot propositions? So maybe Californian voters think that drivers…

OP didn't say that it was a certainty, so a single case isn't really relevant either way.

Re: Billionaires Build

#335

Post by sgt » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #327

kevas wrote: post #312

About to write some possibly controversial stuff... My early life, I grew up and had middle to upper middle class all around me. In my late teens and early twenties, there were times I had to scrounge my cushions and rummage through my car to find enough change to eat a meal. We live in a society where everyone has access to a computer—personal or local library. We have all the information we need to bring (the major…

You're essentially saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". This is very easy to do if you've experienced a middle or upper middle class upbringing. This is almost impossible to do if you were raised in a household of abuse or food scarcity, or where your network doesn't contain any well educated individuals. Basically it works for...middle class people. In short: trickle down economics is being pissed on and ca…

But his point is valid to millions of middle class people who still struggle to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps". I think that demographic is so large (most of the people you know, if not all, are in that group, and HUGE potential is lost), that it is worth focusing on.

Re: Billionaires Build

#336

Post by wakeywakeywakey » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #276

throwaway09223 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.

I don't disagree, but can you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a differen…

You could consider implementing a generic 'throwaway' account that anyone can use, since these are not expected to have continuity of discussion or identity. Or, this could be a flag on accounts or sessions.

Re: Billionaires Build

#337

Post by dang » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

kgog wrote: post #319

dang wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg hasn't changed a bit, as far as I can tell. Surrounding conditions (e.g. the political and media climate) have changed a lot, plus there are the expectations people have from anyone they perceive as rich and famous. He ignores that kind of expectation, which pisses a lot of people off—but this is nothing new. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233038

That's called being out of touch.

That's a mushy pejorative; it means whatever you want it to mean. You could just as easily say he "thinks for himself"—poof, now we have a mushy honorific.

Re: Billionaires Build

#338

Post by buzzerbetrayed » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

canofbars wrote: post #287

ohashi wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if we will look at this like climate change that the oil companies knew about decades ago.

Everyone knew about this decades ago. It was even taught in schools as just basic facts and science before it became political.

Could I get your source for this? I've never heard that climate change was taught in public school decades ago.

Re: Billionaires Build

#339

Post by abhinav22 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

curun1r wrote: post #330

throwaway09223 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…

Great post! Agree 100%

Re: Billionaires Build

#340

Post by foobarian » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

bob33212 wrote: post #31

Traster wrote: post #28

For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view. It's a massive blind spot that PG fails to address is that it's the exact same sense of mission that he sees in start ups that creates the permission structure to exploit people. It's not that people set out to exploit people and as a result they become bil…

Right, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt as many small businesses as he could. He started with providing a wider range of books to people over the internet. For the person who wanted a specific book and was only able to get it on Amazon this is a "good" thing. For the local bookstore who is now bankrupt that is a "bad" thing. I've come to the conclusion that to be a CEO you have to wear these blinders and have faith t…

I feel that what happened with tech is that there were two things occurring simultaneously: one, there were many new useful ideas possible to build with IT that were not possible before and that delivered genuine value. With companies like Amazon or Airbnb or Google you had genuinely motivated "builder" founders who were first to scale, kind of like when a dam breaks and the water rushes out.

But, the second, more negative thing is that a lot of the inefficiencies removed by these companies were in the form of livelihoods for many people, or adherence to various regulations and laws that was a lot easier to omit with IT in the middle. Examples would be the Mom-and-Pop retail stores going out of business or Uber breaking taxi regulations.

Like you said, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt Mom&Pop, it was just an unfortunate side-effect of using IT. The thing that I think pg is missing is that projects where this happens are exploitative to a degree, and is why they get rightfully criticized.