You either die a hero or live to become a villain.
Perhaps he could have always been a, how you say, asshole?
Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
21–30 of 72 posts
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#22https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-...
Here is another example of this behaviour - its fine as long as it does not affect me.
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#23I got the sense from reading the “Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto” that it was deliberately crafted to troll.
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#24Quotes like “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep [rural Americans] docile” are really bad… so it’s quite the achievement for the words outside the quotes to be even worse. Every other sentence by the author feels like it’s practically bursting at the seams with spite, barely containing the writer’s apoplectic rage. A very off-putting read.
It's like you can peer into Marc's thought-bubbles where he's imagining himself in the black turtleneck on-stage.
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#25My issue with American programmers and technologists who get rich is that it goes to their head and suddenly they think they're an intellectual on a wide range of subjects. It happened to me but I grew out of it when I got old. Marc Andreeson is no different. Have you ever really listened to Peter Theil in an interview? He's all over the map, saying things that sound profound but when you think about it actually make…
Where do you place Naval?
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#26My issue with American programmers and technologists who get rich is that it goes to their head and suddenly they think they're an intellectual on a wide range of subjects. It happened to me but I grew out of it when I got old. Marc Andreeson is no different. Have you ever really listened to Peter Theil in an interview? He's all over the map, saying things that sound profound but when you think about it actually make…
Is this true of experts in other fields? Why are programmers prone to this behavior?
Physicists and engineers are a lot like this too. I think software people have more of a chance getting rich very easily based upon some dumb idea that just happens to make them rich when the company sells.
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#27"While Andreessen may be all over the place ideologically, when you burrow down to his core beliefs they seem pretty simple. He’s a big fan of power. That is power for certain people—i.e., people like him. Rich people, in other words." Tax these fuckers so they shut up
Every billionaire hoarding untaxable money is a win in my book. The government wastes money, and causes harm in doing so. Much less than Andreessen.
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#28This story was on the front page of Hacker News – but then disappeared. Did the original poster delete it or something else happen?
Looks like a moderator downweighted it, probably because it's a sensational-indignant article, which is not what HN is supposed to be for.
Angry articles about how awful rich people or celebrities are a sure hit with upvoters, but their appeal does not come from intellectual curiosity, which is the organizing principle of this site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So it's standard moderation practice to downweight them here; otherwise the front page would consist of little else.
We make exceptions if an article has significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) that can provide a basis for an intellectually curious conversation, but it doesn't look like that's the case here.
Edit: it's also the case that users heavily flagged it, which has a similar effect. I'm not sure whether the moderation chicken or the user eggs were first in the downranking of this piece, but it doesn't matter much in the sense that both are the system functioning as usual.
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#29My issue with American programmers and technologists who get rich is that it goes to their head and suddenly they think they're an intellectual on a wide range of subjects. It happened to me but I grew out of it when I got old. Marc Andreeson is no different. Have you ever really listened to Peter Theil in an interview? He's all over the map, saying things that sound profound but when you think about it actually make…
Is this true of experts in other fields? Why are programmers prone to this behavior?
Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
#30"While Andreessen may be all over the place ideologically, when you burrow down to his core beliefs they seem pretty simple. He’s a big fan of power. That is power for certain people—i.e., people like him. Rich people, in other words." Tax these fuckers so they shut up
> Tax these Good luck. And I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, just that it won't be easy. Look at what happened in Canada when they increased capital tax rate few weeks ago. It was a ton of articles and opinion pieces about how it will destroy the economy and innovation. You try taxing more in US and it will likely be an even harder push back given the larger ultra-high net worth population.
What's interesting is that taxing the super wealthy would actually increase the health of the economy. They are leaches on the economy, hoarding up more and more money, land, assets, etc. just to make more money. Decreasing wealth inequality will help the economy.
And I think there's also a point of culture. I think the startup culture and Silicon Valley culture is damaging the American economy, hyper focusing on short term results. What startup has been actually influential in recent times, in terms of a benefit to society? There's very few, and there's plenty of examples of these startups harming things.
Lastly, these billionaires are actually a security threat. They start to become so powerful, with so much money and power concentrated, that they can literally affect laws, policies, wars, and even elections. Trump won because of Robert Mercer, yet another libertarian extremist billionaire.