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Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

gizmodo.com

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Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#41

Post by hilux »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #11
labrador wrote: post #4

My 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?

Nature: maybe highly analytical people are lower in empathy. There's some evidence for this - difficult to prove.

Nurture: when you're extremely well-paid, when both employers and (many) women want you ... the motivation to change your worldview is low.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#42

Post by yashg »

>>It's never been clearer that the VC founder's whole outlook on life revolves around how great it is to be rich and how shameful it is to be anything else.

Quite a few "successful" founders who invariably also turn angels/VCs seem to share this idea. If you aren't hustling and getting rich then that's a life wasted.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#43

Post by _jl2g »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #27
downrightmike wrote: post #5

"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.

If the institution by the people and for the people has flaws, then we the people should work together to improve it.

We would rather not throw all of our hopes and dreams at the feet of greedy capitalists who would sell their own grandma's walker for a powerball ticket.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#44

Post by labrador »

hilux wrote: post #40
labrador wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a working class kid and made my money in that era (money long gone). I moved my family into a wealthy neighborhood thinking it would be good for my kids to be around a better class of people. Boy was I wrong. There are a surprising number of rich people who are not smart at all. They got lucky, made a windfall and got lucky again to find a good financial advisor so they manage to hang on to their wealth. Not only…

I used to live next to the Menlo Park Caltrain station. All the time, we could hear the train stopping for hours ... for another suicide. I know a lot of rich people who sent their kids to the fanciest private schools. My friends are legitimately smart, but their kids ... have serious problems. In hindsight, they might have done better to go to a comprehensive public school with "average" kids.

I grew up low middle income in Santa Cruz and can't recall a single suicide in my high school of 2000 kids. Why kill yourself when you can go surfing?

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#45

Post by neilv »

This is always personally kind of curious to me, because, at the same time Andreessen was the young "hayseed with the know-how" (as I think JWZ once called him) working on NCSA Mosaic and then mcom/Netscape... I was also a (slightly younger) Internet-savvy Unix workstations programmer, working in a science park out in Oregon farm country.

My own awareness and leanings were more towards traditional Internet altruistic/egalitarian, with a healthy skepticism of government and business in practice, and keeping an eye out against exploiters.

(Separately, a more libertarian school of thought was also represented among the early Internet-savvy, but I had less exposure to that.)

Sometimes I wonder what would've happened to the modern Web and tech industry, if certain formative figures in dotcoms had been of the more traditional altruistic/egalitarian Internet kind.

But maybe they wouldn't have been able to get that influence, given their mindset and motivations.

Maybe big money would've bought and colluded their way to shaping the Internet how they wanted, in any case.

Certainly, a bit into dotcoms, the Google founders sounded to me like "one of us". But I think I was also quick to assume they were, when they did some smart things, and said some things ("don't be evil") that I expected from one of us.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#46

Post by neilv »

Seems buried on HN. It was at least rank 10 with some comments, but then I couldn't find the post in the first 20 pages of HN (up to rank 600).

    Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac (gizmodo.com)
    80 points by jweir 1 hour ago | unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite | 41 comments

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#47

Post by the_snooze »

labrador wrote: post #4

My 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…

It goes at least as far back as Silicon Valley's earliest days with William Shockley. Smart guy when it comes to transistors. Less so when it comes to other people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Racist_and_eu...

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#48

Post by labrador »

renewiltord wrote: post #31
labrador wrote: post #4

My 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…

You have the direction mixed up. They became this successful because they always had conviction in non-mainstream ideas. This is frequently shown in criticism of the Internet Archive. "How could they think that Outrageous Thing X could be legal? The Archive is reasonable but this new thing is not". Well, none of the people who thought that did the original Internet Archive in the first place. Those who only take well…

I looked into Marc Andreeson's genius once and it surprised me that there were several GUI web browsers before Mosaic. Marc made a better one at the right time for it to take off. He's a coder, a good one, but to say he's a maverick following his own path is incorrect. It was a no brainer to start Netscape, so that's not so original either.

Q: What were some GUI web browsers before Marc Andreeson wrote Mosaic

A: Before Marc Andreessen and his team developed Mosaic in 1993, there were a few early GUI web browsers:

WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus): Developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in 1990. It was the first web browser with a graphical user interface. (WorldWideWeb on Wikipedia)

ViolaWWW: Created by Pei-Yuan Wei in 1992, it was the first browser to support scripting and stylesheets. (ViolaWWW on Wikipedia)

Erwise: Developed by a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology in 1992, it was the first browser to support inline images. (Erwise on Wikipedia)

Midas: Created by Tony Johnson at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1992, it was another early graphical web browser. (Midas on Wikipedia)

These early browsers paved the way for Mosaic, which became widely popular and laid the foundation for modern web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#49

Post by yodon »

neilv wrote: post #46

Seems buried on HN. It was at least rank 10 with some comments, but then I couldn't find the post in the first 20 pages of HN (up to rank 600). Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac (gizmodo.com) 80 points by jweir 1 hour ago | unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite | 41 comments

Marc is likely a controversial character, which leads to people disagreeing about comments.

Lots of conflicting up votes and down votes is a signal HN uses to detect disagreement.

The HN algorithm is designed to promote good discussions, explicitly at the expense of discussions where people interact poorly with each other, even if those other conversations are important. Lots of disagreement is a common precursor to bad behavior, and the algorithm automatically pushes those posts down in the ranking.

Not a conspiracy. An algorithm that intentionally and successfully encourages well behaved commenters here, at the expense of some important topics algorithmically being pushed down.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#50

Post by jahewson »

bmitc wrote: post #30
emestifs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sho…

Would it help the economy though?

It helps to think of our current super-rich as an outcome of the asset bubble that currently exists in our economy, due to the fed’s post-2008 money printing; because it’s stock that accounts for most of their net worth.

So what happens if we tax away the majority of that wealth? It’s a huge amount - enough to have a marked effect on the economic system. Well, we get a lot more money spread around the system, but we didn’t get any more products, services, or value being created. What do we get? Inflation. We have the same amount of everything - it just costs more.

So the super rich end up being a place to park inflated dollars to keep them out of the real economy. They’re actually a useful deflationary mechanism.

I’d prefer if we would get out of this asset bubble and return to a “normal” economy but this is the situation we are in.

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