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Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

gizmodo.com

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Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#61

Post by haunter »

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…

>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.

Bill Gates is also a good example of that but there are countless others.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#62

Post by labrador »

renewiltord wrote: post #57
labrador wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: Befo…

One of the things with being first on something cool is that it's a no-brainer 30 years later. Everyone thinks things are obvious in hindsight.

My point was Andreeson wasn't first with a GUI web browser. It seems like you didn't even read my comment.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#63

Post by mikestew »

lr4444lr wrote: post #18
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…

Peter Thiel was like that before he got rich. He was very politically active in his Stanford law days. I don't think the problem is limited to American programmers. Actors and musicians have been behaving that way in this country before personal computers were even a thing.

Actors and musicians have been behaving that way in this country before personal computers were even a thing.

I always think of Jessica Lang, Sissy Spacek, and Jane Fonda testifying before Congress about the family farm, because they each played the part of a farmer's wife in a movie once.

https://archive.ph/wip/g1YYc

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#64

Post by renewiltord »

labrador wrote: post #62
renewiltord wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things with being first on something cool is that it's a no-brainer 30 years later. Everyone thinks things are obvious in hindsight.

My point was Andreeson wasn't first with a GUI web browser. It seems like you didn't even read my comment.

I read it. No one is first with anything. There isn't a single thing that someone is first with. Given some thing x, and some \eps, you can find some x_0 that precedes x in time such |x-x_0|<\eps. It's just a matter of looking. That's just how human knowledge is formed. Who can tell, perhaps William Gibson was the originator of the Internet and everyone else just did the highly obvious thing of making it.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#65

Post by VirusNewbie »

_jl2g wrote: post #43
VirusNewbie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

ok, then improve it first instead of making it even more powerful, and therefore even harder to improve!

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#67

Post by dzhiurgis »

yashg wrote: post #42

>>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.

Sounds better than putting your money into yachts and jets?

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#68

Post by wdr1 »

giantrobot wrote: post #36
cjensen wrote: post #9

Sometimes a person is in the right place at the right time and has an opportunity to become rich. It's important to resist the human urge to account success as a product of one's own intelligence.

I've yet to see any SV billionaires admit any of their success involves luck. They seem incapable of recognizing that being in the right time and place is a huge component of any sort of success. Their egos are so wrapped up in their fortunes that their success must be their omniscience and not the fact they won the tech stock lottery.

> I've yet to see any SV billionaires admit any of their success involves luck.

Are you even trying, or just being glib for karma?

"You have to get lucky in today’s society in order for that to happen" -- Mark Zuckerberg https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/billionaire-mark-zuckerberg-...

"... it's both massively luck and massively hard work. Sometimes it's more luck than hard work, and sometimes it's more hard work than luck. But every success requires both." -- Reid Hoffman https://www.businessinsider.in/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman...

"I'm a lucky guy. I mean, I certainly had a lot of near misses, but I was very lucky in terms of actually achieving success." -- Elon Musk, CNBC, May 2017

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#69

Post by dzhiurgis »

fwlr wrote: post #15

Quotes 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 Gawker media, what do you expect?

OxyContin ref was obviously a joke.

Re: Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

#70

Post by sershe »

cjensen wrote: post #9

Sometimes a person is in the right place at the right time and has an opportunity to become rich. It's important to resist the human urge to account success as a product of one's own intelligence.

I always took the opposite insight from this. It's easy to find some bit of luck in anyone's trajectory and attribute their position to it. However, it's important to remember that for most, there were millions (or at least thousands) of people with the same economic resources, in the same place at the same time, and they haven't achieved the same position. So it's far more important (and useful) to look at individual actions.

It's interesting that in a way these are meta with some of the Andreessen's (or Thiel's, he had a whole essay about this) beliefs. Mine is a belief in the power of agency. The above, I view as "excusitis". It's always possible to find an excuse...

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