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Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

Despite the "change the world.. break the rules, etc." rhetoric, Silicon Valley couldn't be more different today.

I find it hard to imagine a Google employee releasing an ad blocker[0], or Popcorn Time raising a Series A round, or startups shipping crypto that breaks the law, or a startup selling offensive security software (there's a reason that business has been pushed overseas)

Today, startups that push the boundaries on bad laws and regulations are more likely to be roundly criticized than praised.

DMCA notices are automatically complied with without question via automated systems. The tech companies have become the media companies. Founders in file sharing or media make a point in investment pitches that they'll be conformist. YouTube's ContentID system means thousands of legal satire and parody videos are removed every day.

Not to mention whatever is/was happening between SV and the intelligence agencies.

It's pretty hard today to find projects or communities that have similar levels of energy and disregard for rules. When you do find them it's no coincidence that they're usually on the periphery of what SV touches.

[0] Brian Kennish quit Google and released Disconnect, a privacy plugin for browsers.

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I often read stuff like that. "Now you couldn't do it like they did it before".

"You wouldn't be able to get away with the same jokes today."

"You wouldn't be able to publish the same story today."

I agree that time changes, but this is discarding the merits of those who did it then.

Believe it or not, at that time it was not easy either. The people that did it had huge balls.

Geeks were considered less that nothing by society. The working world didn't trust them, believe in them or value them. They were basically rejected, as something annoying you had to have somewhere in your closet. My father actually told me in 2003 that he was disappointed I choose to work in such a boring field.

Technology didn't exist. You couldn't google your way out of anything like today (now if you google, SO answer everything!). Networks and computer where slow and expensive (we now got unmetered VPS for 3€/month, come on!). Less libraries, less frameworks, no crazy powerful API (can you believe making uber before google map ?) and no proof whatsoever that what you wanted to do was achievable.

The market was unproven (the 2000 bubble killed so much). We had no experience in it. Not tools to recruit, sell, build...

It's was not easier to do anything. The constraints were just different.

The constraints of tomorrow will be also different.

Let's not use the change as an excuse.

Doing something that matters is ALWAYS HARD.

"Geeks were considered less that nothing by society. The working world didn't trust them, believe in them or value them. They were basically rejected, as something annoying you had to have somewhere in your closet. My father actually told me in 2003 that he was disappointed I choose to work in such a boring field."

Exaggerating a bit? By a bit I mean a lot? I know that some geeks had hard childhood and were bullied, but way more others were not. Plenty of fathers were disappointed over children choosing various professions.

The way you people talk about it makes it sound as if all people who ever went into tech were bullied outcasts and that is simply not true.

I'm not exaggerating by one bit.

At best you had an "ok" situation. Nothing like the "rock star" attitude you get today.

Not only geeks where the less popular in school, but the media mocked them. And this snowballed into the workplace where the only people threated like the IT department was the accounting one.

The pay was not nearly in the same area. Nobody would consider buying a dual screen for their IT dev a minimum requirement.

I can recall people dreading to call the sysadmin to deal with anything. Talking to them was considered a chore.

The best way to defend this is that before the ipod existed, noone would ever say "I'm such a geek". Today somebody playing too much on iphone would say that. We call girls with cute glasses "geeks".

"At best you had an "ok" situation. Nothing like the "rock star" attitude you get today."

Not being rock star is not an oppression. The ok treatment is what majority of people have. I mean, not being treated as something super special is not "considered less that nothing by society". It is being considered normal.

"And this snowballed into the workplace where the only people threated like the IT department was the accounting one."

There is nothing wrong with the accounting department. In pretty much all workplaces I have been at, they have been treated with respect. In any case, if that workplace treated accountants badly too, the workplace was shitty for more then one group.

"I can recall people dreading to call the sysadmin to deal with anything. Talking to them was considered a chore."

I have seen such behavior towards admin, but then again I did not liked talking with that particular admin either. I dont doubt that there were groups of great admins that were not treated fairly despite acting all polite and all that. Bad workplaces happen.

However, admin I considered chore to talk with was condescending too often and it was hard to get what I needed from him. He was good in tech, but talking with him was a chore.

"The best way to defend this is that before the ipod existed, noone would ever say "I'm such a geek"."

Yeah, I find everybody is a geek culture annoying too.

"We call girls with cute glasses "geeks"."

Guys with pretty much zero technical skills used to be called geeks just for liking a tv show or play videogame.

Regarding the IT department thing:

From my first job to my current one, I always made sure I was in good stead with the IT department (whatever its size) - it was where I could get cast-off hardware for my computer junk pile!

This is an interesting tidbit regarding pay. I have a feeling (no data) that the compensation for lots of professions mostly gravitate around some value that is connected to the perceived social status of said profession. Supply and Demand often really doesn't factor in as much as it should. But maybe it's just because compensation in Germany is weird in general.

it's because salaries aren't public. if you had public salaries you'd see a huge quick readjustment.

> The pay was not nearly in the same area.

Because the dot-com bubble had recently burst...

Seems to me he is mixing geeks and nerds.

The impression i have is that the geek label came into effect during the dot-com era as a way to be a web guy without the "no social graces" stigma.

These days you get geeks appropriating nerd elements as a element of their self promotion, resulting in hipsters...

Nerds is what we call today the people we called geeks yesterday.

To be honest, the difference between geeks and nerds is so regional that it's hardly ever worth trying to explain the distinction. I always found it interesting that the difference between the two words could change so radically depending on where you are, considering most of the west got the same movies and TV shows.

And yet back then we built the entire infrastructure of the internet and connected the world. Now we use it for Snapchat.

I'm not just being nostalgic. Before quick money ruled over all a lot more actually beneficial innovation took place. Now that the Balkanization is in full swing and the battle lines are drawn we've regressed: realtime chat is fragmented, non-corporate online entities are sidelined everywhere and any attempt at widespread integration and change goes crashing headlong into shortsighted gold rushes. Why do something that works for everyone? You can't monetize that. You can't fight Facebook with that. You can't impress your financial suitors with that.

We could do so much more than we're doing today - and we did. The most painful part of being embedded in Silicon Valley this long is seeing so much potential and momentum sacrificed on the altar of shit like G+.

How is Snapchat not something that connects the world?

Saying that Snapchat connects the world in the sense of GPwould be the same that saying that "AOL discs connect the world", or that "MSN is already web portal that connects the world". You really don't see the difference?

I don't think that you and nikcub necessarily disagree. I read his comment more as "technologists today tend to/are forced to conform more to the expectations of society/powerful instutitions" than a comment about everything being easier before.

> Geeks were considered less that nothing by society.

Please shitcan the hyperbole and grow some perspective. Until geeks are systematically denied fundamental civil rights, until their very lives are routinely under threat because of who they are, they have nothing on the average gay person, let alone the average Muslim, black, or transsexual person.

By the standards of society, most geeks enjoy very privileged lives indeed. They just lack the social wherewithal to play by society's rules.

Well, the sort of irreverent crackpottery that made up life in the first dot com boom doesn't really fly right now.

If you've read the "Life in the Boy's Dorm" series by Nancy Hauge, the power dynamic was very different then. Sun's engineers refused to stop smoking pot for the visit of the President (or Vice President, I don't remember which) of the United States. They promptly put on a protest against The Man when asked to cut out the potheadery. Completely unreasonable, and downright hilarious in their adherence to their principles, as illegal as that may be. That's not an engineering thing but it's emblematic of the wild seat-of-your-pants approach that characterized the Gold Rush years.

It was inevitable it wouldn't last, though. The market learned to harness this unbridled power and direct it along the appropriate channels. And that combined with a greater spread of information means that non-standard actions will meet the weight of the community.

Sun's cannabis-powered engineers unwilling to give up their fuel source weren't a well known thing and that may have helped. The thing with "break the rules" mode is that everyone wants you to follow the rules. If everyone knows you're willfully breaking the rules (often just for the sake of it) you will be hammered down. The justifications come afterward, and they're always easily accessible. After all, you _are_ breaking the rules. The broader the reach of news, the more conformist the reported must be if they are to get away with their actions.

Cormack and Romero ghost shifted on computers at their daytime employer. Philippe Kahn started Borland while illegally in the United States. How much of this would you tolerate? Probably little. Probably neither of those actions.

>Cormack and Romero ghost shifted on computers at their daytime employer. Philippe Kahn started Borland while illegally in the United States. How much of this would you tolerate? Probably little. Probably neither of those actions.

Definitely fine with both those. And had that happen at a less exciting circumstances but they were comparible. I like to cultivate people that take stands and believe in something instead of berate them. As I know the latter will only end up in those people doing it anyway but then in secret.

Yes, yes, of course there are individuals who would support that. But not everyone will, and given the breadth of exposure, those who don't will find out and they'll expend significant effort to drag violators down.

> Cormack and Romero ghost shifted on computers at their daytime employer

That's a very timely example given the Oculus lawsuit verdict...

There is pushing the boundary on regulation as a political act and there is pushing the boundary so that you gain competitive advantage over companies that follow the law.

There is element of idealism in pushing for open crypto which is simply missing from what (for example) Uber is doing. Uber behavior is closer to what Microsoft used to be doing (not in power, just in ethical considerations) then to what crypto pushing projects were doing.

"Not to mention whatever is/was happening between SV and the intelligence agencies. It's pretty hard today to find projects or communities that have similar levels of energy and disregard for rules."

What is happening between SV and the intelligence agencies is oftentimes disregard of the rules. The only difference is that their disregard for rules does not benefit you - but lawbreaking being done for benefit of random strangers is rather exceptional thing.

Well you might be forgetting about Uber and AirBnB disregarding laws in their operations.

that's who I was referring to - they get criticized

it's pretty hard to be innovative and not be illegal somewhere. Difference is many today see being illegal in China, Turkey, Iran, or wherever as a good thing while being illegal or borderline illegal in the USA is a bad thing

The USA has regulatory capture that is just as bad as ideological or dogmatic religious capture is in those other nations. It just happens that the largest markets with monopolies or cartels that are super profitable and ripe for tech disruption also usually/sometimes also markets that have built a moat via government regulation.

I think the criticism lobbied against AirBnB and Uber is for a reason, and the reason isn't the same "up-yours" attitude of past maverick tech companies. It's a little easier to buy the maverick attitude of something like gnutella when the author isn't getting close to billion dollar revenue yearly. It may seem a little strange, but the ethos is a bit easier to believe when you stay outside the system and benefit everyone instead of just looking out for yourself alone.

The reason Uber and AirBnB are the subject of scrutiny is simply because the difference between them and any other business is non-discernable except that they have the money to stall out legal issues. Just from a "feel" perspective, they don't really feel like they're fighting the fight for everyone, they're just trying to line their pockets. There's a world of difference between what they do (offer a service at cost) to something like bit torrent or gnutella.

I can't really say where or what the limit is on something like this, when a software maverick stops being a maverick and starts playing the game, but admittedly I haven't really carefully analyzed it beyond just "here's why I see a difference". Uber and AirBnB (and quite frankly, many other SV start ups) don't really have that hacker feel to them like we'd see with older projects - instead it feels much more like they're rooted in business and business alone.

Making a billion dollars a year revenue is pretty much the definition of "benefiting everyone", except when you're a part of regulatory capture (which AirBnB and Uber are not... yet).

> Making a billion dollars a year revenue is pretty much the definition of "benefiting everyone",

No, no it is not. One party making lots of money is not the same as something benefitting everyone.

Companies ignoring environmental regulations could make more money, but it wouldn't benefit everyone, as an example.

Before even talking about externalities like the environment it's worth noting that revenue isn't profit. So who benefits from revenue depends on profit margins.

If a startup disrupts a high margin industry, especially if that industry is also inefficient (which often goes together) and replaces it with a more efficient lower margin business model, then consumers will benefit.

If a startup disrupts an industry by finding loopholes in government regulations, the question of who benefits is much more complicated. I do believe that finding loopholes or even breaking the law to some degree is a necessary part of the democratic process. It's also unavoidable given the global nature of some businesses.

But whether or not regulatory arbitrage benefits anyone other than founders and investors very much depends on the specific business model and local circumstances. It's extremely complicated and varied. Finding out what all the effects are will probably produce a couple of nobel laureates in economics.

>If a startup disrupts a high margin industry, especially if that industry is also inefficient (which often goes together) and replaces it with a more efficient lower margin business model, then consumers will benefit.

If before you had independent smaller businesses or individuals, and now all that has been captured by a single company, then a job has just gone down the drain, and the road is open for monopoly.

That is always a danger. But I think history has shown that monopolies or oligopolies are often less stable than they appear.

The assumption, beginning with Marx I think, was that monopolies have a self reinforcing element. That's true, but there is also a self defeating element. The more a monopoly absuses its power, the more complacent it becomes and the greater the incentive to disrupt it.

The problem is that governments sometimes collude with monopolists instead of making sure that markets are actually functioning as they should.

I'm not sure I follow.

I didn't explain my point well now that I've re-read it but the idea is more than the early maverick hacker projects felt more like just a project, something that was made to make sure everyone's lives got better. Uber, AirBnB, et. al., were business from the beginning. Their interests look to be making money, not providing a service or making it better. The focus isn't on making transportation or hospitality better, it's about controlling a market with their system and earning a profit. Motive matters, and it just doesn't strike that they are really benefitting anyone but themselves.

This isn't saying their services can't be useful - heck, I have an AirBnB reservation for my holiday the next 3 weeks. But I also don't doubt that if AirBnB would change their service in an instant if it suited them. They're only doing hospitality because there's money in it. That's not really the same spirit and it's not really with our benefit in mind, it's with our wallets in mind.

> I'm not sure I follow.

So, thinking out loud... a billion dollars at $10 a ride, so lots of transactions, lots of customers. Theory says a transaction will only happen if both sides feel they will profit, so lots of people must have benefited, right?

But no, because you were talking about the total benefit, not total number of people who benefit.

Trivially, if the customers got a ride plus a share of a billion dollars, they'd be better off than if they just got the ride. More benefit would be delivered to customers if Uber had zero revenue, so using a massive revenue figure as a measure of value delivered to customers is meaningless.

But, the guy might still be on to something, since Uber benefiting lots of people only a little may still be more total benefit than some free software that hardly anyone uses, he just needs to back that idea up with something more substantial.

Uber and AirBnB made a billion dollars by having a lot of satisfied customers. Being satisfied is a benefit. In other words, they benefited a lot of people.

The fact that I have to explain this makes me wonder...

> Making a billion dollars a year revenue is pretty much the definition of "benefiting everyone"

This is by far the strangest thing I've ever heard.

How do you think revenue is generated? People give you money because they rather have your good/service than the money. Selling something to someone is benefitting them.

> Selling something to someone is benefitting them.

This is so myopically capitalist. It's like the argument for the free market distilled into a single sentence.

People would not just rather have the good or service than the money; people have no use for money. Money isn't a real thing. It's an artificial construct designed to allow us to exchange goods and services freely and to avoid loss.

Exchanging money has nothing to do with a benefit for the consumer. It is simply an exchange. There is no law of nature that says all exchange is fair, or a benefit. Quite often, the buyers are at a disadvantage. The entire idea of providing for a "need" precludes that someone can be taken advantage of.

If you sell me cancer drugs at $800 a bottle, it benefits me in that my cancer is staved off for a month. But then I have no more money, and can't buy the drugs, and die. Who did it really benefit?

>Exchanging money has nothing to do with a benefit for the consumer. It is simply an exchange.

Why are you making the exchange if it doesn't benefit you?

>There is no law of nature that says all exchange is fair, or a benefit.

Fair has nothing to do with anything. I never used that word. Don't put it in to my mouth.

Sure there's no law that says an exchange has to be beneficial to you. Do what you want. But most people choose their actions based on self interest and make trades that are beneficial to them.

>if you sell me cancer drugs at $800 a bottle, it benefits me in that my cancer is staved off for a month. But then I have no more money, and can't buy the drugs, and die. Who did it really benefit?

You benefited by a month of life. How is that not incredibly obvious?

... And then died due to the loss of money from the transaction. A transaction with a short term benefit that results in long term disaster is not really a benefit. It's like being sold slow poison.

A benefit is a profit or an advantage. People often have no choice in what they buy, or are forced to buy something. Like with the cancer drugs, if their only other option is to die, it really isn't a choice.

People can also be sold things that are bad for them that they need, like heroin. Buying heroin is not a benefit. Then there's buying things that are more unintentionally harmful, like blankets full of smallpox sold to American Indians, or overpriced half-faulty weapons sold to resistance fighters. Sometimes nations are forced to buy and sell goods at an inflated price only to later be accused of not supporting local goods more for political gain, making their transactions only beneficial to the banks that hold their money or the multinational corporations that provide the goods and services in the first place. At the far end, a grocer paying protection money to gangsters results in losing money, but no benefit.

In the real world, people do things for a variety of reasons, and not always good ones. I believe your argument is a facile generalization that completely ignores the reality of trade.

>... And then died due to the loss of money from the transaction. A transaction with a short term benefit that results in long term disaster is not really a benefit. It's like being sold slow poison.

Extending their life by a month doesn't result in the long term disaster though. They already have cancer. I don't follow extending life = slow poison at all.

>People often have no choice. Like with the cancer drugs, if their only other option is to die, it really isn't a choice.

So the benefit to performing the trade is so great that they wouldn't even consider not making it is somehow an argument against the trade being a benefit?

The rest of your argument appears to just boil down to "there are exceptions". Cool, checkmate on that one. You found exceptions. Bravo.

I look at plenty of companies that make billions of dollars yet benefits very few.

Do you have any examples where they did that purely on the market, without benefiting from regulatory capture?

Typical 'vice' companies? Gambling and cigarettes, oil? 'Big Pharma'? Does heath insurance count as 'regulatory capture'?

Gambling and cigarettes - lots of satisfied customers.

Big pharma - regulatory capture. Health insurance - mostly regulatory capture in the US.

If millions of people want to pay you money, you bet you're benefiting someone. Or else they wouldn't pay.

Wikipedia benefits just about everybody with an internet connection and they sure don't make a billion dollars a year. The same could be said of open source devs who contribute to core projects running our internet.

You're talking about the opposite of what I said. My implication was

1 billion USD revenue => benefiting everybody

Yours is

Benefiting everybody => 1 billion USD revenue

I stand by the first but not by the second.

You said: "A is the definition of B"

I said: "Here are some Bs that are not A"

If you had said the definition of a kangaroo was "a big marsupial from Australia" and I pointed out many kangroos that weren't actually big marsupials from Australia, It would suggest that the definition was flawed.

> You said: "A is the definition of B" > I said: "Here are some Bs that are not A"

Yes, and I pointed out that the two are unrelated.

> If you had said the definition of a kangaroo was "a big marsupial from Australia" and I pointed out many kangroos that weren't actually big marsupials from Australia, It would suggest that the definition was flawed.

If I had said that the definition of an A (kangaroo) is a B (big marsupial), and you pointed out that many As (kangaroos) aren't Bs (big marsupials), I would have been proven wrong.

However, I said A (companies making a billion dollars in revenue) implies B (they benefit a lot of people) and you pointed out some Bs (companies benefiting everyone) that aren't As (companies making a billion dollars in revenue), which is irrelevant.

This is basic logic, I learned it in fifth grade. A => B is not a commutative operation.

Because that money are spread around to people?

Old companies needed 1000s of workers to make that money, so money were indeed somewhat distributed.

Automation and computing means a company can make that with 50-100 people even, and huge profit margins on that billion dollars.

And then with the right schemes, you can also avoid paying taxes.

> Making a billion dollars a year revenue is pretty much the definition of "benefiting everyone"

Is this satire?

Travis?

>that's who I was referring to - they get criticized

Well, it's not like breaking laws is enough to make you both disruptive AND a good guy.

One, like Uber, can break laws and be a petty, exploiting, company.

your statement is very powerful, but I think the sentiment that you describe - "projects that disregard the rules" and "push the boundaries on bad laws" could apply to Uber and AirBnB?

Also, projects like Plex, Kodi, Radarr, CouchPotato, - these projects still exist. They're not companies, like Nullsoft was, but they are definitely projects!

The late 90's was a wild time in MP3-land. Does anyone else remember:

1) Sonique vs. Winamp vs NAD debates? 2) The vqf audio format? 3) One of the big "hubs" was DimensionMusic (DMusic). Whatever happened to them?

It's easy to identify the successful companies 20 years hence, but the graveyard is littered with bodies.

holy shit i remember NAD. i didn't remember that it was something other than a hifi audio electronics manufacturer until you just mentioned it in the same breath as winamp/sonique. talk about memories...

Glad to see Sonique being remembered by someone other than myself!

> Today, startups that push the boundaries on bad laws and regulations are more likely to be roundly criticized than praised.

Perhaps those companies should move to countries with less strict rules then, perhaps in Asia. For example, I know that many biotech companies are looking for Singapore because of less strict ethical rules. In the field of stem-cell research, see e.g. [1].

Another option is Mexico.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2744936/

Was it ever like thag though? Considering the origins of SV are with military and intelligence requirements, you'd expect a bit of an 'oversight'.

Thankfully we now have a vibrant open source community to take the burden of pioneering, no startups necessary

To be fair, there are plenty of companies that are still irreverent of rules and laws. Zenefits and Theranos are the obvious bad boys. Arguably AirBNB and Uber in their early days were just as bad too. It does seem like society, and the law, comes down much harder on startups these days, ever since the tech industry went from being the underdog to the 800 pound gorilla.

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