Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
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
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...
Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac (gizmodo.com)
80 points by jweir 1 hour ago | unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite | 41 commentsLots 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.
HN is an echo chamber.
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.
Just speaking as an American, my biggest fear with SV getting involved in the defense sector is that founders and VCs tend to be very opinionated about how their products actually get used, and I'd be worried they rug-pull key defense technologies away from the US military should be applied in a manner contrary to their interests. Maybe those interests align with mine, maybe they don't, but I can hold my electeds accountable: I can't do that with Andreessen or his "Gundo Bros"
Here is another example of this behaviour - its fine as long as it does not affect me.
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.
OxyContin ref was obviously a joke.
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.
Discussed at the time here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27343914
I endorse this because mania is a medically recognized condition that can be managed successfully with treatment.
Do we have evidence that MA is bipolar or otherwise verifiably maniacal? Or is he just another unscrupulous capitalist? I think it's the latter.
MA: If you're reading this, just know that whatever trendy "ism" is making its rounds at the yacht club will not justify the awful, inhumane business decision you are about to make.
- Lao Tsu
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few
- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance
- Confucius
The more I know, the more I understand one thing: that I know nothing
- Osho
Nobody knows anything
- William Goldman, Hollywood producer
Nurture: when you're extremely well-paid, when both employers and (many) women want you ... the motivation to change your worldview is low.
And I've always found it intriguing that these people happen to get real libertarian after they get rich. It's beyond me how someone has such a blind eye regarding the luck that they had. Jim Simons is the only billionaire I've seen explicitly state that his success had a lot to do with luck, honestly addressing what his skills were that helped with his success.
[1] THE SILICON VALLEY SUICIDES Why are so many kids with bright prospects killing themselves in Palo Alto? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
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 expect people (including myself) to be ~50% right in disputes, based on symmetry.
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.
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.
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-worn roads rarely discover new places. And to them, discovery seems serendipitous. Why would this explorer not just take the well-worn road now that he's discovered something, they wonder. He thinks he's a visionary just because he found this. If I found it I'd never leave the road.
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.
He sounds exactly like what many white male American (as opposed to immigrant) Silicon Valley guys would sound like if you got them to talk about politics or anything to do with non-tech humanity.
They're not well-informed outside of tech. They ARE well-paid and in-demand. Since they're "winning," there's very little motivation to update their world view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Racist_and_eu...
Bill Gates is also a good example of that but there are countless others.
Keeping away from these personality caricatures, here is why i think this topic and these conversation are important, yet difficult to have in constructive ways:
1. It builds over our preexisting imaginations of how the world is, what runs it fundamentally, who governs it today and how these frameworks are changing. 2. People are fundamentally biased weather we are heading towards prosperity or slowdown. 3. We can't help adding our ideas of how the world should be - what systems should come etc. 4. Timeline of events - a truth 10 years down the road is practically a lie today. 5. Contradictory movements - as rural real estate crashes, urban might spike up and we can mostly only hold head or tail of the elephant. 6. To make the discussion simpler, one could use simpler analogies but the risk again is that complex systems don't follow simple linear paths. 7. These are conversations about the problems of the goats and not understood so easily by lions given little incentive to understand pastureland. Yet they do eventually affect them.
There are fundamentals to growth of every system and what weakens them will eventually simplify the system.
I am not as much interested in being "right" because that is a very naive way of looking at this. I am more interested in highlighting these trends because i fear we often build downstream of international trends (hyped areas vs fundamental changes that go unnotiticed).
Safer proven strategies do reduce risk but they also take away the upside of rewards. There is no replacement for ahead of the curve courage and societies, markets, time - all punish as well as reward forward thinking.
I see great opportunities when systems undergo large changes. As global energy economics, labour availability, localisation trends undergo fast changes, we have a real chance of riding these waves vs doing service delivery for NY and Valley. Cloud seeding was innovative till Dubai flooded. The world markets will quickly shift the narrative hanging us dry if we are not intellectually prepared for different possibilities.
As short term trends, i am noticing that there is a huge collapse in the middle of the economic pyramid. Without fundamental innovations in how we recalibrate our systems, only rich dog shampoo products would work and a lot of us and our people will be out of jobs and economy.Perhaps this isn't as applicable to the audience of this group as the members are incredibly well connected and can float away to greener smaller pastures but i also see counter trends to the "infinite growth for everyone, eventually" narrative. There are only so many rich dogs to shampoo and this is to address the "rest of us" part of the problem. It is already clear in product circles that we aren't building for our people and i feel that we can.
No answers here, to be honest. But an urge to highlight that these shifts are both opportunities and challenges and some of the hardest problems in the world. Having spent a few years in rural areas working on climate, i confess i have tilted my brains a little. :)
I have come to love the tech community, in large parts because of the sensitivity, nuance and accomodation tech bros also have here on HN. Honestly i've tried many times to judge the tech world but i also see enough balancing acts going on here at HN.
Many of us may fall, but I see great kindness and hope in Technologists to be able to inch the world towards great positivity. Few others have that agency in this tilted world, so it is also that.
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.
Unless you're interested in human behavior and see finance as part of a natural process. From a biology perspective there's an obvious line of thinking around resource sequestration you can't really discuss in public, so I'm always interested in seeing the shape its eventual expression takes.
The articles are also rage bait and I agree with the moderation fwiw. We aren't really here to square this particular circle.
Tax these fuckers so they shut up
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.
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.
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.
The super-rich whose net worth consists of large unrealised gains in stock are simply a product of this bad fiscal policy and are, believe it or not, helping, by acting as a buffer to absorb asset inflation. Remember that their wealth is imaginary - stock they can never sell in significant quantities - by forcing them to sell it and pumping the money back into the bottom half of the economy, what was previously imaginary money would now be real money flowing through the economy, causing the price of things consumers care about (i.e. not stocks) to go up.
The only solution is to fix the fiscal policy and stop printing money and running up deficits. Asset prices can return to normal levels and the super-rich’s net worth falls with them because it’s all stocks.
There’s nothing wild about this position, it’s just monetarism. If you expand the money supply without expanding the productive output of the economy, all you’ve done is make money worth less than it was before. The number of goods and services hasn’t changed, the cost to produce/import them hasn’t changed, demand hasn’t changed. You simply have slightly more money that represents a smaller fraction of the total money supply.
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.
ok, then improve it first instead of making it even more powerful, and therefore even harder to improve!