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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> While hardware folks study and learn from the successes and failures of past hardware, software folks do not.

I guess that’s the real problem I have with SV’s endemic ageism.

I was personally offended, when I encountered it, myself, but that’s long past.

I just find it offensive, that experience is ignored, or even shunned.

I started in hardware, and we all had a reverence for our legacy. It did not prevent us from pursuing new/shiny, but we never ignored the lessons of the past.

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Why do you find it offensive? It’s not personal. Someone who thought webvan was a great lesson in hubris could not have built an Instacart, right? Even evolution shuns experience, all but throwing most of it out each generation, with a scant few species as exceptions.

> Someone who thought webvan was a great lesson in hubris could not have built an Instacart, right?

Not at all. The mistake to learn from in Webvan's case was expanding too quickly and investing in expensive infrastructure all before achieving product-market fit. Not that they delivered groceries.

By the time you realise the error of your comment, you'll have reached the age where your opinion can be safely discarded.

I have to say, this is some good, concise writing.

absolutely. we should discard opinions from anyone with experience.

I think you're mistaking the funding and starting of companies with the execution of their vision through software engineering -- the entire point of the article, and the OP.

This is a classic straw man argument, which depends on the assumption that all people of a certain age would think a certain way.

Also, your understanding of evolution is incorrect. All species on Earth are the results of an enormous amount of accumulated "experience", over periods of up to billions of years. Even the bacteria we have today took hundreds of millions of years to reach anything similar to their current form.

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