and sometimes you learn about a person by working with them. Long ago, Vinod was an investor and director of two of my early companies. He was helpful, supportive, polite and wonderful.
"If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
Now size that up to billionaire status. They too are likely to take actions based on thinking that they are in fact right in their decision making. The issue in that case: billionaires often tend to impact a lot of other people with their actions, because so much of what they do is outsized.
My issue might be with my neighbors on a single property line marker. Or maybe they think my trashcans are encroaching on their curb area, pick the issue.
Billionaires generate billionaire-size problems.
This leads us to one of the most frustrating oddities of the Hacker News website: you can't collapse the comments. If there's a tree structure of comments, every comment will take up at least a good thumb's width of screen space.
The consequence of this is that every comment is an imposition on the reader. Every comment needs to be able to account for itself. Posting on Hacker News is a performance, rather than a conversation. We're on stage, whether anyone wants us there or not, and unless we're trying to write words that other people might find valuable, unless we're at least trying, then yes, we will be swiftly downvoted to oblivion by everyone, including people exactly like ourselves. There may be annoyance behind it, but there's scarcely enough thought wasted for malice.
One-liners must be very informative or situationally relevant messages. And properly capitalized and punctuated. Or else they should go unwritten.