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Felleisen taught the first CS class I ever took. I think part of the point of the class was to mess with people who think they know what to do because they've coded before, when in actually they are now on even footing with everyone else. In my position, I was glad for it. Everyone was perfectly intuitive!

So this is just the author's personal gripes? "proof of state is against social justice," and "I like the non-rivalry of Internet art." No one if forcing you to use crypto art.

> Cryptoart lets a few artist early adopters get rich from a system made to reward investors, not artists.

This is true in the same way as Da Vinci pieces are expensive because Da Vinci was an "early adopter" (one of the first great artists)

> AWS has alternatives

Yes, but we are seeing collusion

> It's not a free speech issue at all

Yes, it is.

> Free speech means you can't be jailed or persecuted by the government for your speech.

This is incorrect. You are confusing free speech with the 1st amendment.

The first amendment is the law that says the government cannot suppress your free speech. Free speech is not synonymous with that.

> Due process is 100% irrelevant

It is relevant to the extent that tech companies are operating as quasi governmental entities.

> Silicon Valley wants to use its power to make it harder for people with those views to meet, organize and share their views? Crack on.

No, they should not be doing that. It shouldn't even be legal for Silicon Valley to do that. I don't care that you describe the people being censored as having negative traits, that is your political opinion.

The term healthy is doing a lot of work for you. If you mean signal/noise ratio, then yes, and HN truly optimizes for that, so it makes sense that you're here. But HN doesn't optimize for total amount of signal, for example, buried underneath a lot of noise. Personally, I care about content a lot more than I care about "community."

What did he do to deserve a ban?

This article seems to make a lot of mistakes, which is unfortunate, because they are very interesting thinkers. I can mostly speak to Thiel's views. I will spell them out, if anyone is interested.

1. Peter Thiel strongly values timing. This is not incompatible with the idea of creating your own market.

2. Thiel argues strongly against the ideas that a good invention sells itself. He emphasizes, to the point of contrarianism, that sales is underrated.

3. Thiel believes that competing on quality and price only is a sucker's game, competition. To get monopoly (the goal), you need to do something fundamentally different than anyone else (in kind, not in efficiency). The exception is if you do something 10x better than anyone else, it rolls back around to constituting a difference in kind.

> Do you have to come up with elaborate verbal descriptions of abstract concepts in your head before you can think about them?

I am very unusual, but for me, yes.

I don't think "this isn't new" is a legitimate criticism. Discovery is all about finding interesting iterations or elaborations on previous discoveries. I'll give them their self-entitled diatribes if they will stay this interesting.