I found parts of this amusing, but it does feel like bad form of me to post an article with a paragraph trashing Paul Graham on a site PG started. Apologies to him if he's browsing HN today :)
Edit: I reread the post and noticed the author also has a go at Sam Altman, so apologies there, too.
Before I deleted my FB and Twitter accounts, I posted many scathing critiques! This felt a bit different for a couple reasons.
First, the article entertained me, but makes a couple points I vehemently disagree with. Most notably: as keen as the author is to dismiss some VC's intellectual pretensions, it's those pretensions that stop HN from turning into a garbage dump of bigotry, misinformation and viral marketing fluff. The pretensions I have more of an issue with are the a16z variety: the brain-dead 'I am very bad ass' church-of-the-hustle attitudes.
Second, HN has fewer posts and does not silo users. That's different than Facebook, where there was no chance Zuckerberg would read anything I ever posted. If I criticize someone more-or-less to their face I want it to be criticism I truly stand behind.
>This segues nicely into your third and final theme: American greatness. Today the Silicon Valley elite is obscenely rich; with a wealth tax in place, it will become merely extremely rich. This fear will undergird all your work as a VC intellectual. You won’t admit this, of course; instead, you’ll sell yourself as singularly obsessed with maintaining American hegemony in business and technology. The challenge for America, you will argue, is to beat China. And the sternest cautionary tale for an America on the precipice of Sandersism is France: a living hell of high-speed trains, immaculate town centers, public health care, excellent higher education, five-week paid vacations, progressive taxation, and abundant, low-cost cheese. All of which sounds pretty good until you consider that up to a few years ago, the French had failed to produce a single startup unicorn this century—the result of a (thankfully now-abolished) wealth tax and decades of addiction to bureaucracy that have left the country’s business culture as clogged and unimaginative as the pores of its inhabitants are enragingly clear. What’s the point of taking long vacations if your society doesn’t have a retail economy built on Groupon vouchers? The French have developed no good answer to this question, but America must continue to ask it.
Apart from the clean towncenter part this paragraph is perfect
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 19.2 ms ] threadEdit: I reread the post and noticed the author also has a go at Sam Altman, so apologies there, too.
Doesn't make sense to me.
First, the article entertained me, but makes a couple points I vehemently disagree with. Most notably: as keen as the author is to dismiss some VC's intellectual pretensions, it's those pretensions that stop HN from turning into a garbage dump of bigotry, misinformation and viral marketing fluff. The pretensions I have more of an issue with are the a16z variety: the brain-dead 'I am very bad ass' church-of-the-hustle attitudes.
Second, HN has fewer posts and does not silo users. That's different than Facebook, where there was no chance Zuckerberg would read anything I ever posted. If I criticize someone more-or-less to their face I want it to be criticism I truly stand behind.
Apart from the clean towncenter part this paragraph is perfect