These discussions on HN are a bit ironic to me. HN seems to cut across several areas of discussion, and a large one is the startup world (principally the SF one). In general, the culture seems to be very liberal and sympathetic to socialism. Socialism isn't necessary mutually exclusive with capitalism, but it tends to be opposed. At the very least, it aims to level out the bell curve a bit, eliminating capitalistic excess.
Today's startup scene: Talk about capitalistic excess. Everyone's running around with MacBook Airs and Pros, iPhones, and iPads. The true "rebels" running Android: they're cheerleading for a phone that's backed by a mega-corp with a $300B market cap, so from an excess perspective, not much different.
The culture wants home runs. 9 or 10 figure exits. Built a photo sharing app or game moving blocks around on the your phone? Is $1B for your company really the best way for society to allocate its resources? VC's throw money away everyday on dumb companies that they know will fail; they're just keeping skin in the game knowing that if they do, they'll inevitably hit some home runs.
tl;dr Went all meta on the idea that startup culture that drives HN is capitalistic excess, opposite of socialism
edit "opposite of capitalism" should have been "opposite of socialism"; some grammar
Today's startup scene: Talk about capitalistic excess. Everyone's running around with MacBook Airs and Pros, iPhones, and iPads. The true "rebels" running Android: they're cheerleading for a phone that's backed by a mega-corp with a $300B market cap, so from an excess perspective, not much different.
The culture wants home runs. 9 or 10 figure exits. Built a photo sharing app or game moving blocks around on the your phone? Is $1B for your company really the best way for society to allocate its resources? VC's throw money away everyday on dumb companies that they know will fail; they're just keeping skin in the game knowing that if they do, they'll inevitably hit some home runs.
tl;dr Went all meta on the idea that startup culture that drives HN is capitalistic excess, opposite of socialism
edit "opposite of capitalism" should have been "opposite of socialism"; some grammar