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All it takes is a second to stop and realize that wealth is created, not taken. If it was all really taken, then where in the heck did we take it from? (I mean we as in the whole world.) The world is immensely more wealthy than it was a thousand years ago, and all that wealth was created by the hard work of all those generations. Surely all the wealth creation done by startups is evidence of that.

I think this is generally an economic misunderstanding that a lot of people have. To them, it's "Every dollar Bill Gates has is a dollar less for everyone else, so that is unfair." In fact, PG made this argument much better than I can, here: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

You could say "just browse at 4 and higher," but then you miss a lot of good stuff that was downmodded for political reasons, or was too far down the page to ever get upmodded to begin with. This gives more weight to early comments than later ones, and hence everything must be hastily done, and hence there will be a typo which will bring out the Grammar Nazis, etc.

Slashdot has a lot of problems. The only reason it hasn't become a Digg or Reddit is because human moderators actually screen the stuff that gets posted, rather than rely on the (lack of) wisdom of the crowds. Content-wise, Digg and Reddit tread a lot of the same territory as Fark nowdays, only on Fark the main point is writing a funny headline or photoshopping a funny image, not the story itself.

Or I should say Reddit. The responses here were fairly normal until someone pointed out that reddit-ers were freaking out about it. I really hate to beat the old 'reddit is teh dumb' dead horse, but it kind of seems like it sometimes.

I think someone read into that essay what he wanted in a search for controversy, and then a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon in order to grind an axe with PG or YC, or to appear politically correct, or any number of other reasons.

It's just like when the whole world had a cow over the (lack of) unicode support in Arc0.

I am currently a caged lion, and I feel like one. I dream of nothing else but the open savanna and a tasty gazelle. How is that for taking a metaphor too far? I understood the whole thing as "startups are liberating to hackers" ... not "hackers that aren't doing startups suck" as others have suggested. I think his points about giant organizations not being natural make sense, and I really don't see why everyone took it personally.

Sure, people can enjoy their big company jobs. But you have to wonder... I have yet to meet an (ex)entrepreneur that hated running his own business. Just because you happen to like your company job doesn't mean you wouldn't get more done and feel more free in a startup. And just because you would get more done and feel more free in a startup doesn't mean you should quit a company job you are happy at either. It's up to the individual. It's not like we are arguing over religion here.

I'll mod something up if it's on-topic, well thought-out, and I agree with it. I'll only mod something down if it's blatantly off topic and rude/trollish. If I simply don't agree with what they said, but they said it in useful way, I'll just leave it be.

I'm all about modding the people who post goatse links down into negative oblivion, but I think it kind of stifles discussion if you downmod simply because you don't happen to agree. Instead of dog-piling someone for a dissenting opinion, take the extra 30 seconds to write a response. It'll enrich the discussion.

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