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“Facebook is not worth $33,000,000,000” (medium.com/five-hundred-words)
16 points by jmj4 on June 10, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



> this makes no sense to me, therefore it makes no sense.

This is my main problem with the tech community, especially HN. Most of the commenters here are intelligent and knowledgable, but many of them seem to be, for lack of a better word, arrogant. I see comments all the time that point out an undressed issue in a post and then go on to assume that they are the first people to think of issue and that it's unaddressable and/or unaddressed. It's not that hard to look past that tone and assumptions to get to the meat of the comment, but it gets old after a while. I don't think this means that all of the commenters on HN are cynical assholes (hell, I do it myself sometimes), but sometimes it seems that way.


I thought the same thing about tech, until a very short while ago. I'll agree that there is a fair bit of hubris in the industry among developers ("shit code" vs "my code"), but beyond that, the arrogance that seems prevalent isn't really much more prevalent than general society.

It's just that the bar for entry into tech is, really, somewhat high in terms of social capital and intelligence, leading to a group of (generally) well spoken or well written individuals who often reality test their assumptions amongst each other. You'll see similarly well composed (not necessarily STRONG arguments, but well composed) thoughts coming out of similar fields: law, medicine, politics.


Here's a link to the original HN discussion from September 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975




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