This critique, which annoyingly has little to do with the headline, is a regurgitation of many of the surface level critiques that have been made of VCs for years. Nothing novel about it.

It also wonders off to random topics, like Elon’s new baby’s name. I have a lot of respect for Elon, but a) I don’t care what his baby’s name is and b) what in the world does that have to do with the article’s main topic??

I usually enjoy articles from this publication and was looking forward to reading it but was sorely disappointed by the end.

Reader beware.

~Capitalizm~ Capitalism is purely a theoretical idea. Free markets as capitalism defines them are impossible. Perfect information, competition, price taking, ect, which are baked into the economic theories of capitalism are simply not feasible.

Often our critiques of capitalism are not critiques of capitalism at all. In fact they’re criticisms of monopolies and oligopolies in our modern society, which are antithetic to capitalism.

The American economy is an aristocracy. VCs, the big ones at least, are members of that aristocracy. Many of which are filled with smart good hearted people. But there are some incentives baked into their position of power that we need to be cognizant of.

Edit: “free-market capitalism” would probably have been a better term. Clearly that was not the point I was making.

Perfect information is not a requirement of free markets.

The term for imperfect information is "risk" and pricing risk is very much an integral part of free markets.

> Often our critiques of capitalism are not critiques of capitalism at all.

While this is superficially true, the structure of capitalism arguably makes such concentration of wealth and power inevitable, so the phenomena of monopoly and oligarchy are intrinsic features of capitalism. Not free markets, but capitalism, i.e. the system where individual, private citizens own the means of production.

I'm not sure yet whether I think that capitalism can ever be made work for the people (including the underclass that our society currently consumes as human fuel to keep the status quo). I think it's quite possible that it will foil all attempts to reform it. But we'll see.

I’d argue that free markets are a requirement of the definition of capitalism, but like the term “communism” the definition has become squishy.

I agree that your definition inevitably leads to income inequality.

Either way, I think we agree on the nature of these problems.

'Capitalism' was a term conceived by Marx and despite Marx and many other anti and pro-capitalist economists having much more to say on the subject, has always had a pretty straightforward definition of being an economy characterised by capital owners hiring wage labourers to generate returns on their capital. A definition sufficiently succinct to describe both the excesses of Silicon Valley and the grim poverty of the Industrial Revolution.

The definition relies on the assumption the distribution of capital is sufficiently unequal for workers to need/want to work for capitalists to earn wages and the market sufficiently free for it to be possible for capitalists to hire workers to generate returns. But both the Marxist arguments that capital must inevitably become so concentrated that capitalists won't need to pay workers above subsistence levels [until it leads to revolutions] and the free market economist argument that competition will resolve this [and pesky social democrats will ruin it] are firmly in the 'squishy' parts of the definition.

('Communism', which had competing definitions before Marx started writing about it, has always been a bit squishy...)

Fair enough. I learned - in an American college - that “capitalism” was a term coined by Adam Smith in “Wealth if Nations”, which apparently was an incorrect conflation made by my Econ professor.

The term “free-market capitalism” is used often by politicians and economists, but apparently that term is conflating two distinct concepts by your definition.

That illustrates my point that the term’s meaning has morphed since it’s coining. Even the Wikipedia page’s disagrees with both of us!

> The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850

> Marx did not extensively use the form capitalism, but instead capitalist and capitalist mode of production, which appear more than 2,600 times in the trilogy Capital

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

What a rabbit hole! We’re officially lost in the minutia of term definitions. Time to log off of HN for the weekend haha

Monopolies come about because of government interference, not free markets.

The reason is pretty simple - the larger a company gets, the more bureaucratic and inefficient it becomes, until a smaller, nimbler company eats it for lunch.

A large company can benefit from massive economies of scale or upfront costs that create an impenetrable barrier to entry. e.g. Wal-mart, Barnes and Noble, mobile phone networks. In certain areas, once you amass enough power, you have the power to crush competition, no government interference necessary.

However, we're not just talking about market dynamics of monopoly, we're talking about concentration of power in a society. Billionaires control enough wealth to influence or even effectively buy politicians, who then make rules that benefit them. They use their money to control media narratives. They hamstring labor power and increase their own leverage without limit. You can't write this off as a consequence of government interference into an otherwise self-regulating system - government interference, and interference by other centers of power, on behalf of the super-rich is an essential feature of concentration of wealth and power in a society.

If you're saying that monopolies only arise because of government interference, I'm gonna need a lot of citations.

I don't want to replace free markets or have a totally planned economy because I agree with you that excessive power centralization is a problem, including when it goes to the government. I am just saying that the system of capitalism (which, again, doesn't just mean free markets, it means that individual citizens can own essential means of production) has power concentration as an inevitable consequence. Government interference on behalf of the super rich, which leads to more concentration of power, is a consequence of capitalism, not a foil to it.

To be clear, I don't know what the best alternative is. But it looks something like more democratic control and accountability over the essential means of production. I'm not convinced government ownership would always accomplish this. But letting individual citizens own it and use it as leverage to increase their own personal wealth and power, virtually without limit, at the expense of those who depend on it and labor on it, is unacceptable.

> If you're saying that monopolies only arise because of government interference, I'm gonna need a lot of citations.

Name one that isn't. If your theory is correct, there should be free market monopolies everywhere.

> But letting individual citizens own it and use it as leverage to increase their own personal wealth and power, virtually without limit, at the expense of those who depend on it and labor on it, is unacceptable.

Who do you think sits in power in the government? Individual citizens.

> virtually without limit

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc., cannot order you arrested. But the rookiest cop can arrest you.

Amazon tried to influence the Seattle City Council election buy funding opposition candidates. This became a campaign issue, and Amazon failed badly at it.

Hilary Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost the election.

Bloomberg got trounced.

Wealth buying power in America is not nearly as effective as you suggest.

- Most industries in the US are largely dominated by oligopolies. I think it's on you to prove that they all, or at least most, arose due to government interference.

- As I said in my answer (are you reading?), I'm not sure that giving control to government is always the answer. Maybe a syndicalist approach, maybe community ownership, more power in the workplace, more accountability in the community, etc. But the current situation is untenable.

- Don't be pedantic. I didn't literally mean that every wealthy person has every possible power. Further, an example of wealth failing in one case doesn't disprove the 10 cases where it succeeded. For example, yes sometimes people lose in elections even when they outspend their opponents. This has no bearing on the fact that billionaires and their interest groups completely succeed at influencing politicians through lobbying, and even writing legislation for them to push.

I'm going to bow out of this conversation now because I don't feel you are engaging charitably and in good faith. I think you are ideologically determined not to recognize how wealth and power function. I would still have engaged for the sake of argument, but I can't do that with someone who's not showing efforts to represent my argument faithfully and charitably. Bye.

I had this issue last night. What was really odd was that algolia’s API was throttling - 429 error code - when I was connected to my wifi, but when I switched to my cell network it worked fine. Then this morning it worked fine on both.

I tried on my regular home internet, then my cell phone, then had a friend who's in the same geographic area as me (but different ISP) try it.

Thanks for sharing, this is surprising as the rate-limit should be per IP :/ Investigating.

Should be good now.

Thanks! It’s a small world on HN haha. What was the issue? If you don’t mind me asking

We were experimenting some rate limiting settings and the load balancer IP in front of the hn cluster wasn't excluded, both features haven't been mixed before (doesn't make much sense to rate limit a search cluster behind a load balancer).

Sure thing, we’re experimenting with some Load-Balancing heuristics and instrumentations, and it looks it got rate-limited by the engine who got surprised all traffic was coming from a single IP /o\

Why fundraise against the Prisma open source project instead of creating a new brand for the premium / enterprise product? Like how Confluent is separate from Kafka.

As a developer, I prefer the Confluent/Kafka model because it’s crystal clear where the separation is between premium and open source.

These types of tools are effectively another way to parameterize your SQL that _feels_ more like writing in your scripting language (nodejs in this case)

This approach is notorious for generating inefficient sql queries, but it can improve jr fronted dev productivity b/c a tool like this is easier to learn than SQL.

Me too! They also don’t make much sense. The innovation in data storage was from “self-hosted” to “managed”. That’s quite a broad generalization over what’s happened in data storage over the last several decades.

Does Prisma have a business model or premium version I’m not aware of? I don’t see anything on their site around premium options. Not sure why Amplify Partners would invest in Prisma unless they were planning on dedicating substantial resources to a premium / enterprise version.

From what I understand, prisma is an open source query builder for node/ts. Like sqlalchemy-core in python, which has been around for a long time.

> While almost any other part of the development stack has been modernized, database tools have been stuck with the same paradigms for the last decades.

This is simply not true. Perhaps that’s been the case in the node.js world but it has certainly not been the case in other server-side languages.

We've alluded to this in the blog post as well:

> We are commited to building world-class open-source tools to solve common database problems of application developers. To be able to sustain our open-source work, we're planning to build commercial services that will enable development teams and organizations to collaborate better in projects that are using Prisma.

So, your hunch is correct that later down the road we'll invest into building commercial cloud services for teams and enterprises that are using Prisma's open source tool!

Oh, it’s mentioned in the very last paragraph!

Are they? What’s the alternative that gets all the undeserved attention?

Simple Death rates?

Insurance rates are developed by financially-motivated actuaries that consider a whole bunch of variables in order to create market-efficient rates.

Well, in this case, the testimony of cops and politicians themselves

While learning about another tech stack is lots of fun for an engineer, I believe that great products aren’t written by great tools. They’re built by great engineers. A great tool helps but is not sufficient to build a great product.