This might be a downvote target, but I think it's worth it. So here I go.
I'm curious to know why HN is overall supportive of Zuckerberg in this matter (based on top voted comments in similar threads). Here are my views and logics about this:
1. Just because a person is a billionaire, it does not mean that they should be treated the same as Buffett or Gates. If today there is a chance if winning a lottery worth tens of billions, and tomorrow a random person is a winner, is does not mean that winner is comparable to Buffett and Gates.
2. Warren Buffett became a millionaire in early 60s, then it took him 3 decades to be a billionaire on paper. Compared to this, Zuckerberg's path to be a billionaire was at least one order of magnitude faster. This does not mean that he was a genius developer, or a great business man. Many people tried building the same app as Facebook. In my view, Zuckerberg simply won that lottery, the very same way that there were many pubsub apps out there, older and arguably better designed than Twitter, but Twitter happened to win the lottery.
3. The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. The business model of Facebook is questionable. The way Facebook handles its users privacy is questionable. In a more similar space, Larry Page also had a fast track to the billionaires club, but what he built, and how he built it, is way more sound. There are many apps hat could replace Facebook, bit there aren't search algorithms as effective as Google. You can live without Facebook without making a difference to you life, when was the last day in your life that you did not Google?
4. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big lotteries in another, and I'm asked to play a machine learning classification algorithm, my brain would give Zuckerberg a high score of being a member of the second group.
UK doesn't not work as described in [1], and I don't think any other country works like that.
In the UK, if you have a certain income (as low as £8,000), you must pay for national insurance, whether you like it or not, whether you're going to use it or not. If you want to use the faster/better service, that is private insurance, then you have to pay for your private insurance, as well as national insurance, both in full.
I guess setting up discourse is too heavy for this use case. The same may be applied to the original reddit source, but at least reddit comes with a VM image.
The thought of lisp coming back to life as other forms like clojure, makes me wonder if in a couple of decades a modern form of c++ will be trendy. In that universe, the current hate of java and c++ will be the cool stuff.
Is this the technology keep evolving, or is it us keep changing our minds?
I'm curious to know why HN is overall supportive of Zuckerberg in this matter (based on top voted comments in similar threads). Here are my views and logics about this:
1. Just because a person is a billionaire, it does not mean that they should be treated the same as Buffett or Gates. If today there is a chance if winning a lottery worth tens of billions, and tomorrow a random person is a winner, is does not mean that winner is comparable to Buffett and Gates.
2. Warren Buffett became a millionaire in early 60s, then it took him 3 decades to be a billionaire on paper. Compared to this, Zuckerberg's path to be a billionaire was at least one order of magnitude faster. This does not mean that he was a genius developer, or a great business man. Many people tried building the same app as Facebook. In my view, Zuckerberg simply won that lottery, the very same way that there were many pubsub apps out there, older and arguably better designed than Twitter, but Twitter happened to win the lottery.
3. The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. The business model of Facebook is questionable. The way Facebook handles its users privacy is questionable. In a more similar space, Larry Page also had a fast track to the billionaires club, but what he built, and how he built it, is way more sound. There are many apps hat could replace Facebook, bit there aren't search algorithms as effective as Google. You can live without Facebook without making a difference to you life, when was the last day in your life that you did not Google?
4. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big lotteries in another, and I'm asked to play a machine learning classification algorithm, my brain would give Zuckerberg a high score of being a member of the second group.