northwind

Three cheers for calling this article what it is!

Quoting from a comment I made previously:

----------------------------------------

A good friend of mine described the articles displayed here as a "rat's nest" which does not lead anywhere. At first, I thought he was crazy; then I began critically looking at said articles.

I signed up here looking for what the original post posits providing; what I found were articles about startups, business, marketing, the current/next great gold rush, followed by the token (recently it has been improving) programmer/hacker article. And the articles about startups, business, and marketing were not great on any scale; in fact upon critical review, said articles advocated rather bad strategies. Strategies which amounted to little more than legalized scams, strategies which optimize for the short term, strategies promoting win at any cost, strategies which advocate me first and to hell with the consequences; in short, strategies of which Phineas Taylor Barnum would have been proud.

Before joining the Hacker News community, I was interested in starting my own business. Now that I see what is advocated as "startup culture", I want nothing to do with starting a business in the United States (because my conclusion is the culture and laws of the U.S. have optimized for short term gain, with the resulting push towards the strategies mentioned earlier). What happened to a business (either startup or established business) having integrity in all of their relationships, being a responsible citizen of the business ecosystem it operates within, and providing a legacy beyond the generation within which it was founded?

----------------------------------------

So now here is my dissenting opinion of the linked article: if all you are concerned about is the money, then you have already lost.

As an interesting (as in "odd") exercise, go to the root node of the blog (http://angloaustria.blogspot.com/) and notice the phrase "Curse of Maturin Towers".

After asking yourself "WTF does that mean?", do a Google search for the aforementioned phrase (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=Curse+of+Maturin+Towers); hmm, no useful results (that is, we could not find a definition).

Now do a Google search for "Maturin Towers" as an exact phrase (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=Maturin+Towers) and notice we have 300+ hits for a rather odd exact phrase; all of which point to, or are directly related to, the AngloAustria blog (http://angloaustria.blogspot.com/).

Could this be an well crafted SEO blog designed to tell people what they want to hear?

And here is the link to the the actual PDF (die frames, DIE):

http://weblog.miceda.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/build_we...

Actually, no, said sarcasm does not fall flat. A good friend of mine described the articles displayed here as a "rat's nest" which does not lead anywhere. At first, I thought he was crazy; then I began critically looking at said articles.

I signed up here looking for what the original post posits providing; what I found were articles about startups, business, marketing, the current/next great gold rush, followed by the token (recently it has been improving) programmer/hacker article. And the articles about startups, business, and marketing were not great on any scale; in fact upon critical review, said articles advocated rather bad strategies. Strategies which amounted to little more than legalized scams, strategies which optimize for the short term, strategies promoting win at any cost, strategies which advocate me first and to hell with the consequences; in short, strategies of which Phineas Taylor Barnum would have been proud.

Before joining the Hacker News community, I was interested in starting my own business. Now that I see what is advocated as "startup culture", I want nothing to do with starting a business in the United States (because my conclusion is the culture and laws of the U.S. have optimized for short term gain, with the resulting push towards the strategies mentioned earlier). What happened to a business (either startup or established business) having integrity in all of their relationships, being a responsible citizen of the business ecosystem it operates within, and providing a legacy beyond the generation within which it was founded?

In conclusion, I would be VERY interested in being involved with the community type proposed by jcapote (in any capacity: contributing member, developer, beta tester, et cetera).

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/05/...

By the sound of it, they already have...

Or, at least the people have begun voting with their feet (no pun intended).

Arguments won via "Argument by The Stick" will work only as long as our institutions of learning continue turning out more sheeple than rational humans (once upon a time, this was not true in the U.S.; I know because an elderly friend of mine was required to take a "Critical Thinking" class in high school).

As for the "advertising immunization shots" the author of the article talks about, the authors experience is beautiful confirmation of what C.S. Lewis writes in the first few chapters of "The Abolition of Man".

Sorry, Belarus cannot even claim "developed". I saw that style design on homebuilt aircraft at the 1999 EAA Oshkosh Airshow. "Commercialized" may be the only verb left to claim...