I have no objection to the rest of your comment, but I do wonder about the part I quoted. Hacker News isn't just, or even primarily, about programming, and articles shouldn't be judged based on their direct relationship with that field.
From the HN Guidelines[1]:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
For what it's worth, I found VS2010 to be so slow and prone to crashing that I reverted to 2008. Since installing the VS2011 beta, though, I haven't looked back. It's been great.
I work on C++ desktop apps, though, and they aren't huge. Your mileage may vary.
This 3 year "absurd generosity" is nothing more than a classic bait and switch Marketing strategy
As someone who is currently enjoying the benefits of BizSpark, you're completely wrong.
Your sense of entitlement is simply amazing. I write software, and I charge for it. I would never expect a package as complex and high quality as Visual Studio to be free. The fact that I can use it for free for three years is fantastic, and I'm grateful for it.
This is a very insightful theory and I really, really hope you're wrong.
Regarding students, though, Microsoft has DreamSpark, which looks like BizSpark for students (all the way down to high school students, apparently). They can get free access to VS and at least some subset of operating systems.
Near the peak of the bubble, I was at the gym in Phoenix, AZ. Two guys on the stationary bikes in front of me were talking. "I just bought AOL at $X today." There was a look of resigned exasperation between them over how high the buy-in was. "But hey, you know, it can only go up from here, right?"
That was about the time I started moving my 401k into bonds for awhile. :-)
Incidentally, for the younger folks, one of the interesting things about the Dot Com bubble was that it coincided with mass interest in online trading. I have no idea what the numbers are regarding the number of active individual traders now versus then, but at the time you'd go to a party and overhear tons of people self-identifying as day traders. Living through that taught me that I really don't know enough about finance to pick individual stocks, and since then I've left my money in mutual funds, index funds, and now an entirely managed Vanguard account.
Almost the same story a friend of mine told me about how he knew when it was time to cash out. "I was at 7-Eleven and the clerk was talking to the customer in front of me about what stocks they were buying. The next day I sold all my stocks."
True, but taking Facebook as an example, it's IPO'd with a 100:1 P/E ratio. It would take 100 years at current earnings in order to pay for its current value. So, the question is: will they double revenue for enough consecutive years to bring that P/E ratio down? If they manage it, it will be a very impressive feat.
(for the record, I'm not saying it's a bubble, and I'm not necessarily saying FB is overvalued. I admit that they have a lot of bright people and are probably the best-poised company right now to develop completely innovative revenue streams)
My recollection of Apple leading up to and immediately following the introduction of the iMac and OS X, was that everyone in the press was beating the drum of impending doom. I recall a coworker telling me that her financial adviser had recommended she buy Apple, and I thought she was nuts. Not that I had a shred of wisdom at the time, but I'm pretty sure a good portion of the public would have sided with me (hence the extremely low share prices).
1) These are, by far, the most inspiring stories on HN. I would so much rather read about how a developer or small group sold X dollars of product Y than about a mega-corporation going public.
2) The SEO benefits of creating buzz and links around your product must be worth something. I don't know how applicable this is to something like iPhone apps, which I assume are generally discovered within the iTunes store.
Bullshit right back. I don't pay attention to the others, but Torvalds is awful. His bizarro personal attack on C++ programmers when explaining why C++ isn't used in the kernel was wildly unnecessary. There are sufficient technical reasons alone. I watched his talk on git where he repeatedly said SVN sucked in order to make the case for git, but he never gave any example of why SVN sucks. In other words, the only people to benefit from his comments were git users who already shared his hate for SVN.
I like Linux. I cannot stand Linus, and I'll avoid him at every chance. He relishes in being awful to people and, regardless of his technical contribution, he seems like a terrible person.
Sure. But he didn't give any explanation for why SVN sucks. He merely repeated the mantra at every opportunity. Well, if you don't have problems with SVN, then he hasn't done much of a job explaining how git is an improvement, has he? Why even bring up the competition if you're just going to vaguely say "X sucks and we all know it!" without ever drawing a comparison or explaining why the competition is weak in an area?
