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No one is saying you owe billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The third sentence of the article is
> But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5.
Does anyone really believe the co founder of google retiring after their rise to supremacy in search was the equivalent of someone quitting their 9-5?
They might have well said “Google co-founder shares secrets that stealing bread to eat when you’re hungry and sleeping under bridges is actually illegal”
The lede is that Sergey is back full-time at Google and I haven't happened to see any other post about that, let alone a good one. If there's a better article, we can consider changing the link.
(and in any case, people still should not be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452725 to HN, no matter how bad an article is—so the moderation point stands.)
Most tech jobs aren’t a 9-5 either since that’s a traditional hourly job and tech has on call rotations that are unpaid.
This is what I’m talking about with the article insulting the readers intelligence. If you wanted to make the point of “people who retire should be aware that they need to find meaning outside of work” then it could just say so, instead of trying to act like it’s so hard to be so wealthy that there is no more struggle in life and you need to invent new ones for yourself.
A couple points that are important, if you want to understand how moderation works on HN:
(1) we're mostly responding to a random sample of the total - there's far too much content for us to read it all.
I have the impression that when someone posts a "you're moderating this, of all things?" comment, as you did here, it's usually because they've seen other cases where a comment ought to have been moderated but wasn't. Then the moderators' priorities start to look strange. The likeliest explanation for this, though, is that we just didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
(2) I've already forgotten point #2. Sorry! I fear that my short-term memory window is getting ever smaller - this is the 'sandblast' phenomenon (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(And hardly anyone mentions Greenland on X.)
To do so during a time when tech is also dragging its reputation into the mud by generally harming the rank and file, through large corporations whose actions are not held to account in anti-trust laws, to tech bro oligarchs who wine and dine with power while the rest of us are worst off in a time of unprecedented inequality, to tech laying off hundreds of thousands of employees over the last few years, to LLMs replacing hard working people with slop-generators… is just additional insult to injury.
The article is simply, itself, shallow. "… Is a Lesson for the Rest of Us" — no; barring unforeseen and extremely unlikely circumstances, I'm literally never going to have the "problems" faced by Brin, because I have no expectation of ever retiring with "perpetual wealth" levels of money.
As I said in a separate comment, TFA is distinctly lacks empathy.
HBOs Silicon Valley is more accurate than any Paul Graham essay