[danaris]

While it's true that extrapolating from "me to infinity" is a logical fallacy, that's not the same thing as saying (in the general case) "even if you think it's a bad idea, there will be a lot of people who want it, therefore it's still a good idea", regardless of the reasoning behind why the one person you're talking to thinks it's a bad idea.

In this case, I think there's a strong argument to be made that while yes, there are people who will be willing to buy into an unknown startup's unreleased product, by and large, those people are fools (in the sense of "a fool and his money are soon parted", at the very least). There's certainly a segment of our population (which is, completely unsurprisingly and reasonably, overrepresented on HN) that's very excited about startup culture, and wants to believe that any given startup is going to Change The World™...but far, far too many of them fall into one of three categories:

1) Come up with a "new" way of moving money around so that rich people get richer (eg, the entire cryptocurrency space)

2) Make something that looks just flashy enough for them to get bought out by a bigger company

3) Fail outright