[davidw]

I want the freedom to do what I want, and in my case that involves a certain quantity of money. Not tons of it, but more than I have now.

[Helianthus]

There's paying the bills, and there's lust for percentages of 16 billion dollars.

[davidw]

And who are you to say what is the "correct" amount of money for people to desire?

This really wasn't the appropriate thread to hijack for this discussion anyway; I came here to talk about Erlang.

[Helianthus]

I'm not specifying an amount or a correctness, and I do not disagree that there is a line between means and end.

I'm saying that HN's attention span is dominated by dollar signs.

[parasubvert]

What do you expect? It's a startup-oriented hacker bulletin board run by a guy that suggests that hiring is obsolete and most nerds should be able to start a new venture and make a killing.

Even if it's overly optimistic, it's a pretty reasonable aspiration compared to the wage slavery most have to endure, so I fail to see why this is wrong.

There are plenty more of stories of failure studied at HN than successes like WhatsApp. That's actually more correlated with reality than the mainstream business media that focuses mostly on success.

[Helianthus]

I don't expect different, but pointing out that the technology sector is no less rotten than the financial sector is a pastime of mine.

[parasubvert]

Still waiting for the explanation of why it's rotten to want to create value through technology and seek reward for it.

One might argue WhatsApp isn't worth what was paid for, or that the money would be better spent elsewhere. But that's a rather subjective judgement. Spending $16 billion on, say, philanthropic causes, doesn't necessarily lead to desirable or sustainable effects. As with any scarce resource, it depends on how the money is managed.