I tried in vain to find a valid argument in this article. Instead, it was nearly wall-to-wall non sequiturs and faulty generalizations.

There's some arm waving about how increasing the income tax on high wage earners will act as a disincentive to angel investors. Am I misunderstanding tax law, or aren't capital gains (e.g., from startup investments) separate from income for tax purposes?

Then, when Obama's "socialized medicine" plan would actually help, the author rails against it because it has 'failed everywhere it's been tried.' (Except where it has succeeded. And also, the dismal failures mentioned are anecdotal scaremongering.) The solution is held out in front of the author and he rejects it on unrelated, partisan grounds!

Maybe he makes sense to himself, but his oversimplifications haven't adequately made the case for the article title or his two supporting gripes.

But that's the thing, nothing in the valley came "crashing down" except maybe the net worth of some investors, who just went from obscenely wealthy to very wealthy. And maybe TechCrunch's standards.

Buildings are all still standing. Almost every company that was in business yesterday is still in business today. There've been a few layoffs, but those were due to issues stemming a while back.

Everything is, for the most part, the way it was two weeks ago. It'd be one thing if there was an 8.2 Earthquake. But the Dow dropping?

Matt, I'm worried about you. I don't think your level of alarm is sufficient. When those buildings do start falling over, you won't be prepared! It basically goes Dow drop -> Earthquake -> Zombies. Those of us who realize that are just trying really hard to help our fellow Americans by posting article after unsubstantiated article with our thoughts on how exactly the world is about to end. Stop undermining this important public service, sir!

This is simply ridiculous. The author clearly hasn't filled out IRS Form 1120S lately, or any other tax form that actually might be applicable to entrepreneurs. Furthermore, I don't really care if angel investors and venture capitalists have to pay more taxes on their successful investments. There's a difference between investing and inventing.

In regard to health care, adding more tax incentives (read loopholes), thereby increasing the complexity of the laws, and making the market for health insurance "more competitive," when the lack of competition is not the problem in the first place, will make matters far worse. Health care is not a commodity that lends itself to a market. It's a human right, which lends itself far better to [competent] government.

A while back I wrote about some of these issues here:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=11

TinyMCE is not viable if users will be pasting content from Word documents, and generally does a terrible job of dealing with pasted styles...nearly impossible to override, so you end up pasting into Notepad, etc. etc. At my job, we're going to migrate our pilot Drupal sites from TinyMCe to FCKEditor due to this reason alone: To our users (content editors/admins who were stuck in Contribute before), this makes the Drupal software as a whole look bad. Even with the "Word Paste" plugin installed for TinyMCE, users have to click a special "Word Paste" button. This is silly, in FCKEditor you just paste normally.

One of my least computer-savvy clients for whom I built a Drupal site in the spring had absolutely no trouble using FCKEditor, while even I have a hard time wrangling some content in TinyMCE.

In short, TinyMCE's time has come and gone. It's still a decent RTE, but FCK has definitely surpassed it.

Yes there is a big advantage to keeping your memory consumption low with ruby apps. Ruby's garbage collector is not the best and has to walk all the objects in the process when it GC's. The more memory your process uses the longer and more often GC will happen. This will degrade performance the more memory you use. In fact I've seen really leaky apps spend most of their wall clock time in the garbage collector.

Sure, throwing more ec2 instances at the problem is one solution, but if you care about your apps performance you will try to optimize for smaller memory footprint.

If your $600bn figure is correct...

US incomplete health care is $600bn/305m people = $2,000 per person.

UK national health service is $120bn/60m people = $2,000 per person.

The US needs a really hard look at why it is getting such a bad deal. You already have socialised medicine (anyone can go to the ER and it gets amortised over private insurance patients - essentially taxing the rich) but that cost is on top of the $2k/person you pay for an inferior national program!

Look at this:

"Calce estimates that he had hacked into perhaps 40 percent of the major universities in the United States, _using attack code that he picked up online_"

and

"_He took denial of service attack code written by_ a hacker named Sinkhole and developed a way to remotely train all of his approximately 200 university networks on the same target simultaneously, he said."

I think some users are confusing Hacker News with Script Kiddies News.

Just curious, being a Valley outsider (Washingtonian): How common is the startup that finds the middle ground between working to the bone (trying desperately to be the next Google/Yahoo/Microsoft and secure massive VC) and the expect-nothing-back, RMS-enamored open source group?

Because that's where I'd like to be: A tech shop that cares about turning a profit, but that's equally concerned with innovation and just having a good time. It seems to me that many people affiliated with the startup scene are way too dollar-driven or take themselves too seriously.