Seems like the reason is to catch new bugs, fix them and upstream the fixes promptly, with a team of 10 doing that. Sounds awesome, but I could see other people just passively consuming stable.

I think this person might just be seeing Vietnam in a retrospective lens and has not seen the pro vietnam war propaganda from the 1960s which was immensely popular.

I wasn't alive either but I've seen it after the fact. Also the kind of people who thought the Kent State massacre was the right thing to do. The political radicals of that era "won" many culture wars but they were a minority, and the influential, pro-war, pro-establishment people sounded exactly like the ones who were in favor of the Iraq War and who think what's going on in Iran right now makes sense.

There is a reason, for example, that John Fogerty of CCR [of the song "Fortunate Son"] wrote the mid 2000s song "It's like Deja Vu All Over Again" to describe the Iraq war. It's because the war propaganda was all the same, just with a rotating cast.

> No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient.

Iraq.

Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too.

Also keep in mind when making comparisons that the Vietnam war was not unpopular with Americans at the beginning, and many people justified it all throughout, using language that will be similar to observers of later wars.

I think I'm a bit more of an iconoclast than the average HN reader, but when this community was fawning over him when he was head of YC, I always got the impression, without knowing the guy or much about him, that it was totally undeserved. Mainly because thoughtless fawning of any kind makes me immediately suspicious. Nobody deserves that kind of praise.

I read that quote and see no positive interpretation. It was always a negative description.

I think maybe this community could use a bit more natural skepticism of hierarchy.

> Flock would have detected, but maybe not prevented, two of these cases

I'm glad you acknowledge this, because it highlights what has irritated me about the discussion of crime in the last ~6 years. People seem to expect that crime can be prevented. Our criminal justice system and system of civil rights can only intervene after the crime has occurred, which means it won't prevent anything. Maybe I've misread you personally, and I don't mean to put it all on you, but I think people with your position tend to vastly overstate the deterrent factor of proposed interventions.

Further, only reacting to crime and not seeking to "punish" people before a crime has occurred is exactly how our system should work. When reasoning about crime prevention, a large number of people seem to want police to intervene preemptively. Or they want to punish offenders out of proportion to actual crimes, to prevent recidivism that hasn't happened yet. This type of thinking seems to slide pretty quickly into the "pre-crime" concept of dystopian scifi. We called that stuff dystopian for a reason.

In my opinion what we should do instead to prevent crime is to promote social cohesion, in the form of preventing income and wealth disparity, funding a strong social safety net, help for drug addicts and the mentally ill, etc. People who live happier, more stable lives will have less reason to turn to crime.

(I will also note, crime is lower everywhere in America vs. a few decades ago. Violent crime peaked in the mid 1990s. So it is in some sense a misguided endeavor completely, focusing on problems that are relatively unlikely.)