I find it a bit startling to see this sentiment on HN, a site that used to be mostly full of people building startups, attempting to get wealthy by building something useful that people are happy to pay for.
A couple of days ago, I learned about an audio processing plugin that apparently (I haven't verified it yet) earned its creator US$1M in 4 months. This is a little blob of code that you load into your DAW and it makes or changes the sounds, and you tweak knobs till it's doing what you want.
If you don't see the difference between that and, say, Amazon, then I don't know what to say.
The fact that you can trace a line between a scrappy startup in a converted garage somewhere and a behemoth doesn't mean that they are both the same thing.
I find it a bit startling to see this sentiment on HN, a site that used to be mostly full of people building startups, attempting to get wealthy by building something useful that people are happy to pay for.