patkai

Behind many, but I sincerely hope not "every". A trivial counterexample is Warren Buffet: he simply saved and invested. Or consider inventors with patents.

Same here. As a teenager I dreamt about working for SUN. Oxide comes close in a way.

I admit that I am a skeptic, but my first try [1] gave an intriguing response, so I will continue playing with it.

[1] https://galactica.org/?prompt=what+is+the+relationship+betwe...

Some say it's a symbiosis

Where would you advertise for ex-Meta or ex-Twitter developers?

I've just finished his autobiography "Homage to Gaia". I've read dozens of scientists' biographies, but this stands out. Funny, unusual, very warm and humane with a lot of good thoughts about work, freelancing, science and history. Very recommended. My favorite story is when NASA asks him how to detect life on Mars and he answers "by an entropy reduction meter". The rest of the story is epic and very educational!

Yes, by far! The Gervais Principle is brilliant and after reading it a lot falls into place. It also corroborates with Slava's experience https://www.spakhm.com/p/how-to-get-promoted

I thought that the emotional life-history pattern of cancer patients is quite well researched and linking trauma, anxiety and stress to cancer is not his hypothesis, he is just popularizing it.

Correct! Worth checking the work of Gabor Mate on this. He claims that trauma is the key.

it's often the CTO

This is interesting. Do others have the same experience? (I don't have a large enough sample to tell.)

Eric Schmidt was running the show at Google

Was he really? I always thought he was more of a coach to the founders.

that part can be outsourced to eg. Hetzner

"it's not something where you throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks and just assume that programming languages, browsers, and operating systems are made of magical dust"

Actually, it is - and he just described evolution. And for the record, I don't like it, but what can I do. Would like to go to the cathedral, but I'm stuck in the bazaar.

The Metaverse is not bullshit. It is a brilliant tool to replace reality, control it and tax it. And it _will_ happen, the only question is who will implement it.

Sad that we are not paying for software nowadays. Look at the consequences!

I agree with you. Also, the Gervais principle should be required reading for everybody on HN. Half of the discussions would be so much simpler. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ To put it simple: it would be hard to operate a large organization without some of the above mentioned tendencies. Regarding awful fathers: what do we know about the father of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or even Arnold Schwarzenegger? All of this plays out in society in a non-black-and-white way.

Am surprised that in such a long thread nobody mentions RethinkDB.

Everybody should take responsibility, parents first and also Zuckerberg.

May be unrelated, but the question is killing me: what caption would you give to the photo at the top of the article?

Please, everyone, do this more often! So simple and so powerful.

Maybe a tablet maker will one day add a second, e-ink screen to the back of the tablet and run the Kindle app on it.

This is one of the best titles I've seen this year. Reminds me of G.G.Márquez, who told how much he sweated over the first sentence. I haven't read the post yet, but I feel the discussion has already started.

No way I am judging the company, meaning Joyent. But Samsung Electronics owns them, so what I expect is they realise they sit on a goldmine of talent, and if Joyent products are not doing well then they reinvest that talent in something else.

It is the sign of terrible incompetence to downsize people like him. If you ever get hold of people with this much competence then find a clever project for them, or create a new subsidiary.

How about DHH? He is the closest to this I know.

Related: while reading this thread I got an email with a job advertisement for COBOL programmers. It starts with "SIXT is an IT company with a very large car pool". Big words for a car rental firm, but I do hope they will be a tech company.

Somehow these comments reminded me of a rant by John von Neumann. In an essay he says something like "mathematics is actually very shabby, just have a look at the extremum principles. Extrema? So we can't even tell if it's a minimum or a maximum?" It amuses me how software developers think of themselves as precise, when, actually, there is a lot of shabbiness in sw development. Hickey's example is one.

It took a moment to google what Unison is. Apparently a new programming language: https://github.com/unisonweb/unison

Gell-Mann is one of my favorite scientist, partly because he conforms to my idea of what a scientist is, ie. diverse interests (linguistics, systems science), fun communicator (just check YouTube), very slightly eccentric (Yann LeCun's story on how Gell-Mann pronounced his name), captain of big intellectual debates (the whole field of Complex Systems, or as he called it "Plectics" is fun, fun, fun!) and last but not least a great wine connoisseur (the Wine Spectator made a lengthy interview with him in June 2004). Nine decades well spent on our planet. R.I.P.

I just read von Neumann's biography recently. He wanted to call the ENIAC the MANIAC - because of its unreliability - but his colleagues refused.