The Cringely story was great. the Google story, also great. I click over to to the home page, ready to settle in for some more interesting reading, and -- there's a total of three posts.
Paul Tyma - 3 posts in 20 years. A prolific blogger! :)
Nice post. I read Cringely's blog for 20+ years. I think Paul hit the nail on the head. I think the problem with Cringely's ventures is he never seemed to have the discipline to hang on long enough to pivot and find product market fit.
I've only learned about them recently from a post about Mineserver. The article was posted to HN on Oct 4, they've passed on Oct 3 but I didn't know this until today.
I like the idea of slowly downloading content in the background over a dial-up connection, but using it to print out a full magazine seems kind of silly. You'd probably end up paying more for the digital copy plus ink than you would for a print subscription. I remember one of my old printers came with "apps" that would allow you to print out the top news stories from various wire services every day, meaning that the startup idea was similar to a feature cooked up by a printer company to try to get the user to buy more ink.
> I always thought he should start a Youtube channel interviewing Silicon Valley celebrities. I sent him a few emails along those lines, but Bob would mostly just ignore me. He was usually too excited about his new/current startup idea.
He did do a series of video interviews with tech people that got distributed online in the early 2000s. They're a good watch: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22nerdtv%22 . I agree that it's a shame that he didn't keep going with that idea during the rise of Youtube. He wrote a blog post where he basically says that the economics of Youtube didn't allow for the scale and spectacle of content he wanted to put out: https://www.cringely.com/2012/06/28/why-youtube-isnt-future-... . He did try to return to being a TV presenter by making a show about traveling around the US to interview various company founders, but for whatever reason PBS chose to pick up a similar show rather than his. The production company uploaded some clips from the project if anyone's interested: https://boondogglemedia.com/project/startup-america/
HP Inkjet Components group developed www.instant-delivery.com (if I remember correctly) around this time. Lots of good content, but failed for the very reason you noted re: costs. Of course driving revenue higher was the sole reason for HP developing this. (Note: www.instantdelivery.com had already been registered. Not sure why HP did not pay to acquire it. Early days...) HTH, NSC
He messaged me a couple years ago and it matches with this post's description: "While the first half of the email was about the idea, invariably, the 2nd half was about how much money it was going to make."
Point-to-point supersonic organ delivery
Dear Derek,
I'm Bob Cringely, an ancient Silicon Valley pundit. I also run a little
CubeSat air-launch startup. Competition from SpaceX forced us to cut costs
so we figured how to make an old French business jet fly Mach 1.6 on the
fuel to fly Mach 0.8. Now we want to apply this tech to organ delivery.
100 VTOL supersonic drones could serve the whole US operating from helipad
to helipad at 1000 mph. Not autonomous, they'll have pilots on the ground.
It's a $2 billion business with 75 percent margins but only we know how.
Please pass it on.
FYI, that's audio only. Magnolia Pictures is enforcing their rights on it, so if you want to see the video you either have to rent/buy it or it can be found on the high seas in varying degrees of quality.
Seemed to me like a nice write up with a bunch of anecdotes, I got the sense that Bob was curious, friendly, smart, maybe hopped around from idea to idea(reminds me of me!), and generally lived a good life, made some things(the YouTube video seemed interesting).
I'm with 'jacquesm here. Without being there, taken in isolation, hearing about being stolen-from (email republished without attribution), then brought along to Sun for potential blowback(?) or (semi?)-publicly by being labelled an apparently under-sexed nerd don't make Cringely sound like much more than a sort of sociopath.
Kind of a strange story. That prime number approach is just awful. You'll (obviously) need a bignum library. You need a prime number generator that can get you the Nth prime. The division operation is going to be very slow. It's interesting to consider how it works, but it would never occur to me to mention it since it's so clearly not actually a good idea.
If you want to take advantage of having a limited range of possible characters, just use a bit vector. If you're limited to ASCII then you only need 16 bytes to track them all. Less if you're limited to printable characters.
It would be fun to discuss the prime number version in a sort of "how would this work and why would it be terrible?" way, but if I had an interviewer present it as a way to "do better" I'd have to seriously reconsider if I'd actually want the job.
Technically, sure, you're absolutely right; but the moral of the story is (I think) that making your interviewer think you're an out-of-box thinker all but guarantees an offer.
Reading this piece, I feel a longing for a friend, but it also makes me think about what true talent really is. In the piece, he mourns his friend, but says that the friend's real talent was being an influencer rather than cooking. Reading some of the stories, it's sad, but sometimes I think that the talent a person has and the talent a person wants to have are different.
But I don't know much about the person named Bob, and yet Bob as he appears in this piece still seems cool to me.
We like something because we're good at it, but sometimes we keep living because there's something we absolutely want to try even if we're not good at it.
To me, programming seems to be that kind of thing.
Paul Tyma is the creator of Mailinator. I remember reading about how he made it scalable with Java.
Mark Stephens (aka Robert X. Cringely) obituary:
https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49...
Tell HN from two weeks ago about Bob's death:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49949438
Plane Crazy documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSNzF-KSGiw
(I watched it for the first time last week. Very entertaining.)
Thanks for the links -- I was traveling in early October and somehow missed Cringely's passing.
The Cringely story was great. the Google story, also great. I click over to to the home page, ready to settle in for some more interesting reading, and -- there's a total of three posts.
Oh well.
Paul Tyma - 3 posts in 20 years. A prolific blogger! :) Nice post. I read Cringely's blog for 20+ years. I think Paul hit the nail on the head. I think the problem with Cringely's ventures is he never seemed to have the discipline to hang on long enough to pivot and find product market fit.
I've only learned about them recently from a post about Mineserver. The article was posted to HN on Oct 4, they've passed on Oct 3 but I didn't know this until today.
I'm disturbed.
I like the idea of slowly downloading content in the background over a dial-up connection, but using it to print out a full magazine seems kind of silly. You'd probably end up paying more for the digital copy plus ink than you would for a print subscription. I remember one of my old printers came with "apps" that would allow you to print out the top news stories from various wire services every day, meaning that the startup idea was similar to a feature cooked up by a printer company to try to get the user to buy more ink.
> I always thought he should start a Youtube channel interviewing Silicon Valley celebrities. I sent him a few emails along those lines, but Bob would mostly just ignore me. He was usually too excited about his new/current startup idea.
He did do a series of video interviews with tech people that got distributed online in the early 2000s. They're a good watch: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22nerdtv%22 . I agree that it's a shame that he didn't keep going with that idea during the rise of Youtube. He wrote a blog post where he basically says that the economics of Youtube didn't allow for the scale and spectacle of content he wanted to put out: https://www.cringely.com/2012/06/28/why-youtube-isnt-future-... . He did try to return to being a TV presenter by making a show about traveling around the US to interview various company founders, but for whatever reason PBS chose to pick up a similar show rather than his. The production company uploaded some clips from the project if anyone's interested: https://boondogglemedia.com/project/startup-america/
HP Inkjet Components group developed www.instant-delivery.com (if I remember correctly) around this time. Lots of good content, but failed for the very reason you noted re: costs. Of course driving revenue higher was the sole reason for HP developing this. (Note: www.instantdelivery.com had already been registered. Not sure why HP did not pay to acquire it. Early days...) HTH, NSC
He messaged me a couple years ago and it matches with this post's description: "While the first half of the email was about the idea, invariably, the 2nd half was about how much money it was going to make."
His Steve Jobs “Lost Interview” is also the best Steve Jobs interview. Highly recommend taking the time to watch it. https://youtu.be/Bbwj58Xj2yI?is=J5w7WWg3-AegCwbf
FYI, that's audio only. Magnolia Pictures is enforcing their rights on it, so if you want to see the video you either have to rent/buy it or it can be found on the high seas in varying degrees of quality.
I'm not sure what the author's intention was but to me this comes across as 'damning with faint praise'.
Seemed to me like a nice write up with a bunch of anecdotes, I got the sense that Bob was curious, friendly, smart, maybe hopped around from idea to idea(reminds me of me!), and generally lived a good life, made some things(the YouTube video seemed interesting).
Reads as nice memories of a memorable character who was a part of the evolution of our industry. I enjoyed it.
I'm with 'jacquesm here. Without being there, taken in isolation, hearing about being stolen-from (email republished without attribution), then brought along to Sun for potential blowback(?) or (semi?)-publicly by being labelled an apparently under-sexed nerd don't make Cringely sound like much more than a sort of sociopath.
Another story worth reading (same blog/author):
A Google Interviewing Story
https://tyma.com/google-interviewing-story/
Kind of a strange story. That prime number approach is just awful. You'll (obviously) need a bignum library. You need a prime number generator that can get you the Nth prime. The division operation is going to be very slow. It's interesting to consider how it works, but it would never occur to me to mention it since it's so clearly not actually a good idea.
If you want to take advantage of having a limited range of possible characters, just use a bit vector. If you're limited to ASCII then you only need 16 bytes to track them all. Less if you're limited to printable characters.
It would be fun to discuss the prime number version in a sort of "how would this work and why would it be terrible?" way, but if I had an interviewer present it as a way to "do better" I'd have to seriously reconsider if I'd actually want the job.
Technically, sure, you're absolutely right; but the moral of the story is (I think) that making your interviewer think you're an out-of-box thinker all but guarantees an offer.
Reading this piece, I feel a longing for a friend, but it also makes me think about what true talent really is. In the piece, he mourns his friend, but says that the friend's real talent was being an influencer rather than cooking. Reading some of the stories, it's sad, but sometimes I think that the talent a person has and the talent a person wants to have are different.
But I don't know much about the person named Bob, and yet Bob as he appears in this piece still seems cool to me. We like something because we're good at it, but sometimes we keep living because there's something we absolutely want to try even if we're not good at it. To me, programming seems to be that kind of thing.
The 2004 story made me laugh