Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 297 posts

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#211

Post by mrandish »

Roritharr wrote: post #198
K0balt wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time. Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege. Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk. My parents prioritized one…

This is gut-wrenching to read from Germany. I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that" and had to slowly break out of it as much as I could. Just knowing that there's people like you out there makes me happy. I applaud your freedom.

> I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that"

No matter how wealthy or poor your Western European upbringing may have been, being saddled with that worldview is, IMHO, the worst kind of disadvantage someone in otherwise fairly good circumstances can have because it's baked into your skull and how you see everything. I hope you've been able to overcome it.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#212

Post by GoatInGrey »

larusso wrote: post #93

I often contemplated about people like Zuckerberg who had massive success with the first thing they built and then have to come to terms that not everything they touch turns to gold. I wonder what kind of feeling that must be if your greatest success happened in your 20th. How do you measure your successes then?

This dynamic has been explored extensively in the creative fields. Most namely with the music industry and the "sophomore album curse".

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#213

Post by mixmastamyk »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #164
mixmastamyk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, though in the eighties and somewhat to the nineties you could own a home with modest job.

That was the era before globalization hollowed out the middle class

Ok, though believe the major factor was a refusal to build enough new housing.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#214

Post by arnaudsm »

an0malous wrote: post #189
arnaudsm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correctly describing the most common mindset in tech entrepreneurs. Chasing the last shiny trend instead of caring about quality. Apple is the best example that doing the opposite can be immensely successful.

When Apple was a startup they were riding the personal computing wave, when they created the iPod and iPhone they were no longer a startup. Sure, if you have a billion dollars and thousands of engineers you can create your own waves. I don’t think that ignoring these foundational innovations or trying to work against trends is generally good advice for startups though, it’s easy to think you’re really clever and smar…

It's probably a combination of both innovation and quality. Respecting your users matters.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#215

Post by jimmydddd »

mandevil wrote: post #110
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.

Unpopular take. While I agree with the sentiment, I still think it took some fortitude to walk away from the golden handcuffs of a successful finance career to do an Internet startup at that time. Bezos said he ran the idea past his boss at the time, and the boss said something like "that's a good idea, but not for someone who already has a great job like you." So I do applaud him for that. Bloomberg made a similar transition.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#216

Post by bsder »

mandevil wrote: post #110
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.

It also overlooks the fact that what Amazon was doing was outright illegal for years and they never got handed their ass on a platter.

For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax.

Quite a few of the "successful" tech companies followed this pattern: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. all engaged in blatantly illegal behavior to become big.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#217

Post by llm_nerd »

acdha wrote: post #138
jglamine wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes. I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under t…

> was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a publi…

Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but-

"that women were innately less qualified"

He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset.

His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- each group has average and percentile traits on a variety of axes, whether it's aptitudes or intelligence spread (e.g. the variability hypothesis), musculature, long distance running, etc. These traits have negligible applicability to any individual person or subset, but if you're selecting from the whole set for exceptional extremes, you likely will get a set that doesn't demographically represent the whole.

NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB players. Nobel prize winners. Top mathematicians. Long distance runners. And so on.

Damore's mistake was that a) there was no value in publishing this, b) he is on the spectrum and didn't realize how dangerous this absolute statement of fact was.

You say that he had bad science, but then you link to a piece that says that it's "politically naive, and at worst dangerous". Which is precisely the sort of tired "but it isn't socially acceptable" sort of response that is just boorish and unproductive.

I get why Google fired him. They pretty much had to (though I would argue that he could have contested it as punishing his handicap). But for all his folly, when people have to misrepresent what he said, or do the "it's bad science because I don't like it"....meh.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#218

Post by jeffbee »

arduanika wrote: post #188
jeffbee wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.

Where does this "they" come from? You seem to know a lot about the guy. Do you have some information about his gender that's not public to the rest of us?

You comment seems pretty hostile but since prescriptive English usage is the greatest of all possible topics, I choose to view your question favorably. "They" is accepted in written American English with a singular antecedent when gender is irrelevant, unknown, or when gender neutrality is preferred by the referent.

HTH.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#219

Post by larusso »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #212
larusso wrote: post #93

I often contemplated about people like Zuckerberg who had massive success with the first thing they built and then have to come to terms that not everything they touch turns to gold. I wonder what kind of feeling that must be if your greatest success happened in your 20th. How do you measure your successes then?

This dynamic has been explored extensively in the creative fields. Most namely with the music industry and the "sophomore album curse".

Interesting. Never heard that term. Will check it out thanks.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#220

Post by dalyons »

bradford wrote: post #113
argomo wrote: post #4

Nice take. Don't let the DEI lead-in sway you from reading this observation about tech moguls trying to reclaim their glory days.

I agreed with a lot in the article, but I was a bit baffled by the DEI name-drop in the opening. > "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems." Who is the author referring to here? (I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to…

certainly Andreessen has gone on many public rants about how he thinks dei and other "woke" initiatives are killing american tech innovation. Here's one interview - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-t... About halfway through he really lets it fly
Post reply on HN