Sacha Chua recently did one of her "Emacs Chats" with Xah Lee:
http://sachachua.com/blog/category/podcast/emacs-chat-podcas...
I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
101–110 of 315 posts
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#102I can empathize and I feel bad for anyone in what feels like a helpless and hopeless situation. I sometimes feel like I am there as well despite having "enough" money for a rainy season or two. Some people need to hit rock bottom to even begin to understand that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Manual labor, however humiliating and seemingly beneath him, may give him the proper motivation he seems to be lacki…
I think this explains the vastly different reactions to the author's post. His mental state, I can easily empathize with. So if I focus on that, my reply will be very positive. But at the same time, he is calling the every day experience of something like 1/3 of Americans "as good as dead", which is frankly insulting to those who do it their whole lives and even support families doing it. Having to do manual labor fo…
I don't think you read the whole thing.
Among minimum wage labor, he also mentioned impending homelessness, lack of private transportation (which, at least in the USA, is a huge impediment) and a total of $23 in life savings, which is pretty bad, even for a lot of people in rough situations.
I don't know if he's "as good as dead", but he's in a hard place, certainly. More than you're giving him credit for.
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
$360/mo, maybe more, with adsense, potentially much more if people clicked on the ads and the ads were high value. Also possibly a lot more if he sold display ads directly or ran a good affiliate program for technical books and other products.
A technical book is a good idea once this guy has his feet on the ground. It seems up his alley, would provide a small advance and beef up his resume.
Yup. The right thing for him to do would be to write a technical book and sell it. He has his emacs tutorial, but his website already has a bunch of poorly placed ad units on it.
He's literally competing with his own tutorial by selling other sections of his webpage at probably less than $2 cpm. If he optimized his page to sell the tutorial he would earn more than $2 cpm per unit on that. The 'around the web' units are probably not even being managed because it looks like they are set to the defaults for general audiences, which is inappropriate.
What I would do:
1. Redesign page
2. Kill ads 3. Raise price to $30 or more
4. Aim for 2% conversion (no clue how many of those numbers are unique sessions)
5. 2% x 240,000 = 4800 sales -- 4800 * $30 = $144k before fees and taxes
That's wildly optimistic given that a lot would have to be done to the site and that the people looking for free emacs tutorials may not line up perfectly with those willing to pay for it, but if it's legitimately a good tutorial there's an opportunity there. Even a more realistic .2% conversion would still be an OK living for the guy.
He could even get started by quoting one of the other dudes in this thread who said that it was good.
The ads that he has on the page are pennies and it's hard to actually find the tutorial that he charges for. That he might be a jerk is actually totally fine. You would just have to work it into the copy as him having a maverick attitude and being a no-nonsense technical guy, which works well for selling to people who are technical.
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#104Who would hire a 45 year old programmer? Certainly good as dead. Have fun at the laundry.
I think you'll find that, when trying to get hired, being a dick is a bigger obstacle than advanced years
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's certainly 'notorious' in certain circles. He used to be considered a troll in certain newsgroups, because he's very argumentative. I think he is in some ways the prototypical hacker. He's very good at what he does, but he struggles to do anything with financial value, and he's got very bad interpersonal skills. He's done quite a lot of Emacs work, particularly around trying to make it easier to work with. His wo…
Ah, thanks. I think there's a lot of room for boisterous, outspoken and even aggressive developers, but you really gotta prove you have the chops to earn that. I'd agree with your assessment that interpersonal skills are the issue (in fact he agrees, too) and that's not something you can fix overnight. I really think the best situation for this guy is to get out of the valley for a bit, get a job doing some very focu…
You really gotta prove you have the chops to deliver judgement on Xah Lee. I have no idea who you are and I can't tell you did anything as helpful as Xah Lee did.
Maybe you should just refrain from judging people like this so harshly when you don't really know anything about them.
Your attitude sucks. I would never, ever want to work with you when you talk smack on people like this without knowing anything about them.
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#106Sounds like the guy needs a friend more than he needs a job.
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#107Edit: He seems to have a lot of interest and worked a lot on good documentation, which is the bane of the typical OSS project. Why doesn't Red Hat/Google etc. throw some money at him to write docs for underdocumented OSS stuff? Sounds like win win for all. It's hard to find really smart developers that are interested in writing documentation.[End edit] If you don't really know him, his LinkedIn profile shows more det…
> 8 thousand visitors per day. 240 thousand visitors per month Could he set up Google Ads on there - automatic, passive income that just goes straight into his account?
It looks by his bank statement that he might have done just that. There's a payment for $150 or so from Google on there.
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#108He needs to find a social services office that can help him get organized and take care of his personal responsibilities. It's completely his fault that he's in this mess, but he probably has some kind of personal/mental health problem that requires assistance. The one thing nobody should do is simply send him money or give him a job, since there's nothing on this page that indicates he won't go back to exactly the s…
The only comment in this thread to point out the $1600 rent. Unless I'm misreading or it's (heavily) back-logged, living on $3/day/food but paying $50/day/rent just seems insane.
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lee is a noted Internet crank, very sure he's completely brilliant and everyone else is a moron. I remember his flaming about the quality of the Python documentation, e.g. https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-April/310...
He used to be trolling all over Usenet. There's a good chance he's made a very bad impression on just about anyone now in a position to hire him.
Speaking of which: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-April/355...
Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
#110Cases like this, when the talented person in question is a geek who "doesn't interview well," always frustrate me. Most of my professional success is a result of social skills and a lot of experience with wildly different social environments and cultures. While I do work hard at being actually good at what I do (because that's just more fun!), I could get pretty far as a cruddy developer. And that just feels unfair,…
I get what you're saying, but I also tend to think: if they're so smart, why not learn some social skills? It's not like being socially awkward has to be an innate thing; they're called social skills for a reason, you can learn them. Many people were once socially awkward, and then fixed it.
It's not particularly fair, but social awkwardness does tend to send a signal about what people value. And what a socially awkward person clearly does not particularly value is time spent with other people. I'm not saying everyone needs to be a gregarious extrovert (I'm certainly not), but if I were looking to hire someone, I'd be a bit concerned if it was obvious that they had no real interest in anything that isn't directly within their bubble. It's not just "are they skilled" it's, are they actually going to fit in the company?