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.)
Oh well.
I'm disturbed.
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.> 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/
A Google Interviewing Story
The prime number thing is obviously bad for this problem, since the giant number would grow arbitrarily large and you'd have to do a bunch of expensive division operations. But it's out of the standard box enough to suggest to the interviewer you are a curious sort who likes to think about novel data structures. At any rate, I got the job.
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.
Those were great years.
They asked [Cringely] if he wanted to be interviewed about what it was like being a “geek” in high school.
He replied to the Producer, cc’ing me:
“Sorry, but I got laid plenty in high school. However, I have cc’d my friend Paul who actually was a geek in high school. He also lives in NYC.”
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.
I guess I'll go with the middle ground and respect the tenacity to keep going but wonder how much more could be accomplished one finally acknowledges where one's talents actually lie.
In my own circumstances, I'm actually holding onto programming by force. For most people, going down a different path would have paid better—I'm not a Silicon Valley person, after all. My environment isn't particularly favorable either. But even so, I love this life. Life is, in a way, a trial, and in a way, suffering. In Eastern thought, life is suffering.
If the whole of life is steeped in suffering anyway, then perhaps it's better to choose what you want to do. This is ultimately a difference in ways of thinking, and I suppose you'd agree there's no right answer in what I think either.
Having a dream that's hard to achieve can be cruel (though Bob might not have thought so), but without that cruelty, you would never have dreamed that dream in the first place. A dream is cruel not because it's hard to achieve, but because it makes you unable to give it up even when it isn't achieved. And for those who can't give it up, perhaps the very process of pushing that boulder is already life. In other words, the dream itself may have already become life.
On a day to day basis, I have to do certain hobbies not just because I want to, but because I lose the physical coordination to do those things if I don't keep doing them-- and then it takes days of struggle to get that ability back.
Sometimes I wonder why I continue to fight that battle; it's inevitable that I'll lose at some point. As much as I micro-give up multiple times a day, I'm too stubborn to ever truly quit and walk away entirely.. for the most part. There are a few battles I accept that I've lost and moved on from, but there are some things that I'll probably just keep struggling against until I'm physically incapable of entirely or I'm dead.
So I get where Cringely's choice comes from. I'm.. just not sure where one can reasonably draw the line and say "This is something I should give up on, because my time is better spent on something I can uniquely succeed at."
It's not an easy decision to make.