>Stephen Wolfram does add a few self-congratulatory remarks.
This is the man to a T. I think he would have done well in Victorian England. He is a clinical narcissist, and is incapable of mentioning any topic, subject, or fact without inserting a remark about his achievements.
It gets comical once you get to know him. I'd start pointing things out to him if I ever spoke to him.
"Stephen, this steak is delicious. Didn't you invent the software that allowed the design of the temperature sensors on modern grills?"
Lineage the Bloodpledge, a hugely successful korean MMO was heavily based on NetHack [1]. It is still one of the most widely played games in the world (mainly in South Korea).
The article below does an excellent overview of its history and inspiration from NetHack.
Compare the size of grasshopper to BO's little toy rocket. Grasshopper was a full Falcon 9 first stage, which is a production GTO capable rocket.
What exactly is BO's rocket capable of? Reaching 100km altitude?
No one is more embarassed than BO engineers by the comparisons with SpaceX. They are in completely different leagues. BO is playing with toys, SpaceX is hauling commercial payloads to GTO.
It's like me making a go-kart that goes 0-60 faster than an F1 car, and saying "I've built a faster race car than McLaren!". Anyone with an ounce of knowledge on the subject would be in tears from laughter.
Does Triplebyte do TN visas? They're almost trivially simple to do, so the candidate could take care of it themselves without any help from the sponsoring company.
Careful about TN though. The T in TN is temporary, so it prevents you from applying for say a Greencard or an H1-B (which are attempts to be not temporary).
Disclaimer: IANAL but I recently looked into a lot of this.
TN allows for 3 years per visa and unlimited visa renewals, so as long as you demonstrate that you aren't trying to gain citizenship, the US embassy shouldn't mind.
As a Canadian, I have no interest in becoming a US citizen. On a TN visa you can open bank accounts (including investment), buy cars and real estate and do everything other than start a company. It's incredibly convenient and painless compared to an H1-B.
Most people gunning for H1-Bs want to become US Citizens. Canadians have no such need, we just want to work in the US legally and be able to buy stuff and make investments, all of which you can do easily on a TN.
That's BS. TN doesn't help Canadians with family. Also US CBP can always terminate your TN visa on the border if they "think" you are abusing. H-1B is safer for that reason.
Well, it's not really a law, but attorney has suggested that CBP normally don't terminate H-1B at border vs TN as H-1B does have a dual intent, so they can't just say you have an "immigration intention" to deny your visa at border.
Yup, after a few visits back home US immigration officers have asked me variations on if I was planning on returning to Canada. Regardless of my feelings or intent, the answer is "yes, I plan on returning", especially when a guard is explicitly trying to catch you with intent to immigrate.
> The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
And therein lies the problem. Professional feminists are extremely vocal radicals that do not represent the majority of women. Their statistics and talking points tend to be universally unsound and inflammatory, and they are at this point more accurately described as a racist and sexist hate group.
So the question is, why are they deemed the authority on so many issues in the mainstream media? Why does PG even acknowledge their nonsensical demands, or try to engage with them to defend Jessica?
Anyone who has lived a day on this planet understands that empirical reality is immutable, and ideologies cannot alter them. So when feminists for example, state matter-of-factly that "biology is a social construct", why are they allowed to continue speaking nonsense? Meanwhile, brilliant academics who debunk feminist propaganda like Helena Cronin [1] are nowhere to be found in the media.
Perhaps women like Jessica Livingston and Helena Cronin need to take an active stance against radical feminists, and not dignify their accusations with a response other than: "please educate yourself before attempting to open a dialogue regarding these issues."
> In September 2014, Boeing won a $4.2 billion award to provide crewed launch services, and SpaceX won $2.6 billion. (SpaceX received less because it offered to provide lower-cost flights).
Oh, the logic of government contracts. Maybe they should've incentivized Boeing to try and do it for the same price as SpaceX? I understand the whole redundancy argument, but by paying Boeing double to do the same thing SpaceX is doing you are simply incentivizing inefficiency.
This amounts to sheer stupidity in economic terms.
The good old "Bill Gates the bootstrapped college dropout" argument. These myths never die.
William Henry Gates the Third had a trust fund before he was born. His downside risks for anything he chose to do in life were completely nonexistent. Same with Zuck. Same with Spiegel. Same with 99% of the entrepreneurs HN idolizes.
EDIT: Removed potentially inflammatory line, which went as follows: "Just a bunch of rich kids trying to prove a point to their parents".
This is definitely a personal opinion, but one that has merit if you examine the evolutionary psychology of parent-child relationships. The conversation is a bit in depth, but please understand that I was not trying to simply fire off an ad hominem. I was instead trying to hint at the incentives which drive an already rich child to strive for more wealth. For the vast majority of us who have to work for a living, such behaviors seem confusing. Only upon deeper analysis do the pyschological incentives for such individuals begin to make sense.
> The good old "Bill Gates the bootstrapped college dropout" argument. These myths never die.
You appear to be refuting a claim that was not made in the GP post or in the Forbes article they cited.
Grandparent only said that Gates is among the top 3 riches and is not going to pass on his wealth, they did NOT claim that Gates was born poor or otherwise among the self-made millionaires.
Similarly Forbes lists Gates as the richest person, but makes no claims whatsoever about how he made his fortune. There are two independent claims there and at no time does either source claim that Gates is in the self-made group.
Your QZ article is more responsive, but it boils down to saying that one needs access to capital to start a business. This is not really surprising and ensuring that any capable person can get funding is why we have things like YC. If there's any group out there with good ideas that's being systematically ignored or denied funding, you and anyone else could make big money by investing in them. All you need to do is prove there's an opportunity being ignored and people will jump on it, chasing the money.
A million dollars is rather achievable with a good education, good health and drive, provided you live in a developed part of the world and can keep expenses lower than earnings. Hopefully we someday develop the rest of the world, as well as making sure that everyone can get all the education and healthcare they need, so that this level of success no longer boils down to luck.
That's not at all the argument I'm making, and probably isn't an argument made by anyone. Going from dirt-poor to richest-in-the-world is much harder than any other economic jump. My argument was simply that "the richest don't stay the richest" for very long. If you take $330bn and spend $1m a day (getting no interest on the principle) it would take 1,000 years to spend it all. You'd expect that the money would last the Rockefellers for centuries, but in fact it's pretty quickly been "returned" to the central money pot.
If every tycoon has 2 or 3 heirs, chances are that unless one of them inherits the parent drive (and then goes to amass more wealth), the fortune will spread out. We all know how the exponential function works, it does not take that many generations to level off any finite amount of money.
It's a bunch of rich kids trying to get richer than their parents to prove a point.
You had me until there. Why question their motives? Is it really so hard to believe that Gates really loved computers?
If he was just thinking in terms of outstripping his parents, there were lots of other more-credible avenues available to him. The very idea of a personal computer was scoffed at. Not just by non-techies, but people like DEC founder Ken Olsen.
Professional athletes get caught cheating all the time, but I don't doubt they still love their sports.
I very much doubt that cheating athletes love the sport. They may love the fame and benefits that come with the sport, but if they loved the sport, they would work hard to become better at it rather than cheating.
I love my job. I read up on research, volunteer at conferences, tinker/hack on my own time, and provide lots of free consulting. Heck, the only reason I don't provide more free consulting is, well, because I have bills to pay. I certainly can't imaging expressing my love for the field by engaging in unethical, immoral or illegal activities. I suppose if it was the money I loved foremost, it might be different.
It's a funny way of showing love to a sport when you subvert the rules that make it fair. No doubt if everyone cheated all the time, practically nobody would love the sport.
One may as well think that Hitler eating meat remains a vegetarian.
It's a funny way of showing love to a sport when you subvert the rules that make it fair.
Uber and AirBnB are subverting rules and breaking laws in hundreds of municipalities. Do you think they don't care about what they're building over there? Is it just money-money-money and no serious interest in technology? Does that mean, by proxy, that Paul Graham only cares about money?
Is it really so hard to believe that people can have more than one thing that motivates them? Why did Ray Ozzie join such an evil beast? Surely he's just motivated by greed!
Black and white thinking will be the death of us all.
I don't know where you got black and white thinking from. I wouldn't say Bill Gates doesn't love computers, just that he loves something else more. Something that may very well not be good for computing.
Uber and AirBnB? Do they love the work they do? Maybe. But they love themselves more. They love the idea of being "disruptors" or "innovators" or "rich" more than they care about transportation, housing, or their customers.
And those guys who love sports? Maybe they love winning more.
It's easy to feign passion, after all. Especially when you're already committed to investors.
I like to accept what people say at face value until evidence suggests otherwise.
People go on about Bill Gates and antitrust, but do they really think Steve Jobs or Scott McNealy or even Page & Brin would behave differently?
Bill Gates' biggest fear was not losing the OS monopoly. His fear was of Microsoft turning into IBM -- always having to run everything you do by lawyers.
MS-DOS wouldn't even exist if IBM hadn't had the justice department watching their every move.
The PC revolution owes its greatest debt not to Gates, but to Kildall, in terms of individual contribution.
It may well be that Gates was driven to purposeful action from a love of computers. That he has had no notable productivity since Altair BASIC (other than third-party accounts of him doing code reviews early at Microsoft), nor any research, would nevertheless make his contributions to the field quite little.
"Code reviews" makes it sound like something he did for 15 minutes as part of a standup. He was known to be incredibly sharp, asking extremely detailed questions.
"Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer."
Edit: My point is, one can love computers and be very good at them without making significant contributions to the field. That describes me and probably most of the people on HN.
Of course you can. The fact remains that Bill Gates has not been associated with any directly technical work in decades, so his action in the distant past is of little relevance to his action in the less distant past and the present, and moreover is irrelevant to the GP's assertion of his familial wealth.
Of course not. But if he was more motivated by money than technology, I doubt he would have spent four years building a company trying to sell a product that nobody wanted. (Microsoft basically had zero revenue for its first four years.) He would have been better off going into real estate, and I think he was smart enough to know that even at 19.
I love computers, but I don't start companies just to say I start companies. I expect a financial return.
>"[f]ully 1,191 members of the list are self-made billionaires, while just 230 inherited their wealth"[1]. The top 3 richest people on the planet at this point made their money themselves, and 2 of them (Gates & Buffett) are not going to pass their wealth down the family tree.
@Natsu, my point of contention is the very liberal definition of "self-made" and "made their money themselves". If you give every reader on HN a trust fund, and a few start successful companies, would these individuals be considered "self-made"?
I don't think so. Self made means start with zero net worth. That means no trust funds, no loans at 0% from parents with infinite payback periods, and no parent board members making absurdly lucrative deals that you'd never get otherwise. Just money you've made from your own labor, and loans you've received without nepotism. You'd be surprised how few entrepreneurs fall under this category.
If you don't restrict your definition in this way, then every rich person is self made, because the interest accruing in their trust fund happened during their lifetimes.
> Just money you've made from your own labor, and loans you've received without nepotism. You'd be surprised how few entrepreneurs fall under this category.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if anyone fits under that category. Pretty hard to survive as an infant completely on your own.
I mean, obviously that doesn't count. But where exactly are you drawing the line? It's less black and white than you are implying; it seems like there's enough fuzziness here that you can put anyone in the "not self-made" category, so of course group X has very few members outside that category. Because, you know, Mr. CEO over here was driven to college by his parents once, so he's out, and Ms. Entrepreneur there inherited a few hundred dollars from her grandfather, so that's no good either.
I struggle to understand why you've been downvoted for this. Perhaps HN has finally become the bastion of neo-oligarchs it purports to train?
It's all high and mighty to speak of taxes, but as the esteemed commenter above states, they mostly come from the wage slaves, not the capitaled elite.
The thoughts I expressed above seem logical and clear to me yet I've seen very little discussion around this subject. For some reason, it seems to me that people find it acceptable for corporations to use every means possible to pay less.
I sure would like the option of not paying taxes on overseas income. But yet the US government is intent on taxing all personal income regardless of locale. How is that fair or ok?
> And economies have overcome many revolutions, from iron to industrial, without these programs. Do you have a principled reason why the information age is any different?
I truly hope you are a billionaire, because once your Randian utopia comes to fruition, you will need private armies to protect you against their Blackwaters and Pinkertons. Because they'll come for your assets. Count on it.
Don't believe me? Look at Russia. See what happens when oligarchs challenge the supreme oligarch? Their assets get "nationalized", and they are imprisoned. That's best case. The less significant ones catch odd diseases strangely similar to polonium poisoning...
I am sorry, but the leap from "Randian utopia" to Russia is quite hard to follow. Could you explain what do both have in common? Russia is, likely, the most regulated economy in the world (e.g. from the recent news http://www.topnews.ru/news_id_83651.html , the government banned a supermarket chain from selling loose candy, tea, nuts etc. where else something like this could possibly happen?) with giant welfare programs and a big chunk of the population employed in the government. I only read digests of Rand's books but they left an impression that a "Randian utopia" would not have any of these things.
The "pressure" for these women to find their ideal spouse is similar to the "pressure" startups face in finding ideal employees. That is, they want the absolute best at rock bottom prices.
If you read the article, many of these women who desired to get married had numerous suitors, but these suitors were judged unfit for one reason or another and thus failed to meet the women's strict requirements. Much like companies wanting to hire 100x developers at 30$ an hour, these women are unfortunately trying to bend the supply/demand curves to their tastes, rather than working within the reality of the market.
As an aside, marriage as an institution in western societies is now a legal quagmire [1]. It's legal roots were laid down in times when women did not earn much and did not vote, so they were paid very generously in case of a divorce whose fault could be proven. Nowadays, divorce is the single most powerful legal instrument to take half of someone's net worth without any reason whatsoever. Marriage as an institution is beyond repair, and any couple who supports the spirit of family unity should boycott legal marriage for their own sake, as it leads to extremely toxic financial incentives for the lower earning spouse.
Just another case study in man-made systems which are patched and reworked continuously without thought to the designer's original intent.
> If you read the article, many of these women who desired to get married had numerous suitors, but these suitors were judged unfit for one reason or another and thus failed to meet the women's strict requirements
In traditional societies where marriage is a one-shot that generally ends a woman's career prospects (or, one could argue, shunts them into being a wife), this is entirely rational behaviour.
If you were only allowed to pick one job when you left university, and couldn't resign and get a new one, you'd give suggestions you lock yourself into McDonalds the short shrift.
Well, for how long? Not all the job offers come in at the same time. If your only offer so far is McD's, it might be worth it to do some extra job training for a year to be a more attractive candidate and then see how things go after that. Even though it's another year of unemployment.
There are actually "wife skills" classes you can take in these countries, I just saw one from India the other day. Offered to cover everything from cooking and cleaning to beauty to party planning.
This is a very deep topic, but in summary, I believe the difficulty for women looking to marry in this day and age actually has more to do with the supply side.
Marriage is a terrible, terrible decision for any individual with above average income or assets. Given that most people who get married want to have kids, and because of biology women usually need to be the ones to take maternity leave, this creates an imbalance in earning power that only intensifies throughout the length of the marriage.
As a result, the lower earning spouse has an increasingly larger financial incentive to initiate a divorce. Note that this incentive is completely independent of the relationship between the spouses, because of the way marital assets are divided after a no-fault divorce.
Even in the happiest marriage imaginable, if there's any income/wealth disparity, the spouse on the low end has a massive economic incentive to initiate divorce for a payout.
This is why I said in my first post that marriage is an inherently broken institution, and needs serious reform. Incentives matter.
This is the man to a T. I think he would have done well in Victorian England. He is a clinical narcissist, and is incapable of mentioning any topic, subject, or fact without inserting a remark about his achievements.
It gets comical once you get to know him. I'd start pointing things out to him if I ever spoke to him.
"Stephen, this steak is delicious. Didn't you invent the software that allowed the design of the temperature sensors on modern grills?"