It's cute but are there any actual nerds left in big tech leadership? Of the magnificent seven we basically only have Jensen Huang left as a technical leader and maybe you can count Zuckerberg.
The nerd/jock dichotomy is at best loosely pointing at some genuine clusters of interests and predilections that exist among people in the world, and is more often taking a set of tropes from 80s Hollywood movies about high school and using them to try to explain how real people in the world are today, which is stupid.
(Who wrote all those 80s movies? Bookworms! Who acted in them? Theater kids!)
The jocks at my school (Championship Winners) were also simultaneously the smartest kids at it. Most went to Ivy Leagues on academic scholarships. I know a few of them were the first engineers on several well known unicorns.
There is an unspoken presumption many people live believing that the various qualities people can have must be evenly divided among people, because somehow it would otherwise be “unfair”. Got brawn? Can’t have brains. Got X? Can’t have Y. Etc. It’s a coping strategy for weak people with big egos.
The fact is that in primary school, a “nerd” wasn’t necessarily all that “intelligent” even in some narrow sense. If you are inept at something or insecure about it, you might gravitate toward things that avoid it. So you invest time in that activity.
Of course, if the brain is the seat of intelligence, and the brain is just a part of the body, and an intelligent brain is a healthy brain, then it follows that a healthy body overall is more likely to have a healthy brain and thus an intelligent brain. Conpare this with the ancient expression “Mens sana in corpore sano”.
Indeed. People who use this terminology in earnest have a maturity problem. It’s a juvenile way of classifying the world that silly people like to use to channel their petty resentments and envies. Time to grow up.
Google has some tendencies - Sundar Pichai was a materials engineer, Brin is back working there who considers himself a computer scientist. Maybe Hassabis - depends how you define it I guess.
Hassabis is absolutely a nerd. Joint honours physics and maths from Oxbridge and a PhD in neuroscience (and a Nobel prize in none of these fields).
His driving interest was always games (master standard in chess at 13, five-time winner of the all-round world board games championship, video game programmer in his teens then his own studio in his 20s).
Yeah but the dictionary has "intellectually passionate but socially awkward, or someone considered unstylish and lacking social skills". I think he might be a bit social.
I thought it was super cool when a few years ago I found out that Eric Schmidt was the author of Lex! I struggled mightily with lex and yacc in college, but that was a me thing, I think.
When I watch Ex-machina the degree to which I loathed Oscar Isaac's character surprised me. While much of it was because the character was objectively loathsome, part of it was because I felt the type of person he represented was infecting the tech world.
The thing that seemed really inconguous to me was that he actually made the amazing tech. I don't think I have ever encountered a personality like that who actually made things. Certainly I've seen them talking about how great the thing they made is, but invariably, to them, I made means 'my employees made'
Which is not to say that there aren't toxic people who do actually make things. They exist, but it presents somewhat differently to the 'Tech bro' archetype.
One of the reasons I enjoy coming into HN. Is to read comments stating that the guy that created Facebook, alone in his dorm room, could “maybe“ be counted as a tech lead.
It shouldn't matter whether the leaders are actual technical nerds. They are highly focused and motivated individuals who are harnessing tech for the stated purpose. Maybe this is by design and a coordinated movement - or maybe it is the inevitable consequence of uncontrolled and unregulated capitalism.
If profit maximisation is the ultimate goal every smart individual chases, the current trajectory seems inevitable?
Yeah, as I recall Carmack came out against some of the anti-trust actions of Lina Kahn, soecifically blocking certain type of acquisitions and mergers by big tech companies.
Though I'm curious what the take of "founders first" type of VCs like YC on the Figma IPO is, after the acquisition by Adobe was blocked. Whatever the stock price of Figma is now, would they specifically argue that of the two outcomes the Figma IPO was worse for the founders? To be clear, if that acquisition wasn't blocked the IPO wouldn't have happened.
Elon Musk must be one. Seems enough techy to me: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink - software being used for the hardware in innovative ways.
Edit: Oh, wow, mentioning this guy is surely controversial, sorry. However discussing whether he is a nerd, understands engineering on very deep level/gets his hands dirty OR he only manages people - there must be some psychological aspect related, a form of disagreement to discredit or have a hard time believing it can actually be true.
Maybe he used to be one, who knows. But I doubt he read a book or seen a movie in the past few decades. He got roasted by Joyce Carol Oates on X recently for being an oaf and he immediately started replying to tweets about acclaimed movies. And nothing insightful that proved he had seen them, just 'this is a great movie' or some other stupid oneliner. It would be hilarious if it wasnt so sad that the richest man on earth is such a pathetic little man.
The list is missing my #1 quote from Jim Keller (an epic engineer type) although unfortunately quote is in middle of a long YouTube vid. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33662764
Aside: I don't understand why they even mention what journalists think - only engineers opinions matter when judging engineering ability.
Middle of a long YT video is nothing: you can make links to auto seek to a specific place in YT video. When you share link on computer, it even allows you to check-a-box that will include timestamp within link
Or append &t=1h2m3s to the link to prevent writing long sentences on where to seek and save users from manual seeking :)
I think Elon Musk just wants to be Tony Stark and cultivates the appropriate image for that.
And possibly a genuine obsession with (rightwing-ish) meme/youth culture, which I think got him a lot of his initial followers on twitter/reddit/4chan/etc.
A lot of people miss how much of a tit Tony Stark (at least the Robert Downey Jr. version) was.
Smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is. Not good with anything interpersonal. Flair for the dramatic (and dad jokes) at the expense of those working with him.
Musk is a complicated character. He's had nerdy times programing, fascist turns including the famous salute, emperor delusions - he was named after The Elon, a fictional ruler of Mars.
Spoiler: He is not. But he is very good at faking it.
Anytime he tries to give a serious opinion on anything related to computers: It is laughably bad and out of touch (SQL, compilers, languages, performance, etc... ).
He definitively has a scientific background but definitively not "Tech" as far as computer are concerned.
I don’t see how “tech” is limited to software. While your case might be made for software, according to many accounts Musk is a strong driver on the hardware side. For instance, I’ve read the Tesla and SpaceX books by Eric Berger, which are much more focused on technical things compared to the more mainstream books. And while Musk is not in the trenches with a screwdriver, he’s not faking it either.
To be honest, I’m actually interested in this hypothesis: is he legitimately skilled/knowledgeable, or is he indeed faking it? And for either side I would like to see evidence. This question is interesting to me because some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).
If he is really faking it, that might even be good, because the success of his companies might be replicable and could continue without him. But what if he is not?
He has a public image of "geek/need hero" that is honestly inspiring.
And that benefits him a lot because it bring people to trust his decisions. He has all the interest of the world to maintain this image.
> some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).
People he hired for these companies made contributions.
Unlike the more common pattern, Elon doesn't hesitate to make straight up engineering decisions for his businesses, including ones that look unnecessarily high risk to a lot of his own engineers. Chopsticks catching spaceships made of stainless steel and self driving cars without lidar are well known examples. The success of those choices earns him legit nerd cred.
Disagree. The current limitations of Tesla self driving are not around difficulties in judging distances that lidar solves. They're around inference deficiencies with accurate geometry.
If the AI was good enough, vision-only self-driving would be at least as good as the best human.
The AI isn't good enough. I'm starting to suspect that current ML learning rates can't be good enough in reasonable wall-clock timeframes due to how long it takes between relevant examples for them to learn from.
It's fine to lean on other sensory modalities (including LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever else you fancy) until the AI gets good enough.
It's safer than human drivers now. That's good enough. It will take more than that to convince world, and it should. I applaud the well earned skepticism. But I'm an old guy who has no problem qualifying for a driver's license, and if you replaced me with FSD 14.2, especially under not ideal conditions like at night or in a storm, everyone would be safer.
I predict a cusp to be reached in the next few years when safety advocates flip from trying to slow down self driving to trying to mandate it.
I can't speak to your driving level, but everything I see about Tesla's FSD has unfortunately been giving me "this seems sus" vibes even back when I was extremely optimistic about them in particular and self driving cars more generally (so, last decade).
Unfortunately, the only stats about Tesla's FSD that I can find are crowd-sourced, and what they show is that despite recent improvements, they're still not particularly good.
Also unfortunately, the limited geo-fencing of the areas in which the robo-taxi service operates, and that they initially* launched the service without the permits to avoid needing a human safety monitor, strongly suggests that it hasn't generalised to enough domains yet.
Lack of generality means that it's possible for you to be 100% right about Tesla's FSD on the roads you normally use, and yet if you took them a little bit outside that area you might find the AI shocking you by reliably disengaging for no human-apparent reason while at speed and leaving you upside down in a field.
* I'm not sure what has or hasn't changed since launch: all the news reporting on this was from sites with more space dedicated to ads than to copy, so IMO slop news irregardless of if it was written by an AI or not
No reason we can't rely on other sensory modalities after the AI "gets good enough," either. Humans don't have LIDAR, but that doesn't mean that LIDAR is a "cheat" for self-driving cars, or something we should try to move past.
In principle, I agree; but remember that people like to save money, and that includes by not spending on excessive sensors when the minimum set will do.
What I think went wrong with Musk/Tesla/FSD is that he tried to cut costs here to save money before it would actually save money.
Im sorry that is just not true. You can never achive the kind of data with vison-only tech. its easy to confuse, you need lidar. anybody that thinks they can achieve self driving safety without that tech is lost.
> Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[11][28] At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.[29] At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500 (equivalent to $1,579 in 2024).[30][31]
I think it's fair to say he at least was a nerd. He was a dweeb getting beaten up in school, burying himself in books and computers at home. His skills are doubtlessly outdated now, but does that really mean much? Woz's skills (which to be perfectly clear, outclassed Musk's by miles) are doubtlessly out of date now too, but nobody would say Woz isn't a nerd.
I think the part where he grew into an unstable dirtbag might be influencing the way people see him now. Saying that is is, or at least was, a genuine nerd shouldn't be seen as any sort of excuse for his scamming, lying, etc.
He definitely has talked about a lot of nerdy books. Don't know about his attention span and not sure how to square what he likes with his values. He brings up the Culture all the time but I have my doubts that he's actually read them
I don't know either, I haven't read the Culture books (yet) either so I can't really evaluate that.
I do believe he read a lot of sci-fi in his youth, if only because that would fit the pattern of a young boy who doesn't get along well with their peers and turns towards solitary pursuits like computer programming. He seems exactly the sort to have read lots of Heinlein.
Almost everything about The Culture will be immediately apparent from stuff Musk talks about, but only about half of it would look like he's understood it.
The only real crimes are reading/writing someone's brain without permission (at which point others may call you names and stop inviting you to social events) or destroying a consciousness without backups (where you'll get permanent supervision to make sure you don't do it again). Most biological citizens have a full-brain computer interface for backups and general fun, called a "neural lace".
The AI Minds in charge of everything give themselves fanciful names, which Musk has used for his SpaceX drone ships.
For the reverse:
Almost every biological citizen is gender-fluid, can change physical gender by willing it, and there's a certain expectation that you try things both ways around so you know how to be a good lover. They dislike explosive population growth regardless of if it's organic or machine reproduction, and as everyone can get pregnant if they want to (because everyone can be a woman if they want to and it all works), it's considered quite scandalous to have more than one child.
It's sufficiently post-scarcity that money is considered a sign of poverty. They mostly avoid colonising planets, instead living on ships, or on habitats so large that if one was located at any Earth-Sun Lagrange point (including the one on the far side of the sun), we could see it.
At the time your choices for dynamic server web apps were php or perl. The LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Perl) was very popular back then (early to mid 00s)
Yes, it's a leadership failure and probably time to go, it only gets worse. In my experience. It's a vicious cycle where, as velocity slows, inexperienced leadership gets more and more panicked and starts frantically rearranging projects, features and people in desperate attempts to fix the problem, obviously exacerbating the communication breakdown and gridlock further. It also builds resentment and can turn pretty toxic as everyone starts just looking out for themselves.
In most trading advice, cutting loses as soon as possible and as emotionlessly as possible is emphasised heavily. It's also physiologically one of the hardest parts for people to do consistently.
From what I’ve seen people mostly used the Epson scanners like the V600, V700, V850, etc.
They stopped making them early this year. Only the top end model for $1500 still exists and I don’t know if that’s because they still make it or just that there is still stock left at Amazon/etc.
The developer fee is a business expense for anyone publishing software as an entity on the App Store. This is the same as any other expense someone might require for their profession, it doesn't have anything to do with their financial security.
Just a heads up from someone who's gone down iCloud sync path before. Make sure you're aware of the tradeoffs before relying on it for your app. It has a lot of downsides that aren't immediately obvious due to it relying on the user's iCloud storage quota. Many user's don't understand this and will leave 1 star reviews etc.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll definitely keep that in mind. I’m curious though, what other downsides did you run into when using iCloud sync? Would love to learn from your experience.
In general it's a bit of a closed box, it's not that easy to work with and to me felt unreliable and difficult to debug. Running migrations can be easily forgotten and this needs to be done in the dashboard as far as I remember. There aren't official APIs to check certain things like if the user has quota, what to do when the quota is full, how to communicate that etc. I think you may be able to check if it's enabled though. Another one is its not cross platform in any meaningful way, I thought this would be fine initially but as the app I worked on developed it was clear a web or Android version would be nice to add without being tied to an Apple account. I ultimately removed it and wrote my own optional sync layer with my own auth and no one seemed to mind. This thread might be useful https://mastodon.social/@marcoarment/109540935902363728
Most of those things can probably be worked around and might not be applicable to your app but for me it went to the bucket of technologies not to touch again.
Had a coworker paste an error log from a repo I maintain in Slack with an LLM summary of the log, three dot points which were written quite clearly in the log if he’d bothered to read it.
Unfortunately, they realistically cannot. Basically every major infrastructure project gets loads of local opposition which would require substantial political will. However, the currently elected government is the government that let the rail infrastructure get that bad in the first place
AFAIK to fix reliability no new major infrastructure projects would be required (at least for most of the reliability offenses). They would just need to maintain/modernize existing infrastructure and rolling stock, so all things that aren't really opposable.
To achieve the Deutschlandtakt as noted in the article, yes new infrastructure projects are required, but I think most people would be happy with all the existing service running as well as it has ~15-20 years ago.
There's a lot to unpack here but to me your comment sort of contradicts itself. You're saying these things are in their infancy and therefore not able to produce code at the standard of a skilled software engineer. But you also seem to have an axe to grind against code review, which is fine but wouldn't that mean code review is even more important? At least right now? Which is kind of the point of the article.
