Paul Tyma - 3 posts in 20 years. A prolific blogger! :)
Nice post. I read Cringely's blog for 20+ years. I think Paul hit the nail on the head. I think the problem with Cringely's ventures is he never seemed to have the discipline to hang on long enough to pivot and find product market fit.
The Cringely story was great. the Google story, also great. I click over to to the home page, ready to settle in for some more interesting reading, and -- there's a total of three posts.
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.”
I've only learned about them recently from a post about Mineserver. The article was posted to HN on Oct 4, they've passed on Oct 3 but I didn't know this until today.
He messaged me a couple years ago and it matches with this post's description: "While the first half of the email was about the idea, invariably, the 2nd half was about how much money it was going to make."
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.
FYI, that's audio only. Magnolia Pictures is enforcing their rights on it, so if you want to see the video you either have to rent/buy it or it can be found on the high seas in varying degrees of quality.
Seemed to me like a nice write up with a bunch of anecdotes, I got the sense that Bob was curious, friendly, smart, maybe hopped around from idea to idea(reminds me of me!), and generally lived a good life, made some things(the YouTube video seemed interesting).
I'm with 'jacquesm here. Without being there, taken in isolation, hearing about being stolen-from (email republished without attribution), then brought along to Sun for potential blowback(?) or (semi?)-publicly by being labelled an apparently under-sexed nerd doesn't make Cringely sound like much more than a sort of sociopath.
I feel like if a “friend” is posting that stuff in an obituary, it sheds a little more context on their type of relationship and humor. But who knows, I guess the way you paint it, it does seem kind of rude.
I like the idea of slowly downloading content in the background over a dial-up connection, but using it to print out a full magazine seems kind of silly. You'd probably end up paying more for the digital copy plus ink than you would for a print subscription. I remember one of my old printers came with "apps" that would allow you to print out the top news stories from various wire services every day, meaning that the startup idea was similar to a feature cooked up by a printer company to try to get the user to buy more ink.
> 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/
HP Inkjet Components group developed www.instant-delivery.com (if I remember correctly) around this time. Lots of good content, but failed for the very reason you noted re: costs. Of course driving revenue higher was the sole reason for HP developing this. (Note: www.instantdelivery.com had already been registered. Not sure why HP did not pay to acquire it. Early days...) HTH, NSC
When I interviewed at Instructure in 2013, I used this exact story. I got a very similar question: you had a string coming across the network and you were supposed to keep track of how many times you saw each character. I ended up going through it the same way the author did, where you maintained a hash and incremented the count as you read each letter. Then at the end I did a "by the way I saw this blog where someone was discussing this problem and they had a crazy idea..."
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.
Kind of a strange story. That prime number approach is just awful. You'll (obviously) need a bignum library. You need a prime number generator that can get you the Nth prime. The division operation is going to be very slow. It's interesting to consider how it works, but it would never occur to me to mention it since it's so clearly not actually a good idea.
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.
Technically, sure, you're absolutely right; but the moral of the story is (I think) that making your interviewer think you're an out-of-box thinker all but guarantees an offer.
Right, I have no problem with bringing up that approach or exploring it as a curiosity or fun thought exercise, it just doesn't make a good impression to have it described as "better."
Reading this piece, I feel a longing for a friend, but it also makes me think about what true talent really is. In the piece, he mourns his friend, but says that the friend's real talent was being an influencer rather than cooking. Reading some of the stories, it's sad, but sometimes I think that the talent a person has and the talent a person wants to have are different.
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.
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.)
Flawed humans? Certainly. But the world is left a little less weird, and (dare I say) a little less brightened. Rest in peace, gentlemen.
Oh well.
Such a polite yet brutal burn.
I'm disturbed.
> 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
https://tyma.com/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.
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.