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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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'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.
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).
Cringely was a character. I can't say he changed the world in a major way - he was no Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Heck, he wasn't even Eric Schmidt. But he was a clever, charming, and interesting person, and his coverage of the tech industry made it feel a lot more glamorous that it really was. He was also a fabulist and possibly even a bit of a scoundrel. That said, I do think our industry was better with him in it.
Depends if you think he should be damned for such minor sins. I have dead people who have done much worse who I miss like crazy, and still laugh (and get sad) when remembering some of the worst things they did.
I find Plane Crazy really charming, although it's a portrait of someone who I definitely wouldn't do business with.
I also find it endearing that the OP thinks that he'd have been just as good as the modal successful startup CEO if one of his ideas had accidentally hit (despite him.) I agree. There are a lot of Cringelys running massive companies, but without the heart that he had. The man seemed an often self-destructive dreamer, but not evil in any way as far as I can tell. He seems to have honestly liked people, and to be driven by wanting to impress them through making their lives better.
Yeah, frankly the guy seemed like a real cad. I've always recognized the name as someone who was "around" the tech world, but never was clear to me he did or said anything interesting. This does not dispel that impression.
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.
One could easily argue that he lived how he wanted to and never gave up on his dream even if it eluded him. On the other hand, one can also argue that at a certain point one should maybe accept that you have talents you can use even if they're not the exact ones you strived for..
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.
While I agree with what you said, I was reminded of Camus's Sisyphus. Bob was pushing the boulder. It's hard to infer whether he knew if the boulder would ever reach the top, but even so, the process was there—and because it was there, I think his friends were there too.
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.
Yeah. I have degenerative nerve damage related to a set of several severe spine injuries.
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."
Thanks for writing this comment. You captured something in words that I was feeling as well, a longing for more friendship in my own life (assuming that's what you meant).
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.)
Sounds like there are some stories there.
Flawed humans? Certainly. But the world is left a little less weird, and (dare I say) a little less brightened. Rest in peace, gentlemen.
Yeah, no kidding man :)
Oh well.
Video version, not blocked (for me at least)
Thanks for sharing
I'm disturbed.
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.
Hehe. Very funny!
> 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/
I wished we had some real role models in tech. Who would you propose?
https://youtu.be/yIaNZXgDtRU
I find Plane Crazy really charming, although it's a portrait of someone who I definitely wouldn't do business with.
I also find it endearing that the OP thinks that he'd have been just as good as the modal successful startup CEO if one of his ideas had accidentally hit (despite him.) I agree. There are a lot of Cringelys running massive companies, but without the heart that he had. The man seemed an often self-destructive dreamer, but not evil in any way as far as I can tell. He seems to have honestly liked people, and to be driven by wanting to impress them through making their lives better.
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.
My guess is: Teee-Ma
Such a polite yet brutal burn.
Those were great years.