Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | chihuahua's commentslogin

Or maybe a guy with a large incredibly smelly cheese who is trailed by a huge cloud of flies.

Legend has it that Meta was having difficulty making their metaverse Mii characters look human, so Zuck solved that problem by making himself look like a Mii.

That was his biggest win in quite some time if true. Really hit the mark. My guess is he refused to acknowledge his receding hairline so he just kept having hard "bangs" cut further and further back.

For some people, money is not for buying things, but just for keeping score. That can make it rewarding and addictive to accumulate money, even if you don't buy anything (like a giant house) with it.

The score keeping aspect makes it interesting, just like playing tennis while keeping score is more interesting than just hitting a ball back and forth across the net without counting.


Yeah, I kind of agree. I read Andrew Tobias's (did I get the apostrophe right?) book on investing and he made a point very early on: the people who are rich like money. No, not like you and I like money, they like money the way you and I like fishing, or reading, or hiking or whatever. It's their hobby, their love, the thing they like to learn about, read about…

Warren Buffett wouldn't be where he was if he wasn't obsessed with money. But to your point, that doesn't have to translate to material goods: the bigger house, yachts, etc.


Maybe he just likes building things that others find useful.

When I was younger I rented furniture from a company called CORT. I happened to notice on the contract or receipt or something, that it was a Berkshire company (I didn't know that before then).

If I were Warren Buffet, I would have been happy to know that someone was a satisfied customer of one of his companies. I got some decent furniture for a few months at a reasonable price.

Just like I'm happy when someone is a satisfied user of my software.


What has he built

That's not entirely fair, he may have been profit chasing or he may have actually believed in the companies he was investing in.

If he believed in them as an investor he helped build the companies.


> What has he built

He took Berkshire Hathaway, a struggling textile company, and transformed it into one of the largest and most successful conglomerates in history.


For some people, money is not for buying things, but just for keeping score.

You can see this behaviour in online multiplayer games that have a currency aspect --- some people will spend almost as quickly as they earn, while others will save some and buy items as they can afford, and then there are those who will just keep saving and saving, rarely buying.


How can MacOS possibly sleep/wake any faster than Windows? My Lenovo X1C wakes up so quickly that the limiting factor is how fast I can enter my PIN on the keyboard. Well below 1 second, maybe 0.5 seconds. Going to sleep is the same, I'm not going to measure it but it feels like it's about 0.3 seconds.

They just need to feel superior about their Macs. My experience is that Windows wake just as fast if not faster.

But in typical Apple fanboy fashion, they will compare a 2K laptop to a random 500 cheapo laptop.

Apple real strength is in the efficiency, but there are many things it can't run and they leave top end performance on the table (outside of video editing).


Yes, provided it's not dead because it didn't actually sleep or you have to boot it up because it decided to shut itself down at some point (windows update?)

Sleep on windows is a hot mess, I've never had an experience I had any amount of confidence in.


This happened about 15 years ago back in the Windows 8 era.

Audiobooks are great, while driving or walking or riding a bike. But for complex topics, I miss the ability to read a sentence or a paragraph again.

This is definitely a disadvantage of audiobooks, although I’ve found having access to a `skip backwards 15 seconds` button can help a lot.

(There was one point during Riyria Revelations where a character was explaining how Elven succession works. After repeating the sequence a bunch of times, I finally had to get out my laptop and take notes.)


After I finished reviewing the CS textbook "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" in the mid 1990s during a vacation (looking for errors before publication), I found that my brain had been permanently reconfigured for speed reading. For years afterwards, I would automatically read entire sentences at a time, to go as fast as possible. I think I have now recovered sufficiently so that I can read books one word at a time.

I did 13 interviews in 2 days at Microsoft Research (in 1998). I did not get the job.

I bounced from Amazon to Microsoft to Amazon to Microsoft to Facebook. Why? Because the grass is always greener on the other side. Amazon didn't pay enough, Microsoft was too boring, Amazon was too chaotic, and then Facebook paid much more. All bad decisions, but I only know that in hindsight. I'm not very smart.

Oh gosh, I didn’t mean to imply it was poor decision making, I was just curious. You’re a better person than me for putting up with the interview process. I absolutely refuse to grind leetcode problems. My TC at the moment is probably a lot less than what you’ve made though. Always tradeoffs.

No worries, I didn't sense any criticism. I've just become more critical of my own decisions, now that I have some perspective and it seems to me that most of what I did was poorly considered.

Getting through the interview process used to be so easy back then. I probably applied to 2-3 jobs to get an offer. That has changed drastically since 2023.


Do you wish you’d have gained tenure at one company longer?

I did stay at Microsoft for a total of 15 years, but in retrospect it's the least interesting place to work. 5% coding, 95% overhead.

Of the places I've worked, none of them had anything where I can now say "I should have stayed there for longer." Amazon and Meta have obnoxious aggressive culture. Microsoft is a place where you can chill out and collect a paycheck and good health insurance. But very boring.

I also worked at some much smaller companies, but not for long. Maybe those are more interesting, but also less stable.


They probably mean that with some projects, Microsoft builds something half-assed and then moves on to something else. Instead of sticking with the project, evaluating it critically, and committing to fixing whatever sucks about it until it's high quality.

One could get that impression from the Windows Store/Microsoft Store. And also the state of the Settings UI for at least the past 13 years - Windows 8 moved a small fraction of Settings to Metro design, but 13 years later there are still some pieces of Windows 7 UI left.

Or the Edge browser fiasco - how can a company as large as Microsoft conclude "eh, I guess we just can't have a browser that works well enough for enough of the web to be competitive, let's just give up and do a Chrome branch"

Or the Kin phone: "we launched this 4 weeks ago and I guess it sucks, let's just pull the plug and never mention this again"

Or Windows features like home group, libraries, and Windows Home Server - they're around for a few years, then someone decides "we don't really care about this" and dump them.


It's very interesting and helpful to get your insider's perspective on this. I believe that the issue cannot be understood by people sitting on the outside who have no idea about the nature and scale of the fraud attempts.

Still, from your perspective, do you have any opinion on this particular case, other than "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs"?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: