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The netscape dorm

jwz.org

35 pointsluu19 comments

From the top of the page:

  Greetings, people of the future!
  If someone has linked you to this page, 
  they're probably trying to con you. 
  Don't fall for it. In fact, stop reading 
  right now. Don't read this page. Go read 
  this page instead.

  I wrote this twenty years ago. 
  Now is not then. You are being robbed.

  -- Jamie Zawinski, 2014.

Edit:

Has been discussed previously, and the original site seems to have crashed (is HN now so popular we can slashdot a site!?). A good roundup on the issues with her usual style is on https://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-lon...

Basically, we still need to fix the management of software lots lots more than we need to fix the interview process.

After reading your "Fuck Glory" link, I recalled something I'd read about prestige:

> "You shouldn't worry about prestige.... It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious."

The irony, of course, is that none other than Paul Graham wrote that in How to Do What You Love: http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

jwz commented [1] on a previous discussion of his diary after Arrington linked to it claiming "rah rah rah startups are awesome keep busting your ass [to make me rich] [some editorial liberties taken]" [2]. This is the bit that stuck with me

   I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's 
   true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as 
   much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept 
   under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people 
   from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what 
   kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented 
   here.

It's well worth thinking about, particularly given the endless whining on here / in the industry that engineers aren't leaping at the chance to give up $40k or $50k a year in salary for a couple basis points in almost-certainly-never-gonna-be-worth-anything options. Therefore there's an engineering shortage that must urgently be addressed at the highest levels of government, which solution must necessarily include open immigration for engineers.

[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-s...

[2] http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so-work-m...

9 Years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545

8 Years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100176

5 Years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211360

I remember when silicon valley work life balance meant wandering around the cube farms as a little kid and seeing all the old people napping in their sleeping bags under their tables.

You step outside and the particular business park you were in was separated by miles of nothing in between. So after you get up, realize what time it was, you get in a car and drive a solid fifteen minutes without seeing many others.

Then when you get home you try to explain or relate to others about what it is you're doing they just don't care. They're busy with their television sets or radio or magazine. This internet thing you keep talking about won't ever take off.

Now it's still the same. People are still busy with their tvs but it's called youtube, they're busy with their radio but it's called instagram and they're busy with their magazines but its called Facebook.

Worse it takes me 40 minutes to drive two miles through the town and everything old is getting torn down to be rebuilt as high density four story duplex condos.

The cool thing is now is to disconnect. Funny how that reverb goes.

Reminds me of the swirl society of Netscape: http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html

That moment a HN reference to your site causes a full scale DDoS takedown.

The hug of death.

I do wonder if this wouldn't be preventable with a better-designed web. Why fetch static media from the source anyway? You could grab it from your peers.

Sounds like you want IPFS: https://ipfs.io/

There's plenty of interest in replacing transfer and naming, but I don't see a lot in developing a post-WWW hypertext system. Are there any projects or did the WWW and HTTP kill off research in that area?

You just need to configure your server right. A static site can take a ridiculous amount of traffic even on toy hardware.

I suspect in this case, the fact that the static page links to a dynamic one on the same server, right up top, and urges you to go there helps not at all.

We used to call this slashdotting.. and bots had to be made to mirror sits about to be linked.

previous discussions of note:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288671

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3283214

from https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/vc-metadata/

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GJCV4xo...

Is there a link to what the original said? I remember reading the 2011 jwz doc in college and it was a huge topic of discussion in our CS community.

This is now redirecting to a rather NSFW link...

I'm not a robot! :(

(open in a new tab if you get a 403 Bots Forbidden)

Looks nuts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com