1. In the 90s, I had a struggling one-man Mac ISV, and would do gig programming on the side. I did a lot of work for boutique investment banks, and also for a "consulting" firm that did about 75% of their business with the finance industry. The owner of that firm praised me, but didn't like that if my business took off, he'd lose me.

"What would it take to get your commitment to this firm?"

50%

"Where will you get the money to buy half my company?"

A loan from the firm?

When the dust cleared, the business loaned me the money to buy in, and I paid it back with 50% of my profit sharing payouts. This is not some weird financial alchemy, a lot of partnerships are run this way.

———

2. My Duathlon racing buddy was a mold-maker, very specialized and good at his trade. He worked for an elderly entrepreneur who had built his mold business up over decades. Said entrepreneur sent his own kids to university to become "professionals."

What to do about succession when he was ready to retire? My buddy literally photocopied my own arrangement, bought 50% so the business would have a successor it could count on, and bought the remainder when the founder retired. He is now a comfortably wealthy automotive sector entrepreneur.

———

The huge LBOs in the news always seem like space-age deals, but little LBOs for succession purposes are remarkably common.

If the market can remain irrational longer than a fundamentals-driven investor can remain solvent, is it irrational to bet on the market remaining irrational?

I was reading a book about paying yourself first, "The Richest Man in Babylon." He spotted that and we had a short conversation about money, in which he recommended another book about personal finance, "The Millionaire Next Door," an enormous amount of which is about not buying into the Upper-Middle Class Trap.

I walked directly to a bookstore, bought it, and while I am not wealthy, what I do have I credit largely to that book. Yes, it's a book that could be a podcast episode or series of blog posts. But no matter how you consume the wisdom or where you get it from, consider this my heartfelt endorsement.

And yes, The Volvo V90 Estate in my garage was purchased used. And even then... We vacillated over spending that much to replace our XC70 Estate, also purchased used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door

When there is a boardroom battle over control, I think almost any take is fair. Sculley kicked him off Macintosh. Steve then tried to oust Sculley, who gave him a "window seat."

Sculley had the Board's support, and Steve resigned rather than quietly sit in the corner playing with "New Product Development" toys. The Board refused to accept his resignation and encouraged him to rescind it, but no they didn't give him meaningful authority, so he carried on to Plan B and negotiated the right to make "Education" computers.

Did he jump? Was he pushed? Yes!

And back to the point I was making... His trajectory had something in common with Raskin's trajectory, right down to raising money from Canon.

———

p.s. Fellow OG Mac developer here. I still have the SE/30 I used to write a classified ads app for QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker back in the day. I would describe classified ads software in the 90s as, "faster horses about to be eclipsed by automobiles."

“Intuitive Equals Familiar,” a classic from Jef Raskin, the man who started the Macintosh¹ project at Apple:

https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

———

¹ Only to have Steve take it away. Jef left and created the Canon Cat, an opinionated computer that eschewed the WIMP interface in favour of anchoring n incremental search. Steve would also leave and create NeXT, and Canon would invest in NeXT as well.

ChatGPT, write me a 2010-style Hacker News front page essay about how software maintenance is just like automobile maintenance, and why nobody wants low-value maintenance work to be arduous, failure-prone, and boring.

Same problem.

This place discusses SpaceX technical things all the time. But SpaceX is not a research lab. It's a company. That does business. And is going public. Taking a little time off from arguing about thrust and payload to talk about their business paratices, lobbying and late-stage capitalism is not only appropriate here...

Look around you. This may be called "Hacker News," but it is run by and for the benefit of a business, YCombinator. Speaking bluntly, if you come here only to talk tech, you're only getting half of the HN value proposition. The value of HN is that it mixes business with pleasure, so to speak. Many people here will either work for a tech business or found one. You can find technical discussions everywhere. Business discussions tailored for tech? That's actually very, very valuable.

One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.

So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.

At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.

Meanwhile, a different take:

Now, what we’ve been told about models is that they’re only as good as their training data. And so languages with gargantuan amounts of training data ought to fare best, right? Turns out that models kind of universally suck at Python and Javascript (comparatively). The top performing languages (independent of model) are C#, Racket, Kotlin, and standing at #1 is Elixir.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410349

Whether it's testes or testy language, getting personal and insulting does not meet my personal standard for assuming good intent and being worthy of an open-minded attempt to create constructive dialogue.

But I applaud you for wanting to lift the standard of discourse!

If they did, why did they hold it back just to speak so contemptuously of a subject that is actually interesting and reasonably well explained?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubadQ1jcWOM

And the late Jaco Pastorius with the bass harmonics song that would have broken the Internet if we had had the internet when he released his first solo album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsZ_1mPOuyk

Speaking as a person who owns basses... I like the sound of harmonics on a bass better. I think it's something to do with the longer strings giving more play to the overtones.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...

Question three is this:

Last year my team had to remove all the phone numbers from 50,000 Amazon web page templates, since many of the numbers were no longer in service, and we also wanted to route all customer contacts through a single page.

Let's say you're on my team, and we have to identify the pages having probable U.S. phone numbers in them. To simplify the problem slightly, assume we have 50,000 HTML files in a Unix directory tree, under a directory called "/website". We have 2 days to get a list of file paths to the editorial staff. You need to give me a list of the .html files in this directory tree that appear to contain phone numbers in the following two formats: (xxx) xxx-xxxx and xxx-xxx-xxxx.

How would you solve this problem? Keep in mind our team is on a short (2-day) timeline.

In Yegge's case, he explicitly does NOT want a hand-written program, he wants the candidate to suggest a CLI tool, e.g.

grep -l -R --perl-regexp "\b(\(\d{3}\)\s|\d{3}-)\d{3}-\d{4}\b" > output.txt

———

So...

These questions aren't good or bad unto themselves, but when the person asking is engaging in "Guess the answer I'm thinking of," don't beat yourself up if you guessed wrong. Your answer might be prized by someone else with an enormous amount of experience hiring engineers.

Is that how it works where you are? Because over here, the best way to win an award from a publication is to advertise in that publication. Advertise enough, and you'll also become their go-to when they need a quote about anything vaguely related to your restaurant or other business, and once a year or so they'll print some hagiographic article about the amazing things going on under your leadership.

What I can say is that every reference I've found to Bill Gosper's algorithm describes the data structure as an immutable quadtree with canonicalized nodes, id est, there is extensive structure sharing in a Game of Life quadtree. That in turn facilitates heavy memoization.

The wikipedia entry for Quad Trees mentions Hashlife explicitly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife

https://raganwald.com/2017/01/12/time-space-life-as-we-know-...