Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge

I feel myself being pulled westward as if by an invisible force.

Are you planning on DIY cancer research ?

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Fair enough!

just finished watching Stevey's talk. Fantastic talk. And i get the impression that Stevey changed, matured, he wasn't what i thought he was. (watched one of his talk a year or two ago about i think javascript lang at stanford)

really good talk, and encouraging.

but, then, to be me, on the negative side, i do feel a bit empty after some thought. Because, in a sense, the talk seems to be nothing other than just encouraging math. In that respect, it's mundane. But i guess that is the point, and he expressed it well. Certainly encouraged me too. (am about same age as him)

@EM great observation. Kudos.

Awesome. Excellent short video, thanks for sharing.

Time to spread the word and get busy myself, before it's too late!

Your Jedi mind tricks won't work on me... I am *not* coming to work for Google. Nothing against 'em, but it just doesn't seem like the kind of place where I'd fit in. I don't do "open plan" work environments, or elitism / snobbery, and I've heard tales of all of the above about Google... plus Google is just plain too big for me.

Nah, I'll stick to doing the startup thing and following my own path to trying to A. change the world and B. get rich.

That said, I loved the speech, and best of luck to you, Mr. Yegge, and to Google.

I noticed that you had Concrete Mathematics on your desk on one of your slides. I've also been working through that. It's quite dense!

I do feel like too often programmers go after problems that are cookie cutter. I feel like as programmers and engineers, there's an unending vista of projects we could work on and technology that could be developed, yet almost everyone seems to plod around in the same constrained space. I think its got as much to do with a lack of imagination as anything else.

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Another vote for EM. Thank you.

Regardless, thanks for reminding me that there *is* a reason to learn math while coding up sites.

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What I found funny once was a Google interviewer saying "wtf, why didnt you apply to Google, how can you have no interest there??"
Either he was very good at faking his surprising and decided such as statement was marketable, either he was genuinely surprised.

I wouldn't want to work at Google. It's not heaven.
The company is against my ideals and the work people fighting each other without sharing there as well (yeah its not that nice in fact)

So closer to hell I suppose. =p

There are already dozens of pre-clinical, animal, and in vitro studies showing that cannabinoids have strong anti-cancer properties. This is congruent with both the epidemiological data showing that cannabis users have a vastly reduced chance of getting many cancers, as well as the testimony of many patients who say that the oral and topical use of hemp oil has cured their cancer. And, finally, there is no evidence that using drugs on unmethylate the CB1 receptors on colorectal cancers can cause the regression or even remission of tumors.

The pre-clinical evidence here is overwhelming, if the U.S. government would just stop blocking all actual attempts at *clinical* research then we would probably already be able to cure many if not most cancers. No fancy math needed.

For reference: Could marijuana cure cancer?

Steve, really, seriously...

Thank you for the talk you gave at OSCON.

That was inspiring and I hope that every geek on the planet watches and understands what you're saying.

Very good news that you still have a job but I really thought you were quitting and going to a quiet place to study math and other subjects!

Anyway really inspiring speech, I'm starting a company myself to attack data and text mining problems, it really spoke to me.

I'd like to know of any book recommendations you have.

Hey, Steve. I work a lot with Octave. If you need some heavy number crunching, give us a ring. It's what we eat for breakfast.

Thank you for an inspiring talk.

Working at Google had its appeal some time back, but there have been quite a few horror stories written in the last couple of years. In my case, two interview attempts was enough to remind me how dumb I am. Even if I did manage to pass, I would not (necessarily) get to work on the project to which I wanted to contribute. That kinda sucks. I don't think of myself as an interchangeable cog. I think I would be more useful somewhere else anyway. What I would like to see you write next is more about work at Google. Tell how it is for someone who is happy there.

I think many of us would like to give up our day job and switch to working on something beneficial and meaningful for society - I know I would, but a new baby, a mortgage, car payments etc. keep me from doing so. As an early employee at Amazon.com and Google, I expect you did rather well these last few years - sure takes the pressure off doing something like this.

Or perhaps you are pretending you like working at Google....

What is the key to working for Google?

thanks,
--Gautam

Nice talk but be warned. Doing good bioinformatics is very hard work. I've worked with top notch biostatisticians and machine learning researchers alike. The biostatisticians sleep far less. The problems are harder. The data noisier. Progress is slow.

i failed twice too :( am trying for a third

"It is a project that aims to turn source code -- ALL source code -- from plain text into Wikipedia"

Say what?? Can you elaborate? That's not very clear... sorry :(

Steve, I had the same epiphany about 2 years ago, though I didn't quit my job. Got the books, brushed up on my statistics, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning. (Math has always been pretty easy for me). Brushed up on Linear Algebra (Khan Academy is AMAZING!)

Now I have lot of interest in many fields (bioinformatics, astronomy, NLP, ML etc) and an amazing hobby but no idea what the next step is.

Unfortunately most people that work on these problems don't appreciate self taught. If you don't have a phd, your just a grunt to them.

Hope your luck is better! At least your in a good company that can take you where you want to go!

In your video you told people you wish you could go back in time to learn these things...its never too late to start!

So that was 2011's relevant post from stevey's blog. To think there's only one fake news post left before we're done with this year ...

Good talk. Thanks for it. Also good to see more blog posts. As someone who works on something below even cat pictures, your posts are always a welcome way to spend some time during the day

"It is a project that aims to turn source code -- ALL source code -- from plain text into Wikipedia." Interesting. Sounds similar to this:

http://mindprod.com/project/scid.html

...NOT through some new goddamn dependency-injection framework or web framework or other godawful embarrassing hacky workaround for a deficient programming language.

More on this too, please. For those of us corporate grunts in the trenches dealing with all of the above, what is the ray of sunlight? I would love to see some concrete examples (pseudocode or whatever) of how a good programming language obviates the need for dependency injection and the overly layered boilerplate approach. Every pointy-haired PM these days thinks that agile+framework+design-patterns != perfection.

It seems we have graduated from struggling with spaghetti code to struggling with bureaucratic frameworks. I would say I end up spending at least 40-50% of my time these days just wrestling with the framework rather than solving the problem at hand.

You might be interested in contributing to the SeqWare
project.

I would come to work with you, and Google keeps putting me through the pipeline for the last six years, but can't place me AT ALL. Especially if I indicate a programming language or meta-programming slant.

One interesting way to develop new treatments for cancer would be to analyze all of the cancer-related studies in PubMed (or at least starting with Neoplasms/therapy) by using data mining or machine learning to find promising treatments that may have been overlooked.

Steve, could you post the list of books on your table from your "study hour" still picture?

Thanks.

dear Steve, now that you are a compiler expert, would there be anything exciting you might share with us related to emacs? (i know you've done js2-mode and ejacs.) I'd like to see any dev related to emacs down the road. Thanks.

Hey man just wanted to say thank you. After watching that video and realizing what you were doing you brought me back to my true beliefs and you made me realize that I to was loosing track of what is important to me. I remember back in college I used to sit for days in my room trying to figure out pattern sin pi because I thought that figureing out the golden rule that is behind the most basic geometric figure in the univers would some how unravel unachievable capabilities. I think I'm gonna start looking at it again. I hope you still a have a job and I hope you can still have the life that you want. For what it's worth, thank you and keep preaching who you are, maybe your not ment to cure cancer but you surely are helping people out.

Steve,

1) I want to work at Google.
2) How freakin' old are you? You can't be older than Uncle Bob...he's still coding away. Give me some hope; I came to this field late in life.

Cheers,
Steve

What kind of help does Google need? I can probably help if they will pay me and then actually listen to me.
Call me. We'll do lunch... in the doctor's office. ;-)

Great to see you are having fun at Google, Steve!

I'm sure you've got too many comments to read them all, but I'm more interested in the idea than your career choices.

This is come thing I've been thinking on for a while too, would love to talk if that's possible.

"It is a project that aims to turn source code -- ALL source code -- from plain text into Wikipedia."

Saw this coming. Why, just 3 years ago I told anybody who would listen that if Emacs didn't evolve in a hurry, then "Firefox or some other extensible browser is going to eclipse Emacs." Oh, wait, that wasn't me.

Turncoat ;)

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Hilariously and intelligently written! I think I will, come work for Google that is (oh please god, I'll be good, just make it come true!) :)
...was "Googling" for information about jobs @ Google, found an old 2008 article of yours - a click later, there you were doing that mind-thingy of yours! (i really hope it works too!)

You might want to reconsider putting rockstar games and "principles" in the same sentence. They have a pretty bad record for the treatment of their workers and their execs clearly are only interested in making a lot of money.

Hi,

Can anyone (Steve?) identify the books visible at about 14:20 in Steve's OSCON presentation?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8&feature=player_detailpage#t=840s

Concrete Mathematics is the only one I recognise.

thanks,
Kevin

Steve,

Sadly, I find it uncommon to hear words that ring so true in my ears as yours had in that keynote speech.

I feel so strongly about helping people and especially helping to solve life's most complicated problems. Instead of just sitting around and making software for money.

I would like to join in your battle. What books do you recommend and what other types of learning should we go after?

I am interested in bioinformatics but do not know where to start. Email me any information if you can as it will help my journey start faster than fumbling by myself.

Cheers and thank you for saying what I have wanted to for a while.

I liked your talk. Rather than feeling inspired, though, I simply feel frustrated: I have the desire and the math ability, but I can't find a company willing to hire a new grad.

What am I to do? Even with the open source community, I can't change the world without resources or a job. Heck - I even got the Google interview, but was then told that, "My experiences do not match any of Google's current openings at this time." This, of course, is without them ever describing any of the openings (or even the one they were interviewing me for).

Running low on money, I will soon have to accept a position working with 'cat picture'. Are there other options I'm not seeing?

Thanks for the offer but I will pass.

I have no desire to work at a spyware company.

I have been reading your blog for years, and I wanted to say thank you. Five years ago, I was like the programmer in "Being the Averagest", working on essentially "cat pictures", and you inspired me to be better than that.

I had wrongly assumed that I couldn't "really" learn a concept unless a professor or boss handed me assignments and projects. Thanks to your enthusiasm for the self-study method, I started teaching myself new programming languages and concepts in my off hours.

It was slow going, as I have two small children, but today I am a much better programmer, I can more or less pick my next opportunity, and I get to work on "real" projects that help humanity.

Thanks, Steve.

hi , steve i m your grt fan , i m a final year diploma student in comp. engg. and love to do programming and technology , but here in india we have to manage and study as well score grt percentage to score more percentage to get into degree colg , so i didnt get time to code but i do that when i m free ,
can you tell me the tips how to be a grt programmer