Hotz has always come across as very arrogant to me. Claims everyone else is doing things the wrong way, claims he can do it himself in 24h, then never delivers on his words.
This is a weird comment to me, the guy is clearly exceptional. He's written security exploits that have been seen across the industry and in publications and has touched various spaces across engineering. His insights on self-driving in particular were just far ahead enough in their time that now Tesla Engineering is doing what he claimed was the only practical way to deal with SAE level 2 driving, without radar.
I want every last thing on this website related to cryptocurrency to be annotated as such.
everything about it is just a supreme waste of time and energy. including my own.
everyone is a genius at something and the easiest way to negate any positives that you could possibly provide is to be an arrogant prick, and geohot is exactly that.
While I agree on crypto in general, and on arrogant pricks in general, it can be extremely satisfying to have an arrogant prick who is right and on your side.
An interesting anecdote about a deeply technical problem, with a clever solution, is instantly critiqued, because of an aversion to the topic, and the perceived arrogance of one of the persons involved.
This level of cynicism and irony, especially on hackernews, is hard to top.
Lately it seems like there are so many accusations of over-promising, but no one explains why this is harmful. Misleading investors? Doesn’t HN hate big money anyway?
In so many cases it seems like someone promises 5x and delivers 3x… I’ll take it, over 0. Then I’ll remember and apply an adjustment factor to future promises.
I mean he delivered pretty good car assisted driving software (and hardware) and with a company that did raise 100 billion $ to do it. That seems pretty impressive to me.
In some of these comparative rankings a device that runs open source software and cheap hardware beats most of these driver assist systems that companies put in their car. All of those system probably had 10-100x more developer time put into them and work on fewer cars.
Hotz's story is our story. He is the embodiment of the top comment of every HN thread in existence. "Of course the author doesn't know a damn about what their writing about. They're wrong. And no I won't deliver a better solution," is Hotz in a nutshell. To be critical of him is to be critical of us. It's great if we can do that, but I'm not sure we can. There's a certain essence of digital rhetoric that runs through our veins and we wouldn't be the same without it.
Nah. But I do recognize his story. I've worked with many people who have the same story, not all of them software engineers. They trade on the fact that it only takes 20 percent of the time to get the first 80 percent. So they do the 80 percent, and people are impressed. Then they bail. It is pure genious, because you leave on a high note - knowing that the last 20% is going to be difficult to impossible to deliver on. It is where all the problems built up while building the easy 80% get solved. That is the boat.
> There's a certain essence of digital rhetoric that runs through our veins and we wouldn't be the same without it.
Both in the case of HN and with Hotz, I'm 50/50 on whether this is even a bug. It's hard to do anything interesting if you're not both highly opinionated and highly critical about the current way of doing things.
That said, I think some of us are more self-aware of this mentality than others. In my case I know that self-awareness has emerged slowly from being wrong a lot, which I suppose isn't the case with someone as successful as Hotz. Maybe he's never needed to self-reflect in the same way some of us have, or need to. I know I was a lot like him when I was younger anyway.
I think one can be opinionated and critical without being arrogant. I do not know who the author is, but reading the post, I'm getting huge Main Character Syndrome[1] vibes. I mean, calling it "The Hero's Journey"? Seriously? Sure, buddy. The world is a story and you're the protagonist hero, venturing forth among a world of NPCs. I don't care how much of a literal genius someone is: that kind of life attitude is pretty off-putting.
