7 ms·

"I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs." Funny he should write that. Many, many years ago I wrote an email to John Carmack asking some

by uptown 8y ago

"I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs." Funny he should write that. Many, many years ago I wrote an email to John Carmack asking something about his .plan postings which must have seemed fairly mundane looking back on it now. He was nice enough to write me back. And I thought that was pretty cool too. I guess it just goes to show that even the people you respect or admire have people they respect and admire themselves.

gallerdude 8y ago
To add one rung above that, I remember a quote from Jobs's biography to the extent of "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
- vijay_nair 8y ago
  For anyone wondering how a Steve-Socrates dialog might be like, I found this analogous bit of history: --- Diogenes was in Corinth when Alexander the Great sent word through a messenger asking Diogenes to come see him in Macedonia. Diogenes told the Alexander’s messenger, “Go tell your emperor that Corinth is as far from Macedonia as Macedonia is from Corinth. So if your emperor wants to see me, he can come and find me here.” Irrefutable logic and infinite self-assurance. The last bit can only come from someone who really does not need anything from anyone however high and mighty. Alexander surely was not used to being turned down. But I suppose being a warrior, he admired courage. So he went to Corinth to meet Diogenes. Diogenes was sitting in his tub and enjoying the morning sun when Alexander showed up on his high horse with a whole bunch of soldiers. After a brief introduction, Alexander proudly offered to give Diogenes anything that he needed. “Is there anything I can do for you, Sir?” asked Alexander. Diogenes replied, “Yes, you could. You are blocking the sun. Please stand aside.” --- https://deeshaa.org/2017/03/03/diogenes-of-sinope/ https://deeshaa.org/2017/03/03/diogenes-of-sinope/
  - NoB4Mouth 8y ago
    This story was one of the first i heard back in high school during my first courses of philosophy. I still admire the courage and free-thinking spirit of those Greek intellectuals. Imagine some of our current "intellectuals" been called by the White House today. They will be in the hurry to meet the "President". During the visit they will make sure they get some selfies with M. President in order to show it as a life-achievements... Vanity is a common pattern among our modern days intelligentsia
    - fabrika 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure this pattern was also common in Ancient Greece. Diogenes was exceptional.
      - musage 8y ago
        They didn't say all Greek intellectuals were that way, it's qualified with "those". They also aren't saying that all intellectuals today are cowards, it's qualified with "some of". And you know, rolling our eyes at Trump while not talking about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, sweeping the fact that the grass roots support for Sanders was unprecedented under the rug, not even attempting to see where one might "go from there"... just being constantly amazed and upset at Trump's antics, without using those 4 years for anything good or honest at all, is exactly as good as outright hopping into his lap. Like Bill Hicks said about Basic Instinct, he's a piece of shit, walk away... but no. Let's instead do anything but that, that's the ticket. > Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy - or even two orthodoxies, as often happens - good writing stops. -- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature" This happened, this is the situation. Posts pointing it out get consistently punished instead of engaged with (and replying to what the comment doesn't even say is another form of that) because it is the situation.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
IntelMiner 8y ago
Years ago, my friends and I got drunk while celebrating my 20th birthday As a joke, I emailed Gabe Newell and asked if he'd wish me a happy birthday Much to my surprise, he actually replied! https://i.imgur.com/n0BvCPS.png https://i.imgur.com/n0BvCPS.png I can only imagine the amount of garbage he gets in his inbox every day. So to get that email back (on a Sunday for him, as well) was pretty heart warming
- tshannon 8y ago
  My wife (then girlfriend) got John Carmack to email me for my birthday in college.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    That's a very considerate thing to do. Cute!
- seanp2k2 8y ago
  They’re busy people and in many cases very influential (and probably also wealthy), but famous people are still people at the end of the day. As a fan of few people in this world, when I do get the chance to meet them, I try to approach them as a human first and a famous person second. Another way to look at that is: great every stranger you’d like to make a connection with with the same respect you’d treat your heroes. If you go up to them and start freaking out because you’re actually talking to them...how do you think that feels for them? I’ve always thought that it wouldn’t be that fulfilling to be famous, because you’d lose the opportunity to do things like go out to a normal restaurant with your family and have dinner without people acting weird around you constantly. Paparazzi are one thing, fans and stalkers another. TL;DR don’t be the person who makes being famous suck, and you’ll probably get a lot more out of having an interesting conversation with someone you look up to vs just getting an autograph.
- daeken 8y ago
  I love stories like this. A few months ago, my daughter was born and was named after the main character in a Philip Pullman series. He tweeted a welcome message to her! https://twitter.com/PhilipPullman/status/946678534776516608 https://twitter.com/PhilipPullman/status/946678534776516608 One of the weirdest, most amazing internet moments for me.
Yoms 8y ago
Speaking his .plan files. One heck of a trip down memory lane: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/ https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/
webkike 8y ago
I sent an email to Jonathan Blow about Jai once, and I was surprised that he sent me a thorough reply. Russ Cox never got back to me about having GUI apps take over the terminal window in Plan 9 from userspace, although my idea was fundamentally trash so I don't blame him
- AJRF 8y ago
  I emailed Jon about unblocking me on Twitter once and he did. Made me appreciate him as a person a lot more.
emodendroket 8y ago
That's one of the things that I do think is neat about Twitter; there is actually a pretty reasonable chance someone whose book I admired, or whatever, will read and respond to my message.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
reidrac 8y ago
Back in uni I emailed Andrew Tanenbaum asking some silly question about the Amoeba operating system. This was around 97, and the Internet was still new to me. There was access in one lab 1 hour once a week or something like that, so the fact that he replied with some pointers to few ps files about the OS was really amazing.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Back in the day (~1989) when Minix was hot stuff I asked a friend who went to VU a question about Minix to pass on to Tanenbaum, next thing I knew I was invited to his flat next to the Amsterdamse Bos for tea and cookies. That was a very interesting afternoon.
  - icc97 8y ago
    There's always the risk that it'll turn out that you don't like your heroes when you meet them in person.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Tanenbaum certainly didn't disappoint.
agumonkey 8y ago
Can't recall who, but I remember a famous actress saying she got star truck meeting another not far above famous actor. Must be weird to go from star to fan.
- desertrider12 8y ago
  Was it Jennifer Lawrence meeting Jack Nicholson?
  - kyberias 8y ago
    This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJmhsJ5T5L0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJmhsJ5T5L0
jeffbax 8y ago
Funny, I felt very similar when this happened :) https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/993142700374462464 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/993142700374462464
- linkmotif 8y ago
  Wow that’s this haha!
codelord 8y ago
I see people I admire the most everyday at work. I never dared say hi to them!
- forgotmysn 8y ago
  You don't say 'Hi' to your co-workers?
cabaalis 8y ago
On this very forum I had Alan Kay politely tell me I was a fool, and I thought it was great. I bragged to my developer friends, who also agreed that it was great. And that I was, indeed, a fool.
- da02 8y ago
  What did you write that made him say that? (I've written some pretty dumb things to him and he never called me a fooled. He was nice enough to try to re-explain things to me. I finally had to give up because I felt I was wasting his time.)
  - cabaalis 8y ago
    No he was polite. I suppose I should restate, he didn't call me a fool straight out but let me know it was foolish to comment on things I had no firsthand knowledge of. I think it was an article regarding Steve's visit at Xerox PARC.
    - mentat 8y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575389 - that didn't seem like 6 months ago.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        I think this is a case where you didn't take the trouble to find out the facts and are instead projecting your beliefs on a situation at which you weren't present. I'm calling you on because there is much too much of this kind of commentary in most forums. I bet dang saw that and wanted to remind him about the HN guidelines and then realized that the author of the comment was freakin Alan Kay and just said never mind.
    - da02 8y ago
      But in the opening post, John Carmack said that is what Steve would do: "It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions." Alan is very smart and was a prodigy, but I think he put up with Steve Jobs' eccentricity to a larger extent than our eccentricity because he could influence people and got a few things right. (Although Alan has been said to call out CEOs for incompetence.) Murray Rothbard (economist) said all the billionaires he ever met were crazy. Probably because their colleagues and employees would put up with a lot of stuff they would never let anyone else get away with.
BinaryIdiot 8y ago
For a little bit of a different type of story I wrote Leo Laporte back when I was a teenager and he was on Call For Help. I asked him a very specific question about getting video card drivers to work with a specific video encoder (which, looking back, is a terrible question to ask someone who is doing a TV show and can only give back sound bite answers). To my surprise he actually read my question and answered it on tv! It was so freaking cool! But, my inner teenager kicked in when I realized his answer was something I already tried. I sent him an really awful email in response. I called him terrible names. I was a complete shit. I felt so bad about my actions _for years_ that I eventually emailed him a, what I thought was, a heartfelt apology for being such a shit. I got an email back a few days later from his wife telling me she shared it with him and to not worry about it. I still feel bad about writing it...
Flemlord 8y ago
I did this too! A question about how they were testing Quake. John responded with some detail about how to set up a simple proxy server. Very helpful and relevant to what I was working on at the time; thanks John!

by uptown 8y ago

gallerdude 8y ago

To add one rung above that, I remember a quote from Jobs's biography to the extent of "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."

vijay_nair 8y ago
For anyone wondering how a Steve-Socrates dialog might be like, I found this analogous bit of history: --- Diogenes was in Corinth when Alexander the Great sent word through a messenger asking Diogenes to come see him in Macedonia. Diogenes told the Alexander’s messenger, “Go tell your emperor that Corinth is as far from Macedonia as Macedonia is from Corinth. So if your emperor wants to see me, he can come and find me here.” Irrefutable logic and infinite self-assurance. The last bit can only come from someone who really does not need anything from anyone however high and mighty. Alexander surely was not used to being turned down. But I suppose being a warrior, he admired courage. So he went to Corinth to meet Diogenes. Diogenes was sitting in his tub and enjoying the morning sun when Alexander showed up on his high horse with a whole bunch of soldiers. After a brief introduction, Alexander proudly offered to give Diogenes anything that he needed. “Is there anything I can do for you, Sir?” asked Alexander. Diogenes replied, “Yes, you could. You are blocking the sun. Please stand aside.” --- https://deeshaa.org/2017/03/03/diogenes-of-sinope/ https://deeshaa.org/2017/03/03/diogenes-of-sinope/
- NoB4Mouth 8y ago
  This story was one of the first i heard back in high school during my first courses of philosophy. I still admire the courage and free-thinking spirit of those Greek intellectuals. Imagine some of our current "intellectuals" been called by the White House today. They will be in the hurry to meet the "President". During the visit they will make sure they get some selfies with M. President in order to show it as a life-achievements... Vanity is a common pattern among our modern days intelligentsia
  - fabrika 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure this pattern was also common in Ancient Greece. Diogenes was exceptional.
    - musage 8y ago
      They didn't say all Greek intellectuals were that way, it's qualified with "those". They also aren't saying that all intellectuals today are cowards, it's qualified with "some of". And you know, rolling our eyes at Trump while not talking about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, sweeping the fact that the grass roots support for Sanders was unprecedented under the rug, not even attempting to see where one might "go from there"... just being constantly amazed and upset at Trump's antics, without using those 4 years for anything good or honest at all, is exactly as good as outright hopping into his lap. Like Bill Hicks said about Basic Instinct, he's a piece of shit, walk away... but no. Let's instead do anything but that, that's the ticket. > Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy - or even two orthodoxies, as often happens - good writing stops. -- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature" This happened, this is the situation. Posts pointing it out get consistently punished instead of engaged with (and replying to what the comment doesn't even say is another form of that) because it is the situation.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

IntelMiner 8y ago

Years ago, my friends and I got drunk while celebrating my 20th birthday As a joke, I emailed Gabe Newell and asked if he'd wish me a happy birthday Much to my surprise, he actually replied! https://i.imgur.com/n0BvCPS.png https://i.imgur.com/n0BvCPS.png I can only imagine the amount of garbage he gets in his inbox every day. So to get that email back (on a Sunday for him, as well) was pretty heart warming

tshannon 8y ago
My wife (then girlfriend) got John Carmack to email me for my birthday in college.
- jacobush 8y ago
  That's a very considerate thing to do. Cute!
seanp2k2 8y ago
They’re busy people and in many cases very influential (and probably also wealthy), but famous people are still people at the end of the day. As a fan of few people in this world, when I do get the chance to meet them, I try to approach them as a human first and a famous person second. Another way to look at that is: great every stranger you’d like to make a connection with with the same respect you’d treat your heroes. If you go up to them and start freaking out because you’re actually talking to them...how do you think that feels for them? I’ve always thought that it wouldn’t be that fulfilling to be famous, because you’d lose the opportunity to do things like go out to a normal restaurant with your family and have dinner without people acting weird around you constantly. Paparazzi are one thing, fans and stalkers another. TL;DR don’t be the person who makes being famous suck, and you’ll probably get a lot more out of having an interesting conversation with someone you look up to vs just getting an autograph.
daeken 8y ago
I love stories like this. A few months ago, my daughter was born and was named after the main character in a Philip Pullman series. He tweeted a welcome message to her! https://twitter.com/PhilipPullman/status/946678534776516608 https://twitter.com/PhilipPullman/status/946678534776516608 One of the weirdest, most amazing internet moments for me.

Yoms 8y ago

Speaking his .plan files. One heck of a trip down memory lane: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/ https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/

webkike 8y ago

I sent an email to Jonathan Blow about Jai once, and I was surprised that he sent me a thorough reply. Russ Cox never got back to me about having GUI apps take over the terminal window in Plan 9 from userspace, although my idea was fundamentally trash so I don't blame him

AJRF 8y ago
I emailed Jon about unblocking me on Twitter once and he did. Made me appreciate him as a person a lot more.

emodendroket 8y ago

That's one of the things that I do think is neat about Twitter; there is actually a pretty reasonable chance someone whose book I admired, or whatever, will read and respond to my message.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

reidrac 8y ago

Back in uni I emailed Andrew Tanenbaum asking some silly question about the Amoeba operating system. This was around 97, and the Internet was still new to me. There was access in one lab 1 hour once a week or something like that, so the fact that he replied with some pointers to few ps files about the OS was really amazing.

jacquesm 8y ago
Back in the day (~1989) when Minix was hot stuff I asked a friend who went to VU a question about Minix to pass on to Tanenbaum, next thing I knew I was invited to his flat next to the Amsterdamse Bos for tea and cookies. That was a very interesting afternoon.
- icc97 8y ago
  There's always the risk that it'll turn out that you don't like your heroes when you meet them in person.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Tanenbaum certainly didn't disappoint.

agumonkey 8y ago

Can't recall who, but I remember a famous actress saying she got star truck meeting another not far above famous actor. Must be weird to go from star to fan.

desertrider12 8y ago
Was it Jennifer Lawrence meeting Jack Nicholson?
- kyberias 8y ago
  This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJmhsJ5T5L0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJmhsJ5T5L0

jeffbax 8y ago

Funny, I felt very similar when this happened :) https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/993142700374462464 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/993142700374462464

linkmotif 8y ago
Wow that’s this haha!

codelord 8y ago

I see people I admire the most everyday at work. I never dared say hi to them!

forgotmysn 8y ago
You don't say 'Hi' to your co-workers?

cabaalis 8y ago

On this very forum I had Alan Kay politely tell me I was a fool, and I thought it was great. I bragged to my developer friends, who also agreed that it was great. And that I was, indeed, a fool.

da02 8y ago
What did you write that made him say that? (I've written some pretty dumb things to him and he never called me a fooled. He was nice enough to try to re-explain things to me. I finally had to give up because I felt I was wasting his time.)
- cabaalis 8y ago
  No he was polite. I suppose I should restate, he didn't call me a fool straight out but let me know it was foolish to comment on things I had no firsthand knowledge of. I think it was an article regarding Steve's visit at Xerox PARC.
  - mentat 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575389 - that didn't seem like 6 months ago.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      I think this is a case where you didn't take the trouble to find out the facts and are instead projecting your beliefs on a situation at which you weren't present. I'm calling you on because there is much too much of this kind of commentary in most forums. I bet dang saw that and wanted to remind him about the HN guidelines and then realized that the author of the comment was freakin Alan Kay and just said never mind.
  - da02 8y ago
    But in the opening post, John Carmack said that is what Steve would do: "It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions." Alan is very smart and was a prodigy, but I think he put up with Steve Jobs' eccentricity to a larger extent than our eccentricity because he could influence people and got a few things right. (Although Alan has been said to call out CEOs for incompetence.) Murray Rothbard (economist) said all the billionaires he ever met were crazy. Probably because their colleagues and employees would put up with a lot of stuff they would never let anyone else get away with.

BinaryIdiot 8y ago

For a little bit of a different type of story I wrote Leo Laporte back when I was a teenager and he was on Call For Help. I asked him a very specific question about getting video card drivers to work with a specific video encoder (which, looking back, is a terrible question to ask someone who is doing a TV show and can only give back sound bite answers). To my surprise he actually read my question and answered it on tv! It was so freaking cool! But, my inner teenager kicked in when I realized his answer was something I already tried. I sent him an really awful email in response. I called him terrible names. I was a complete shit. I felt so bad about my actions _for years_ that I eventually emailed him a, what I thought was, a heartfelt apology for being such a shit. I got an email back a few days later from his wife telling me she shared it with him and to not worry about it. I still feel bad about writing it...

Flemlord 8y ago

I did this too! A question about how they were testing Quake. John responded with some detail about how to set up a simple proxy server. Very helpful and relevant to what I was working on at the time; thanks John!