7 ms·

Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..

Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.

aidenn0 7y ago
I don't live in SV, but the impression I get is that nobody cares what you did 25 years ago.
TylerE 7y ago
Ubiquity doesn't equate to profitability. In fact, most of the big internet Startups (Twitter comes instantly to mind) lose and money and likely always will.
Thorentis 7y ago
Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry). tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded Brave instead.
- eschaton 7y ago
  Don’t sanitize it, he was fired for being anti-gay. That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
    I did not know that. It is odd though. I used to remember no one cared what about your Views as long as you were good at what you did. CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been. It is a shame.
    - sp332 7y ago
      "Views" are one thing... I guess. Working to make sure your employees don't get the legal right to get married is another.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
        Ahh, I see now. So it is not just Views. It is the wrong kind of Views. The guy basically the kinda guy that kicks puppies and worships Hitler. And anyone who associates with him is as bad or worse for being complicit nay culpable.. And the only thing that is not asked is whether he was good at what he did. Was he good at what he did apart from being bad bad anti-homosexual?
        wwright 7y ago
        Part of his job was to acquire and retain employees, allocate capital, and engage in public relations. Spending his personal money on fucking over other people (with no real benefit to the world), many of whom worked for or could work for him, is a bad sign about those parts of his job. (That may not be an argument for the board to fire him, of course, but it is an answer to “how good is he at his job?”)
        A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
        Well, how is him spending his personal money anyone's business but his own? Now, you could make an argument that his sort of mob mentality is why people now skulk around behind various trusts, llcs and PACs to any kind of political work other people may dislike. To your point, I guess it really depends on how you define his set of responsibilities, which is a valid point to make. I thought of something very limited ( writing lines of code ). From that perspective.. why does it matter who he donates to and why. Is it not up to him to decide?
        wwright 7y ago
        He was the CEO, so it was much more than coding. For a regular software engineer (ie, no direct reports) I think it’s a very different calculus. And it _is_ up to him to decide how to spend his money. But if he spends that money on things that deeply impact other people, it is more than fair for other people to care.
  - zaksoup 7y ago
    To be clear, it wasn't that he was "anti-gay" it was that he donated $1000 to Prop 8 in 2008, a California Proposition that made gay marriage illegal in CA until Obergefell struck it down 7 years later. This is important because it is a clear delineation between "privately disagreeing but allowing individuals their freedom" and "actively campaigning to take away rights from Mozilla employees and users".
  - doublekill 7y ago
    Did he not donate to a legal political cause, without publicizing it? I doubt funders care about your opinions on gay marriage, but they do care a lot about the stink the cancel culture raised around him. The poison seems to be applied externally.
    - wwright 7y ago
      Legality and morality are very often unrelated; in this case, the implication is not that he did something illegal, but that he is an asshole for spending his money for the purpose of making other people’s lives worse to the benefit of nobody. Personally, I think that’s a perfectly good reason for not giving him more money. “Cancel culture” is many people (many of whom matter to investors in one way or another) stating that they also feel that that is a bad place to put money.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    Don't lie: Mozilla itself says they didn't fire me, why don't you believe them? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... In fact per CA labor law it would be illegal to fire me for "being anti-gay": https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=1101 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... et seq. And of course, once I got Brave started outside the valley, we got "funders" in the valley to invest, including many top VC firms (who now constitute <10% of all funds we raised to date so don't switch horses to argue we are VC-controlled).
  - Thorentis 7y ago
    So being fired for holding a particular view is okay now? Regardless of your views, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of corporations having a de facto role in enforcing public morality, through who they chose to hire and fire. People okay with this have obviously learned nothing from the days where you could be fired for being gay. Other way around? Nothing wrong with it according to some people. This whole trend is worrying. Having said that - corporations do have a right to hire and fire who they please. But it is important to at least acknowledge "cancel culture" as a legitimate and immature trend that is happening. Often the pressure to fire somebody comes from the outside, not from within.
- __jal 7y ago
  Conservative != bigot/anti-gay. We do have a brood of reactionaries attempting to blur that distinction like they always do, but there are plenty of conservatives who do not share that particular bias.
  - Thorentis 7y ago
    Bigot: a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions. (http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/bigot http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/bigot) I have met plenty of bigots on both sides of politics. But immediately trying to call me out on labeling this man a conservative by saying he is actually a bigot is, ironically, bigotry itself.
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      __jal's comment was ambiguous. I think they may have been saying the opposite: that not all conservatives are bigots, and that it's unfair on conservatives to brand bigotry as conservatism.
core-questions 7y ago
He got cancelled for not supporting gay marriage. Nothing he has actually personally done or will do matters in this new moral calculus.
- cdmckay 7y ago
  He didn’t not support gay marriage, he actively gave money to oppose it. That’s a little different.
  - core-questions 7y ago
    It doesn't matter - it's legal, protected political speech in donation form. There's nothing wrong with having differing opinions about things; you can disagree as much as you like and donate as much as you want to counter it.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      You're right, it absolutely is. The corollary to this is that no one has to hire him/work with him; they're allowed to fire him for his legally-protected speech. I don't agree with how it was handled either, but we must protect their freedom to act as they choose as much as Mr. Eich's freedom to speak as he chooses.
      - core-questions 7y ago
        Oh, sure, until it ends up in the situation where you have to prove your perfect ideological allegiance to the Party in order to have employment. It's already the case that you can't publicly post things without getting dox'd and fired for a lot of opinions that were 100% the norm not that long ago. You may call it progress, but the progression is towards totalitarian liberalism; your gay marriage is really not going to make that experience that much better once they find some place where you're not faithful enough. For example, what if you're a white gay male?
      - BrendanEich 7y ago
xmprt 7y ago
Creating a language 20 years ago doesn't mean you're responsible for everything the language produced. If javascript didn't exist something different would have taken it's place and produced just as much value.
- Eikon 7y ago
  Not to mention the original Javascript was pretty much only good at making snow animations on your website when winter was coming.
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  Microsoft tried with VBScript, but JS was fit enough to survive, and no one wanted a second language after it. No point in speculating, we know JS matters. Asserting it could have been Blub means nothing. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155. Also, I kept working on JS, while doing other things. I worked on JS in both Netscape and Ecma TC39 through late 1997, then co-founded mozilla.org with jwz and others. For mozilla.org I was chief architect, but I still kept working on the Mozilla JS engine, SpiderMonkey, adding features such as getters and setters that became important in 2005 due to use by Microsoft's Live Maps. Live Maps emulated the IE DOM in Firefox via those same getter and setter extensions that I'd added over the years since 1997. In IE, Live Maps of course used the native DOM. This left Safari and Opera failing unless they reverse engineered the getter and setter extensions from SpiderMonkey in Firefox quickly. It took them about a week, and then Live Maps worked in Safari and Opera too. This shows how quickly browsers can evolve, based on innovation in just one browser's engine, even in the wake of a monopoly period of stagnation.
samantohermes 7y ago
HN itself wasn't affected by JS in the life of HN readers, LOL
BrendanEich 7y ago
If it wasn't obvious from my tweet, in a thread on "cancel culture", many valley investors were scared of being mobbed if they invested in me.
- paul7986 7y ago
  Yes once learning the back story via the comments here it's clearer/obvious. Maybe I should delete my comment too...seems a lot of HN members in this thread did the same once you popped in ...lol

aidenn0 7y ago

I don't live in SV, but the impression I get is that nobody cares what you did 25 years ago.

TylerE 7y ago

Ubiquity doesn't equate to profitability. In fact, most of the big internet Startups (Twitter comes instantly to mind) lose and money and likely always will.

Thorentis 7y ago

Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry). tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded Brave instead.

eschaton 7y ago
Don’t sanitize it, he was fired for being anti-gay. That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
  I did not know that. It is odd though. I used to remember no one cared what about your Views as long as you were good at what you did. CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been. It is a shame.
  - sp332 7y ago
    "Views" are one thing... I guess. Working to make sure your employees don't get the legal right to get married is another.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
      Ahh, I see now. So it is not just Views. It is the wrong kind of Views. The guy basically the kinda guy that kicks puppies and worships Hitler. And anyone who associates with him is as bad or worse for being complicit nay culpable.. And the only thing that is not asked is whether he was good at what he did. Was he good at what he did apart from being bad bad anti-homosexual?
      - wwright 7y ago
        Part of his job was to acquire and retain employees, allocate capital, and engage in public relations. Spending his personal money on fucking over other people (with no real benefit to the world), many of whom worked for or could work for him, is a bad sign about those parts of his job. (That may not be an argument for the board to fire him, of course, but it is an answer to “how good is he at his job?”)
        A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
        Well, how is him spending his personal money anyone's business but his own? Now, you could make an argument that his sort of mob mentality is why people now skulk around behind various trusts, llcs and PACs to any kind of political work other people may dislike. To your point, I guess it really depends on how you define his set of responsibilities, which is a valid point to make. I thought of something very limited ( writing lines of code ). From that perspective.. why does it matter who he donates to and why. Is it not up to him to decide?
        wwright 7y ago
        He was the CEO, so it was much more than coding. For a regular software engineer (ie, no direct reports) I think it’s a very different calculus. And it _is_ up to him to decide how to spend his money. But if he spends that money on things that deeply impact other people, it is more than fair for other people to care.
- zaksoup 7y ago
  To be clear, it wasn't that he was "anti-gay" it was that he donated $1000 to Prop 8 in 2008, a California Proposition that made gay marriage illegal in CA until Obergefell struck it down 7 years later. This is important because it is a clear delineation between "privately disagreeing but allowing individuals their freedom" and "actively campaigning to take away rights from Mozilla employees and users".
- doublekill 7y ago
  Did he not donate to a legal political cause, without publicizing it? I doubt funders care about your opinions on gay marriage, but they do care a lot about the stink the cancel culture raised around him. The poison seems to be applied externally.
  - wwright 7y ago
    Legality and morality are very often unrelated; in this case, the implication is not that he did something illegal, but that he is an asshole for spending his money for the purpose of making other people’s lives worse to the benefit of nobody. Personally, I think that’s a perfectly good reason for not giving him more money. “Cancel culture” is many people (many of whom matter to investors in one way or another) stating that they also feel that that is a bad place to put money.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  Don't lie: Mozilla itself says they didn't fire me, why don't you believe them? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... In fact per CA labor law it would be illegal to fire me for "being anti-gay": https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=1101 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... et seq. And of course, once I got Brave started outside the valley, we got "funders" in the valley to invest, including many top VC firms (who now constitute <10% of all funds we raised to date so don't switch horses to argue we are VC-controlled).
- Thorentis 7y ago
  So being fired for holding a particular view is okay now? Regardless of your views, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of corporations having a de facto role in enforcing public morality, through who they chose to hire and fire. People okay with this have obviously learned nothing from the days where you could be fired for being gay. Other way around? Nothing wrong with it according to some people. This whole trend is worrying. Having said that - corporations do have a right to hire and fire who they please. But it is important to at least acknowledge "cancel culture" as a legitimate and immature trend that is happening. Often the pressure to fire somebody comes from the outside, not from within.
__jal 7y ago
Conservative != bigot/anti-gay. We do have a brood of reactionaries attempting to blur that distinction like they always do, but there are plenty of conservatives who do not share that particular bias.
- Thorentis 7y ago
  Bigot: a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions. (http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/bigot http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/bigot) I have met plenty of bigots on both sides of politics. But immediately trying to call me out on labeling this man a conservative by saying he is actually a bigot is, ironically, bigotry itself.
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    __jal's comment was ambiguous. I think they may have been saying the opposite: that not all conservatives are bigots, and that it's unfair on conservatives to brand bigotry as conservatism.

core-questions 7y ago

He got cancelled for not supporting gay marriage. Nothing he has actually personally done or will do matters in this new moral calculus.

cdmckay 7y ago
He didn’t not support gay marriage, he actively gave money to oppose it. That’s a little different.
- core-questions 7y ago
  It doesn't matter - it's legal, protected political speech in donation form. There's nothing wrong with having differing opinions about things; you can disagree as much as you like and donate as much as you want to counter it.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    You're right, it absolutely is. The corollary to this is that no one has to hire him/work with him; they're allowed to fire him for his legally-protected speech. I don't agree with how it was handled either, but we must protect their freedom to act as they choose as much as Mr. Eich's freedom to speak as he chooses.
    - core-questions 7y ago
      Oh, sure, until it ends up in the situation where you have to prove your perfect ideological allegiance to the Party in order to have employment. It's already the case that you can't publicly post things without getting dox'd and fired for a lot of opinions that were 100% the norm not that long ago. You may call it progress, but the progression is towards totalitarian liberalism; your gay marriage is really not going to make that experience that much better once they find some place where you're not faithful enough. For example, what if you're a white gay male?
    - BrendanEich 7y ago

xmprt 7y ago

Creating a language 20 years ago doesn't mean you're responsible for everything the language produced. If javascript didn't exist something different would have taken it's place and produced just as much value.

Eikon 7y ago
Not to mention the original Javascript was pretty much only good at making snow animations on your website when winter was coming.
BrendanEich 7y ago
Microsoft tried with VBScript, but JS was fit enough to survive, and no one wanted a second language after it. No point in speculating, we know JS matters. Asserting it could have been Blub means nothing. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155. Also, I kept working on JS, while doing other things. I worked on JS in both Netscape and Ecma TC39 through late 1997, then co-founded mozilla.org with jwz and others. For mozilla.org I was chief architect, but I still kept working on the Mozilla JS engine, SpiderMonkey, adding features such as getters and setters that became important in 2005 due to use by Microsoft's Live Maps. Live Maps emulated the IE DOM in Firefox via those same getter and setter extensions that I'd added over the years since 1997. In IE, Live Maps of course used the native DOM. This left Safari and Opera failing unless they reverse engineered the getter and setter extensions from SpiderMonkey in Firefox quickly. It took them about a week, and then Live Maps worked in Safari and Opera too. This shows how quickly browsers can evolve, based on innovation in just one browser's engine, even in the wake of a monopoly period of stagnation.

samantohermes 7y ago

HN itself wasn't affected by JS in the life of HN readers, LOL

BrendanEich 7y ago

If it wasn't obvious from my tweet, in a thread on "cancel culture", many valley investors were scared of being mobbed if they invested in me.

paul7986 7y ago
Yes once learning the back story via the comments here it's clearer/obvious. Maybe I should delete my comment too...seems a lot of HN members in this thread did the same once you popped in ...lol