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Brendan Eich on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]
- irockzz 6y agoNetflix isn't working with brave browser? Anyone else?
- BrendanEich 6y agoYou may have missed or dismissed the prompt to enable WideVine (DRM). Please check brave://settings/?search=widevine.
- gabrielsroka 6y agoOnly on HN will you find the creator of JavaScript, Firefox, and Brave helping an end user troubleshoot. Thanks, Brendan!
- roenxi 6y agoJust watching the start of the part on BAT tokens (2:20 - 2:22) - I have a prediction. Brendan Eich is going to be attacked by Google somehow for something, maybe through lobbying in Congress around cryptocurrencies. These ideas are a credible threat to their advertising revenue.
- echelon 6y agoGoogle is under attack from all sides. Antitrust scrutiny at home, regulations from Australia and Europe. Apple anonymizing iPhone users. Brave picking up steam... Is their moat as wide as they think it is? They don't exactly have a healthy revenue diversity.
- simias 6y agoThey own android and chrome, that seems like a very good moat for the time being.
- phreeza 6y agoDo you want to put a timeframe on the prediction to make it falsifiable?
- roenxi 6y agoNot particularly, no. I'm not going to track it, and nobody else is in a position to. If anyone were going to try, they should rethink their priorities. If you like I can say 10 years but that doesn't advance the conversation in any meaningful way.
- mupuff1234 6y agoI believe Google has something pretty similar called Google contributor, not sure what's it's status.
- BrendanEich 6y agoNot similar, and it flopped. It requires the user to pay, for one. We pay users. See https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/706597283219963904 https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/706597283219963904.
- ibeckermayer 6y agoHey Brendan, I bought $500 worth of BAT a few days ago under the impression that line would go up, but thus far line has gone down. Think I should sell? Or is it suicide stack time?
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- gigatexal 6y agoI really, really enjoyed this interview. Such an illuminating history of JavaScript and such.
- christocracy 6y agoSeatbelts weren’t a thing in the first cars. People weren’t thinking long-term about how fast these things might one day go.
- galfarragem 6y agoI really like Lex Fridman podcast because his guests don't feel under threat. In the end they open up more than if he had asked loaded questions "a la journalist". Probably this is the main reason why so many illustrious guests accept his invitation.
- tomComb 6y agoYes, but he is poor at challenging his guests and I think that is a valuable part of a good interview. I enjoyed the recent interview with a prominent American objectivist (Ayne Rand) but some of the stuff he said really need to be challenged and since it wasn't we didn't the opportunity to really be convinced.
- jasode 6y ago>Yes, but he is poor at challenging his guests and I think that is a valuable part of a good interview. The biggest part of a "good interview" is getting the guest to say "yes" to being interviewed. The issue that people overlook with "challenging questions" is that the guest must agree to be interviewed in the first place. If the interview is denied, then the "lack of challenging questions" is a moot point because the guest never made himself/herself available to be made uncomfortable. In other words, let's say Lex starts out of the gate 3 years ago with a hard-hitting style. This instantly increases his rejection rate and decreases his guest count. Then later guests he tries to pitch to also look at those previous challenging interviews which is distasteful to them and they also decline the invitations creating a snowball effect. You can't replay history with (as of today) 160 podcasts and say they should have been more challenging -- because we wouldn't even have the 160 podcasts to complain about. Yes, journalists like Kara Swisher like to challenge/ambush/provoke/etc their guests but not everybody wants to be interviewed by her. See the chicken & egg issue? Lex isn't poor at challenging questions. In reality, he's building a body of work that solidifies his reputation for interviews in a friendly conversational style that doesn't threaten the guest. This reputation attracts many types of guests that a bigger journalist like Kara Swisher can't get.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
- lordgrenville 6y agoGreat interview, what a brilliant guy. As an aside, I wish there was a simple/standard way to link to podcast episodes.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> I wish there was a simple/standard way to link to podcast episodes Seems to me the way it should work is that a podcast has its own website with a URL for each episode, but makes the episodes available through many different platforms. The indieweb folks have a term for this sort of thing, POSSE, Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. [0] Many podcasts upload to YouTube, which naturally supports linking to a specific time in an episode. Related: it's a pity so many podcasts seem to view it as a their duty to obscure the URLs of the audio files. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- adolph 6y agoHere you go https://lexfridman.com/brendan-eich/ https://lexfridman.com/brendan-eich/
- jessaustin 6y agoMuch better link! Mods, please substitute this one at the top of the page.
- adolph 6y agoAs I listen to this podcast I think there should be several HN threads due to its range: - Browser and JS history - Adtech and trying better with Brave - Has SV run it’s course
- blackrock 6y agoThis was a pretty good interview. Really wish he didn’t create the === implicit equivalence function. And made JavaScript stricter from the beginning.
- BrendanEich 6y agoIt's == that has implicit conversion semantics. === was the backward-compatible (because extension into formerly illegal syntax, which is reserved to future versions) operator we added that does no implicit conversions. As I said, in the beginning (Mocha in ten days), == was just as strict if operand types differ: false result. The lesson is to say "no" by default and reflex to RFEs, consider only on repeated request and be willing to find what they truly want that's not a hole in the head ;-). The other sloppiness in JS is `var obj = {prop:42}; obj.prep` where you get undefined instead of a thrown exception (as you would get in Python). That was due to 10 day rush and little time after for core language work leaving 0 time to add try-catch-finally.
- leoh 6y agoWhat was Tabb's contribution to JS?
- BrendanEich 6y agoDo you mean Lloyd Tabb? He was part of a four-person acquihire from Borland. He didn't do anything for JS, but Ken Smith from that team, after the ten days in May, did do the port we all agreed was the right solution: java.util.Date from Java to C. This left us with the same Y2K bugs, 0-based month numbers, and other warts that Java had then. Lloyd suggested `with` after the ten days, also the String.prototype.{anchor,bold,...}() methods, and I added them in the same spirit that I made == sloppy on request from others in the ex-Borland gang of four (Bill Turpin, I think). I should not have agreed to any of these. Lloyd can take credit for them. The String methods are the least offensive but not that useful, now-archaic. Someone (I think jevering) wrote a dishonest Quora answer claiming Lloyd wrote an engine and I used or benefited from his code. That's false. Mitchell Baker, who was a Netscape lawyer at the time, came on Quora along with others from Netscape management to back up my testimony. It's funny people want credit for JS when boosting their resumes (Lloyd did great with Looker and as far as I know doesn't need money), while I get blame still. As I should: again, I'm the idiot who agreed to these Borland-flavored requests: sloppy ==, `with`, HTML helper string methods. My blame and credit, mine! But Lloyd is welcome to a share of the blame if he wants. :-D
- superbcarrot 6y agoI would love to know what Lex is doing to get the guests that he's had on. It's an impressive list of people and he certainly isn't attracting them with his charisma or interviewing skills.
- ianai 6y agoWatch where he interviews his dad. Connections, I think.
- dogma1138 6y agoI would think he is rather well respected and well connected in the academic and “corporate R&D” world. He isn’t the best interviewer because he doesn’t have the experience yet but the podcasts are very good because he gives the guests an open stage, he is never adversarial and he never seem to push the interview into a specific direction. Overall it wouldn’t surprise me if many of the guests would just enjoy to sit down and talk to someone who is without sounding too elitists a smart as they are, being able to reach to a lot of other people is just a bonus.
- TOMDM 6y agoBecause he doesn't have the experience yet? He's been running the podcast for two and a half years, and this episode makes 160. How much experience do you reckon it takes to get "good" at interviewing?
- bob33212 6y agoSome people don't like his style. I don't think they will ever think he is that good. Someone like Oprah would be considered to be far more talented at driving the conversation where she wants it to be. Personally I a huge fan of Lex, I think because the people and topics are what I'm interested in.
- type0 6y agoSo much for his style that it makes his podcasts hit or miss (depending on the topic). For some personalities his conversational demagoguery feels nauseating, for others it fits the conversation. In my opinion Sean Carroll (Mindscape) has much more consistent conversational theme that borders on philosophical but still makes it engaging for the listener, where Lex often misses the red thread and rambles in unrelated territory. I don't think his podcasts are bad, just inconsistent, and thinking of how many he manages to do doesn't actually make it that strange. In order to improve Lex needs to curate his ramblings better and learn to read the motivations of his guests.
- TOMDM 6y agoI've found myself enjoying these less since Lex rebranded the podcast. I can't quite put my finger on why and I haven't watched the previous few. Is it worth jumping back in for another try?
- blueboo 6y agoYea, there’s definitely been a decline. Conspicuous injection of Lex talking about himself, poetry/love, and (sigh) cancel culture. All feels awfully Joe Rogan-wannabe-ish. The MIT AI podcast => AI podcast => Lex Podcast worked out great for him, though...but it feels kind of gross. There are some fascinating guests, but it feels like the content is good in spite of Lex and his “journey”.
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- ironmagma 6y agoThe very act of talking about cancel culture is a decline? What?
- monopoledance 6y agoHe is not talking about cancel culture. He is taking this very overloaded term as premise, as self-evident "fact" for the degeneration of academia and "the public discourse", to pave the way for injecting his super deep ideology about salvation by Love, Elon and Ayn Rand. I am not sure, if you are familiar with Joscha Bach, but he once said something about something, and people think he's super intelligent! None of these podcasts talking critical about cancel culture. There is a far, far better (critical) take on it within "marxist" culture, e.g. from Natalie Wynn. If Lex wants to talk cancel culture, why not invite her for example? She is an academic, smart and wrote and talked extensively about it. But that would be a little too open-minded wouldn't it? [§] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8 [$] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us
- charliebrownau 6y agoThey might find out the true number is 275k , not 6m Check out * podcasts * Bitchute * Gab/minds/alt tech If Jews have lied about - Non white immergration - Equal outcome - fait currency + Interest loans - Anti whitism - Anti Male - Anti Merit/hard work - Feminism - Diversity - LGBT - Globl homo (Depopulation) - Trans (real name - mental illness + Mulation + Brainwashing) - Multi culturalism (real name Multi racial) Is it really a suprise they lied about - ethnic nationalism - Hilter - WWII - Death count to guilt trip whites into funding their corruption and illegal formation of the state of israel
- mjgs 6y agoI really liked this episode. I think Brendan Eich has got to be one of my favourite people to hear anecdotes about early web history. He was around at some pivotal moments, was in with the business side of things but also super technical. He’s also just very good at talking, he never appears to talk himself into a corner, somehow always avoids getting into the weeds, there’s a lucidity to all his answers that’s somehow very impressive. I wonder how much preparation he puts into his interviews. As for Lex, personally I really like his style. He operates at a different pace to many of the people he’s interviewing, but I find this often enables him to see interesting parallels and analysis. It’s not always perfect, and maybe there’s room for improvement, though it gives the whole show an authenticity that it might not otherwise have if it were too polished. I feel like his style works very well with all the guests he has on. They all seem to get on very well, which has a massive positive effect on how the guest interacts. Sure he has some prepared questions, but he also goes off piste quite a bit, and when he gets back to the prepared questions, I generally find they are well researched and very relevant. I’d also like to know how he gets so many great guests on the show.
- galfarragem 6y agoBill Gates, Alan Kay and Steve Wozniak would fit perfectly in this format. Other missing guests (yet) - from the top of my mind - Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and even Mark Zuckerberg.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoI usually prefer to listen to slightly less famous people. The really big names usually are too used to public speaking and not saying anything wrong that they come across as too slick and guarded.
- tomthe 6y agoYes, but if someone with a big name says something stupid, that is interesting because of who says it. If some nobody says something stupid, it is just a podcast.
- typon 6y agoIs worse really better though? Imagine C was designed the MIT way. Sure it would have taken a few more years, but maybe we could have avoided the billions of damages in security bugs and productivity loss. I think worse is better if you want to win the Silicon Valley race, but not if you want to design something useful for society.
- ZitchDog 6y agoThe problem is that something worse will always get made more quickly and gain traction.
- BrendanEich 6y agoThe "gain traction" part requires more care to assert, it's not just something worse getting made that ensures this. Bad is just bad, and so sometimes worse is not better ;-). What RPG described was good-enough but worse in New Jersey vs. MIT sense, not the cathedral or Fabergé egg: the farmer-hack from Murray Hill. Good enough + "Who's on first" and iteration win.
- bsdetector 6y agoAda was designed a few years before C and it could do much more than C and without the problems you mentioned. So we don't have to wonder at all, it would have turned out exactly the way it did and the reason is because things like undefined behavior, zero terminated strings, null pointers, etc have positive utility underappreciated by academics.
- csb6 6y agoThat’s not really a good comparison. The reason C has been so prevalent is because it was used to make Unix, which was distributed widely for decades, and because it was relatively simple to write compilers for it/port it to new platforms. Ada doesn’t exist in the same context; compilers were expensive and not widely distributed, there wasn’t a free, open-source compiler until GNAT in 1995, and Ada was never the default systems language for any widely distributed OS. I mean the circumstances could not be more different. If C had been designed as a safer language (with even just small improvements that would not have been hard to implement), it would still be widely used and there would be fewer security problems associated with it. It is the Just World Fallacy [0] to assume that the most widespread language became so on its merits and not based on its historical context. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
- blackrock 6y agoHe said he had originally wanted to implement Scheme as the scripting language. But was over-ruled by his managers, and forced to make it look like Java. I wonder how things would’ve turned out differently, had he implemented Scheme instead. Lisp in the browser.
- AzzieElbab 6y agoHe pretty much answered that. If they were going for ‘perfect’ we’d ended up using some form of vb from ms instead of anything from Netscape
- blackrock 6y agoThis really adds nothing to the conversation. Nor does it provide any further insight into my pondering of what if.
- BrendanEich 6y agoI think it's a good point because Scheme was not standardized in practice or widely taught in 1995. So whatever happened, it's likely MS would have prevailed with VBScript, which was a real threat and did ship in IE3-4 (I forget when they dropped it).
- skissane 6y agoIt would be an interesting parallel universe to visit, where the Web runs on VBScript instead of JS. Would we have had node.vb? VBScript, the syntax is aesthetically less pleasing, but there is no reason why it couldn't do anything that JavaScript can do, if more verbosely. (Of course, the semantics are inferior as well, but if VBScript had taken off, its semantics would likely have been improved at some point.)
- AzzieElbab 6y agoI count myself lucky because I don’t really know vbscript. Does legacy vb have a notion of first order functions and async?
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- mongol 6y agoI enjoyed this. The only thing I was missing was to hear Eich's view of his departure from Mozilla. It's absence from the podcast made me wonder if leaving questions about that out was a condition or request from Eich.
- BrendanEich 6y agoI cannot comment on anything about my exit. You should not assume this is my choice, or assume anything really. Sorry, can't say anything specific at all.
- bsaul 6y agoFunny how i only now discover the inventor of JavaScript is behind the brave browser. I’ve seen a few stories about brave on HN, but it always looked like a semi-scammy project. This adds a lot to the credibility of that projet...
- tomComb 6y agoThat's because it is a scammy project. I don't think that creating a popular technology should grant you a pass on the ethical issues of future endeavors.
- BrendanEich 6y agoI would not want anyone using Brave because they blindly trust me. On the other hand, you libeling Brave without any evidence (to avoid rehashing, onlookers should see https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1360780527100338177 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1360780527100338177 and do their own research) reflects poorly only on you.
- tomComb 6y agoThe person I was responding to had already read about the issues - I was confirming their existing impression and, more important, addressing the fact that they were putting them aside for a reason i didn't agree with. The fact that you would attack me without understanding the thread (and use it as an opportunity to divert people to your Twitter) reflects badly on you.
- BrendanEich 6y agoI don't see anything above justifying your "scammy" word, which is libelous thrown without back-up and therefore does reflect badly on you. But please, go on: justify it. I'll help by citing the dictionary definition of "scam": Noun: a dishonest scheme; a fraud. "fraud": "wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain." Also, as the tweet I linked above said, we didn't profit from either the fast-fixed error of showing unverified creators as being tipable with our token grants to users (we don't make money recirculating our own grants) or the refgate case (we turned off that future-share-of-trading-commission affiliate revenue with Binance). Hanlon's razor explains these blunders without jumping to scam or fraud, which is a crime we have to fight on the Brave Ads front, so I take it seriously. Should someone not use Brave on account of these two mistakes? Not for me to say; no browser is perfect. But they were not scams or frauds, and we fixed code and design processes to avoid anything like them in the future.
- dano 6y agoThis is a great interview. The early history of exposure to the Internet at the beginning is exactly as I remember. Brendan is a brilliant man and good conversationalist. He's has the ability to make tough technology simpler, adoptable, and do the right thing for the consumer. I recall several positive encounters with Brendan over the past 35 years, including help over Usenet on an NFS issue while he was at SGI. His impact has been tremendous.
- staticelf 6y agoI really like Brendan, I think it's sad that he was let go from Mozilla and I switched to Brave as soon as that was possible.
- jonoon4484 6y agoI wish they could have gotten into the Brave/BAT stuff sooner. Also, you don't have to be an apologist for JS. You created something, while not perfect, is awesome. Onward and Upward!
- paulryanrogers 6y agoWhy sooner?
- Kurtose 6y agoThree hours well spent. Never a dull moment in the browser business. From downward—funargs and twinkies to browser wars and bitcoin.
- gurumeditations 6y agoAll you need to know is Brendan Eich is a homophobe.
- mind_half_full 6y ago+1