13 ms·

Marshall Brain has died

335 points by bsagdiyev 2y ago

evilDagmar 2y ago
In other news, yet another website fails at understanding that a hard redirect prior to a 404--instead of just issuing a 404 in the first place--is an idiotic practice that breaks browser history.
justinclift 2y ago
The link seems to be broken. It's just showing a 404 error.
michaelcampbell 2y ago
Well, damn. Some time before HowStuffWorks, he was an instructor for our newly minted development team teaching us all how to do C++/Motif programming in a reasonable way in 1993. For #reasons I was the only person on the team available to help him out with getting our development environment set up and we worked together for the better part of a day on Sun SparcStations running Solaris. Later in the year we were both in Manhattan and decided to meet under the WTC towers to head to lunch. He got there a little early, stepped off the base of one of the World Trade Center towers, and knowing the length of one side of one tower and the number of floors, estimated how many Zebulon NC's would fit in the 2 towers (Zebulon was where he either lived at the time or where he was born.) I've forgotten the value he came up with, but the mental math there amused me that he'd bother to try. Super neat guy.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Sad to hear. This is an amazing resource that many curious people have grown up with. It alleges here that he committed suicide. It makes me extra sad that someone who gifted others with so much found themselves in that place. Dang - deserves a black bar?
lwhalen 2y ago
He was also the author of https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna, a sci-fi story that has stuck with me for years.
- ryoshu 2y ago
  Very relevant in the age of smart glasses for workers.
  - chgs 2y ago
    I was think about the software some companies use to “monitor productivity”
raphman 2y ago
Duplicate (different submitted link, however): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42222387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42222387
monocasa 2y ago
I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read. Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system. The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- simpaticoder 2y ago
  Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existing. Maybe an asteroid or a caldera explosion? In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy.
  - monocasa 2y ago
    Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
    - bhhaskin 2y ago
      Well for starters having the technology for prefect recycling.
      - monocasa 2y ago
        I interpreted it had perfect enough for their goals rather than breaking any thermodynamic laws or something.
bckr 2y ago
Oh, this is very sad. I was really inspired by his essays and stories when I was 17. I wonder what was happening with him.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  > Marshall Brain died inside his office Wednesday on N.C. State’s centennial campus. >While the university would not confirm any details related to his death, sources close to Brain said he died by suicide. :( Marshall was a frequent poster in subreddits such as /r/collapse. https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain/ https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain/ I don’t think it’s hard to see what things concerned him. I think it’s important for all of us to realize that no matter how we think the world is going there is still brightness in the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through his contributions to society.
  - bckr 2y ago
    I wondered. How dark.
FlynnCruse 2y ago
Marshall was one of my closest Mentors through college. Truly heartbreaking to hear of his passing. I wish his family; wife and kids, the best through this tragic period. He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him. Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, a real-life legend.
- panoply220 2y ago
  Same! I owe so much to him. Heartbreaking and forever grateful for the time we got to spend together.
BadHumans 2y ago
Given the amount of dystopian content he was posting on his website and subreddit lately, he seemed to be despairing quite a bit regarding the direction of society.
- schiffern 2y ago
  I noticed that. He made several subreddits, here's a (likely incomplete) list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224139 His commentary near the end of this interview is also telling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o An optimist in (increasingly) a cynic's world. Be at peace, Marshall Brain.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Do you have an approximate time point for that comment? Brain makes a comment beginning at about the 30 minute point, I'm listening to that now, though it doesn't seem to match your description. The bit a couple of minutes later (32m) beginning "I have four children now in college..." seems closer. I have to comment that the song about how bright the future was (by Timbuk3) was absolutely satiric and ironic, though that point is often missed. As is often the case, in music and otherwise (Beastie Boys "Fight for your Right", Bruce Springstein "Born in the USA", Neal Stephenson Snow Crash & the Metaverse, etc., etc.).
    - schiffern 2y ago
      I can do, but I warn you it's long. Be careful what you wish for! YAFIYGI. :-) I didn't use a direct timecode link because 1.) it's not really all in one place, and 2.) I feel the entire interview is almost a microcosm of his thought. But if you insist... -- @12:20: (on climate change) "We know we have to do something, but how do you get an entire planet of people to decide on a direction and start doing it together? We have terrible examples of it, like WWII, where the entire planet marched to destroy each-other. It was horrible! Think how much time and effort and people and materials got spun up for WWII. If we can do that for climate change, climate change would be done! It would be well on its way to being better than it is now, where we're just on a path to doom essentially." @14:30 (asked about Manna) "We would have hoped that we would have somehow gotten enlightened -- I don't want to go political here, but -- you gotta look back on the past five years and just wonder, 'what the heck happened?' The dystopian side of it seems right on target, right on track for... something. Because people are just getting poorer and poorer in the United States. The body politic is just getting crushed, and you would like there to be a better way. I don't have a great..." @16:50: (on privacy in a Manna-like world) "The problem with privacy is that you end up with a whole bunch of people storming the Capitol of the United States, and you have to do this enormous amount of work to figure out who they were, and some of them you don't even know now. I don't think they caught even half the people, and very few of the people at the upper echelons, it's undetermined, but it's likely they're all gonna escape. Because they're able to do stuff, they're able to hide -- right now we're seeing all this stuff about people erasing their text messages in the Secret Service, and now in the Department of Defense, and now you get what happen on the internet where these anonymous trolls are just coming out of nowhere and saying whatever they want even if it's not true, and you get bots on -- I don't know what the percentage is, but let's say half of Twitter is not even people. All of that gets eliminated if it's all non-anonymous." -- (and now, we get to the parts I was thinking about in my original post) -- @24:18: "The blessing and the curse of that [Doomsday] book is that it's so depressing. Imagine writing it! ... It still effects me today. Having gone that deep on that many topics is hard. But what I'm doing now is writing about climate change. That's just a little part of the doomsday book. And it's so hard, because we're looking at an apocalypse possibility here if we don't change. How do you get all of humanity to change -- you mention the profit motive -- in the context of giant corporations who don't want to change, and have 1,000 reasons not to? Climate change is a hard thing." @28:14 "this week, there is so much bad news on the climate front, it is really... if you're paying attention it is really hard to see how bad off we are." @30:00 (on causes for optimism) "[long pause] Well if you're in the United States, Kansas voted yesterday... to protect abortion in Kansas. And if you look at all the states around Kansas, they're all now locking down. So if you're in favor of abortion being a right that women have in their reproductive space, then that was a tiny bit of good news. A fundamental right was taken away from women by the Supreme Court, and that was a tiny victory. It showed that you could get people out to think about things in a rational way. I found that vote yesterday uplifting. If I sat here long enough I could probably think of some others, but that's the first thing that comes to mind. There's just so much awful stuff!!" @32:05: "I have four children who are all in college. And I teach in a university, I have 100 students a semester. I know them, I interview all my students. It is hard to grow up in a society with this much stuff roiling around. This absolutely was not part of my college experience. The future looked bright! There was even a song about how bright the future looked. College now and college then are on different planets. There's so much stuff our 20 year olds are thinking about. You just rattled off a list: from the economy, to jobs, to the climate, to fundamental rights, to will we even have a democracy in America in two years? And you either embrace it -- I got my both arms wrapped around it trying to see the whole picture! -- or you just turn off. You know, don't watch the news." -- Sad to see the darkness take such a bright light. In his honor, we should all strive to hold something of Marshall Brain's optimism in ourselves. Thanks for reading.
willio58 2y ago
Very sad, just a reminder that success doesn’t translate to happiness. The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast but no longer owned by How stuff works. I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod, repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  "success doesn’t translate to happiness." I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)
nisten 2y ago
Spent hours in highschool printing stuff out of howstuffworks.com because dialup at home was too slow until we got dsl :( May he rest in peace.
gothink 2y ago
Wow, this is very tragic. I was actually just reflecting on the influence Howstuffworks.com had on my life and interests. Quick story: My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago. I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.
- schiffern 2y ago
  Marshall Brain also wrote many programming books in the 90s era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications
- arresin 2y ago
  This makes me nostalgic for the small internet.
- ilayn 2y ago
  Same experience for me. I was able to buy my first drumset from the money I got for making a PHP+MySQL+HTML website for someone (also done all in notepad). I did not know anything about computers but I needed to buy a drumset. And that page actually got me going about how HTML works. I still remember their animations about car differential which were magical.
yarg 2y ago
As someone who has pulled himself back from suicidality, I absolutely abhor the expression "died by suicide". If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole). I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  I've had similar experiences, and I have exactly the opposite beliefs. Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital functions of your existence until you can no longer survive. For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts, but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the things that trigger my own chronic depression. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41113032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41113032
  - opello 2y ago
    I found the linked, and subsequently linked, posts very insightful, and entirely relatable, thank you.
yrral 2y ago
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds). I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website. Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill. Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- arcanemachiner 2y ago
  Loved that website. Its intro to C programming was how I got into programming.
- slaucon 2y ago
  I had the same experience, as I’m sure many others did. It’s easy to forget now how much rarer it was to find high quality and engaging educational content on the internet back then. Howstuffworks got me interested in so many different things, and exploring the articles was a lovely way to spend the time as a kid.
- sd8f9iu 2y ago
  Same story for me. I got into electronics as a kid, and he had articles on how components such as the capacitor worked[1]. It opened up a whole new world for me. Sad news to hear. [1] Which is still incredibly up: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm
goodmunky 2y ago
He was 63 and wrote this a few years ago, “You’ve Had Your Turn –The Case for Euthanizing Everyone at Age 65” https://marshallbrain.com/youve-had-your-turn-the-case-for-euthanizing-everyone-at-age-65 https://marshallbrain.com/youve-had-your-turn-the-case-for-e...
- bufordtwain 2y ago
  That is a very weird and troubling article.
- rafram 2y ago
  His premise seems to be that life past 65 averages out to suffering and a slow decline toward death, which I think many active and happy older people (who don’t wish to be killed!) would argue is very mistaken. Misanthropic environmentalism isn’t environmentalism at all. Environmentalism designed by humans should be good for humans, not give them scheduled death dates.
- ororroro 2y ago
  This is likely satire along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal. The main giveaways are the directness of the language and the time of writing (on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals).
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals They were? I remember a lot of awful stuff about those years, but this isn't one of them. I remember people making somewhat mean-spirited but understandable comments about (some) older people getting killed off by Covid due to their own actions (refusal to take the threat seriously and take precautions, leading them to catch it, and then have much worse outcomes due to the fact that the disease was much more deadly for unhealthy and older people).
    - cldellow 2y ago
Horffupolde 2y ago
What happens with domains, content, etc now? Is there a systematic way of preparing and securing online services for death?
- xyst 2y ago
  archive.org|.ph
panoply220 2y ago
I shared this on the other HN thread, but I spent some time revisiting the HowStuffWorks c 2001, and highly recommend as a catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was: https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffworks.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffwo...
StephenSmith 2y ago
I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives. I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic. RIP Marshall. You were loved.
- AlphaWeaver 2y ago
  Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me. He will be dearly missed.
joemazerino 2y ago
Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
- las_balas_tres 2y ago
  What guard rails could anyone with an unrestrained high IQ possibly have?
  - LinuxAmbulance 2y ago
    A social network with people who's voices could serve as a check against one's internal mental state of the world around them going out of sync with the real one. There's the old joke about how several different blind men perceive an elephant differently, but that's not too far off from how we perceive the world around us. Marshall clearly thought things were getting significantly worse towards the end of his life. What if that perception stemmed from a poorly selected input that was never challenged by any other person's perception of reality? For example; "There is no point to living after 65" - when there's plenty of 65+ year old people who enjoy life and contribute to the world around them. My grandparents contributed significantly to my existence when they were older than 65. If they'd both passed away at 65, my existence would be far poorer for it. It's important to have people in our lives that help us keep our perception of reality from spinning off into dark versions that don't accurately represent actual reality.
  - joemazerino 2y ago
    Faith.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mandmandam 2y ago
  Bit premature to use the e word. You don't know what he was going through, what his medical status was, or even have certainty how he died. And all of us, even the von Neumanns and the Ramanujans, have restraints and guard rails.
pinkmuffinere 2y ago
If it weren’t for howstuffworks, I suspect I wouldn’t be an engineer. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Rip Marshall.
dyauspitr 2y ago
This is so sad, I loved this man. I wonder if the current dystopian road the US is going down had anything to do with it. Rest in peace, Marshall.
thimkerbell 2y ago
[flagged]
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  Say what?
  - thimkerbell 2y ago
    That's unclear?
BobbyTables2 2y ago
Can’t help but feel he got screwed when the HowStuffWorks website was sold for 250x what he got just a few years earlier. Aside from his futuristic works, his Win32 API book was extremely good and my first introduction to Windows programming. It’s our loss to loose such a talented human being.
TZubiri 2y ago
Hey that's how I learned C RIP
slfnflctd 2y ago
A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off. Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized several points I still consider hugely significant. For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would consider honest amongst each other.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  It does contain a bit of a false-dilemma though: It asserts that the only "real" form of god involves a specific flavor of Christian evangelical prayer-interventionist deity, and that the only other option is (B) no god(s) exist at all. I'm very much in favor of showing how silly or self-contradictory (A) is, but it is fundamentally unsound to jump from that to asserting (B) is true.
- qgin 2y ago
  Wow, I never realized that Manna and Amputees were both created by him. Both of those had a big impact on my thinking and have stuck with me since I read them.
- nashashmi 2y ago
  Obviously someone who has come to atheism is not going to speak well of prayer. The guy ends each section with more questions than answers. And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. And maybe even what your purpose is. In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ...” meaning his guide will only take him to further darkness and misguidance.
ziofill 2y ago
Very sorry to hear that Marshall died :( I just went on howstuffworks.com and I see two articles on astrology on the home page. For real? I thought it was a science-based website.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  It definitely was when Brain was involved.
zackangelo 2y ago
So grateful that HSW existed when I was younger. As a teenager, I couldn't afford to get the timing belt and water pump replaced on my car so I had to figure out how to do it myself. I bought the service manual from AutoZone but I needed something to closer to an introduction to even be begin to understand it. He seemed to love explaining how car engines work and that series of articles was exactly what I needed at that time to get started. RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.
dodongobongo 2y ago
Marshall taught one of my classes at NCSU when I was there ten years ago. He was a little eccentric but super nice. I remember that he said if we made a website, the “natural exploratory pressures” of the internet would find it, so all we had to do was have good content. I wonder how much of that still holds, but it’s a good memory. Hope his family finds peace.
mulhoon 2y ago
TIL about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo from reading about Marshall.
pgl 2y ago
He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option). What a loss. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o [2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-ebook/dp/B007HQH67U https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-... [3] https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna Edit: Fixed "free to download from Amazon" - it's not
grupthink 2y ago
I loved his articles and stories. Hopefully his sites are archived before being taken down.
- pabs3 2y ago
  ArchiveTeam are working on it, his main site is saved by ArchiveBot: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/?q=marshallbrain.com https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/?q=marshallbr... He seems to have a lot of domains, if you know of any, please post them here.
thr0waway001 2y ago
Oh man. Sad to hear that. I remember in the early '2000s before Wikipedia printing out those tutorials to read before I'd take these long bus rides out of town to work at the meat (slaughter) plant. I was trying to educate myself so I would not have to work at the meat plant for long. That job kinda sucked but at least it got my mind straight. I was debating whether or not to save up for college. Working there for a year let me save up and to convince me that I'd rather go to school to try to not work a blue collar job. I read a few of those How Stuff Works articles printed on paper at the public library on those long hour bus rides. They'd keep my spirits up.
- panoply220 2y ago
  Wow, thanks for sharing this story! As a long time friend of Marshall’s it’s fascinating to hear folks share their encounters with his work. What are you up to now?
  - thr0waway001 2y ago
    Went to University to do a math major with a minor in economics. My condolences about Marshall. Very thankful for his work.
chakintosh 2y ago
Websites that refresh instead of returning you to the previous page (HN in this case) should be nuked off the internet. Microsfot does that A LOT on their support forums.
mmmlinux 2y ago
obituaries deleted?

335 points by bsagdiyev 2y ago

In other news, yet another website fails at understanding that a hard redirect prior to a 404--instead of just issuing a 404 in the first place--is an idiotic practice that breaks browser history.

justinclift 2y ago

The link seems to be broken. It's just showing a 404 error.

michaelcampbell 2y ago

Well, damn. Some time before HowStuffWorks, he was an instructor for our newly minted development team teaching us all how to do C++/Motif programming in a reasonable way in 1993. For #reasons I was the only person on the team available to help him out with getting our development environment set up and we worked together for the better part of a day on Sun SparcStations running Solaris. Later in the year we were both in Manhattan and decided to meet under the WTC towers to head to lunch. He got there a little early, stepped off the base of one of the World Trade Center towers, and knowing the length of one side of one tower and the number of floors, estimated how many Zebulon NC's would fit in the 2 towers (Zebulon was where he either lived at the time or where he was born.) I've forgotten the value he came up with, but the mental math there amused me that he'd bother to try. Super neat guy.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Sad to hear. This is an amazing resource that many curious people have grown up with. It alleges here that he committed suicide. It makes me extra sad that someone who gifted others with so much found themselves in that place. Dang - deserves a black bar?

lwhalen 2y ago

He was also the author of https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna, a sci-fi story that has stuck with me for years.

ryoshu 2y ago
Very relevant in the age of smart glasses for workers.
- chgs 2y ago
  I was think about the software some companies use to “monitor productivity”

raphman 2y ago

Duplicate (different submitted link, however): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42222387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42222387

monocasa 2y ago

I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read. Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system. The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

simpaticoder 2y ago
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existing. Maybe an asteroid or a caldera explosion? In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy.
- monocasa 2y ago
  Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
  - bhhaskin 2y ago
    Well for starters having the technology for prefect recycling.
    - monocasa 2y ago
      I interpreted it had perfect enough for their goals rather than breaking any thermodynamic laws or something.

bckr 2y ago

Oh, this is very sad. I was really inspired by his essays and stories when I was 17. I wonder what was happening with him.

Mistletoe 2y ago
> Marshall Brain died inside his office Wednesday on N.C. State’s centennial campus. >While the university would not confirm any details related to his death, sources close to Brain said he died by suicide. :( Marshall was a frequent poster in subreddits such as /r/collapse. https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain/ https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain/ I don’t think it’s hard to see what things concerned him. I think it’s important for all of us to realize that no matter how we think the world is going there is still brightness in the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through his contributions to society.
- bckr 2y ago
  I wondered. How dark.

FlynnCruse 2y ago

Marshall was one of my closest Mentors through college. Truly heartbreaking to hear of his passing. I wish his family; wife and kids, the best through this tragic period. He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him. Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, a real-life legend.

panoply220 2y ago
Same! I owe so much to him. Heartbreaking and forever grateful for the time we got to spend together.

BadHumans 2y ago

Given the amount of dystopian content he was posting on his website and subreddit lately, he seemed to be despairing quite a bit regarding the direction of society.

schiffern 2y ago
I noticed that. He made several subreddits, here's a (likely incomplete) list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224139 His commentary near the end of this interview is also telling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o An optimist in (increasingly) a cynic's world. Be at peace, Marshall Brain.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Do you have an approximate time point for that comment? Brain makes a comment beginning at about the 30 minute point, I'm listening to that now, though it doesn't seem to match your description. The bit a couple of minutes later (32m) beginning "I have four children now in college..." seems closer. I have to comment that the song about how bright the future was (by Timbuk3) was absolutely satiric and ironic, though that point is often missed. As is often the case, in music and otherwise (Beastie Boys "Fight for your Right", Bruce Springstein "Born in the USA", Neal Stephenson Snow Crash & the Metaverse, etc., etc.).
  - schiffern 2y ago
    I can do, but I warn you it's long. Be careful what you wish for! YAFIYGI. :-) I didn't use a direct timecode link because 1.) it's not really all in one place, and 2.) I feel the entire interview is almost a microcosm of his thought. But if you insist... -- @12:20: (on climate change) "We know we have to do something, but how do you get an entire planet of people to decide on a direction and start doing it together? We have terrible examples of it, like WWII, where the entire planet marched to destroy each-other. It was horrible! Think how much time and effort and people and materials got spun up for WWII. If we can do that for climate change, climate change would be done! It would be well on its way to being better than it is now, where we're just on a path to doom essentially." @14:30 (asked about Manna) "We would have hoped that we would have somehow gotten enlightened -- I don't want to go political here, but -- you gotta look back on the past five years and just wonder, 'what the heck happened?' The dystopian side of it seems right on target, right on track for... something. Because people are just getting poorer and poorer in the United States. The body politic is just getting crushed, and you would like there to be a better way. I don't have a great..." @16:50: (on privacy in a Manna-like world) "The problem with privacy is that you end up with a whole bunch of people storming the Capitol of the United States, and you have to do this enormous amount of work to figure out who they were, and some of them you don't even know now. I don't think they caught even half the people, and very few of the people at the upper echelons, it's undetermined, but it's likely they're all gonna escape. Because they're able to do stuff, they're able to hide -- right now we're seeing all this stuff about people erasing their text messages in the Secret Service, and now in the Department of Defense, and now you get what happen on the internet where these anonymous trolls are just coming out of nowhere and saying whatever they want even if it's not true, and you get bots on -- I don't know what the percentage is, but let's say half of Twitter is not even people. All of that gets eliminated if it's all non-anonymous." -- (and now, we get to the parts I was thinking about in my original post) -- @24:18: "The blessing and the curse of that [Doomsday] book is that it's so depressing. Imagine writing it! ... It still effects me today. Having gone that deep on that many topics is hard. But what I'm doing now is writing about climate change. That's just a little part of the doomsday book. And it's so hard, because we're looking at an apocalypse possibility here if we don't change. How do you get all of humanity to change -- you mention the profit motive -- in the context of giant corporations who don't want to change, and have 1,000 reasons not to? Climate change is a hard thing." @28:14 "this week, there is so much bad news on the climate front, it is really... if you're paying attention it is really hard to see how bad off we are." @30:00 (on causes for optimism) "[long pause] Well if you're in the United States, Kansas voted yesterday... to protect abortion in Kansas. And if you look at all the states around Kansas, they're all now locking down. So if you're in favor of abortion being a right that women have in their reproductive space, then that was a tiny bit of good news. A fundamental right was taken away from women by the Supreme Court, and that was a tiny victory. It showed that you could get people out to think about things in a rational way. I found that vote yesterday uplifting. If I sat here long enough I could probably think of some others, but that's the first thing that comes to mind. There's just so much awful stuff!!" @32:05: "I have four children who are all in college. And I teach in a university, I have 100 students a semester. I know them, I interview all my students. It is hard to grow up in a society with this much stuff roiling around. This absolutely was not part of my college experience. The future looked bright! There was even a song about how bright the future looked. College now and college then are on different planets. There's so much stuff our 20 year olds are thinking about. You just rattled off a list: from the economy, to jobs, to the climate, to fundamental rights, to will we even have a democracy in America in two years? And you either embrace it -- I got my both arms wrapped around it trying to see the whole picture! -- or you just turn off. You know, don't watch the news." -- Sad to see the darkness take such a bright light. In his honor, we should all strive to hold something of Marshall Brain's optimism in ourselves. Thanks for reading.

willio58 2y ago

Very sad, just a reminder that success doesn’t translate to happiness. The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast but no longer owned by How stuff works. I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod, repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.

readthenotes1 2y ago
"success doesn’t translate to happiness." I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)

nisten 2y ago

Spent hours in highschool printing stuff out of howstuffworks.com because dialup at home was too slow until we got dsl :( May he rest in peace.

gothink 2y ago

Wow, this is very tragic. I was actually just reflecting on the influence Howstuffworks.com had on my life and interests. Quick story: My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago. I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.

schiffern 2y ago
Marshall Brain also wrote many programming books in the 90s era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications
arresin 2y ago
This makes me nostalgic for the small internet.
ilayn 2y ago
Same experience for me. I was able to buy my first drumset from the money I got for making a PHP+MySQL+HTML website for someone (also done all in notepad). I did not know anything about computers but I needed to buy a drumset. And that page actually got me going about how HTML works. I still remember their animations about car differential which were magical.

yarg 2y ago

As someone who has pulled himself back from suicidality, I absolutely abhor the expression "died by suicide". If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole). I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.

rachofsunshine 2y ago
I've had similar experiences, and I have exactly the opposite beliefs. Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital functions of your existence until you can no longer survive. For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts, but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the things that trigger my own chronic depression. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41113032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41113032
- opello 2y ago
  I found the linked, and subsequently linked, posts very insightful, and entirely relatable, thank you.

yrral 2y ago

Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds). I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website. Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill. Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
arcanemachiner 2y ago
Loved that website. Its intro to C programming was how I got into programming.
slaucon 2y ago
I had the same experience, as I’m sure many others did. It’s easy to forget now how much rarer it was to find high quality and engaging educational content on the internet back then. Howstuffworks got me interested in so many different things, and exploring the articles was a lovely way to spend the time as a kid.
sd8f9iu 2y ago
Same story for me. I got into electronics as a kid, and he had articles on how components such as the capacitor worked[1]. It opened up a whole new world for me. Sad news to hear. [1] Which is still incredibly up: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm

goodmunky 2y ago

He was 63 and wrote this a few years ago, “You’ve Had Your Turn –The Case for Euthanizing Everyone at Age 65” https://marshallbrain.com/youve-had-your-turn-the-case-for-euthanizing-everyone-at-age-65 https://marshallbrain.com/youve-had-your-turn-the-case-for-e...

bufordtwain 2y ago
That is a very weird and troubling article.
rafram 2y ago
His premise seems to be that life past 65 averages out to suffering and a slow decline toward death, which I think many active and happy older people (who don’t wish to be killed!) would argue is very mistaken. Misanthropic environmentalism isn’t environmentalism at all. Environmentalism designed by humans should be good for humans, not give them scheduled death dates.
ororroro 2y ago
This is likely satire along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal. The main giveaways are the directness of the language and the time of writing (on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals).
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals They were? I remember a lot of awful stuff about those years, but this isn't one of them. I remember people making somewhat mean-spirited but understandable comments about (some) older people getting killed off by Covid due to their own actions (refusal to take the threat seriously and take precautions, leading them to catch it, and then have much worse outcomes due to the fact that the disease was much more deadly for unhealthy and older people).
  - cldellow 2y ago

Horffupolde 2y ago

What happens with domains, content, etc now? Is there a systematic way of preparing and securing online services for death?

xyst 2y ago
archive.org|.ph

panoply220 2y ago

I shared this on the other HN thread, but I spent some time revisiting the HowStuffWorks c 2001, and highly recommend as a catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was: https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffworks.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffwo...

StephenSmith 2y ago

I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives. I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic. RIP Marshall. You were loved.

AlphaWeaver 2y ago
Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me. He will be dearly missed.

joemazerino 2y ago

Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.

las_balas_tres 2y ago
What guard rails could anyone with an unrestrained high IQ possibly have?
- LinuxAmbulance 2y ago
  A social network with people who's voices could serve as a check against one's internal mental state of the world around them going out of sync with the real one. There's the old joke about how several different blind men perceive an elephant differently, but that's not too far off from how we perceive the world around us. Marshall clearly thought things were getting significantly worse towards the end of his life. What if that perception stemmed from a poorly selected input that was never challenged by any other person's perception of reality? For example; "There is no point to living after 65" - when there's plenty of 65+ year old people who enjoy life and contribute to the world around them. My grandparents contributed significantly to my existence when they were older than 65. If they'd both passed away at 65, my existence would be far poorer for it. It's important to have people in our lives that help us keep our perception of reality from spinning off into dark versions that don't accurately represent actual reality.
- joemazerino 2y ago
  Faith.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mandmandam 2y ago
Bit premature to use the e word. You don't know what he was going through, what his medical status was, or even have certainty how he died. And all of us, even the von Neumanns and the Ramanujans, have restraints and guard rails.

pinkmuffinere 2y ago

If it weren’t for howstuffworks, I suspect I wouldn’t be an engineer. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Rip Marshall.

dyauspitr 2y ago

This is so sad, I loved this man. I wonder if the current dystopian road the US is going down had anything to do with it. Rest in peace, Marshall.

thimkerbell 2y ago

[flagged]

kridsdale3 2y ago
Say what?
- thimkerbell 2y ago
  That's unclear?

BobbyTables2 2y ago

Can’t help but feel he got screwed when the HowStuffWorks website was sold for 250x what he got just a few years earlier. Aside from his futuristic works, his Win32 API book was extremely good and my first introduction to Windows programming. It’s our loss to loose such a talented human being.

TZubiri 2y ago

Hey that's how I learned C RIP

slfnflctd 2y ago

A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off. Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized several points I still consider hugely significant. For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would consider honest amongst each other.

Terr_ 2y ago
It does contain a bit of a false-dilemma though: It asserts that the only "real" form of god involves a specific flavor of Christian evangelical prayer-interventionist deity, and that the only other option is (B) no god(s) exist at all. I'm very much in favor of showing how silly or self-contradictory (A) is, but it is fundamentally unsound to jump from that to asserting (B) is true.
qgin 2y ago
Wow, I never realized that Manna and Amputees were both created by him. Both of those had a big impact on my thinking and have stuck with me since I read them.
nashashmi 2y ago
Obviously someone who has come to atheism is not going to speak well of prayer. The guy ends each section with more questions than answers. And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. And maybe even what your purpose is. In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ...” meaning his guide will only take him to further darkness and misguidance.

ziofill 2y ago

Very sorry to hear that Marshall died :( I just went on howstuffworks.com and I see two articles on astrology on the home page. For real? I thought it was a science-based website.

ilaksh 2y ago
It definitely was when Brain was involved.

zackangelo 2y ago

So grateful that HSW existed when I was younger. As a teenager, I couldn't afford to get the timing belt and water pump replaced on my car so I had to figure out how to do it myself. I bought the service manual from AutoZone but I needed something to closer to an introduction to even be begin to understand it. He seemed to love explaining how car engines work and that series of articles was exactly what I needed at that time to get started. RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.

dodongobongo 2y ago

Marshall taught one of my classes at NCSU when I was there ten years ago. He was a little eccentric but super nice. I remember that he said if we made a website, the “natural exploratory pressures” of the internet would find it, so all we had to do was have good content. I wonder how much of that still holds, but it’s a good memory. Hope his family finds peace.

mulhoon 2y ago

TIL about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo from reading about Marshall.

pgl 2y ago

He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option). What a loss. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o [2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-ebook/dp/B007HQH67U https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-... [3] https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna Edit: Fixed "free to download from Amazon" - it's not

grupthink 2y ago

I loved his articles and stories. Hopefully his sites are archived before being taken down.

pabs3 2y ago
ArchiveTeam are working on it, his main site is saved by ArchiveBot: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/?q=marshallbrain.com https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/?q=marshallbr... He seems to have a lot of domains, if you know of any, please post them here.

thr0waway001 2y ago

Oh man. Sad to hear that. I remember in the early '2000s before Wikipedia printing out those tutorials to read before I'd take these long bus rides out of town to work at the meat (slaughter) plant. I was trying to educate myself so I would not have to work at the meat plant for long. That job kinda sucked but at least it got my mind straight. I was debating whether or not to save up for college. Working there for a year let me save up and to convince me that I'd rather go to school to try to not work a blue collar job. I read a few of those How Stuff Works articles printed on paper at the public library on those long hour bus rides. They'd keep my spirits up.

panoply220 2y ago
Wow, thanks for sharing this story! As a long time friend of Marshall’s it’s fascinating to hear folks share their encounters with his work. What are you up to now?
- thr0waway001 2y ago
  Went to University to do a math major with a minor in economics. My condolences about Marshall. Very thankful for his work.

chakintosh 2y ago

Websites that refresh instead of returning you to the previous page (HN in this case) should be nuked off the internet. Microsfot does that A LOT on their support forums.

mmmlinux 2y ago

obituaries deleted?