"John Carmack is one of my heroes in the tech world. Not because of his technical accomplishments and helping to create games that I’ve spent years of my life on. But for his single minded obsession with his craft after two decades. Every time he is on stage, he is so obviously in love with what he does that it is infectious.
That was one of my favorite things about Dave Cutler back at Microsoft.
Here’s this legendary figure pushing 70 years who has accomplished more things than most developers dream up. But he showed up at work every single day and made checkins every single day - including Dec 25th and Jan 1st, something he was proud of.
I was once at Microsoft campus late on a Sunday and walked past his office. Spotting the familiar blue hue from his office, I looked inside and saw him debugging something.
“Hey Dave,”, I said “Ever get bored of ntos and ntos/ke? You’ve been coding there for…for like 20 years now?”
ntos is the core part of the Windows NT source tree and ke is where the kernel code lives in. Where pretty much every source file would have a header with Cutler’s name on it and a created date in the 80s.
He turned slowly, looked me over. Obviously not very thrilled about this pipsqueak program manager interrupting him being in the ‘zone’. He then smiled and said. “I love this stuff. What else do you want me to do? Be on a boat somewhere?”
With that, he turned back to his debugger and went back to work.
"
Please tell me why PDFs are constantly being hosted on scribd.com? I find that site extremely annoying with its ridiculous "shaking window" ads and fake buttons that are meant to trick you to click on an ad.
Or more to the point: doesn't either Scribd or YC have some kind of code of ethics? Fake 'Download' and 'Play Now' buttons make the web worse, not better.
I block all ads, so I often don't realize when a site is being evil. Those kind of ads sound pretty bad for Y Combinator's image, I wonder why it's being allowed.
I've learned to mechanically translate "scribd.com link" into "no content past the third page for some reason". I don't even bother with them now.
That means I actually wind up preferring the original PDFs or whatever when HN puts a (scribd) link out to the side! PDF isn't exactly a walk in the park either, but it's far better than this scribd thing.
Actually in this case it was the Scribd URL that was submitted. If a URL pointing to a PDF had been submitted, then the title text would link to the raw PDF and the appended '[scribd]' text would link to the Scribd version of it.
If anybody else was wondering what a .plan file is... it is part of the Finger Protocol[1], put together in 1977:
> The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory. Often this file (maintained by the user) contains either useful information about the user's current activities, similar to micro-blogging, or alternatively all manner of humor.
For me, while I do take a lot of pride in shipping a great product, the achievements along the way are more memorable. I don’t remember any of our older product releases, but I remember the important insights all the way back to using CRTC wraparound for infinate smooth scrolling in Keen (actually, all the way back to understanding the virtues of structures over parallel arrays in apple II assembly language..). Knowledge builds on knowledge.
Gems like this really show why Carmack has been such a successful developer. I found his week-long getaways an interesting concept; I can definitely relate to distractions often seeming like a really big problem in terms of momentum. These days with the internet I think it would take much more to isolate yourself and still be productive.
I was rather sad to find that the finger command is no longer installed by default in Fedora. Moreover I can't find a reliable/up to date/secure finger server. Latest one I can find hasn't had updates since 2006 which doesn't make me feel confident enough to install it.
nope, anyone could do it. A surprisingly large amount of people's workstations or dev boxes were open to the net, or at least passed finger and a number of others. '98 was on the waning edge of that but for years it was common practice for people to use plan files as a blog like platform. Much different security environment (and everyone had a ton of IP4)
Copy-pasted below
"John Carmack is one of my heroes in the tech world. Not because of his technical accomplishments and helping to create games that I’ve spent years of my life on. But for his single minded obsession with his craft after two decades. Every time he is on stage, he is so obviously in love with what he does that it is infectious.
That was one of my favorite things about Dave Cutler back at Microsoft.
Here’s this legendary figure pushing 70 years who has accomplished more things than most developers dream up. But he showed up at work every single day and made checkins every single day - including Dec 25th and Jan 1st, something he was proud of.
I was once at Microsoft campus late on a Sunday and walked past his office. Spotting the familiar blue hue from his office, I looked inside and saw him debugging something.
“Hey Dave,”, I said “Ever get bored of ntos and ntos/ke? You’ve been coding there for…for like 20 years now?”
ntos is the core part of the Windows NT source tree and ke is where the kernel code lives in. Where pretty much every source file would have a header with Cutler’s name on it and a created date in the 80s.
He turned slowly, looked me over. Obviously not very thrilled about this pipsqueak program manager interrupting him being in the ‘zone’. He then smiled and said. “I love this stuff. What else do you want me to do? Be on a boat somewhere?”
With that, he turned back to his debugger and went back to work. "