All these companies were a lot smarter than us. What we had was luck (1984) | Hacker News Reader

All these companies were a lot smarter than us. What we had was luck (1984)

atariarchives.org

84 pointsjanandonly27 comments

I adore that apparently Steve Jobs and Wozniak wrote Breakout while they were at Atari.

I absolutely adored that game as a child.

As an aside, this article was wonderful and if you haven't already done so, you should read it right now. (I especially liked the why you should get a computer argument at the end).

Plenty of good stories here too: https://www.folklore.org/

Well, Woz wired it. There was no software, right?

Right, it was TTL logic - no microprocessor (too expensive at the time), no software. Also, Woz's design wasn't the one that was ultimately used:

> Atari was unable to use Wozniak's design. By designing the board with as few chips as possible, he made the design difficult to manufacture; it was too compact and complicated to be feasible with Atari's manufacturing methods. However, Wozniak claims Atari could not understand the design, and speculates "maybe some engineer there was trying to make some kind of modification to it." Atari ended up designing their own version for production, which contained about 100 TTL chips. Wozniak found the gameplay to be the same as his original creation, and could not find any differences.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...

Whatever happened to that computer club, does it still exist, the Homebrew Computer Club?

Now it's called Hacker News.

Well - kind of. At least a little.

HN, half Homebrew Computer Club, half "get rich quick" schemes, half California housing law discussions.

Luck (as a factor to make someone / something successful) is too underrated.

Yup!

When you ask how someone became a manager (especially if they are bad), a lot of it was luck. I'm not discounting that the worked hard to earn it, but a lot of people work hard but are unlucky. I count myself in the unlucky pile.

Stated like this this assertion is unprovable and unfalsifiable. Another person could state that luck is too overrated, who is right, who is wrong, and how do you decide?

In a controlled setup though, like backgammon or poker, luck is definitely overrated. Just try to play a single game of backgammon with a professional player, and see if you stand a chance. You can play 100 games, and without fail you would lose all of them.

So, how can a professional player of a game of chance consistently win? By maximizing the win when they get a lucky roll, and minimizing the loss when they get an unlucky one. In the long run the number of lucky rolls is roughly equal with the number of unlucky rolls, but they will manage to get a positive expected value.

Maybe real life is similar to a game of chance. Maybe not? I don't know for sure. But my hunch is this: both Mark Zuckerberg and I were faced with a long string of random events in our life. Many, many, many. After each such event, we both had a number of ways to respond. Somehow Zuckerberg got richer pretty much every day of his adult life, and he now sits at #3 at the top of the world. I, on the other hand, made whatever choices I made and sit currently at #1e9 or #2e9 (not sure). I can think that Zuckerberg has been dealt a luckier hand in life, or I can think he was much better at playing what he was dealt than me. Nobody will ever know for sure. But my personal belief is that he was a more skillful player than me.

To be fair, you don't hear (as much) about all the Mark Zuckerbergs who weren't quite so successful. If you're going to look at some of the richest people on the planet, then of course you'll see a string of successes, because without a long string of successes they wouldn't have been the richest people on the planet. I also think that as the string of successes becomes longer (or you become richer), you have more of a chance at further successes as well.

Looking at the most successful people in any situation is not a good way to get a sense of the underlying probabilities involved. If you let 1000 people flip coins 1000 times and count the number of heads, you'll see an extraordinarily high number of heads among the most successful people.

The mere fact that there are really few people as rich as Zuckerberg indicates a big luck / network effect factor in my opinion. Zuckerberg is probably more skilled than the average person, but there are many more people like him in terms of skills (I believe), and the vast majority of them didn't get anywhere near as rich. Zuckerberg also didn't accumulate his wealth by lots of small repeated increments: he won big by Facebook becoming successful (and there was no guarantee of that, despite Zuckerberg's skills). Without that big win, I doubt that Zuckerberg would have ended up anywhere near #3.

> If you let 1000 people flip coins 1000 times and count the number of heads, you'll see an extraordinarily high number of heads among the most successful people.

Not really. If you do this experiment you are virtually assured that all the people will get between 400 and 600 heads. Not a single one will get 601 heads. Not a single one will get only 399 heads.

Zuckerberg is not one or two or ten standard deviations away from me. He's thousands of standard deviations away from me. Luck alone cannot explain his success.

Edit: For fun, here's a code snippet that shows the range of the number of heads that 1000 people get when flipping a coin 1000 times. I ran the experiment 10 times.

  import numpy as np

  for seed in range(10):
      flips = np.random.RandomState(seed).binomial([1000]*1000,p=0.5)
      print(min(flips),max(flips))

This is what you get:

You need to run this experiment many millions of times before you see a minimum less than 400 or a maximum higher than 600. As you can see most often the range is much tighter.

A few months ago I heard about the concept "return on luck". It seems to me that Apple had the highest return on the luck they had of any of their contemporaries, with the possible exception of Microsoft.

Microsoft's luck was that IBM gave them the license to make the OS, because they thought the money is in the hardware.

That's one of the biggest business mistakes ever.So that's a huge amount of luck.

So I'm not sure Microsoft is so unique with regards to "return on luck".

That wasn’t luck. That was Bill Gates being his genius self.

And his parents were lawyers, so he was somewhat familiar with the fact that powerful enough people could use the courts to prevent ordinary folks from "illegally" copying software media (tapes, floppies, punch cards, etc.).

The luck was in Gary Kildall missing out on the contract

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates

"In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."

That helps explain Gates talking to IBM. It doesn’t explain IBM’s taking the contract, or their massive blunder in allowing Gates’ non-exclusivity clause on the OS.

Lots of companies contracted with IBM without IBM signing off their whole business to them.

Bill Gates clearly was very fortunate in his life, but it’s a mistake to chalk the IBM blunder up to 100% luck.

The commoditization of the PC is not wholly due to Microsoft’s luck: IBM used common parts that could be copied legally. It helped a great deal.

> We were finally going to get control of our own computers. It wasn't a million-dollar thing that belonged to the company you worked for.

Too bad it's gone full circle. The cloud is the new mainframe.

When did Wozniak write this? Don't see a date.

Next to the post it says 1894, which is decidedly, uh, odd, if Wozniak wrote it.

I’m disappointed it wasn’t about Gilded Age business, written by a robber baron or something.

I was expecting something about Morse code. I too was disappointed.

My guess would be 1984, since it's a transposition away from what was printed and there's also a link back to a table of contents that says 1984.

Apple was ahead of its time.

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