One heck of a bio | Hacker News Reader

One heck of a bio

worrydream.com

173 pointsHitchhiker26 comments

I've always had a few ideas to explore in the back of my mind, hoping I'd get to them once I retire or "have more time (tm)":

* Understand the EE (lowest-level) part of computing. Work on embedded devices.

* Getting rid of the nagging feeling there is something I'm missing about differential equations (this despite acing the respective uni math courses on solving them).

* Explore cognitive science (the intersection of math/computing/psychology/NLP/communication).

* Learn proper design, create a personal website I can be proud of.

* Explore the low-frequency heartbeat of civilizations (cyclic patterns by which social structures act and react).

Bret already did all that and much more. Plus he polished, published and (sometimes) sold it. This guy is phenomenal. His KillMath project is something I would actively support, if I better knew how...

Btw, does Bret Victor have a HN account?

"* Getting rid of the nagging feeling there is something I'm missing about differential equations (this despite acing the respective uni math courses on solving them)."

Bret talks about this here (scroll down to 'A Possibly Embarassing Personal Anecdote'):

http://worrydream.com/#!/KillMath

Long-Term Goal (paraphrased): Wants to destroy consumer culture and corporation's oligarchical control over employment, entertainment and creativity.

Worked at: Apple.

  keep your friends close, your enemies closer :-)

Seriously though, his experience at Apple seems to have left him somewhat jaded: http://worrydream.com/#!/Apple

As mentioned above, he states working at Apple "was a mistake". I wonder how long these non-compete/disclosure agreements last. And another matter is, even if he could make use of these ideas, would it be better through a rival company or just out on the open internets?

That sounds surprisingly like my popular HN-comment-turned-blogpost, "Why I do not want to work at Google": http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/...

Except with Apple, and in the past tense.

I should offer Bret crash space.

Honestly though, the text in the left column is kinda unreadable.

The rest of the site is even more impressive, especially the reactive documents: http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/

Mr. Victor's personal site is one of the most impressive I've come across. It's borderline magical.

Hate that he broke my back-button, though.

Seems to work for me. Where's it broken?

I remember using Lloyd radio in early 1999 and thinking, "WTF, why doesn't this just stream mp3s?". At that point, he was still 1 year behind being 2 years ahead of the times.

It's cute but what you didn't learn is that ~10% of the world have issues with vision and therefore will not see or hear any of your admittedly nice words...

And 63% of the world doesn't speak english!

missing; quantity of carbon you absorbed and emitted, amount of dopamine you segregated..

worrydream.com has become an old friend around HN - http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=worrydream....

(Not w/o good reason.)

Very cool, but I have no idea what he does exactly. Programmer? Designer? Scientist?

All of the above. He trained as an electrical engineer first.

It's not his CV it's a biography of the stuff you don't put in a CV.

(his CV is on the site.

http://worrydream.com/#!/cv/bret_victor_resume.pdf

He's a Hardware Designer + Programmer + UI Designer + Scientist + Electronics Engineer.

Oh, and he designed the original UI for the iPad)

lol @ the sublime way you replied to the parent query .. it is his journey that is truly remarkable.. rare to see someone this multiskilled. The man's a diamond. Reminds me of Pavel Florensky[1] strangely.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Florensky

Ironically, the CV has no dates!

does anyone know what he used to generate those graphs/graphics? Page looks great, too bad almost nothing is clickable (i.e. few links to about/contact/blog/etc.)

It looks good, but what exactly do I get out of that page as someone who wants to know who this guy is (which, as I understand, is the purpose of a bio)? It doesn't even say his _name_.

Seeing that he categorizes income as "bound" vs "free" tells me far more about him than his name would. And that is just one of many such details.

I don't think such details are not mutually exclusive with the generally useful information.

You can probably do what he did in most imaging/graphing software if you spend a lot of time doing the cosmetic tweaks.

The interesting thing about the graphs is that they are in the same style and color scheme that you'd see in an Edward Tufte book.

Hey Bret!

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