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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

>A person, the professor, who put in the work to learn an advanced subject with the potential to advance society, evaluated two others who also put in the effort to push the boundaries of knowledge and engineering.

Who was born in Canada in 1951 near one of the best engineering universities in the world, perfectly suited to benefit from economic liberalization and was lucky enough to be interested in computers at a time when almost nobody was and as a result was able to be around the best computer science people.

So yeah I'd say born pretty lucky - made a lot of really timely calls that lined up. Lets not pretend this was $10B of hard work - they aren't comparable

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Let's deconstruct your statement:

>> Who was born in Canada in 1951 near one of the best engineering universities in the world,

He was born in Vancouver; Waterloo, ON is more than 4000 kms away, so not really close. Waterloo was also not the globally recognized institution we talk about today. It was a relatively new school.

>> perfectly suited to benefit from economic liberalization

He graduated from UBC in 1973, in the middle of a recession with economic stagnation and high unemployment. With a degree in mathematics he likely had no choice but to go on to grad school.

>> lucky enough to be interested in computers at a time when almost nobody was and as a result was able to be around the best computer science people.

I'm not sure how you're "lucky" to be interested in a subject deep enough to pursue a graduate degree, but regardless, in the 70's computer science was still not held in the same regard as mathematics and other pure sciences in most of academia. He was obviously driven by a deep desire to explore an emerging field despite this.

No one is saying he earned $10B through hard work, but discounting the luck he helped generate is really petty and unfair.

It's not about the investor who makes $10B. It's about the economy that you are able to get when you have incentives for people to take these kinds of risks. The investor making $10B along the way is incidental. I mean, not from his perspective of course, but from society's.

Mini-kings might be a good thing for society. Imagine everyone is middle class, and the government is the only entity that has large amounts of money.

I think we are lucky that geeks are also getting rich and may do geeky things (such as things for the greater good), with some of that money.

Everyone middle class, no poors, no homeless? That sounds extremely nice, better than current society's big inequalities.

Oh I really meant being capped at middle class. But everyone middle class would be great.

You get an economy where money and power is the highest goal and turned into a religion.

So yes you’re correct, this is precisely the problem.

While this is all very true, it seems much more than just excessively cynical to me. There were lots of folks who could have taken the path he took. He had the foresight to see that Computer Science was where interesting things were going to happen at a time when so much of the Western Intelligentsia was not terribly positive about “tech.”

I definitely remember the tone of the NYTimes around this sort of thing. It took some real moving against the grain to be positive about the potential that tech had, in the timeframe that this investment happened. It took a lot to even get to be in his position. We were not at all making fat six-figures back then.

The 90s were not tech hostile. That's a very strange take and yes I was there as well. And no, NYTimes was and is not representative of Western "Intelligentsia" (God help us), much less the subset that was and remains quite keenly focused on technology.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cisco-buys-granite-s...

Do you really think people like Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton give an F what NYTimes thinks of investing in technology, or that it was "moving against the grain" (???) for a Stanford CS professor to invest in his bright young things?

However I agree with you regarding the "luck" business. I believe most, though not all, people who are seen as lucky (or even see themselves as lucky) are simply those that take advantage of opportunity. Many of us (raises hand) are either oblivious to opportunity or have mastered the art of squandering them. Then we complain about being unlucky or how others are "so lucky".

I don't get your timeline; he pursued a field that was not very popular, specifically in academia, in the 70's. That was definitely against the grain.

Looks like I misread GP (thought ref was to the investment period).

Why do some smart people go into obscure fields. Who knows, there are so many variables. One of my absolute favorite cs geeks is John Backus. Do you know how he got into computing in the '40s? He was walking down the street and liked the look of the street level display of the IBM office and walked in and began his career in computing. And granted, he was a unique and somewhat strange bird, but that is one of the variables mentioned. I honestly don't think people like him really pay attention to what the liberal arts crowd ("intelligentsia" /g) thinks about technology.

And so did thousands of others. It’s luck.

I’ve been around long enough to see who gets “success” and it seems to be a pretty random walk within certain groups, and those who take multiple chances “At bat” are more “lucky.” So yeah sure you have to work hard to get into the game but again even that is largely chance based on your upbringing.

As it happens rich kids are the ones who get more chances at bat cause they have fall backs etc..

I don’t understand what point you’re making. Are you litigating against happenstance?

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