I live my life a quarter century at a time | Hacker News Reader

I live my life a quarter century at a time

tla.systems

309 pointsCharlesW182 comments

This is a fun story, but also just reminded me of how destructively eccentric Jobs could be. All the shenanigans to pretend the author lived in the US, flying him back and forth from Ireland, planning his interactions (or lack of interactions) with Jobs so the deception wouldn't be exposed, and everything. What a colossal waste of time, money, and stress just to cater to the ego of Steve Jobs.

And then they threw all that work away, seemingly mainly because it was done out of the wrong office. Presumably the final Dock that shipped was significantly different from the author's version, but throwing away all the code and doing a full rewrite is rarely warranted.

I assume that the Cork development team was built up before Jobs took over, which also explains why they were all laid off shortly after the author quit. Jobs probably wanted to have all (significant) software development happening in Cupertino? If he were still around, he would probably hate home office/remote work and join Elon Musk in the "people can have all the home office they want as long as they work 40 hours per week in the office" camp...

One wrinkle here is that Jobs himself was by all accounts the person most responsible for Apple opening a Cork facility in 1980, and for whatever Apple and the Irish government promised each other as part of that deal. There's some indication that Irish governments were unhappy with what they got from it https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/state-papers-... but it's hard to be sure exactly what happened there: Apple was probably not in the best shape to carry out ambitious relocation plans for much of the '80s, for one thing.

While I don't have boundless love for either Jobs or RTO mandates, and as an Irishman I would very much rather not see Cork getting the dirty end of the stick, I have to defend Jobs' desire for centralisation a bit here. There's considerable evidence that having nearly all the central product and design people within easy reach of SJ stalking around 1 Infinite Loop did in fact work very well for Apple in the second Jobs era. Maybe it was still a wrong decision, despite appearances, but you can hardly say that it was an eccentric one. (And in 2000 the tools for offsite or multi-site collaboration weren't even as not-entirely-great as they are now.) It was other people who brought in the madcap element of trying to hide things from the boss, not Jobs himself.

All else being equal, for team-based, creative, knowledge work, having everyone collocated is more productive.

But not all is equal. You can't necessarily attract the all the talent. It doesn't scale without extremely disciplined organizational and physical space design - working remotely in the office, is the more common norm. Your team is spread over different locations and buildings anyway so you aren't really working locally in practice. Strong communication and collaboration practices are what dominate - so just having people together in one place and expecting osmosis doesn't beat good async tooling and discussion practices (like those from the best OSS projects).

> Jobs probably wanted to have all (significant) software development happening in Cupertino?

Looks like it. There were still people working on iSync, iCal (and presumably software for the first iPhone) in an office in Paris. I think that ended in 2005.

In an alternate and very charitable timeline, after being healed of his cancer by top doctors, Jobs grows greatly in love with science and medicine, and faced with the covid pandemic, makes Apple permanently remote work (with office option for those who want it), and donates sums of money to bootstrapping vaccine production for all the world.

A boy can dream.

> “how destructively eccentric Jobs could be”

I miss Steve Jobs. He was clearly an asshole at close range, but at heart he was a humanist and a bit of a hippie. He made money but also left the world a better place.

Such a massive difference to today’s crop of tech billionaires like Thiel, Andreessen and Musk.

History would suggest otherwise. Ripping Woz off springs to mind. And is giving the world expensive Apple products making it a better place?

I mean electric cars, solar panels, and rockets so we don't have to rely on Russia to get to and from space ain't nothin'. Then there's that torch thing.

I can take or leave the other two. Netscape was pretty cool.

As a customer I find a stark difference between Musk and Jobs. I have a Tesla and I was also a customer of Jobs’s Apple since 1999.

The big difference is that Jobs never lied to me. Sure, he was an enthusiastic salesman, but the products actually did what was promised. (I even bought Mac OS X 10.0 in a retail box. It was rough but it showed that their new OS is delivering.) Apple products fit my purposes and I kept coming back to buy more.

Musk sold me a very expensive feature that still does nothing, six years later. He knew that he was lying about the capabilities of the cars, but still took my $7,500 for a feature that was worth zero. I’m never buying anything from him again.

The same approach of bald-faced lies is evident in most of the tech industry today. Cryptocurrency products don’t serve any purpose but enriching people like Andreessen. AI is almost as bad. And now these titans of misinformation are barging into global politics. They don’t care about empowering people and creativity like Jobs did, they just want more personal power.

>Musk sold me a very expensive feature that still does nothing, six years later. He knew that he was lying about the capabilities of the cars, but still took my $7,500 for a feature that was worth zero. I’m never buying anything from him again.

I assume you're talking about auto-pilot?

>The same approach of bald-faced lies is evident in most of the tech industry today. Cryptocurrency products don’t serve any purpose but enriching people like Andreessen. AI is almost as bad. And now these titans of misinformation are barging into global politics. They don’t care about empowering people and creativity like Jobs did, they just want more personal power.

Yes, the tech industry went from promising Star Trek like future to Demolition Man meets 1984 where Taco Bell owns everything and spies on you. It's not great. Stallman was right, but he got conveniently pushed out of the conversation.

> I assume you're talking about auto-pilot?

Full Self Driving. Tesla doesn't charge extra for Autopilot.

Jobs lied all the time, only difference was that he had the luck of not being busted cause he could realize the lies before the due date.

Not saying this makes him worse than Elon Musk though, Elon is obviously much worse. You can see this in just how he interacts politically and how he used his social media platform to influence elections.

It's not "lies" it's "reality distortion". So much more pleasant!

> The big difference is that Jobs never lied to me.

I'm sure he will get around to providing FaceTime as an open industry standard any day now...

That is not because of him. They ran into patents problems and lost a lawsuit about this.

They did contribute a couple of industry standards, including zeroconf/bonjour and OpenCL. I haven’t seen anything or anybody saying that the FaceTime thing was a deception.

Supposedly he announced it off the cuff, without consulting anyone else as to the viability, not even notifying the FaceTime team beforehand. You can get into a semantic argument with yourself about whether that is actually a lie, but no matter what you conclude, that seems to be the same kind of "lie" that Musk makes.

> [an off the cuff promise] seems to be the same kind of "lie" [as charging $7,500 for future self-driving]

No, it doesn't, and I cannot understand how they could seem so similar to you.

I assume the intent here is for it to be a question with a forgotten question mark? Otherwise, the comment devolves into ad hominem without any technical exploration, and there is no conceivable expiation for that.

Unfortunately, I am not entirely sure how to grok the question. What I am able to gather is that Musk sold a unrealized future promise on the basis of hopeful optimism as its own line item for $7,500, while Jobs sold an unrealized future promise on the basis of hopeful optimism as part of a bundle in the ballpark around $1,000, with some variation depending on the specific bundle purchased.

Is the contention around the price magnitude? Would Musk be less of a "liar" if it sold for $100 instead of $7,500? Is it being sold independently instead of as part of a bundle what is in dispute? Would Musk be less of a "liar" if that $7,500 included other features available at the time of sale? Perhaps you can elaborate?

I would ask why you believe $1,000 was charged in exchange for a promise to turn FaceTime into an open industry standard -- which would be usable by all, by definition, regardless of whether they were even customers -- but you appear more interested in put-downs. "There is no conceivable expiation for that," so I'm done; good luck!

Jobs is on the whole probably better than the modern "tech right", yes, if only because supposedly he turned down opportunities to get seriously into politics. OTOH, who knows what kind of strange political or personal journey he might possibly have taken if he'd been around for the past decade and more. And in fact I think he may have contributed to the US getting where it is now in (at least) one significant way. By committing his options-backdating caper and then avoiding punishment for it he contributed to the feeling that the Special Boy is too precious to suffer criminal consequences for his actions, something which has likely had consequences for the later career of Musk in particular.

Oh, I'm sure it's even fuzzier than that. Apple's cachet over the past 25 years was built on the type of class consumerism that reflects and then amplifies a lot of America's particular brand of social dysfunction. Much of tech during this time was focused (and continued to focus, to their market detriment, until they "wised" up and stopped) on a sort of egalitarianism; if the proposition is, "Anyone can benefit from our product," most companies whispered the qualifier, "...if you can afford it." Apple, on the other hand, shouted that last part from the rooftops, also encouraging the addendum, "...and it makes you better than people who don't use our products."

Apple was a standard-bearer for the toxic exclusivity and gatekeeping that's kind of always been a part of American society, but that we occasionally see some chance of finally throwing off.

> ... but that we occasionally see some chance of finally throwing off.

That seems optimistic to me. What are you thinking of?

> it makes you better than people who don't use our products.

It seemed to me that this was more of a product of the fandom. "Even though this Apple computer is less popular/useful, I'm a discerning tastemaker and am better than the unwashed Wintel masses."

The Apple “Lemmings” ad came out in 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(advertisement)

don’t get me wrong Jobs definitely progressed the technology of that time by leading Apple but what exactly did he do to make the world a better place?

if you believe that enabling people to easily communicate with each other and access basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge whenever they want is a good thing (ie if you think giving people iPhones so they can message each other and read wikipedia is a good thing), then you can say his work did help with that.

You can also say that Macs have helped many people express themselves creatively (iMovie, Garage Band, Logic, Final Cut...), which you might think is a good thing.

The technology to do all of those things existed well before iPhones & Macs appeared. You may argue that "yeah but he made them popular", but the iPhone & Mac users were never in the majority.

At this point in time I'm not yet convinced smartphones are a net positive for humanity. They enable various forms of internet/"social"/consumerist addictions. Sure, there are great and transformative uses for them, but it's not clear to me yet how the scales balance out.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that running a super-secretive company and building a locked-down status-symbol walled-garden product that takes way the "owner's" freedom to tinker with it pushes him in the "left the world a better place" column.

The iPhone and other Apple products are just that: products. There are not many products in history that I'd say made the world a better place. Certainly better-than-previously-available computers and phones wouldn't meet that bar for me.

Tell me about all Jobs' philanthropy and maybe I'll agree with you. But you can't, because Jobs ran what was once described as one of the least philanthropic companies operating, and Jobs' own philanthropic activities were either so secretive that we still don't know much about them, or (the more likely option) were more or less nonexistent.

I agree that Jobs was probably on the whole better than Thiel, Andreessen, or Musk, but IMO that's not saying much.

Maybe (I think so) it was more about aligning every detail with the standards Jobs had in mind...

> how destructively eccentric Jobs could be

last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.

not saying he deserved it but he had an out and he chose to ignore it till it was too late, hard to feel sorry at all for him at that point.

also I heard he was a massive twat irl

If he'd've gone into politics, the net total outcome could've been much much worse.

Luckily there is no indication that he was interested in this sort of things. Contrary to…others.

Insert Bill Burr on Lance Armstrong "just keep him on the bike" quote.

> last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.

People who tend to go the "alternative healing" route usually do so because the traditional healing route hasn't worked.

> he had an out and he chose to ignore it till it was too late

Did he? Guess you are the expert.

Cancer treatment isn't an exact science. Millions of people who go the traditional route die. It's always the know-nothings who talk with such confidence of absolutes.

> also I heard he was a massive twat irl

Did you now? I guess it takes one to know one.

It was widely documented at the time that Jobs chose non-medicine over medicine very soon after diagnosis, and then went through heroic real-doctor efforts once it was too late: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

It's hard to take an article seriously when they write "was one of the 5% or so that are slow growing and most likely to be cured."

There is no cure for pancreatic cancer. There are people who survive it, but nobody knows why.

> and then went through heroic real-doctor efforts once it was too late:

If it was "too late" why did these "heroic real-doctor" exert any effort? Shouldn't they have known better? Being "heroic" and "real" doctors.

The guy chose to be a lab rat after his 9 months of "alternative medicine" and 5 years of "real medicine" failed him. These "heroic doctors" failed him just like the "unheroic doctors".

As I said, cancer isn't an exact science. People who think it is either know nothing of cancer or are just unthinking bootlickers. Hopefully one day we'll have a cure for cancer.

I think one of the first things we need to adapt is calling it more than just "cancer" instead of something more descriptive. Like Alzheimer's, it's not actually "one" thing but many things together or separately are labeled with it. Each type of cancer can have its own cause, treatment, and prognosis.

Once we better recognize it's a family of ailments, the populace can better understand the challenges to its various treatments and how we need to invest more into it.

“Heroic” had a specific medical meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_measure

I wasn’t saying the doctors were heroic. I was saying the drastic measures to help him after he dicked around too long with fake healers meet the description.

He was diagnosed with a gasteroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. Neuroendocrine cancers make ups about 5% of all pancreatic cancers, are slow growing and in many cases curable.

I understand the scepticism, but in this particular case is unwarranted.

> last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.

The tragic last act of Jobs' infamous reality distortion field

Great story, and a thought-provoking title. I LLOLed at "We’ll just tell Steve you did move."

I'm 45, so I'll mark my 2nd quarter-century in the not-too-distant future.

Very approximately, so far:

0-25: learning

25-50: doing

50-75: TBD

75-100: Hopefully not dead.

Depends on how 50-75 goes!

I'm a couple years into that range and I'm not dead yet! Only 90% of a quarter-century to go!

Not dead but disabled and dimwit, an annoyance to those who used to love the person you previously were, likely also short on money all the misery which that entails? No, this is seriously worse than death to me.

Either it's a life worth living, or forced shutdown for me, while I still have a say.

Wow - what a bleak answer.

You can't imagine being healthy at 75?

Most of my family members 75+ are still doing quite well.

My great grandma lived to 99 and wasn't particularly unhealthy until 98.

My mom's best friend's dad is 98 now, and was in pretty good health until 96.

None of them were poor and burdens on society.

Of course it's best to stay healthy at 75 and beyond!

My bleak answer is a refutation of the idea that merely "staying alive" is a goal. Staying physically alive is not enough.

> I LLOLed at "We’ll just tell Steve you did move."

It made me remember about that rumor of Musk firing people at random, but afterwards their immediate superiors just make them to move to another office whatsoever - Musk won't remember the next time he'd be there.

They told the same exact yarn about Steve back in the day. I think both are probably exaggerated.

I worked at Iomega (Zip Drive) from 1994 to 1998. The VP was rumored to fire people on the spot for the smallest thing.

One day we worked an all nighter. The entire department. The next day we were still there. Having solved the problem, most of us were asleep at our desks.

The VP made an unannounced visit and walked through the office. None of us noticed him. He walked to my bosses bosses office and asked him to assemble us in the meeting room.

He walked into the meeting, said he was impressed with how hard we were working, pointing out that our heads were down in deep thought. Then he left.

These days, I think he was trolling us.

I got to know him quite well later in my career. I never saw him fire anyone.

Musk firing people at random was not an exaggeration. My friend was head of all software at Tesla for the original car and much of the Model S development. Musk would routinely fire random folks in his department and he’d have to go to musk to get it undone. Often he had to put his job on the line threading to quit if he did not change his mind. Eventually musk took him up on it and my friend quit.

That timescale… got me thinking.

In my case it was closer to:

0-25: dicking around, with some incidental learning

25-35: learning how one gets screwed in business deals (by getting screwed in business deals)

35-40: dicking around pretending to work and thinking this is called "startups"

40-50: actually doing stuff, working on meaningful things that people pay for and making a good living off that

I am looking forward to the future :-)

You’ve peaked. The rest is just the same story in reverse.

Or you can never stop peaking and growing in different ways :)

That is certainly possible, I don't know yet. But what I have noticed is that it is only past 40 that I started doing things that matter, and I learned to recognize things that do not need doing or that should not be done.

This goes across the spectrum: from knowing what to do (and more importantly what NOT to spend time on) to build a business that earns money, to avoiding jumping onto the latest and greatest JavaScript framework.

Incidentally, one amusing side effect is that I tend to disagree with >90% of HN commenters and often regret posting my comments, because I get downvoted or criticized into oblivion. I might of course be wrong. But then again, when I look at the depressing comments even in this discussion, or at comments from people worrying about their job, securing income, etc, and compare this to my situation, which I've ended up in by following my own compass — I stop worrying, take a deep breath and continue to do my thing :-)

I'm 47. 50+ is looking a lot like "struggling to run the red queen's race to keep my wife and furbabies safe, sheltered, and provided for, while watching the eventual deterioration of my body into uselessness and decrepitude begin, and watching ageism diminish my opportunities in the field". Affordable rejuvenation therapy in the next couple of decades is pretty much my only hope. Maybe then I could claw back another decade or two of vigorous life with my wife with greater wisdom than I had the first time around.

I’m 50 now and have plans to run a 5K in at around 30 minutes by the end of the year. I haven’t run a 5K in over 15 years. Even though I have worked out continuously since I was 12.

But from my current training, I don’t see any reason that isn’t achievable. No part of my body is giving me warning signs and the training isn’t any harder than it was 15 years ago.

As far as “ageism”, I changed jobs at 40, 42, 44, 46, 49 and last year at 50 and neither time did it take me more than 3 weeks to get a job. I got my first only and hopefully last job at a “FAANG” at 46.

None of those were management jobs and I’m now a “staff software engineer” at a third party cloud consulting company.

I’m well aware that my body will decline over the next 20 years. But no need to give up prematurely

I listen to a podcast called Crushing Iron. One of the two hosts realized he was in poor shape and his friends were starting to decay. I think he was about 50 when he had that realization.

He decided not to let it happen to him, so he got into triathlon. Now, he’s doing Ironman races every year for the last ~10 years, and he started at around 50 (maybe 49 or 48, don’t remember).

Other host was an alcoholic who bounced back into a very healthy life. Both are inspirational, but I think the other applies to you more.

Point is, you can do it! You don’t have to do a whole Ironman, obviously lol, but making choices to be healthy like you are is an amazing step. And it’s absolutely possible to start at 50.

If you want motivation, the Crushing Iron podcast has some great episodes (and some kinda boring ones). Check out this one, “Out alone in the dark”.. I like their episodes from a couple years ago (and older) the most. Also 667 and 685 are a couple I had saved recently as good ones.

Out alone in the dark: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

#667 Play like a kid: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

#685 stop waiting for life: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

Couple bonus episodes I love:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

These comments are spot-on as far as physical health is concerned. Make an effort and you'll significantly improve your quality of life. I'd say you don't necessarily need to run marathons or triathlons, though, and I'd also suggest that cardio is not the best way to maintain good health, strength training is better.

I have been lifting weights for years now, and it does wonders for my health (for example: all my back pain and back injury problems are totally gone).

I would highly recommend to past myself reading "The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40" (https://www.amazon.com/Barbell-Prescription-Strength-Trainin...) and starting earlier.

Or you can be a couch potato and suffer.

Look up Clarence Bass [0]

You can stay impressively fit well into your 80s :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Bass

My dad is still active in the yard and is mobile and independent at 82. But age is slowing him down. His eyesight and hearing is deteriorating.

My mom is 80, active and I don’t see her slowing down, she is still comfortable driving from south GA to central Florida where we live and the other surrounding states as long as it’s daytime.

I’ll be happy if I can still be as active as my dad

I can barely run a quarter mile in one shot. But at least I'm running!

Ha for me its been:

0-25: Arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, delusions, boring normal person

25-50: Obsessive learning/study, application, and passion, finding myself

50-75: Not there yet

I just turned 30 and I'm having a blast learning graphics and audio programming, mostly in C! Found my passion, raycasting, audio engineering, and building desktop software

Yeah the only thing i dont love about the framing is that it implies you cant still be in the learning phase later in life. Neuroplasticity can be encouraged and cultivated.

Learning has no expiration date

Or as Shakespeare would have put it:

0-25: Act I 24-50: Act II 50-75: Act III, the final act.

I`m pretty sure that most of us will be alive after that final act ;)

For me:

0-22 - I’m someone else’s responsibility - graduated college degree in CS

22-36 - shuffled aimlessly between two meaningless jobs, a horrible mistake of a marriage (and divorce), got into real estate too heavily and the crash of 2008, taught fitness classes on the side as my only outlet.

36-46 - got remarried and became an instant father to a 9 and 14, rebuilt my career from scratch and hopped between 5 jobs, got my finances under control after walking away from 5 mortgages, built a strong marriage and both (step)sons graduated. “Retired my wife” when she was 44.

46 - present - transitioned into consulting, got first and only job at BigTech, (working remotely cloud consulting department), moved permanently into what was a vacation home in Florida, and start traveling extensively post Covid including doing the digital nomad thing. Left BigTech and enjoying a nice balanced life with my wife while I work remotely and she enjoys her passion projects.

What does 'retired my wife' mean in this context?

She’s unemployed and he pays for her lifestyle

The official definition of “unemployed” is you are out of work and looking for a job.

Honestly, though her spending money was a matter of selling 2 shares of AMZN pre split every six months when I was getting RSUs.

We cut our fixed expenses dramatically after Covid and our younger son graduated, downsizing and moving to a state tax free state.

"not engaged in a gainful occupation"[1] "not having a job that provides money"[2] Maybe not official as in dictionary definition, but official as in political / statistical lingo?

[1] Kagi's response provided by WordsAPI, I'm not sure if linking a technically paywalled would be the reasonable thing https://kagi.com/search?q=unemployed+meaning

[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/unemploy...

You are not considered “unemployed” by the government if you are not actively seeking work.

The official definition as far as the BLS.

http://www.mississippi.edu/urc/downloads/econ101-01_151118.p...

> Finally, other individuals who are not working or seeking work for pay or profit are not included in the labor force.

> BLS considers the unemployed as those individuals without a job who have looked for one in the past four weeks and are available to work. Looking for work involves an individual taking some action to obtain a job, such as completing an application, sending out a resume,contacting an employment center, etc. Individuals who have been temporarily laid off are considered unemployed regardless if they have looked for work in the last four week

The government’s definition is designed to make things look nice, not gauge the actual level of unemployment. If you’re not looking for work because you gave up trying, you’re not counted even though you’re unemployed. Retired or disabled is a different thing, and being a home maker and taking care of kids should be counted in the numbers as employment, otherwise everyone should be under unemployed.

This has been the standard definition of unemployed and being part of the labor force forever.

This is the same definition the UK uses

https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/employmentandlabourmarket/p...

Australia

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/detailed-methodology-infor....

And the international OECD

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/unemployment-rate.ht...

I couldn’t find a single English speaking country that didn’t use the same definition.

The percentage of people who are working/total adult population or a subset is the labor participation rate.

Yea and? The government isn’t the people, they want things to look as rosy as possible, every one of them. The people’s definition for unemployment is you’d want to work but you can’t find a job. Your definition is just appealing to authority.

So I’m “appealing to authority” by using the global definition of “unemployment” in the entire English speaking world?

Why would the OECD want things to look “rosy”?

And how would someone “find a job” if they aren’t actively looking?

What exactly is “the government” if it’s not “the people”? Every country I cited is one where the government is democratically elected.

We should instead use a definition that a random person on HN think is more appropriate?

Nearly anyone who you ask will say you should count someone who has no income and can’t find a job as unemployed for the numbers, otherwise type ignoring problems. What if you have 10% of your population that can’t find a job and gives up to live on the streets due to loss of hope? Do you just not count them as unemployed? That’s stupid. Your rapid fire set of questions carefully worded to sound reasonable is just a way for you to avoid the crux of my argument that government numbers for unemployed are low due to the twisted definition they use.

Tell me why they shouldn’t count the hopeless as unemployed?

> Tell me why they shouldn’t count the hopeless as unemployed?

Because “Words Mean Things”. Every single country’s government that I could find - including non English speaking countries (I just looked up the definition in Japan) define unemployment the same way.

The unemployment, the homeless and the labor participation rate are all statistics that are reported by the government and one isn’t ignoring the other.

And you don’t think it is “unreasonable” to make up definitions instead of using ones that are accepted globally?

I made enough so she doesn’t have to work anymore. Before Covid, she was a special needs bus driver. I didn’t want her on the bus after Covid for both her health and mine.

By the time Covid lifted, we had decided to fly around the country taking one way trips and she was deeply into her passion projects.

We got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit into 4 suitcases. Our official home was our vacation home in (state tax free) Florida that was being rented out while we were traveling as a short term rental.

The “state tax free” came in handy when I was getting RSUs/pro rated signing bonuses

> Our official home was our vacation home in (state tax free) Florida that was being rented out while we were traveling as a short term rental.

States typically define residency as either based on domicile, or a statute. In other words, some of the states you "traveled" to undoubtedly have laws stating that if you are in the state for a certain number of days out of the year, you are automatically a resident, not a visitor, and liable for taxes on your world-wide income.

Besides Las Vegas where we ended up staying a month and a half and two cities in Texas where we were in Dallas and Houston 3 weeks each, we only stayed in one place for a maximum of 3 weeks.

It just happens to be a moot point in Nevada and Texas since they were both state tax free states.

When we do it again probably in summer 2027, those also happen to be the two states we will be spending the majority of our time. My wife knows a lot of people in both states

She's been 'taken care of'...

Out of curiosity, what do you think was the biggest turning point for you?

The biggest turning point for the worse and for the better was not having a good stable home life.

I am not saying you have to be in a relationship to have stability. Of course it’s better to be single than being involved in a bad relationship.

Looking back, what really started things going bad was a lack of self confidence and wanting to be in a relationship.

I was a short computer geek, kind of awkward. I got better. Now I’m very comfortable talking to anyone. It’s my $Dayjob.

Ironically enough though, I had no trouble being in front of people at 28 and had been a part time fitness instructor for 3 years by then as hobby. I was in great shape.

I met someone who was physically attractive and was interested in me after being friendzoned all of my adult life. I got married and I should have seen the signs.

That led to everything else that happened for the next 6 years - staying at a job too long, getting too heavily invested in real estate trying to make more money, stagnating both technically and financially. Got divorced at 32.

At 34, in 2008 around the time of the real estate crash, I just had to accept the fact that everything I had done up to that point was a waste and be comfortable starting over from scratch.

I got ready to interview after being at my second job for over 9 years and did a vertical move to another job that would let me get some real world experience with an in demand language - C# and the startup was working with ruggedized mobile devices right when smart phones were taking off.

I wasn’t trying to date anyone at that time and my now wife had to basically shove her number at me once we had been working together for over two years. She was in another department. I told her all of the shit I was going through at the time with my real estate and she was still interested.

We both got laid off when the company went out of business and she got a job quickly that had benefits and I got a good paying contract without benefits. I proposed to her while I was working as a contractor with the plan for us to get married after I got a permanent job.

She suggested we get married sooner so I could be on her benefits. That arrangement kept until 2020 when I was 46. It allowed me the freedom to jump back and forth between full time and contract jobs to build my resume.

In 2020, as a direct result of me being able to aggressively job hop, a remote position at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap in 2020.

The difference between what I was making pre-AWS and post AWS was 3x what she was making. But there is a direct line from her supporting my career to me being able to do that.

I have no problem with my wife not working so she can pursue what she wants. It gives us a chance to travel like crazy and it’s not like my life is stressful once I left AWS.

Sounds like you’ve built yourself a great life!

Thank you for sharing! It’s interesting how much self-confidence and stability, whether internal or external, play a role in shaping our paths

suggested edit:

0-25: learning

25-50: earning

50-75: returning

Old Hindu philosphies have a similar split.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80%C5%9Brama_(stage)

0-25y grow and study

25-50y develop your household, your family, your community and gain wealth (non-extractive, provide value).

50y-75y hand over all worldly things to the next generation, advise, teach and help those around you. Focus on your spiritual enlightenment.

75y- renounce the world and disappear into the forest as a monk / hermit.

I hope more people read comments like these and ask themselves: "What warrants these life suggestions? Are they justified? What would make them justified? What alternatives are there?"

Indeed, why wait till 50 to start giving back.

Edit: Not talking purely about financially giving back, but also volunteering your time.

There's an argument to holding on X money will let you make more money, therefore making your actual contributions larger / more valuable

You can more easily invest your second million than your first (Because you probably need that (Or at least a portion of that to live)

There's also no significant reason to start earlier (or later), unless you factor in dying as your stopping point, worthwhile causes aren't going anywhere

Because by then you've mostly finished spending money on raising your own children.

I turn 49 tomorrow, and my kid’s next birthday will be her 11th. I have a lot more spending on her ahead!

Similar to Andrew Carnegie, although I am not sure if he quite disappeared from the world:

The "Andrew Carnegie Dictum" was:

- To spend the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.

- To spend the next third making all the money one can.

- To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.

I’ve only ever heard these sequentially so was interesting to read they need not be.

“while in the original system presented in the early Dharmasutras the Asramas were four alternative available ways of life, neither presented as sequential nor with age recommendations.”

Almost everything in Hinduism is not prescribed strictly because Hinduism is really an amalgamation of many separate beliefs systems / traditions / ritual / books, etc. which were followed by local cohorts.

That's why many books contradict each other. Some books prescribe an age and order for such steps, others don't, etc. They weren't meant to be all collected, all studied, and all chosen piecemeal by one observer. But over time it has evolved into a much different thing than when it started

Can we just skip to disappearing into the forest as a monk? The rest of it seems a bit unnecessary.

I hope there was something like a fun quarter some where in there.

Perhaps whatever we might call it.

0 - death -> Doing things.

This is just how it unfolds.

Just turned 50.

Unfortunately I already feel like a theme of 50-75 is "forgetting."

I remember very well the stuff I learned from 0-25 but damned if I remember last month.

[flagged]

Pretty sure your potential future employers are not reading my self-deprecating humour on HN before considering your application.

YC started by funding 20 year-olds with no experience, and telling them they were the best people to be doing startups.

We know that our field already has a lot of age discrimination.

Why reinforce that message with grassroots chatter that impressionable new startup founders and young engineers will see on HN?

AFAIK, representatives of other discriminated-against groups aren't coming to HN to voice silly negative stereotypes directly related to workplace performance.

Anyone who can’t see the value in hiring someone with some wisdom is really damn stupid imo. Easily worth it even under a cynical, money-focused outlook.

Denzel’s Learn, Earn, Return.

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx1T-qoilkYC6vZ48N8US2aM9nHiFTq2I...

I think it's interesting that everyone's timeline here stops at 75, meanwhile we're about to inaugurate a 78 year old President, who is replacing an 82 year old President.

As much as everyone loves to hate these guys, they're the most powerful men in the world and they clearly didn't get there by fading into retirement from the age of 50 onward. I guess it depends on what you want in life but I wouldn't mind taking a hint from them. You clearly don't need to stop when you're old. For some, life appears to be a continual doubling down for higher and higher stakes.

I'm in my mid 40s and as my resources expand all I want to do is ante up and wrestle with bigger demons. Every decade for me is one more chance, maybe the last, to reclaim the stolen aspirations of my youth. The ticker will give out someday, but until then I don't want to ever stop. I'm the healthiest and probably also the angriest I've been in 20 years. Whatever else may transpire I hope to be a bit like those croaking old fuckers and never go gently.

effin' a :)

Reminds me of that old guy in the documentary Ren Faire who absolutely refuses to step down and pass power down to the next generation.

0-25: learning

25-50: doing

50-75: enjoying

75-100: leaving

> Fiche bliain ag fás,

> Fiche bliain faoi bhláth,

> Fiche bliain ag meath

> Agus fiche bliain gur cuma ann no as.

"Twenty years growing,

Twenty years in bloom,

Twenty years in decline,

And twenty years when it makes no difference if you're there or gone."

> And twenty years when it makes no difference if you're there or gone.

That does not seem to picture today's reality all that well, considering that most power in the world is concentrated in the hands of 60+ year old people.

Some describe the three phases of your career as learn, earn, return (e.g. philanthropy, advising, etc).

> "I was shown some prototypes and basically told that six people had seen it, and if it leaked they would know it was me that had talked"

This near-paranoid level of secrecy was because Apple leaked like a sieve in 1997 when Jobs returned as interim CEO.

There were sites like Mac OS Rumors that reported about internal meetings and projects in almost realtime. Nothing that was started before Jobs's return was secret. Leaking seemed to be part of standard office politics at Apple.

Jobs wanted to clamp down on that. Who knows if they actually had measures like described in the article (which suggests that every screenshot of Aqua carried a steganographic hardware id) but the threat worked.

The leaks were obviously bad for Apple, but as a teenager in my first tech industry job I found them fascinating reading. It was a rare insight into the inner workings of famous tech company in faraway California (even if it was the company that everybody in the media was convinced would be bankrupt in a year or two, but that just made the product drama more poignant).

Yeah Jobs was probably afraid of anyone involved in sensitive stuff, not based in Cupertino, to be engaged in games or tricks like that. And they would be too far away to closely monitor.

I remember an internal website (circa 1997) having the Mac OS Rumors logo with a big cross through it. :)

I laughed at the title! My friends and I say the original quote way to much, even 25 years later. (From "Fast and Furious - Vin Diesel says "I live my life a quarter mile at a time.")

At work I coined the phrase "Fast & Furious Planning" to describe teams that plan only a quarter at a time (without regard for longer term thinking).

For those 10 seconds or less, they are free.

Small tangent:

> As a final note, when I left Apple for the last time, and emptied out my drawers, at the very bottom of the last drawer I found my distinctly unsigned NDA.

I wonder if that legally makes any difference? There's probably an oral or implied contract for this kind of stuff, if you keep showing up to work and they keep paying you?

I've always wondered about the opposite. That is can an NDA even be legally enforced?

Why wouldn't it?

I was wondering the opposite: even if you don't explicitly sign some contracts, as long as you have seen them and behave as-if you are following the contract and the other party gives you their part of the bargaining, that might be legally (almost) equivalent to having signed the contract. (I'm not a lawyer, and this is speculation.)

It seems the legal term of art for this in 'an implied contract'.

Terminology I head in law classes over a decade ago is tacid contact and definitely was a legal contract although difficult to prove in court when I did study the little contract law I studied.

The NDA could say that by signing this I am to hand over my first born but it isn't enforceable. An obvious straw man example I admit but to make the point that signing a thing doesn't give a thing some kind of godly power.

Yes, that's why our judges are human, and code is not law.

If your NDA contains 'reasonable' clauses only, they will (most likely) bind.

How do you "imply" non-disclosure?

Well, you hand your employees that very sheet of paper that the protagonist found unsigned in their drawer. And trade secrets are a fairly widespread concept, too. So judges wouldn't have a hard time believing that a reasonable person would recognise trade secrets in most cases.

The reverse is true. They asked to sign an NDA, the person looked at it, decided not to agree, but they kept them on regardless.

It would be better to have never handed te person the formal agreement, than give it and be ok with them not signing.

(not keeping track is just as bad, it marks the NDA as unimportant)

Yes, and I bet all the finer details of what happens in these cases if they go to court depend on a ton of precedents, and the luck of the draw with your judge and lawyers.

The mention of Finder being built with Carbon APIs using OS9 as dev environment makes me wonder if that's not why some Finder APIs in 2020 still used classic Mac pathnames (with colons as separators).

Had to find some gnarly AppleScript to convert pathnames when interacting with Finder

I suspect using Carbon also helped shake out Carbon itself. Eventually the Finder was rewritten in Cocoa. Maybe one day it'll be rewritten in SwiftUI and some SwiftUI bugs will get shaken out ;)

Maybe one day it will stop using classic paths then...

fortunately I don't have to deal with it anymore ;3

I wonder as well how much the early Finders were platform-independent: are there builds that ran on MacOS 8, for example?

> You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).

On a website with huge margins at the sides. I think the OSX Dock is a pretty good thing, but it makes so much more sense to keep it on the side of the screen and preserve vertical pixels. Unlike (some versions of) the Windows Taskbar, the icons are all square with no text, so you're not even sacrificing readability.

I just set mine to auto-hide. Right now it's showing just shy of 30 icons, and I feel it really benefits from the additional horizontal width.

> I loved doing UI stuff, but somehow ended up working on a command line Mac OS X Server authentication component for At Ease that was to be used with a new line of diskless netboot computers that nobody had actually seen. It turned out I’d actually been on the iMac project all this time, and in the end they got hard drives.

Relevant: Macintosh Network Computer

— https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-...

— https://web.archive.org/web/20130603044116/https://sw.thecsi...

— https://web.archive.org/web/19961220160908/http://www.macwee...

— https://web.archive.org/web/19961220043823/http://www.macwee...

— https://web.archive.org/web/20000531132121/http://www.theapp...

“During a speech trumpeting the network computer for the Harvard Computer Society earlier in December, Larry Ellison, Oracle chief executive officer and Apple board member, responded to a question about Apple's role in the NC space.

Ellison said the Macintosh NC would be available in April, with a near-300-MHz processor and a 17-inch screen. The Mac NC will run on the Mac OS and cost less than $1,000, according to attendees. Ellison added that the NC would not ship with a hard drive, but one could be added to the unit for an additional $100. ”

This year, I push 50. Ideal time to start learning c/c++ and watercolor painting.

Don't limit your mind to a predefined timeline.

I have a friend, his grandfather 69, completed a law degree and opened an office.:)

P.S. The tech industry ageism is standard which must be outlawed. It is not objective and moves the industry in the wrong direction.

For the purpose of organization, 15 minute intervals, is how you should look at your day. You only have abut 64 of these in your day to allocate (if you sleep 8 hours) So make the most of them.

I feel this in my soul. I work in higher education, and every major contribution I've made has been ripped from my hands and either dashed like the first copy of the ten commandments or handed over to someone shinier. I'm still proud of all I've done.

Kinda funny watching people OOoh and Aaaah over something that Windows had launched 5 years earlier with Win95. The Mac/Windows flamewars back then were still as vivid as they are today.

If you're talking about the Dock demo (vs the Windows taskbar), it's not so much the Dock itself getting that reaction but more so the Genie effect. Mac OS X 10.0 and its Quartz Compositor did enable window effects beyond what Windows was capable of at the time--Windows didn't get a compositing window manager until Vista was released in 2007.

I don't recall Windows 95 spatially minimizing windows into the bottom of the screen while preserving their dynamically updating contents. Did it? Or was it full of identical grey rectangles and moved window contents just by their outline, not their contents? The Aqua interface was a cut above given the landscape even five years later.

> Or was it full of identical grey rectangles and moved window contents just by their outline, not their contents?

It moved the whole window, but you could enable the effect you mention to save on system resources. (If memory serves right.)

I believe full-window moves were an optional Windows 98 feature. Possibly also available in Windows 95 via registry tweaks or if you had Microsoft Plus! installed.

My memory might be from Windows 98, yes.

I remember full-window moves from Windows 95 and even the Windows 95 preview skin for Windows NT 3.51.

Windows 95 > System Properties > Performance > "Show window contents while dragging"

It's kind of easy to forget OSX did this but it was glacially slow at first.

I remember seeing the Betas in 1999-2000 or so and they were on an iMac and the whole UI barely worked.

And I think in 2004-2006 I was still turning the animations down or selecting the simpler ones. I maybe started leaving them on when I got a monster Mac Pro in 2006.

Kinda funny watching Windows nerds ooh and aah over something Jobs launched 7 years earlier with NEXTSTEP :)

The Dock was an evolution of the applets that had originated in NeXTSTEP several years before Windows 95’s UI team iterated the “system tray” into the taskbar that actually shipped.

And I guess Windows 95 was sorta building on the fact you could stack your open windows at the bottom of the screen in Windows 3.x. The early versions of 95 I was running still had the 3.x look to the taskbar/dock:

http://toastytech.com/guis/chic58.html

As the author notes, Windows 95 was remarkable for the iterative process that Microsoft’s UI folks undertook. They published an article in the ACM [1] on how they completely discarded the previous approach of designing from first principles in a vacuum in favor of rapid iteration and frequent usability testing. This let them abandon their fear of changing too much—in fact, the article directly addresses the evolution of taskbar icons from the version shown in your linked screenshots to what eventually shipped.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611

That's not too dissimilar to the folder tabs which appeared at some point in classic MacOS, though I don't remember when: quite possibly after '95.

IIRC that was with MacOS 8, which was in 1997.

And whatever was in Win95 was in Motif, right? Come on it was distinctively superior when it came out.

The dock has more to do with NeXTSTEP’s than with the Windows taskbar. They really are quite different (though maybe less so these days compared to back in the late 1990).

I just hate the Dock. I wish there was a way to make it completely disappear. I have no need for it, everything I can do via Terminal/open, Spotlight, or cmd+tab app switcher. It's really annoying how baked into the OS it is.

Even trying to auto-hide the dock in new versions of MacOS is a huge pain in the arse.

Right click the divider line > Turn Hiding On

Not complete without setting the autohide delay which doesn't have a GUI option, need to set with a 3rd party tool or `defaults`.

I live my life four quarter century at a time for I don't ignore 4 simultaneous days same earth rotation. Navel Connects 4 Corner 4s. Bikini Bottom is the signature of your personal creator.

I don’t know if you’ve been voted down to discourage joke comments or because people aren’t familiar with Timecube.

It'll be a bit of both, given time the timecube comment might rise again.

I get a mixed reaction to tongue in cheek, jokey comments that I make, some rise, most fall - HN doesn't lack a sense of humour but a good many don't want to see it normalised as that tends to drag the general level downwards.

To tell a story about slapping a few desktop buttons in a way that makes it interesting to read is a talent

It seems sorta trivial at a surface level but we as developers are always standing on the shoulders of giants. What seems easy and simple was not always so without the tooling, compute, language advances, and knowledge sharing that we have today.

As a software engineer from the U.K. I always wondered if mega big tech did any interesting work outside the US. Hopefully things have changed now?

They do quite a lot of interesting things, but often either through acquisitions or by collecting up a whole load of specialists when somebody else closes an office. You also find some interesting stuff being done in the UK and the EU because salaries aren’t as high over here.

We did some interesting work at Google Sydney. Google Wave was developed there, for example. (But that was before my time.)

Definitely. Megacorps often outsource projects to development shops in the UK, even if they're not working directly for Megacorp. It's just hard to hear about it because NDA hell.

source: experience

Cork had Apple engineering. A lot of work was done in Apple France as well. (For example I worked with the French team that wrote "Data Detectors" when I worked on Preview at Apple). Pretty sure a lot of the French accents I heard on the Photos team were engineers that had decided to move from France to The Valley.

Indeed. There was a developers teams around Jean-Marie Hullot in Paris up until 2005. They were responsible among others of iCal and iSync, and I believe iPhoto (Hullot was a photographer and a photo nerd).

Yes, they do. On the top of my head, Meta Fair labs has a big office in Paris for instance. Google/Meta have offices in Europe (including pretty big ones) and have interesting teams there.

Drag Thing. What a trip down memory lane. I had totally forgotten about playing around with this application in my youth.

I loved that utility.

One of the things about Aqua, was that it really slowed things down.

We had gotten prerelease OS X, but it basically used Classic UI.

Once Aqua came out, things like window drawing, dragging, and general responsiveness, went way down.

I noticed that. I was always on the cheapest hardware so I made peace with it.

Aqua would rather drop frames than produce incorrect or partial draws.

Well, that seems to be a significant new insight into the mystery of what does or does not happen in Apple Cork https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42255412 .

0 - yesterday: can't really remember but happy with whatever I did to get here.

Future: stay the course.

I've never much liked who I was yesterday, but I'm (almost) always happy with who I am right now.

I wonder how many HN readers remember what DragThing was and have used it... memories.

The story is great on its own, but that ending was absolutely magnificent

Wasn’t the dock part of next step?

Earn a penny Owe a dime…

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