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Comment by varelse | Hacker News Reader

Steve Yegge is 100% talk and no action. He wants to go cure cancer? Well then dive right in and join the fight! I'm sure he has Google lucky megabucks so what he does with his remaining time on Earth is entirely up to his whims.

Those whims seem to be telling him to stay in his Google glass menagerie and enjoy what his keepers feed him and taking time to play and extensively critique _Borderlands_. And that's a fine and understandable hacker hedonist strategy, but please, STFU about "curing cancer" etc. (unless he's going to get in the ring(tm), which I seriously doubt he ever will).

But to be fair, I've seen this happen to a few of my friends who hit it big, and I think it explains why there are so few Elon Musks and James Camerons among us. Once Maslov's hierarchy has been topped off, it's like the insatiable drive to achieve that made that possible just evaporates.

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This kind of comment is unnecessarily mean. It's an attack on Yegge, who does not deserve the kind of vitriol you're directing. Please don't do this on HN. It's poison for the community.

Having just watched the video (YouTube: vKmQW_Nkfk8) I feel nothing you say takes anything away from what he said. Most of us, including Steve, get caught up in short term goals and many of us indulge in some sort of entertaining distraction from thinking about hard problems. That's why we're not the next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. Even if I take your word for it, that you know Steve Yegge and have many friends who hit it big, how do their failings (which are also most of ours) detract from the ideal?

I'm not attacking his words, he's an eloquent guy.

But I'm personally not into motivational speeches, I'm a hard-core believer in follow-through and results (and little else). And while that has problems of its own, they're not the same ones as all talk and no action.

He actually has been working on a big data analysis problem for the last four years, which is presumably why he was asked to speak, so your characterization of him as all talk and no action is incorrect

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJs-0EInW8

I think its quite the opposite: he is humble to realize that he alone can do very little.

Steve writes so that others can be influenced in the direction he believes is the right one. See, for example, his stuff on why marketing is important for engineers.

> I've seen this happen to a few of my friends who hit it big [...] it's like the insatiable drive to achieve that made that possible just evaporates.

This hits many people after just talking about their goals. They get the same good feelings of achievement that lead to de-motivation to follow through with it.

He wouldn't even have to do it alone, there's tons of startups and events in the valley, particularly around Stanford, working on big significant medical problems. Coders are in short supply as well. If he wanted to code on a real life medical issue I could match him up with several doctors within a week.

But hey, it probably felt good for him to talk about what other people should do even if he doesn't do it himself.

>>Once Maslov's hierarchy has been topped off, it's like the insatiable drive to achieve that made that possible just evaporates.

Great quote, I just tweeted it. I wish it weren't true, but it is.

Steve Jobs is another one who clearly didn't have that very common gene. After getting fired from Apple he could have just done drugs and had sex for the rest of his life. But he kept on building. And building. And building.

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