But in the intervening years Larry Page became a billionaire and is actually my employer, while I'm an aging pudgy programmer posting on hackernews.

Y'know what I'm saying? The passage of time is weird.

Ok, finishing my coffee now.

Let me offer another way of framing it so it doesn't seem like comparing your programming-trajectory to Larry Page's programming-trajectory.

The way to look at people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Elon Musk is to see them as businessmen who happen to know how to do some programming.

I'm not trivializing Larry as a "script kiddie" because he did know advanced programming concepts since he pursued comp sci PhD at Stanford but the programming itself wasn't his main interest. Yes, Larry asked a Java question but the real interest was solving an intellectual puzzle: since the impact (e.g. h-index[1]) of academic papers can be approximated by citations, can that same idea be applied to webpages by analyzing the pages' href links??? This is the idea that's bigger than Java which preoccupied his mind.

After he codes his proof-of-concept crawler in Java, one of his later employees at Google Inc rewrites it in C++ for performance. Larry Page doesn't waste time arguing on internet forums that "C++ gives you so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot". Instead, he concentrates on the expanding his idea to organize all the world's information.

That's what a lot of us on HN are trying to do... find a big idea that just lets us use our programming skills to implement it. The programming is only a transition state to something else. Personally, I do like programming but that's not my end goal of self-actualization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

For example I worked at a company which built a social network, starting out in schools, generously funded by VC money. Unfortunately that was back in 1999 before a bunch of stuff had come together to turn that into a multi-billion dollar idea (such as widely available always-on flat-fee internet, and cheap digital cameras).

https://web.archive.org/web/20000303100223/schoolmaster.net/

It's a bit hard to get an idea what the site was about now because everything was behind a login (hey, like Facebook!) so the Internet Archive didn't scrape very much.

[ Counterpoint: some argue that pagerank wasn't as important as google's ad-free front-page (not a "portal"), and superfast results (thanks to Sergey) - but even if so, "The Algorithm" impressed Stanford, Sun co-founder investor, talented employees and early nerd users. ]

BTW as for programming, it seems Scott Hassan "wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine." https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Oh, they had great marketing. Some of it was even true.

Too bad they became that other direction.

Arguably Steve Jobs is more deserving to be in this list than Musk who's never run a profitable company.

Musk promises self driving year after year, and now even Waymo is moving away from that term in order to distinguish themselves from misnamed driver-assist technology like Tesla's [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/6/22216848/waymo-change-self...

Except they'd be gone without the Microsoft investment. Profitable companies don't end up on the verge of failure.

Isn't the profit of a private corp. like SpaceX an unknown variable? They do not have to publish any financials and they don't.

It may be that Musk uses a string of companies to shuttle money between, who knows. He did manage to convince shareholders to buy his cousins'/brother's company which ended up being a huge liability. It seems to have saved him from the public seeing one of his family's companies fail.

That makes sense, but can you assume it's not profitable?

He's definitely a different kind of CEO.

Of course, sometimes they did manage to deliver some of the things the promised also, like Musk.

I find this hard to believe. In fact I don't.

I'm not discounting what Larry Page has done. I'm saying he had the tools to build Google. So many others had and didn't but not every programmer in 1996 had.

It's just interesting to look back at those early days and think of how green field it all was, and how there was at least the semblance of opportunity.

But as you point out, it wasn't really a level playing field either.

Read up on Highlands Forum, DLI, OSD, ONA, CMS, ORD, MDDS. And no, its not a conspiracy.

It shows that being willing to be wrong in public (and not waste time thanking people who help you) is a more effective way to learn and grow than only speaking up when correct.

Wow...

quite an understatement there

While not illegal, I think it is unethical and breaks the symbiosis that their search engine had with the web.

I don't blame them. Cloaking couldn't be detected otherwise.

To anyone coming here, it's not verified if he's the same Larry Page, but the date and name + topic checks out

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2533236/setting-user-age...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2529682/setting-user-age...

In my experience, if you ask a straightforward question that doesn't require answers in the form of opinion/debate, you'll get answers.