Well… duh? This is sort of a defining part of his personality. Of course it’s going to be brought up every time he comes up.
It’s just like nobody is going to discuss Terry A. Davis and only speak of his work on TempleOS.
> someone who is, by all standards, very successful in their field,
What field is that? Not self-driving cars, anyway.
No it isn’t. Your perception of him is warped because you read the Hotz Haters Digest on HN and elsewhere. Go read his blog posts and you might learn a thing or two about what he’s really like. Go watch his interviews on YouTube. He may not be the most impressionable individual (nerds rarely are, even Carmack is criticized for being robotic sometimes). He’s opinionated and he likes to say provocative things for the interviewers to throw them off guard and not be so monotone, but that doesn’t make him a person worthy of being scorned in every thread on HN. He’s far more capable and far more nuanced than people give him credit for. It’s just shitty watching this community eat people who brought it up to what it is today (referring to hackers and crackers alike).
Why would reading HN takes influence my views on him over my personal experiences?
Boy, he must have seriously pissed in your Cheerios. Which of your suggestions did he shoot down?
Successful? Comma.ai has raised a rather small amount of money and hasn’t delivered anything except a toy for a couple of nerds.
I really can’t imagine by which metric you’d call his work in self-driving “a success”. It certainly hasn’t been a commercial success.
I rest my case. Go troll elsewhere.
Voting one way or the other doesn't change this.
Of course, I’m not surprised that HN is bashing Hotz - any amount of tangible success will bring about negative rhetoric from people who don’t like seeing others succeed. It’s just that HN keeps having its own slashdot iPhone moment on a weekly basis, and it’s awful to see it in a tech community (I hope it’s still a tech community). Really tone deaf and petulant takes by people who should think twice before hitting the reply button.
As it stands majority of this thread are comments bashing and slighting someone who is, by all standards, very successful in their field, certainly well known in their community, and who has almost two decades of track record of getting things done. The comments, on the other hand, have nothing to show for themselves.
If this is what the commentary of the top front-page thread concerning a hacker savant looks like, then I’m pretty sure the hacker spirit on HN is dead.