Is he a particularly noted person? Maybe just in the emacs community? I don't know who he is and that resume is pretty skimpy.

It seems that his biggest need right now is self-presentation and that's a pretty tough thing to acquire on short notice.

I'd also say there would likely be way more opportunities for someone of his skillset outside of the valley, where the skimpy resume probably looks even skimpier by comparison.

I realize leaving is tough when you don't have a car, but he also won't have a home soon. Some relocation may be in order. Best of luck to him either way.

He's certainly 'notorious' in certain circles. He used to be considered a troll in certain newsgroups, because he's very argumentative.

I think he is in some ways the prototypical hacker. He's very good at what he does, but he struggles to do anything with financial value, and he's got very bad interpersonal skills.

He's done quite a lot of Emacs work, particularly around trying to make it easier to work with. His work was very helpful to me when I was starting out with Emacs, so I've given him some money. His documentation saved me weeks of work over the years, so giving him a days wages is a no-brainer.

Ah, thanks. I think there's a lot of room for boisterous, outspoken and even aggressive developers, but you really gotta prove you have the chops to earn that.

I'd agree with your assessment that interpersonal skills are the issue (in fact he agrees, too) and that's not something you can fix overnight.

I really think the best situation for this guy is to get out of the valley for a bit, get a job doing some very focused dev/maintenance stuff in his areas of expertise (Python/JS?) and design a personal reboot plan.

You really gotta prove you have the chops to deliver judgement on Xah Lee. I have no idea who you are and I can't tell you did anything as helpful as Xah Lee did.

Maybe you should just refrain from judging people like this so harshly when you don't really know anything about them.

Your attitude sucks. I would never, ever want to work with you when you talk smack on people like this without knowing anything about them.

I didn't talk smack about him, so I have no idea what you're ranting about here.

Yes you did:

> I think there's a lot of room for boisterous, outspoken and even aggressive developers, but you really gotta prove you have the chops to earn that.

This sentence of yours strongly suggest that you think Xah Lee didn't prove he has the chops to earn being outspoken. You may even think he probably did not earn such a right at all. Even if you don't think so, the suggestion is there for all to read.

Besides, I have read a good chunk of his website. Even when he goes full insult-mode, he generally has a point.

> This sentence of yours strongly suggest that you think Xah Lee didn't prove he has the chops to earn being outspoken.

I didn't say nor did I suggest this. I'm simply saying that if you're going to walk into a room and act like Linus you'd better have a track record like Linus.

I didn't say Xah Lee does or doesn't, particularly since I noted above that I didn't know much about him. I'm simply pointing out that if that's your style, that's what you need to back it up.

<looking up…>

Oops. Sorry. I retract.

He is known as annoying Usenet troll by many. I don't classify him as pure troll, however. He don't troll for the sake of trolling and he can be helpful. He is very opinionated and argumentative and don't adjust his thinking very well.

He might have mood disorder. http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

Yup. I suspect this is the core of his incompatibility with nominal employment in the tech space.

I agree with others that perhaps a documentation role on an open source project would be something that would be in demand, but having the tech writer telling the developers they are doing it wrong is not a good recipe for success (and that seems to be a real possibility here).

He was unemployed by choice, not incompatibility. I know he has written quite a bit of good emacs documentation and elisp code, and just that is worth donating for to me.

I second this. His emacs/elisp docs have been exceedingly helpful for me in the past, certainly helpful enough to warrant a donation, regardless of any reputation for being difficult to work with.

Like Erik Naggum, which is considered a troll by many, and also a great writer w/ deep knowledge of programming languagess if can get past the troll part.

Also Jon Harrop. There is no doubt he is trolling, but also no doubt he is a very accomplished programmer. (He may disagree he is trolling, but if audience thinks you are trolling, you are.)

"if [the] audience thinks you are trolling, you are"

Really? I thought the entire definition of trolling was based on intent. Trolling is trying to provoke a reaction from people.

By your definition a significant percentage of the world is trolling the anti-vax and truther communities for example. And many mentally ill people who comment online are trolls instead of just being mistaken for them?

This definition seems a lot less useful to me than the intent based one.

> a significant percentage of the world is trolling the anti-vax and truther communities for example

You don't go to an anti-vax or truther community to remind them how crazy they are. When we consider mental conditions, it may be that some people have compulsive troll disorder or something to that effect.

My point about anti-vax or truthers is that they often think people who disagree with them are trolling them, and under this definition that means they are. That seems ridiculous to me.

As for mental conditions, that's another definition that seems inconsistent. I thought trolling was trying to provoke a reaction by being obnoxious or acting stupid or acting mentally ill. I thought the whole point of trolling was that you mostly can't tell if you are being trolled or not. Similar to Poe's law.

A definition of trolling that labels anyone who provokes a negative reaction from a community for any reason, like actually being mentally ill or actually being very ignorant seems overly broad. You just put weev in the same category as someone extremely technically illiterate who asks a stupid question on yahoo answers.

Now you just have a synonym for "annoying" or "irritating".

Hah, indeed. I actually brought a copy of OCaml for Scientists and I was surprised when I received basically what looks like a a hand-bound copy. But the book is actually good, and I could recommend it.

Also some folks thought the disease he had (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulcerative_colitis) played a part in his usual "bad mood".

I remember this guy! Blast from the past! He used to make trouble around comp.lang.java.programmer, i think. He was clearly intelligent, but unhinged and emotional enough that he didn't really contribute anything useful. A sad case all round, really.

Indeed. I know a few people who have a (strong) mood disorder, and one characteristic they all share is that they tend to be more abrasive and 'rigid' in general, even when they're in a good mood.

When you're bipolar, you spend less time in the emotional midrange, where social skills are built, and develop a social deficit. (Some people recover in their 20s, because a 20% social deficit is catastrophic at 20 but not at 40-- being "socially 16" at 20 is devastating, but at 40, it means you're socially 32, which is not a big deal-- but some don't). You also spend more time than most people in intense states, which makes you more creative. So bipolar people have a paradoxical age-skew where they seem socially younger but, in some critical ways (creative maturity, ethical insight) tend to be substantially older and more experienced, because they've spent more time at extremes.

From this, there's a tendency (out of resentment?) for people with BP to discount the experiences and skills of normal people as trivial "small talk" and turn emotional and ethical extremity ("I've really experienced life") into a virtue.

Bipolar, I'm convinced, is a different thing from being manic-depressive (which would, in 2014, be called hypomanic-depressive if the term were still used; but to save keystrokes I'll use "manic" even though modern psychiatry only uses "mania" for extreme highs that even most bipolar people never get.) Manic-depressive is present pathology, a symptom profile that few bipolar people have all the time. On the other hand, bipolar (as I'd define it) is a type of mind (creative, judgmental, ethically rigid) that has advantages (if the manic-depressive symptoms are contained) and drawbacks, but that never goes away, even if the manic-depressive symptoms remit. Well-treated bipolar people tend (contrary to stereotype) to be unusually conscientious, loyal, and self-aware. The flip side of it is a sort of extreme moral mysophobia.

It actually makes sense. If you're bipolar, little things have gigantic consequences. A night of heavy drinking can have you suicidally depressed for a week. Simple excitement about an intellectual interest can become socially harmful (you don't realize that others don't share the interest). If you live in a world where you're punished (by internal and external causes) severely for small mistakes, you tend to become intolerant of others who get away with much more.

Thank you for that! The type of people I befriend tend to suffer from disorders, and while I've often come to understand much about how they function, this was something I was particularly curious about. It makes a lot more sense to me now, and I'm pretty sure it might solve some of the misunderstandings and conflicts now that I know this.

Heh. Spoken like someone that doesn't really feel anything.

I'd rather work with a cranky trolling yet competent and accomplished programmer, then a sweet talking dip tard. In my experience incompetence is directly proportional to the amount of pleasantries one uses in discourse.

He used to piss off a lot of people on rec.juggling by commenting rabidly on any videos that featured female jugglers. I liked him though - for some reason his webpage directly a lot of traffic my way, even though I wasn't female...

This guy doesn't deserve to have had Silicon Valley turn its collective back on him, and I definitely feel bad for what has happened to him, but I don't think his behavior can be attributed only to bipolar disorder or depression. I also don't see hypomanic grandiosity so much as defeat in his posturing, but that's just me.

Whatever makes you feel better.

Is his resume really skimpy? I thought it was rather good, but I have no reference points on what is and what isn't considered good enough.

I don't think it's skimpy, but maybe wrongly ordered and perhaps some stuff should be omitted.

Example :

Accomplishments (at the top) : High school dropout Education (at the bottom) : Member of MENSA.

seems obvious to me which one of those two should be getting played up more.

His site has been personally very helpful to me, and I hope that he has a run of better luck.

According to his autobiography, he moved as a teenager from Taiwan to Paraguay, then to Bolivia and finally to Canada. That's a very different story than simply "high school dropout". http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

Sounds like writing him a new, attractive, professional resume could be very helpful. Clearly his biggest issues are dealing with people and presenting himself.

Side note: that he could live at all in San Francisco on that kind of income is truly impressive. At $1600 a month, rent alone is over $17000 a year.

I'd remove both, as they paint a picture that is predominantly negative (even if it might be incorrect).

I agree.

Some don't realize that a resume isn't a life-journal, but rather a carefully crafted group of documents which should help to paint the image of a choice candidate in the eyes of the interviewer, not the interviewee.

Like much in life, the biggest part of the problem is stepping into the shoes of the other party and learning to craft what they expect to see.

Having helped numerous friends and loved ones with their individual resumes was personally enlightening for when the next time comes that I must make one.

It actually does look pretty good, until you realize he doesn't list any real previous job experience anywhere.

Which is the worst, unforgivable sin (even worse than being old). It doesn't matter what you have done, if there is no corporation to witness to your ability and you do not have a fresh face. Hence "entry-level" positions requiring 5 years of experience, and yet you are unemployable forever if you don't have a job within 5 years of graduating. It might as well be law.

Is having corporate experience really that much better though?

I mean, obviously working for someone for several years implies some level of competence, but your work is nearly always locked away and you can't show it off.

Ideally you'd want someone who does both; working for someone, which demonstrates the ability to work on a team, while also contributing to open source and making their own content, upon which you can grade their technical skills.

As someone who has worked in the corporate world since graduation, I feel I have little to show that is concrete. It's all hearsay.

I feel I'd be better off if I spent time developing myself outside of work hours so that I can have something visible to the world to be proud of, but frankly with a family to take care of it's a struggle to get the energy to do that. I'd like to have my cake and eat it too. It's a little depressing to me, honestly, but it is what it is.

Practically speaking, yes, having corporate experience is much better.

After leaving the school (I didn't graduate), I spent 2 years doing self-directed learning about computing. I have commit access to PyPy and LLVM, am credited in release notes of Mono and IronPython, and hundreds of open source commits to show off. I still had a lot of trouble landing a job. I got lucky in the end, but it was rough.

You seem to overestimate how open source contributions are judged in job search. Corporate experience is not hearsay; it is concrete. Open source contributions are not concrete, because most employers do not know how to evaluate them.

I have had mostly the same experience.

On the plus side: a lot of companies care about Open Source experience and are able to evaluate it.

On the down side: companies who do it are still the minority, and you'll get a lot of competition from similar folks, who'll likely have written even more open source code than you did, and if they have had a real paid-for work experience will probably be preferred

> Is having corporate experience really that much better though?

Yes, a thousand times yes. At a minimum it gives you insight into some product/set of products that are commercially viable and people use. You get experience with at least one build system, and code architecture someone took to market. It also gives you a paycheck that frees up worries about food and housing. In the least demanding of these jobs you can use the down time to learn other technologies by building a MVP of the current product in another technology or contributing to open source projects your corporate job uses. The insight gained from one "real job" is a million times more helpful than trolling github and trying to figure out what a given project is used for in the real world.

It also gives some assurance that you won't be unmanageable in a working-for-hire context, or a HR problem child in other ways.

Long-term corporate employment is more valuable if you're seeking corporate employment. Only a few corporations (relatively speaking) place any value on open-source project association.

Apparently one reason that Valve did do well for themselves was that they were something like the first to seek out and hire modders rather than just new grads and gaming-industry made men. Naturally they were looking for the best, most accomplished modders but at the time they had their pick of them.

That's what our company does - we produce redirect loops for corporate sites.

Xah Lee is open source contributor to the LISP communities? Really? Where?

He acted as a troll for years in the LISP communities. There is no other contribution I'm aware of.

He was more helpful with Emacs.

In the 90's, he was the biggest troll on comp.lang.lisp. I actually found some of his stuff funny. It wasn't like it was hard to tell he was trolling. It was performance art, IMO. I often wonder, though, what strange person was behind it. Now I know, sadly.

I guess this is a cautionary tale then about not burning bridges? Seems like the guy is pretty bright, but for all the years he was trolling people, those are the people he needs now more than ever to help him out.

Sad, really sad.

I guess there are a lot of people willing to help him out.

He might be 'bright', but he is not a programmer - though he lectures programmers in his trollings.

What is MyLinux?

Xah Lee seems like a helpful guy and a decent coder, and I was saddened to find out later that he could also be a highly unpleasant troll. Now, I'm saddened to learn that being an unpleasant troll and failing to file taxes has caught up with him. I hate to hear of him washing dishes for a living, but I can't say I'd jump to give him money, and I wouldn't put my reputation on the line by recommending him for a job.

Same for me. I came across his site (through some usenet emacs stuff) and read his blog entries...I'm all for free speech and all, but I don't think a lot of his opinions would be considered, especially on HN, "unacceptable". Some of it might even be considered "creepy"[0].

It also doesn't help that he is insistent on using his own brand of English[1].

I don't mean to say that you shouldn't help him out. And I definitely can't say if he "deserves to be homeless/near-homeless". Just want to point out that the reason why he hasn't been hired isn't mainly because he has had "no corporation to witness to [his] ability", as someone else pointed out.

[0] Recent example blogpost: http://xahlee.org/sex/pretty_girl_racism_facial_expression.h... [1] http://wordyenglish.com/musing/xah_style.html

Edit: Just realised his writing style is only used on his blog, and not in professional stuff.

I have never heard of this guy, I popped open the JS tutorial, and I am very thoroughly impressed. This is actually one of the best introductions to JS I have ever read. I bought his emacs book because I didn't know how to donate otherwise.

> 8 thousand visitors per day. 240 thousand visitors per month

Could he set up Google Ads on there - automatic, passive income that just goes straight into his account?

It looks by his bank statement that he might have done just that. There's a payment for $150 or so from Google on there.

Because I've found his emacs info useful many times, and because I'd rather not see or filter ads, I bought the tutorial.

Any estimates for how much income that would provide?

A little bit, until his account gets suspended out of the blue for no particular reason. Of course it's found money and even a bit is better than nothing but he really should not become dependent on his adsense income for something as crucial as food or rent.

$360/mo, maybe more, with adsense, potentially much more if people clicked on the ads and the ads were high value.

Also possibly a lot more if he sold display ads directly or ran a good affiliate program for technical books and other products.

A technical book is a good idea once this guy has his feet on the ground. It seems up his alley, would provide a small advance and beef up his resume.

Yup. The right thing for him to do would be to write a technical book and sell it. He has his emacs tutorial, but his website already has a bunch of poorly placed ad units on it.

He's literally competing with his own tutorial by selling other sections of his webpage at probably less than $2 cpm. If he optimized his page to sell the tutorial he would earn more than $2 cpm per unit on that. The 'around the web' units are probably not even being managed because it looks like they are set to the defaults for general audiences, which is inappropriate.

What I would do:

1. Redesign page

2. Kill ads 3. Raise price to $30 or more

4. Aim for 2% conversion (no clue how many of those numbers are unique sessions)

5. 2% x 240,000 = 4800 sales -- 4800 * $30 = $144k before fees and taxes

That's wildly optimistic given that a lot would have to be done to the site and that the people looking for free emacs tutorials may not line up perfectly with those willing to pay for it, but if it's legitimately a good tutorial there's an opportunity there. Even a more realistic .2% conversion would still be an OK living for the guy.

He could even get started by quoting one of the other dudes in this thread who said that it was good.

The ads that he has on the page are pennies and it's hard to actually find the tutorial that he charges for. That he might be a jerk is actually totally fine. You would just have to work it into the copy as him having a maverick attitude and being a no-nonsense technical guy, which works well for selling to people who are technical.

Not very much.

If we give an aggressive pages-per-visit of ~2 and 3 ads and a semi-aggressive RPM of $4 you're talking about ~ $150/mo.

I see ads on his page.

He should realize that he is more inclined to be a blogger and a writer rather than professional programmer. He just needs to realize that and go for short term contract or part time gigs which enable to get pursue his Lisp or other teaching roles.

He simply is unaware of the deeper psychological dimension of being a teacher and an advocate and what that means for his personality

Seems like traffic numbers like that would at least pay some income through ad views.