jbyers

This is good for Tottenham, we need that money:

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7542593/2026/09/02/tottenha...

($405M in gross transfer spend in this summer's window)

Two stories:

1. We had an engineer who worked remote (us in Silicon Valley, him in Central Europe) in the early 2000s. He was - and still is, I'm being a bit vague to protect his privacy - massively productive. He generated reams of high-quality code at a shocking rate, and was an all around star performer: supporting others on the team, fixing bugs, writing docs, super nice guy. We joked that he must have been farming out work to the rest of his town.

We finally get him to visit after a lot of challenges securing a visa, and we are super excited when he shows up in the office. He brings a tiny laptop with a screen less than half the size of a 15" Macbook Pro and sits down and starts coding away. I can't remember which editor he used - vi(m) or emacs - but someone asks him after an hour what machine he used at home and if he'd like to borrow a larger screen / desktop? He's like, what are you talking about, this is my only computer.

You could hear the crickets as every member of the team has the same thought: if he's that productive on a teeny laptop...

2. Our company did an Oracle ERP implementation on Linux, which in the early 2000s was a big deal, as we were the first Oracle Applications user on Linux. It was very painful - we had to fix a lot of bugs alongside the team from Oracle at every level of the stack. After many rounds of escalations we told Oracle we needed a lot more horsepower, and they agreed to send their best consultant, pitched like the Harvey Keitel cleaner in Pulp Fiction. The Oracle team held him in awe: "Oh, [X] is exceptional!"

The guy shows up. Very nice, soft-spoken, unassuming guy. I agree to be his handler for the first week. We sit him down at a Windows machine, and I'm like, what do you need? He's like, I just need access to various systems and this freshly installed Windows machine is just fine.

He opens Notepad. He can't touch type, he hunts and pecks. I'm thinking: zero percent chance this guy is The Wolf.

I watch him write SQL and PL/SQL, huge queries, with no reference material and no distractions, entirely in Notepad, slowly picking away at the keyboard. I realize: he does not make typos, he does not backtrack. He looks at the problem, thinks for a few minutes, talks to people, thinks a bit more, runs a few exploratory queries, grinds out some code, pastes it in and runs it, on to the next. I'm not saying every query ran perfectly, but he did 99% of the work in his brain and and just played out the tape.

He did more on a few weeks than the rest of the consultants did in six months. I'm not sure he ever touched the delete key, and I'm absolutely certain he used nothing but Notepad.

Long story short, you see a few of these people in action, and you stop assuming anything about what great looks like. Never underestimate the people who don't look like you / the idealized image in your head - judge them by how they treat other humans and what they output.

Title reads as clickbait; this is a repackaging of previously-reported layoffs with no additional content

I suspect they meant "hundreds of thousands"

This article is not particularly detailed, authoritative, or newsworthy. Wikipedia offers a better overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

Without exception?

Note the post was written in January 2020.

The author of the blog post is one of the founders of Keybase (and also a member of Hn, maxtaco).

...and if you'll accept it fully loaded, the price is $15M.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141513 links to the Dropbox Blog post (https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you-quentin--a...)

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19616244

This article does its subject something of a disservice in the fourth paragraph: "His fortune comes not from some flash of entrepreneurial brilliance or dogged devotion to career, but from a lifetime of prudent do-it-yourself buy-and-hold investing."

We learn later in the story that Wertheim did in fact demonstrate enterpreneurial brilliance and dogged devotion to his career and was an unimaginably successful buy-and-hold investor. The company he founded, BPI, threw off up to $10M / year in cash that funded his investment portfolio.

That he he was successful not just as an investor, but also as an inventor and entrepreneur, is what's truly amazing.

Notably, from that site: "Vitess has been serving all YouTube database traffic since 2011, and has now been adopted by many enterprises for their production needs."

(I work at Google, but not on Vitess or YouTube)

  "But there’s still one thing that continues to nag me after all these years  -
  how the hell did Dave track me down 3,000 miles away from home after midnight
  on that hot summer’s eve in Bristol, Connecticut?"

Assuming the author flew cross-country from California and his brother had a phone number in the family name, it doesn't seem too hard to piece together with good old fasioned detective work - on top of good old fashioned databases open to the NSA. I wonder if Dave got it right on the first call?

For those experiencing an acute sense of déjà vu, this deal was announced in December 2017 and closed today.

This works surprisingly well for a class of unsophisticated attackers. nginx, among others, will happily spoon-feed very large numbers of concurrent clients at 1 byte / second.

"The year was 1986 ... ended up settling on Las Vegas's MGM Grand."

This immediately made me think this story is made up: the MGM Grand as described and pictured opened in 1993. As noted in the comments, the actual year is more likely 1988 and the casino likely Bally's.