Posers: Has-Beens, Con Artists and Good Lookers
I originally joined Hacker News in 2009. At some point in the early days -- first couple of years that I was there, I guess -- there were three members with roughly 50,000 karma apiece holding the top three slots on the leaderboard:
jacquesm (Jacques Matheij)
patio11 (Patrick McKenzie)
tptacek (Thomas Ptacek)
As I start this draft, tptacek is number one, jacquesm is number two on the leaderboard suggesting he's resumed participating after a hiatus and patio11 is number 14.
Of the three, I knew the most about jacquesm in part because we had a mutual friend who wouldn't shut up about him. He was a high school drop out and self described "misfit" who went into business for himself at a young age because he was smart but never fit in anywhere socially.
At the time, he was divorced and the divorce was rather ugly. He was a successful business man with serious business experience who was semi retired.
He had a new family and hardly went into the office anymore. He made a few phone calls and did business related stuff online and was probably already a millionaire though probably "just barely" so and later solidified his position in that regard.
That's a polite way of saying he was a has-been at that time and that's why he had time to dick around all day on Hacker News. He eventually recovered from his ugly divorce and resumed working more and spent less time on Hacker News thereafter.
As documented in my last post here, patio11 is basically a con artist or at best a poser. He had a side project developed using IP from his day job that he probably had no right to use and he played brinkmanship as a "consultant," asking for evermore outrageous sums of money until someone said no, then ultimately got a job again.
While he was a "consultant," dicking around on Hacker News served as networking or advertising and he wrote about the brinkmanship games he played, real programmers with real careers took his advice and it worked for them, they sung his praises and this made his reputation as a brilliant guy etc.
Everyone turned a blind eye to the fact that the success stories were from people who were not actually doing the same thing he described in his writing and we never heard from anyone who tried it and failed, nor was there any meaningful discussion of the circumstances under which this was likely to be good advice and which circumstances this was likely bad advice.
People who failed likely didn't feel they were in a position to argue that it's not necessarily good advice because it didn't work for them. I saw it was a flawed process by which his reputation was made, but I'm a woman among other issues, so never felt I was in a position to meaningfully point out the issue without cutting my own throat.
As documented elsewhere:
At one time, the top three slots on the leaderboard all had roughly the same amount of karma and the three people occupying them would periodically swap places. That changed after I left this comment.Thereafter, Thomas became the top ranked member on the leaderboard by a country mile and no one can catch him. No, he's NEVER done a FUCKING thing for ME.
He's a real business man but his wife is also a programmer, he didn't adequately appreciate how much her career made it possible for him to succeed and he talked a lot of trash about how sexism in the industry held her back when really it was sexism in her marriage holding her back and propping up his career.
And her HN profile used to merely say "HN widow" or something like that. In other words, Thomas spent ALL his time dicking around on HN to the detriment of his marriage, she PUBLICLY wore that complaint on her sleeve and that made zero difference to his obnoxious behavior.
He's a real business man but it's not like he's a cofounder of something huge, like Reddit or Microsoft or Google. Of the three, jacquesm is the most serious real business man and in recent years has resumed being a serious business man and stopped being semi retired.
But when they were all three neck and neck at 50k karma, they were all three posers. Jacques was a has-been, Patrick was a con artist and Thomas was doing the looking good schtick with minimal substance to back it up.
Thomas wasn't all hot air. He wasn't flat out pretending to be a business man. It wasn't a lie or fabricated story.
But it was blown way out of proportion. He's something of a blowhard. And that fact has led me to the following thought:
It's well documented by Bill Gates himself that Paul Allen asked him TWICE to co-found a company with him. Gates inherited wealth and initially turned Allen down for reasons I've not personally seen documented.
I have already speculated elsewhere that Gates wasn't genuinely a co-founder and was really mostly an investor. But upon further thought I have a new hypothesis:
If Paul Allen was the only real founder of Microsoft -- if Microsoft was the brainchild of Paul Allen and ONLY Paul Allen -- he must have been a genius and this suggests that letting Bill Gates serve as the face of the company in a puppet-like role must have served a purpose.
And I do think Bill Gates was mostly hot air. I think he's a poser who couldn't have possibly been seriously involved in actually running the company while spending all his time talking to the public far more than most founders do that.
The people most active on HN were all posers of some sort. They ran their big mouths in public all day everyday because they weren't really working that MUCH.
Logically, it seems likely that his real role -- in addition to providing capital -- was information security.
He was just plausible enough as a co-founder of Microsoft to be the perfect baffle. He likely was largely clueless about what Paul Allen really did all day and spouted essentially BS all day everyday in a completely convincing fashion because he drank his own Kool aid and believed his own BS about being all SPECIAL and an industry insider.
Reality: Real insiders with real insider information and serious power are typically pretty tight lipped and frequently eschew the limelight.
Like Paul Allen did.