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by danpalmer 68 days ago
Geohot is famous for not being as smart as he makes out. Famously said he'd go to Twitter when Musk bought it and help Musk fix search, because "how hard can it be". Then left in shame 3 months later having achieved nothing except figuring out that It's A Bit More Complicated Than That(tm).

Comma does some cool stuff, if relatively entry-level, and this post is good napkin-maths and was a fun read, but there is so much more depth and a hundred ways in which this post is wrong or over-simplified to the point of near irrelevance.
1 comments
petesergeant 68 days ago
> Geohot is famous for not being as smart as he makes out

That someone isn't as intelligent as they think they are doesn't place an upper bound on their intelligence.

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danpalmer 68 days ago
That someone thinks they can personally "fix search" in a few months at a multi-billion dollar social network that just fired half its engineering staff, however, does.
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diogocp 68 days ago
What if someone thinks they can personally fix the loading time of a multi-billion dollar game, while having no access to its source code?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

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danpalmer 66 days ago
The difference there being that they did.

The GTA fix shows humility, literally the first sentence of the "recon" section is "First I wanted to check if someone had already solved this problem". Geohot wasn't interested in if anyone had tried and failed to "solve search", or why it might be a difficult problem. He assumed that Twitter were a bunch of idiots.

The whole approach of the GTA fix author is curious and humble. Very low ego.

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