that steve yegge story is...anti-climatic. you mean bezos pointed out he left off data mining and machine learning in a presentation about generalist engineers? what vast and yet cutting insight! ugh.

that story just reeks of the blind idolization that goes on with these people. you see it in musk devotees as well. yes, these people are smart, successful, and driven. but they aren't literal incarnations of comic-esque super geniuses or intellectual gods. they are people who's primary power is their drive.

how about just respecting their drive and intelligence rather than putting it on a pedestal? think originally and don't be some dumb slave that bows down to supposed super intelligence. question whether those people really have the capability to understand a certain novel idea, because they may not. they got to where they are because they followed a path and followed it HARD, meaning there are maybe paths they didn't have time to consider.

Well, this story was posted in 2011 and although Yegge doesn't specify a date, I think it's safe to assume that the story took place years before the blog was posted as Yegge had by then already moved on to Google.

So this means that Bezos was thinking about data mining and machine learning in a presentation about generalist engineers at least 1/2 decade before this became common place.

that still doesn't really hold up. i mean amazon was dealing with massive data a lot sooner than most. it's a pretty natural instinct to think those (not all that young) fields are important. and generally the story makes no sense. yegge acted like it was an obvious thing, immediately saying oh yea i forgot that. how is that alien-level genius at play? bezos may be smart, but yegge's exposition does nothing to demonstrate that. it's hard to believe yegge got famous as a writer.

The seeming "idolization" is probably to make up for what he wrote about Bezos (and Amazon) in his famous "accidentally public" post that preceded it: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

Reducing Bezos' intellect to a banality like "drive and intelligence" tosses out a lot of fascinating particulars.

i didn't reduce anything, there is nothing unfounded (i used this because you said canard but then changed it to banality) about applying "drive and intelligence" to bezos, and yegge didn't present any particulars to even throw out. i am sure there are a lot of interesting particulars about bezos, but yegge's article didn't present any. do you have any you'd like to share?

More to the point statement of the problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting

Joel's anecdote was refreshing to read! Thanks for the share! Bill Gates is definitely remarkable

Great reads. Thanks!