zlacker

Who/what is JWZ?

>>Waterl+(OP)
Jamie Zawinski

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

>>sib+q
TIL he owns and operates DNA Lounge. Thanks for the late night fun and pizza, jwz.

>>sib+q
I love that this wikipedia article includes a "Principles" section.

Is this normal for wiki pages on people?

>>hoten+v1
I suspect he made the decision to buy DNA after this:

http://home.mcom.com/mozilla.org/1998-03-25/party/

That party was a huge milestone in retrospect. It was the day FOSS went mainstream. Shortly thereafter, the dot-com boom ended and the 90s tech parameters got upended and scrambled.

>>worsts+R3
I went to that! Heady times.

>>worsts+R3
His blogs (LiveJournal, and later on, his own WordPress instance) and website has content going all the way back to 1993. I remember finding it as a teenager and reading all the stories and being enchanted by them.

At some point he did write why he bought the club, he was moaning about the state of night life in SF, and a friend said something like "Why don't you do something about it?"... so he did.

Edit: found it: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/1998-1999.html

>>Waterl+(OP)
[flagged]

>>TMWNN+F8
what a terrible take. no wonder referrals to his site from this one get the treatment it does.

>>fragme+1b
This is the first time I have ever discussed jwz here. I have no particular brief for, or against, whatever HN's "consensus" on Zawinski is. What I said is based on my reading his blog for more than a decade.

>>TMWNN+F8
JWZ is a skilled and noteworthy hacker, in the sense of HN.

IIRC, he decided a long time ago that he'd had enough of crazy startup life, and bought a nightclub, and somehow kept a nightclub going all that time.

>>neilv+Re
People talk the same shit about Woz and Paul Allen too.

I could have gotten in on the third big round of hiring at Amazon, but I told my friend I’d rather work until retirement than get rich writing Perl code. People are allowed to have standards, and those standards are allowed to keep you from taking money you don’t feel good about.

If it wasn’t then we would all be sex workers. Most pay for the least work.

>>TMWNN+Gb
You believe he’s “eternally bitter” and “mentally ill” but you’ve been reading his blog for over a decade.

>>TMWNN+F8
As one of the early Netscape employees he should have made pretty good money. He didn't make founder money because he wasn't a founder.

As for his personality, I get the impression he was always like that.

>>TMWNN+F8
Please don't cross into personal attack on HN, regardless of who the person is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>>justin+zi
It's partially because of inertia, because I put it into my RSS reader a long time ago. It's partially because there are interesting posts every now and then, such as the one about him repurposing his old Lisp Machine terminal, or about XScreeenSaver. And yes, it's partially because rubbernecking while passing by a colossal trainwreck is always entertaining.