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A mentally ill San Francisco restaurant/nightclub owner [1] who is eternally bitter that he did not become a billionaire like his colleagues and contemporaries during the dotcom bubble.

[1] Well, until said restaurant/nightclub finally drain his remaining funds



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

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


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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.




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