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  • Hacker News
  • > We won’t do THAT again.

    Narrator's voice: They will do it again.

    by vova_hn2
  • >Cringely posted pictures of the boards, the SD cards that would hold the open-source Minecraft server software, and the plastic shells etched by a laser cutter that would serve as the cases.

    For others who have played plenty of Minecraft but never heard the term "mineserver" used, sounds like he was trying to rewrite the Minecraft game server software.

    by opan
  • Richard Garriott, Peter Molineux, Chris Roberts there's a long list of similar "Don't give money to your childhood heroes" stories
    by gmerc
  • Did he actually die? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49949438

    His Wikipedia page has not changed and there are no news articles about it.

    by tarr11
  • Influencer from ages ago with dubious claims to fame building a hardware project that never sees the light of day?

    I feel like I've heard this one before. Its the story of the Intellivision Amico & Tommy Tallarico.

    Weird how similar the two stories are. I wonder if there's a 3rd and a 4th computer-personality-from-the-90s-who-fails-to-build-a-crowdfunded-hardware-thing-and-lies-rediculously-about-it that I don't know about?

    by Morromist
  • (2020)

    I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.

    There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.

    They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.

    by syntheticnature
  • >There is no scenario where you have enough time to pick up a bunch of clothes but nobody thinks to grab the irreplaceable electronic parts that you spent $90,000 on.

    Gonna have to disagree on this one. A handful of clothes can be held in your hands. A bunch of electronics can't. That's for insurance to sort out at that point.

    by Toynbeeidea
  • This has bothered me from the start. I was not one of the buyers, so I have a different take on the issue. From all his writings, you get a sense that Cringely was a big-idea man, but he had very little ability to follow through on his next great idea or venture. It seems like he would lose interest once the hard part of building a business started to appear. In this case, it looks like someone revved him up on the idea of selling a low-cost Mineserver, I think it was his son, but he probably mispriced the true cost and did not calculate the amount of work it would take to get the project finished. I don't think he started out with the idea of not delivering the product. He was just not capable of following through on his grand ideas. Some people are dreamers, and others are doers. He was a dreamer, and you could sense it in all of his writings.

    That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.

    by WheelsAtLarge

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