Next.js Hacker News
Mario and Earendil
61 points by doppp 10 hours ago | 36 comments
  • ahhhhnoooo
    I see a Tolkien name on a tech company, I assume the founders deeply misunderstood Tolkien and probably are pretty gross. I haven't been wrong yet.
    • tietjens
      Why should we cede Tolkien to those villians?
    • egonschiele
      Armin is pretty well-known in the tech space. He has contributed a ton to open source and generally seems like a fairly principled person. I think this may be the first case where you turn out to be wrong :)
    • incanus77
      > First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post.

      And from that:

      > Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book, who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around.

      So, somewhat hopeful? I'm not sure I can take any more of this grossness.

      • dpoloncsak
        I know nothing about Earendil and this is not meant to take away from them, but half of Alexander Karp's (Palantir CEO) book was "We are basically well-meaning hippies in my book, who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around."
        • popalchemist
          Right. And now he brags about being part of an automated kill chain and being proud that he kills his enemies.

          Words carry no weight in a world where every person in power weaponizes lying.

    • teddyh
      Good thing my project is not a company, then: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos>
    • popalchemist
      The right wing completely misunderstands Tolkien and/or is deliberately co-opting it in an attempt to gaslight the world about their nature/motives.
  • niemandhier
    I was hoping for a piece on how Tolkien and Nintendo secretly interacted.
    • projektfu
      That would have been the love hotel/pachinko era, no?
  • moffers
    Gotta admit, I’m a sucker for a well-dressed mysterious preview. Really excited to see what Lefos is all about.
    • dgb23
      The first one I remember was the old whatisthematrix.com. Seems to be updated now unfortunately.
  • peterldowns
    My very first real tech job in the bay, my new boss recommended I study up on Armin's open source code in order to get better as an engineer. It's been very interesting following his work over the years. I'm extremely curious to see how Earendil goes — no surprise if it's a success.

    Congratulations Armin, and Mario, and good luck.

    Dug up the email, here's what my boss said directly:

    In terms of tech to keep up on, it might be worth while to play around with node.js a bit as we've been doing a few small projects using the Express MVC framework. A great reference for js, (which I remember chatting with you briefly about) is Javascript the Good Parts (Douglas Crockford). You may also consider seeking enlightenment on Armin Ronacher's github page (he's a python master, leader of flask, genshi, pocoo, long time python contributor) https://github.com/mitsuhiko. His code is pretty top notch. I follow Kenneth Reitz quite a bit too (Armin and he often work on projects together). Kenneth is know for le*git and python's request library.

  • aikinai
    Oh… not what I expected this to be about.
    • A_D_E_P_T
      I unironically thought that it was going to be an essay on naming characters in fiction. Like simplicity vs. self-imposed complexity.

      Ah, anyway, what's clear enough is that Earendil is a tragically bad name for a company.

    • cm2012
      I thought it was going to be an essay on the hero archetype from Earendil to Mario lol.
      • gweinberg
        I thought it would be a team-up between two. Presumably the elf would help fight turtles and donkey kong, since what good is a plumber in a world without plumbing?
  • vingilot
    Good luck Mario! Just don't tarry there in errantry
  • georgemcbay
    > Trademarks: our main mechanism of protection is trademark enforcement. When you see pi, it’s a product of Earendil, with Mario, the creator of Pi, at the helm.

    Interesting, considering I doubt I will ever see Pi in the context of computing and not immediately think of Raspberry Pi first.

    I realize that legally speaking they can hold a distinct trademark for software when the other Pi is hardware but it just seems odd to me to lean so heavily on the trademarking of a commonly overloaded two letter name.

    • aaroninsf
      Yeah.

      This was terrible branding, and is terrible branding.

      The clash between "Earendil" and "Pi" is so overdetermined it might have required earnest effort.

  • tolerance
    Someone convince me that "machine entity" is not an odd phrase.
  • swiftcoder
    From browsing the Earendil website, I'm honestly not sure if this is a software startup or a cult...
  • jfengel
    I was really hoping for some kind of Nintendo/Silmarillion crossover.

    This is good too, I guess.

  • bitwize
    I thought this was going to be a comparison between the archetypal features of the Tolkien Legendarium and that of Nintendo games' lore, but no.
  • dude250711
    Who even are these people? I thought it was going to be about Nintendo...