The creator of Wikipedia answers the questions: programming, sleep, books, tips "for life"

“Every day I wake up and do the most interesting things I can think of.”

When I first fluently reviewed Jimmy Wales' 961 responses to Quora, I wrote out some of the most interesting ones to “look into my head” to a person who did perhaps the most useful project for humanity with a pronounced IT component (Jimmy does not consider Wikipedia IT project, and considers it a social community project).

Some answers overlap, some contradict each other, since there is a hodgepodge from 2011 to 2018, but all of them are useful, in my opinion, to hone your thinking and the ability to give polite answers and ask retrieving questions. Understand how Jimmy Wales is guided when making decisions, how he makes choices, how he sets priorities, how he looks at life.
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During the second and third reading of the answers (961 ... do not ask how many summer sunny days and starry nights it took), I have already identified several thematic blocks that I will publish later. Write your questions in lichku, in the comments, by e-mail (alexey.stacenko@gmail.com), which you can ask Jimmy Wales on behalf of the social community (as we once asked Alan Key ).

Programming

- Jimmy Wales has an account on GitHub?

- Yes, I have an account on GitHub. I use it for Ruby on Rails projects.

- How did Jimmy Wales learn to program and what is the sequence in which he studied languages?

- I can not remember all the details, but I will tell you that I can. However, it is important to keep this in mind: I am not a great programmer. I think I'm not even a very good programmer. But I am a programmer.

When I was young, my uncle opened one of the first computer stores in my city. Perhaps the first. Sales of Commodore computers.

On Commodore, under his guidance and using various books, I recognized Basic. As you probably know, terrible language.

Later, in college, I learned a little Fortran and S. Quite a bit.

Then, as soon as I graduated in graduate school (in finance), I realized how useful programming would be for me. So I plunged deep into it all once in the summer and learned a little C and C ++. I used Coronado C and C ++ tutorials that were distributed as shareware in those days.

Later, when I was working in finance in Chicago, I learned Perl to start building websites. Of course, among other things, I had to learn HTML and, ultimately, a bit of Javascript, but these were the first days on the Internet, before Javascript became so important.

I began to understand Perl very well, and indeed, this is the language I knew best.

Most recently, I studied the book on Ruby and took a course on Ruby on Rails (the course of Michael Hartl is very good). I am by no means an expert, but during my project work in a social network, where I play my role in The People's Operator, I am very glad that I took the time to learn Rails, because I can read the code, I know that it is possible and that is impossible, and I like working with people who know more than me, being competent enough to learn from them.

- How did you learn to program?

- I used the Coronado C Tutorial to learn C, and then the Coronado CPP Tutorial. Technically, this was not my first programming language, since I had studied Basic and a bit of Fortran before. But it was the first time I really learned how to program by studying pointers and object-oriented programming.

These textbooks are still available on the Internet today, perhaps with little or no change, because the basics of these languages ​​are eternal, I suppose.

- Does Jimmy Wales know how to program?

- Yes I know.

If you browse Quora, you'll find other answers that describe my story, but I will tell you what I can do now.

Last year, I took a month off to learn Ruby on Rails. I got to the initial level of professionalism, relying on old programming skills that I haven't used for years.

Over the past 3 days, I plunged into the code base and launched on my laptop a prototype code for a social network for The People's Operator, where I lead the development. I think it is important that the project leader knows the technology and can function, but this is not the case when I will be the lead developer, because my skills are too forgotten to be fast and accurate.

- Jimmy Wales - a scientist working in the field of computer science?

- Not. I am a programmer, although compared to real professional programmers, I am not a very good programmer.

- What was the first programming language that Jimmy Wales learned?

- Commodore BASIC also known as PET Basic, I suppose.

- What is Jimmy Wales's favorite programming language?

- Ruby.

I used to program in Perl, and I still love it. But recently I started learning and using Ruby, and I really like this language. Everything in it is an object! And the syntax is compact and logical.

“How well does Jimmy Wales know programming?”

- I am a good, but not a great programmer.

I started studying it in high school. Languages ​​I programmed for fun or professional use include: Fortran, Pascal, C, C ++, Perl, PHP, JavaScript and Ruby. Languages ​​I don’t know at all include: Python, Lisp and some more.

Of these, Perl was best for me. In JavaScript, I never did anything except small fragments on web pages, and not so much.

I have not written code professionally for many years. Wikipedia and Wikia have many great programmers, so I don’t have to do this. :-)

I learned Ruby last fall, and now I am learning Ruby on Rails. I do this for the best reason: there is something that does not exist, which I think should exist, and it is very interesting to create things that should exist.

- I'm torn between graphic / web design, music and travel, what should I do? (for example, enrolling in a 10-week development camp, continuing to work in architecture for money and working in a graphic design night school or traveling for some time and focusing on music)

- If you learn Rails in camp, you can create a website for people who want to travel for the sake of music. There must be a lot of people in the world who dream of relaxing in the summer to follow their favorite group and they need to find friends who want to go with them. There are also many people who dream of seeing a wonderful group on an amazing journey around the world.

Thus, you can combine all your passions and interests and, possibly, earn a lot of money. And even if you don’t make money, the site will remain just an amazing little community of people like you, it would be a great way to have a full life, wouldn’t it?

One possibility, which would not be a huge undertaking, is to buy the textbook of Michael Hartl Rails and spend an hour every night, sorting out with him. This is an inexpensive and low-priority way to check if you really want to do something similar.

Sleep

- Jimmy Wales argues that sleep is very important for success. What does he think of many other highly successful people who get so little sleep?

For some of them, I think it’s just natural. If you do not wake up on your own after a short sleep, then you probably don’t treat such people.

Some of them, I think, make a mistake. They would be even more successful if they had rested properly.

And regarding many people or most rumors, I think this is simply not true. People like stories of people who do not need to sleep more than a few hours a day, perhaps in a sense, because it makes them feel better about their own shortcomings — that is, if I were genetically different, or if I wanted to make myself suffer, I could be more successful, but I can’t or prefer not to.

I think that in this area many people think wrong.

“How many hours a day does Jimmy Wales sleep at all?” Smaller than the average adult? I always thought that really successful people just do not need so much sleep to remain vigilant and highly functional.

- I sleep for 8 hours approximately every night. When I can, I sleep more. I believe in a dream. I think that the big mistake that young people make when they want to be successful is to deprive oneself of sleep. This is terribly stupid.

How does sleep deprivation affect mental abilities? Do great people like Einstein, Feynman and Ramanujan have any way to sleep less? If not, how did they do their job?

I think that it is possible to deceive a dream, but I think that the bulk of the evidence points to the opposite of what you seem to think and the opposite of what most people think. But this is how it should be, and this should be a great deception of sleep. :-)

The best way to fool a dream is not to pursue some bizarre regime that we hope will deceive our body to sleep less. You can train to sleep less - but you'll be cognitively weakened and less productive, so what's the point?

So fool the dream by the system of one of the greatest deceivers of sleep of all times, Benjamin Franklin. "Early bedtime and early awakening makes a person healthy, rich and wise."

Go to bed and make sure your sleep is effective. No caffeine in the afternoon. No glowing screens and lights in the evenings. Go to bed early. Get up naturally, but much earlier than if you were socialized and watched television until midnight.

In case someone asks a question, I do not do it all myself. But I have very productive periods in my life, and now I have to get better.

- How can I overcome my lack of focus on the GMAT?

- As a guide, many years ago, I scored 750 points on a GMAT scale on a scale of 200-800.

My advice to you: sleep. Sleep 9 hours a day. 10 if you need it. This extra hour or two of research per day will not do you any good if you are so tired that you just do it out of a sense of duty or competitiveness or something that people are telling you.

Sleep a lot. Wake up. Have some coffee. Dig into the books and be the superman you are in your dreams. Be such a collected, focused person for several hours a day, and then you will know how to do it during testing.

Then, stop using caffeine before you can, so you can ... sleep. Sleep 9 hours a day. 10 if you need it.

- How can a decrease in activity be overcome? I am a 12th grade student. Although I am passionate about math, I don’t want to learn anything. I feel sleepy all the time. How can I study? I meditate, but it is useless.

- Although I agree to some extent with other answers, I would like to assume that 9 hours of sleep at night is normal (you are a teenager, you should sleep a little more if you can), but another 5-6 hours of sleep during the day are excessive to the extent that you can consult with your doctor.

It is worth reading about excessive daytime sleepiness.

As for the reluctance to engage in "official" studies, I can only sympathize. Here I agree with the other answers, but I can say that I have never used my own advice and, therefore, had terrible school performance during most of my adolescence. Sometimes you just need to score and break through some boring tasks.

But then again, I think excessive sleep is a warning sign from your body. Go check out!

- Jimmy Wales is flying first class?

I travel by air more than anyone.

Sometimes I fly first class. People often pay for my trip when I come to give a speech for them, and this is usually business class, but sometimes first class. And since I fly quite a lot, I sometimes get upgrades from business class to first class.

I will almost never fly first class if I pay for the flight myself. The business class is often worth it, because I can sleep and be more productive, and also spend less time away from home (there is no need to plan extra time for recovery after the flight without much sleep). But upgrading from business class to first class is usually not worth it.

Once I paid for a first class trip from London to Mexico, because for unknown reasons, it was actually cheaper than a business class.

Finally, whenever I talk about flights, I would like to emphasize that the Wikimedia Foundation paid only for 1 of my flights ... I think it was almost ten years ago. When I work with the Foundation (for example, I attend council meetings), I insist on paying for my flights myself.

Job

- What prompted Jimmy Wales to become an entrepreneur, rather than engage in a corporate career?

I would be a terrible employee. Every day I get up and do the most interesting things I can think of.

- What was the first work of Jimmy Wales?

I carried newspapers. Technically, this was not “work” because, since it was organized, newspaper hawkers bought newspapers in bulk and sold them at retail, which meant that we made a profit if we did our work well and got more customers and did not reorder the newspapers and We did not lose them, and we lost money if we worked poorly.

This is often considered an excellent exercise for the formation of personality and an excellent job training entrepreneur. I thought it was a great experience, demonstrating how little you can get if you do manual labor and, therefore, it is a great incentive for education!

My first actual “job” with a paycheck was a packer job at a grocery store.

- Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur? Do you receive a salary from the funds of Wikipedia?

Yes, I am an entrepreneur. I myself have founded several organizations over the past few years and have participated in several start-ups, both commercial and non-commercial.

No, I do not get paid from Wikipedia. With rare exceptions, I don’t even get a refund. Wikipedia is my charity work.

- Does Jimmy Wales know the value of his fortune?

No, and I do not think anyone knows the value of their condition. How can you know?

I have an old softball glove. How much is it? :-) To know exactly the value of my condition, I would have to get a reliable estimate of the value of everything I have. To seem less stupid, I have a 5-year-old Hyundai car ... I have no idea how much it costs on the market, because why should I know this? I drive it, and it works fine, and this is important.

Even entrepreneurs whose main asset with a very wide margin makes up shares in a highly liquid company listed on the stock exchange are unlikely to be able to very accurately assess what they can get if they really try to sell it all at once.

- What are the chances of Jimmy Wales to become a billionaire?

- At first I thought: what a stupid question. Then I thought: what a stupid question, but it would be funny to try to take it seriously.

According to Forbes, as of March 1, 2016, there are 1,810 billionaires in the world. I assume that they have overstated several people and missed several others, but this figure is close enough for our purposes.

In the world there are about 7.5 billion people.

Therefore, our first estimate can be found simply by dividing one number by another.

So far, there are chances: 0.000024% This is about 1 to 4 million.

But this alignment assumes that I am in a middle position on Earth. But it is obvious that it is not. I am in a very fortunate position, having already been born as a white man American. The recent calculations totaled 516 billionaires in the United States, and most of them are white men, let's just say straightforwardly that there are 400 white male billionaires out of about 90 million white men in the United States.

So far there are chances: 0.000444% This is about 18 times more than before! We have reached 1 to 225,000.

But look, even this is not a very accurate estimate. I am in even more fortunate position. Suppose that being in a good position, being well known and knowing a lot of billionaires, my chances increase 10 times.

Thus, we get 1 to 22 500.

But then we must take into account what is perhaps the most important factor: the desire to carry out a total desire for wealth for all other purposes. I am 50 years old. I like what I do. I have never been even about as interested in money as in matters that I consider important and interesting.

So in fact, the odds end up with something almost indistinguishable from zero for all practical purposes.

Bias

- What is a fact for Jimmy Wales?

“Since language is a complex concept, and since many people are inaccurate in using a language, you can mean several different things here.” I will take it as an epistemological question, reminding you that I am not a professional philosopher, who nonetheless in my life paid much attention to such questions and thought about them, I will explain what I mean when I use the word "fact".

We make statements (or assumptions) about the world: the sun shines, water consists of H2O, 2 + 2 = 4, etc. The well-formed statements are either true or false.

Truth is the result of identifying the facts of reality.

“Fact” is something that is “there” - something in the world corresponding to something in our consciousness. A lie, which may be the result of error or dishonesty, is a statement that does not identify the facts of reality.

Facts matter, and in a very real sense, our fundamental cognitive moral responsibility is to identify the facts.

There is another, more casual, use of the word "fact", which is slightly different. We can compare the facts with a simple opinion and use the word “fact” to identify statements that we are completely convinced of the truth of.

- Which of the sites in your opinion the most biased? Quora, Reddit or Wikipedia?

“I don’t think that the notion of“ prejudiced ”can really be applied to both Quora and Reddit - since they encourage people and allow them to publish their personal views and opinions, of course, many of them will be biased in their own way.

Let's focus on Reddit for a moment - it is divided into “sub-forums” and there is a moderator for each of them - so you get a lot of patriotic and apolitical sub-forums, which are very biased.

Wikipedia is the only platform that tends not to be biased or categorical. We manage to succeed to a greater or lesser extent due to natural human deficiencies.

Books

“What book is Jimmy Wales reading now?”

- I just finished reading Michael Hartle's Ruby on Rails Tutorial.

- Successful people like Jimmy Wales, Jason M. Lemkin and David S. Rose, read motivational books on their way to success?

- I am not a huge fan of such books, but I read some of them, which were very good, and would recommend them to people just starting their own.

"7 skills", in particular, is a very good book.

Tony Robbins “Wake up a giant in yourself” is a pretty lousy book, but if you realize what it really is and pick up only the moments that are worth it, then it’s quite motivational.

“Your money or your life”, which in fact is not a typical “success book” is in fact the book that I think is very useful in terms of understanding how little money actually needs to live and be happy .

Remember - the less money you need to live, the more money available to do cool things.

One of the problems with all these books is that they are practical and superficial, and do not help you establish a serious and long-term philosophical view. For this, I recommend something from the early works of Ayn Rand or Nathaniel Branden.

“What is Jimmy Wales's favorite book?”

She often changes. This is currently a tutorial on Ruby on Rails by Michael Hartl. :)

In the long run, I must say that Ain Rand's “Source” is a book that you should read if you want to know more about how I think.

Other matters

“What is the craziest thing Jimmy Wales owns?”

- In my opinion this is a flashlight Surefire M6 Guardian.

This is a seriously insanely bright flashlight. He is now several years old, and now there are even brighter flashlights on the market, but this is a beautifully designed thing, and it is simply unreal.

- Why did Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, take part in the Bilderberg meeting in 2011?

- I did not attend the Bilderberg meeting in 2011 or in any other year. I have never been invited. I have no idea why the questioner got the idea that I was there, but, as we say in Wikipedia: the link to the source is needed!

- What OS for smartphones does Jimmy Wales prefer and why?

- Android, because this OS is open source (sort of for the most part, partly - depending on what you mean by open source).

“What kind of car does Jimmy Wales drive?”

- In London, I do not have a car. In Florida, I have a Hyundai.

- Who will win the fight between Jimmy Wales and Julian Assange?

As the Kinks sang, "I'm a lover, not a fighter - And I was born for speed."

He lives near Hyde Park, so I propose to arrange a race. From his home to mine.

He is much taller than me, and I am sure that he can run faster than me. Therefore, he will easily win, except that he will have to get ahead of not only me, but also the police. :-)

- Will Jimmy Wales secretly provide money to a highly professional and talented student so that he can continue his education?

- No I do not think so. I do not think it will be great. If you consider it as an investment, it is on average almost no pay off. If this is viewed as charity, it is unlikely to be sufficiently effective, and will often lead to bad emotional consequences for all who are involved.

I would be more likely to hire a very ambitious and talented student on an incomplete basis. This is an honorable exchange of profit for money, which does not create long-term debt or dependence.

- What is Jimmy Wales's opinion about hacktivism?

- In very many cases, such actions are counterproductive at best. They rarely achieve anything more than mere concern for a goal, but they cause a very bad impression on the general public.

I dream of having the same talent turned to work on creating things that can really organize people for positive change.

I hope that young people inclined to this direction will stop and take a deeper, longer and smarter look at how influential they / we could be / can be if we unite and use our strength wisely. In the book “Homeland” (Homeland) by Corey Doctrou there is something perfectly illustrating what I mean.

- Why does Jimmy Wales want to know if Edward Snowden ever edited Wikipedia?

- Based on everything I've read so far, I'm a big fan of Edward Snowden. I think that he did something bold and for valid and principled reasons. One of the things that I really like about what he did to clarify is the fact that his leak was selective and mostly abstract. He did not present any real detailed operations against legitimate military objectives under threat, but he attracted to the public consciousness some activity that clearly shocked most people — an activity that deserves an open public debate.

It is known that he was active on the Internet as a teenager. His youthful posts at Ars Technica were widely discussed and analyzed, and he painted a picture that helps us understand how he turned into the person he is today.

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