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Comment by jbk | Hacker News Reader

After FFmpeg (used in all your TVs and gadgets, very likely), QEmu (used also by Xen and VBox and other), tcc and his IOCC entries, the DVB-T emission with an ATI card, Fabrice comes, once again with something crazy...

He is really impressive...

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Don't forget that he discovered the fastest known algorithm for computing an arbitrary digit of pi. If you ever are tempted to get egotistical, just think of this guy. If you are prone to low self esteem, avoid reading about him.

And still, he has normal job in a normal company... Not in a start-up or not in a mega-tech-corp...

which company is that?

He works for Netgem (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netgem).

Perhaps he's able to produce great stuff like this because he has a normal job in a normal company.

It isn't so much the "normal" company thing, I think, as having a good work/playthings/life balance. The main reason none of my personal/toy/experimental projects are languishing on note paper or electronic equivalent is that my balance is very wrong and getting worse!

He is presumably working for a good company (or at least one that is good for him) and has time management skills himself.

That, and a brain to be envious of plus a supply of inspiration!

I would think he'd be a patent office clerk...

But do you think he'd be passed over for promotion until he 'fully mastered machine technology'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Judging from his performance review, there's definitely room for improvement :)

http://norvig.com/performance-review.html

No more excuses, I'm going to finish those damn projects I have on the backburner...

Seriously, who does Bellard work for?

He seems to leave virtually no trace (other than awesome software) on the Internet. I googled the shit out of him tonite...

He works for Netgem.

"He seems to leave virtually no trace (other than awesome software) on the Internet."

Probably because he spends his time writing awesome software.

Take a look at his IOCCC entry in 2001/02:

OTCC is an Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler for i386-linux. It generates FAST! i386 32 bit code (no bytecode) and it is powerful enough to compile itself. OTCC supports a strict subset of C. This subset is compilable by a standard ANSI C compiler. OTCC compiles, assembles, links and runs C code without the need of any other program.

http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2001/bellard.hint

(Note for those not familiar with the IOCCC: This is done in 2048 bytes)

Whatever happened to IOCCC? Last update was they announced an announcement due a year ago; nothing since.

So pg was wrong, the greatest hackers don't use Lisp, they write in (and invent) obscure versions of C all day.

One of my favourite hackers is an academic who creates languages just for fun.

Great hackers can use whatever languages/tools they like. The fact that they're being great is not the consequence of the tools they chose, but of the masterpiece work they achieved.

I am always fond of such an analogy: in terms of efficiency, the greatest hackers has an algorithmic complexity of O(1); meanwhile, the majority of us may be O(n), if you can manage to get a O(log n) you can make into the club of good hackers. The tools, be it OS, programming languages, etc, are only a constant coefficient to that complexity, i.e., they can make you noticeably more efficient, but they won't improve your "greatness".

Close but I think you have your orders understated. A normal programmer faces O(n^2), while a great programmer achieves O(n log n). Really bad programmers do O(k ^n) amount of work to achieve the same, with k>2.

Why k > 2? k > 1 is bad enough. Otherwise, recursive fib(n) would be just fine (O(~1.618^n)).

Because 1.00000000000001 ^ N is not bad for most values of N that you will actually use.

Pity me - I work in pretty much the same role as Fabrice in one of his company's direct competitors...

Any Macarthur Grant folks floating around here? Take note! That's an impressive resume.

Great idea. That guy deserves it. Though I suspect he would be too modest to accept the money since he GNUed all his creations.

That does not necessarily imply modesty, there is another MacArthur grant winner who GNUed all his creations... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Recognition

In the days before KVM, he wrote a paravirtualization kernel module for QEMU (kqemu), gave away binaries and tried to sell the source. I don't know what happened with that business.

Yes he wrote that.

Indeed he also wrote QEMU.

Wikipedia says you have to be a US citizen or resident for the MacArthur grant. As far as I know he's French.

According to the Wikipedia page, you need to be a US citizen or resident to be eligible. He seems to be residing in France and I doubt he has a US citizenship. Otherwise, he definitely fits the bill.

damn it they should take mine and give it to this guy . i just can not believe what my browser can do . what the f k!

Searching for "tcc" and "tcc unix" returns nothing helpful.

Searching for "IOCC" returns nothing, and "IOCC Fabrice" returns a site that is caching HN in realtime, and it's your post.

Any help?

There you go: http://bellard.org/

It's IOCCC. He's Bellard.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:ioccc.org+bellard

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