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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

One more characteristic: fearlessness. You have to be able to not only start, but commit to completing, a project even tho' you've no idea how to do it. You have to have that faith that you are smart enough to learn on the hoof, and you have to have the courage when you realize that you've written a ton of code already, when you realize you're heading down a dead end, to just delete it all.

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I couldn't agree more, both about fearlessness and about deletion. The only thing worse than deleting a ton of code is not deleting it. Without ruthlessness there is no containing complexity. How many software projects are run this way though?

Courage is far better than fearlessness. Fearlessness means complete lack of caution, since nothing is feared. Plunge forward without any thought of safety.

Courage, on the other hand, means paying attention to the dangers and going forward whenever it's not a mistake.

Having said that, fearlessness can be the correct attitude when dealing with situations that are extremely risky from the start, such as startups.

I've actually worked on a project that had the owners approached me at the start, I would have told them it was impossible due to various concerns. It turned out to be massively successful and they created a new niche, but only by rushing head-first into it and refusing to stop.

fearlessness - come to think of it, Git makes developer fearless while deleting current version code and put some new twist to it. cause you can go back to it whenever you want it.

and git is a tool like vim.

With Git you can branch, try something, then abandon the whole branch if you want to, it's pretty sweet.

Delete only after you have a copy under source control.

It's not the physical act of deletion that matters. It's the psychological act of abandoning something you've invested time and effort in when you realize it was wrong, and not looking back.

Reading this reminds me of a quote about the charge of the light brigade

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre, c'est de la folie

I'm curious. Why is there a "de" in "c'est de la folie" but not in "ce n'est pas la guerre"? How would the meaning change if you took out the "de"?

The "de la" means "some" or "some of," while "la" alone just means "the".

"Folie" (folly) is an amorphous, uncounted quantity, like water or sand. War is a one-of-a-kind entity, like "Peltier effect." So you speak of "some water" but "the Peltier effect."

When thirsty, you could say that "I want to drink the water," but unless there was an antecedent already set up in the conversation, it would sound a bit silly.

Interesting. I know the definitional difference between de and la and I know that de applies to indefinite things and so on. But the rules don't help here because to me (an English speaker with rudimentary French) la folie and la guerre aren't in different categories of definiteness to begin with. In English, war in general is just war, no different from madness in general being just madness. Thus I would never have constructed the sentence that way, and even after you explain it it still seems strange.

Once you tell me that la guerre is definite and la folie amorphous, then sure, I'd know to use the articles that way. But I would never have guessed this. It seems you have to know how the nouns feel to a French speaker; you can't simply compute the right answer from the concepts.

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