Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

And qemu... and ffmpeg.

The productivity of Bellard is truly admirable.

And around a week ago, his text compressor topped the enwik9 (Hutter Prize) benchmark. Not prize-eligible though-- that would require a single core, non-GPU build to run in <100h. His nncp 2.1 benchmark took 140h to run on a GTX 3090.

https://bellard.org/nncp/

http://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

I'm happy for him.

I also wonder his employer might be the nicest do-whatever-you-want-in-your-free-time employer on earth.

Not only that, I wonder what kind of day-job roles he has since I assume there is significant cognitive load in his personal projects (we still think he's a human not a superhuman right?).

For context, my last employer was "Oh you're doing something in your free time? let me utterly destroy you." (and they did).

No worries on that front: https://www.amarisoft.com/about-us/

Founded in 2012. That's like yesterday. 80% of his stuff was done by then.

edit: Even then, now he probably has the world's nicest co-founder instead. Who does cognitively demanding open source software projects made available for free online, while running a startup?

> For context, my last employer was "Oh you're doing something in your free time? let me utterly destroy you." (and they did).

How could they? And what was their motivation for doing this?

An employee doing something in their free time is a rare and valuable asset.

Boy I got news for you.

They also had a policy that everyone should spend at least 4 hours every week (outside of the 40 hour work-week) doing some personal project, or learning. The more the better. (it was a recommendation, not a requirement, and there was no monitoring).

Well what I had in mind was a bit more ambitious than four hours. It did not infringe on their bottom-line (I wasn't using their tech or competing with my day-job; it was completely unrelated). But for me they were like "Oh, no, no ... we were just kidding. We really didn't mean that you should do something in your free time".

The encouragement to do something in free-time is a lie! ... they know most of the engineers don't do that. But if someone actually does something, then the lie gets exposed.

Try it yourself. Take them up on their offer and see what happens.

I don't work anymore, but I'm curious of what happened.

You said they destroyed you.

Did they fire you for working on your project?

Were you harassed? (tall poppy syndrome?)

I'm not going to open a can of worms here but lemme suffice by saying this:

With success comes maturity, and a startup turns into a corrupt, org-chart, white-elephant company. 90% of the employees end up being cronies that are pushing paper. The remaining 10% are the real engine of the company (cz the revenue stream has to be maintained somehow and real work still needs to be done). But those 10% need to be kept under the thumb at all cost, made to feel they're not good enough no matter what they do; otherwise they might start questioning wtf's going on in the rest of the company. Let's just say that I was one of those 10%. They did whatever they had to do to make an example out of me. I got my freedom, but I actually feel worse for the other hard-workers who were left behind.

Is this SV? What was the field of that startup?

He worked on ffmpeg under a pseudonym. He may very well be secretly involved in other projects.

damn that’s ballin, I didn’t even know people did that with code

Worked on might be an understatement, given that he was the initial ffmpeg developer, and thus founded that project.

There have been many more ffmpeg developers since then. I think it was originally a mpeg1/2/4 codec only, which is something one person can do. Although hardly anyone has done it with acceptable performance like he did, usually they like to get abstract and object-oriented for no actual benefit.

jslinux as well, it's more of a cool demo than anything useful but the "cool" factor is super high. And led to tinyemu (which underlies the current jslinux implementation). The current version can run Windows NT inside QEMU inside JSLinux. In your browser.

Bellard is one of those 1%’ers.

Only 1%? At least one per million, if not per billion (depending on how you count the denominator).

He's not just 10x, he's 0x10x.

You’re right. Let’s say he’s a 1%’er under a linear view of a logarithmic ranking of all programmers.

~0.00001‰

I wonder if he's lonely, with not too many people in the world who can communicate, operate, execute at his level...

That reminds me, Edward Teller said "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com