permille42

As an "uncontrolled lunatic" myself, they are rather obvious in the field.

I'll agree that many of the things he says are reasonable. An example is his recent defense of long lines and dismissal of the insane "80 characters per line" peeps.

What I mean specifically by "uncontrolled lunatic" is that he often ignores convention and current opinion and does and says things that get him into trouble. He also has a temper that he often is bad at controlling. I myself have this issue, and I don't see how one could say he does not have issues in this regard.

While it requires some amount of perpendicular thinking to be a master of software, having such an attitude and working with other people in that way will cause too much conflict that is unnecessary.

I think what you are missing in my statement is that I consider calling someone an "uncontrolled lunatic" as a sort of compliment.

I agree also that he is less of a technical person and more of a manager. His skills lie in herding.

On the other hand; Git is a flaming piece of garbage and he is directly responsible for its popularity... so... He did though reasonably tell people he didn't intend for anyone outside of kernel developers to use it. I just wish he corrected its deficiencies. Maybe someday he can apply his "arbitrary character restrictions are silly" logic to Git comments and become less contradictory.

There are plenty of good alternatives. One is: Talk to the fucking candidate and ask them about the things they have done over the course of their career. Have them explain something you don't know about yourself and see how they do.

The key thing here is you need senior engineers conducting the interviews to be able to judge properly, not the 3-4 yr out of college monkeys that Facebook uses to interview.

"Hey are you experienced with coderpad?" "No obviously I have never encountered coderpad in my 20+ years of writing software and will have a hard time using a simple online text editor." Facebook interviewers are such insulting morons to senior engineers.

I agree that actually running code, seeing the errors and fixing them in like 10 seconds is a common behavior amongst those of us who have been coding for ages. One can write code that works without doing that but it is a drag and wastes time.

Wrong. If you are a serious Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience you will easily fail their stupid interview process.

Why? Because most of the people on the loop have far less experience than you. They aren't any good at measuring those who are truly skilled and are just looking for clones of themselves that are happy to reinvent the wheel constantly.

The basics aren't really crucial to developing most software. Not the way Faceboook is testing them at least. They want you to spout off the typical college explanations for things you do in just a call to a library.

No serious systems developer gives a shit about how to implement sort these days. It's a waste of time.

The only way to measure the value and experience of senior developers reasonably is to have in depth discussions about their experiences. Using college type tests is just absurd and idiotic.

I had the same experience. They only asked about things I haven't focused on or cared about in over 20 years.

The person on the other side of the design interview also seemed very inexperienced and wasn't able to follow things that would be obvious and simple to anyone who has actually done system architecture.

Been there. Done that. Fuck Facebook.

They focused way too much on "college mentality" skills and zero on long term knowledge or experience with developing software in the field.

They also didn't ask jack shit about my past experiences.

Basically Facebook doesn't care about hiring specialists. They just want generic robots who will do their bidding.

Signal is better anyway. WhatsApp cooperates with the US government.

He is one of 3 people that came to mind immediately reading this post. One of his latest creations, QuickJS, is quite remarkable.

The other two I thought of are Peter Norton and Linus Torvalds.

Fabrice, despite his tremendous contributions to the field, doesn't reach for acclaim and just seems to go his own way.

Peter Norton was a genius in his field. His book on Assembly Language was one of my favorites as a youth. Norton tools were impressive for their time.

Linus, as the namesake for Linux also made a huge impact on the field... and comes off as somewhat of an uncontrolled lunatic.

I don't though think that these three people are the highest level masters in the field. I think they are just the ones who have chosen to do things that have high impact and visibility.

"Who is John Galt?" Mastery could most closely be viewed as a state of enlightenment. To the non-enlightened it will appear to be dismissive and lazy.

There are a variety of positions one could take once reaching enlightenment: 1. Domination. One could choose to be controlling of the entire field and use it for selfish benefit. 2. Dismissive. Once you reach the pinnacle it becomes apparent that both humanity and the society it has created are horrid and aren't worth interacting with. 3. Appreciation. One could choose to be thankful for being able to reach such a position and to respond by generously using the mastery to use it for the good of humanity. 4. Constructive Legacy. One could choose to form ones own group around that mastery to preserve it beyond themselves.

I believe the dismissive position is the most reasonable and hence most likely to be chosen by those who reach true mastery.

All four positions regularly occur and you can see it readily in masters of respective fields.

The way a master appears depends on their reaction to having gained mastery.

I think the dismissive position is also most likely because I believe there are far more masters than we ever notice. They are not noticed because the majority of them don't bother to use their mastery in an obvious way.

Why should a master bother to correct those beneath them?

If a master interacts with society they have an uphill battle to being treated with the respect they deserve. For the true master there is great value in going their own way and rejecting society.

This article misses the broader goal/reason to use DSLs. That reason is metaprogramming.

DSLs are very powerful and extremely effective when they simplify how some specific task or sequence must be configured.

When you do something repeatedly in a programming language where it seems like there is a lot of copy/paste, that is exactly when a DSL should be created and applied to avoid that sort of behavior.

In this sense, good DSLs are deeply related to the low-code movement.

When enough DSLs are made, need to write all logic in a general purpose programming language will be minimalized.

The place where this can most be seen currently is in process management systems and the DSLs used to configure them. Few are familiar with these because they are very expensive enterprise tools used to rapidly setup business processes and related interfaces.

Well I don't outright physically harm others ( such as with my fists, fights, weapons, etc )

I don't though seem to have a problem urging others to engage in dangerous behavior that could cause them physical harm.

This is essentially a throwaway account but I've decided to continue to use it till it gets banned into oblivion.

Ycombinator themselves still have the IP address though, and I'm not bothering with Tor and VPNs for its usage, so I could be held accountable should I admit to anything illegal.

There is nothing I am doing that I know of that is outright illegal, but I do believe that some of the things I am involved with do in turn cause probable harm to others. ( of their own accord )

I unfortunately can't give the concrete examples that cause me to believe what I've said, as it would both lead to telling more about myself than I wish, and also expose me to even greater criticism.

I'll give one example that I think is fairly common: I have no issue verbally abusing others, especially in a workplace scenario. I was, in fact, encouraged to do so during my time at Amazon. Anything for the results.

Cussing someone out to their face in front of others, berating them very strongly telling them that their work is absolute garbage is something I have done on occasion and feel almost zero guilt about. I feel they deserve it.

The trouble is that I feel this notion of "other people deserve to suffer" for the majority of humans. I personally dislike crushing bugs... but the idea of a human being harmed somewhat pleases me because intellectually I think humans deserve mostly to suffer.

I have seen personality studies that have detection for people attempting to fool the study in the following ways:

1. Answering too extreme to any particular known "psychological profile" will throw flags. Unless you are trying to manipulate your answers, generally you won't perfectly match any particular profile. I do though account for this when I answer psych tests by diversifying my answers and not being perfect in my manipulation of the test.

2. The same question is asked in multiple ways to see if a person will answer it different ways when asked from a different perspective. This is an attempt to detect the person "spinning" their answer based on the way it is asked. It is pretty easy to spot these questions though, at least within a single session of questions, so I usually notice these and attempt not to answer them in a conflicting way.

3. Questions are asked that are overly personal or probe to traumatic areas. I've had shrinks attempt to goad me into overly emotion reactions when I am carefully answering questions in the way I want to present myself. The best way to combat this is to intentionally believe in a particular set of emotional responses and to not attempt to hide any emotions. One cannot completely suppress whatever emotions you have, therefore you can only really be deceptive well about things you don't feel emotional about. Fortunately, over time one will tend to believe and experience the feelings that you act like you have. Eg: If you feign love for someone, it isn't that hard for it to appear entirely real, and you do feel it to some degree even if you know it "isn't real". The trouble here is feigning too intense reactions in an attempt to live up to the "real portrayal" of the emotion. Example: The person you love is belittled by someone and you react angrily defending the person you "love". Those faking will tend to go overboard with the reaction.

We wish to cast humans into profiles, sort of like applying stereotypes to people. This will seem to work and make some statistical sense out of how people act, but it fails terribly at the corner cases.

People are internally as complex as we can possibly imagine.

The tests and analyses given tend to work for specific debilitation. They do not work for intentional malfeasance. If you are "healthy" for a general psychological perspective, you can simply choose to be a dark person for no particularly good reason other than deciding to be.

I'll admit that one typically chooses to be dark due to the experiences you have in life. Do you, though, know all of the traumatic experiences a person has had that you meet? How could you possibly? Supposing you knew, must we assume automatically that many traumatic experiences absolutely cause continuing problems in life?

This reminds me of a question I had early in life on a test to work in a retail sales position. The question was "would you steal or borrow $5 from the register", followed by "$1", then "10 cents". I of course dutifully answered "I would never steal or borrow any amount".

The trouble with my answer is that it is not a human answer. Most normal humans beings, if we answer such a question truthfully, would not care at all about borrowing 10 cents. Depending on the job and the amount of money, $1 also would be meaningless.

The amount that it becomes acceptable to "fudge" increases as you deal with larger amounts of goods and money. You begin to realize that small amounts really are irrelevant and not worth thinking about too hard. This is normal healthy behavior.

A person who is a stickler and insists that no amount of money can ever be borrowed/stolen... watch out. Such a person is dangerous.

What Amazon is doing is not fine in any way. Having seen their dev process from the inside it is an absolute nightmare. They give zero shits about the wellfare of their devs nor about their contribution to open source.

The only reason they ever release things to open source is to try to get people to use their paid services. Eg: attention. They view open source only as an advertisement and nothing more.

The problem isn't that they use open source. It is that they spend a lot of dev times fixing all the bugs and then don't contribute them back upstream. They have sooo many internal patches that should go back but they go "if we contributed them back people wouldn't use our more reliable paid service based on that".

They are the exact opposite of the healthy hacker mentality that has brought Linux to the state it is today. Fuck Amazon * 100.

The world isn't a better place in any way with them. Their services aren't cheap in any sense.

Also, behind the scenes all those services you think are "ultra stable" are actual unstable and flaky as hell. Ask anyone who has worked at Amazon for more than a year and they'll tell you that it is constantly in pants on fire mode. All engineers are required to be on call because they have that many fires every single fucking day.

I worked there. I can assure you that they contribute very very very very little in terms of what they use. They also have very strict gatekeeping about what they allow to become open source. I've seen multiple projects get prevented from going into open source despite their devs requesting it. Fuck Amazon.

Post logic: Here is an example of a company taking their software closed sourced after previously being open. Also, AWS.

AWS uses the crud out of open source. They admittedly "steal" it in that they fork it internally, applying patches, add UI, and then sell it. They still depend highly on basically all the open source software in the world.

That Amazon does this is a rallying call for new licensing schemes. Large monopolistic companies such as Amazon need to be legally shut out of this type of abuse of open source software. So long as we go "It's fine. You have to allow this to truly embrace open source" then we will continue to see Amazon try to shut down all "open core companies" that they can by outright stealing their IP.

Open source is not developed primarily by hobbyists or aficionados. Most open source imo comes from closed source projects being open sourced by companies in order to gain free testing, free work ( contributions ), and more market share ( exposure / interest )

Heralding the death of open-source seems like nonsense just to grab attention. I agree that the large companies are trying to crush open-core companies that are small, but it is obvious they are doing this and there will be a backlash from those of us who don't appreciate their meddling.

To start, I'll define what I view "dark traits" to mean personally to me. They mean having an internal moral system where it is acceptable to harm others in some ways.

The more harm a person is willing to do, the more we generally label those people with the personality traits that we say are "dark".

There is some measure of psychology that would indicate that many such people who we label that way have neuro-atypical thought patterns. They may even simply feel differently about things.

I personally view freewill / personal decision as the primary factor in harming/not-harming others though.

A single person can be all of the following simultaneously: 1. Empathetic ( able to understand what others feel and also feel those emotions themselves ) 2. Willing to harm others ( disregarding how they feel ) 3. Successful. 4. Appear to be neurotypical ( for the most part ) 5. Be "team players" 6. Be narcissistic 7. Be manipulative 8. Be happy

The false conclusion made by most is that harming others is incompatible with the other modes of thinking. That is unreasonable as it is relying on "holistic stability of the mind". There is no guarantee that the thought process or emotions of a human being are internally consistent.

There is also no guarantee that the observable actions of an individual reveal their internal processes.

Since this is a throwaway, I'll take this a step further. I'm okay with actively harming others, either for my own amusement or my own gain.

I can understand how those I would harm feel about it, and understand how terrible that feeling is. It doesn't prevent me from causing this feeling in others. I simply choose to do so. I may occasionally become overly fixated on the emotion, but I am capable of dismissing it.

I am very successful and command a high salary. I am well liked by my peers. I am commended regularly for my work. I am considered a "team player" and am regularly asked to mentor others ( and do so as well ).

Those around me believe and say that they think I am neurotypical even when I have confronted a select few that I am not.

I morally believe that taking advantage of others is "wrong", but I still am capable of doing it, and I do.

I'm happy about who I am. While I do occasionally ponder the morality of my actions, and feel what you might call "guilt" over them, I choose to actively dismiss these emotions and carry on anyway.

I don't think I'm the only person who is this way. In fact, I'd wager that the majority of people are capable of harming others for their own gains, and able to dismiss guilt over it given a bit of effort.

I do agree that I am atypical in the amount of harm I could do and easily dismiss it... but I don't think any of these studies are able to easily "detect" me.

Put simply: if there exist light/dark people, I'm definitely on the dark side, and it absolutely enables me to succeed in ways those on the light side could not.

I will though meter this statement a bit by saying that being on the dark side also can be constraining. There is less mental effort needed to simply choose a solid moral base and stick to it. Most of the atrocities in history have come from highly religious groups with strict principles. Blinding believing in some set of morals is very enabling.

So it is inaccurate to say that being dark/light will cause success either way. There is simply too much variance and complexity with the ways a human can approach life.