Live data from Hacker News

What Happened to Lee

wired.com

181–190 of 299 posts

Re: What Happened to Lee

#181

Sandra did a wonderful piece in capturing Lee, his family, his work, and his degeneration. Lee was a coworker and roommate of mine for years. Some additional info that might be of interest to this crowd: He was fantastic at video games (RTS and RPG) and chess. He had impeccable hand-eye coordination. He co-founded a gaming clan. None of that is relevant anymore. There is nothing to be done. His condition can't be sol…

Can I ask you, when Lee’s personality began to change drastically, did he maintain the same level of technical proficiency (in coding or gaming)? It is a wonderful piece on a very sad story, and after reading it that’s one of the things that I’m interested to know more about, to understand the general condition.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought of someone I love (in the broadest sense of the word) being affected by this is horrific. I'm really sorry for his family and friends :( I think that you're kind of right: I know one engineer who is like that and he it's his autism which makes him brilliant. He could operate in deep-thought mode all the time - he is extremely intelligent and extremely focused. There are other people who can hit it for pat…

Life is short and slips away quickly. Use your abilities to further the things that mean the most to you, not on a possibly misguided sense of what you "should" be doing.

And also: have pity on the person who outwardly seems to be an asshole or checked out. You don't know what they're going through.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#183
post #142

I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare. Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very heavy use of stored procedures, that called other procedures, that called others. It was one giant program inside the database. It took me a while to comprehend what he'd d…

I’m sure he did a great job, but I’ve seen those things be a huge nightmare for anyone other than the irreplaceable genius code wizard who created them.

Yeah, stored procedures making API calls to external services, sounds like a nightmare of tech debt to unwind.

I'm sure when you have a brilliant engineer like this you can make it work though.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#184

I come from a family of extremely gifted visual thinkers (PhDs from MIT/Stanford/etc) and in the last year one of us had a heart issue that coincided with a month long bout of psychosis, where dream-like real visualizations were overlaid onto the real world. I’m convinced that the genetic effects that provide us with extreme visualization and problem solving skills are related to this particular failure mode, where s…

I don't know if abstract problem solving is related to schizophrenia but genes that increase schizophrenia risk are generally correlated with lower iqs. Saying this as someone whose mother scored in the top 1% on the SAT and was schizophrenic.

Indeed, I believe IQ is found to be protective for development of schizophrenia (hence lower IQ correlation) -- if you have the genetic disposition but high IQ chances of developing the disease are lower I believe.

Schizophrenia is different that it is at least partially behavioral. The brain is more like an adaptive neural network, so it's sometimes hard (or impossible) to disentangle hardware from "behavioral configuration". In the case of schizophrenia I think (not a doctor!) there is a (perhaps structural) disposition toward modes of thinking, psychosis, delusion etc. -- thought and behavioral patterns that develop if there is inadequate self-assessment in place (which is how I would explain identical twins differentially developing the condition), and experiences of stress and trauma that can disrupt benign thought.

It is a terrible condition... I have close family members with psychosis too (that's somewhere in the spectrum of bipolar to schizophrenia). For me it appears quite clear why intelligence has a protective effect (and one of the many reasons I value, and cherish, intellectual activities of all kinds so much).

Counter to opinions elsewhere (where you shouldn't live in the "shadow of the disease" through genetic screening, family history, etc.), I personally do think it's important to be mindful of it. That way at least symptoms may be recognized early and treatment can be more effective (since it is at least partially treatable and has a large behavioral aspect). Here's hoping we never develop it.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#185
This story is sad and tragic. It reminds me that whenever someone comes hard at you, they probably need more help than you do. Best of luck to Lee and his family.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#187
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working with stored procedures is just the pits. I wonder why you would describe that as "great". Maybe it's optimized, but so would be a giant executable written in assembly.

I've found the opposite. It can take a long time to get your head into that space but it produces much more maintainable and robust systems in my experience.

I have a similar experience. I've worked with a product that consists of tens of thousands of stored procedures implementing all business logic. Because you are right next to the data you can get away with doing many thing you would have not otherwise.

Also it acted like a barrier, the core team who understood the business well worked on the stored procedures, keeping things fast and stable.

Another team was doing the tech to interface with the database and UX/UI was then implemented in various technologies in parallel and changed/got recycled every few years to whatever was in fashion.

The difference in culture between the two teams was huge, it seemed to work out well in their case.

Post reply on HN