What Happened to Lee • Hacker News Board

Re: What Happened to Lee

#251

Post by eastdakota » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #224

eastdakota wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels right. Even when he could express himself in a way I could understand, he never expressed himself as frustrated or suffering. The disease at some level seems to rob its victims from the ability to suffer. It’s hard to comprehend.

I'm curious. Before his disease got bad, when he was still working but maybe starting to show some of the first signs... Did he ever express any concern? Or was it entirely other people who noticed his decline, but he was oblivious?

He did not ever express concern. The weird thing about the disease is it’s not like Alzheimer’s where you realize you’re forgetting things. Instead it seems you lose the ability to realize. I think by the time he’d be concerned he had lost the ability to be concerned, if that makes any sense.

Lots of people around him did. However, I don’t think any of us thought it was a disease. We just thought he was becoming a jerk or “couldn’t scale” as Cloudflare became a bigger organization. I was angry at him when he left. Felt like he’d abandoned this project we’d started together.

I feel incredibly sad and guilty I didn’t even question whether he could be sick until when I heard his diagnosis about 6 months after he’d left the company.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#252

Post by jgrahamc » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

eastdakota wrote: post #251

rubicon33 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious. Before his disease got bad, when he was still working but maybe starting to show some of the first signs... Did he ever express any concern? Or was it entirely other people who noticed his decline, but he was oblivious?

He did not ever express concern. The weird thing about the disease is it’s not like Alzheimer’s where you realize you’re forgetting things. Instead it seems you lose the ability to realize. I think by the time he’d be concerned he had lost the ability to be concerned, if that makes any sense. Lots of people around him did. However, I don’t think any of us thought it was a disease. We just thought he was becoming a je…

I was walking down a street in London when you called me to tell me about the diagnosis. I stopped on a street corner (corner of Adeline Place and Bedford Avenue) and talked to you.

Everything I'd seen Lee do and especially some of the last meetings I had with him at work that were so difficult and I kept wondering why he seemed like such a jerk, all that suddenly made horrifying sense.

I felt so awful for my own reaction to him. And guilty.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#253

Post by am33 » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

Really shows you about how little (if any) free will exists.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#254

Post by kilpikaarna » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

billti wrote: post #25

> The neurologists delivered their verdict: He appeared to have a textbook case of frontotemporal dementia—known by the shorthand FTD Oh man, was that a kick in the guts when I got to that bit. My Dad was diagnosed with that in the past year, (after obviously struggling for a while), and declined rapidly. He had a different variant, and indeed the one thing that DIDN'T change was his personality. In fact, that's what…

Sorry about your loss! My father got diagnosed with this about a year and a half ago, and the first paragraph of your post sounds very familiar. Not a clear (or rapid anyway) change in personality, but certain aspects of it seem to somehow become amplified. He's still able to do a lot of the same things as always, but they seem to turn into reflexes and mannerisms.

At this point he often falls into the verbal loops described in the article, and hasn't really been able to hold a conversation for quite a while. Exacerbated by his poor hearing. He's also extremely restless, and wants to run the washing machine and dishwasher and go for groceries many times a day. When my parents still owned a dog he'd take of for a three minute walk every hour, and he drives my mother nuts by constantly wanting to help out with housework but then being unable to comprehend the simplest of instructions.

He currently spends about a week every month in an assisted care facility, and my mother seems to have finally let herself be talked into looking for a permanent spot for him, though with Covid-19 is hard to tell what will happen and when.

It was a relief when we finally got the diagnosis after he was repeatedly hospitalized for unrelated stuff in late 2018 though. It had been obvious to everyone that knew him for at least five years prior that something was wrong, but he didn't display any of the obvious signs of Alzheimer's. I guess it took extended time spent around medical professionals and a thorough checkup for them to see that something was wrong.

Also to all the young people freaking out about the inability to concentrate: Relax! From everything I've seen and heard a telltale sign of FTD is complete obliviousness on the part of the patient.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#255

Post by Retric » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

Agathos wrote: post #247

Retric wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of appointments, republicans have had control of the Supreme Court for years. In terms of the actual judges and their rulings that’s anybody’s guess. They could easily remove the tax while keeping the rest of the law unchanged or do just about anything.

I don't really know what to make of "republicans have had control of the Supreme Court for years." Overturning Obamacare was their number one priority during the Obama administration. The Supreme Court chose not to. The five justices who chose not to are still seated. Some control.

Scalia and Kennedy where both republican appointments and replaced with Republican appointments. So if you’re saying they have 5-4 control now they also had 5-4 control then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_justices_of_the_Suprem...

That said, many justices have not voted as expected. In other cases political parties have swapped positions on various issues etc.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#256

Post by cookiecaper » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #183

woah wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Step back and take an honest look, and in the vast majority of systems, it's hard to deny that stored functions and/or procedures are one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox. If anything, they're widely underutilized. This is especially the case with Postgres -- it has built-in support for functions in several non-SQL languages (including Python).

In practice, the aversion to stored funcs/procs mostly arises from political concerns. Most devs don't understand databases very well, and in most companies, independent DBA teams and independent dev teams end up burning tons of energy fighting for turf.

One of the advantages of a startup is that the smart people are free to utilize the best tools in the toolbox for the problem at hand, rather than having to conform to the social mores around "don't use that tool because it's under the control of the other team and we'll never be allowed to touch it again".

Re: What Happened to Lee

#257

Post by nabnob » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

dimxasnewfrozen wrote: post #135

rubicon33 wrote: post #107

Terrifying. As a software engineer, shit like this scares me. I've felt like I'm on a steady, slow, decline for the last ~4 years. Is it just burnout? Do I need a new hobby? I used to love programming... Spent 12 hours a day jamming on it. Now, I struggle to keep my mind on a line of code for more than 5 minutes. At what point is it just burnout, or at what point is it something more? That's what's terrifying to me.…

After reading this I had to do a quick self-assessment. For the last few years or so (I'm 33, also a software engineer) I've noticed a pretty big decline in my mental state. I can't focus. I immediately forget what I just looked at, read or did. I completely zone out when people talk to me. I am just not present in any situation. What is strange is that I can actually notice it, not in real-time however. It's been wo…

Hmm, I've experienced the same thing. My hunch is that this is related to spending long periods of time in front of a computer, with internet addiction gradually making my ability to focus worse and worse. I honestly think I was better at reading difficult material when I was a teenager.

I think you just have to retrain your brain to focus in other ways - exercise is shown to improve learning and brain function. There's definitely a relationship between physical health and mental health, and I'm guessing that physical health is an area that a lot of us software devs are neglecting.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#258

Post by cheeko1234 » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #222

dimxasnewfrozen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading this I had to do a quick self-assessment. For the last few years or so (I'm 33, also a software engineer) I've noticed a pretty big decline in my mental state. I can't focus. I immediately forget what I just looked at, read or did. I completely zone out when people talk to me. I am just not present in any situation. What is strange is that I can actually notice it, not in real-time however. It's been wo…

I'm 33 also. I'm starting to form a theory that it could be dopamine depletion. [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2791340/

Can you elaborate on the theory?

I tried reading the article but can't make too much sense of it.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#259

Post by anarazel » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #163

woah wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess you're using the word genius ironically, but I've also seen such things be radical in the sense that they're built in a way that no one else would have done, yet it ends up working perfectly for the business and being far more successful than anyone would have predicted. There's a certain type of mind that is immune to fashionable or normal technical choices, that often goes along with remarkable productivity…

> as remote from one another as Postgres procedures and custom Lisps must be in every other respect.

Just a fun fact: Parts of postgres (before the SQL days, I think) used to be in lisp. To this day we still have some weird function/macro names stemming from those (e.g. lcons).

  * Once upon a time, parts of Postgres were written in Lisp and used real
  * cons-cell lists for major data structures.  When that code was rewritten
  * in C, we initially had a faithful emulation of cons-cell lists, which
  * unsurprisingly was a performance bottleneck.  A couple of major rewrites
  * later, these data structures are actually simple expansible arrays;
  * but the "List" name and a lot of the notation survives.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#260

Post by ndespres » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

caleb-allen wrote: post #154

basch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to make strong abstract connections transforming into misassociations? I think about this one a lot, how easy it is for pattern recognition to misfire and synthesize conclusions and connections that are partially rational and correct, but with one bad piece of input data skewing them into fantasy. Sometimes the conclusion may be right, but its magnitude, impact, or applicability are grossly overestimated.…

My father is an entrepreneur, with multiple successful companies under his belt. He's got a knack for seeing opportunities others don't, synthesizing those connections. Anybody who's had a conversation with him can tell you that. His younger brother, my uncle, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 20 after becoming severely erratic while away from home on an LDS mission. The diagnosis devastated their family, and h…

One idea mentioned in the article that I've seen elsewhere is this:

"The gist, then, is that someone is “himself” because countless mental artifacts stay firm from one day to the next, anchoring that person's character over time."

I have read reports that latent schizophrenia is often revealed when people travel abroad. Maybe if your environment and surroundings change drastically, your mind loses its sense of "self" that was based around anchors to the rest of the environment.

This journal article touches on this:

"Long distance travel has long been known to aggravate pre-existing psychosis.... Travel can be a destabilizing life event7 with many potential hazards to mental health, from the effects of drugs used for prophylaxis against infection, to homesickness, to disrupted circadian rhythms, to culture shock." http://www.ijtmgh.com/article_33029_738f7bb0f6124261891cf610...