Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It takes a PhD to develop that

blog.royalsloth.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 429 posts

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#311

Post by lkey »

gnustop wrote: post #221
amw-zero wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he had a condescending tone from the beginning (as he always does). Maybe if he was more respectful / likable, the developers would have responded better.

Where? He started completely neutral here: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 We live in a time where every competent developer is slandered in public if he isn't fully submissive to the great corporate powers.

Casey is in fact perpetually annoyed with and disdainful of microsoft. Anyone who is familiar with him knows this.

He's been like this for years, and that's fine when you are hanging out with you buddies over a beer, but now Casey is a public figure.

Being a public figure means you are not 'every competent developer'. The reason this was made so public wasn't ms employees, it was Casey's followers.

The sequence of events he started here ended with his fans and friends on discord feeling justified (because Casey, not them, was right on a technical level) brigading volunteers and microsoft employees alike until at least one of them quit open source.

A truly ugly conclusion that could have been avoided with a more circumspect approach.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#312

Post by Miraste »

onion2k wrote: post #7

A few hours later another programmer came up with the prototype of a much faster terminal renderer, proving that for an experienced programmer a terminal renderer is a fun weekend project and far away from being a multiyear long research undertaking. I have no idea if this is the case here, and I suspect it might not be, but pretty much every time I've seen a developer complain that something is slow and then 'prove'…

Counterexample: WireGuard. Turns out OpenVPN was massive and slow for no reason and it only took one (talented and motivated) man to make a much better version.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#313

Post by Jensson »

avereveard wrote: post #294
maficious wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turned out it defaults to Cascadia Mono, my bad. Still your argument is wrong, because, like it doesn't work on your machine, on mine it does.

which is exactly the point, the amount of shortcut taken to convert code point to fast graphics make it just a nice hack thrown together and devs were right on preferring the slow but correct approach.

That is a terminal bug and not a rendering bug though, since the problem was that the terminal didn't properly fetch your user settings here. Feeding the same character into the other rendering would cause the same issue.

Nobody said he made a fully functional better terminal, just that the terminal rendering was better and functional. Doing everything needed for a fully functional terminal is a lot of work, but doing everything needed for terminal rendering isn't all that much work.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#314

Post by zadjii »

zibzab wrote: post #266
mwcampbell wrote: post #169

I pity the developer (or maybe manager) at Microsoft who wrote the GitHub comment on which this article's title is based. (And no, I never met him when I was at Microsoft.) If he's in the Seattle area, he's likely not even awake yet, but when he is, I expect he's going to have a bad day. Assuming he's not already sick of the Windows Terminal versus refterm drama, it would be interesting to read his perspective.

yeah, i would be really sad if I was at the receiving end of this. One guy is not 100% correct one day (because we overworked devs always are?), and the next day someone has written a blog text painting him as a subpar dev and now he is on front page of HN used as an example...

Yea, it's been a generally shit experience. Knowing the sense of humor of the original "PhD" comment, yea, I read that as a light-hearted jest, which was definitely lost in transit. Communicating on the internet is hard. Miscommunications are easy, and this one happened to spiral quickly. It saddens me that this whole incident was used to balkanize the community rather than to work constructively together.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#315

Post by zadjii »

mwcampbell wrote: post #304
DHowett wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the guy responsible for that comment (and the dev lead for the team! Hi!) I can say it haunts me pretty much weekly. My parenthetical-laden snarky sense of humor, my use of italics to indicate speech-like emphasis and pretty much everything else about that comment has been dissected to parts as small as possible. In the end, though? Yeah, I was completely wrong. I don’t know much about graphics engineering and I’m…

> his group of fans taking every opportunity to slander us Conversely, I think I went overboard defending you and your team, to the point of making my own over-broad generalization about game devs in another subthread [1]. I'm glad it's practical to get the best of both worlds in this case. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744315

Such is the nature of a flame war. It's also REALLY hard to take thread after thread of discussion about how this thing you built is totally shite, and not try to respond in some way.

It's hard to clearly communicate on the internet "we could do better here, we'd love some help, but you don't need to be an asshole about it". Once casey was set on his warpath, I think it was just too late.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#316

Post by Jensson »

lkey wrote: post #311
gnustop wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where? He started completely neutral here: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 We live in a time where every competent developer is slandered in public if he isn't fully submissive to the great corporate powers.

Casey is in fact perpetually annoyed with and disdainful of microsoft. Anyone who is familiar with him knows this. He's been like this for years , and that's fine when you are hanging out with you buddies over a beer, but now Casey is a public figure. Being a public figure means you are not 'every competent developer'. The reason this was made so public wasn't ms employees, it was Casey's followers. The sequence of e…

The problem wasn't that the Microsoft devs were wrong technically. The problem was that the tone of the Microsoft developers got much worse than Cassey's tone, they should have just closed the bug rather than ridiculing him at the end. If they did that the issue wouldn't have been a big deal.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#317

Post by jameshart »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67

Yup, this. Something I've been ranting about[0] for a while: there is no technical progression ladder. The Senior->Principal-> ... path seems to be a faux-management track, with all the managerial responsibilities and little of the authority. Software is shitty in big part because it's mostly written by juniors, as almost anyone who has any clue moves over (or gets pushed over) to managerial or faux-managerial roles.…

This definitely resonates. I've often talked about how the key transition to 'lead engineer' is when you learn how to wield a team of programmers to solve a technical problem, instead of solving it yourself, and to higher levels it's when you learn how to wield an entire organization to some technical purpose.

These ARE much clunkier tools than a compiler.

Another way I've expressed it is how the tool you use to get started on implementing a change shifts as you grow more senior (if you'll forgive an IDE-centric kind of view - this is meant to reflect life in a Big Org - feel free to substitute with appropriate emacs commands)

- Junior Dev: File > Open

- Dev: File > New

- Senior Dev: File > New Project

- Lead Dev: File > New Diagram

- Principal Dev: File > New Powerpoint Presentation

- Staff Dev: File > New Recurring Meeting Request

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#318

Post by zadjii »

fellellor wrote: post #123
tasogare wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows terminal is a shit show. The dev blogs posts are all about useless features such as image background while fundamentals like unicode input are still broken.

My mouse would start lagging whenever I “moused” over an active Windows terminal window, in spite of running a brand new system with a 3070 GPU etc. Did they ever manage to fix that?

That's probably some combo of:

* https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/649#issuecommen...

* https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/11230#issuecomm...

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#319

Post by lkey »

moffkalast wrote: post #220
amw-zero wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he had a condescending tone from the beginning (as he always does). Maybe if he was more respectful / likable, the developers would have responded better.

Well given how absurdly big the difference is, and the main thing he did was render on demand instead of 7000fps I think he has a good reason to be condescending and they totally deserve it for wasting millions of people's time with this shit.

Yes, the open source volunteers and random employees deserve it. They are responsible for all of microsoft's many sins, and we should find them online and tell them they are trash tier developers until they learn their lesson, right?

Ok, sarcasm off. This attitude is utterly toxic. People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#320

Post by Jensson »

avereveard wrote: post #298
jiggawatts wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not arguing in good faith. Casey threw something together in a matter of days that had 150% of the features of the Windows Terminal renderer , but none of the bug fixing that goes into shipping a production piece of software. That screenshot you keep parading around is a small issue with a quick fix. It's not like Casey's approach is inherently unable to deal with punctuation! You don't discard the entire cont…

You've lost the original point: everyone was pretending this refterm was ready to replace the terminal app, criticizing microsoft for taking the slow but sure approach: > The "complaining developer" produced a proof of concept in just two weekends that notably had more features[1] and was more correct than the Windows Terminal! But now apparently pointing out that "MS was right not to want to take shortcut in unicode…

> everyone was pretending this refterm was ready to replace the terminal app

Who said that? Refterm isn't a fully functional terminal, it is just a terminal renderer bundled with a toy terminal.

Post reply on HN