111–120 of 161 posts
Agreed. Other programmers who seem super-productive to me include Julian Seward (bzip2 and valgrind), Larry Wall (patch, rn, and perl), Ken Thompson (Unix and substantial parts of Plan9 and Golang), Aaron Swartz (web.py, Open Library, Demand Progress), Steve Wozniak before his accident (Apple I, Apple II, Integer BASIC, a hardware video game, SWEET-16), of course Bill Gates (BASIC-80 and various other early Microsoft…
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I have to ask, what is your age that you think you only have 20 years of brain power left? For sure, there are ages for which this is true, but given the age distribution of HN readers, seeing this post makes me curious. Perhaps the plasticity of our brains is reduced, but that alone doesn't mean you have no brain power. If you think of learning as "leveling up", you may stop increasing in level at some point, but yo…
I am 41, and am assuming I will (be able to !) want to retire at 60.. I know Ghandi, Linus Pauling etc. But I suspect I shall be a tiny bit tired by 60. Who knows. Maybe I have 40 years to go. Whatever, I am fed up with looking back and thinking "if only" - so I shall try and minimise those by 60.
Nothing personal. Seems like a very common mistake, but I can't figure out why. I also see this mistake when people mention Sal Khan as Sal Kahn.
He also authored jslinux[1] in 2011. This guy is amazing and I am truly envious. [1] http://bellard.org/jslinux/
Wow that is really amazing. It actually works. It has wget installed and gcc, tcc a workable vi and screen! You could actually be productive in this enviroment!!! EDIT: Looks like there is no iface though. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise. I didn't catch that until I tried to wget bash and see how long it would take to compile.
https://github.com/ewiger/jsmodem
Yeah, that was my reaction as well.
For the sake of discussion, I'm going to throw some fuel on the "should you go to college?" fire. One of the things that's evident in Bellard's achievements is that he has a tremendous depth of domain specific knowledge, especially in signal processing. This is unsurprising, because he studied at Ecole Polytechnique, France's premier engineering school, specializing in telecommunications. See page 4-6 of this PDF: ht…
I've found that in (music/audio) signal processing software, the backgrounds of the programmers are almost more erratic than in more general software like mobile and web apps. Many were drop outs and people with degrees in seemingly unrelated subjects, like music or biology. That said, one constant I noticed was that a high percentage of them were from Europe.
Does anyone have a link to or know how he came up with his formula for the computation of pi in base-2? I look at that and... I just want to know: how?
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No meaningful disussion can come from this. Other students went to the same school I'm sure. Why are we not seing the same results from all of them or at least from the majority of them? The question whether you should get university education is not an easy one. I'm strugling with it all the time and I am going to an university.
> Why are we not seing the same results from all of them or at least from the majority of them? The point isn't that Fabrice Bellard isn't special. It's that even a special (clearly brilliant and self-directed) guy like him can arguably benefit from the systematic learning of domain specific information that happens at a university. It could be the case that had Bellard not gone to university, he would have gone to t…
You still have to work to benefit from a university. They don't inject knowledge directly into your brain. You have to consciously put in hard effort to learn the material and retain it, instead of making extra room upstairs doing keg stands for a few years.
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Everyone is an asshole in someone's mind. You'll never please all people, and when you don't, they'll think you're an asshole. That's life. Don't let what they think bother you.
If one person calls you a jackass, ignore him. If two people call you a jackass, think about it. If three people call you a jackass, buy yourself a saddle.
For example, I hate it when people spend a long time deciding where to eat. It drives me crazy. So if it goes on for more than 5 minutes, I'll say "I'm going to (insert restaurant here.) Anyone who wants to join me should come" and leave. Some people love this, some think I'm an arrogant prick, and most are just happy they don't have to wait 45 minutes to eat.
So really, you should ask why people think you're a jackass. I know some people hate my tendency to unilaterally make lunch decisions, but I have no intention of changing it.
> Bellard, born in 1972, began practicing his own coding techniques first on a TI-59 scientific calculator, at the beginning of the ‘80s. I wonder how many people have started their programming experience on a TI calculator. I had the same way in with a TI-85.
The next one was a CASIO PB-700.