151–160 of 161 posts
Fabrice is awesome. I am also extremely impressed with the code written by a guy that goes by the name of Bisqwit. He has multiple videos speed coding here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit
(I'd never heard about DOSBox, and now that I installed it, just seeing the initial window threw me right back when I got my first 486 (and would connect to local BBSes using bananacom).
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…
In my opinion, that's the key.
Getting famous, comes in the way of a lot of people, whether they are a scientist or a programmer.
Read at some place, that many popular scientists, once they do something great and get popular, just have to interact with other people so much, that they don't get the time for doing something great.
Recently, on HN, there was a 'letter of note' by some famous author of why he was going to stop replying to reader letters. As that left him no time to write another novel/story[1].
Of course, for mere mortals (who don't taste that level of famousness) there are mundane hindrances like Facebook ;-)
[1] Discussion on 'The morning mail is my enemy' http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4409363
Update: Added reference
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Hm... I'm glad for having you here... :-) Oh, and personally, I believe young age is hyped too much. ( http://500hats.com/late-bloomer/ )
But 9 isn't prime. So it would be 11 and 5.
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Not all people have the capacity to do ambitious personal projects on top of their day job. I've tried, ended up with burnout and depression. So controlling the pressure means never planning to do something big on the side outside of holidays or other time off work. It's nice that you're able to do it like this, but your approach won't work for everyone. People have different capacities for doing organized stuff. My…
I think people would be very surprised what they are capable of doing. I have been working 80-100 hours per week since March of last year, and before I worked a pretty standard 45 and 'had no time'. I am actually more productive with my time, help my wife more, and still read business books and novels at a pretty good clip. My biggest two tips are to wake up early and get things done before work, and truly love what…
I am not doing it again. It doesn't work for me. I have worked more than 40 hours a week for periods of time, up to 6 months. But it is not sustainable. There are individual differences here that a lot of people with very high capacity for work do not understand.
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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…
I don't think anyone would argue that college cannot expand the mind and enable brilliant people to do even more brilliant things. The argument, however, is whether that leads to increased income and access to jobs. The data, even outside of the popular anecdotes, seems to indicate generally not.
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Ghandi -> Gandhi 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.
Pronunciation? Ghandi is a potential spelling for gon-dee. Gandhi looks like it would be pronounced gand-hee. Perhaps it depends on your accent.
"If there’s a secret to this superhero-level productivity, it appears to have less to do with comic-book mutation and radioactivity, and far more with discipline, confidence, rigor, and many years of practice." This is one line that you should take away from the article. Most of us think that highly productive programmers are magicians but we forget that they are just like us, just hard working and disciplined.
Flip side: don't feel tiny in comparison to this guy's achievements. Did he bang out LZEXE the first time he sat down at a terminal? Probably not. But over time, through pursuit of a passion and hard work, his skill has progressed incredibly. We can get there too, with persistence. And we can have fun on the way. This is as much a reminder for me as anyone, I have a tendency to compare myself to amazingly talented an…
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He went to a institution known for its math, we do see the same kind of results from his peers - just not in computer science.
>> we do see the same kind of results from his peers It's interesting. Can you name some of them? With published works
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I'm essentially doing it. It's hard. You have to quit your job and organize income. For me it's a combination of open source donations and consulting with living in a relatively low income (and low cost) country, so consulting can pay for a lot more, if you do it on a global scale.
Where do you live?