Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#111

Post by wolfgke » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

mads wrote: post #44

nibs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is definetely possible to be both.

Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be? It is an honest question. I really dont know. I am sure he had some great technical insights, but I haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe that he was actually a genius coder or engineer.

> Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be?

At least there are strong signs:

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=... "In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent."

According to https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard... "Christos Papadimitriou, one of the absolute top theoretical CS people in the world (almost certainly top 10 active researchers), told his girlfriend at the time that Bill Gates was the smartest person he had ever met.

Bill Gates, advised by Papadimitriou, found a bound on a problem that stood for 30 years."

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#112

Post by wolfgke » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 9:50 PM UTC

aab0 wrote: post #47

mads wrote: post #22

I dont know if autistic people are better programmers, but what I feel that - from 20 years making software - is that people with these personality traits that fit into the spectrum of autism and who happen to end up in the software industry are extremely vulnerable to being exploited by people with certain other personality traits. Put a narcissistic (or whatever you want to call this type of people - maybe sociopat…

> "haven't learned wage-slave mentality yet" > In the ensuing outrage, a PowerPoint presentation written by St. John surfaced which included a slide in which he referred to engineers with Asperger syndrome as being "the holy grail" of hires. "They work like machines," he wrote, "don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs." Someone needs to send all these people patio11's guides to salary…

> patio11's guides to salary negotiation

Link: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#113

Post by therestisgone » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 10:28 PM UTC

adrusi wrote: post #20

dschiptsov wrote: post #7

Tell that to guys like Igor Sysoev, who outperformed averages by an order of magnitude due to autisticly intense attention to details. Hint: a mild form of autism, what casuals call Asperger, given that one survived childhood constant bullying and confusion about its causes, is actually good to have.

Maybe its neutral or slightly better in adulthood, but only if the autism isn't accompanied by other problems that frequently accompany autism, such as language disabilities and anxiety.

It's almost as if autism is a spectrum...

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#114

Post by wolfgke » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 10:33 PM UTC

aab0 wrote: post #76

digi_owl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't seen an aspie thats aggressive and disagreeable, then you haven't seen an aspie outside his/her comfort zone.

Salary negotiation is outside their comfort zone; yet it doesn't seem to help.

Because negotiations (thus salary negotiations) aren't about spreading disagreement, but about making an agreement with which both sides can cope.

Thus if you add the personality trait "aggressive and disagreeable" to a typical aspie, you'll get a termination of negotiation instead of a strongly suboptimal (for the aspie) negotiation result.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#115

Post by bitwize » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 10:36 PM UTC

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #29

afarrell wrote: post #17

> "The internet has kind of killed my 'autistic pride,' so to speak," says Gillmer. "The constant use of it as an insult makes me want to hide it, so I tend to not bring it up unless it feels like I'm not communicating properly." I cannot for the life of me understand why I see "aspie" or "spergy" used as insults on both reddit and tumblr.

As far as anti/pro SJWs are concerned, I've mostly seen it as an insult by pro SJWs against white nerdy autistic gamergate basement dwellers.EDIT: which annoys me, since I'm more on the Pro SJW side by default.

Queasy nerds make SJWs uncomfortable because they are perceived as much more likely to display shockingly inappropriate sexual behavior. Since women have the right not to fear for their lives or chastity, the reasoning goes, they have the right not to have any contact with queasy nerds, and so they must be expunged from the places in society where they nest (computing, gaming) in order to create "safe spaces" for women.

This is also a subtext in the upcoming 2016 Ghostbusters film: the villain is a queasy nerd who summons ghosts to Manhattan as revenge for getting the mockery and rejection he deserved; so it is up to the Empowered Womyn Ghostbusters to exorcise him so NYC can become a safe space again.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#116

Post by astrange » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 11:10 PM UTC

tedks wrote: post #69

mads wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be? It is an honest question. I really dont know. I am sure he had some great technical insights, but I haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe that he was actually a genius coder or engineer.

He wrote FAT on an airplane. Make of that what you will.

I'm surprised his battery lasted that long.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#117

Post by Paul_S » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 11:10 PM UTC

"work them "too hard" it's good for them and the only way they get seasoned"

Oh, games industry, never change. I'm sure people will think this is satire - except the ones who worked in gamedev.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#118

Post by PhasmaFelis » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 11:37 PM UTC

55acdda48ab5 wrote: post #99

Autism results from brain and metabolic damage. Autism is comorbid with a huge mess of other physiological problems and early death and is not at all associated with abstract reasoning ability. The idiot savant thing like with Rain Man is pretty much a myth. Whatever happened to the eccentric "absent minded professor" stereotype? There has been a seemingly deliberate and strange conflation of eccentric introverts wit…

> The idiot savant thing like with Rain Man is pretty much a myth.

https://www.autism.com/understanding_savants

I don't want to go point-by-point, but you seem to have a very poor grip on...anything to do with autism, really. Do you also think it's caused by vaccines?

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#119

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 11:48 PM UTC

erichocean wrote: post #50

nibs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We call this dynamic the nerd vs. nerd exploiter dynamic. Jobs and Woz or Allen and Gates are good examples.

Ironically, it's Jobs that has all of the typical Aspy traits, not Woz—right down to deciding on one set of clothes and sticking to it. If you actually read an S. Jobs bio and are familiar with Aspy traits, he's a textbook case. What confuses people (if they are confused) is that most people with Aspergers are not artistic, don't like speaking in front of crowds, or running teams. However, it makes a ton of sense if…

> Ironically, it's Jobs that has all of the typical Aspy traits, not Woz—right down to deciding on one set of clothes and sticking to it.

You could easily say the same about Bill Gates. His rocking is a standard sign of Asperger's.

Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer

#120

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 11:53 PM UTC

cma wrote: post #96

mads wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, he could read a spec and I read this before. Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.

How about this: > In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper boun…

Hey, that's the official name for what I thought of as "aligning a stack of coins".

The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page:

> The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.63n (exact boundaries: 15n/14 and 18n/11,) but the exact value is not known.