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I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

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Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#361

Post by allenu »

justin66 wrote: post #308
rafram wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not a great design. It's just nerdy in a HN way. A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability, would use the tiniest bit of CSS to make the text readable on wide screens, and would have images for projects with a visual component. The only reason his site is appealing is because you already know who he is.

> A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability Why?

I imagine they're suggesting that so someone who lands on the page and is unaware of Bellard can immediately know what he is (famously) known for instead of having to scroll through the long list of projects.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#362

Post by MinimalAction »

andai wrote: post #246

Reading the list of Bellard's contributions, what strikes me is not the raw ability (although certainly there is that too!) but "damn, he knows how to pick 'em!" He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability. Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.

Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#363

Post by taeric »

gopher_space wrote: post #349
taeric wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big hidden in plain site facet of this, is few are willing to put forth the work within the existing system. That is, going to town halls, writing senators, and running for office are all standard parts of the system people are complaining about. And they are offering the complaints, largely, as stand in complaints for whole hosts of problems that they actually think are there. So, agreed, few are willing to ignore…

I don’t know, it wasn’t until the pandemic and a layoff that I had time to actually sit and think. There’s a reason that most of the voters (and protesters in my area) are retired, and it isn’t apathy. I don’t have time to educate myself on these topics in any real depth. And I need to educate myself because the push information is all bullshit. Digging into policing in Seattle, the official and public conversation w…

We don't disagree? But this is part of the problem of many complaints. The cost of entry into any system is non-zero. That people with more resources are involved is not at all a surprise.

Which is why I have my "twist" there that this is not necessarily bad. I'm fine letting people dream. I'm fine with people having general complaints. I have to be fine with people being wrong, as it happens whether I'm fine with it or not.

What is getting dodgy is how many people accidentally find themselves hijacked in the delay that is inherent in understanding systems to think that they can win with a culture war.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#364

Post by FpUser »

latexr wrote: post #359
andai wrote: post #246

Reading the list of Bellard's contributions, what strikes me is not the raw ability (although certainly there is that too!) but "damn, he knows how to pick 'em!" He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability. Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.

> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life. Work on being a positive influence in the world. Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.

>"Work on being a positive influence in the world."

Different groups have different "positives" / negatives. So unless trivial like don't eat babies who's the judge?

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#365

Post by mschuster91 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #210
miki123211 wrote: post #185

It's interesting to me that most of Bellard's work is basically turning specs into C. His most important projects are ffmpeg (codec specs), qEmu (ISA specs), QuickJS (the EcmaScript spec), tinyC (the C spec), and his telecom company (LTE specs). I guess the pi calculations and neural network stuff are exceptions. Just to be clear, this doesn't make his work any less impressive. Highly performant codec and emulator im…

That's actually how I was trained. The spec and the implementation (and the testing) were separate areas; sometimes, done by different people. These days, I tend to mix them all together, and I think I get good results. I strongly suspect that a lot of folks, these days, only do the middle one.

> I strongly suspect that a lot of folks, these days, only do the middle one.

Ain't no one willing to pay for all of that. The clear separation is something you only see remaining in academia and industries where code quality issues have legal consequences (i.e. aerospace, marine, automotive and medical), and even there, pressure is high to relax rules viewed as "arcane".

Writing good specifications, documentations, implementation code and tests each is an art form in itself

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#366

Post by Capricorn2481 »

copperx wrote: post #295
account42 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a tweet, no need to over-analyze everything.

Carmack is the one over analyzing the praise he hands out.

This is truly the most non-controversy I have ever seen on here. I don't know what you drank this morning.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#367

Post by Tuna-Fish »

kroeckx wrote: post #306
harrouet wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is exactly the opposite for MPEG, which only specifies the decoder (i.e. how frames should be decoded).

Maybe they meant encoding, the file format.

But that only specifies the decoder.

The format for all modern video codecs is not the kind of format where any specific piece of uncompressed input should always be encoded the same way, but more like a very restricted programming language that gives the encoder a lot of tools to compress the video, and which tools they use and how they use them are up to them.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#368

Post by latexr »

FpUser wrote: post #364
latexr wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life. Work on being a positive influence in the world. Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.

>"Work on being a positive influence in the world." Different groups have different "positives" / negatives. So unless trivial like don't eat babies who's the judge?

> who's the judge?

You are. Decide for yourself what it means to be a positive influence in the world and do that. This isn’t that hard, it’s not a gotcha. If you are capable of empathy, you are capable of understanding what it means to be good for others, learn from mistakes, and do better.

Also, I provided examples:

> Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.

Seems unambiguous to me.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#369

Post by speedgoose »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #109
shevy-java wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagined him with wild, long hair; possibly tattoos, huge and heavy set. The picture destroyed my imagination - and now I want my imagination back. :(

In my personal experience, uber French nerds don't really fit the Simpsons "Comic Book Guy" appearance stereotype. Anyone else reading this, feel free to disagree.

Yes, it’s difficult to practice climbing if you are obese.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#370

Post by Capricorn2481 »

menaerus wrote: post #126
latexr wrote: post #99

I’m asking genuinely: What’s the point of linking to Carmack’s tweet? The intellectual curiosity (what HN is ostensibly about) is all in the quoted tweet (despite it being written like an LLM trained on LinkedIn posts). Carmack isn’t really adding anything of importance or interest. Linking to him feels a bit cult of personality, as if Bellard is deserving of attention because Carmack gave some vague praise with qual…

The tweet also reads a bit off to me too. Carmack positions himself as if he is a some sort of a litmus test for being a great and successful programmer, which I don't doubt that he is but it's a bit strange. Egotripping.

If most people would agree with that, is it really egotripping?
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