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Note that the author of the linked page is Fabrice Bellard. He created a PC emulator in JavaScript. https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/

Note that the author of the linked page is Fabrice Bellard. He created a PC emulator in JavaScript. https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ He's also made several other impressive hacks: https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/

nailer 8y ago
Just reiterating this. Same guy behind FFmpeg, QEmu. One of the living legends.
- shawn 8y ago
  Pointing this out discourages others from posting things to HN. Why bother posting your own stuff when you're not a legend? I've seen this in practice, so it's not theoretical. It's the main reason my friends don't even try. But the reason is more subtle than that. Say you made BPG. If you don't have past accomplishments, people will tear you to shreds here. Yet the comments are all "Look at what this genius has made." I'm trying, hard, to find a way to resist credentialism. A meritocracy is something I want to live in. Look, the reason I'm writing this comment is because my friend just gave up on open sourcing their amazing project. Why? Because incentives. I've been trying to convince him to MIT the code, but I can't say I blame him for keeping it closed. And part of the reason is that the only people who get paid for writing open source side project software are those high-profile genius types that we're lauding on HN. Credentialism. Reputation. Audience. These are harmful to a meritocracy. If you've made something good, no one should give a damn who you are or how many people like you.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Pointing out that he has merit is the whole point of meritocracy. Credentialism is about formal credentials, like academic titles. I'm not sure what is called the kind of tabula rasa system you're advocating, but I don't think it's meritocracy.
    - shawn 8y ago
      Not quite. Your past projects have become the new credentials. E.g. at most software shops, it tends to be the biggest factor in whether you get hired. The essence of meritocracy is that anyone can do something like this. And in this case, it's simply not true. No one would be paying attention if Ballard didn't write this, and that's at odds with the idea that you yourself could create it. Another way of putting it is that in a meritocracy, each project should be judged on its own merits, independent of the author. Art is separable from the artist, but unless your culture values this, you get a clique of insiders.
      - notafraudster 8y ago
        Who exactly is going to compensate us for the time spent giving every single proposal ever made by anyone a fair shake, given that we are no longer permitted to use heuristic shortcuts like "checking if the person has ever made something in the past" or "evaluating their formal training" or "acknowledging that they have a long term history of being a crank"? An author has a promising idea but asks for people to invest early in order to iterate the idea to the point where it's strictly superior to existing alternatives. Investors want to know that the idea will bare fruit, and that the author will not abandon it. How do they evaluate the author's capacity to see the project through without resorting to the author's past history of seeing projects through, references, or credentials? Moreover, what stops malicious actors from inundating us with garbage that takes longer to refute than to produce? We can't ban spammers because banning them is based on their past history, not what they're producing now. What if their next post isn't spam and has value? Surely these considerations mandate that even if you believe people are insufficiently charitable to new entrants in the market of ideas, you can't throw the babies (credentials, reputation, audience) out with the bathwater. This is a good opportunity to position yourself as having made a provocative statement that will, of course, require some concessions to reason.
  - mwfunk 8y ago
    The concept of reputation is harmful to a meritocracy? I don't agree with this at all. Your friend didn't want to open source his project because he was annoyed that he wasn't a famous hacker type who can get free publicity, so he didn't think he would get paid to work on it? That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Nobody gets torn to shreds on HN for showing people their project, people get torn to shreds for trying to use open source and HN as a cynical self-marketing tool, especially when they can't back it up with something cool and interesting. Open source doesn't exist to further the career or finances or reputations of open source authors, it's just a nice little miracle when it does. If someone makes something great, there's a teeny tiny chance it'll catch on to become widely used, and if that happens there's an even teenier, tinier chance that the creator will at some point get paid to work on it, but that's a tiny sliver of the open source world. If that's all your friend cares about, then the meritocracy is real and working. Someone who will only write open source to become rich and famous is clearly deeply confused about how and why any of this stuff exists in the first place, and until they grow up they can't be relied on to do good work for good reasons. However, there's a silver lining. If instead of becoming the next Linus, someone simply wants to steer their career towards working on open source professionally, that's awesome and commendable. There are lots of companies and government agencies and so on that pay people to work on open source projects as their day-to-day job. That doesn't take social capital or name recognition, that just requires getting a job in one of those organizations, which span the gamut from tiny startups, to giant companies like Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc., to government agencies like NASA. Tons of people get paid to work on open source if that's what your friend cares about.
    - shawn 8y ago
      What if you want to work for yourself? What if you want to start a startup? What incentives do you have to open source your software? We all rely on open source tools, but lately they're coming exclusively from large companies that can afford to develop it. And that should worry us. It means we're losing the control we used to have. In a scientific paper, the related work section doesn't present the past work of the authors, unless it's related to the topic at hand. There's a reason Ballard didn't mention himself (beyond signing the page at the bottom).
  - dahart 8y ago
    > A meritocracy is something I want to live in. Then why not celebrate BPG? It appears to stand on its own as superior to older formats. Or celebrate Fabrice? I don’t know him, but his merit appears to be earned, I think. Why do you think Fabrice bothers posting stuff when Google & Facebook & Microsoft exist? He could easily give up, fighting image & web standards is an impossible task for most people. > my friend just gave up on open sourcing their amazing project That’s too bad, but it’s extremely common because building an audience and solving real world problems takes a lot of work, work that’s not programming. Many amazing OSS projects fail for lack of adoption because they’re programming things that, as awesome as they may be, have no demonstrated need nor enough engagement or support to keep them going. > Credentialism. Reputation. Audience. These are harmful to a meritocracy. Credentialism I could agree with, but what’s wrong with reputation or audience? What is merit exactly, and how does it exist without reputation or audience? Think carefully & be honest — how many software appps or projects do you invest your own time in that have no reputation or audience? There are people, early adopters, who try unknown things a lot. Most people aren’t early adopters and don’t want to spend their time waiting for bug fixes and improvements until the software they hope will work actually works. I’d say that not only is this natural, it’s necessary in a meritocracy.
  - nbsd4life 8y ago
    I doubt that Fabrice Bellard is getting a lot of money for his work. The money in open source goes to adding a feature in widely used projects. New projects have no users, so nobody to pay money.
- Thisisneto 8y ago
  Don't forget the Tiny C Compiler (tcc). :)
- joss82 8y ago
  Don't forget the decimals of pi record holder for a while (on a laptop)
- nihil75 8y ago
  He must be stopped. Making the rest of us look bad.
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  The 4G/LTE stuff he did was amazing. We had a team of people at the extremely large network company I worked at previously who didn't get the same quality and coverage he managed. Does he do public talks? I'd love to see him and shake his hand for many, many reasons.
  - bborud 8y ago
    I would be interested to know why, in your opinion, the team at the large company couldn't achieve the same quality.
    - repolfx 8y ago
      Bellard is the sort of guy you makes you realise the 10x programmer meme is nonsense, it's really more like 100x.
    - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
      God knows. Some extremely smart people but we eventually gave up on developing our own 4g stack and bought one instead. To be fair his stack may not be as complete as the one we were aiming for, we spent a lot of time and money on the air interface.
- dvirsky 8y ago
  Probably number one on my list of top favorite open source developers.
- ksec 8y ago
  And he doesn't work in any of the big tech companies. Mike Pall as well. I wonder why?
cs702 8y ago
HN discussion on Fabrice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5187585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5187585
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  Fabrice is a robot from the future.
- tobr 8y ago
  Looks like this was eaten by link rot. You can find it here: https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/ https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-...

nailer 8y ago

Just reiterating this. Same guy behind FFmpeg, QEmu. One of the living legends.

shawn 8y ago
Pointing this out discourages others from posting things to HN. Why bother posting your own stuff when you're not a legend? I've seen this in practice, so it's not theoretical. It's the main reason my friends don't even try. But the reason is more subtle than that. Say you made BPG. If you don't have past accomplishments, people will tear you to shreds here. Yet the comments are all "Look at what this genius has made." I'm trying, hard, to find a way to resist credentialism. A meritocracy is something I want to live in. Look, the reason I'm writing this comment is because my friend just gave up on open sourcing their amazing project. Why? Because incentives. I've been trying to convince him to MIT the code, but I can't say I blame him for keeping it closed. And part of the reason is that the only people who get paid for writing open source side project software are those high-profile genius types that we're lauding on HN. Credentialism. Reputation. Audience. These are harmful to a meritocracy. If you've made something good, no one should give a damn who you are or how many people like you.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Pointing out that he has merit is the whole point of meritocracy. Credentialism is about formal credentials, like academic titles. I'm not sure what is called the kind of tabula rasa system you're advocating, but I don't think it's meritocracy.
  - shawn 8y ago
    Not quite. Your past projects have become the new credentials. E.g. at most software shops, it tends to be the biggest factor in whether you get hired. The essence of meritocracy is that anyone can do something like this. And in this case, it's simply not true. No one would be paying attention if Ballard didn't write this, and that's at odds with the idea that you yourself could create it. Another way of putting it is that in a meritocracy, each project should be judged on its own merits, independent of the author. Art is separable from the artist, but unless your culture values this, you get a clique of insiders.
    - notafraudster 8y ago
      Who exactly is going to compensate us for the time spent giving every single proposal ever made by anyone a fair shake, given that we are no longer permitted to use heuristic shortcuts like "checking if the person has ever made something in the past" or "evaluating their formal training" or "acknowledging that they have a long term history of being a crank"? An author has a promising idea but asks for people to invest early in order to iterate the idea to the point where it's strictly superior to existing alternatives. Investors want to know that the idea will bare fruit, and that the author will not abandon it. How do they evaluate the author's capacity to see the project through without resorting to the author's past history of seeing projects through, references, or credentials? Moreover, what stops malicious actors from inundating us with garbage that takes longer to refute than to produce? We can't ban spammers because banning them is based on their past history, not what they're producing now. What if their next post isn't spam and has value? Surely these considerations mandate that even if you believe people are insufficiently charitable to new entrants in the market of ideas, you can't throw the babies (credentials, reputation, audience) out with the bathwater. This is a good opportunity to position yourself as having made a provocative statement that will, of course, require some concessions to reason.
- mwfunk 8y ago
  The concept of reputation is harmful to a meritocracy? I don't agree with this at all. Your friend didn't want to open source his project because he was annoyed that he wasn't a famous hacker type who can get free publicity, so he didn't think he would get paid to work on it? That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Nobody gets torn to shreds on HN for showing people their project, people get torn to shreds for trying to use open source and HN as a cynical self-marketing tool, especially when they can't back it up with something cool and interesting. Open source doesn't exist to further the career or finances or reputations of open source authors, it's just a nice little miracle when it does. If someone makes something great, there's a teeny tiny chance it'll catch on to become widely used, and if that happens there's an even teenier, tinier chance that the creator will at some point get paid to work on it, but that's a tiny sliver of the open source world. If that's all your friend cares about, then the meritocracy is real and working. Someone who will only write open source to become rich and famous is clearly deeply confused about how and why any of this stuff exists in the first place, and until they grow up they can't be relied on to do good work for good reasons. However, there's a silver lining. If instead of becoming the next Linus, someone simply wants to steer their career towards working on open source professionally, that's awesome and commendable. There are lots of companies and government agencies and so on that pay people to work on open source projects as their day-to-day job. That doesn't take social capital or name recognition, that just requires getting a job in one of those organizations, which span the gamut from tiny startups, to giant companies like Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc., to government agencies like NASA. Tons of people get paid to work on open source if that's what your friend cares about.
  - shawn 8y ago
    What if you want to work for yourself? What if you want to start a startup? What incentives do you have to open source your software? We all rely on open source tools, but lately they're coming exclusively from large companies that can afford to develop it. And that should worry us. It means we're losing the control we used to have. In a scientific paper, the related work section doesn't present the past work of the authors, unless it's related to the topic at hand. There's a reason Ballard didn't mention himself (beyond signing the page at the bottom).
- dahart 8y ago
  > A meritocracy is something I want to live in. Then why not celebrate BPG? It appears to stand on its own as superior to older formats. Or celebrate Fabrice? I don’t know him, but his merit appears to be earned, I think. Why do you think Fabrice bothers posting stuff when Google & Facebook & Microsoft exist? He could easily give up, fighting image & web standards is an impossible task for most people. > my friend just gave up on open sourcing their amazing project That’s too bad, but it’s extremely common because building an audience and solving real world problems takes a lot of work, work that’s not programming. Many amazing OSS projects fail for lack of adoption because they’re programming things that, as awesome as they may be, have no demonstrated need nor enough engagement or support to keep them going. > Credentialism. Reputation. Audience. These are harmful to a meritocracy. Credentialism I could agree with, but what’s wrong with reputation or audience? What is merit exactly, and how does it exist without reputation or audience? Think carefully & be honest — how many software appps or projects do you invest your own time in that have no reputation or audience? There are people, early adopters, who try unknown things a lot. Most people aren’t early adopters and don’t want to spend their time waiting for bug fixes and improvements until the software they hope will work actually works. I’d say that not only is this natural, it’s necessary in a meritocracy.
- nbsd4life 8y ago
  I doubt that Fabrice Bellard is getting a lot of money for his work. The money in open source goes to adding a feature in widely used projects. New projects have no users, so nobody to pay money.
Thisisneto 8y ago
Don't forget the Tiny C Compiler (tcc). :)
joss82 8y ago
Don't forget the decimals of pi record holder for a while (on a laptop)
nihil75 8y ago
He must be stopped. Making the rest of us look bad.
sofaofthedamned 8y ago
The 4G/LTE stuff he did was amazing. We had a team of people at the extremely large network company I worked at previously who didn't get the same quality and coverage he managed. Does he do public talks? I'd love to see him and shake his hand for many, many reasons.
- bborud 8y ago
  I would be interested to know why, in your opinion, the team at the large company couldn't achieve the same quality.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    Bellard is the sort of guy you makes you realise the 10x programmer meme is nonsense, it's really more like 100x.
  - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    God knows. Some extremely smart people but we eventually gave up on developing our own 4g stack and bought one instead. To be fair his stack may not be as complete as the one we were aiming for, we spent a lot of time and money on the air interface.
dvirsky 8y ago
Probably number one on my list of top favorite open source developers.
ksec 8y ago
And he doesn't work in any of the big tech companies. Mike Pall as well. I wonder why?

cs702 8y ago

HN discussion on Fabrice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5187585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5187585

sofaofthedamned 8y ago
Fabrice is a robot from the future.
tobr 8y ago
Looks like this was eaten by link rot. You can find it here: https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/ https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-...