3 ms·

Some things never change. One of my first HN comments got me four down-votes for much the same comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679208 https://new

by billpg 4y ago

Some things never change. One of my first HN comments got me four down-votes for much the same comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679208 Back then, I was so new it bumped me down into negative score. I almost made a new account but decided to keep it and try and rebuild my damaged rep. Nowadays, my score in the thousands, but Mel still sounds awful.

Suzuran 4y ago
I'd be interested to know exactly why; Is it because he doesn't obey his bosses when told to make the program cheat, or just the way it's framed as some kind of testosterone caveman thing?
- metabagel 4y ago
  Obviously difficult to work with and unprofessional. Utilized programming side effects which obscured the intent of the code to such an extent that he unintentionally reversed the logic of the test he was supposed to implement.
  - Suzuran 4y ago
    Abuse of side effects to save code is just a reality of working in limited or embedded systems once you have run into their limits. On one of my current projects, the target has only 8K of program memory. I had to do some things I'm not proud of to get the required functionality to fit because the alternative was to say "It can't be done, scrap everything." The target is an embedded hard-realtime processor core, so there's no way to add more memory to it. It's a component integrated into a larger system so I can't demand a larger or more capable device without incurring significant redesign costs. Quite frankly, I won't be considered worth those costs. Nobody's doing to take on the expense and effort simply because I can't hack it. I'd have a hard time blaming someone for doing the painful to keep a project alive, considering I'm doing exactly that. We can always agitate for better conditions next time around, but this time we must go to war with the army we have, and sometimes that necessitates fighting dirty. The rest of the stuff is entirely valid though. A programmer that cannot be managed is worthless, and someone who is unwilling to accept correction is a liability. I wouldn't refuse to work with him because unless I'm his superior I don't get to make that call, but I would probably go out of my way to avoid interaction. (And if I were his superior, unless he's got political juice or something, I'd have him shown to the door if he won't work with the team instead of against it.)
- billpg 4y ago
  In the story, The storyteller is tasked with maintaining Mel's code. He can't do it. Mel hadn't left any documentation. All sort of tricks. No explanation of what's going on.
  - Suzuran 4y ago
    Upvoted for the effort of responding in verse, very nice. That rubbed me the wrong way too. Even the hackers at MIT documented their hacks, they even wrote up a memo explaining a bunch of them so others could understand and build on them - see HAKMEM. Documentation was much more extensive and available back then. Systems frequently came with full schematics, and you could call the design team on the phone if you wanted. DEC would get phone calls about the PDP-10's RIM10B bootloader right up until the retirement of the 36-bit processor line, and they did their best to explain its tricks. The loader was made to fit entirely in the processor registers so it didn't touch the memory it was loading. To do this it made use of a specific and documented aspect of the processor - that being that the first thing it did when executing an instruction is to determine its effective address, and nothing the instruction can do will have any effect on its own effective address calculation. They had two bold-print warnings about this in the processor manual, both before and after the RIM10B source code, but some people still required more explanation. For those people, the explanation was given. In Mel's story, he grinds out a very well optimized program, and while I can appreciate the skill it takes to do that, he documented none of it. This was customer-facing code. That's unacceptable even by their standards, and even his own co-workers of the era would have thought he was an asshole. A skilled asshole, with skill worthy of respect, but an asshole nonetheless.
    - kps 4y ago
      The story is known to be inaccurate in technical detail¹, so it's not impossible that it's inaccurate in social detail as well. There's some LGP-30 code on Bitsavers including scanned coding forms, and the ones initialled ‘MK’ are not notably different in level of commentary from the others. ¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489273
usefulcat 4y ago
If you're going to post an unpopular opinion, I think the only way to avoid downvotes is to at least make your comment interesting or novel in some way. Merely saying "I don't like X" is neither.

by billpg 4y ago

Suzuran 4y ago

I'd be interested to know exactly why; Is it because he doesn't obey his bosses when told to make the program cheat, or just the way it's framed as some kind of testosterone caveman thing?

metabagel 4y ago
Obviously difficult to work with and unprofessional. Utilized programming side effects which obscured the intent of the code to such an extent that he unintentionally reversed the logic of the test he was supposed to implement.
- Suzuran 4y ago
  Abuse of side effects to save code is just a reality of working in limited or embedded systems once you have run into their limits. On one of my current projects, the target has only 8K of program memory. I had to do some things I'm not proud of to get the required functionality to fit because the alternative was to say "It can't be done, scrap everything." The target is an embedded hard-realtime processor core, so there's no way to add more memory to it. It's a component integrated into a larger system so I can't demand a larger or more capable device without incurring significant redesign costs. Quite frankly, I won't be considered worth those costs. Nobody's doing to take on the expense and effort simply because I can't hack it. I'd have a hard time blaming someone for doing the painful to keep a project alive, considering I'm doing exactly that. We can always agitate for better conditions next time around, but this time we must go to war with the army we have, and sometimes that necessitates fighting dirty. The rest of the stuff is entirely valid though. A programmer that cannot be managed is worthless, and someone who is unwilling to accept correction is a liability. I wouldn't refuse to work with him because unless I'm his superior I don't get to make that call, but I would probably go out of my way to avoid interaction. (And if I were his superior, unless he's got political juice or something, I'd have him shown to the door if he won't work with the team instead of against it.)
billpg 4y ago
In the story, The storyteller is tasked with maintaining Mel's code. He can't do it. Mel hadn't left any documentation. All sort of tricks. No explanation of what's going on.
- Suzuran 4y ago
  Upvoted for the effort of responding in verse, very nice. That rubbed me the wrong way too. Even the hackers at MIT documented their hacks, they even wrote up a memo explaining a bunch of them so others could understand and build on them - see HAKMEM. Documentation was much more extensive and available back then. Systems frequently came with full schematics, and you could call the design team on the phone if you wanted. DEC would get phone calls about the PDP-10's RIM10B bootloader right up until the retirement of the 36-bit processor line, and they did their best to explain its tricks. The loader was made to fit entirely in the processor registers so it didn't touch the memory it was loading. To do this it made use of a specific and documented aspect of the processor - that being that the first thing it did when executing an instruction is to determine its effective address, and nothing the instruction can do will have any effect on its own effective address calculation. They had two bold-print warnings about this in the processor manual, both before and after the RIM10B source code, but some people still required more explanation. For those people, the explanation was given. In Mel's story, he grinds out a very well optimized program, and while I can appreciate the skill it takes to do that, he documented none of it. This was customer-facing code. That's unacceptable even by their standards, and even his own co-workers of the era would have thought he was an asshole. A skilled asshole, with skill worthy of respect, but an asshole nonetheless.
  - kps 4y ago
    The story is known to be inaccurate in technical detail¹, so it's not impossible that it's inaccurate in social detail as well. There's some LGP-30 code on Bitsavers including scanned coding forms, and the ones initialled ‘MK’ are not notably different in level of commentary from the others. ¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489273

usefulcat 4y ago

If you're going to post an unpopular opinion, I think the only way to avoid downvotes is to at least make your comment interesting or novel in some way. Merely saying "I don't like X" is neither.