15 ms·
Cool little library, I'm using it, but author has an ego the size of Wolfram's. This is just one snippet, there are many if you rummage through the docs and iss
by 323 4y ago
Cool little library, I'm using it, but author has an ego the size of Wolfram's. This is just one snippet, there are many if you rummage through the docs and issues:
> In the 1970s, programming was an elite's task. Today programming is done by uneducated "farmers" and as a result, the care for smart algorithms, memory usage, CPU-time usage and the like has dwindled in comparison.
https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets/blob/master/misc/READMORE.md#compression https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets/blob/master/misc/...
- c7DJTLrn 4y agoI used to vehemently agree with stuff like this, but now I just cringe. Yeah software today sucks, but comparing it with the 70s/80s/90s is just stupid. We don't ship software for one piece of incredibly simple hardware and a few thousand customers anymore. Elitism isn't going to make the situation any better and frankly unproductive whining like this is just getting exhausting.
- MisterTea 4y agoI "vehemently agree" but I don't insult farmers or other blue collar workers because that's a shitty thing to do. The author is just an asshole and should be punched in the face by a farmer.
- zmxz 4y agoWhy is the author asshole? You don't insult farmers but you won't stoop before insulting the author of microwebsockets. At what point does one assume moral high ground with 100% certainty? It's as if all this hate comes from the inability to read text carefully, without isolating malicious intent first.
- girvo 4y agoInsulting an entire group of people, by directly implying that farmers are not skilful or educated, is worse than insulting the person who made the insult in the first place.
- codeguro 4y agoInsulting, whether at an individual or at a group, is a lowly, immoral act in of itself despite one being slightly better than the other.
- zmxz 4y agoBut he didn't insult crop farmers, he placed the word in quotes. A "farmer" (note the double quotes) is a gaming/internet culture term that denotes someone who does repetitive, boring tasks in order to accumulate some kind of value. I'm pretty certain that intelligent people who comment here are aware of it, but are using mental gymnastics in order to justify the insults they'll direct towards the author of microwebsockets. Is that not hypocrisy in its finest form?
- orf 4y agoNo, because an old and crusty term like that isn’t common knowledge anymore.
- hunterb123 4y agoYou're saying that gaming term is "crusty and old" therefore your misinterpretation of his statement and your emotional outrage is justified? What is the cutoff date for terms we can use that won't confuse and emotionally outrage you?
- orf 4y agoI’m clearly saying, like others are in this thread, that just because you associate calling someone a “farmer” with an anachronistic gaming term doesn’t mean that almost everyone will read it in a different way, nor does it mean that your interpretation is correct. ‘What do you do for a job?’ ‘I’m a farmer’ ‘Oh right what’s the best quest to farm on in WOW?’ Said nobody ever. It reads very poorly, in short.
- hunterb123 4y ago
- Waterluvian 4y agoThe author should be a farmer for a season and we can live stream their crying and incompetence for charity.
- hunterb123 4y ago
- MisterTea 4y ago> Some of you need to learn how to read, or learn how to not get so emotional. How is anyone supposed to infer that from the quotes? I am not a gamer so I would never know this. Its domain specific jargon that overlaps with long standing definitions.
- hunterb123 4y ago
- bee_rider 4y agoDoes he use it elsewhere or anything like that? I would call players who expend time in lieu of skill "grinders." "Farming," on the other hand, is often a late-game playstyle which gets the best results (farming for rares to fully equip a build). I mean the necessity to do this can be seen as bad game design, and maybe the players are dummies for picking bad games (although the Diablo and Destiny series are pretty well received), but this sort of thing is required to play at the highest levels...
- fernandotakai 4y agoone of the reasons i LOVED clarkson's farm (jeremy clarkson -- from top gear/grand tour -- series on farming). it showed how absurdly hard farming. comparing software development (which, let's be honest, is super cushy) to farming is insulting.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI mean you can be critical about performance and lack of optimization without punching down. People like this have never worked on applications in a normal corporation, I'm sure.
- vanviegen 4y ago> People like this [...] I mean you can be critical of communication forms without punching down.
- nske 4y agohehe yeah, though it doesn't have to be a bad thing. There are quite a few brilliant mavericks that never have and never would be able to fair well doing that -it would crush their soul or drive them mad. They just do what they love and everyone's better off for it. I think in time they tend to stop being permanently irritated/critical/disgusted about these things, and learn to accept and ignore -for their own sanity.
- scaredginger 4y agoAs if whoever wrote this would survive on a farm
- goalieca 4y agoClearly someone didn’t use software from even the 90s.. a lot of it was pure crashing garbage.
- Kiro 4y agoThey most likely didn't considering the author was born in the 90s.
- zarzavat 4y ago> but author has an ego the size of Wolfram's Stephen Wolfram is going to be so pleased that he finally has his own unit named after him! Mathematics, physics, computing, and now psychometrics, is there anything that man can’t make groundbreaking progress on?
- skrebbel 4y agoReminds me of the Dijkstra, a unit for arrogance proposed by Alan Kay: “I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras”
- carapace 4y agoThe unit of arrogance of computer scientists (et. al.) is the Dijkstra.
- xorcist 4y agoTo be fair to the author, that quote is part of a longer passage about how one should not optimize for free form ascii first when fixed size buffers are an option. At least that how I read it, it's clearly opinionated writing.
- k__ 4y agoThat library was on HN a few times, and I read quite some discussions he was involved in. He's a bit like Linus. He knows what's up and sees all the people around him building sub par software. But instead of telling them how to improve, he's very confrontative and I think those times of gatekeeping are over.
- threatofrain 4y ago> But instead of telling them how to improve Gatekeeping implies that this author actually has something he can keep from you, like universities gatekeeping a certificate for intellectual credibility, or OpenAI saying that they have information that is too dangerous for the world. The personal refusal to acknowledge anyone for anything is only gatekeeping insofar as the public ought have some moral prerogative to that person's acknowledgment. Why is this one author's acknowledgment so interesting that we should have a debate over it? In the face of all priorities, does this really bubble up to the top?
- Dave3of5 4y agoYeah I have a look, really difficult to work with i'll pass.
- zmxz 4y ago> In the 1970s, programming was an elite's task. Today programming is done by uneducated "farmers" and as a result, the care for smart algorithms, memory usage, CPU-time usage and the like has dwindled in comparison. What's wrong with that statement? In 1970's, the number of people who dealt with programming was significantly smaller than today. It's a matter of fact. And people who worked with computers back then were highly educated and pioneers of the technology, there was no room for half-hearted effort or "let's copy the first result from stackoverflow.com". Today, programmers who are meticulous, detail-oriented and who genuinely recognize the problem first are in minority and that's how I read the above. The author might have stated it abruptly, but it does not mean he's wrong. You're using the "cool little library", yet you have this kind of resentment for the person who made it, have you even tried to look at the situation from their perspective before you passed the judgement? I'm asking out of curiosity, because I can relate to having to work with under-skilled individuals who spend more time sorting out their CV and online presence than their work.
- 323 4y agoYou can be both right and an asshole. These things are not exclusive. There is a way to say what he is saying without calling all of today's programmers "farmers", which also has some undertones that being a farmer is somehow shameful. > under-skilled individuals who spend more time sorting out their CV and online presence than their work That sounds more like a organizational/hiring problem.
- zmxz 4y agoIn gaming culture, a farmer is someone who repeats the same actions for extended periods of time. It's not an insult in gaming context, and "farming" in the context of our craft does not relate to actual farmers. It sounds like taking things out of context to gain moral upper hand which allows for insulting the author. I have to be devil's advocate, this whole shaming because someone else might have gotten offended is seriously tiresome. Library is crafted well, guy's annoyed with self-proclaimed crappy devs, yet the freedom to say so is revoked by the very community he helps.
- jbirer 4y agoDid his sentence hit close home with you? He's mostly right.
- mardifoufs 4y agoProgramming wasn't an elites task back then lol. I guess I can't disprove his statement about being peasants now, but they are completely wrong about the 1970s. Just ask the programmers back then; https://youtu.be/AxSdWhkMB_A https://youtu.be/AxSdWhkMB_A It sure does not sound like an elite career to me. It was just regular people working with the constraints they had at the time, not because of some super intelligence or leet genius focus on perfection. If anything, projecting yourself (not you in particular!) into some mythical lost elite, as opposed to the current stupid pleb sounds like pure cope imo.
- intelVISA 4y agoIt is pure cope, whilst software has definitely diluted in quality with the lower barrier to entry... that barrier was never some IQ gate it was mostly socio-economic. There is a very valid case to be made for the current state of performance but back then if it wasn't optimized for the resource constraints it didn't run -- nowadays software is optimized for shipping quickly so of course it sucks once the buzzword paint falls off. We're comparing buy-once bespoke boots vs. assembly line fad-of-the-month trainers. The idea that either was the result of some 'giga brain' creators and not market influences is delusional.
- dmw_ng 4y agoAs an uneducated farmer this gave me a giggle, it suggests if I filed a ticket about a performance problem in the project it'd likely be fixed instantaneously. That quote is basically an advert, if the author wishes to establish such a high bar for themselves it'd be foolish not to avail of it.
- fbn79 4y agoHow to not agree?
- a_c 4y ago"uneducated farmer" are those who can survive on a piece of land dependency-free. They know weather, season, plant, animal, chemistry, machinery and many more. Us engineers without 30mins of internet are less useful than a sprouting potato. I'm not sure what the author meant.
- hunterb123 4y ago
- a_c 4y agoI stand corrected for misunderstanding the context :)
- sirsinsalot 4y agoIt is a really poor take, not least because "memory usage, CPU-time..." was more important when computers had less resource. We can instead spend our time doing really cool things with massive amounts of data, beyond the wildest dreams of the early coders. The uWebSocket's authors take is SO bad in SO many other ways too. They should be prescribed a dose of real world.
- joshxyz 4y agoLol, easy to nitpick but if you'll read the whole document this guy really knows his stuff. It's not a coincidence that uWebSockets is continuously being used by most trading platforms. "It's not bragging if you can back it up." - Muhammad Ali
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- beardedman 4y agoMaking derogatory remarks is not bragging.
- metadaemon 4y agoLol, it's also easy to blanket insult groups of people with zero evidence :P
- p1mrx 4y ago> We have had standardized, time-zone neutral representation of time in binary, efficient, 4-byte representation since the 1970s. [...] This is just an example of how we have regressed in our algorithmic thinking. Now I'm wondering if uWebSockets will fail spectacularly in 2038.
- nurettin 4y agoWhat a low hanging fruit. Is this haternews or hackernews?
- joshxyz 4y ago
- 314 4y agoI find it interesting that everybody in this thread seems to take exception to the comparison to "farmers". I mean, farming is brutal hard work but it also does not require a high degree of thinking, so I can see his point even if he has made it in an offensive way. Personally, I'm much happier sitting in a warm comfortable place thinking hard about code instead of being out in a cold field 20 hours a day, but meh. Much more offensive (to me) is this gem from later on: > Designing clever, binary and minimally repetitive protocols saves enormous amounts of CPU-time otherwise lost to compression. Well yes, but also, and more importantly no. This is technically true - not compressing the data is more efficient in terms of computation per bit on the wire. But it is also wrong in a much more subtle way. The advantage of using JSON (or an equivalent) and then compressing it down is that we inject a large amount of redundancy into the format. The CPU is taking that redundancy back out for us to save bandwidth, but we get to exploit it in much more valuable ways. The encoder/decoder are generic, simple and highly optimized. We can use them everywhere and trust them to work. This has value in itself, and it means that we can spend our limited budget of programmer time in optimizing other code where the payoff is higher. It means less time tracking down bugs in "super 10x programmer's one-off encoder that was only written for this specific application". And lastly, but my favourite - it means that when something goes wrong we have a hope of repairing the damage to the data. Because redundancy gives us options for error checking and recovery, while optimizing the binary format generally does not. Also, if you want the format to really be optimal it should not be designed as byte streams (as low-level binary formats generally are) and instead should be a stream of variable-sized tokens that are fed through an arithmetic encoder. The first half of this week I spent repairing data corruption caused by some of my code. Luckily there is a lot of redundancy in how I encoded the data (in a structure that is described in JSON inside the records) so I could write a tool that repaired the damage. I guess I'm lucky that I'm just a "farmer" :)
- janee 4y ago>farming is brutal hard work but it also does not require a high degree of thinking I disagree strongly. Most people I encounter in the agricultural industry are quite creative lateral thinkers. But yeah I guess they wouldn't think of higher lvl thought such as using JSON because it "helps" with corruption...good luck with your data
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agois he wrong?
- metadaemon 4y agoYikes! Imagine believing this and yet still having 20 open issues. Sounds like a bit of delusion.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alexhultman 4y agoYou find what you look for. If you look for humble posts they are there to be found. But you don't want to, so you won't find them.