5 ms·

HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity.

by kubb 4y ago

HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity. Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up. It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods. But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity. The person in your head is a source of inspiration. The person in the world, on which the former is based, is a source of disappointment.

HellDunkel 4y ago
Well said but we don’t know for sure if the above is true. Carmack is a genious programmer and rather than trash him right away we should acknowledge that his job was hard- very hard. In any biography the failures are way more interesting than the successes. The ancient greek understood that pretty well.
johnnyanmac 4y ago
Carmack aside, I think the "never meet your heroes" thing is even simpler: no one's perfect. Your hero could have cured cancer but maybe they're a nervous wreck in public. Or aren't native to your area and may commuicate badly face to face for culture clashing reasons. Or maybe they are great in a small intimate team but completely fall apart in a large setting. Heck it could be as simple as finding out they are a heavy smoker or an alcoholic. The common stereotype is "heroes are narcissitic and have skeletons in the closet", but there are valid reasons for an otherwise good person to fail in what may be common sense to others.
- sundvor 4y ago
  To me it would be the opposite; we all have our faults, so how do they manage the feats that they do? There's no point idolizing people for their accomplishments in the "they must be perfect" kind of way. Ie I look at John and see someone amazingly fit for their age (very close to mine - only a few years older, yet he appears younger); I'd like to learn more about his routines (running and judo?) to see how I might benefit from the same.
  - ambrose2 4y ago
    I’m curious too, in the Lex Friedman podcast/interview, John described he oftens “runs on” a diet of pizza and Diet Coke. https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/ https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/
chongli 4y ago
But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity. This is part of the reason I like Steve Jobs so much. The stories around him never failed to mention his legendary penchant for downright nasty behaviour. And yet people loved him anyway, even when they lived in fear of stepping into an elevator with him! It’s bizarre and entertaining stuff! Personally I’d rather work with boring, reliable, friendly people in an low-stress job and focus my passion on my hobbies. I recognize that others might want to take risks and try to make something big.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  I don't think many people loved Jobs, and a good few hated him. But unlike most narcissistic assholes he was unusually good at certain things [1]. And he could be persuaded to change his mind when he was dead wrong, at least some of the time. So that made him tolerated. [1] Finding good people, understanding that computing is about services and UX and not just boxes, and having a goal for commodity computing that was at least as aesthetic as technological.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- afterburner 4y ago
  The people with those stories typically made a lot of money thanks to Jobs. The people who didn't, just have a negative opinion of him.
- rohit89 4y ago
  If you are really good at something, people will like you inspite of your drawbacks however big they may be.
guerrilla 4y ago
> HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity. I'm not one to defend the culture here but this isn't fair. Everyone is like this and it has nothing to do with HN. They do it with politicians, rock stars, capitalists, etc. Just look at the cult of Elon Musk. And they do it because all of those people put a lot of money and work into making sure they do it. Worship is paid for. That's what PR and image firms do, not to even mention that it's the default culture of the media in pretty much every country on the planet.
- neilc 4y ago
  I’m pretty sure that people like John Carmack, Donald Knuth, or Fabrice Bellard are not spending money on PR firms.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about. Carmack has been covered by multiple PR departments, sometimes simultaneously, throughout his career. Knuth literally has publishers doing that work and I don't know what you think the Nobel committee or ACM Turing Awards are for. That's their entire purpose, to promote these people for their accomplishments. It's not like they hide that. And what do you know, Bellard isn't even remotely as popular as those others. I wonder why.
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
As you mention, the world is about cult of personality, not just hacker news. Look at the situation with influences and such and why brands are following over themselves to link there products with some personality. We like to think it's some super human person that is some for of genius, but there are very real limits to human intelligence and while there are some admittedly great and lucky people in that regard, they are still very limited and would likely be disappointing if we knew what the rest of there lives were like outside of what we see. In some ways we seem to love the idea that others are just somehow more gifted than we are and then idolize them, we don't like to accept that everyone is just making it up as they go along all the time, maybe it's a defense mechanism in some ways as it keeps us from doing some of the more exciting things that we could do, because that's only for these special people that we somehow idolize and of course to make it worse, these people generally love the attention so play up to that even more.
photochemsyn 4y ago
If you want a hero to idolize, select someone who's been dead for at least 100 years. Most of their foibles will be public knowledge by that time, so you probably won't be in for any rude surprises.
- vacuumcl 4y ago
  Even that might not be entirely safe, as Schrödinger's behaviour has only become widely known in recent years for example. (Although he died around 60 years ago, so not quite 100.)
  - oldgradstudent 4y ago
    Was he mean to his cat?
    - aswanson 4y ago
      Yes and no. I'll see myself out.
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
More than that, I think it's important to remember that no one, even a technologist as strong as Carmack, is going to get more right than wrong. Carmack has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. I grew up eagerly reading his plan files. But if we look at the big picture, a lot of his big calls haven't in fact worked out. His vision for the future of graphics was to stick closer to the original OpenGL state machine, and just make it so blazing fast you could do complex lighting and materials via accumulating 100's of passes per frame. The world chose shaders instead, and I don't think they got that wrong. Stencil buffer shadows were a dead end. iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity. Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games. I don't say this to be pointlessly negative. As I said JC is one of my personal heros. But the problem with the "superman" approach to coding is no one is in fact superman, even someone like JC. It's just not possible to get complex calls like this right long term. If you don't pay that some respect in your interpersonal behavior, you are gonna end up alienating people.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Is it possibly because he lacks the academic rigour? I don't think casually reading math (or any) texts as a $50M+ net worth individual is remotely the same as having to study and pass tests like a regular person.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Formal training can be a disadvantage when innovating, since it trains one to think the same as others.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    I'm an autodidact and that's something I definitely struggle with. I'm good at getting the "gist" of something by scanning fast, but then I get hung up in the details because I didn't go back and actually work through the formalisms in the paper. JC strikes me as someone that would do the math however, or at least would code up something that probed it real quick. Just to ramble about another point I wish I'd made in my post above: I've had some success in my career by depersonalizing these kind of debates. Instead of "my plan" vs "your plan" try to frame it as everyone enumerating the possible plans as a group, brainstorming on benefits vs risks on each of them, etc. So if I set myself up as facilitator on the white board aggregating everything, without pushing my own view much, I find it tends to get less into back and forth arguments. Not a silver bullet but that depersonalization is a big part of how I think about these dilemmas now.
mavelikara 4y ago
A young fan of James Joyce once asked the Irish maestro, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" The novelist replied: "No, it did lots of other things too."
phlakaton 4y ago
There are many people lurking on HN who do not fall for the cult of personality and stick to technical and personal topics. You should look around for them! They’re cool. PG has been an inspiration but he gets things wrong all the time. Most famous Silly Valley leaders are people I’d steer well clear of.
GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
Theseus was the name of the mechanical 'learning' mouse that Claude Shannon built https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138508/mighty-mouse/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138508/mighty-mo... Also: https://youtu.be/_9_AEVQ_p74 https://youtu.be/_9_AEVQ_p74 (It would be great it some AI could upscale this...) I had the privilege of meeting Claude, at the CMU Robotics Institute, and showed him how to use (what turned out to be) an early incarnation of of Boston Dynamics -- a hopping pogo stick. Here you can see an operator using the same control box that Claude Shannon used: https://youtu.be/mG_ZKXo6Rlg?t=34 https://youtu.be/mG_ZKXo6Rlg?t=34 p.s. yes, that 'operator' in the video is me.

by kubb 4y ago

HellDunkel 4y ago

Well said but we don’t know for sure if the above is true. Carmack is a genious programmer and rather than trash him right away we should acknowledge that his job was hard- very hard. In any biography the failures are way more interesting than the successes. The ancient greek understood that pretty well.

johnnyanmac 4y ago

Carmack aside, I think the "never meet your heroes" thing is even simpler: no one's perfect. Your hero could have cured cancer but maybe they're a nervous wreck in public. Or aren't native to your area and may commuicate badly face to face for culture clashing reasons. Or maybe they are great in a small intimate team but completely fall apart in a large setting. Heck it could be as simple as finding out they are a heavy smoker or an alcoholic. The common stereotype is "heroes are narcissitic and have skeletons in the closet", but there are valid reasons for an otherwise good person to fail in what may be common sense to others.

sundvor 4y ago
To me it would be the opposite; we all have our faults, so how do they manage the feats that they do? There's no point idolizing people for their accomplishments in the "they must be perfect" kind of way. Ie I look at John and see someone amazingly fit for their age (very close to mine - only a few years older, yet he appears younger); I'd like to learn more about his routines (running and judo?) to see how I might benefit from the same.
- ambrose2 4y ago
  I’m curious too, in the Lex Friedman podcast/interview, John described he oftens “runs on” a diet of pizza and Diet Coke. https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/ https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/

chongli 4y ago

But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity. This is part of the reason I like Steve Jobs so much. The stories around him never failed to mention his legendary penchant for downright nasty behaviour. And yet people loved him anyway, even when they lived in fear of stepping into an elevator with him! It’s bizarre and entertaining stuff! Personally I’d rather work with boring, reliable, friendly people in an low-stress job and focus my passion on my hobbies. I recognize that others might want to take risks and try to make something big.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
I don't think many people loved Jobs, and a good few hated him. But unlike most narcissistic assholes he was unusually good at certain things [1]. And he could be persuaded to change his mind when he was dead wrong, at least some of the time. So that made him tolerated. [1] Finding good people, understanding that computing is about services and UX and not just boxes, and having a goal for commodity computing that was at least as aesthetic as technological.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
afterburner 4y ago
The people with those stories typically made a lot of money thanks to Jobs. The people who didn't, just have a negative opinion of him.
rohit89 4y ago
If you are really good at something, people will like you inspite of your drawbacks however big they may be.

guerrilla 4y ago

> HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity. I'm not one to defend the culture here but this isn't fair. Everyone is like this and it has nothing to do with HN. They do it with politicians, rock stars, capitalists, etc. Just look at the cult of Elon Musk. And they do it because all of those people put a lot of money and work into making sure they do it. Worship is paid for. That's what PR and image firms do, not to even mention that it's the default culture of the media in pretty much every country on the planet.

neilc 4y ago
I’m pretty sure that people like John Carmack, Donald Knuth, or Fabrice Bellard are not spending money on PR firms.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about. Carmack has been covered by multiple PR departments, sometimes simultaneously, throughout his career. Knuth literally has publishers doing that work and I don't know what you think the Nobel committee or ACM Turing Awards are for. That's their entire purpose, to promote these people for their accomplishments. It's not like they hide that. And what do you know, Bellard isn't even remotely as popular as those others. I wonder why.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

As you mention, the world is about cult of personality, not just hacker news. Look at the situation with influences and such and why brands are following over themselves to link there products with some personality. We like to think it's some super human person that is some for of genius, but there are very real limits to human intelligence and while there are some admittedly great and lucky people in that regard, they are still very limited and would likely be disappointing if we knew what the rest of there lives were like outside of what we see. In some ways we seem to love the idea that others are just somehow more gifted than we are and then idolize them, we don't like to accept that everyone is just making it up as they go along all the time, maybe it's a defense mechanism in some ways as it keeps us from doing some of the more exciting things that we could do, because that's only for these special people that we somehow idolize and of course to make it worse, these people generally love the attention so play up to that even more.

photochemsyn 4y ago

If you want a hero to idolize, select someone who's been dead for at least 100 years. Most of their foibles will be public knowledge by that time, so you probably won't be in for any rude surprises.

vacuumcl 4y ago
Even that might not be entirely safe, as Schrödinger's behaviour has only become widely known in recent years for example. (Although he died around 60 years ago, so not quite 100.)
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  Was he mean to his cat?
  - aswanson 4y ago
    Yes and no. I'll see myself out.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

More than that, I think it's important to remember that no one, even a technologist as strong as Carmack, is going to get more right than wrong. Carmack has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. I grew up eagerly reading his plan files. But if we look at the big picture, a lot of his big calls haven't in fact worked out. His vision for the future of graphics was to stick closer to the original OpenGL state machine, and just make it so blazing fast you could do complex lighting and materials via accumulating 100's of passes per frame. The world chose shaders instead, and I don't think they got that wrong. Stencil buffer shadows were a dead end. iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity. Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games. I don't say this to be pointlessly negative. As I said JC is one of my personal heros. But the problem with the "superman" approach to coding is no one is in fact superman, even someone like JC. It's just not possible to get complex calls like this right long term. If you don't pay that some respect in your interpersonal behavior, you are gonna end up alienating people.

osigurdson 4y ago
Is it possibly because he lacks the academic rigour? I don't think casually reading math (or any) texts as a $50M+ net worth individual is remotely the same as having to study and pass tests like a regular person.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Formal training can be a disadvantage when innovating, since it trains one to think the same as others.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  I'm an autodidact and that's something I definitely struggle with. I'm good at getting the "gist" of something by scanning fast, but then I get hung up in the details because I didn't go back and actually work through the formalisms in the paper. JC strikes me as someone that would do the math however, or at least would code up something that probed it real quick. Just to ramble about another point I wish I'd made in my post above: I've had some success in my career by depersonalizing these kind of debates. Instead of "my plan" vs "your plan" try to frame it as everyone enumerating the possible plans as a group, brainstorming on benefits vs risks on each of them, etc. So if I set myself up as facilitator on the white board aggregating everything, without pushing my own view much, I find it tends to get less into back and forth arguments. Not a silver bullet but that depersonalization is a big part of how I think about these dilemmas now.

mavelikara 4y ago

A young fan of James Joyce once asked the Irish maestro, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" The novelist replied: "No, it did lots of other things too."

phlakaton 4y ago

There are many people lurking on HN who do not fall for the cult of personality and stick to technical and personal topics. You should look around for them! They’re cool. PG has been an inspiration but he gets things wrong all the time. Most famous Silly Valley leaders are people I’d steer well clear of.

GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago

Theseus was the name of the mechanical 'learning' mouse that Claude Shannon built https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138508/mighty-mouse/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138508/mighty-mo... Also: https://youtu.be/_9_AEVQ_p74 https://youtu.be/_9_AEVQ_p74 (It would be great it some AI could upscale this...) I had the privilege of meeting Claude, at the CMU Robotics Institute, and showed him how to use (what turned out to be) an early incarnation of of Boston Dynamics -- a hopping pogo stick. Here you can see an operator using the same control box that Claude Shannon used: https://youtu.be/mG_ZKXo6Rlg?t=34 https://youtu.be/mG_ZKXo6Rlg?t=34 p.s. yes, that 'operator' in the video is me.