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This guy again?! Fabrice Bellard gives me serious imposter syndrome. He's built QEMU, ffmpeg, and the Tiny C Compiler that can run off of a floppy. Ugh. If I bu

This guy again?! Fabrice Bellard gives me serious imposter syndrome. He's built QEMU, ffmpeg, and the Tiny C Compiler that can run off of a floppy. Ugh. If I build one thing in my career that's as cool as any one of those, I'll be delighted.

mrtweetyhack 4y ago
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manmal 4y ago
I feel similarly. At the same time, comparing oneself to one of the, what, top ten (?) hackers alive might not be a recipe for happiness. Fabrice seems to know an insane amount about how computers work, knows all the CS stuff, has a tight grasp of all kinds of algorithms, great math intuition, and a lot of time on his hands to write OSS code. I bet he spent a lot of time learning the basics.
- ant6n 4y ago
  The „a lot of time“ part is key. If you have young kids…
lxgr 4y ago
To add on to that, JSLinux was written in 2011, in pure JavaScript (i.e. before both Emscripten (2014?) and asm.js (2013)).
- williamstein 4y ago
  Emscripten has been under active development since at least 2010. Here's the commit frequency history https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/graphs/contributors https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/graphs/contrib... and an article from 2012 about using it https://www.webpronews.com/easily-port-c-to-html5javascript-with-emscripten https://www.webpronews.com/easily-port-c-to-html5javascript-...
dathinab 4y ago
Don't worry there are just a handful of people like him world wide. But the software industry needs myrads, no, millions of people. Given some arbitrary metric it's generally not the best to compare yourself with the best of the best (on that metric), just doing the best you can do and striving to learn and improve (and live and be there for your family etc.) is more then good enough.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
dude, you're not an impostor just because you're not Beethoven. the world needs punks too (and they weren't impostors either)
rahen 4y ago
Check out his latest creation, nncp, a lossless, neural network based file compression algorithm. https://bellard.org/nncp/ https://bellard.org/nncp/ And of course, he wrote it in plain ANSI C for the efficiency.
ddyevf635372 4y ago
Yep, as the wises usually say, compare yourself to your previous self, where you were a year ago, and where you are now.
agumonkey 4y ago
that's why we give him god status, so we can stop comparing :p
deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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msie 4y ago
I used to think that. But loving someone and being loved seems better.
imiric 4y ago
.
bentcorner 4y ago
Also note that, this site is like any other social media sites. The top posts are naturally going to be talented people who seem to effortlessly accomplish things we can only dream about. I would not at all feel bad about not measuring up anywhere close to Fabrice Bellard. Be happy with what you've done. If necessary take time away from social media, including HN. Personally I've stopped visiting most social media and simultaneously feel more satisfied, less harried, and also have had more time to accomplish some small personal projects.
jarbus 4y ago
This man is too powerful

mrtweetyhack 4y ago

[dead]

manmal 4y ago

I feel similarly. At the same time, comparing oneself to one of the, what, top ten (?) hackers alive might not be a recipe for happiness. Fabrice seems to know an insane amount about how computers work, knows all the CS stuff, has a tight grasp of all kinds of algorithms, great math intuition, and a lot of time on his hands to write OSS code. I bet he spent a lot of time learning the basics.

ant6n 4y ago
The „a lot of time“ part is key. If you have young kids…

lxgr 4y ago

To add on to that, JSLinux was written in 2011, in pure JavaScript (i.e. before both Emscripten (2014?) and asm.js (2013)).

williamstein 4y ago
Emscripten has been under active development since at least 2010. Here's the commit frequency history https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/graphs/contributors https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/graphs/contrib... and an article from 2012 about using it https://www.webpronews.com/easily-port-c-to-html5javascript-with-emscripten https://www.webpronews.com/easily-port-c-to-html5javascript-...

dathinab 4y ago

Don't worry there are just a handful of people like him world wide. But the software industry needs myrads, no, millions of people. Given some arbitrary metric it's generally not the best to compare yourself with the best of the best (on that metric), just doing the best you can do and striving to learn and improve (and live and be there for your family etc.) is more then good enough.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

dude, you're not an impostor just because you're not Beethoven. the world needs punks too (and they weren't impostors either)

rahen 4y ago

Check out his latest creation, nncp, a lossless, neural network based file compression algorithm. https://bellard.org/nncp/ https://bellard.org/nncp/ And of course, he wrote it in plain ANSI C for the efficiency.

ddyevf635372 4y ago

Yep, as the wises usually say, compare yourself to your previous self, where you were a year ago, and where you are now.

agumonkey 4y ago

that's why we give him god status, so we can stop comparing :p

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

msie 4y ago

I used to think that. But loving someone and being loved seems better.

imiric 4y ago

bentcorner 4y ago

Also note that, this site is like any other social media sites. The top posts are naturally going to be talented people who seem to effortlessly accomplish things we can only dream about. I would not at all feel bad about not measuring up anywhere close to Fabrice Bellard. Be happy with what you've done. If necessary take time away from social media, including HN. Personally I've stopped visiting most social media and simultaneously feel more satisfied, less harried, and also have had more time to accomplish some small personal projects.

jarbus 4y ago

This man is too powerful