

If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot - neckbeard
http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=196

======
fingerprinter
Generally speaking, I don't know why anyone could/would look at someone's
skills and think anything other than "damn, they are good at that specific
thing". If you apply any moral, ethical or role model paradigm to them, you
will surely be disappointed. This goes for programmers, athletes, politicians
and every other person in the world.

I don't think positive or negative of anyone until they prove otherwise, but I
do note that I'm quite pleasantly surprised when someone with great skills
turns out to be a genuinely nice person. Though, I am not surprised when they
turn out to be assholes.

Bottom line, don't mix someones demeanor or attitude with their skills.

~~~
_delirium
I might just be lucky, but I've had the opposite experiences in my corner of
academia. Most jerks turn out to be at best moderately skilled in a narrow
technical area of competence, while most brilliant people are quite pleasant
and even humble.

Most of the dismissive/arrogant people I've met at conferences tend to be
moderately intelligent junior professors with a chip on their shoulder.
Meanwhile, the genuinely brilliant and famous folks are enjoyable to talk to;
three of the nicest people I've met at a conference are probably three of the
most famous (Robert Moog, Craig Reynolds, and Espen Aarseth).

Some could be the particular social dynamics of this area, e.g. junior
professors are still trying to climb a career ladder and feel they need to
network at conferences with important people, while already-established people
are happy to talk to grad students. (And of course there are exceptions.)

~~~
jacobolus
Alternately, the causality could go the other way: i.e. people who are humble
and friendly and who treat everyone they talk to with respect and genuine
interest (as opposed to sucking up to those above and ignoring those below)
might end up famous because people enjoy working with them.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yes, and the mechanism for this is no mystery. Academia is a political game.
Your peers vote to give you tenure. They vote, anonymously, on whether to
publish your papers. They vote, anonymously, on whether to give you grants. If
you want smart students, you have to recruit them. Et cetera.

You do have to be smart, but you also have to make friends.

(And, let me hasten to add, there's nothing particularly wrong with this. The
point of academia is to build knowledge by connecting with your students and
your peers: Teaching, and learning. Socializing is the name of the game. If
you want to hide in your closet being an isolated cranky genius you don't need
the university, and vice versa. Well, except maybe for the libraries. There's
a reason why research libraries have the reputation of being filled with
slightly crazy cranky people. ;)

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noelwelsh
As I understand it cancer cells can only use sugars for energy. If you fast
your body starts metabolising fat, releasing ketones. Normal cells can use
ketones for energy, but cancer cells cannot. Hence, fasting could be a way to
manage cancer. So at least one of the people mentioned in the post might not
be a crackpot.

Here's a bit of academic work on the subject:

"The goal of the current study was to test the hypothesis that ketone bodies
can inhibit cell growth in aggressive cancers ... all cancer lines
demonstrated proportionally inhibited growth ... The results bear on the
hypothesized potential for ketogenic diets as therapeutic strategies."

<http://cancerci.com/content/9/1/14>

~~~
eru
Wrong thread?

~~~
bartl
Perhaps you didn't read all of it?

Anyway, the person mentioned in this subthread did reply in a comment on the
original post. (<http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=196#comment-721>)

~~~
eru
Thanks. I guess I should read more carefully.

------
gsk
Evelyn Waugh's words capture this rather well and applies to a much wider
field: 'Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride,
emulation, avarice, malice - all the odious qualities - which drive a man to
complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, and renew his work until he has made
something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in so doing he
enriches the world more than the generous and the good. That is the paradox of
artistic achievement.'

------
BrandonM
What the author doesn't realize is that he, too, is being an asshole simply by
dismissing all these people who have different opinions or a different moral
compass from him. Calling someone a "gun nut" and trivializing the change from
GPLv2 to GPLv3 doesn't automatically make them wrong.

~~~
RustyRussell
Sorry, perhaps it didn't quite work. Too subtle?

I was trying to combine the insinuations that we are generally too ready to
call each other names and that all our judgements are relative.

------
biot
I wonder if this explains why some of my best programming productivity comes
when I'm totally pissed off at something -- for example, having to manually do
a task for the nth time or _not_ having fixed that bug yet. Eventually it gets
to the point where I can't stand it and I pound out wonderful code. Perhaps
it's a combination of that and implementing a solution to a "hair on fire"
problem.

Maybe people who are rockstar hackers all the time have a little more piss and
vinegar in them to fuel their coding.

~~~
alnayyir
This is how a programmer I deeply respect described her more aggressive years.
(Piss and vinegar)

She attributed the same notion to a young programmer I hope will be able to
make an impact on other coders.

Sounds like it might (piss and vinegar) might contribute to people hackin'
stuff out that hadn't been tackled before.

I got pissed at Emacs the other day and solved a problem that had been bugging
me, for example.

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rwmj
I thought this was going to be a rant about the people who write BIOSes :-)

~~~
Luyt
That's funny: exactly what I thought. The general shoddiness of BIOSes are the
reason why I always have kept interest in <http://www.coreboot.org/> (formerly
known as LinuxBIOS), but I have yet to acquire a compatible motherboard.

------
davidw
On the other hand, the author of the article, Rusty Russell is most definitely
_not_ an asshole. Really nice person and super kernel hacker. Good guy to meet
if you get a chance.

------
guelo
There probably is _some_ personality characteristic that is similar among
great FOSS hackers that makes them volunteer their time. Maybe passion,
curiosity, idealism... none of those are incompatible with being a nutjob or
asshole.

------
barrkel
A corollary is that people who have done nasty / unpleasant / illegal things,
might actually be nice people who ended up in a situation they weren't
prepared for or able to handle. Judging people is a very tricky business.

------
ScottBurson
"Assholes"?? You don't know the half of it. Some of us are still running
ReiserFS.

~~~
alnayyir
Oh how my hopes rested on Reiser4...

------
Luyt
I'm almost sure half of the people who run my software on a daily basis don't
agree with my political views. I don't think they care about that - in the
same way I don't care whether a loaf of bread I just bought has been baked by
a socialist baker or not.

~~~
Vivtek
In my experience, socialists make great bread.

------
dorian-graph
Interesting. I was thinking about something the other day on my way home from
university and it was nothing profound or new.

People often say things and appear to be what they say though only on face
appearance and they do themselves believe it to be true. I then considered how
someone's true character, beliefs and the like are shown in their actions and
in their work - or rather, the things they create ...

~~~
fleitz
That's why intelligent people deceive by their actions. See Operation
Fortitude for an example.

~~~
akat
Thanks. Link - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude>

------
kia
People usually tend to construct a perfect image of a person they admire. For
example, this is the case for many famous actors and actresses. Some of them
play heroes and almost perfect people in movies. But these movie-good-guys in
many cases turn out to be ass-holes-in-real-life.

Or consider some beautiful fashion models looking at you from covers of big
magazines. People tend to transfer their beauty (which is only due to good
make-up in many cases) to their personality. They construct an image of a
perfect women usually forgetting the what they see is just a picture in a
magazine.

When we meet people we admire in everyday life we can be badly disappointed by
reality... unfortunately.

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Typhon
It seems to me that it's the point of open-source software : To allow anyone
who can improve the software to do so, regardless of who they are and what
they think.

~~~
varjag
Actually, nutjobs tend to be quite passionate people when you think of it.

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sunjain
What is considered as "good/ethical/moral" is relative...to individuals and
time...few hundred years back, to even think that earth goes around sun, was
considered not good/unethical/amoral by lot of folks...

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stretchwithme
This is almost like saying people good at getting a ball to the right place
aren't always straight arrows.

Is it me or is this information already available in 5th grade?

