
The Silent Majority of Experts - pmarin
http://prog21.dadgum.com/143.html
======
gmurphy
We call this the 'dark matter' problem - when you're trying to hire great
people, for every well-known rockstar, there are tens of people who are
better, toiling away in obscurity.

The early JavaScript scene was like this - there were people who published
amazing JS work and everyone on DHTMLCentral knew who they were, and it was
easy to find them and try to hire them. Yet we felt this huge frustration
because occasionally we'd interview someone who was as good or better, but we
had only found them by accident.

I'm excited about sites like Dribbble and GitHub, which make it easy to
showcase your work without having to go through the pantomime of a large folio
piece. Though it can be a pain for introverts to do, I've never met anyone who
regretted overpublishing their stuff.

~~~
sanderjd
I think that GitHub merely shifts the "dark matter" problem. I think your
assertion about "rockstars" applies to GitHub just as well - for every person
with an impressive GitHub account, there are tens of people who are better,
toiling in obscurity.

The point is that you can't _just_ look for people who are famous or prolific
on blogs or twitter or GitHub or whatever else.

~~~
njharman
Exactly. Github (and every other flavor of the time) is an example of the
problem. Not the solution.

~~~
vm
Nah, Github is a step in the right direction. They make publishing online
easier which gets more people to do it. It's like how twitter grew the
blogging world by making it easy to do. Sure, not everyone does it yet, but
it's better than before

~~~
tomjen3
Also with Github you are publishing actual code, and not just writing about
code (I am looking at you, coding horror).

~~~
Silhouette
I'm not sure that helps much when it comes to recruitment, though.

When someone starting out in the industry asks for advice on how to get
recruited, it's very trendy for wisened old souls on places like HN and
Slashdot to mumble something about making sure you contribute to Open Source
projects and have a GitHub account.

But on the big OSS projects, where making a contribution wins you significant
geek cred, is anyone involved in a hire/no-hire decision really going to take
a load of time to look through a bunch of commits you made and figure out
whether they were any good and what sort of impression they give of you? IME,
you're lucky if everyone making that decision even read your whole CV before
the interview.

And on smaller projects, no-one recruiting you knows what they are unless
they've shipped and have an obvious presence to see, in which case that is
probably a far more effective advertisement than the underlying code anyway.

If you've got your own personal project, which is complete and something a
potential recruiter can immediately run for themselves, then sure, include a
link to it. Likewise if you've got a blog that's going to give an immediate
positive impression and is clearly down to you personally, go ahead and
include that. But those are things where you can immediately see the whole
picture as a recruiter, with minimal time and effort.

I remain to be convinced that there is much value in linking to things like
GitHub accounts or major OSS repositories, because they _don't_ offer the same
instant gratification. They do demonstrate that you're a keen programmer
generally and not just in it for the money, but that's going to be all they do
for most potential employers.

~~~
nl
_But on the big OSS projects, where making a contribution wins you significant
geek cred, is anyone involved in a hire/no-hire decision really going to take
a load of time to look through a bunch of commits you made and figure out
whether they were any good and what sort of impression they give of you?_

This is true, but not the point (at least until automatic tools run through
the commit history and rate the contributions automatically).

Contributing to OSS projects gets you through filters, in the same way being
Ex-Google will open a lot of doors.

The fact I'm an Apache committer and have code included in Spring gives me
some credibility as a Java programmer (even if I haven't been active in either
of those roles for years). Hiring managers are more likely to put you on the
"worth looking at" pile rather than the "doesn't have a clue" pile based just
on that.

~~~
Silhouette
Fair enough, but is the advantage here that you have worked on OSS projects,
or that you have worked on big name projects that a recruiter might have heard
of?

------
zerostar07
Blogging also takes confidence, that you have something substantial to say and
that what you say is valid. Unfortunately, due to the Dunning-Kruger
effect[1], actual smart people have too much self-doubt, which would imply
that not-so-smart people are overrepresented in the blogosphere/google
search/messageboards. Couple that with the internet's popularity-contest
dynamics and you have a larger problem than earlier publishing media (which
required a substantial level of peer-review-by-experts)/

Take home message: read everything on the net with a grain of salt.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect>

~~~
delinka
Also, writing requires a tremendous amount of effort. Effort I'd personally
rather spend on creating my next project. When I get to a point that I feel
writing would scratch an itch, I find that simply getting the thoughts out of
my head and onto paper or into the computer is enough therapy for me to move
on. Organizing that into coherent written English takes lots of effort I'd
rather spend elsewhere; sharing it on the 'tubes then necessitates dealing
with the things you mention.

In short, being technical (and pretty decent at it at least), public writing
just Isn't My Thing.

That said, I find that spending a few moments organizing my thoughts into
coherent English for commenting on HN encourages me in the direction of
writing and could indeed possibly lead to be blogging. Eventually.

~~~
carlio
Exactly. Writing well is hard, and you have to spend a lot of time thinking,
writing, editing.

'A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other
people.' - Thomas Mann

~~~
raganwald
I don’t write because I can, I write because I can’t _not_ write. Alas,
looking at my Github projects, it seems that I underscore the problem
described in the OP. I have done a lot of writing, but how good is my code,
really? If I published the exact same Github projects under a pseudonym, would
anyone who hasn’t read my writing care?

~~~
jamesbritt
_I don’t write because I can, I write because I can’t not write._

That seems a better definition of a writer than the Thomas Mann quote.

 _If I published the exact same Github projects under a pseudonym, would
anyone who hasn’t read my writing care?_

You can pull a Stephen King and try it. Start rolling out new code under a new
name. See what happens.

I think, however, that you'd run into the problem of getting lost in a sea of
code, regardless of the quality of your work.

------
kamaal
Even as I'm writing this I'm at a hacknight in Bangalore, a over night even on
BigData. We are hacking away to learn and make a lot of things.

One thing that I observed today was an old friend and colleague sitting next
to me. He sort of wrote a Perl program to analyze a weeks worth of tweets in
India and draw real cool visualization out of it. The thing is script was not
really big and was full of functional programming stuff.

As I was reading the script with another friend, My friend was like 'Oh! I
though SQL is unpopular these days, or Perl was dead, or no one uses
functional programming these days'. I soon realized- For each of these cries,
some one is still sitting and doing awesome stuff with things and using the
most simplest and basic tools.

Vast majority of awesome guys don't blog or tweet or harp about every bit of
tiny things they have achieved on the Cyber space. But your everyday guy is
vastly influenced by ranting, blogging and tweeting and takes them to be holy!
And anything other thing than that- which produces results is generally a
'black swan' event to him.

So when something unpopular is used to get the job done, its often difficult
to the everyday guy to understand this.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
My experience is that less experienced programmers tend to want to get things
done the "right" way, so they tend to jump on the latest-and-greatest
bandwagon. After enough experience (and having seen multiple bandwagons come
and go, they tend to just want to get stuff done.

This change in focus is one of the most valuable things (IMO, of course) that
more experienced developers bring to a project.

------
dkhenry
If the point of this article is to say that you should not be spending time
worrying about and evangelizing your tools and more time using them to create
awesome stuff then I agree. However if its to say that there is a large crowd
of exceptional programmers and engineers that no one hears about because they
spend _too_ much time creating great projects then this is baloney.

There are some people out there who are truly exceptional and might never be
heard from. However in general the real exceptional people are the ones
pushing the envelope of whats possible forward. Their work _always_ finds the
limelight. The author uses an example of a rigid body physics implementation
in a game, and while that's great work and the team should congratulate
themselves its not that big of a deal BLAS had been around for decades by that
point. That does not describe experts doing amazing things. It describes
software developers doing a good job and not being cocky about it.

I think why this has received such a warm welcome here is so many of us
software developers want to think we are part of that silent majority. That we
are doing amazing things too and if we cared to we could write articles and
become famous. The truth is we are not experts we are people who have jobs to
feed our families and we may be just as skilled and talanted as the vocal
minority, but we would never be able to reproduce their success. That's not a
bad thing. I have no problem being an unknown developer working on a piece of
corporate software and providing a good living for my family. Its ok if others
get press time for their contributions I might take from them and learn, but
it doesn't change the fact that they at the end of the day have moved our
profession further and I haven't.

~~~
sshumaker
You're wrong.

There's only a mild correlation between fame and skill set. I can name a few
dozen 'famous' internet developers, and have even interviewed a few of them,
and most weren't anything special, other than being good bloggers.

Meanwhile, take someone like Jeff Dean (who I just learned about a few days
ago). Designed and implemented BigTable, MapReduce, Protocol Buffers, etc. I'm
not sure most people outside of Google have even heard of him.

Sometimes your work finds the limelight but you aren't credited for it. We all
know Elon Musk but who knows the guy who actually wrote the code for the
rockets? I don't remember the name of the Amazon Dynamo guys, and have no idea
who designed EC2 and S3. These are awesome systems used by millions of people,
but the creators are (relatively) unknown.

~~~
dkhenry
Jeff Dean would be exactly who I am talking about. I don't know how you
managed to _not_ know who he is. He along with Sanjay Ghemawaty pretty much
took google from a research project to the Juggernaut we know about today. he
has no blog that I can find no GitHub account and yet most people who work in
the field of data processing should know who he is. He has numerous published
research papers and has given talks about his work at Google. Someone of his
caliber can not stay hidden. Thats the definition of a "Master" at their
trade, if your really _that_ good at what you do you can not stay in the
shadows people will search you out. This idea that there are a majority of
people like Jeff who no one knows about is silly. they may not get profiles in
the new york times, but anyone who want to do what they do will know who they
are.

Also how can you not know who made Amazon Dynamo they published a research
paper on it.([http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-
sosp...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-
sosp2007.pdf))

~~~
xanados
When you are considering hiring you don't want to hire the already famous Jeff
Dean, you want to hire the 25-year-old that will become Jeff Dean. This person
is not in the limelight, and not everyone knows their name. I mean, you want
to hire Jeff Dean too, but you'd be happy to find all the 85% as smart as Jeff
Dean people out there who will never be famous based solely on their work and
without self-promotion.

~~~
dkhenry
I would but that 25 year old is not a "Master" as this article represents. I
know the context of the discussion on this thread has shifted form the content
of the article, and in the context of trying to hire talent yes there are a
lot of talented people who are in the shadows, but my argument is they are not
the true masters and innovators of our craft.

------
yen223
"An appealing theory that gets frantically upvoted may have well-understood
but non-obvious drawbacks."

I'm reminded of the quote, "To every problem there is a solution that is
simple, elegant, and wrong." I have fallen into the trap of looking at a long,
messy piece of code, thinking "I can do better than this". I would replace a
50-line code with 5 lines, only to have it fail at some random edge case,
which the original has been fixed for.

That is why I always remain skeptical of people who are out to "disrupt" an
industry, especially when they don't have much experience in that industry.

~~~
jeffjose
Cant remember where I read this, but I realized a while back the folly of
"rewriting your code". Your code looks messy because it works. Its the result
of weeks of testing and bug fixes. It can handle special cases and is robust.

Many a times, to start of, a clever 5 or 10 lines would suffice. But the
moment you start testing it for production, it'd require more and more logic
to handle _all_ the cases.

~~~
samnardoni
I'm pretty sure you're referring to a Joel Spolsky article, "Things you should
never do". <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

~~~
jawr
Excellent post, thanks for the link.

------
16s
I liked this sentence. It's so very true.

"Just because looking down your nose at C++ or Perl is the popular opinion
doesn't mean that those languages aren't being used by very smart folks to
build amazing, finely crafted software."

~~~
EdiX
Dagdum has been harping on this concept for over a year at this point: "don't
waste time talking about your tools, you can do amazing things with
everything, go do them".

It's a platitude, sometimes it's even the wrong mindset to have, tools do
matter. And worse still it's starting to sound hollow given that all dagdum
talks about is how you should do awesome stuff instead of talking on the
Internet.

How about he talks about something cool he did recently instead? I guess that
doesn't get him as many page views.

At least in this case it is actually correct, unlike previous entries, C++ and
Perl are filling two very specific niches perfectly and their obvious
shortcomings are the flip side of their strengths.

~~~
kabdib
An ounce of passion is worth a pound of tools. You /can/ do amazing things
with limited resources and crappy tools.

You have to be careful about this. Using this as a justification not to have
good tools ("What's wrong with you? Suffering worked great last time") is
bogus logic; there's no reason not to have good tools. The other side of the
coin, NOT doing something because you don't have good tools yet, is equally
poisonous.

\- The test team that spends all its time writing test frameworks and tools,
and never writing any actual tests. (How many times have I seen this?)

\- The engineer who spends half his time "optimizing" (finding the perfect
language, defragging his hard disks six times a day, tweaking TCP settings so
repository access is as fast as possible) and not writing code.

\- Going around and around on a class design until it's /perfect/.

\- Not moving on something because you lack complete understanding.

It's hard to overstate the benefit of just getting in the ring and doing
/something/.

After 25 years of random fiddling with one side project [not going to tell you
want it is] I finally just started writing some fucking code. And you know, it
feels darned good. The stuff I'd been worrying about being inefficient and so
forth turned out to be only a few hours of thinking and coding. It was fun.

A poor craftsman blames his tools.

~~~
tomjen3
A poor craftsman blames his tools -- because one upon a time, a craftsman
would _make his own tools_.

If you give a shovel and a screwdriver, don't complain if the house I build is
not up to code.

If I show up with a shovel and a screw-driver, you have every right to send me
away.

------
alan_cx
There is a more general point here. There seems to be a growing assumption
that activity on the internet is some how proportional to activity in real
life. Yes this could be a problem for programmers, but IMHO, its becoming more
and more of a problem with news gathering. Issues or causes with facebook and
twitter accounts get far more coverage than those with out. Basically these
sites provide tittle tattle to fill the 24hr news channels. OK, cool if you
happen to be in a banana republic dictatorship with internet access, but deep
in Africa, your tribe can be slaughtered and no one knows.

------
mjn
Incentives also tend to disfavor "popular" work like blogging, but I think in
parts of academia that is somewhat changing. May be changing less slowly with
regard to experts in industry, some of whom also have confidentiality issues
to worry about.

As one example, law-professor blogs have really taken off. They're good for
building reputation and making a legal argument actually have real-world
impact (people read them, whereas the average law review article is little
read), and sometimes have even been cited in court decisions! So there is a
movement towards law professors doing more popularly oriented, but still
legally sound, writing; and towards universities taking this into account.

Science has also long had some research/popular-writing crossover, and there
are a number of researchers who blog in areas like physics and climate
science. And mathematics has an increasingly strong blogging culture, with
Terence Tao setting the nearly impossible to top example. So I think there is
good stuff out there if you know where to look. Of course, it's also good to
experiment on your own, and also to look elsewhere (e.g., in books).

------
shrughes
Implicitly in contrast is a loud minority of newbs, with their resume-building
blogs that have an about-me page, a picture of themselves, and
reposting/paraphrases of old Joel on Software posts.

~~~
tomrod
Hey, we newbs can contribute SOMETHING--namely useful content for other newbs
(that rises above the noise). Newbs have to learn somewhere, and if experts
aren't contributing, then to whom do we turn?

~~~
tomrod
I'm surprised to see the above comment got downvoted. Do people think that
excited acolytes contribute nothing?

~~~
zumda
I agree with you. There are things that the experts don't want to talk about
(because it's too easy) and then there are things that a beginner can explain
in a simpler way than an expert.

Staying in a beginners mind is hard once you have spent some time with a
technology. It also sometimes offers great points for the experts what could
change, because it could be easier or is simply unclear.

Of course there are very simple-minded blogs with practically no content, but
there are also simple-minded Github accounts that offer practically nothing.
There are CVs for the same purpose. I don't think this has anything to do with
blogging per se.

------
rbanffy
I signed so many NDAs in the past 4 years it almost looks like I did nothing.

------
dsirijus
One thing is being a good programmer and wholly another selling oneself as
good programmer. And that's absolutely not sad state of affairs; it is how it
is and it is how it should be.

~~~
Wilya
Why is it how it should be ?

The fact that I know how to sell myself makes me better paid, better treated,
and better recognized that others who have the same level of programming
ability as me but are less good at shouting it to whoever wants to hear it.
And yet, I don't provide anything better than them to anyone. Worse, it's
overall detrimental, because I spend time making myself known instead of doing
actual stuff.

~~~
dsirijus
Working with/for someone isn't programming, it's business relations, and
thinking otherwise hurts both parties. It is a nuanced difference, though.

~~~
Wilya
Err, yeah. Except at the end of the day, the goal and outcome of the
relationship is the programming (or, well, the technical side in general).

The business relationship is supposed to be just a construction between us, in
order to be able to agree on the tech work. If there is no need on the other
party, they have no reason to do business with me. People don't just hire me
because I'm a cool guy and I say funny jokes and blabber insightful-sounding
things. They hire me because they believe I can, one way or another, provide
them some value. Telling jokes, or writing link-bait-ish blog posts, (or doing
mostly shiny and maybe useful software), or whatever you want to put under
"developing your personal brand 101" is just a way to make them believe that
in order to put myself in a position where they would allow me to provide
value to them. It doesn't, in itself, provide value to anyone.

Or, at least, it provides less value than the time I spend doing the real, and
boring, and lonely, and hard to justify research groundwork that could (or
not) lead me to developing something valuable. And I mean research in the
broad sense, be it evaluating new or old software, trying to talk to people
and to discern if they have problems that I could solve, or just chasing after
a sneaky bug in an obscure backend thing that I happen to maintain.

------
TwoBit
IMO this is why people who post online think GCC is more popular than it is.
VC++ and C# have far more usage than GCC, but most of it is by professionals
who don't post online. Ditto for the lack of awareness of the popularity of
Perforce in professional environments.

------
pertex
I've been fascinated by this phenomenon for a long time.

The best coders I've found are not the loudest voices. In many cases they do
not comment publicly on the web at all. They just submit bug fixes.

That said, the best code I've found is the stuff that's made publicly
available via internet, and I'd argue it's precisely because it allows all
those "silent experts" to review it and submit their fixes. It's not the best
simply because of the contributions of the silent experts, but because their
scrutiny raises the bar.

It takes a certain amount of confidence to make code avaiable for all to see.
Because it becomes very clear, quite quickly, whether it's any good or not.

I don't see this same type of peer review and vetting within the corporation.
The goal there is different: one need only satisfy the company's clients, most
of whom cannot themselves review code quality.

In my experience, many of the silent experts who submit fixes work at
corporations. They are no strangers to closed source.

So it's all quite interesting. Open source and open discussion in its own
strange way effectively raises the bar. But at the same time the web also
lowers the bar to spreading bad code. And disseminating much nonsense chatter
about programming.

Hence we have lots of chaff. Lots and lots of chaff. The wheat is there, but
you have to know where to look. And generally, when you find wheat, you'll
also find lots of "silent experts" submitting fixes.

I often wish which they were the ones making the noise on the web. Because
then it wouldn't be noise. Many of these guys really know their stuff. I guess
over time the web has worsened things. In the early days, many online
contributors, e.g., to bulletin boards and newsgroups, really were
knowledgeable in their chosen fields. There were just less people online. That
seems to have changed somewhat, but maybe it's just my perception.

In any event, they might be silent, but we know they are paying attention. No
one is going to completely ignore the continuing growth of open source and
open collaboration.

------
nathancahill
No doubt a lot of expertise is locked away in commercial software, but the
open source community has equally (or more) impressive experts working on
software. Maybe not blogging about it, but the expertise is definitely there.

------
n0on3
The thing is: (blogging|writing)-about-/publishing- code takes time. And time
is really what people doing amazing stuff are short on the most. Don't get me
wrong, both discussing and publishing are amazing, but often life is just too
short for the blah blah blah, unless you have good reasons for doing that.

------
OmegaHN
I think this problem is why academia is so valuable; academics sole purpose is
to share their discoveries. What they build is not a product, but rather a set
of ideas ( or others' ideas) to share with the public

------
lani
if only I'd read this article two - maybe five years ago ...

------
tubbo
I think this has more to do with age than anything else. But it might also be
because you can do stuff faster in Ruby or Python or JavaScript so you have
all this time to wax poetic about it. ;)

There's still nothing like C/C++ for getting close to the metal. And until we
have an OS written in Ruby or Python, rather than C, it's gonna be like that
forever.

~~~
tikhonj
It's funny you should mention that, because the language in the blog post was
Forth. And you can run Forth _directly_ on a chip, unlike C. I'm pretty sure
that's exactly what GreenArrays is doing[1]. Starting this fall, I think I'll
be working on something similar as well.

[1]: <http://www.greenarraychips.com/>

Or what about lisp? While these were well before my time, my understanding is
that they could run Lisp directly in hardware.

And, of course, there have been OSes mostly written in higher level languages
than C or C++. The one that springs to mind immediately is the Singularity
OS[2] project from Microsoft that is mostly implemented in C#. I think there
is still some assembly, C and C++, but the kernel and drivers are in C#.

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)>

------
smeg
People still building software in Perl ought to be arrested.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I know a guy working at JPL doing Perl stuff for internal use still. I give
him a hard time about it, but it's a lot cooler than Social_Widget_0003993986
in any other language you care to name.

~~~
smeg
"but it's a lot cooler"

Are you referring to the work or Perl? Most programmers I know working in a
scientific area switched to Python years ago and run away screaming when they
hear the work "Perl".

~~~
inopinatus
Choice of language is quite marginal when it comes to determining the quality
and utility of code.

~~~
stcredzero
Actually, it's been known for quite awhile that there's a factor of 2 to 3
times in productivity. That's not really marginal. Talent far outstrips that,
though.

~~~
pessimizer
productivity != quality and utility

~~~
stcredzero
It doesn't equal utility, but it does equal quality, at least to the extent
that bugs per SLOC matter. This has also been known for awhile, with data to
back it up.

------
dkhenry
Is it a silent Majority? I don't think anyone will doubt that not every
interesting thing that gets done gets published and discussed on the internet
and on blogs, but I don't know if I would say its a majority. From my
experience there are some people in the software world who think they are
either not noteworthy enough to write about what their doing or they are too
noteworthy ( I am not going to share my amazing super advantage I got by
making this really smart and novel thing). I have found however that in
general software development, like any technical trade, works best when its
subject to peer review and an open community. I think most people also know
this, which is why the tech heavyweights have talked about their
infrastructure and technique. They do it so others can build on what they have
done and as a community we can build on each other.

There are a few who don't care to participate thinking they are either above
it or below it , but the truth is most people do and everyone should.

~~~
pmjordan
I've worked with far more excellent people who don't blog than with those who
do. In many cases, confidentiality agreements prevent the really cool stuff
those people work on from seeing the light of day (except of course nestled
deeply within the binary of the product in question, if it's even for public
release). I don't have data, but anecdotally I'm completely willing to believe
it's the majority.

~~~
dkhenry
That really cool stuff nestled deep in a propiratary binary, Odds are its not
really that neat or cool. Thats not to say the people who made it aren't
really smart and good at what they do, but odds are its been done before. By
refusing to learn from and give back to the development community all they
have done is made sure no one ever learns from something they might have done
differently or better. Meanwhile the experts in the field are the ones who
have taken whats been done, understood it, and built upon it. My point is a
majority of those people _are_ giving back in the form of public discourse.

~~~
eliasmacpherson
Are you really trying to argue that the majority of that which is novel is
already open source, or has been discussed publicly? That's a really bold
claim to make, and I really doubt it. NSA and DOD black projects? The majority
of software products that I can think of are more advanced in proprietary form
than their open source counterparts. Google's search algorithm?

~~~
dkhenry
The NSA will have some really novel and new ting we don't know about. They
might be one of a handful of places where you really do have some Silent
Experts. However as to your second example google

<http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html>

This is really common I can pull you up multiple research papers from them on
everything from database design to ranking alogrithems. Same thing for
Facebook, Twitter, IBM, Cisco, and the numerous computer science research
institutions.

For the most part what you see as "Advanced" is just a better implementation
of the same idea. Thats not to say that the people making the proprietary
software aren't intelligent and aren't building better products because they
are, but its just silly to assume that there is this world of computer
engineering talent we don't hear from that's doing groundbreaking things in
the shadows.

~~~
eliasmacpherson
Good point, but that's research, not general software development, which is
what you were initially talking about. Software development is about
implementation, and less about research. That research paper is not the
entirety of what's novel about google's search algorithm. It's more silly to
assume the majority of computer engineering talent get on the megaphone when
they've done something novel, many of them just aren't interested. Games
developers leave it a couple of years before getting public about the nitty
gritty of what they did.

You know already which one this is going to be :) <http://xkcd.com/664/>

