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Comments (47)

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  ivansmf
  Whatever you think of the original discussion, I want to share two lessons I learned, in the hopes they'll help someone: (1) never wrestle a pig. You both end up covered in mud and the pig likes it; and (2) if you're trying to teach or share, argue for the audience. If you try to level with the antagonistic person, people watching from outside will have a hard time differentiating you from them. If the response is not about helping others, well, my sarcastic side will advise you to argue as much as possible with strangers on the Internet. That's what life is for.
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  rdtsc
  > But pyon can’t see the forest for the trees. Experts have spent a lot of time and energy learning what they know. They love their knowledge.Discernment and seeing the forest for the trees is part of being an expert, too.~~Just out of curiosity what did pyon really say? I couldn't find the comment any longer (assuming they'd be attached to https://nedbatchelder.com/text/slowsgrows). If we're gonna throw stones at anonymous cowards, as it were, let us evaluate what they said perhaps. Did Ned feel embarrassed and scrubbed the comment section?~~EDIT: Ned fixed the comments. Thank you, Ned!
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  eviks
  > Points of correctness are useless without points of connection.There are two points in a connection, and one way to sever it is to follow author's advice to "ignore them". Or you could try to learn and maybe even engage.(also, the "non-coward" way would be to actually link to the comment so that we could try to understand how toxic / irrelevant expert peons are)
• ConradKilroy
  For decades, as a career mentor, I've strongly advised (younger) folks to quickly learn how to 'avoid experts who have forgotten what its like to be a beginner.'I will now adopt 'Toxic Experts' in to my teaching mantras.
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  austin-cheney
  Maybe... maybe Pyron from the article is a toxic expert. Its hard to say because the article is entirely one sided.A problem that is encountered frequently among people with exceptionally low social intelligence is the inability to separate agreeability from social intelligence. Those concepts are completely unrelated.Agreeability is the need to please others and to a lesser extent seek reciprocity for kindness. Kindness lives here. This is completely and utterly unrelated to social intelligence and when signals are confused acts in opposition to social intelligence.Social intelligence is a perceptual skill. It is the ability to both introspect and perceive the motivations of others. You can have exceptionally high social intelligence and still be a cold asshole.For people with exceptionally low social intelligence they lack the perceptual skills required to both introspect and discern the emotional communication of others. So... they may confuse that with something else, like kindness, where they strive to fill an unfillable gap.It is fun talking about this with my wife. I am a software developer and software is staffed with males with low social intelligence at a much higher rate than the population at large. My wife works in education and its the same thing there for females.
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  33a
  Weirdly anti-intellectual. I'm not sure what the subtle nitpick the expert brought up, but from reading the comments I gathered that they correctly pointed out that appending to a vector is merely amortized O(1), not truly worst case constant time. This is actually kind of a big deal and is an important distinction to make. As a corollary, it means you can't just use a vector as a constant time sequence data structure in a real time application unless you preallocate it.
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  ghusto
  I like this term because it describes this type of person so well that it's immediately obvious why you'd want to stay away from them.Toxic experts are not interested in getting things done, or actually making any real world difference. In fact they'd _rather_ nothing happens at all. They were the kids who were bullied in the playground, and this is their little bit of power.
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  tpoacher
  If anything, this sounds like a toxic person trying to project or provoke.It reads like a character assassination piece superficially presented as nuanced philosophy, and we don't even have the actual exchange, only this person's account of it, which we are meant to trust in terms of both wording and demonstrated intent."If you have nothing kind to say" as the quote goes ...
• rglover
  Always consider the source.When someone rags on me or my work in a way I interpret as aggressive or dismissive, I make a point to go look at what they're up to. More often than not: nothing, or, something that screams "oh, your problem with me is despite you knowing things I don't, I also know things that you don't."I agree with the general sentiment here, but it helps to mentally filter the passive aggression and condescension from the point they're making. More often than not they're correct, you just have to cut through the weeds to get to it. I'd say that's an occupational hazard as a programmer.Good? No. But a reality (on the personality level) you have to deal with in this business. It sucks, but it is what it is.
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  aksjhg
  Ned Batchelder is a highly toxic person who supported the ban of Tim Peters.And implicitly supported people like Gregory P. Smith who proudly stated that any person who was banned deserved to have difficulties finding a job (because of course the Steering Council, which is unable to summarize a simple conversation and just lies, is always right).
• anon
  undefined
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  rpkla
  Dan Luu, the submitter, has not been kind to Ed Zitron lately. I suppose the allowed dose of "toxicity" is proportional to one's popularity in the tech world.
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  kazinator
  Pyon's comment is obvious humor; the commenter is method-acting as a toxic expert with over-the-top language like "how dare you mislead your readers".However, I have to agree with the substance of the comment; it is a pretty lousy explanation of amortized performance to simply equate it with a kind of average:> If you read more about big-O, you may see the word “amortized” thrown around. That’s a fancy word for “average,” meaning that individual occurrences don’t all behave exactly the same, but over the long run, averaging over many operations, the behavior has a certain characteristic.While the result of amortized analysis gives us a kind of average, averages show up in more than way in performance analysis not necessarily via amortization.The author complains that "[Pyon] pointed out a detail of algorithmic analysis that I had not mentioned. It’s a detail that I had never encountered before."But the author obviously encountered amortization before, and mentioned it in the article, and not in a very good way.Amortized analysis isn't something obscure; it is the basis for understanding everyday algorithms such as chained hash tables and garbage collection. It's covered in like third year CS courses.When an algorithm touts amortized performance, that's a red flag: it suggests that certain operations are infrequently hit with a pretty big cost. For example, a hash table insertion that has to resize the table doesn't just not act "exactly the same" as a previous insertion, or following one; it takes much longer. All the items inserted so far (or at least their hash table entries) have to be visited to redistribute them to a larger table. That could be hundreds of millions: the larger the table, the more expensive this is, yet less frequent. So yes, the amortized performance (like O(1) constant time for hash table insertions) is a kind of average, but the distribution may be heavily skewed, with implications particularly for real-time work. It's not a "nice" average with a tight bell curve distribution jittering around a mean.A better way would be to say that "amortized" is a kind of average where operations are infrequently penalized with a substantial performance hit, which helps make most other operations faster: the "amortized analysis" which calculates this kind of average works by pretending to redistribute the large cost incurred by one operation among the others. And not all average performance figures are derived using amortized analysis. The word is only used when that particular reasoning was applied, and is mentioned as kind of warning label.An example of average that is not amortized is, say, searching an unordered list of unique keys, where we expect on average successful search for a random key to process half the list. Readers do deserve to know that they should not use the word "amortized" for this kind of average!
• hexasquid
  %s/toxic expert/hn commenter/
• werla
  This is from 2017 and didn't really age well. Posts like these prepared the ground for the takeover of CPython by non-experts, narcissistic bureaucrats and corporations, all of whom pretend to represent the unwashed masses. As many politicians from Pol Pot to Mussolini have done.That is always what happens when you get rid of the experts. Ruthless mediocrity takes over!
• baddash
  also known as Douchebags
• rvz
  > They pointed out a detail of algorithmic analysis that I had not mentioned. It’s a detail that I had never encountered before. I think it’s an interesting detail, but not one that needed to be included.Who cares? We have a clear term for this and it is called "point scoring".Just give the rest of the group further reading material if they want to study it in their own time and to not talk over minute details.So just dismiss them with a "Great point" remark and tell everyone else to read the reading list later.Job done.
• llm_nerd
  An important life lesson: Some people are assholes all of the time; All people are assholes some of the time. Is it really such a big deal?Maybe someone was having a bad day. Maybe this is an argument they had with a peer and it triggered a peeve. Whatever.Tangential, but if I had to rank toxicity, someone going overboard at being a pedant in the easily censored comments under a blog post ranks far below overreacting and clutching pearls to try to pillorize and rile a torch mob, hoping to put them on blast and make them pay for their transgression. The latter is significantly more toxic, and it is what absolutely destroys communities.
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  _dain_
  >An anonymous coward named “pyon” said I should be ashamed. They pointed out a detail of algorithmic analysis that I had not mentioned. It’s a detail that I had never encountered before. I think it’s an interesting detail, but not one that needed to be included.on the one hand it's a nasty thing to say he should be "ashamed" for not mentioning it. on the other, it is a little strange he hadn't come across the "amortized O(whatever)" concept before. esp if doing a talk about it..neither of them come across well here.
• anon
  undefined
• lo_zamoyski
  Plain old vanity (specifically, intellectual pride), pedantry, a lack of neighborly love, a wish to dominate others (libido dominandi), pettiness, pusillanimity, and insecurity. Magnanimous people do not feel the need to flaunt, certainly not in the faces of beginners. They are generous, patient, and gentle with those who know less. They desire the good of the other in sharing what they know.I am reminded of the most common reading at wedding masses, 1 Cor 13 [0].[0] https://www.bible.com/bible/59/1CO.13.ESV
• antics
  I guess unpopular opinion but (1) I doubt this person is actually an expert and (2) I think the actual problem is that being anonymous is a coddling blanket that absolves you of the social cost of anti-social behaviors (i.e., acting like a dick) or holding an unpopular view. Obviously anonymity has uses, too, but that is now how it is actually used on the Internet most of the time.The only reason I bring this up is because I think it is counterproductive to view these people as experts when they are likely not.
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  0x20cowboy
  This describes just about everyone who works at a FANNG company or in the valley. The system rewards acting like this so it’s better to not get bent out of shape about it just focus on actually intelligent people.