isaacs
@izs
Followers
24K
Following
15K
Media
2K
Statuses
74K
npm inventor. he/whatever. If I blocked you, might be a mistake. https://t.co/CU4d4ebDMP https://t.co/wOeDpSUjWb @vltpkg @izs_____ all opinions are mine (including yours)
Oakland CA
Joined August 2007
Y'all. Seriously. Hardly anyone even understands the unbelievable depth of Tolkien's linguistic genius. If ever there was an artist just straight up making jokes that only he would ever get, omg. So get this, it's epic. You know the "Brandywine River" in Lord of the Rings?.
302
5K
62K
Addendum: who's Banazîr "Ban" Galbasi?. English name: Samwise "Sam" Gamgee. Mayor of the shire for 49 years, historian of the War of the Ring, and the *only* bearer of The One to give it up willingly.
58
189
10K
And that's like. ONE RIVER. This particular etymology is well understood, but there are so many many more. The entire world of Middle Earth is like this. The Rohirrim speak in archaic english because Rohirric is an archaic form of Westron. It goes on and on.
7
90
10K
You see, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings weren't canonically written in English. No no, canonically in-universe, there once was an elf who somehow found himself in England, and told these stories to Mr. Tolkien, who translated them to English.
13
95
10K
So Mr. Tolkien, punning on a pun from Sindarin to Westron to English, calls it "Brandywine", keeping the alcoholic pun intact, *and* the phonetic closeness to the Sindarin Baranduin.
8
83
9K
And here I'm patting myself on the back when I sneak a clever pun into a comment in some JavaScript. There's not enough nerd respect in the world for that dude. Absolute legend.
15
79
9K
In the books, they mention canonically that "Brandywine" is derived from the older elvish name "Baranduin", which is Sindarin for "golden-brown river". Cute, right?. But wait, there's more.
6
69
8K
The Hobbit is a translation into English from Westron of "There And Back Again; A Hobbit's Tale" by one "Bilba Labingi". The story of the War of The Rings is compiled from several sources, but mostly the account of Banazîr "Ban" Galbasi.
4
65
8K
So "Bilba Labingi" becomes "Bilbo Baggins", since the -a in Westron indicates a male name, like -o in English, and "labin" in Westron is a name for a sack or bag, and Baggins has the kind of folksy vibe in English as Labingi does in Westron.
6
62
8K
So what about "Brandywine"?.Well, the word in Westron that the Hobbits called the Baranduin used to be "Branda-nîn" which is close in sound, but means "Border Water", which makes sense because it's the border of the Shire.
1
51
7K
Now, of course, these names won't do for English readers, Mr. Tolkien thought, so he came up with more English-sounding names that would evoke the same vibes to English speakers as these names do for native speakers of Westron, Khuzdûl, Sindarin, and Quenya.
2
45
7K
Later on, owing to the brown frothy nature of the river (how it got the name Baranduin), the Hobbits began jokingly referring to it as "Bralda-hîm", which means "heady brew" or "frothy beer river".
2
46
7K
Ok, I have actual work to do today, so I'm gonna ignore this for a bit. While you're here, please go donate to my friend Michael's cancer treatment if you can. Any negativity about my boy JRRT will be blocked and hidden 😘.
Everyone whose life has been touched by Micheal Nagle is better for it. I am blessed to count myself in that group, and absolutely gutted by the unfairness of cancer striking him down so early. Please help this wonderful person live a little bit longer.
33
60
4K
@buzzkillbc Combination of "read literally everything written by JRR and Christopher Tolkien", various Tolkien scholars I follow on TikTok and YouTube, and Careful, this rabbit hole has no bottom!.
14
21
2K
GitHub is not a resume, and OSS should not be a hiring requirement. But if you're on GitHub, I'm definitely gonna go see if you're an asshole to people in OSS projects. It's a way to check if someone is definitely an asshole, or maybe an asshole. An asshole bloom filter.
24
217
2K
Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" is the Strunk & White "Elements of Style" of software dev. The less you understand the craft, the more helpful it seems. Once you understand the principles of the craft, you can clearly see it is toxic brain poison that can take decades to unlearn.
93
168
2K
@Argorak Yes! This is why he never authorized translations to be done by anyone else. All names had to be translated in such a way as to evoke the correct connotations for native speakers of the target language. So Labin-nec becomes Bag End in English, but Cul-de-Sac in French.
12
10
1K
This is *so* close to the truth of what makes Autism what it is, but missing some of the details. It's essentially "Intense World Theory" from a woo angle. (Not to invalidate; "woo" and "biomolecular neuroscience" are two different levels of analysis of the same phenomena.).
are autists failed empaths whose natural sensory clarity was so high they had to turn off all the most salient channels (looking at eyes, empathy, love, etc) and invest all their processing into lower human-saliency things like math as a way to cope with constant overwhelm.
14
67
1K
Friends,. It's ok to write open source software when it's your job. It's ok to write it for fun. It's ok to do it for free. It's ok to charge for it. It's ok to license it liberally, or not. It's ok to write proprietary software. None of this ruins anything. It's great actually.
5
244
908
8 years ago, I complained to @GitHub support about how they handled feedback. When I got shut down, I made the isaacs/github repo and started posting issues. Eventually, others within the OSS community got involved there, and it became a de facto way to post GH feature requests.
11
171
702
If coding doesn’t feel like a Faustian bargain with a vindictive cenobite demon of infinite complexity that you know will haunt you for the rest of your days and never be satisfied, a necessary evil to attain great ends, you have at least another level to master before calling yo.
5
174
653
@LouisatheLast @scalzi @Checkmite @gm_wggames I’ve has good results with demanding a consulting fee for continuing a discussion. My time is valuable, if you want me to continue, and you’re all about debate and the free market, you should be willing to pay for that value. (I’ve had no paying clients yet.).
10
18
498
Don't sleep on @remix_run. I'm definitely still honeymooning a little bit, but the last time I saw something and had this level of "THIS is it, this is how to best do ${thing} in JavaScript", it was Node.js.
13
57
552
@njholm @ole5006 @EthanMidkiff @mlcowen Also, in practice, English is actually very flexible about the use of "I" vs "me" when conjoined with another party. In some dialects, it's always "X and I", in others it's always "X and me" or "me and X". Any of these patterns are common and perfectly intelligible. Not an error.
3
2
470
For Mother's Day today, never again use "a mom" as a tired generic sexist example of someone who is not tech savvy or competent.
15
311
449
Controversial opinion: the JS tooling ecosystem is good, actually, and a lot of the people who complain about it have no idea how good they have it.
26
25
409
Developers who love and hate file systems, join me in this. Every time I meet someone who works at Microsoft, and I mean just about *every* time, I bring up a specific and important point. One simple way Microsoft can improve their operating system. Unix filesystem conventions.
19
95
334
@laurenancona Especially employed self-masking autists who've been hitting the snooze button on the burnout alarm for ten or twenty years and don't realize the brutal crash waiting for them in their future. Grown up gifted kids who internalized all the well-intended abusive praise.
8
14
344
In OSS, saying "only the code matters" is just incompetence. Software is by and for humans. Empathy is a core developer skill.
13
339
307
@ginnyhogan_ that's like assuming my parents "liked" each other just because they stayed married for 22 years.
0
5
318
@r2_d10 @toddbdean @njholm @ole5006 @EthanMidkiff @mlcowen Tell me you don't know anything about the English language without telling me you don't know anything about the English language.
5
0
313
@moorehn I was in my 40s when I realized that "Dja do anything fun over the holidays? 😁" is an invitation to a financial dick-measuring contest. Now I like to respond "yes" followed by an excruciatingly detailed account of what I did at home with my kid, or "no" followed by a period.
2
8
305
@gldivittorio If they're not going to phrase it actively, I always wonder, why not go all the way, and just straight up implicitly blame the victim? Have the courage of your convictions!. "New York City has seen a rise in face punching, which women are more likely to experience.".
2
8
297
@alan_mcmillian Exactly. Learning what all that meant, too, man. what a badass call out. "I'm Manwë's boy, and I got the fire ring, motherfucker, you really wanna dance!?".Plus, that balrog? Basically his cousin. Like, they definitely know each other.
4
2
301
Recently a young dev at a tech conference after party, probably about 25 years old, drunkenly insisted to me that npm was created by joyent and then sold to GitHub to resolve GitHub's fork of node, io.js. I told him he was wrong, but I don't think he believed me.
8
10
299
Ryan Dahl.
Name other scholars beside Oppenheimer who spent their later years running away from their early work.
9
27
304
This is what I'm on about. "AI Safety" people have it all wrong. They're worried about skynet, when they should be worried about AI making it easier for douchebags to shit all over the information commons we've built over the last 30 years.
We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor. We got 489,509 traffic in October alone. Here's how we did it:
6
43
298
I've seen people talking about how hard it is to ship TypeScript modules that work with both CommonJS and ESM. Indeed, it can be a dark art. I made a thing that makes it very simple:
10
42
290
Slack is not documentation.GitHub is not a resumé.Hotdog is not a sandwich.Email is not a phone call.Twitter is not a message board.
18
190
269
Racism isn't always called "racism" openly. In Silicon Valley, the dominant racist political view is called "meritocracy".
7
121
250
Do you have code that does this?. try {. doSomething().} catch {. return fallbackValue.}. Wasteful! Creates a whole Error object with a stack of call sites for no reason. Do this instead:. catcher(() => doSomething(), fallbackValue).
24
21
276
When I say "empathy is a core dev skill", I don't mean "be nice". I mean "fully imagine being a person who DOESNT know how this shit works.".
12
312
254
But they're entirely fucking arbitrary, and out here in the real world of thoughtful and dedicated practitioners, we all know that what matters is trade-offs, priorities, and delivering a positive return on investment in pursuit of whatever unique goal we have.
6
9
263
When you say "JavaScript isn't a real language", I hear, "I am threatened by tools I don't know how to use effectively".
10
133
213
If we don't settle for an imperialist center-liberal, we'll get white supremacist fascism. Those are the options. It's not complicated.
7
133
198
This is a great lesson for CEOs and product leaders at every level. When you have a user who's saying "I'm going to keep using your product, I mostly love it, but gahhh it's pissing me off in these specific ways", THAT IS GOLD.
3
38
220
JavaScript is good.
UNPOPULAR OPINION: TECH EDITION.
6
42
206
Cases where you can sit down and focus singlemindedly on a fairly well-understood problem are the exception, not the norm. At npm, we call those “typing problems”, because the work is just typing. Thinking problems are harder. Talking problems are hardest.
5
52
196
@kat_blaque At least weekly, some poor woman comes to r/polyamory like, "my partner has 3 girlfriends, but pitched a fit about me being 'unethical' because I told him I want to date the guy from work", and *every time* it's this. She's bi and been dating women, he's toxic af.
1
2
195
omg, big super nerdy TIL. So, in ANSI color codes, the named colors are:.0 black.1 red.2 green.3 yellow.4 blue.5 magenta.6 cyan.7 white. It always annoyed me that they're not in spectral order. But:. 000 black.001 red.010 green.100 blue.101 magenta.110 cyan.111 white.
6
18
206
What if most "10x developers" only seem 10x as productive as their colleagues because they bring down everyone around them?.
12
95
188
@DrMSnap @arsonistIesbian @iurichavesx @puppetmotel @Random_Factor It's better if we all try to forget actual chuck norris entirely so in a few centuries some nerd can be like "did you know chuck norris was based on a real person?" and no one will believe them.
3
3
176
Kids today and their "console.log" debugging. Why, in my day, we would document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('p')).innerHTML='uphill in the snow both ways'. And we were grateful!.
8
41
187
Here's the conclusion of this thread, a TypeScript --import module loader with the full power of TSC's type checking, and (warm cache) performance as good as or better than "blazing fast" ts compilers written in Rust and Golang (which don't typecheck).
I think I'm gonna have to fork ts-node. Ugh. I don wanna.
7
29
196
@theleezajohnson @CarissasNewLife If you say yes there, they have a bunch of other questions they're supposed to ask, possibly involving a form 5150. (Do you have a plan? When will you do it? Have you acquired the necessary equipment? Put affairs in order? Etc).People are just lazy and don't wanna do their jobs.
2
1
184
@workflowsauce Yeah, I feel like the entire LotR, Silmarilion, the whole Legendarium, is all just there to produce this one perfect character of Sam Gamgee. He is Tolkien's vision of the Ideal Man. Humble, earnest, loyal, chill, brave, just wants to live peacefully and foster living things.
3
10
182
Talent is a myth. Every skill is learnable. Start by learning compassion, communication, confidence and C. Watch out for liars & psychopaths
Hey friends. You have 140 characters to give a newbie advice about coding. What would you say? RT for reach. Let's help people.
16
64
175
A reminder that evolution only cares about passing the unit test of “genes got passed on”, not the integration test of individual survival.
6
44
172
When @natfriedman started as CEO, I'm told, on his first day, he asked about the isaacs/github/issues, and got some eyerolls from his new LT. He said, "Which of these issues can we close TODAY?". He pushed a cultural shift towards caring about OSS needs in a real way.
1
11
179
Angry. Spews terrible political ideas and obvious lies. Orange. Bragging about business skill that is mostly grift. Trump is Hacker News.
0
82
162
And instead of getting newcomers who are similarly thoughtful and ready to learn, with fresh ideas and curiosity, we get these insufferable twits who've gotten the lesson that the way to be impressive is to be the most mundanely pedantic scold in the room at all times.
6
7
177
CS 207: Introduction to Not Being An Asshole Online.CS 307: Privilege and Team Dynamics.CS 407: Advanced Internet Empathy.
5
124
165
Every computer system is in a perpetual state of partial to total failure. At scale, something is always broken, often in ways that no one can every fully fix.
Please quote this tweet with a thing that everyone in your field knows and nobody in your industry talks about because it would lead to general chaos.
5
33
161
2
3
141
Controversial opinion (that is actually obvious) about the move of some JS tools to Rust and/or Golang:. If you just cut out (skip, cache, parallelize, etc) the slow parts, it doesn't much matter how fast you do the fast parts, or what language you do them in.
10
23
159
A huge body of research shows two things:. 1 Women are as good at knowledge work as men are. 2 Companies with more diversity perform better.
3
58
146
What's worse, they apparently have invented "shazam for video" and aren't sharing
Vizio TVs:.✅ stole your watching habits.✅ took your IP address.✅ tracked devices.✅ sold your identity to advertisers
6
35
145
"Will bun completely replace node?". Node hasn't even completely replaced Rhino. Perl still hasn't completely replaced cobol. Things don't get "completely replaced".
11
17
149
This sort of approach sends the message that the basic practice of creation is a matter of learning, implementing, and most of all *enforcing* a set of rigid rules, which lead invariably to precision and correctness. The authors present these rules as observed universal facts.
4
2
149
Matteo's impact is impressive here, but hold my beer:.I'm responsible for 100% of npm downloads.
Here is some absurd stat: packages I maintain are downloaded 2.6 billion times per month (july), making me responsible for 1/100 of the whole npm traffic.
6
1
147
They can wait until 2020, in fact. @SenWarren #resist
The FBI Director testified @realDonaldTrump's campaign is under investigation for collusion w/ Russia. Lifetime court appointments can wait.
10
17
121
It teaches junior devs that "being corrected" is a punishment, "being wrong" is a threat, and "showing someone up" is the way to get ahead. Constantly defensive, relitigating every decision, nitpicking everyone, never open to feedback, etc.
6
3
147
@MetalWarrior10 1 if anything Galadriel is way LESS badass in RoP than in the silmarillion.2 some elves are darker skinned (not the Eldar, but others).3 orcs canonically do NOT have dark skin (their skin is more like pale waxy corpses). If you're claiming it was "woke-ified", you're just wrong.
6
0
140
@ken_wheeler @somewheresy @Lunens__ It seems more likely to me that the reduction in motivation is a side effect, which is often unnoticed in people with cognitive decline.
1
1
142
We call women "girls" to remove their power. We call men "boys" to remove their culpability.
4
70
128
It implicitly teaches newcomers to a craft that power in a craft comes from being the authority, and authority comes from knowing the rules better than anyone, and you can trust the rules because they came from an authority (who by definition knows the rules better than anyone).
4
0
143
@mortimer_ben I liked it as a fun dnd fantasy adventure with tolkienian names. But it's not tolkien's story.
3
2
140
OSS maintainers: What is the minimum amount of money that someone could guarantee you on a monthly basis that would justify quitting your job and doing OSS full time?.(RT for reach, please).
53
137
132
A lot of people at GitHub knew me from Node.js and npm, but so many people when I introduced myself, were like "omg, you're THE isaacs? From the issues repo??". I'd gone from troll to folk hero without doing anything different, because GitHub changed.
2
6
136
The culmination of this is a comprehensive feedback system at Go check it out.
3
12
134