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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

> A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.

... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is?

He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles

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I'll be honest. I discovered him with this post. And I studied in France. I am also familiar with his projects, the obfuscated C code contest and more. Just don't remember seeing his name.

I guess that if people aren't loud on social media, people tend to ignore them.

Respect to those who posted their praise of someone else on social media. We need more of this.

What percentage of the population are computer programmers?

Welcome to that sub-group of the Lucky 10,000 today!

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I've been around for a long time and I know of him. Most people don't bother looking up where stuff comes from.

He's a lifelong familiar name since the LZEXE days.

I think I've known about him for 20 years right now, ever since I discovered his code to compute pi to an ungodly amount of digits. The man sure was prolific.

I have an explicit rule not to meet or look up my heroes. Been burned way too many times.

I don't need to know who is building VLC, curl, ffmpeg or any of the other essentials in my life. I just appreciate their work and pitch in some money if possible.

You'd be fine with Daniel Stenberg. :)

There are multiple people I'm fine with in software circles - Daniel being one of them, but then we have Notch and DHH who used to be cool, but some of their current hot takes are kinda oof.

Specifically way too many authors whose books I've loved have turned out to be not very good human beings. David Eddings and Neil Gaiman are pretty good examples of this.

Rowling / Harry Potter comes to mind, too, and Heinlein. You need to be able to separate the artist from the art, the programmer from the program. It’s ok to appreciate a work even if you disagree with its creator’s morals or ethics.

> It’s ok to appreciate a work even if you disagree with its creator’s morals or ethics.

In the case of Harry Potter... the perception of the work tends to follow the perception of the author. There's a bunch of issues with the original books that's widely seen as problematic today - character names seen as racist [1], enough problematic gender stereotypes to warrant half a dozen of academic papers of various quality, and last but not least antisemitism that continues even into modern works such as the shofar in Hogwarts Legacy [2].

I won't deny it, I enjoyed both the books and the movies, but it's ... not something I'd just hand over to my kids one day without having a serious talk with them beforehand. Back when I was young nobody cared too much (although I do member that at least in Germany, the goblins-jews analogy was discussed a bit), but nowadays...

[1] https://7news.com.au/entertainment/harry-potter-fans-call-ou...

[2] https://theconversation.com/how-hogwarts-legacy-video-game-r...

I'm not gonna lie: it has always struck me as extremely racist to claim that goblins are caricatures of Jews. No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures".

> No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures".

It was a pretty obvious thing for us Germans when the movie came out. Caricatures of Jews that were used in the time leading up to 1933 are taught and analyzed at schools here. Crooked noses, deal with money, hoard money... it's not that far away. There's a pretty good blog post with actual imagery, if you want to read further [1] - although I admit that JKR just used existing folklore as a foundation, just as with other elements of worldbuilding.

That shofar however, now that's intentional. HL came out many, many years after I read about the issue the first time. And 4chan, inevitably, immediately identified the goblins as jews.

[1] https://jewitches.com/blogs/blog/goblins-jews-and-antisemiti...

Wow, that site was... something. I would have never made that connection in a million years. As a non-German, I might lack some critical context here, but the author seems to be desperately searching for antisemitism, and finding a tiny kernel of it. Of course, 4chan will be 4chan anyway.

The authors are a group of Jews, of course they're even more sensitive towards antisemitic imagery than Germans are - they had to live with that imagery and often died because of it... pogroms against Jews are a staple of European history dating back centuries!

(That's also the reason why I support Israel being a safe state for Jews first and foremost. The rest of the world has shown over centuries it is not a safe place for Jews.)

If you don't put them on a pedestal, you won't ever be crushed when they can't stay on top of it. Appreciating people and the results of people's work doesn't require worship. People don't have to be perfect or even good to make good things. Coming to terms with this and being able to take people as they are instead of how you want them to be is just another part of growing up and leaving behind childish attachments.

There is a difference between "not perfect" and "Convicted and went to jail for 11 counts of physical child abuse".

I appreciated the art at the time, but can't really enjoy it anymore knowing what I know. My life would be better if I never found out.

> I have an explicit rule not to meet or look up my heroes. Been burned way too many times.

I mean, don't put them on a pedestal, but meeting them can still be fun. Carmack may have developed some really unfortunate rich-guy political views, but it was nice to get to go to Dallas to meet him.

"Meet" is metaphorical here =)

I'd _love_ to meet Notch or DHH live and have a chat, both would have some pretty good stories. Hell I'd even have a beer or two with Neil Gaiman.

It's mean to convey "don't look up the personal details of artists, just enjoy the art as-is". Similarly I don't interact with the fandoms of any of the media I follow. There are a few good ones, but the majority are insufferable (to me).

no, most people wouldn't know. you're in an echo chamber if you think he is well known.

Can we stop calling every niche an echo chamber?

It is an echo chamber if you think your niche is universal though.

“And quartz, of course”

https://xkcd.com/2501/

And you can just email him. He's just this guy, that writes stuff, and likes to help answer questions about it.

The HN bubble surfaces mainly those programmers who are either

- active in the startup/VC scene

- "indie hackers"

- chasing platonic elegance with functional languages (for which the world at large doesn't care)

- rewriting everything in Rust

Fabrice doesn't seems to firmly fit any of this.

First time hearing the name too.

>programming circles

Well, not all tech people are part of some curcles I guess.

"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.

I knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?

Ruby on Rails creator (among other things).

Yeah, same.

If you did "web stuff" in the early 2000s (like 2005-2010). You'd probably know who he is. He did Ruby on Rails, a backend web framework.

But that was also very Start-up and America focussed. So if you did web dev in some other country and didn't have colleagues who were into that culture you still might've missed the name.

TBH the biggest difference is him being more vocal.

I'm pretty sure most of the people who did "web stuff" at the time and used twitter (key point maybe) know him simply because you'd often see his tweets. Regardless of coutry (I'm from Russia, for exampl)

There was a big RoR scene in Glasgow in the mid-2000s, but there were a few of us that were resolutely Django.

I stand by that decision, for various reasons.

Not least being that "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" gave me the ick.

Ru y was something that one guy tinkered with briefly. It was less used than Perl. Java and php was what tools were built in at my company.

DHH markets himself much better. His company (basecamp), in a sense, revolves around his public persona and he's unapologetic about this. It's the same with all of his projects (e.g. Omarchy recently).

To be fair, I don't think anyone outside the Ruby community knew who DHH was until his politics went viral on twitter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson

DHH is even less known, don't kid yourself.

Oh DHH is well known. We all know about DHH.

Just that he's a douchebag, not what the letters stand for.

I hope your middle name doesn't start with H ;-)

We know it's not you.

I'm not saying DHH is more widely known than Fabrice Bellard. I'm saying that it really depends on your audience. I can think of many colleagues over the years who would know who David is, but not Fabrice.

(Also, I specifically chose DHH as somebody who's highly unlikely to show up in the same discussion as Fabrice Bellard, not because I'm a fan of his. Judging from the replies, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations!)

That's understood in the comment which explicitly indicates that there are many programming circles and that Bellard is known in a number of them (but not all).

eg: I grew up in the Australian Kimberley region (kind of remote), spent decades in geophysical mapping, multi channel data processing, computational algebra, and other odd niches, have no real interest in SV, and am quite familiar with Bellard's work.

No idea who DHH is though.

https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

That validates his point - barely anyone outside the ruby community would even know about DHH if he didn't manage to trigger the eternally outraged.

Oh, yes. That was a straight-face answer to "who DHH is", not anything to contradict or argue anyone's point. I never heard of the initialism in any other context either.

What is a DHH? A person?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson

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