ziyao_w

Beautiful article. Reading this after having mixed feeling and honestly a bit depressed about the Navier-Stokes situation feels almost like therapy, and I had to try really hard to hold back tears.

The Riverside Park has always been beautiful but particularly this time of year. Maybe I should pay a visit again, sitting on a bench thinking thoughts.

Lol you are totally right! ;-)

I am normally a casual guy but for a giant being a bit more formal (pun intended) seems appropriate. Or maybe I am a nerd through and through :-)

Random anecdote and Mr. Hoare (yep not a Dr.) has always been one of my computing heroes.

Mr. Hoare did a talk back during my undergrad and for some reason despite totally checked out of school I attended, and it is one of my formative experiences. AFAICR it was about proving program correctness.

After it finished during the Q&A segment, one student asked him about his opinions about the famous Brooks essay No Silver Bullet and Mr. Hoare's answer was... total confusion. Apparently he had not heard of the concept at all! It could be a lost in translation thing but I don't think so since I remember understanding the phrase "silver bullet" which did not make any sense to me. And now Mr. Hoare and Dr. Brooks are two of my all time computing heroes.

“We are ugly but we have the music.”

One of the first things I did in New York was to visit the Chelsea Hotel. All the stories.

I’ve always been borderline obsessed with hey that’s no way to say goodbye, so long, Marianne, and later on if it be your will. There are so many other gems I was almost angry when Dylan won a Nobel and not Leonard Cohen. Another musician I enjoy in the same way would be Gainsbourg. Wonder when will the language model overlords understand all of these beauty.

lol thanks! Read probably 80% of the article and missed this:

"Almost before knowing it, she had decided. Lynn copied the most important papers. After carefully eradicating her old name and inserting the new on every title page[...]"

Wow, 4 citations. I feel happy for Lynn that she ended up doing a lot more impressive work, but definitely this should be restored to its proper place in the history of computing.

Something doesn't quite compute here though - according to Wikipedia after she announced her intent to transition Lynn was fired in 1968, but this paper was from 1966 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650635 also does not have any information. Maybe at least someone shielded her for some time?

Also Francis Allen seems to have worked on the same project at IBM - she mentioned there were works by other women that other people (Turning award winners IIRC) took credit of - could Lynn's work be one of those? Really hope Fran and Lynn would at least knew each other.

It's kind of funny to see Linus browbeaten other people into submission regardless of him being right or not, while claiming "I am always right".

A few counter points:

- `hg` has `cp`, and I believe both Meta and Google's internal systems have that; - git has `mv`, which was added later, but it is really janky and git would forget files are moved which I think it is because git doesn't try to track that, likely because of the philosophy here; - as for storing file moves - nobody said you *have* to use this information, but you can certainly use this information to help with things.

The whole thread is an interesting read though and I will try going through it someday - maybe doing that would change my mind.

Good point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand%27s_postulate is actually for any n > 3 there is always a prime between n and 2n - 2, or like you said for n > 1, between n and 2n.

Possession is one of the best novels I have read - a book about writers and books, the intertwined story lines are in some sense a bit recursive, a mystery and a romance at the same time. It's one of those books that I had to struggle a bit to get through but the more I do the more I love the story.

The movie adoption is a total abomination though and basically lost all the charm of the original novel.

Seeing the outpouring from the OpenAI team makes me think there might be a real schism there - it’s a bit troubling to see, id software became less special after Romero left and either way for OpenAI it seems they would lose some remarkable people.

pg is a world class lisp hacker, no idea about sama though.

Respecting and admiring someone for their achievements is one thing but blindly following successful people sounds like the antithesis of what a "hacker" is.

I know the HN crows idolizes people like pg and sama, but so many people appear to not even know who Ilya Sutskever is makes me think somehow this isn't "hacker" news anymore.

Obviously sama is a very productive individual, but I would think obviously a research lab would have to keep one of the princes of deep learning at all costs. Somewhat reminds me of when John Romero got ousted by John Carmack at id - if you are doing really hard technical things, technical people would hold more sway.

190 citations sounds impressive but considering they mostly come from possibly the two fields that gathers citations the quickest - biomedical sciences and artificial intelligence - this shouldn't be too surprising?

Shalosh B. Ekhad, OTOH, is the real deal -

https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/ekhad.html

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

Basically Shane Legg (who is probably not the Google AI chief), chief AGI scientist at DeepMind, who said in 2011/2012 (https://www.vetta.org/2011/12/goodbye-2011-hello-2012/) that

> I give it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028 and a mode of 2025, under the assumption that nothing crazy happens like a nuclear war. I’d also like to add to this prediction that I expect to see an impressive proto-AGI within the next 8 years. By this I mean a system with basic vision, basic sound processing, basic movement control, and basic language abilities, with all of these things being essentially learnt rather than preprogrammed. It will also be able to solve a range of simple problems, including novel ones.

is saying the same thing but pushed his timeline back a few years. I assume if you ask Shane 3 years ago before GPT he would look away and murmur something like "kurtosis".

I think the parent was trying to imply that Ken Thompson had no experience in designing a programming language :-)

Seriously though, "having experience" and "getting things right" are two different things, although Golang got a lot of things right, and the parent is being unnecessarily harsh.

Thibault (the creator of lichess) is a really impressive human being. I don’t idolize people but he is quite inspiring.

There’s an old perpetual chess podcast episode where he said he has never seen a single ad that was useful :-) Which is somewhat extreme and probably hyperbole but still his philosophy is loud and clear.

This article does not seem to mention this but Bobby Fischer lived in Japan and his wife is a WIM - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyoko_Watai.

He certainly had his insanities but some accounts say he was quite sane in his later years, and it must be amusing to be possibly the GOAT and living incognito in a place where chess wasn’t played much.

Finally picked up Strunk and White after years of procrastination and so far it has been a tour-de-force consolidating/spelling out the knowledge I picked up along the way (ESL). I found mentally swapping out words about writing for words about programming to be fun.

Yeah, moments after replying I realized there is a more charitable read :-)

Of course, with this read comes the age old question of "I can build Google/FB with 20 good men, what are they doing?"