It really was a fun read. Highly recommend to any programmer!

I can't tell if you're joking or not. If you read HN ten years ago, you would hear about SICP and Lisp constantly. Makes sense when you consider who made this site.

I am, I know and I know.

I tend to agree. Group loads and stores isn't very RISCy to me. But then again, you could make the case that any x86 machine is RISC under the covers.

As someone who has spent time around Lajes Field, War Plan Gray is interesting seeing as how the U.S. de facto seized land on Terceira anyway. Much of my family came over around that time to make room for the military base.

Ironically, the Portuguese are very upset now that the U.S. is pulling more and more soldiers away from Lajes as it's leaving a hole in the local economy.

This was the sentiment of everyone outside of SV when Altman was considering running for governor this year. I'm glad Sam actually cares about helping people, I really do, but it reminds me so much of Obama's quote about tech entrepreneurs giving him advice:

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences -- setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio -- then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That's not, by the way, to say that there aren't huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it's not inherently wrecked; it's just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow up.

Is there evidence somewhere that Altman was really considering a run for governor?

Can you guys not do this, please? HN isn't Reddit.

We try to maintain some semblance of effort and thoughtfulness into posting here.

You should read Turing's Cathedral if you are interested in Von Neumann's life.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm actually reading the biography of Turing at the moment, so that sounds like a perfect follow-up.

He's also one of the preeminent minds in quantum computing. When Scott speaks he's worth listening to regardless of his mannerisms.

Judging by his resume... yes.

It's not the tone - it's the fact that one uses a natural disaster for self-promotion while the other does it to inform the populace about the extent of damage.

How can using any new medium in such a context NOT be seen as self-promotion? It can't. But the benefits of the new medium also shouldn't be sidelined over the fear that folks like you might get outraged over a non-issue.

I feel like it'd help to avoid saying features of your product "are really cool" as you use it to present disaster footage. Also the upbeat cartoon avatars were probably not a good choice.