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.
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.
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[...]"
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.
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.
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.
The salesmen always take the credit. If you see someone getting all the credit... 9 times out of 10 they are the salesman not the engineer or brains that actually built the thing. Add to that the hero worship for celebrity in our current culture and there you go.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
On this subject, I did see an ad for a small music festival near my hometown, and i brought the ticket and had a good time. If i had not seen the add, I would not have known about the festival, so I actually did at least once see a useful ad
I used to hate ads, for the intrusion they made. Then I started to run my own ventures and realised advertising is essential: even finding friends and partners requires advertising of a sort.
But on the web, advertising doesn’t stop at attention theft. Most web ads are agents of surveillance networks, and also are software running on your hardware. Neither we should tolerate.
Yeah, I actually went to school for "strategic communication" which was in large part advertising/marketing/PR. I originally had this very naive perspective that these sorts of communication are important and valuable. Which is still true (we all engage in -some- form of self-promotion, even if only in how we choose to present ourselves to others), but with massive asterisks.
In my ideal, advertising and marketing are about really understanding what the other party needs and finding a truly mutually beneficial agreement that actually generates value through exchange (A has X but values Y more highly, B has Y but values X more highly, simply by the act of exchange, value is generated).
I was even pro-tracking at one point because the more you know about people, the better you can understand their needs so the better you can offer them something they'll value. In the abstract, I still think there's something here. But it has to be done responsibly and with a user-before-profit mindset.
By contrast, ad companies have time and again proven themselves irresponsible with this information, e.g. selling it to shady groups.
> I started to run my own ventures and realised advertising is essential
There are ethical ways to go about it. In certain contexts, what people think of as advertising is really just information. It's totally fine to inform people when they ask for it.
When people open a store app, it's because they want to see products. There's no ethical conflict when the store app does what people want it to do. What's unethical is the constant product spam when people are trying to do anything else.
How’d you get the ad? It seems like something that could be posted on a coffee shop bulletin board for example, or placed in the culture section of a local newspaper. In other words, environment and location are all that are really needed, we wouldn’t need to send somebody to stalk you (like Facebook or Google) in order to show you this ad.
Ads are only good for things with broad appeal like that.
I agree that it could be posted somewhere locally in the real world, and it may have been, but the interesting part is that I dont live in my hometown anymore, even though I travel there frequently. I live in another country, 4 hours away, so I would have never seen a real world ad. Only instagram and all the data they connected about me knew my ties to my hometown and my interest in the music hence they showed the ad.
I agree on all the stalking points and I dont like that they have all this data, but this one time it was useful, i can not deny that.
> Which is somewhat extreme and probably hyperbole but still his philosophy is loud and clear.
Is it? I wish online ads that make it through would target me well.
yes, I use adblockers and I opt out of data collection. But any old-school advertisement such as print, TV, billboard, and prospect ads feel more targeted / relevant to me and guide me to a sales funnel than online ads.
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.