Two tech legends left us this week: Larry Tesler and Bert Sutherland. Both played key roles at PARC, the research center Xerox started that sparked large chunks of what we use today.
Regarding Tesler: I sat next to him when I flew back from interviewing at Microsoft. He was in the last row on the plane. I saw his Blackberry, assumed he was a nerd. He had just left Apple, was on the committee that hired Steve Jobs. He had his fingers in so much of the tech that we use today from object oriented programming to the Newton that set the stage for the iPhone.
Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer, the tech of microprocessors, the Smalltalk and Java programming languages, and much more.
Yes. I discovered Montgomery Multiplication from the book Hacker's Delight. Potentially very useful for me.
Yesterday I looked at the wiki page for that, followed the link to Peter Montgomery's wiki page, and thought I'd send him a little thank-you just for that (I had no idea of his crypto work, none at all). Then I noticed he had died that very day, yesterday, Feb 18th 2020, age 72. I wish I'd just been able to send him that little thank-you. I missed that window by a few hours.
Is there a way to know the "freshness" of the data? Obviously if I'm driving and a car in front of me just imaged the road I can be much more reasonably certain that there isn't any debris on the road surface, or new potholes that have opened up.
I think that there is grey-area between data that is sufficiently static to represent in a map (buildings, lane lines) and data that is dynamic and must be handled by on-board perception systems (pedestrians, road debris). A good way to think of this is that the map is encoding priors about the environment for use by the perception system. It may be possible in the future to do all of this on-board (like humans do!) but the computational constraints would be quite high.
To add to this: it's not just computational complexity, but it's also about safety. There is a human review process for every element of the map, which enforces a level of quality and safety that is extremely difficult to ensure from a fully on-the-fly system.
Even those of us who are almost professional conference goers get tired of this stuff eventually. I know I far prefer having a couple of awesome programmers over my house for a great conversation. Just did that this morning, actually, when the folks behind FluidInfo came over. No beers were consumed.
What Ryan should do is focus on hackathons and other, smaller, places where code actually gets written, shared, and discussed. There are plenty of those every week. At least there are in places like San Francisco. Every week or so there's a Node.js hackathon in our office at Rackspace. Generally folks have a choice of whether to stick around for beers after a long day, and even when the beers came out, at about 6 p.m. during dinner, it wasn't anything like a SXSW drinking fest.
Some other feedback:
1. Conferences are awful places to have real, deep, conversations. Why? There's an opportunity cost to spending any time with any specific person. Heck, you can be talking to someone very interesting, like Bram Cohen, who wrote Bittorrent and then Eric Ries walks by and you lose interest in Bram all of a sudden. It's far better to see if you can get Bram together at your house, or in a hackathon, where there's only 40 other programmers than hang out at some party with 200 other cool people you want to meet.
2. When you're in a noisy situation, like at a party (even one without alcohol, they do happen, but rarely) it's just not a great place to have a conversation. I remember being at one Techcrunch party and I couldn't even talk to the developers there. Why? I couldn't hear them and they were two feet away. So, I started drinking and smiling. Horrid for actually discussing anything important. I stopped going to those too, my time is better spent sitting down with someone in a quiet place and actually learning something.
Parties, to me, are only about one thing now: collecting business cards and making plans for meeting later on. That's what I did at SXSW. I had breakfast with the guy who runs Al Jazeera and it was magical. That's what made the parties worth it.
Hi Robert, thanks for your comments! I think you're right that most conferences just aren't the place for me. Fortunately I can often watch the talks afterwards, so I should probably just focus on doing other things. It's a shame, though, because other than the focus on alcohol and parties I actually do really enjoy the conference atmosphere.
Nice query-spam suffix. Nothing personal, but it sounds less like a day job and more like a retainer for you to give RS presentations/info based on your normal travels.
The New York Marathon is a contest. Contests are not necessarily lotteries. If there are winners and losers it's definitely a contest. And with Y Combinator there's usually about 30 "winners" and more than 1,000 "losers."
Like I said, you're technically right. But nobody describes Harvard admissions as some contest that they hold. YCombinator is a lot closer to that than the New York Marathon.
Is it just me or have the major bloggers taken an interest in HN recently? I noticed that Dave Winer started engaging about two months ago and now Scoble. Did something major happen to prompt this or is it just a general response to the increasing levels of traffic that we send to the various blogs?
Regarding Tesler: I sat next to him when I flew back from interviewing at Microsoft. He was in the last row on the plane. I saw his Blackberry, assumed he was a nerd. He had just left Apple, was on the committee that hired Steve Jobs. He had his fingers in so much of the tech that we use today from object oriented programming to the Newton that set the stage for the iPhone.
Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer, the tech of microprocessors, the Smalltalk and Java programming languages, and much more.
Huge losses for our industry.