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.
It is not usual to call people with an honorary doctorate "Doctor" except in the context of the awarding institution. Most likely the awarding institutions will have actually specified that the recipient should not give anybody the false impression and I can't imagine Tony is the type to do otherwise.
His title at Oxford was 'Professor', and he was addressed as 'Tony'.
He made incoming DPhil (PhD) students a cup of tea individually in his office at the Computing Laboratory. It was a small group, but still I appreciated this personal touch.
I never met Tony, but I liked his work. I'm not much of a one for tea, but I don't think either of my PhD supervisors ever bought me a drink - I didn't finish (got cancer, I'm fine now†, some cancers are very curable, but frankly I was struggling anyway so it was a good excuse to quit) and I'm sure it's traditional to buy something a bit harder than a cup of tea if you pass, but I didn't get that far.
Anyway my point here was just a PSA that honorary degrees "don't count". If somebody only has an honorary doctorate but insists on being called "Doctor" they're an asshole. In fact, even outside University I know a lot of MDs and PhDs and in most contexts if they insist on the title "Doctor" they're an asshole even though they're entitled.
† Well not fine, I'm old but I think that's an inevitable side effect of surviving so the alternative was worse.
There's having An honorary degree... and then there's having 6 of them plus numerous other awards, and all the achievements to back them up :)
Regardless, I've met people with only honorary doctorates, and it's a mixed bag when it comes to preferred titles. Often, though, the ones that really care, soon acquire a 'superior' title anyway, so it ends up becoming a moot point.
Hoare's undergraduate degree from Oxford was in Literae Humaniores, nicknamed Greats - ancient Rome, ancient Greece, Latin, Ancient Greek, and philosophy. In the US, this course of study is usually called "Classics".
According to Wikipedia, "It is an archetypal humanities course."
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.
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.
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