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Doctor-R

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Ages ago, when secretaries (usually female) were still common in offices, my boss told me "learn the names of all of the secretaries and say hello <name> every time you see them. If they know you and like you, they will probably do you a favor, when you need it. They are the important people running the company."

You have to do visible, great work.

Apps that create false data to crash advertising algorithms. Random GPS locations, random product interests, random web site visits, random follows and likes. Like how SEO poisons search results.

Apps that respond to video ads by calling/messaging the sponsor CEO and the media company CEO with the audio of the ad.

Advertising cost is added to the product price. In order to generate one trillion dollars in advertising revenue, there would have to be about 20 trillion more in product spend. Civilization does not have another 20 trillion sitting around to spend.

Currently, consumers are totally bombarded with ads, on TV, on streaming, on social media, on websites. There are multiple copies of the same ad during an hour time slot. Consumers go from slight interest, to irritation, to disgust, to nauseated.

Currently, the algorithms that target ads are complete failure. At least, they could get my gender right.

The next big advance in AI is going to be ad blockers for social media, streaming video, live television. Then the next step will be bots that respond to ads, with total click through rate and messages directly to the CEO of the company. Imagine an App that calls the CEO and replays the audio of their video ad. Or an App that DM's the CEO for every social media ad. The CEO bothered a million people, let the million respond directly to the CEO.

2001: a Space Odyssey. I saw it in the theater in 70mm when it was released in 1968. It totally blew me away. A majestic vision of the future. Thirty three years from now (1968) there was going to be all this marvelous stuff: Pan Am space craft going to a huge rotating space station to a round globe ship to a moon with several lunar bases. And a talking intelligent computer! Cool space suits! Video telephones!

Remember, this was before the first moon landing in 1969. There were Apollo flights happening, like Apollo 8 that orbited the moon in December 1968. There was a strong commitment to advancing space flight.

In 1968, the movie presented things that could actually happen, by the year 2001. Much more like a bunch of product announcements rather than science fiction (long ago in a galaxy far, far away).

Ages ago, the Digital Equipment VAX had a hardware hack where a null pointer (value is 0) would return a 0 when de-referenced. Which is the null character, the end of a string. So most of the time operations moving characters would terminate correctly. Obviously not portable to other computers.

In the IEEE 754 floating point definition, there are specific values for errors: mathematically undefined, division by zero, overflow, underflow, and inexact. These MUST be implemented in hardware to meet the specification.

Ages ago, before even dumb terminals, we were programming on punched cards, batch compiling, and printing on a line printer. For some reason, this printer supported control G (the bell character) with a buzzer. So someone hacked the compiler to include control G in the beginning of the error messages.

So we could sit back and listen to the line printer. If the buzzer sounded, the programmer would say "Oh &#$!@". Just like Pavlov demonstrated.

Some of his books are available in pdf on his website: https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/gbvita.htm

I used Computer Structures:Readings and Examples in an architecture class, and High Tech Ventures in an entrepreneurial class at Stanford.

I feel that Digital Equipment Corp entered a death spiral when he left.

As a volunteer, I was fortunate that I was able to work with him on some projects at the Computer History Museum. I wish that I had taped him discussing many of the artifacts in the exhibit, especially machines he worked on.

I created some training notebooks for CHM docents using chapters from Computer Structures, and the 1982 revised version.

There are a bunch of places in Silicon Valley. For example: https://www.abettersource.com/ Search for used office furniture.

There are also auctions when a company closes down: For example: https://svdisposition.com/auctions These may include furniture, computer equipment, machinery, lab equipment. Bidding may be on single items or many items batched together, like 50 office chairs.

There was a local auction two days ago (May 16, 2024) for the entire contents of a Red Lobster restaurant that suddenly closed, as one bid.

They are restricting the solutions by encapsulating each problem with boundaries.

1. Create remote work technology that is better than open plan workplaces.

2. Create small self-driving one or two person electric cars.

3. Rebuild the sprawling two story office parks with multistory housing: one desk => one apartment. Everyone can walk to work.

4. And housing on top of schools and shopping malls for staff.

5. Standardized modular homes that can be easily assembled into new buildings and slip into old office buildings.

6. Nasty filters for email, messages, social media posts and replies.

7. Formal verification for software, and hardware that protects it. Penalties for broken software.

1. Winnie the Pooh to kids on their third or fourth or fifth birthday. 2. The Mythical Man Month to non-tech bosses. 3. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to girlfriends (it's a test). 4. "Get It Together: Organize Your Records So Your Family Won't Have To" to 70+ old friend (single) and 70+ old sister (single).

Move to San Francisco, or Silicon Valley and start networking: subscribe to techstars silicon valley sf bay area newsletter.

Triplebyte had online tests and phone interviews, now owned by Karat.com

Put a notification in the monthly 'whos hiring' thread on HN.

Put a posting on LinkedIn, Indeed, SimplyHired, Glassdoor, Dice, etc.

If your concept has any tech, you need a technical co founder to get it right. VCs will be interested in the tech experience of the founding team.

You need to be able to generate any machine instruction. like clear the cache, turn interrupts off and on, access the hardware bits on the I/O cards, access privileged instructions, etc. The language needs to use every instruction. In C, there is a feature to embed/call assembly language instructions which are architecture dependent.

Go to the Stanford Business School. Learn to schmooze. Stanford has a golf course, with classes for students. Date and marry one of the students. Make lots of contacts. Hang out at the various startup groups and the D-school. Attend the biannual Y-Combinator Demo Days (Sept 6 and 7, 2023). Hang out with the VC's that circle the Bus school. Visit the Computer History Museum for inspiration.

Years ago, I watched a Y Combinator startup school video. The presenter was talking about their standard company structure, registering the company in Delaware, standard vesting schedule (four years, one year cliff, 1/48 per month).

One of the audience members interrupted, his co-founders had discussed their vesting schedule alot and thought it was better, he started to explain.

The presenter interrupted, asking why are you wasting time, energy, and brain cells on discussing vesting, and not spending it on THE PRODUCT, product market fit, MVP, customers, schedule, and THINGS THAT WILL MAKE YOUR company succeed. Vesting is binary, it either pays off, or more typically is worth zero. Don't waste the group's time and certainly don't waste VC's time on vesting. During your pitch, vesting should be exactly one sentence, the standard. Anything different makes you look clueless and not focusing on the PRODUCT.

There are a number of actual matchmaking services in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

The wikipedia article on Garbage Collection (software) is one place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s...

Here is a list of garbage collection papers (newest is 2002) https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ckrintz/racelab/gc/papers/

Here is an old paper (1994?) that surveys different kinds of software Garbage Collection. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/15411-f08/misc/wilson94-g...

I am concerned that you are new to CS and you want to 'improve' a working system's garbage collection code. But good luck anyway. Finding a new fast GC is like searching for the Holy Grail.