jll29

I understand you. As an AI research (actually, despite formally called professor of AI, I have historically always called myself more specifically NLP/IR/ML researcher rather than "AI" researcher, to avoid historic baggage).

I am intellectually curious whether "intelligence" and "consciousness" are simply layers that can be separated from the hardware they operate on or first emerged from, but I never had the urge or saw the point to practically replace human beings by machines.

Not everything that can be done should be done.

When I go to a supermarket, I always avoid self check-out. Why? First, I enjoy human interaction, even if machines may be more efficient (not yet the case). Second, I don't want the people working at the checkout to lose their jobs.

When we purchased a GPU cluster, I felt bad when I learned that the electricity bill was going to be north of 60 000 EUR every year (that number apparently assumes no jobs are running - so 100% idle time).

The parsley and condoms I don’t get

Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal, per-household look.

Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside.

The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.

Whoever likes this will likely also enjoy this clock announcing the time using literary quotes: https://www.amazon.com/Author-Clock-Literary-Quotes-Unique/d...

(What I particularly enjoy is that one can contribute to the database of quotations.)

There is a version of Chekhov's short stories available on Amazon [1] that is bi-lingual.

Has anyone tried this? Are the translations good? Is the material sentence-aligned so that it is easy to switch between reading the original and the translation?

[1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Short-Stories-Bilingual-English-R...

Always a good exercise to implement a text editor, every programmer should have tried it. And I always try using new ones, curious to find something exciting.

Sorry, but it looks exactly like Zed.

And I'm not going to try out Zed again until they finally introduce auto-save, which Sublime has had for a long time and Emacs had since last century (because losing a file hurts you more than GPU rendering pleases you).

Where are those "big ideas"?

I recommend a BlackBerry (this problem was already perfectly solved in the past).

Thank you.

Is there a counter-part that focuses on implementations and practical exercises for hackers (in the MIT sense of the word)?

I'd like to see STRICT as the default.

That's pretty much the only disagreement with the SQLite developer, who is an amazing guy that wrote an amazing tool!

The title of the HN post "History of T (paulgraham.com)" is isleading, as this article was not written by Paul Graham himself. "Olin Shivers: History of T (paulgraham.com)" would be clearer.

Thanks for the personal take on Scheme history.

It ran on Vaxes & 68000's, which had also just come out.

It ran on Vaxen and 68000s, which had also just come out.

All hot compilers do DFA.

Note here, DFA stands for Data Flow Analysis (not Deterministic Finite Automata, another compiler acronym).

the deepest and most powerful part of my diss, in my opinion, is the part (a) about which no one seems to know and (b) which is on the shakiest theoretical ground: environment reflow analysis. I would surely love it if some interested character one day takes that piece of my diss and really takes it someplace.

I know that feeling. But my experience is the author is best-suited to do that themselves.

Very cool. As a linguist (not a native English speaker, but highly trained), I love it a lot.

Love the pressure due to the timer, and the best aid to help is say it aloud.

Slightly related: https://oeis.org

Receiving one of Don's cheques ("Bank of San Serif" ;-) a few months after pointing out an error has been many a computer scientist's career highlight!

I agree with that opinion. He started writing TAOCP in 1968, and could have switched to Pascal in 1972.

Pascal is simple and clear, and can be translated easily to anything from LISP, Fortran, Python to C or C++ (in fact, subsets of Pascal are often used as sample language in books about compilers, including in Pascal inventor N. Wirth's own compiler book (which, unlike Knuth's, was completed timely):

Wirth, Niklaus, Compilers (1996), 101pp., 2rd revision, 2017, online: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil..., last accessed 2026-07-07).

It does not matter that Pascal is not much in use anymore, because due to its readability, it's timeless. It nearly reads like English prose, yet is automatically executable. It has also been standardized, and there is a book-sized language description available, as are several -- commercial and open source -- implementations.

In contrast, his pseudo-assembler is arcane. Whenever I wanted to implement an algorithm following Knuth TACOP, I had to work off his English pseudo-code description rather than the associated pseudo-assembler code.

Not to forget he was asked specifically to write a book about compilers (= "Volume 7") by Addison Wesley in the 1960s.

Now, half a century later, he is chickening out...

In short, it's the "mind's 'I'" - we think not as response to external stimuli (only) such as prompts, but we have an inner "I" that asks questions on its own initiative. There are people like Douglas R. Hofstadter, who believe consciousness is not linked to human hardware (the brain), but that it is an epiphenomenon that emerges as a result of sufficient complexity of the underlying system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I

I believe that while underlying high complexity is certainly logically necessary for consciousness, but it is not logically sufficient, and I am undecided (slightly "pro" intuitively) on the question of separability of consciousness from its hardware.

Will a LLM ask an original question on day? I doubt it.

Note that AI models do not have to be conscious to be useful (or to take away millions of jobs)!

"France is a beautiful country" may also still continued by "...in the heart of Europe".

Agatha Christie was also a high-volume writer; apparently, this was due to unreasonably demands in her contracts with her publisher, and she hated to be thus pushed.

Stallman wanted to protect the right to fix bugs, he was not against paying for goods and services.

One point that was not addressed is the sorry feeling one gets when others are wrong and you are right, but for whatever reason you cannot convince them otherwise, and as a consequence they are going to go in a direction that they will severely regret, or would regret if they survived it, entirely foreseeable (sadly).

I have often had to tell myself "I wish they had listened to me." or, not quite "I wish I was wrong", but at least "I regret that I was right." because it led to a situation where someone suffered without objective need for it. Only a jerk would proudly state "Ha, of course I was right, they should have listened to me."

Wouldn't a virtual cloud server better (e.g. Hetzner) suited for this, at least at the beginning. (Once you know some visitor stats, you can right-size the box and move away from the cloud.)

Distraction-free times... https://img.kleinanzeigen.de/api/v1/prod-ads/images/ab/abf08...

...or are even in the hands of the same family?

Did you do it by hand, or did you write a script to make your LI profile self-sustaining (which others may also run)?

QNX is fine, but it's an acquisition.

Can we have our BBs back, please?

google::dense_hash_map is faster than this new implementation according to their benchmark's diagram (google::dense_hash_map has the lowest runtime of all tested methods).

1st Word on the Atari ST 520+ with monochrome monitor: that was how the far future felt like in 1986.

With the exception of the somewhat wobbly cheap keyboard, that was the best and most distraction-free setup I have ever seen for WYSIWYG word processing (sadly never tried the Xerox workstations).

he accomplished this without the source code

Sure thing, who needs source code? This is HN.

But instead of reverse-engineering, I would just find or write an emulator, in case I would be asked to "port" another software.

It's actually sad that for the most part, we don't know who is responsible for the good and bad features of software we use. In movies, there is an extensive practice of showing "credits" at the end, and I enjoy reading them in detail. Software development should have the same culture (some games do, and then some "Easter eggs" do).

Strangely, Peter's 1987 Ph.D. thesis cites itself (reference 90), but with the year being off by one (1986).

Writing a LISP in Python is only for educational use, or to have a boostrap LISP that you can write a better (faster) LISP in.

Typescript for C

You mean "C with Classes", later to be replaced by "C++" (Stroustrup pick this as favorite from a list of candidate names he crowdsourced) as implemented by Cfront.