smiljo

I'll just chime in with congrats on the new book. I was a huge fan of the Network Programming book that I first read in 2013, and which I still consider as having the best balance of approachability and rigor. Looking forward to checking the new one out. :)

Easy one for me: Stephen A. Cook. Proved that SAT was NP-complete and formulated the P vs. NP problem.

IMO, even among Turing Award winners there are tiers, and he's in the top one in my book.

Author here, thanks for the thoughtful reply!

Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results (debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of PageRank.

Is this actually the case? We don't have a good way to test it, but I believe that you wouldn't see the crappy articles I referred in the first N results even with vanilla PageRank (and for a very large N at that).

Keep in mind that my definition of fake news is pretty narrow here: it's "Pope Francis endorses Trump" rather than "Fox dismisses COVID-19 threat" or spin of that sort, which is probably what you meant by crap.

There will certainly be blind spots like the ones above, but my goal is to eliminate the most egregious miscreants and the method outlined will achieve that (well, we'll test it and see how it goes).

Great subject, great panelists, thanks!

Did we break their site? :(

Edit: seems to be back up with everything in order.

I like the inspection feature! The natural question is: could this also support editing, rather than just inspecting?

I guess reconciling that with regular in-file edits might be a problem?

As a distributed systems guy I'm partial to Nancy Lynch. But that's distributed systems, a field which has already had awards.

Search engines getting a couple of awards seemed like a no-brainer.

I couldn't resist the little jab about AI. :)

Saying this as a big fan of the old guard, McCarthy in particular.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, the threshold is too sensitive, but we didn't catch it when testing on my device. My colleague is fixing it and we'll have another version out very soon.

Saw only recently that Judea Pearl was a guest on Sam Harris' podcast: https://samharris.org/podcasts/164-cause-effect/.

The preamble is depressing, since the episode aired right after a mass shooting, but Pearl gives a brief overview of his thinking.

Yup, it appears he was quite passionate about politics, which formed the crux of most of his conversations apart from music.

On a musical note (heh), it's also interesting to learn that he was one of the first people to play and compose for a proper piano. I guess that's what makes his piano works "richer" than those of the older composers (Bach notwithstanding).

And then a different take: https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/01/20/su...

A great article! It's particularly cool to see that despite the author's adoration for Beethoven, he still points out some of his musical weaknesses, like counterpoint (we could also add opera).

I would highly recommend "Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph" for anyone with the perseverance: https://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Anguish-Triumph-Jan-Swaffor...

"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. I found this one very motivating, covering MIT hacker heroes of old, early game developers, and the Homebrew Computer Club.

The top five most popular articles are well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed "The Google Squeeze" and "AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source".

And as he mentions, it really is quite brutal that the most popular one is "The WeWork IPO", where he was playing devil's advocate.

I don't think we can tell for sure before they start releasing numbers for cloud proper. Both Azure and GCP are problematic in that regard (see the acrobatics that Stratechery was going through while trying to deduce GCP numbers).

That being said, they've been closing the feature gap, and have shown themselves able to pick up large contracts (controversy over JEDI notwitstanding), so the market certainly seems more competitive than a couple of years ago.

As for factoring discounts etc. into cloud numbers, I confess that I don't have a good answer.

Seems like Oracle is taking totally contradictory positions in this case and the Google one.

Did Oracle infringe Amazon's copyright here? Ars Technica contacted Oracle to ask them if they had a license to copy Amazon's S3 API. An Oracle spokeswoman said that the S3 API was licensed under an Apache 2.0 license. She pointed us to the Amazon SDK for Java, which does indeed come with an Apache 2.0 license.

However, the Amazon SDK is code that uses the S3 API, not code that implements it—the difference between a customer who orders hash browns and the Waffle House cook who interprets the orders.

While I'm not a lawyer and didn't study the Google case in that much detail, I don't see how they can claim that their own Java APIs can be copyrighted, and then defending their copying of Amazon's API on the grounds that an SDK using it is open source. I would think they could just look at the documentation, and skip the SDK altogether. :)

Great observation, with a very minor caveat: when Gates & Allen started out in programming languages, they were an awesome first mover. I highly recommend the "Hard Drive" book which goes into a bit more detail.

However, in everything after that very first stage they were an amazing second mover: DOS, Word, Excel, etc. And now Azure.

It's actually a great testament to Microsoft's execution that they were able to catch up (to some extent at least), despite AWS having a seven year head start.

Bezos himself called this a business miracle (the seven year head start, that is): https://youtu.be/f3NBQcAqyu4?t=2133

And this is against Amazon, which is known for execution. I suppose we're in for a fun couple of years, especially with the JEDI contract soap opera and all that.

You and Your Research by Richard Hamming: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

It's rare to have a researcher of that caliber give nitty gritty advice on having the greatest impact in your research.

A great summary of Kai Bird's book, which is highly recommended!

A really interesting thing to note about Oppenheimer, as the author points out, was a somewhat "haphazard" approach both to studying physics, and in his actual scientific work. Meaning, picking the problems he found the most interesting, rather than some grand, overarching idea.

It's always fascinating in reading books of this sort to see just how closely knit the physics community was, since Oppenheimer studied with Born and Thomson, met Bohr as a student, and later worked with a lot of the truly great ones. Even in the macabre poisoning episode, the tutor he left the apple for was Patrick Blackett, a future Nobel laureate.