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It really was a fun read. Highly recommend to any programmer!

I can't tell if you're joking or not. If you read HN ten years ago, you would hear about SICP and Lisp constantly. Makes sense when you consider who made this site.

I tend to agree. Group loads and stores isn't very RISCy to me. But then again, you could make the case that any x86 machine is RISC under the covers.

As someone who has spent time around Lajes Field, War Plan Gray is interesting seeing as how the U.S. de facto seized land on Terceira anyway. Much of my family came over around that time to make room for the military base.

Ironically, the Portuguese are very upset now that the U.S. is pulling more and more soldiers away from Lajes as it's leaving a hole in the local economy.

This was the sentiment of everyone outside of SV when Altman was considering running for governor this year. I'm glad Sam actually cares about helping people, I really do, but it reminds me so much of Obama's quote about tech entrepreneurs giving him advice:

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences -- setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio -- then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That's not, by the way, to say that there aren't huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it's not inherently wrecked; it's just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow up.

Can you guys not do this, please? HN isn't Reddit.

We try to maintain some semblance of effort and thoughtfulness into posting here.

You should read Turing's Cathedral if you are interested in Von Neumann's life.

He's also one of the preeminent minds in quantum computing. When Scott speaks he's worth listening to regardless of his mannerisms.

Judging by his resume... yes.

It's not the tone - it's the fact that one uses a natural disaster for self-promotion while the other does it to inform the populace about the extent of damage.

I wouldn't start with Chisel as there's a lack of good documentation online. When I used it for a Berkeley class, sometimes you would feel like you hit a wall. Verilog or SystemVerilog will have much more in the way of stack overflow type of documentation.

Thanks. Sometimes I feel like the "just use X" folks don't really think about the problem at hand, not to mention how trivializing it can be. And this is coming from a Rust fan and someone who uses bindgen.

They do. But I would like to see homeless populations as a percentage of the whole population before making a judgement. I would still expect the US to have a larger percentage but not that much higher. I was in Denmark/Germany/Netherlands/France/Greece this year and saw a good amount of homeless -- though they've been dealing with a migrant crisis unlike the U.S. has experienced.

Many commenters here are extrapolating on their experiences in SF/Oakland/LA/Seattle/Portland and thinking the rest of the US has a commensurate homeless population. Spoiler: they don't.

My 1995 Jeep Cherokee is the reason why I'm weary of too much electronics in cars. And I'm a serial electronics tinkerer. Need a new engine? Do it yourself. Need a new alternator? No problem. Install larger tires? There's a million kits out there ready for anyone to do it.

And since there's so many enthusiasts out there it's really cheap. I needed a new door so I bought one for a hundred bucks and installed it myself in 20 minutes.

Please, please, please do this!

Perhaps we should revisit the idea of a political detox?

I for one have been noticing the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year. Discussions have become less about the content of the article and more about the title or some other related fact. Technical discussions are becoming increasingly derailed by bike-shedding, ideology, and flame wars. Hell, I bet even the average word count per comment is down.

In signal processing, when noise becomes too high we implement a filter. It doesn't have to be too harsh of a filter, perhaps a band-stop filter which passes most frequencies unaltered but attenuates those in a specific range to very low levels.

Unfortunately, this is where we are in 2017. For many companies and people, contributing to open source has nothing to do with the Stallman concept of "freedom" - it has everything to do with PR.

Imagine? With wasm, I'm afraid you won't have to imagine in a few years...

Yeah he's everywhere. I remember that NYT did a featurette on their top commenters and he's actually Chelsea Handler's brother.

Sent an email :)

Note: Susskind has a follow up - Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18210750-quantum-mechani...

Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang is the standard introduction to quantum computing. Besides that, you can find some old CS191 Vazirani lectures on the internet.

We've rehashed the debate over the utility of the dragon book in the 21st century so many times on HN that I'm not going to comment on it's usefulness. (Search if interested)

But, for those interested, I highly recommend Engineering a Compiler by Cooper and Torczon OR Modern Compiler Implementation in ML by Appel. I've read all three and would only recommend the dragon book to someone very interested in the subject.

You can see it in the Rust community. So much of the focus has been on http servers instead of codecs, operating systems, daemons, file systems, etc.

I've always been confused as to why Chicago isn't more of a tech hub. Great city, great people, cheap housing, good transportation (by US standards), good schools, etc.

Are the Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offices engineering offices? I know that the Microsoft one is not.

The reference to Dieter Ram's Braun designs didn't tip you off?

Jony Ive is well known to love that look: https://www.google.com/search?q=johnny+ive&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8...

In what ways? Sorry Michael, but I reject the idea that you can be 'better' than another person.

Spectrum's are legendary in the UK. I'm guessing that's the reason.

I deleted my FB nearly three years ago and it forces you to actually go to news sites. I'm much more informed this way.

I get my local newspapers (the Chronicle and the East Bay Times) delivered and I go online throughout the day to read NYT, LA Times, WaPo, BBC. I've never felt the need for the instant spam news that you get on FB or Twitter. There's only been one time where I've had to use Twitter for realtime news and that was during the fire in Oakland last fall.

Later when I did read SICP, I didn't like it. Maybe that was like reading the book after seeing the movie. Dunno, but I didn't like it.

Which introductory CS books did you enjoy? I still love my copy of Patterson and Hennessy but it is dry compared to SICP. To someone who had only ever programmed in C++ before 61A, SICP felt like an adventure.

As an aside, there was a whole subculture of students who read nothing but just did the HW and worked past tests and sets. They did amazingly well.

Yep. Sadly this has only become more common with the rapid growth of the major. Most of my friends were brilliant but they didn't love EECS. If they had been 10 years older they probably would have majored in math or physics but they felt pressured to study something that would get them a job. They were able to do well just by studying old tests.

We would only get old tests from HKN but many students were somehow able to illegally obtain them. Cheating has only become more rampant and more sophisticated -- the department is going to have to address it at some point instead of sticking their head in the sand.