Interested in natural language processing, information retrieval/search engines, machine learning, software technology, GIS, start-ups, R&D, innovation, security, UNIX and ethical & social impact of technology.
AI research professor during the day, startup CTO at night, coder, avid reader and book collector.
Wrote my first compiler during high school. Systems I've had a hand in are used by folks ranging from London traders to the Justices of the U.S. Supreme court.
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.
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):
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.
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)!
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.
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.)
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).
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).
AI research professor during the day, startup CTO at night, coder, avid reader and book collector.
Wrote my first compiler during high school. Systems I've had a hand in are used by folks ranging from London traders to the Justices of the U.S. Supreme court.