201–210 of 250 posts
I have never had any brush with the giant. But I have my own little story to share. Way back in 1998, I was a newly minted engineer in India and was visiting Bangalore. While roaming around on MG Road, I picked up a book named “Inside Intel”. It is through that book that I learned about Gordon Moore. On the 48 hour train journey back to Delhi, I devoured the book. It left an impression and I was in awe. It also ignit…
I'm a little curious, is there a reason why the ultra rich, once they've cashed out, create foundations that hand out grants? Is it because they suddenly find themselves wanting to do something good for society with the money or just because that is what everyone in that situation does? Is there a ranking of what foundations have done the most good work? Is that ever evaluated? Anyway rest in peace Gordon Moore, a tr…
And no, there really is very little work done evaluating private foundations. They operate with very few guardrails and oversight is extremely minimal. It is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of charities, so how do you evaluate foundations that give grants to charities?
I am an academic that studies foundations and would be happy to talk more about it if you have other questions.
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> music, movies and arts will outlive us. Will they? Who watches old movies?
Peter Parker for one. > Hey guys, you ever see that really old movie, The Empire Strikes Back As a kid I watched many films from my parent's generation. Mary Poppins (1964) or Great Escape (1963) come to mind as being staples every christmas -- Great Escape on boxing day especially A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason. I've subjected my kids to a few old film…
Some of us still watch it!
Of course the vast majority of old movies are long forgotten (and no great loss), just as the vast majority of what we're producing today will be. But there are a minority of classics that endure. Just as there's still a market for Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mozart, despite all the plays, books and music that have been written since.
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> all while being 38,000 feet in the air I was pushing code while on a transatlantic flight the other day and I got a little overwhelmed with just how cool it was. There I was in a metal tube staying aloft with 2 jet engines, and had wifi at 30k feet while traveling at ~600 mph.
And all of this..all of us..basically coalesced from star dust that will one day again be star dust :)
Wow, we have lost a true legend. As I get older, I marvel a bit at the giants I once shared time on the earth with. Sometimes it feels like we don't have giants in the 21st century in the same way.
People attempted to use dog sleds to traverse up the antarctic plateau, which is nearly the same altitude as Tibet, and reach the pole.
Many died in the process, their names are remembered (though slid out of public discourse as its over a century ago).
In our industry fortunately people don't die, but trailblazer had to do a similar thing - they used the proverbial dog sleds to build a camp in the middle of antarctic plateau.
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> all while being 38,000 feet in the air I was pushing code while on a transatlantic flight the other day and I got a little overwhelmed with just how cool it was. There I was in a metal tube staying aloft with 2 jet engines, and had wifi at 30k feet while traveling at ~600 mph.
And all of this..all of us..basically coalesced from star dust that will one day again be star dust :)
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Can you please make your substantive points without name-calling? It's not hard, and we're trying for something a bit different from internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Was there an edit? I don't see any name-calling in GP.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
(a bit more explanation if anyone cares: aggressive pejoratives tend to poison curious conversation and are easy to cut, so this isn't a hard one. I think mostly people write like that online because it's how many of us would talk in person with people we're friendly with—and there it's totally normal, because there's already a 'contract' that takes care of understanding each other's good intention. That's absent online, so many commenters are on a hair trigger with this kind of thing and will react in ways that take the conversation to less interesting, more conflictual places.)
Before anyone says that Moore's law is dead, remember that transistors are still getting smaller and more dense (not to mention more expensive, which was another part of his prediction). In every thread people confuse Moore's law with Dennard scaling (which states roughly that, as transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant, so that the power use stays in proportion with area; both voltage and current…
Moore's Law has been dead for a while. The most common confusion I see is that people don't understand he was referring to economical scaling. These days we're getting more density and bigger chips but prices are going up a lot too. More for more instead of more for less.