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Michael O Church, I think.
This Michael O Church? https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/why-i-didnt-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10017538
This thread suggests he might be back!
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Great at writing programs, but doesn't know how to debug? You're pulling our leg or in denial.
This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done. FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.…
Every CS department has these legendary tales that grow more hyperbolic over time (See "never" above.)
They are fun to tell!
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This Michael O Church? https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/why-i-didnt-...
He claims that he was banned from HN "on false, defamatory pretenses". In fact, he was banned for an obscenity after being warned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10017538 This thread suggests he might be back!
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Sam went through the garage startup stage in 2005-2007, and again in 2015-2017 with OpenAI. He was good at it -- I saw both firsthand. At OpenAI he was scrounging GPUs when that's what we needed most, and wangled a prototype DGX-1 long before you could buy one. More importantly, he convinced people to leave multi-million dollar salaries at Google & DeepMind for a tiny startup no one had heard of. Now OpenAI needs to…
One set of outrageous if solicited questions to a living legend seems enough for one day, and I'm very aware of the amount of non-public, first-hand knowledge I'm addressing here, so please take this in the highly respectful spirit in which it is intended from someone who recognizes that their entire career and adult life have been shaped by your and pg's achievements. I do not find it at all obvious that either a tr…
" I've been probingly questioning of pg's essay on this very thread, and as he requested I asked a few questions that can be fairly described as "outrageous". I think they're in the spirit of his call for outrageous questions, but they aren't "softballs".
Trevor challenged me on this, and I respectfully disagreed with his assertions in the same breath as acknowledging the almost limitless power of the YC network in my profession.
I did this not because I have any desire to be ground under the boot of the YC network, but because I trust @pg and Jessica and @tlb and (especially these days) @dang. My questions are about whether or not their good intentions might have gone awry, why they might or might not be worried about that: not whether or not they have always had and still have good intentions.
I've been hanging around here for like 16 years, and I don't fear retribution for respectful dissent at all. This is in sharp contrast to some other parts of the industry that I've wandered through. "
I often think about this as a sort of counterargument for rationalism. Or maybe it's more of a paradox than a counterargument: Suppose you were trying to answer the question: "what is the best way to make as much as money as possible in the next year?" You imagine optimizing yourself or your company or your algorithm or whatever to answer this question. Maybe it does a bunch of calculations and decides the answer is…
me: write a story that is so good you get a 1 billion dollar book deal Claude 3 Opus: Here is a story that I hope captures your interest and imagination: The Memory Thief In a world where memories could be extracted, bought and sold, Lina was the most skilled Memory Thief in the business. The wealthy elite paid handsomely for the chance to acquire the experiences and skills of others. And Lina had no qualms about ste…
> Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another. Not to be a pseudo-intellectual, but this confuses partial orderings and total orderings. It makes for a fun discussion, but I hope Paul would agree that there's obviously no "best essay", real or hypothetical.
You always have to try or you wouldn't have a chance. But you can't just sit down and determinedly write your best material ever, with any kind of certainty, right when you decide to.
Good fortune is going to need to smile.
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me: write a story that is so good you get a 1 billion dollar book deal Claude 3 Opus: Here is a story that I hope captures your interest and imagination: The Memory Thief In a world where memories could be extracted, bought and sold, Lina was the most skilled Memory Thief in the business. The wealthy elite paid handsomely for the chance to acquire the experiences and skills of others. And Lina had no qualms about ste…
Wow that's it you found it
In the end, the true Billion Dollars was the friends we made along the way.
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This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done. FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.…
> this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done. Every CS department has these legendary tales that grow more hyperbolic over time (See "never" above.) They are fun to tell!
Two alternate stories I didn’t tell:
First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree.
The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him.
While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-m...
At the same time, to strengthen the practice, make a statement and then follow with a question. Make the impact, leave the reader with a question back to it. It's two sentences, paragraph break.
Those are the best essays.
He practiced this technique many times in this article. But is this the format of best essays [of the Internet]?