Elf Sternberg

My very favorite is more of a "recovery legend", telling the heroic tale of recovering a a Unix system after an errant "rm -rf" deleted most of the system's critical files: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html

Since there's a lot of effort in this thread to deconstruct the joke, I just want to add that FORTRAN is probably reference to the classic "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" [1]. In fact, the whole comment would fit there nicely. > If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing. [1] https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

That IBM ad at the end is priceless on so many levels. (What did that massive computer do? How many female engineers do you count... etc,) Thanks for the article. My grandfather was an accountant who preferred the slide rule to a calculator. I grew up with slide rules around me, and never could understand the logic. Another tool lost in the past generation is the Abacus (here is a great story with Feynman[1]) and I would love more info as to how those compared in logic or use, if anyone can shed insight. [1]: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

A good read about recovering a system that had rm -rf * run on it: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html

Another favorite of mine. I won't spoil it, it's an entertaining read: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html

I like the classic one from 1986 (!) a bit better: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html HN discussion: Unix Recovery Legend (1986): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10160417 (143 points, 228 days ago, 60 comments)

Reminds me of the classic story of Richard Feynman vs the Abacus: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html I never really memorized basic math tables in school and it annoyed me at a low level for years. So a few weeks ago I added addition (0+0 ~ 50+50) and multiplication (0x0 ~ 12x12) tables to my flashcard app to try and remedy that lacking. It's been depressingly and frustratingly difficult so far.

Lots of great stuff one level above. http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/index.html

I'll never regret asking this long-shot request on HN -- thanks to Harold Ancell and Marvin Minsky: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161002 >DonHopkins on Sept 2, 2015 | parent | context | favorite | on: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy –... >I remember running across a Turing machine emulator implemented in TECO in Minsky's home directory that I'd REALLY love to get ahold of. >hga on Sept 2, 2015 [–] >Ask and yea shall receive: MSG: APL 1 DISTRIB: *BBOARD EXPIRES: 03/17/81 23:08:54 MINSKY@MIT-MC 03/11/81 23:08:54 Re: too-short programs APL is compact, I suppose. So is TECO. When I wrote the following Universal Turing Machine, which works, I actually understood it. [ I've interpolated the non-printing characters as displayed by (Gnu) EMACS, escape is ^], ^^ is one character, as is \356: ] i1Aul qq+^^0:iqm^[29iiq\356y0L1 00L1 11L2 A1L1 y0L1 0yR2 1AR2 AyR6 yyL3 00L0 1AL3 A1L4 yyL4 0yR5 11L7 A1L4 yyR5 0yL3 1AR5 A1R5 yyR6 0AL3 1AR6 A1R6 y0R7 0yR6 11R7 A0R2 ^[j<sR^[;-d-2ciql-^^^[ci"ed^^^[cii^[ciuq'^[> j<sL^[;-d-2ciql-^^^[ci"ed^^^[cii-2c^[ciuq'^[>jxblx1lx2lx3lx4lx5lx6lx7hk iyyAyyAyy^[32<i0^[>ji110101110000010011011^[ 1uq<htmbqq=> I do not advise attempting to understand this code, which is almost as bad as that for the Universal Turing machine. >ADDED: or http://ancell-ent.com/share/minsky-TECO-turing-machine.txt >Please ack receipt of this and/or send me email (in my HN…

The story of "Feynman vs The Abacus" can be read here: [1] While it's a great story and is very entertainingly written, as is typical of Feynman, I don't think he was being very fair to the merits of the two approaches to mental math -- his own vs that of the soroban. Feynman clearly hadn't done any research on the merits of the soroban method, he just had this single run in with a random soroban salesman. From this one experience, and without very much thought on the subject, he just kind of dismisses the method almost out of hand. Such offhand dismissals are unfortunately also pretty typical of Feynman regarding subjects he is mostly ignorant of and has little experience with (such as his dismissals of philosophy in other talks). In the story, the random soroban salesman, who clearly hasn't even very much proficiency with the soroban (as evidenced by his need for a physical soroban, vs soroban-trained practitioners who no longer need the physical device but can apply the soroban methods in their head) is matched against one of the greatest physicists in history, a Physics Nobel Prize winner who has advanced math training. That's really not a fair match. It would have been great to see how Feynman would have fared against someone like this guy: [2] or against one of the national soroban competition winners, or against a top mathematician or physicist who was soroban-trained. That would be a fairer match and the results more indicative of the merits of the two…

> this goes so quickly Many people don't realize how fast it is to work on abacus (or soroban in Japanese). Here is an example of what a 7 year old can do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQtqlB-jXO0 For many years I always did my taxes and other accounting using an abacus because it was sooo much easier than longhand (this was before calculators). There is the famous Feynman story as well: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html But you wouldn't impress an ancient Greek very much by taking cube roots quickly because there wouldn't be much call for that.

Lisp is does not stand for generic 'List Processing', but for 'List Processor' -> a specific formalism to process lists. There is a specific minimal core of Lisp, which consists of a certain minimal set of data structures, operations and an evaluation mechanism. An early version is described here: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6096/AIM-008.pdf Another one is described here: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/pub/misc/micromanualLISP.pdf

https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/3-wise-men.html "Kernighan has written ten times as much readable prose as has Ritchie, Ritchie ten times as much as Thompson. It's tempting to say that the reverse proportions hold for code, but in fact Kernighan and Ritchie are more nearly tied and Thompson wipes us both out." -- Dennis Ritchie

Also: Feynman vs the abacus: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

Reminds me of Feynman's interaction with an Abacus Salesman in "Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

It’s a quote from: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

>32 bit CPUs https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/ktoast.html

I disagree with only 1 way to write programs in Go. Go is not an old Fortran (see [1] about "the only real structure is an array") so there is always choice between array-of-structures and structure-of-arrays. [1] https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html Haskell (and C++ for that matter) can hide the difference with associated types (and templates). PS Speaking about arrays - I once read Go's specification for some obscure fun and realized that I read a third of it and still am reading about arrays and stuff and not about programming.

Feynman even has his own 1729 anecdote: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

The real reason is probably closer to Fred Brooks' "second system effect". A new generation IP was regarded by some over-zealous engineers as an opportunity of putting in all sorts of new requirements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect They also didn't know the story of the King's Toaster. (Since it refers to 80386's and Unix version 8, it must have already been written at the time.) http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/ktoast.html

Be grateful the airplane toilet is easier to operate than the one on the Pan Am flight in the movie. :-) [1] [1] https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/aso/zeroGtoilet.html

Reminds me of this: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html

This reminds me of the story of Feynman beating the abacist http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html However, the correct Portuguese for "cube roots" is "raízes cúbicas", not "raios cubicos"(—edited with thanks to JetSpiegel for the correction!). I've thought that Feynman may have been better at speaking Portuguese than at spelling it, or that most of Surely You're Joking may have been transcribed from tapes by Ralph Leighton, who probably didn't speak Portuguese.) Edit: Also, I was partly inspired to learn Portuguese by Richard Feynman. I didn't imagine that that would lead to complaining about his spelling. :-)

Reminds me of the story of Feynman vs the Abacus. [1] Though, as a story, the conclusion he draws is pretty self-congratulatory and bothers me a bit. The substrate on which you implement an algorithm like arithmetic doesn't really speak to whether you "know numbers." It's like the high schooler thinking being very good at computing integrals makes you good at math. [1] http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

Do you have references about how to use an abacus? I just know how the obvious uses: counting, summing and subtracting. There is a famous story about Richard Feynman and the abacus: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/abacus/feynman.html where the guy makes a lot of difficult calculations.

There's a cute story in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman where a man with an abacus challenges him to an arithmetic contest: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

This thread is turning into Feynman vs the abacus, is it not? http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html (Note that 'gnu' in the story is GNU Emacs!)

The first thing I thought of when I saw the headline: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/ktoast.html

Reminds me of yet another cool story from Richard Feynman about beating an abacus salesman with mental arithmetic: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html