How the hell have you done it? (1961) | Hacker News Reader

How the hell have you done it? (1961)

lettersofnote.com

118 pointsmerrier13 comments

Western Skies Hotel. Wow. That place was quite an Albuquerque landmark in the 60s. It was one of the nicer hotels on Route 66 and many celebrities stayed there including JFK. After Interstate 40 was built and bypassed it, it fell on hard times. It was torn down in 1988.

Sorry for all the New Mexico inside baseball but this brought back memories.

I like the phrase “inside baseball”. Not from the US so had to look it up. HN is all about inside baseball for every topic!

Kind of like on a related note, I like how the Internet raises the bar. I guess it only applies to certain kind of people, but at least I am constantly amazed by the engineering efforts in my field, of which I learn through here. Just as of today, I felt like I still know nothing, which certainly helps to keep pushing forward and to excel, even while there's no pressure for that in my day to day life.

I think the Internet is different. You see the absolute tops, be it real or slightly "boosted", of everyone's highs and project all of that onto a single imaginary awesome person to which you compare yourself.

I think most of us would agree that we see tons of new and fascinating stuff here almost every day. If for no other reason then via the process of selecting where to direct your attention - you wouldn't be here if it was all easy and obvious for you.

The internet turns the whole world into a village. That means your "next door neighboor" is hundreds, even thousands, of people.

Hard to compete against that. Our natural impulse, for a certain kind of person, is to be the best that you know. But when you know thousands? oof

Specialize enough and you can do it.

Even before today's internet the famous "geniuses" existed and what they were able to do was not achievable by the ("untrained" or "untalented") mortals. There are so many examples, but I'll take just one which is, as far as I understand, indisputable:

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/bobby-fisher-playing-50-opp...

"At age 20, Fischer won the 1963–64 U.S. Championship with 11/11, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament."

My programming favorite is definitely:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567

Knuth writes an ALGOL compiler for Burroughs in 1960.

"don claimed that he could write the compiler and a language manual all by himself during his three and a half month summer vacation. He said that he would do it for $5000." "it was taking mortal human beings 25 man-years to write compilers: not three and a half man-months." "The machine had 4080 words of memory." He did it. During the summer of 1960, receiving the computer time as the "third" (after the payroll tasks and when the people developing Fortran compiler didn't need a computer). "he had been working all summer from cards" (punched cards -- for this time a normal condition: he didn't have a terminal to "interactively" develop the program -- he had to punch the cards, one line per card).

Agree. Those were/are geniuses and it’s relatively obvious that us normals can but aspire to get there. This is healthy.

Modern social media has the insidious habit of surrounding you with hundreds of relative geniuses who one-by-one are totally achievable. But as a group they expose you to tens even hundreds of breakthroughs every day.

Individual breakthrough or achievement may have taken 6 months, but when you see ten of them per day you start to wonder why you can’t stack up.

People often remark on this but I wonder how different is it from a library where anyone can find the greatest works by the greatest minds in history? It all just a bit self congratulatory and self absorbed to me.

To answer it in library terms...

1. The catalogue can be instantly searched. 2. You don't need for the other guy to return the physical copy so you can start reading it. 3. Inter library loans are instantaneous regardless of distance.

These advantages are more significant than you think.

I call it "the bush vs. the line". There are lots of comfortable places to hang out in the bush (tree? whatever). The internet linearizes it, for better or worse.

An actor appreciating another actor while realizing he's competing with a ghost of past accomplishment. That's certain to be true of every young person in any field; except the appreciation part. That takes some wisdom.

Kirk Douglas is still alive, he turned 102 this year. He's the father of Michael Douglas. Old school Hollywood

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