The Mountains of Pi | Hacker News Reader

The Mountains of Pi

newyorker.com

21 pointsnadim12 comments

Ah, the YMP-C90 (pic at http://www.geocities.jp/takaomitsuji2000/ymp-c90.jpg)...

When I went to secondary (high) school in the UK, we had to do a work placement week when we were 16. My first choice of company was MicroProse, as they had a big UK office. I wasn't quick enough off the mark with them though, and got the standard "too high demand" letter.

Then I was in our career room, and found some random business listings book that had a small call-out for Cray Research. I put a letter together, thinking "there's no way someone as cool as Cray would have spaces," and sent it off. A while later I received a response from a manager, who said (paraphrasing) "nobody's ever asked about this before, we'd love to do it, but we'll have to figure out what you can do." I was rather pleased :)

The UK office was mostly support, so I spent a day and a half with the hardware guys who gave me a tour of ECMWF (http://www.ecmwf.int/) - they were an ongoing Cray customer, and always had the fastest hardware available from them - happened to be the C90 at the time, or "the dustbin". Then it was off to the software support team, who got my 16-year-old self drunk at the local pub (I doubt they knew my age) while hosting a Spanish sysop who was troubleshooting some benchmark results for his employer. The software guys let me loose on a couple of internal Cray machines ('forest' and 'wind') so I could write some quick C programs to see how they compared to the Sparc 5 on my desk. Finally, I sat on the helpdesk team for a day or two, where I fielded live questions from customers ("sorry, we don't support bounds checking in Fortran in your version of UNICOS, it's a known issue and will remain such").

An amazing week. And yes, I still have the T-shirt ;)

Incredibly good read.

  He pointed to a gauge that had a dial on it. “Here we have a meat thermometer.” 

  The brothers had thrust the thermometer between two circuit boards in order to 
  look for hot spots inside m zero. The thermometer’s dial was marked “Beef Rare—
  Ham—Beef Med— Pork.”

  “You want to keep the machine below ‘Pork,’ ” Gregory remarked.

"... The tragedy—the disgrace, so to speak—is that the American scientific and educational establishment is not benefitting from the Chudnovskys’ assistance. Thirteen years have gone by since the Chudnovskys arrived here, and where are all the graduate students who would have worked with the brothers? ..."

Funny enough this was the same sort of response Werner Von Braun received moving to the US with his rocket team ~ http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/bio.html

Thanks for posting this 'nadim' it is hands-down the best hackernews article I've read to date.

“They are prototypical Russians. They combine a rather grandiose vision of themselves with an ability to live on scraps rather than compromise their principles. These are people the world is not able to cope with, and they are not making it any easier for the world."

Love this. I'm sure if we could be more like them, the world would be a better place.

“Look, we are getting nutty,” David said.

“We are not the only ones,” Gregory said. “We are getting an average of one letter a month from someone or other who is trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.

This was written in 92. Fermat's Last Theorem was proven in 95.

And that, friends, is a grade-A piece of writing.

I hope you are joking? I thought it was horrible - it took forever to get to the point. In fact so long that I couldn't bear reading it beyond the first paragraph.

Agreed. It was interesting, and I read the whole thing for some reason, but I don't think the writing was that good.

"Gregory’s bedroom is filled with paper; it contains at least a ton of paper."

Don't read the New Yorker much, do you guys?

That "ton of paper" is great writing - people use a "ton" to mean an unspecified large amount, but then there's already the unspecified "filled", so you have to rethink what they just read as an actual, 2000lb ton. Then, once they've corrected themselves, they have to visualize what 2,000lb of paper looks like, and most people probably imagine it looking bigger than it actually does. I found the writing to be a joy.

I didn't have a problem with the phrase "ton of paper". I just picked that example because I thought the two clauses of the sentence didn't fit together well and the double use of the word "paper" was jarring.

Maybe, "Gregory's cluttered bedroom contains at least a ton of paper." Or, "Gregory’s bedroom is filled with paper; it contains a literal ton of printouts, articles, and magazine clippings."

IANAW though. And I don't know what a literal ton is.

A great quote: “In ten years, a Cray will fit in your pocket,” David said.

The article is a bit weak on specifics, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are totally spot on. The article was written in 1992 after all.

2005 follow-up at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/04/11/050411fa_fact?cu...

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