70-80 years of actually being hands-on and i bet you'd be pretty quick too. dude is definitely naturally "gifted" but it seems pretty obvious being hands-on has a lot to do with it.
That doesn't sound right to me at all. Modern academia is highly competitive, and career academics typically have long working hours.
If they aren't doing programming, that's likely because it isn't relevant to their job. A theoretical computer scientist is closer to a mathematician than to a typical programmer.
> Knuth is impressive but as a human being most people choose their humanity over their careers in some way
We're talking about scientists, not most people.
Getting a PhD is no cakewalk, and there are far more PhDs than faculty positions. You can try being a workaholic, but if your competitors are doing the same, that won't make you stand out.
> obsessive about his work and his life is warped around it
Again this describes every modern scientist. Deep knowledge of one's field, and deep commitment to it, are just table stakes.
Additionally while Knuth is clearly an outlier by any measure he’s also an outlier in his celebrity. There are a lot Knuths out there who aren’t well known outside their specialty, or are in industry. He played a seminal role in a field everyone studies in computer science and published a uniquely interesting and continuously revised set of fundamental books in the field. However in my time in academics there were people in say transactional memory for speculative out of order compute whose work powers every machine in use today and they still contribute similarly powerful work. They’re obsessive and very driven by the problem space. But for everyone one of those in academia there are a hundred tenured professors who paper mill their undergrads (generously).
You mention long hours but I said obsessive. That’s orders of magnitude more than working hard. It’s so distorted as to be pathological if they weren’t paid and rewarded for it. Yes many academics are pathologically obsessive. But unless they are bringing in funding or repute to fill a deficit in the department, there’s no work for them in current academic settings.
Finally Knuth isn’t a common occurrence because -he doesn’t bring in money-. Modern academia is oriented towards grant milking. The example of the txn memory guy is interesting because he brings in lots of research funding from intel and ARM and NVidia because his work is very commercial. Knuth - not so much I imagine. He brings repute, but you can only find so much repute with modern academic funding models before they’re a net negative on the department. Knuth is a fossil of a different era in academics (not used as a pejorative).
This kind of stuff is not useful to be posting where impressionable people (young students) can read it. The truth the majority of academics are managers and delegate hands-on work to postdocs and PhD students. I finished a PhD just last month and I never saw in 4 years anyone on my committee so much as look at code let alone write it (and I was not a theory student). Almost everyone in my cohort would echo this observation.
Biden's been hands-on in his domain for over 50 years, yet "quick" is definitely not the word that comes to most people's mind when they think of him nowadays.
And every time people actually watch him speak (not just a selected clip), there's weeks of coverage about how alive JB seems, not recognizing that all evidence points to that being typical.
This isn't the flex you think it is. When the media is lapping out of your hand like a 6 week old puppy instead of doing their fifth estate job, of course there are no scandals.
> and gun control bills,
You mean stripping Americans of their constitutional rights.
> not to mention he's ended our two decade war in Afghanistan.
Which was an unmitigated disaster.
> and overseen the fastest wage growth of the two lowest income quintiles seen in modern history.
Hello inflation.
> You mean stripping Americans of their constitutional rights.
Not that I disagree with you, but when posters like modriano engage in political/partisan commentary on HN, I find it more productive to merely downvote and flag their comments rather than replying and getting engaged in a war.
A dead post makes quite the impression, as this sort of political commentary just generally defeats the quality of discourse on HN (which, you must admit, is much better than many other platforms, and I'd like to try to preserve it as long as possible).
Please don't post flamebaity political tangents on HN.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.