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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

So much was done with mechanical systems back in the day, because they were better understood and comparatively cheaper than corresponding electrics. I wonder if the engineers who designed teletypes or artillery range computers could learn to program, and if they did, would they have any unique insights?

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Krylov (the guy the subspaces are named after) was a naval engineer. Cholesky was an artillery officer.

I love this unique insight:

"Fire control computers ... solve ... fire control problems."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug

U.S. NAVY BASIC MECHANISMS OF FIRE CONTROL COMPUTERS MECHANICAL COMPUTER INSTRUCTIONAL FILM 27794

Those old educational videos are a lesson in how to give presentations I think. There’s an art to the way they build up a fairly complicated concept step by step. The viewers are starting from zero after all.

The starting step is one that is impossible to misunderstand. From there, go one concrete step to another.

They'd probably take a dependency, slice out the quarter they actually use, and somehow turn it into a cleverly-encoded lookup table or two?

Hopefully, you didnt miss this tangentially moored submission (was your depedendency on time constant re: [VP] sales vs engineers related to that covered therein

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556915

No, I was referring to a different time constant: the τ such that the number of times the whiskey priest[0] falls off the wagon[1] occuring at t<τ equals the number of times the decay occurs at t>τ.

So, just like the quantum watched pot never boils, the up-through-sales CEO would, out of habit alone, keep nurturing[2] their company officers — staying in touch (t<<τ) and shepherding them away from personal and towards corporate goals.

(My hypothesis being that an up-through-engineering CEO, not finding this behaviour natural, would have to make an explicit attempt to do so, and hence might experience severe cultural issues dealing with people who can deliver a great deal of value under the right leadership but require steady, if small[3][4], external inputs to keep them in the fold.)

[0] compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Camillo_and_Peppone#Charac...

[1] pads headcount, orphans mistakes, etc.

[2] for a prospect: staying in touch and shepherding them towards close

[3] the shepherd's crook can be mightier than the prince's cannon. (back when we had Prince-Bishops they used to commission statues of themselves holding both sword and crook, emphasising their ability to use either temporal persuasion or moral suasion)

[4] see also the unstable yet controllable regime for designing fighter aircraft.

The designoris (as well as the B2C sales (“marketers”) whom they tend to relate more to) should also have a time constant, such that the dynamics of navigating these various time constants do not tend to elevate them to any inner party (e.g. in AAPL, designoris getting driven out..)

EDit: just saw that you replied to showrunning, thanks for directing my attention! I also replied to DG thread

Feynman did some mechanical artillery range computer design. Read "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman". He has a few things to say about it.

If you tour the British cruiser parked in the Thames in London, you can see the artillery computer. It's a triumph of mechanical computing.

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