patkai

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a good friend of Fidel, his books must be available in bookshops.

I remember those quite dark times in Hungary, I was a small boy in school and one couldn't travel without complicated paperwork and the option of refusals to the West - and we got permission to buy foreign money only once per three years, so that was quite limiting. In those times Rubik was a huge inspiration, even for me. Parents were telling their children in that era of hopelessness and contra selection that "if you are smart like Rubik, you can also achieve things when you grow up".

I vaguely remember an interview with him in the late 80's, I think he said that he made the cube because he was outraged by the lack of 3D vision of his students.

The "Oliver Twisting" remark is quite funny, actually.

"Some of the best programmers I have known have been philosophers and lit majors"

Or musicians like Rich Hickey. Without a strong sense of aesthetics you can't build good software, that's where the "over-engineered" stuff comes from. Aesthetics and a sense of proportion makes miracles.

I watched several of his YouTube videos. I wish I had a colleague, a boss, a mentor, a neighbour or a grandpa like him. May he find peace and satisfaction in the thought in his old age that he could be so humane, inspiring and loveable in a time when we are so obsessed with machines.

"Xanadu is a story of building castles in the air for thirty years"

You mean the name "Xanadu" is perfectly fitting :)

> "there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team"

That took some time for me to sink in. I can fully understand the aversion towards dedicated teams á la Jobs, but we are talking about an OS that is used keenly by developers, an ecosystem essential to maintain. I was baffled by Apple not pushing ZFS further, the clear lack of interest in developers by not working on e.g. virtualisation, e.g. containers, a polished OpenSolaris or similar with tools we could make MacOS even greater. Like they couldn't afford it.

"15 inches" - none of the photos I've seen show more than 15 mm.

One trick I discovered last year is that whenever I feel like procrastinating I reach for my Kindle Oasis. It sucks much less energy than HN or browsing or aimless computer work.

> "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.

I would add that it is not entirely their job. After all, all the stakeholders have a primary goal, the infrastructure engineer will maximise infrastructure metrics, the VC their own and so do regulators, who society does need, even in our angelic brogrammer society.

We need an alternative to free content on the web. I often read Nautilus and never pay them anything, it's wrong. Any SV-based disruptors interested in this? These contributors are special, they contribute a lot to society and they are probably underpaid and under-appreciated.

One of those paradoxical situations when something _really_ needs to be regulated but can't be regulated. E.g. how do you know what data set is the result of an algorithm (a dubious consolidation step?), or how do you regulate algorithmic learning when we don't fully understand how learning works?

Is there a way to vote this as the funniest HN submission of the year? I started laughing and when I thought "what will happen when the vague concept of the Internet-of-Things becomes a reality" I can't stop. I always loved Subarus, but now I want one.

I'm a big fan of Estonia, Estonians and during my many visits I admired how quickly they transformed their small but not insignificant country to an innovative model nation. I hope they can stop brain drain and our Estonian colleagues realise that they have a 10 times bigger impact on the world if they stay there than if they move to Silicon Valley or other bigger hubs.

Code as data is such a big deal that - whatever you say - I will never ever understand why we don't all do Lisps.

You are right that "the impact factor of a journal is meaningful and provides a simple/preliminary heuristic for measuring up _some_ aspects of a paper published in it" - but this is not what you wrote.

1. Imre Lakatos and maturity are great, both implying that you should not apply the aforementioned rule of thumb to an individual paper - an individual in the population - whether it was published in Nature or an insignificant contender.

2. Your memetic approach is also good, but incomplete: the objective function in case of these journals is maximizing the impact factor - so we can conclude that "PrevMed is less successful in maximizing the impact factor than some competitors, or it is a younger journal, or ..." Yes, imact factor and quality correlate in the long run, but we are not at undergrad level.

3. "A low impact-factor ... directly says" - Not directly. Also, most of the journals - not to mention conferences - do not even have an impact factor.

4. "...this journal sucks" - Most of the people writing in these kind of journals have given up a lot to contribute something modest. The editor of this journal is probably emailing with reviewers at 1am or so. Just saying...

Good question! The scientific method does not include references to "impact factor" :)

The only solution is to own your company, otherwise an impersonal set of shareholders own you. The IPO removes moral degrees of freedom. Everyone, build SMEs!

"Eastern European Jews" should be more like "motivated, liberal, hardworking and a terrific high school identifying talent early". There is a related thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684785

You are probably right, but I couldn't find a better example of a benevolent dictator - like Linus - more or less _sourcing_ the building of the cathedral from the bazaar with a strong grip on the process. But I know that analogies shouldn't be stretched too far :)

When I read Cathedral and the bazaar I was genuinely surprised that it is not entitled "the cathedral _with_ a bazaar". Both have a role, e.g. the Linux kernel is a cathedral while GNU software is the bazaar - neither of them would make much sense without the other.

Reading George Polya's books might be a way of learning this technique. At least they explain very well the method of thinking about math.

This question is not just worth understanding in itself but it would be essential to ask at many levels, as science education is becoming the key to the survival of humanity. As a Hungarian who left the country 20 years ago I have been fascinated by this surprising success of the country, partly because I did not personally get a good science education there. Actually, it was very unbalanced, with most of it barely mediocre, while some of it absolutely brilliant. The successful people came from 2-3 high schools (or "gymnasiums", for ages 12-18) in Budapest in the beginning of the 20th century, and whatever success Hungary had in the natural sciences was mostly a result of the work and heritage of that generation. There is a very good description of this in Norman MacRae's book on John von Neumann, worth reading.

A quick summary of the "reasons":

1. Boom: at that time (from 1867 till WWI) Budapest was booming, more attractive to immigrants than New York. Actually, most of the city you can see today was built in those times.

2. Culture: as a result of the boom and the wave of immigrants it became a very liberal and open minded place (though this did not apply to the feudal class at all - their kids typically became soldiers or playboys)

3. Motivation: in a feudal society studying and intellectual eminence was the way to go unless you were born an aristocrat. Parents, students, teachers were willing to put time and money necessary to make their kids excel. This may not sound unusual with all those helicopter parents you see nowadays, but actually this was huge. Imagine growing up in a family where you knew - and your whole family knew - that your only chance of making it is to be the best at math your abilities allow.

4. Education: I don't know where to start, so I can only give examples. Imagine you are a 12 year old child and your teacher borrows you his favourite papers on quantum physics and asks your opinion on them. Then you give a smart comment and your teacher contacts the relevant professor at the university to have a tea with you at your house next Sunday.

5. Language: most of these kids learned Latin and Greek, and in before their teenage years also spoke at least German fluently.

6. The "marble table": Stanislaw Ulam (in his autobiography, another amazing read) and also MacRae tells about the most important ingredient, the marble table at the café (the easy-to-erase whiteboard of the time). In Central Europe mathematicians met at cafeterias, discussed all day (often meaning 12 hour days at a cafe!), challenged each other, and did rarely work in isolation, not worrying too much about "who thought of it first". They happily took young kids in, 15 year olds sipping juice and 50 year old Banach drinking something much stronger (may not have been Banach, but you'll read the book!). It was such a well-known "way of doing math" that the IAS in Princeton was officially established to re-create this culture and pull the typical American professors out of their ivory towers.

It is an elitist system, I know, and does not solve mass education challenges. But this small elite circle had an impact on almost everyone in the country's education system. Even if you weren't a Wigner, Teller or Neumann, you spent 6 years in this environment and possibly became a great teacher, similar to the one who taught half of these people, the great László Rácz [1] and taught in this fashion.

Also, a similar great science education happened in Japan at some point (50's, I think ), but I only read this as a side note in the book on Neumann. Anyway, it is possible to do this again and with two small kids I'm very interested to know how.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_R%C3%A1tz

I would add Eugene Wigner, also Nobel laureate.

It's interesting that we tend to ask for advice from rich people. Once I've heard a very annoyed George Soros saying in an interview - CNN or similar - that "you got me here not because I know stuff but because I'm rich".

He probably wasn't at all. https://www.quora.com/Was-Einstein-a-fake-and-a-plagiarist

And there goes integrity. It applies to many other situations, where taking investment, accepting help, or committing to excessive mortgage makes you lose your integrity - you simply won't be able to afford it. One of the many down sides of aiming to build Facebooks instead of Basecamps.

Is there a good writeup on "WSDL: Lessons learned", with some depth?

Yes, the e-residency is extremely cool and forward looking. And you don't even have to travel there, only to one of their embassies.

I graduated from a Telecommunications technical school in Budapest in 1992. We took the exam from relay-based switching centres (also 7A2 and ARF102) and had to repair an old style rotary dial phone to pass and get a diploma. Our teacher told us about Minitel in France but emphasised that the real thing will be ISDN (64kbps). In a couple of years in college I had high speed Internet access, Silicon Graphics workstations with those beautiful, huge blue monitors. It is hard to imagine nowadays what a change that was, though switching from my Motorola flip phone to iPhone 4 was also quite something.