Arno Penzias when he directed Crawford Hill Laboratory at Bell Labs is said to have sent a memo to the scientists working there. In the memo he said that a VP had visited Crawford Hill and noticed that there were cars arriving in the parking lot late, between 8AM at least until 9 AM, and leaving early, at least between 4 PM and 5 PM.
Arno asked all staff reading his memo for the following. If you have to come in late, please try to arrive after 9 AM. If you need to leave early, please leave before 4 PM.
I never saw the memo myself, but I did have the pleasure of working at Crawford Hill for nearly 2 years in the late 1970s. I find the existence of this memo easy to believe. So at minimum, it is a good story, might even be true. My own meager google skills do not turn up any corroboration on our universal consciousness.
Wow, what a great story! It makes some memory cells vaguely stir in the back of my mind, but I can't remember where I might have heard a variant of it. Hope it sticks this time.
Speaking of brilliant managers, one of my favorite anecdotes is of an engineering exec who, his first day at a new job, was doing the rounds meeting people and happened to notice an engineer asleep at his desk. Most managers in this situation, of course, would have one of two reactions: either get mad because the guy was sleeping at work, or try to be quiet because he was obviously working hard and needed it. This exec, instead, immediately grabbed a couple of the other engineers and went out and got a couch.
I have a PhD from Caltech in Applied Physics/Engineering. I worked for a physics prof when I felt like it. He didn't even KNOW when I was working for the most part, and I took great vacations.
You payz your money and you takez your choice. Different profs, different groups, had different cultures. I was in a group where the cultural values were being really smart and having a great time. This letter is clearly from a group where the cultural value is devoting your life to climbing the ladder.
Rejecting the work your butt off model is the wiener way out. Maybe it works better, maybe not. Maybe it works well for some people, and that's why many of them are represented among the full professor faculty at Caltech. I don't care if it works that well, it is not my choice, and I had no problem finding full professors at Caltech who asked for nothing of that kind.
There is a rather strong and noble tradition among great physicists of being a little bit off the beaten track. Read Feynman. The bets between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne at Caltech. There wasn't a lot that was conventional about Einstein.
I didn't have my first personal computer until I was 30. It was a Sun 3 "dickless" workstation on my desk, POS. I gave it to my grad student and got a Mac II the next year.
I read a Fortran (66?) programming lesson book when I was 15, and wrote some programs on paper, but had no machine to try them on.
I wrote Basic on a dial-in (120 bps acoustic coupled) teletype (with paper tape for saving/restoring) at high school when I was 16 (1973).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600968 is the Chomsky link that prompted this poll. In case there are anybody besides me who would want to see the link before blessing or damning it.
That is not her average interview. You should post a representative comparison link. And the host kept yelling at her and being offended which didn't help.
"showdead" should allow me to follow links in killed submissions. Right now I can see the title of the dead links, but there is nothing I can click on to actually go to the page which was originally linked.
I agree, up to perhaps a log-log scale. My grammar isn't likely to be significantly better in 30 years. However, when comparing among groups with similar English experience, grammar is likely to have a reasonable correlation with well-structured arguments. Also, the amount of time since learning English is not under your control; adherence to the rules of grammar is.
Perhaps more importantly, it wasn't actually grammar that I criticized. It was erratic use of punctuation (which was clearly for effect and to catch attention rather than clarity), lack of appropriate capitalization (which negatively impacts readability, and definitely doesn't require extreme English skills to get right), aggressive tone (which I find annoying pretty much anytime I see it on the Internet, as it provides no value), and sounding like a self-righteous teenager (which everybody older than ~24 finds irritating). Though one could argue that capitalization and punctuation are components of grammar, I used specific terms rather than a general one for a reason. I tend to be quite forgiving of grammatical mistakes that can be attributed to native language differences and different levels of skill with English. But, I'm less forgiving of things that are very easy to control and get right, even for non-native speakers, and that negatively impact my ability to read and understand. When wrapped in negativity and an aggressive tone, I tend to feel negative towards the person. So, I explained why his tone made me feel negative towards him, and why I thought people were voting him down.
I thought I was providing a helpful suggestion for how he could better present himself and his ideas on HN, but one can only do so much to be helpful.
Sure, you can't evaluate every dingdong idea. But when you find one you are going to skip, you can either do so respectfully, or you can declare to everyone around you that even in the absence of any thought on the matter, you happen to know (how?) that this is just wrong and BS and worthless.
Sure its frustrating when you stop trashing all the ideas you reject. But it has some good results too. Like you get a more realistic idea of how limited what you know (vs what you think) is.
You are not only ashamed of getting caught. You INTERNALIZE the shame. You BELIEVE you are no good. I was just watching a youtube video that had a clip of a "youth minister" in a charismatic church getting a room full of what looked like 10-13 year olds in tears and on their knees talking about how they had disappointed jesus with their behavior, exhorting them that "YOU know what you must repent. Say it out loud."
If only we could keep the external external. If you have managed that you are way ahead. Don't miss what is happening with those who haven't managed.
Arno asked all staff reading his memo for the following. If you have to come in late, please try to arrive after 9 AM. If you need to leave early, please leave before 4 PM.
I never saw the memo myself, but I did have the pleasure of working at Crawford Hill for nearly 2 years in the late 1970s. I find the existence of this memo easy to believe. So at minimum, it is a good story, might even be true. My own meager google skills do not turn up any corroboration on our universal consciousness.