I had his class in the 90s as well. Enjoyed it. UCSC was smaller then and some interesting classes I’m not sure would be possible today. Another I enjoyed was Frank Andrews (chemistry) course titled something like the chemistry of love.
That’s a shallow take. The Bay Area used to have a plethora of different types of companies and innovation. Sadly social media and ad companies took over.
Google AdSense became a load-bearing pillar of the Internet before we realized what that meant, and now we (seemingly) can't get rid of it. Every new product is Yet Anotherᵀᴹ free service with a paid subscription tier, which will get more expensive, and the free tier is ad supported. Then the ads get more egregious. Then the free tier becomes a cheap, ad supported tier. Then the ads infiltrate the original paid tier. Then a new service with a fresh round of VC funding sets up to be the "ad free" version of the service that's now infested with ads, and as soon as their AWS bills creep up, the ads enter the new service, but hey there's a cheap subscription if you don't want ads...
2. Advertising is a virus or tumor that will consume all available space in an ecosystem until there is no non-ad content left; it ultimately kills its host.
HN has advertisement. It has the sponsored hiring posts from YC, Show HN posts to projects, and the monthly who is hiring / wants to be hired posts, which are all advertisements. Seems far from cancerous.
HN is also not profitable and is not driven to be so. I don't think it's the ads in and of themselves that's the cancer, but rather that in order to make money, you need just shit-tons of the things. And as the number of ads goes up the amount of attention they get drops which just demands more ads to offset the lower-valued ones.
That being said, I absolutely vibe with the notion of ads being cancer. I would classify personally HN's "ads" as you describe as less advertisements and more just posted notices of things relevant to the community. I don't suspect money changes hands for those to be put up which I would personally classify as the line between the two. And, more importantly, they are likely to be relevant to a fair chunk of the users here, and for those they aren't, they're ignored easily enough too.
HN is only able to bet be profitable because it is backed by a company that is. And if you combine "posted notices of things relevant to the community" with a commercial intent, that is basically the definition of ads.
Also, when you say relevant to the community, what exactly is the definition of that? A job posting on "who is hiring" is likely to be relevant to maybe 0.001% of HN readers. If Apple put a big banner on the site saying "HN users get $100 off a MBP," I bet a much higher percentage of users would click on that (I would). But nobody would ever deny that is an ad. So I don't think community relevance is a great way to determine it. That community relevance factor is exactly what advertisers pay so much to targeted ad companies for anyway.
I do find ads annoying myself and use ad blockers to get rid of them. But I take exception to the idea that they are this cancerous destroying force. Published media has been an advertising platform since well before the internet and I just don't see a feasible way that business model can be replaced just because the medium is now the internet. Yes, there is subscription revenue, but even newspapers back in the day had ads on every page.
Newspapers no longer need to perform the overhead of printing and distributing which was a massive cost to the news org. They can also now sell to the world vs just the local market they can deliver papers to. So not only have their costs been lowered their customer base has expanded quite a bit in theory. Why should we therefore expect to see ads on subscriptions?
> HN is only able to bet be profitable because it is backed by a company that is.
I mean, yes, but also no. We had pages upon pages of unprofitable websites once. There was a time, believe it or not, when all kinds of people setup all kinds of websites, with no expectation whatsoever of making money off of them. I for one hosted a niche phpBB board for years on end at my own expense, offset only by occasional donations from the community we built.
> And if you combine "posted notices of things relevant to the community" with a commercial intent, that is basically the definition of ads.
Well, again, yes and no. I think there's a nuance there. A job posting for example does have commercial intent, but at the same time, it's a mutually beneficial relationship (hopefully anyway) for both the entity and the employee. I would much rather see job ads in a place like this than, I dunno, weight loss drugs and erection pills.
> Also, when you say relevant to the community, what exactly is the definition of that? A job posting on "who is hiring" is likely to be relevant to maybe 0.001% of HN readers.
I think it's much higher than that. Just because you're not unemployed doesn't mean you wouldn't be interested in a job posting. People move companies all the time.
> If Apple put a big banner on the site saying "HN users get $100 off a MBP," I bet a much higher percentage of users would click on that (I would). But nobody would ever deny that is an ad.
But, if the community overall benefits from that, even if that benefit is nothing more significant than a cheaper mac, I'd say that's an overall win for all involved.
> So I don't think community relevance is a great way to determine it. That community relevance factor is exactly what advertisers pay so much to targeted ad companies for anyway.
I'm not saying an ad is good because it's relevant. I'm saying an ad is less irritating if it's relevant. That's why I find most ads so grating, because they are for products I have zero interest in and they are occupying space and attention that would be better filled with something I'm at least vaguely interested in.
In what sense is it effective? I'd been lurking here for months before I learned that YC was a company and it ran this place. (Then again I guess I'm not in any sort of relevant target group).
Still does. Yes, two of the biggest are social media / ads, but out of all the engineers I know in the Bay Area only a small fraction work at ad / social media companies.
An M4 in an iPad. It feels like the hardware between an M* Macbook Air and the M* iPads is really about the same (maybe screen differences, a keyboard) and memory. That said, the real hinderance / differentiator(?) is what the OS allows you to do with the device.
The MIT link I shared mentioned Demaine studied Huffman's work but the mini and full paper make no reference. I first heard about this from Huffman when Demaine was about 16 years old. So I would hope for some reference there in.
Every time something like this comes up, I recall “office hours” with David Huffman at UC Santa Cruz. Most of the conversation was about things other than class. One frequent topic was his paper folding.
I took Huffman's class "Cybernetics" (we never discussed origami) which was pretty fun. It's the only CS class I ever took in college, and the only class I failed (his tests were hard). The class was filled with interesting tidbits of information theory and random interesting math problems like sphere packing.
Well, this was 1993 so my memory may be faulty but I believe it was a CS class (or maybe math?)
I put the effort in but he didn't appreciate me. I still got a lot of out of the course, though: the imposter syndrome it gave me made me work extra hard to learn actual CS I needed to be successful later in my career.
He was a hardass. I had a class with an acquiantence/friend (who went on to found two start ups) and failed is 103a class the first time around with Huffman. We caught Huffman in a mistake and gave back as good as he gave. It was a fun time. Learned a lot.
I don't do a lot of writing, that said I use fountain pens when sketching out ideas / designs - paper is preferred to sketching / whiteboard programs. I've found the pen that works for me is a $30 Lamy fountain pen - it works better for me than ballpoints, etc.
My brain is rusty, but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked. TSRs, memory managers, etc. Moving a lot and not being a packrat I've lost some of that history.
I think the pinnacle goes to MS-DOS 7.1, which while bundled with Windows was also usable as a DOS by itself and contained features like FAT32 support. MS-DOS 8 was the last version that came with the ill-fated Windows Me and significantly neutered.
I think it was 3.3x where things started working. I don't recall 4.x being around much. I do remember 5 and 6. For some reason 4 never made a splash in my circle of friends.
It took more base memory than ever. It had a complicated code page system that most people didn't want, and a clunky early version of IBM DOSShell that was scorned although it grew into something useful.
But it supported disk partitions over 32MB, and for that reason, it was reluctantly adopted. If you had a 286 or 386, then there were measures that you could take with a memory manager to make it not so bad, but on 8088/8086 class hardware, it didn't leave enough free memory for many big apps to run.
I was kind of happy with MSDOS 2.11, I felt that they'd got the basics in place (in particular hard disk / subdirectory support) and that bloat hadn't started. From memory I used this for years and years although I was young so time didn't rush past so quickly so who really knows. I kept a version of MSDOS 2.11 debug.com around for decades (patched with itself so it wouldn't just do a version check then quit). From memory it was something like 12K bytes whereas debug.exe from MSDOS 6.x was more like 60K bytes.
There was indeed a Windows 3.11 and the much more common Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which was a profoundly different product (32-bit disk subsystem & 32-bit networking subsystem -- the first time these pillars of Win9x went out into the world.)
But neither of them ran on any particular version of DOS. They ran on PC DOS, MS-DOS and DR-DOS -- although Microsoft tried very hard to block the latter:
IBM was taken over by bean counters years ago. There were researchers and others that would literally skip being in or find a way to avoid bean counters when they walked through IBM Research Labs (like Almaden Research Center) years ago (heard from multiple people years back that were working on contracts/etc there - mainly academics).
Also, IBM has been extremely ageist in their "layoff" policies. They also have declined in quality by outsourcing to low cost/low skill areas.
There is a former column that was under multiple writers (same name), that did a great expose on IBM and age discrimination, but I don't want to give said column their due since the columnist had other issues.
If it's really their due, you should give it to them. This value system where you have to punish people if they don't have the "right" views needs to stop. Would you like someone to do that to you? If they did good work, it doesn't get infected by whatever "issues" they had.
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